George Will at Purdue University

ladies and gentlemen welcome and thank you again we're gonna try to make up a little lost time but I do think one preliminaries in order and that is for the roughly four or five hundred who were we were not able to accommodate initially in the other hall I think you ought to give a round of applause to the gracious four or five hundred who said sure let's move down and let them if anyone here is unaware of the credentials of our guest the Internet is available to you later I'm not going to go through them I'll just make this simple observation I suppose depending on one's viewpoint someone could dispute that our guest is among the very finest of our nation's thinkers I just don't know how anyone could dispute that he's among our finest writers the Washington Journalism Review who once deemed him finest writer any category now what they meant was of the various categories they were honoring he was first among equals in the book of something that some of us would prefer he would be the best writer on any subject he chooses and we've got a lot to choose from tonight in the questions that I'll ask and those that very shortly will invite you to ask let me just the the obvious comments please mute your cell phones and also yourselves so that all can hear and secondly those who want to ask a question my suggestion is if you're if your first sentence doesn't end in a question mark strive to see that your second does you've got time to compose your thoughts and remember the value of conciseness thank you so dr. will George this being higher ed will give will give precedence to process over substance and so I would like to ask a first question really about your your craft you met today very kindly with hundreds of our students many of whom want to become writers or journalists or other similar pursue other such professions what's your mo you've generated by now somewhere in the mid four digits of columns to a week four four and a half decades and the post syndicate and what in the magazine formerly known as Newsweek how do you work first now let me begin by saying how good it is to be on a Midwestern campus I'm a faculty brat from the University of Illinois where my father taught philosophy I I went from Trinity College to Oxford and I had decided when I was leaving Oxford I applied to Harvard Law School and Princeton and Philosophy I chose philosophy because Princeton was midway between two national league cities which gives you some measure of my academic seriousness I did teach of Michigan State University I'm making a tour of the Big Ten and at the University of Toronto before I turned to journalism or as my father the professor said before I sank to Germany isn't it is about that that you asked my method is the most frequently asked question of a columnist is the one I asked my friend and colleague Bill Buckley when I started this I said bill how do you come up with things to write about and he said the world irritates me three times a week I would modify this it irritates me piqued my curiosity amuses me something I've never had a day in which I didn't have five topics I wanted to write about in fact I have in my wallet I can actually show it to you I always carry a card with the coming topic so I want to write about it and there it's my next column that'll go out tomorrow and I'll be in Sunday Thursday's paper is on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Frank Sinatra the Great American Songbook and all that I think if I'm if I'm don't write a third of my columns not only on subjects that are not above the fold on in the New York Times but on subjects that are not on the front page of the New York Times or even in the New York Times I'm not doing my job right because you're neglecting among other things culture and those of us who have said at the feet of my former best friend Pat Moynihan know that culture drives politics and that politics can improve culture but culture is primary and politics is in some sense an epiphenomena so my method of operating is to be open to the stimuli of this endlessly stimulating country and to understand that there's an awful lot more going on in the world than the Iowa caucuses I copied down a line from EB White who like and what you do to hunting said sometimes writing sometimes he sat in his blind waiting for something to come what come along and sometimes he roamed the countryside hoping to scare something up maybe that's what you're doing tonight I don't know I would like to ask you one other question about journalism in particular political journalism in our time the erosion maybe collapse of print journalism it's something that some of some of us worried about worried that it will not be adequately replaced by 140 whatever it is characters and so forth but maybe that's maybe that's just old fogey ism I mean George what in terms of the public discourse of the country and in terms of self-governance the the necessary information of the public are the new forms and you're involved in some of them electronic but also digital and so forth going to suffice to to to inform a public that that is supposed to make its own wise decisions well first I do think American newspapers are going to figure out how to monetize what they do digitally I think the reason Jeff Bezos whose Worth's what fifty million billion dollars or something the reason he bought the Washington Post for 250 million dollars which was pocket changed for him is he wants to solve the problem he thinks it's an interesting challenge and people like Beezus will solve that I get up every morning at about 5:00 a.m. so I'm up when I hear this flap on the concrete outside my house that means some trees have been cut down in Canada turned into paper covered with ink given to an undocumented immigrant to deliver to my house and I keep saying how long can this keep going on particularly when I ask young people as I did today in the class here at Purdue how many of you read a hard copy of a newspaper and in the room of a hundred students maybe five hands went up but that doesn't mean they're not reading there's an enormous amount of writing going on but it's going on online and I get up in the morning and I go fire up my tablet and I go to the AG Twitter called the aggregators RealClearPolitics