Heather Mac Donald on Identity Politics & More | Part 1/2 | The Origins Podcast w/ Lawrence Krauss

[Music] hi i'm lawrence krauss and welcome to the origins podcast today's podcast is unique in in our experience for a variety of reasons my guest heather mcdonald is a very provocative and interesting journalist and we originally had a conversation in her apartment in new york city almost two years ago and the issues she was discussing at a time based on her book called the diversity delusion at that time were provocative as they are provocative today but at the time may have seemed outrageous to many people and they still may to some people but what's been interesting is in the last two years the public conversation has shifted with the development the popularization of critical race theory and and and and discussions of wokeness and in in in popular literature and and mainstream magazines some of the issues she's she raised then are are a little more common and may seem a little less outrageous though i suspect they'll still provoke and and disturb some people but that's okay but because uh that was recorded a while ago what we decided to do was do a second discussion more recently by zoom where we could update some of those issues so this is a two-pronged interview spanning almost two years one in person recorded in three cameras and the other other by zoom and i hope you'll find um both discussions interesting and the updates particularly interesting heather doesn't mince words and she and i don't agree on everything as you'll see but i think it's very important to have these conversations with people even if you don't agree with them especially in fact if you don't agree with them and uh and so this is another example of the kind of dialogue that i think should be happening plus i think several issues she raises are very important and need to be discussed in public so i hope you enjoy the upcoming interview and uh or discussion they're not interviews or discussions uh but let me also say that uh for our viewers on on on youtube about 85 percent of our viewers are not subscribed to our channel it'd be great if you could subscribe to our channel and if you want more content and want access to things like live q and a's with me please consider subscribing to our patreon subscription service where you can where you can watch these things in fact without any uh additional advertisements as well but we also have live q and a's and other things and it helps support this podcast which is part of a non-profit organization the the origins project foundation so please consider either subscribing to youtube or and or subscribing to patreon and if you uh if you want if you're a patreon member you can write in about issues you want to discuss people you'd like me to interview or dialogues we'd like to have and and and be uh and make it more a little more interactive and we're hoping to try and make this more interactive all the time having said all that i hope you enjoy the upcoming podcast here with heather mcdonald well heather mcdonald thank you for letting us invade your personal space here well it's been interesting watching the setup it's an impressive impressive crew you've got here they are they're always behind the scenes but they're impressive behind the scenes i look like a studio a hollywood studio here it's right it's actually all fake it's just a backdrop but uh here we are and i want to uh first if this is going to be a fun conversation for so many reasons in my opinion but but we we come from opposite sides of the of the political aisle and in principle don't be so certain well we'll see and and uh and that's great i think that's and this is an example of actually talking to people you don't always agree with about everything it's it's a it's a new concept and i applaud you for in your writing which i've been a big fan of for sort of confronting what you might call much conventional political wisdom and uh and and you do it with actually facts which is really refreshing as well as cogent arguments and so although as i say i don't agree with all of them but i i really applaud your your lucid and courageous efforts well thank you i appreciate you then keeping an open mind if we do come from polar opposites which we'll discover i didn't realize that so now i'm going to be on my guard here so i'm i'm a left-wing traditionally an academic of course yeah of course exactly we all are and um the uh i should also in the in the in the spirit of the current times give a trigger warning to the people watching and listening that we're going to talk about difficult concepts for some people here and they shouldn't be but they are and is we're gonna push people's buttons and that's a good thing in my opinion and i and uh and if you don't like having your buttons pushed it's time to push the button and listen to something else right now just remarkable that you have to give that though i just i i frankly do not believe that i don't take it seriously that people are truly emotionally traumatized by hearing a discussion of something they disagree with i frankly think it's fakery it's a way of of shutting out trying to shut down ideas you disagree with but the idea that people actually feel uh emotionally affected by a perfectly rationally rational discussion to me is preposterous but maybe maybe i am completely out of touch well i think i think we find that what people believe they feel makes them feel a certain way and if people have been convinced that they should feel that way we'll get to that okay because i think i mean much of the points you're trying to write many of the points you're trying to raise are are um are just about this so uh but first you know this is the origins podcast so i want to talk a little bit about your origins how you came to the point to be to be uh escorted by police uh off a campus uh uh or at least protected by police from from from students so let's talk about your background a little bit how did you what what was your interest in and why ultimately what i really want to focus on is is uh your recent book which which i think is a masterpiece called the diversity delusion how race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture but how did you get there i don't know if you want to know politically or intellectually both i i began as a default liberal uh on the west coast you know which is what one is i have to say and i don't i don't really mean this sounds condescending but it's it's what the air one breathes and so you have to work your way out of that position if if one is going to do so i was i loved school i loved studying i loved reading literature and i i was fascinated by language and in high school i adored faulkner i adored moby dick i adored