real clear policies real clear markets and there's an enormous amount of tremendous talent out there writing for these and I don't know but I have my columns and four hundred and fifty some papers and I'll bet I have more readers online than I do in my papers I'm guessing but I think that's an educated guess so I don't despair about the reading public continuing to read whether than they read words on former trees I don't know and I don't particularly care as long as they read just an ancillary bit related note Black Friday weekend after Thanksgiving for the first time in history more Americans shopped online than shopped in stores now the economy is going to have to adjust to that and the journalistic economy is going to make a similar and I think a similarly successful adjustment a common lament these days as to do with the dysfunction of particularly the federal government people come at that from different directions there's what I think I was the Friedmann temptation if gee if we could just be China for a little while another Milton Friedman Tom fear yes yes important clarifications thank you and we were discussing earlier scholar named Francis Fukuyama just 25 years ago was writing about the end of history free institutions or triumphing everywhere it's all inevitable and the latest book has to do with what he sees is the near fatal decay of our institutions the V tock recei is his phrase for the way Congress operates right now you remind your readers every so often that our our Constitution wasn't really written for smooth well-oiled efficiency mr. Madison had something different in mind have we is this maybe this is the system he contemplated or the sorts of outcomes or have we really fallen to a state that we should worry about this is what he had in mind with an important asterisk when those 55 extraordinary people gathered in Philadelphia on the sweltering summer of 1787 they did not go there to devise an efficient government the idea would have horrified them they went to devise a government strong enough to secure our rights but not too strong to threaten them to which end by the way I said the most important word in the Declaration of Independence is secure the oldest truths to be self-evident all men are created equal endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and governments are instituted to secure those rights pre-existing rights rights are not given to us by government they're given to us by our nature they're called natural rights and the government exists to secure them so it is in the language of the first two paragraphs of the Declaration limited government is written in it has the limited function of securing our rights including facilitating our pursuit of happiness so in Philadelphia they designed a government full of blocking mechanisms three branches of governments two branches of the legislative branch the Senate with its own constituencies and electoral rhythms the House different constituencies different alike rhythms supermajorities veto veto overrides judicial review all kinds of ways of slowing the beast down and making things go slowly so people can have temperate judgments George Washington famously just defined the Senate as the saucer into which we pour our T so that will cool and yet I can think I've been in Washington for 46 years and not in considerable portion of the life of this Republic and I can think of nothing the American people have wanted intensely and protracted ly that they didn't get sooner or later the government delivers now the asterisk over this so far I've said it's working the way Madison designed it it's supposed to be slow it's supposed to be difficult to get over it the asterisk is this Madison said in Federalist 45 the proposed Constitution the Federalist Papers of course were newspaper columns designed to get New York to ratify the Constitution he said the proposed Constitution delegates powers to the federal government that are few and specific they envisioned a federal government that did not tell us what kind of light bulbs we were going to have how much water could come through our shower heads both of these are recent government policies the government was to do a few things and try to do them well when you have a government that is into every form of national life every nook and cranny it begins to coagulate and you begin to get these veto groups and then what you get is government grows by the very negotiation of government someone says well there are no limits on what government does I wanted to do a B and C and someone says well I wanted to do de and F so I'll support here three if you'll support my three in the very process of bickering and broker in and negotiating inexorably makes the government bigger which makes it all the more hard to move and all them easier to bring to a halt so in that sense it's medicines basic framework but without medicine sense of limitation on government if I could add one more thing that we've just reauthorized No Child Left Behind No Child Left Behind was the sixth I believe iteration of the education Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 I mentioned this bit of ancient history because until about 1965 there was what was called a legitimacy barrier to Congress before Congress did something that asked the question where in the Constitution is the enumerated power that gives us the right to do this James Q Wilson the smartest social scientist of his generation said that that really ended in 1965 after the Goldwater landslide anti Goldwater landslide in 1964 I was one of the 27 million Goldwater voters but never mind the Democrats had this enormous majority in Congress they could do whatever they wanted and they passed among other things the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act and James Q Wilson said that was the end of the legitimacy barrier if the government could casually intrude itself into the quintessentially state and local responsibilities there were no more limits on the purview of the federal government and I think it was probably right well pursuing that question of limits then you and many others have written in the last few years with concern about out of concern that extra legal executive actions were being taken that things were being done by the executive branch of government that did it hadn't had not the delegated powers to do and they were the right hand or were the rightful prerogative of the legislative branch and and you however unlike many folks who would agree with you most of the time have argued that it's the judiciary in fact the more activist judiciary which should be stepping up to these issues where they arise could you say a word or two about that yes conservatives alarmed by what they took to be the activism of the war on court in creating new rights SMUD enforcing traditional race adopted the language that there should be less judicial activism a more deferential judiciary to the popularly elected branches celebrating majority rule in doing this conservatives were doing the work of progressivism it was the progressives who came along and said with the judiciary must proceed we must allow the government to legislate and regulate where it will out of respect for majoritarianism my view is that it is a dereliction of judicial duty not to enforce the boundaries of government because if it doesn't no one will and to that end some of us there now real growing movement among conservatives to say we do know the United States is not about majority rule the United States is about liberty and Liberty can be threatened by majority rule our founders catechism was roughly this what is the worst outcome of politics tyranny to what form of tyranny is democracy pray tyranny of the majority now Madison's answer to this wasn't first of all judicial it was a new sociology of democracy he said the Madisonian revolution and democratic theory was this hitherto everyone who had said democracy was possible and it was a few people had said it they said it is possible if but only if you have democracy in a small face to face society Rousseau's Geneva Pericles Athens because the larger the society the more factions you will have infections were thought to be the enemy of democracy Madison turned that on its head saying the way you will prevent majority tyranny is to don't have majorities by which he meant don't have stable tyrannical majorities hence he said famously in Federalist 10 have an extensive Republic not a small Republic and extensive Republic the larger the Republic the more factions you will have and he said in Federalist 51 the first job of government is to protect the different and unequal capacities of acquiring property because those would generate different factions and you would have this maelstrom of factions forming temporary unstable majorities that would not be durable enough to be tyrannical and that is roughly the interest-group liberalism that we have in this country now it gets out of hand particularly when the government doesn't recognize Madisonian limits on its proper scope and actual competence but beyond that it's again Madison's great contribution to world democratic theory the expansion of government and in particular the unilateral executive actions and many of we've seen lately though or generally presented as defending the defenseless or the powerless well when presidents say they're going to go around the Constitution to defend a powerless they're defending a constituency of won the presidency all presidents do it this president has done it with more enthusiasm and briault and gusto and lack of conscience than most I mean the idea that one one of the surely the most important international agreements of the post-war post Second World War era is our agreement with Iran which should have been a treaty he didn't like Congress so he doesn't submit it to Congress Woodrow Wilson more about whom welcome back also times the root of all evil Woodrow Wilson said a president can be as big as he wants to be and that's true because unless you have in a president the self-restraint that is dictated by the ethics of our Constitution to respect the separation of powers Woodrow Wilson was not just the first PhD to be President as a warning in this he was I speak as a PhD from Princeton at Wilson's President Woodrow Wilson was not just the first president of the American Political Science Association to be president but he was not coincidentally the first American president to criticize the American Founding which he did not do peripherally he did root and branch he said the heart of the problem is the essence of the American Constitution the separation of powers he said at one point that was fine when we had to worry about majority tyranny but now he said in the early 20th century we are so enlightened and so United as a people that we don't need to worry about that and what we need to do is unleash the government to do the wonderful things it can do he said our Constitution was written and this is right at a time when there were four million free Americans 80% of whom lived within 20 miles of Atlantic Tidewater now he said were a continental nation United by steel rails and copper wires and all the rest and we need a government with powers commensurate to its great responsibilities therefore he said the Constitution bequeathed by the founders is fundamentally wrong because it divides it has separation of powers and rivalries branches of government that make it difficult to move well if you believe that then you believe that presidents should do what this president has done and Richard Nixon did also with certain gusto and that is ignore the separation of powers ignore the Congress and here's where I come back to the requesting about and activist judiciary Congress is so busy they're only 535 members so they've been 535 members for about 80 years the business of government has increased a hundredfold in those years the same number of people spread thinner and thinner and thinner so what they do is they don't really pass laws anymore they pass sentiments they say we should have an adequate education we should have maximum participation and then they shove it off to the bureaucracy to really write the laws well there used to be something called the non delegation doctrine whereby the Supreme Court before it gave up enforcing this said in John Locke's words in the second treatise on government legislators may make laws they may not make other legislators what we're doing now is turning over the rewriting of laws to executive agencies and it's up to the