language that was pushing the envelope was trying to create something wild and new so when i went to college i was a prime sort of target for this mad literary theory that was reigning at yale which is where i went to undergraduate at the time in the 70s and it embraced a set of propositions that i now look upon as obviously empirically wrong things like um language always breaks down there is no possibility of a successful communication every book is about its own failure literature is not you may think it's about trying to describe the agony of a first love or or the vicious social gossip in a tiny 19th century town no that's not wrong daemon and paul demand would tell you it's about its own inability to mean and the most absurd claim was that the human self is nothing more than a trope of language there is no self we are simply a play of linguistic signs i bought into this which by the way for people who have weren't subjected to that nonsense it was called deconstructionism deconstruction post-structuralism right um so i i was uncritical i it felt like the hottest thing going yale had this feeling of being at the cutting edge intellectually and this was a secret knowledge it was a secret society that allowed you to feel superior to those unwashed who actually thought that you could read a book and understand the author's intent or that you know you could make a contract and it would actually work to bind the parties so i got sucked into this i wasted far too much time in the sterling uh stacks of of uh yale's main library slogging through jacques de gridas la mythology because i suspended disbelief and i i revered my fac my professors uh they seemed the source of knowledge and so that i i wasted far too much time reading theory instead of great books which i did fortunately at the time still read some extraordinary literature and in fact the one benefit of being in the college in the 70s as opposed to the 80s was one still got to read the canon i got to read dead white males without anybody thinking to and moan about their gonads and melanin it never occurred to me as i was struggling with milton's syntax in paradise lost that what i really should be upset about besides his latinate diction was that he's a male and you know he's writing from some patriarchal tradition and yes in fact eve is shown as submissive to adam so what the fact of the matter is the language was erotically rich it was unbelievable it was bursting with gorgeousness of the of the fruits in in eden uh and so deconstruction still read great literature from a perverse perspective but trying to deconstruct it trying to deconstruct it but but it had very good taste when it came to literature so i then studied in england and i studied linguistics which was a complete revelation to me and i loved phonetics we were talking before about chomsky i liked syntax but what i really loved was speech act theory j.l austin how to do things with words and and john searle who's a philosopher at berkeley and austin has this wonderful draw he was a british philosopher in the analytic tradition and he has this marvelous dry language but what he noticed is that analytic philosophy up to then had been interested with what it called the truth conditions of language what are the conditions under which a sentence is true and austin noticed there's a whole category of language for which the the criteria of truth and falsity don't apply things like i hereby take you as my duly wedded husband that's not true or false it can backfire it can it can be a successful statement or an unsuccessful but it is not describing something in the world it is actually changing the world and you know i i you know i i christen this ship yes hms pinafore again if you don't have a ship or you don't have the capacity to christen it and nobody like you're sitting there breaking your champagne bottle and just walking by you have not christened the ship but under certain conditions that speech act will change the world and so austin set out to think about those conditions and the way uh he called them illocutionary utterances can work or misfire so that to me was a sense of language as something dynamic i came back to yale to start a phd and in literature or in comparative literature which is where deconstruction was at its hottest and i sat in on paul diman's class he was he was the most sort of austere and and and daunting and magisterial of the of the yale deconstructionists whereas jeffrey hartman was sort of elfin and playful and i heard him engaging in the same rhetoric this weird bizarre rhetoric obsessed with decapitation and mutilation in shelley for god's sakes and i thought this is madness this is madness and these people are saying the same thing as when i left it's a broken record and it has nothing to do with language it is not interesting it is a rhetoric that is self-referential it's a bunch of of effete rhetorical gestures this this this arcane language and you know we all know what it's because it spread these die critical marks you know so you'd have the you know impressions impressions with the slash you know and everybody started picking that up so i thought this is madness but it was a it was sort of a crisis for me because i had revered these people but i quit but i still had the theory bug in me so i had i had intuited that legal studies had a lot of the same questions of hermeneutics which is the question of interpreting texts how do you interpret a teacher for the legal profession so i went to law school not because i want to be a lawyer but i was interested in critical legal studies which was the the legal version of deconstruction i still had the theory bug in me and um it was absurd i tried writing a law school note on article three of the uniform commercial code applying speech act theory article three deals with promissory notes negotiable instruments this was insane i was so clueless these are very practical commercial pieces of paper to deal with credit in a the evolving economy to apply speech act theory is so so dumb to that but i couldn't see it i was still blinded by theory that this is something that works it's something that is in commerce uh i kept yearning to go back to academia because to me again the greatest privilege in the world is to be a curator of this tradition of these books that we should all be down on our knees in gratitude before there's none of us deserve them and if we don't read them they die uh and they have they bring to us language experience feeling that we would not otherwise not have access to so i kept wanting to go back but every time i looked at academia it was getting dumber and dumber and multiculturalism hit and so at that point you had this shallow narcissism of students who don't know anything