government Clarence Thomas is extremely good on this st. it's now time for the supreme court to say to the Congress if you can't write laws on your own if you're too busy then just leave the subject alone because you cannot delegate an essentially legislative function that's an example of what some of us on the right say they we need a much more engaged judiciary to do it's time for those with the temerity to do so to come forward and approach one of the mics I've got another question or two which will give you time to do that but if we can get at least a couple in each one I do I do want to ask you about a foreign policy question you have parted company at least as I read you on more than one occasion with people again who would otherwise most often agree with you in cautioning against hubris or overreach on the part of the United States in foreign policy you were very cautionary about Libya about Syria those are if there were I can go back further for other examples but do you feel just take those two examples do you still feel as you did have would you write those columns any different in view of events since it is no I wouldn't then I'd be in with the third example the worst mistake I've made in forty some years as a columnist and it was not opposing the Iraq war which I think one of the reasons why I think that is far and away the worst blunder in American foreign policy history is that I think we've paid about twenty percent of the price we're gonna pay for that pandemic destabilization of a region I got off that fairly quickly I mean by except I take it a little story I was a dinner party with Don Rumsfeld he was a good friend in June of 2003 three months into the invasion and I said I'll bet you'll be awfully glad when you find those weapons of mass destruction and he turned to me and he said what's the difference and I said oh my goodness good men Colin Powell and others read the intelligence the French read the intelligence the British the Chinese they all believed those weapons were there they were wrong and that was the lesson to me about how hard it is to know things in this world how hard it is to be sure Along Came Libya Libya appealed I'm convinced to the Obama administration because it was untainted by national interest it was completely pure humanitarian intervention the British felt the same way this was we were going to save the people of Benghazi and others from Qaddafi well my goodness not only was it illegal because the president didn't even having completely ignored the War Powers Resolution but we we for eight months was probably the longest most protracted assassination in history as we tried to chase down Qaddafi with fighter bombers again for no sir noble American interest and they never asked Admiral Yamamoto his question and Merle Yamamoto was the genius who what day is today it's today pearl her okay this is Pearl Harbor today this is really opposite he was the man who conducted the brilliant attack on Pearl Harbor about eight months before which the Japanese government summoned him and said could you take a fleet across the North Pacific stealthily and deliver a devastating blow against the American fleet in Hawaii Yamamoto said I can do that if you'll design some sauce some shallow running torpedoes for them Pearl Harbor I can do that he said and then I will run wild in the Pacific for six months maybe a year but then what Admiral Yamamoto had studied at Harvard he loved our country amazingly he loved our country even after studying at Harvard he'd been he'd been military attache at the brita at the Japanese Embassy in Washington he knew our country he knew that what they would achieve at Pearl Harbor was they they would arouse a continental industrial superpower and that Japan's defeat would be implicit in its initial great victory we never asked the question when we went into Iraq but then what I once said Iraq needs only four things to succeed I said this in in a talk I gave it was not well-received five months after the invasion I said they need a James Madison that is someone who can devise the our constitutional architecture for a society with factions they need an Alexander Hamilton who can conjure out of dust a economic strength they need a George Washington a unifying figure above politics to unite the country and they need a John Marshall who can construe the works of these other men and I said they need a fourth thing they need the extraordinary social soil from which those four geniuses emerged in the young America well there's no such social soil in the Middle East least of all in Iraq so what I was saying is all they need are five things but those are enormous five things and they don't have any of the five but but remember you always ask Yamamoto x' question huh but then watch I think we have a question here welcome to Indiana thank you briefly you touched on the founding fathers and their construction of the Constitution and the checks and balances and one of the things that they put in there in order to get the states to asset was another check and balance against what you mentioned the tyranny of the government and that was the Article five Constitution to the States can you briefly touch on there is a fledgling movement for that now there is a movement now under Article five you can call a constitutional convention there are two problems with this one who's going to play Madison in those four million people in the end of the 18th century we produce Madison George Mason Hamilton Franklin my goodness we got 320 million Americans I don't think we could find one of them at this point but beyond that you may remember we got the Constitution we got because the Annapolis convention said let's go to Philadelphia and revise the Articles of Confederation that's all they said well they got the Philadelphia tore up the Articles of Confederation I'm glad they did but the cautionary tale is you can start your article five convention but how do you keep it from being a runaway convention now there are some very clever lawyers involved in this who said you can word the call of the convention so that for example this is what they're trying to do they would be allowed to meet for one day they'd be allowed to vote on one thing a balanced budget amendment for example and then they would by that act they would be dispersed it sounds too clever by half to me but let's let's assume you could do it that is what it what the gentleman is talking about there is a movement afoot to do it and it's terrifies me thank you how are you thanks for coming money has moved more and more into politics - I mean it's disheartening it seems that Gerry man Gerry man during and and then lightly citizens united have quashed this maelstrom of differential ideas that were supposed to be awash in and as these factional groups have gained more and more money what's how is the average or common citizen - you know with their single vote supposed to stand up to this this but that's a good question and I'm sure you speak for many here and I'm gonna make you annoy you seriously with my answer I think a there's far too little money in politics and being amazed to how little money there is in politics people say gosh there's too much money in politics 85 to 90% of the money in politics is used to disseminate political advocacy political speech so people who are saying there's too much money and politics are saying two things they know the right amount of money and politics and therefore they know the right amount of political speech that ought to be disseminated I don't believe either people say gosh this year last year each presidential candidacy in the two-year cycle spent a billion dollars it's two billion dollars in 2012 every year Americans spend two billion dollars on Easter candy this is a rich country we just spent in October 6.7 billion dollars on Halloween candy costumes and decorations spend two billion dollars to elect presidents who oversee a three point eight trillion dollar budget it's amazing how little we spend electing the lawmakers who make these decisions in fact I mean any economist looking at this would say there's a disproportion here what the economists would note is that we spend far more on lobbying because it's much more efficient in politics and there's abundant social science demonstrating this money does not draw the convictions of politicians to it money flows toward politicians of particular convictions the NRA supports Republicans because Republicans support the Second Amendment it's not the other way around the owner isn't bribing people to support the Second Amendment that they're out there the teachers unions support Democrats because they're not bribing Democrats Democrats believe what the teachers unions are doing and and that's politics and I don't I'm not ready to charge bad faith on either part of that transaction you can not regulate the quantity content and timing of political speech which mccain feingold did all three without limiting free speech without violating the First Amendment and I would point out to you with regard to Citizens United all citizens united did was it said when Americans band together in corporate form they do not forfeit their First Amendment rights the corporations and unions the corporations and unions that are protected by the Citizens United decision are not Microsoft and Pepsi Cola they don't get involved in politics they don't know him to offend anybody the corporations that are for the tube that are freed up now to spend money are the Sierra Club the National Rifle Association the National Right to Life Committee the National Abortion Rights Action League the advocacy groups that are all corporations every one of them those are the ones that benefited from this and I think we benefited from it by increasing the number of people which you're rightly concerned about whose voices will be involved in and heard in our politics so I think the most alarming development in the last two years in Washington is that 54 Democratic senators voted to amend the first amendment they voted to change the Bill of Rights to make it less protective never happened in American history before they voted to amend the First Amendment to empower Congress to regulate the quantity content and timing of political speech about Congress now that just strikes me as dangerous thank you for a really important question and if if someone hadn't asked if I would have thank thank you very very much over here all right mister dr. will um about fifty or so years ago we had these great I guess side-by-side debates gore Vidal William F Buckley if I had to ask you right now I guess off the top of your head what left-leaning political thinkers or commentators do you most like to read and admire and why that's a good question I just the other night saw the movie best of enemies that that know how many have you seen it it's about the buckling inferred all debate and I have to tell your bill was for the rest of his life she grinned at participating in that he thought it got out of hand and it was the harbinger of the kind of Rage culture that we now have been too much of in my judgment on radio and on television who would I like to I when I was with ABC I appeared periodically with Paul Krugman which is an affliction sent to make us more spiritual Paul is that Paul is smart and you know he's informed and all that the problem is he doesn't think you can disagree with him honestly that you're either a fool or a neighbor of Navis fool so it's hard to debate that's a good question there's a guy named michael kinsley he's been around for many years a man of the left is dead at the new republic very smart and witty he's the one who gave us Kinsley's definition of a political gaffe is an untimely expression of the truth but i'd say michael kinsley that'd be a good match I'd buy a ticket good evening doctor will my name is Mitch McCord my question for you is regarding the front page cover stories do you find yourself writing differently when writing for the front page of a paper compared to one on the inside I never write for the front page I've always been a columnist I said so I I don't have to have to worry about that and what I was amused the other day that the New York Times so excited was it about the problem of gun control they said for the second time we're gonna have an editorial on the front page and I thought New York Times editorialized is on the front page every day thank you the first the first time they did neither way was June 1920 when they were so appalled by the Republicans nominating governor