thinking that they are justified in rejecting works of such profound sublimity simply because of the gonads and melanoma the people who wrote them this was shocking to me so i didn't i didn't start a phd up again and my goal at that point was to write the definitive refutation of deconstruction because i was so mad because i'd wasted so much time instead of reading more trollop instead of reading more jonathan swift i read and so who's a dead end yeah no i it's funny because i was i taught at yale a little bit after that time and i was on science hill which we sort of looked down on that thing but the interesting thing is none of those students none of the most of the steely students never walked up the hill yeah the science part they spent down and yeah constructing down at the other end yeah no it was uh and and if i were a scientist or a science student a stem student i'd be pretty mad you know that there's you still have standards there and the students are working there was definitely a different sense and uh uh uh up on science hill but and yet and yet the theorists the literary theorists thought they knew more than you guys did they because eventually you know even we had the great alan sokol hoax you know the physicist who wrote this this work purporting to show that all sorts of of uh theories in physics are merely tropes they're merely linguistic drugs in fact the first time ever you heard the word hermeneutics was i think in alan so-called uh the title of his piece yeah which had to do with hermeneutics and string theory yeah so they're actually the literary theorists are claiming oh you guys you're just you're just like you're just victimized by the the the linguistic tropes it's just unbelievable anyway so just to condense so i started writing short pieces on um on what was happening in culture at that point multiculturalism post-modernism and i eventually started doing real journalism which i'd never done in college which i regret and and that's what really turned me i guess a little more conservative was going out and this was in the 90s in new york with rudolph giuliani the mayor and big things were happening then he was he was trying to change the welfare culture of the city we had one in every seven people in welfare in the country were in new york he was also bringing crime down to record lows so i started going to homeless shelters and welfare offices because i figure i don't know anything my only value added as a writer is i'm willing to go out and go into strange neighborhoods and talk to people and i find people like talking and so i would go to welfare offices and people the clients would tell me they should have done this welfare reform years ago these welfare mothers and again this is a welfare mother speaking this is not ronald reagan with his welfare queen conceit you know these welfare mothers are having more babies just to get their welfare check increased these are the welfare mothers speaking again or they're too lazy to even change the 40 watt bulb in there in their uh in their apartment i talked to this one couple where the guy was absolutely entitled about i'm never gonna they're not gonna make me work you know if if if getting food stamps he's able-bodied hulking guy if they make me work i'm not going to do it and he mooches off of his girlfriend who is covered by was what used to be called afdc so to get her benefits she had to do a little bit of work fair each week so he was happy to mooch off of her but he felt an entitlement that he had his entitlement to food stamps so that sort of thing i it started to change me guard you clearly yeah it traumatized you right and uh and uh and and started you on the conservative track but but um although you're i've read you describe yourself as a secular conservative which is interesting nowadays you have to say that i guess in this in this climate uh because there's such a connection between conservatism and and religious right at least in this country i didn't realize that i mean i i'd never read a conservative publication in my life until the 90s i was completely i had no knowledge of this and but it wasn't until the 2000s when i discovered how deeply connected religion was to it well we could we could talk about welfare we could talk about religion but we're going to go back and talk about what what sort of started you on on this was the the uh well it's interesting that deconstructionism started you on the concern about what was happening in academia and it's interesting that your introduction of yourself it's a perfectly introduction book because on the on the very first page you you you refer to an incident and i'll read it says in 2016 a student petition at yale university called for the dismantling of the college's decades-long requirement that english majors take a course covering chaucer spencer milton and wordsworth reading these authors quote creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color do you want comment i mean that that encapsulates everything the the the delusion i mean it really is a delusion that reading a work of great literature creates a climate of hostility i mean one doesn't even know how to unpack that yeah it's a it's well i you give a bunch of examples the beginning and we'll go through but there's another example of course and i know the people involved in this case but uh uh brett weinstein but another example of the extremism quote unquote i guess that you would describe in going on american campuses in may 2017 students from evergreen state college in washington in washington state stormed into a class taught by biology professor brett weinstein and began cursing and hurling racial epithets you piece of screamed one student get the out of here screamed another weinstein a lifelong progressive had refused to obey an edict from evergreen's director of first people's multicultural advising services that all white faculty cancel their courses for a day and stay off campus and it resulted in that so i think you know those kind of examples um certainly from an objective sense suggest some problems but you but you were actually you you experienced this directly and i if you could talk what happened to you at claremont mckenna college it would be useful well uh my previous book was called the war on cops and it was looking at the empirical basis for the black lives matter narrative that we're living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of men black men and if you look at the data it's just not borne out what determines police use of force is is civilian use of force and violence and recently a national academy of science study came out with this yet again that it is it is the civilian's use of violent force that predicts whether an officer will and so