Harding of Ohio for president and the country took the times so seriously they gave Harding 60 percent of the popular vote which was to that point the biggest landslide in American history it seems that the media whether it's in politics or entertainment or sports are enamored by the people they're covering you've written in all areas you have friends I'm sure in all those areas what do you consider an appropriate distance between those people in those three areas because that's an excellent question now I'm not one who thinks the media ought to have a dogmatic adversarial position to the political class the vast majority of men and women in politics are trying to do difficult things under difficult circumstances and they're trying to do their best and it's it's important to know them and understand them my wife who was his worked for Bob Dole over and over again she holds world's record for most conceptual drawings last White House director of communication so she's been around this business she and I have regularly have dinner parties small 12 people Barack Obama came to one of them but it was a week before he was elected and not inaugurated we've had all the Republican candidates almost all of them this year because we think it's important to do this to see people in the social setting you're in and understand they're human beings so I don't advocate sort of hostility now you can you can go too far I did so once when in 1980 when Reagan was preparing for his one debate with Jimmy Carter I helped prepare him for the debate it was not at that point a state secret that I was for Reagan but I still shouldn't have done that but so you have to draw a line and there is one and I stepped over it I haven't done that sense but I think it's important to see people tomorrow night in Washington I'm gonna my house is being used for a book party for Virginia Coates who was a written a book called David slang it's on ten at understanding democracy through ten works of art she's an art historian she also is the chief foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz who will be at my house tomorrow night nothing wrong with that that's you know there will be a lot of folks there and we just treat these people as not as constant adversaries not only they're not enemies it was a great question to thank I'm very much hello I read a book recently that was called the shallows and in the shallows the author our view that people are reading more than they ever have but they comprehend less of it due to the tendency to skim on light articles and your point earlier about the switch to online reading really interests me and just asking about your writing have you noticed like people respond differently to your articles or tend to misinterpret what you say and do you feel like new journalists today have to kind of like adapt the writing style in order to appeal to the new deal audience that's a--that's a question that it really gets close to the bone to me because I have to treat every subject in the universe in 750 words which means I have to be concise and compress things which means I have to use a kind of more complicated syntax then you're used to in the normal wire service story that begins explaining who what when where why also there's nothing in the world more optional than reading a syndicated column so if Americans Americans are applied and be labored by tens of thousands I'm not exact ends of thousands of messages a day you drive down the street the signage is bombarding you you turn on the television of the radio the commercials are bomba you you turn on the Internet the spam is my party people to get this so Americans developed these filters it's a survival device in which we turn it all into sort of audible wallpaper there but not noticed but in order for me to get people to read my column I think it has to be written with a kind of flair and energy and elegance if you will I don't always achieve it but I try and I do find getting to the point of your question that some people will say I couldn't follow that sentence and I'm sorry it had a subject object of predicate it was a perfectly serviceable sentence but it didn't read like green eggs and ham and and I do think people are having more and more trouble following I mean they would have trouble reading Dickens they would have trouble reading PG woodhouse from which I got my style they would have trouble reading Middlemarch because the Victorian there was a kind of Victorian fullness and their syntax and it worries me there's a lot of research already and I've been egging some of our people here to look more deeply at what might be happening happening to the cognitive power and the attention spans and things like this I think that of particularly young people who have only known one environment the bombardment you just talked about and the sooner or later we'll know but preferably sooner I did wear my Purdue geared for you today I like to talk about politics and sports bob costas comes to mind and highly irritates me so I turned on the TV but what do you think about the injection of so much political talk into sports or or veering to the left in sports journalism it's real someone has said that ESPN has become an MSNBC with athletes I'm a sports writers like the occasion to get to be sort of you know get out of the dugout and out of the clubhouse and into the larger arena so when something comes up like domestic abuse which is a serious problem particularly in the NFL they sometimes go overboard on it first openly gay football player mr. Sam I guess he was from the University of Missouri they think they do tend to go overboard and it's msnb there ESPN does seem to dwell on race more than as absolutely necessary but it's understandable and at the end of the day that's not why we watch ESPN and ESPN has lost a whole bunch of subscribers and recently and I think that's one of the reasons why I mean Sports is an escape from reality in some ways it doesn't mean a damn thing that's why we like it that's why I wrote a book on baseball called men at work no it's it's they're not boys of summer and they're not playing it's a dangerous demanding business they're doing and it's enough I wrote it was consciously anti-romantic sports writing I didn't I'm tired of people saying