when you look at the data it turns out that black men are not being shot disproportionately to their involvement in violent street crime if you use that as a benchmark this is sounds uncomfortable to say but they're actually shot less than would be predicted by their violent engagement in drive-by shootings i mean the fact of the matter is lawrence and this is also very painful to say that the face of violent street crime and i'm talking here overwhelmingly of robberies armed robberies and drive-by shootings in this country is basically black and brown in in new york city blacks are about 23 percent of the population they commit almost three-quarters of all shootings when you add hispanic shootings to black shootings you get over 98 percent of all shootings in the city whites are 34 of the population they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings though those disparities exist in every single city today and and just so we don't so we get a little less hate mail maybe than um so so my point was i was just going to push back and my uh no but i want to suggest i assume you i'm not justifying political shootings no exactly nor are you suggesting that this is not per there aren't perhaps social conditions that contribute to this i think sure yes i i would definitely i i would definitely say that there are social conditions that can for me it's the breakdown of the family and the lack of kids are not being socialized sure but but in any case what i've found in going out to inner city neighborhoods is that there's an enormous untapped support for the police that does not get reported i've spent i spent a lot of times going to police community meetings in east harlem in the south bronx in central brooklyn in south side of chicago every single time i swear every single time what i've heard from those good law abiding residents who show up they take time off of their week to show up at these meetings is we want more cops you arrest the dealers they're back on the corner the next day why can't you get them off the street there's kids hanging out by the hundreds fighting whatever happened to truancy laws whatever happened to loitering laws so that was a voice that was not being heard so i wrote this book saying it's more complicated you know it is not it's not you cannot explain this by police racism so i was invited to claremont mechanic college which is a small uh liberal arts college in in southern california and a call went out on facebook before i several days before i arrived to shut the fascist mcdonald down and so this got more and more organized and the students um surrounded the auditorium where i was supposed to speak and would not let anybody in there's a some video online of a biology professor an older man trying to get in and just getting pushed back by the people and there were you know scuffles and skirmishes it's nothing like milo riots and berkeley but but um so nobody could get in they had to escort me into the auditorium early through all sorts of secret passages and so i gave my talk to an empty hall but outside the protesters were chanting and pounding on the plate glass windows and they had said they'd moved where the podium was because they didn't want the podium to be visible as the night came on and the lights came out in the room just for safety reasons and then the pounding on the windows got so bad that they figured they couldn't protect my safety so i was escorted out the kitchen by um the police well it's yeah it's an it's one example let me just say i'm not playing a victim here and whenever i just i'm asked to describe what happens yeah inevitably the left says oh well you're playing the victim card like anybody i'm not i'm not claiming i'm a victim just saying no but that the fact that that could happen on the university cap campus is itself ridiculous how is it possible to describe something without if you're going to say that's a victim so tell me you tell me you sleep at night oh and you can still sleep yes yes but you tell me how i'm supposed to just how anybody's supposed to describe that if that's an automatic so anyway facts are facts and you describe the fact the people who are the if there were any victims and i'm not even i hate the word if there are any victims it would be the students who actually had wanted to come sure and engage with me and and ask me questions that was not possible no that's i think that's the case i know of it i i attended a similar event that my wife actually knew about it actually my wife attended the worst part of it at a university up in oregon and it was just amazing because it was a it was a law class in fact but but the kids weren't allowed to hear the the kids who'd come weren't allowed to hear because people were playing music and trumping and playing and it's you know and you're her it's your you're doing a disservice to the people who actually want to listen well maybe we'll we'll get to that but i mean i've interviewed ricky gervais who points out that people who go to one of these things and and and get mad at what someone's saying it's like people who who walk down into a street and see a uh sign saying guitar lessons and saying damn it i don't want guitar lessons but anyway but you point out i think as a interestingly enough ironically you say of all chance how do you spell racist cmc was the most absurd and it didn't even rhyme racist cmc quote unquote is so eager for quote-unquote diverse students that it has historically admitted black and hispanic students with an average of 200 point lower s.a.t score than white and asian students so i think that i mean part of the point of of of the initial aspect of your book is that not only is the is the attempt to um silence uh not just people you disagree with but peop but distinguished but chaucer is ridiculous but also universities are the opposite of of places where where uh where people are experiencing uh uh racism uh in in an institutionalized way it's not as if racism doesn't happen it happens also but but in fact there are places where the opposite is happening so maybe you want to talk about that a little bit yes i mean this is what is so remarkable is the effort that goes into maintaining this narrative that on campuses one is the subject of rampant bigotry i was just protested at holy cross and that chant was hilarious my oppression is not a delusion this got chanted again and again to drown me out and and afterwards this is uh organized by the black student union holy cross which is a catholic jesuit school up in worcester massachusetts the the co-president of the of the union said i'm just so proud of what we did we're on to bigger i can tell this is started something new for you to be claiming that there was something courageous and and and effective and transcendent about chanting my oppression is not a delusion at holy cross or any other college is ridiculous the fact of the matter is again because of the academic skills gap which is very large it's a standard deviation uh that if schools are determined to engineer their critical mass of minority students it's very complicated as you get a cascading effect they are all admitting so-called underrepresented minorities urms in the admissions jargon with a huge huge deficiency of skills no i am not saying and nobody this is something called mismatch which you're bringing students in to an academic environment for which they are not competitively qualified nobody is saying that minority students should not go to college what they're saying is they should go to college under the same conditions as everybody else which is in a class where your peers share your academic qualifications only blacks and hispanics are put under the burden of being catapulted into academic environments where they are not prepared to compete we're not all of them i mean it's obviously something some but but it's it's pretty big i mean harvard in this recent law school uh the the admissions case harvard's yeah if harvard did not exercise large racial preferences it's currently at fourteen percent black student body it would be less than one percent so there's a lot of preference going on anyway so for students to think that they're the victims of racism it's just the opposite they want and the same goes for faculty again the faculty there's not a single academic department that is not twisting itself into knots to hire and promote not just urms black and hispanic faculty but women as well well yeah we'll get we'll get there get together you know the important thing is i wan i i want you to provide what i find or when one of the many things i find refreshing about your writing is that you actually provide statistics and data and not not opinion just opinion about this and the and the statistics are quite remarkable in in a variety of cases and we'll we'll i'll try and quote some of them from you um but one of the things that you talk about when you're talking about the fact that universities that that what you constantly focus they should be focusing on on on on in your case great books and and and and education but instead are focusing on on what is what is a quote-unquote an invented uh um environment of of oppression and and people feel so threatened that they want to close down any any thing that appears to threaten them any speech that appears to threaten them which is really if anything universities should be the bastions of free speech they should be the place where where uh you hear things and and i've said in fact i was planning to say later but i'll say now that the the i've always said that one of the purposes of education is to make you uncomfortable and and and in the sense that if you're comfortable you're really not pushing your boundaries and what's the point of going to school if you're not pushing your boundaries but uh yeah i actually disagree with that i mean that that's that's said a lot um and i guess i have i'm it's becoming an increasingly conservative view of education that i to me the best definition of it comes from the british philosopher michael oakshott who said that school is about passing on an inheritance yeah okay hold that thought because i know the last part of the book is the purpose of universities and i think that's one place where we disagree somewhat um i think partly because of your background in let me just say it now in your background in literature where where great books are important and the remarkable thing about physics is for example is that if you're really good you don't ever have to read a book at all uh uh you know feynman could derive everything himself rather than reading books not that would and i love books so let's make that that clear so we'll we'll i want to get to that academic discussion but i want to get there going through the materials you talk about first and one of the things that i found striking when you talked about shutting you down and other people and potentially racist speech or the assumption that that everything that's happening is racist you quoted frederick douglass who himself said slavery cannot tolerate free speech and he warned that liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions that cease to exist that of all rights is the dread of tyrants it's the right which they for where the which they first of all strike down and so the irony in some sense of striking down speech in an effort to preserve liberty is is is a remarkable thing to be happening in right well they wouldn't i don't know and i think conservatives way overused liberty and freedom i'm so sick of it because there's many more things yeah i grew up in canada where we didn't talk about liberty and freedom as much as americans do i see so maybe and was it that much less free i don't know i know it didn't strike me as i'm sure that's colored me yeah no i think uh tradition and and uh order is also very important but in any case um they're not striking it down in the name of liberty they're striking it down in the name of their power and their uh effort to to crush perceive depression but what i find really amazing is the failure of universities to teach these students to be able to think abstractly and to extrapolate from a current situation to derive a principle for that because every time they are claiming that they have the false major to shut these people down they're setting a precedent saying that is something legitimate to do it's not that difficult you don't have to engage in very abstract logic to say okay so what happens if we give trump this prop this power do you really want trump to be able to find what hate speech is because i'm sure he's willing to do so and i'm sure there's plenty of of media outlets that he would call hate speech so that's one thing at the very least whether or not you believe in the free marketplace of ideas if you're at all conscious of the tables can turn now it may be that in academia it is an empirically sound judgment that the tables will never turn and forever here on out we will always be in control and we will be the ones defining hate speech but should there be some kind of apocalypse and power changes again the the historical ignorance of this because this is what governments have done throughout history exactly it's it's you'd think that well you know the lessons of history would be learned right but they don't learn history i mean come on they're not reading histories yeah there's a i've quoted this before but i learned it last year i love this quote from mark twain who said history may not repeat itself