baseball reminds me of the universe or the Federal Reserve Board or something it's a mouth that's nice it's baseball my dad read your book 14 books and that one's probably sold more than the other 13 a few weeks ago American academia shameful capitulation of the University of Missouri's and Princeton University to the petulant extortion of group identity politics advocates don't you think it's time for American universities to reject group identity diversity politics and focus more on promoting academic freedom by empowering individual students to reach their god-given potential in a word yes and universities have talked so long now about identity politics that we are our race we are our gender we are our sexual preference that we are our identity is tied up with group identities and they're beginning to reap a kind of whirlwind from this that we've developed all kinds of grievance groups and exquisite sensitivity to slights real and imagined that's why they're called microaggressions I should have preceded this answer with a trigger warning but it's dangerous because universities are the probably the finest flour Western civilization and it took us a long time to get here and these are fragile institutions that depend on vast tolerance for surprise and defense and shock and unsettling that's what we're here for all of those things they're not that all those things that are not being called bad things are what we pay good money to accomplish here I mean the idea that the university should be a safe space safe from what I recently saw my son as a northwestern graduate and a former Marine it's a Robert Capa picture taken on d-day from inside a LST it's the American soldiers jumping into the water off Omaha Beach and over it it said college-age men leaving their safe space I when I was at Oxford a friend of mine named Vernon bag de noir this was at a time when the University of Oxford had gone out of its way to offend Margaret Thatcher which is really not smart they always gave an honorary degree to the Prime Minister they decided not to give one to her and she knew what to do about that and he walked out on the balcony of brazenness College which faces the Red Cliff camera the circular library there and he said as though musing aloud he said the most beautiful view in the South of England therefore the most beautiful view in Europe therefore the most beautiful view in the world and yet he said there was a time when everyone wanted to attend the University of Padua no one wants good the University of Padua today and he said there could be a time when people will not want to attend the University of Oxford all these institutions are fragile because they are based on intangible things certain attitudes of tolerance and acceptance and the thrill of verbal combat and the willingness to give a fence and to overturn settled assumptions you get rid of that the institution dies this dies who wants to go to the University of Padua the Bill of Rights most of them they start with Congress shall not but um I believe was in 1925 the Supreme Court believes of 14th amendment to apply the bill rights to states and localities I was wondering what your opinion is of that decision and its ramifications on for I'm for what's called the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to apply to the states I think it was really done by the 14th amendment which says in there that the no American shall be desired denied their privileges or immunities of Americans now what does that mean unfortunately in the slaughterhouse cases of 1873 and we'll go to the details but the Supreme Court gave a very narrow reading to privileges or immunities I think privileges or immunity means all the rights of Americans including the unenumerated rights of the 10th amendment my son is in second-year law student I've told him his life's work is to relitigate the slaughterhouse cases 1873 I've given you the answer to your very good question which is I'm all for saying that Americans are not Virginians we're not you know robert e lee referred to virginia is my country a lot of people did then we fought the civil war to just go from the united states are to the united states is and these are american rights and belong to be protected by the Fourteenth Amendment everywhere we've somehow developed a lopsided tendency to the right side of the stage so yes ma'am please thank you I appreciate your thoughtful commentary so far I have a question but I do have a statement to proceed it and I try to in the second one with a question mark well I'm already behind because I already said it I don't how many semicolons motivated to stand about the question about the University of Missouri and I feel very strongly that when black students are responding to the n-word smeared and feces on a wall it is not a question of tolerance or exchange it's actually the very hostile environment that they're trying to encounter in the request or expectation that they that there will be professors who are who look like them in color or who are female is also not an unreasonable expectation and I suppose that I would like really a thoughtful engagement with that because that's not of microaggression that's really a systemic it's path-dependent right so that if women could not enter universities and how could they possibly be a majority of professors or even half of them as the country you know by by chance we would expect so so Michael response to that but my actual question is about John Boehner right and I wondered I think that resigning is like the new thing to do so that's actually what I think happened at Mizzou I think that resignation is Noble now since John Boehner and I wonder what you think about the freedom caucus and they're pushing him out of leadership of the Republican Party or whether there's some other explanation for kind of the it seems to me that he fell on his sword as a spirit he could not manage the caucus anymore and he got tired of trying and there's a mechanism for calling for the vacating of the speakership and John Boehner didn't want to go through that anymore and if I were in Congress I'd probably be a member of the freedom caucus I'm a tea party guy in good standing I mean I all they're saying is read the Constitution and do what Madison said got to Princetonian