but it sure rhymes a lot and uh uh but the but one of the problems is not just the ignorance or the literally the ignorance of of students who are feeling this but the fact that university administrations are going along with it and and that the an example i guess that hits both of us because we're both at yale is this remarkable experience i want to read from your book here that uh people have probably heard of this but a notorious video of a black female student at yale screaming and cursing at her college master in november 2015 and before i left yale i was going to become a college master so anyway is a chilling portrait of self-engrossed bathos-filled entitlement that's never been corrected by truth much less restrained by manners be quiet she shrieks at the frozen administrator why the did you accept the master position who the hired you she continues at full self-righteous cry you should not sleep at night you're disgusting what caused this the master's wife child psychologist erica christie christakis had recently suggested in an email that the yale multiculturalism bureaucracy did not need to oversee halloween costumes her email prompted an open letter signed by nearly a thousand faculties deans and students accusing her of racism and white supremacy and calling for her and her husband's immediate removal from their jobs and campus home a hundred or so mostly minority students then mobbed her husband nicholas christakis a renowned physician and sociologist for an hour-long abuse session in the college quad that included be quiet shriek among equally horrified displays of rudeness you were disgusting screamed another student i want your job to be taken from you look at my face first of all and understand that you are such a disappointment to this university to your students to yourself your disgusting male you were 20 discussing 20 seconds ago a day ago and a month ago and then christakis later hugs one of the students abdul razak muhammad zachariah in a conciliatory gesture but zechariah orders christas to understand that quote the situation right now doesn't require you to smile another female student alexandra zina barlow cries that christakis's invocation of free speech creates quote a space to allow for violence to happen on this campus christakis responds that i disagree with barlow shouts at him it doesn't matter whether you agree or not it's not a debate now the reason i wanted to do all that and mention those two names is as you mentioned later in in case anyone misunderstood where the administration sympathies at yale lay yale conferred on alexandra zina barlow and abdul razak muhammad zechariah its graduation prize for accomplishment in quote the service of race and ethnic relations yale lauded barlow for her quote womanist feminist anti-racist work and for teaching her peers faculty administration about inclusive leadership i i just you know what what can one say what can one say i mean again like it's hard to believe that there's any faculty member no matter how nuttily committed to the victimology narrative that would not be appalled by this but you know but but you point out over and over again well in this case faculty signed this letter but but they often in in the case of your case too i think the faculty did not uh did not stand up no and and one can understand that as a faculty member a former faculty member it's it there's lots of fear that if you do stand up uh and somehow i mean faculty live in fear you may not realize that but they live in fear of people taking away the resources and their departments shrinking and and and and and um and there they live subject to the whims of the administration in some sense and although they you know may perhaps shouldn't be so timid it's really one can at least understand how speaking out against a political wave yes which is adopted by administrators would be viewed as something dangerous for a faculty member to do for their own career i mean yeah it's you know it may not be laudable but it's understandable no it's very understandable it's easy for me to take my pot shots and and get out you know so it would take a heck of a lot of courage to be a pariah in an environment where you have to live every single day but yeah no it's it was amazing again the experience my wife had was she was there were all these faculty in the back standing in the back of the room when these students were stopping the speaker from speaking in a law class and the students from here and not a single person said anything but it's you know peer pressure is very and and and and it's very hard to overcome virtue signaling which we'll we'll really i think want to talk about it sometime well but you know the fact the faculty are not just scared of the administrators they're also scared of the students you know i recently was reading this wonderful 1917 lecture that max weber the great german sociologist gave called science is a vocation because i've been i gave a speech about social justice and he says another reason why an academic should not indulge in his own political views on the academic platform is because his audience is forced to be silent meaning the students are not allowed to talk back they have to accept his authority and i thought if only i mean this is just such a grotesque conversion of what i think should be the proper hierarchy well you do you see actually i think it's interesting i think students should be encouraged to to be skeptical of their professors and that's that's part of education i mean i i view i've always viewed authority as an anathema in some sense or at least to be questioned in fact um one of the one of the things a total aside but you know why i like to bring in science is that um it went i visited chair of the department for many years and and and involved admission committees and of course one saw a lot of chinese students coming in physics because they certainly do much better on exams than american students and that they so their their their gre scores overwhelm american students on the whole but the interesting thing was that when they came into graduate school they do they do well in the on the classes but when it came to dissertation time really that what was happening was that they unduly respected the professors they would never want to contradict and what's wonderful i think at least for china that's beginning to happen is you're beginning to see that change there's still too much hierarchy in china and because if you don't at least in science and i hope it's the case in the humanities well if you're not willing to contradict the wisdom of those before you then you're not likely at least to explore new options and in physics uh if you're not willing to say well maybe this is wrong and and let me