sitting here Madison from a great class of 1771 is our guy so I think Boehner got tired and I think he felt someone else might manage this better and you know Bismarck once said God looks after drunks babies in the United States he must have been looking after stairs someone who Paul Ryan's caliber and standing there who'll see what he can do I don't know what I'm supposed to say about the University of Missouri other than this obviously feces what was it a swastika or something that's that's intolerable it should be the culprit should be found and they should be at least expelled yes we want lots of women in academia don't know how it is in PhD programs around the country they're more women in law school now I believe in men or women I think in medical school than men right now 59% of all undergraduates 50 so I mean that's it that demography is going to take care of that what we want however a hundred years from now is not to give a damn about who looks like whom when my dear friend Pat Moynihan was Richard Nixon's chief domestic policy adviser and he had a big staff and Nixon once said to Pat what got a portion of your staff are women Pat drew himself up to his full considerable six-foot-five and said mr. president the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids me to ask my staff if they're men or women that's kind of America I want to live in so we got one more and just time for one cuz I'm saving one I've come to believe that the mainstream media journalism has become so biased and so slanted so agenda driven that it's no longer trustworthy and my off base you're not off based in the way we've gone back to the past there was a time but in the 1790s when politics was at least as violently bitter as it is today in our party system which none of the founders anticipated was coalescing all the newspapers were party newspapers Jefferson had his favorite newspaper as Secretary of State he kept it alive with government business the Federalists did the same thing so in a sense we were reverting into something that the period of scrupulous objective independent observing journalism may have been a little episode I don't know but the journalism today is the Internet is part of it and cable television which broke up the oligopoly of the three networks thirty years ago at the dinner hour in America eighty percent of all the television sets in use were tuned ABC NBC and CBS now it's way below 50 and that's healthy break it up you know let people but the MSNBC people go there and the and people both of them go there and the Fox News people bless them come to us a thousand flowers below it'll to help sort itself out but it's healthy that people have now said we have to look at this differently we have to look at this there are party newspapers they just are and if people know that going in make a little sorted out the American people are not DOS they know how to read newspapers and how to watch television makes them irritable but they know how to do it it's only in the last ten years in fact one of them lives on in name at least that in this state the two institutions of the Indiana Democratic editorial Association and the Indiana Republican yet his royal station finally gave up the ghosts and disappeared but they were the vestiges of that era of party voice newspapers and and lived right on into the low 80s at least so so I'll I want to close I want to elevate the debate to something even more important than those wonderful questions and that of course is baseball and so I really this is a question that I've only thought about in the hypothetical till the last year or two when the Cubs began to rise and George my question is I know you've waited through those hundred and whatever it is seven consecutive rebuilding seasons that you always write about but I'm worried now and and I was interested you use this same word a minute ago it's some sports context but if the Cubs perish the thought actually break through and win the World Series won't it end one of the great romances in all of American sports won't it spoil this for this great yearning for all time I hope to find out look I I only write about politics to support my baseball habit which is so severe that my wedding ring which I designed myself as the major league baseball logo on it it's my way of telling Mari that in my heart she ranks up there close to baseball which told me romantic losing is good for your character I'm told I've got quite enough character thank you I'm done with that look I grew up in Champaign Illinois midway between Chicago and st. Louis at an age too tender to make life shaping decisions I had to choose between being a Cubs fan on a Cardinal fan all my friends became Cardinal fans and grew up cheerful and liberal I became a dyspeptic conservative you suffered enough I have suffered enough Dodger fan that I am I was got to spend some time with Tommy Lasorda once and he too said he said his wife Joe had once said to him as he left on yet another scouting trip or something Tommy there are times I think you love baseball more than you love me and he said Joe I do but I love you more than football we we we've done some I had some research Commission and Princeton's a some of Princeton's finest minds have determined that of those 324 million Americans you mentioned exactly seventeen men look good in a bowtie and you were one of very good so here's a Purdue bowtie and it and as we break I just I want everybody who doesn't already know to know that doctor will gave us not just this tremendous tower but several other hours meeting with two classes hundreds of our kids a reception with some of our honors college students he really we probably imposed on him too much and today but I want to thank you on behalf of the Purdue community George not only for today but for a remarkable lifetime of helping all who were attentive presidents senators and most importantly citizens to think more carefully thank you very much

Channel: Purdue Convocations

Views: 11,897

Rating: 4.5714288 out of 5

Keywords: Purdue University, Purdue Convocations, performing arts, live on stage, George Will (Author), Mitch Daniels (Politician), The Washington Post (Newspaper)

Id: s0PuaAHdE6s

Length: 64min 51sec (3891 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2015