explore it and see and let the data tell you whether it is or not then uh you know so you so you have to not accept the if you quote unquote the wisdom of your professors you should be willing to listen to it but i i tend to think that and again this is where maybe we just we slightly disagree i think we i should listen to everything with a skeptical mind uh including if i'm a student what the professor in front of me is saying well i was a talky student i you know i loved talking in class these days i do sort of feel like students are better seen and not heard but um but i would say it's different i mean science is clearly teleological and you are definitely like weber said as a scientist you know that whatever you do is going to be cancelled you know that that's your hope well except you hope you hope you're wrong it won't be cancelled and that's important that's another thing it may be transcendent it could be transcendent that's the biggest thing and it's incorporated right newton is still right he's not cancelled right right that's a but i say that only because that's a huge misunderstanding in the part that somehow scientific revolutions do away with what they would perform they don't at all they just incorporate it in a new in a new whole neither the political revolutions ever do away in my opinion with everything that went before them ultimately but well you can't right well i don't know whether china did or not yeah maybe i would say in the humanities i think that's not quite right i think that there is no student knows enough to challenge his professor's theory of how early civilization spread around the mediterranean i'm sorry a freshman coming in does not know that well no about okay but then and i think and you don't challenge the periodic table you don't challenge german cases you can ask questions about it and and look and i think you should be willing to challenge it and then find out you're wrong i mean if a student says you know that doesn't sound logical to me that's then it's worthwhile saying it and then finding out that their thinking is wrong because actually or this is fun because i hadn't planned to go in any of this but pedagogically there's a lot of data in my opinion that suggests the only way you learn something is confronting your own misconceptions you know when you learn something by writing down the blackboard way you can memorize it but you forget it but when you see something and you say gee that can when and then you think about it and you work on it and you realize hold on what i thought was was think i was thinking it was just completely wrong then you remember it then you internalize it and that's that happens in physics all the time and again i think we are up against the two cultures problem you know i don't think a student approaching aeschylus's orestaya for the first time one of the great works of western civilization this trilogy about the house of atrius that traces the creation of justice and the rule of law from a from a cycle of the furies orestes being pursued by the furies to take vengeance on his mother for killing his father uh and and being persuaded by athena to accept the rule of the tribunal a student approaching that as a freshman we did simply is it's not for him i don't even know what it would mean to disagree with this you're there to absorb something that is a novel experience i guess the point is i don't think anyone should ever be persuaded from disagreeing they just can be wrong and so i'd like to encourage people students to at least well in a reasoned rational way with with substance that's the whole point is to have to rational discussion is to be able to back up your points your arguments with rational uh points but to be not to be afraid to say you know i just don't either maybe i don't understand it or i disagree i think i i think we have to encourage that and you you know you reference in fact a a someone i owe a friend of mine jonathan hates and and um co-wrote a book on called the coddling of the american mind and i heard him here actually at the 92nd street why in new york a while ago happened to be in town and they make an interesting point but you also but but i thought i took your take on it which again caused me to rethink this so there's an example they make it a point that students aren't feel entitled because they grew up in a society where and not only feel entitled but they feel easily offended and feel they should never be offended because they grow up in a society that where where parents teach them everything's a threat that going across the street is alone is a threat and the world is threatening and you should never ever feel uncomfortable that we that modern american parents want their children to never feel uncomfortable and when they do feel uncomfortable they feel that's a an offense even a physical offense even if the words are are making them uncomfortable and i think the point is very well made but you pointed out an interesting point that that when it comes to trigger words that are gender related you point out that if that coddling was the case you say if risk-averse child-rearing is the source of the problem why aren't heterosexual white male students demanding safe spaces as we talk about safe spaces because they're they're safe spaces i heard recently and i don't know the university where where uh a speaker was coming in to speak about free speech and at the time there were women's groups or on campus that organized safe spaces so people would not have to hear about free speech and you may do make the point that safe spaces now are if it's just coddling that that alone can't explain things because there appears to be a gender gap in the in the need for his a spaces do you want to true and uh but you know i i was we were just sharing before this show started uh a really nauseating document from the secretary of yale university about these spa treatments that undergraduates can get because they just need to unwind from their stressful days being a yale student come on you've got like a sampling of extra virgin olive oil in the dining rooms it's outrageous that they that this this amount it's decadent that they're being taught to think of themselves as in need of therapy as an 18 year old they should be out like striding the moors and and you know wanting to write romantic poetry for god's sakes they are the most unfortunate individuals in human history so there is and i also see you know in in new york you see these little three foot tall four-year-old boys on tricycle scooters so this is probably the most stable contraption ever invented so two big wheels and the boys three foot and he's wearing this huge bubble helmet and his father's got his hand on the on the shoulder just to steady him even further so there's definitely that and you know i contrast this with h.l menken's fabulous autobiography happy days of growing up in baltimore in the in the 19th century and just just raising hell i mean that's what boy it should be so there is that but i think that i i do disagree with hate and lukianov in that i think this whole uh guise of being vulnerable as i we started speaking with briefly in the start of our talk is ideological it is very specifically targeted at a certain set of ideas it's based on hatred and resentment and it's not everybody who comes out of this environment is not given an equal hand to play in the victim's sweepstakes well and and once again um playing the victim card and having that that victimhood validated are two are two sides of the coin they're both you would argue equally and or at least both of concern and and we've already pointed out that this ridiculous response of yale which doesn't surprise me actually having taught there for a long time but but i left for many reasons but um uh but you also point out and it's worth reminding that it's not just academia you know there's experiences that at google in that regard too where people are willing to point out um that they're you know there there may there may be reverse discrimination or or uh um uh uh uh any someone who actually called out for greater openness to ideas that challenge what you might call progressive dogma is then you know potentially fired and so that's happening in the workplace as well as as well as you know people have this the optimists among us which i do not count myself as one uh do believe that oh well there's this firewall between academia and there's a conservative political columnist in washington michael barone who wrote a book several years ago distinguishing between a heart american soft american he said soft america's quintessentially the acad you know the academy and that they you know students that don't have to live up to standards and they're cuddled as soon as they get into heart america which is the workplace the marketplace they'll have to their spines will stiffen it was a plausible thesis turned out to be wrong you know soft america's taking over heart america and when uh you mentioned google so you know james damore was fired for writing a very reasonable 10-page fact-based memo drawing upon decades of psychological research you know the big five personality traits poor james damore was such a geek he was so naive that he actually thought he could get away with using a term of art in psychology which is of their you know they their sort of big five personality distinctions one of which is neuroses or being neurotic [Music] it's not his term it's psychology's term but he he was so naive that he thought he could say well females score higher on the neurotic level so this like everybody went absolutely bonkers but he was suggesting that average career predilections um uh may explain why there's not 50 50 male female in high tech and it may not the point i guess the point is it may not be true what he was speculating but the mere speculation shouldn't should not should not get you fired not get you fired it's unbelievable unless you i mean you know there's a difference between demeaning individuals and saying you're not right you're not capable and making an intellectual speculation well this was not understood damore was not talking about any female at google exactly he was merely explaining why there's not more of that he was trying to explain it and he was trying maybe it may not be right it may you know it's a it's a plausible hypothesis i told you i'm skeptical of everything but you should be allowed to make the hypothesis right you're talking about distribution so two things that were relevant to this besides i'm getting fired the the ceo of google sundar pichai who's now been elevated recently to the head of alphabet itself which is worrisome he used the language of academic victimology and firing damore he said well the females feel unsafe by his presence but there was a hole when this happened there was discussion that broke out on the google chat rooms and there's a few conservatives and you know i was invited to speak at google it was very interesting somebody reached out to me several years ago they have a speaker program and thought it would be interesting or useful for me to talk about this penultimate book the war on cops and it turns out that i was going up to mountain view to give another talk so i hadn't heard from this guy this engineer who'd reached out to me and i contacted him against well by the way i am coming up and he said you know after much consultation with his professional friends and family he realized it would be too professionally and personally dangerous for him to even advance my name with the speaker committee so it's a very dominant political monoculture there but there was some conservative chats and one person said we got to stop this diversity thing our hr department which of course in google they've got all their googly language that's very precious so they call it people analytics again the corporate world the the people that have been marinated in this stuff are going out they're going to hr and and they're also you know bitching and moaning as as regular employees yeah yeah no it's it it's it's it's certainly going beyond academia and i think that's what's well it's worth raising and the google example is a really interesting one because google you know i've been to google many times and and it sort of prides itself on this you'd think this open environment to explore i mean that's what it's supposed to be about i mean that's what innovation is for if you're creating new products is to is to break outside the box and ask ask questions that may not seem sensible or and and see if where they go and yeah and and and have open discussion in these in literally safe spaces they have these little tents you can talk in and and you know so i was shocked to see that but let's let's push some other buttons um affirmative action uh there's a whole fair amount of the book on on the fact that in 1996 california voted to ban race and gender preferences in in government education you claim two things one that wasn't carried out in universities universities managed to try and uh go around that and two that affirmative action while while on the surface sounds like a very useful way to help underprivileged minorities um uh instead is insidious and and not only is is inappropriate but actually doesn't help the people you're trying to help and um and uh so you know i i wanted you to talk about the you focus on uc berkeley uh and the law school maybe i don't know what maybe because of your lock background i'm not sure why but or maybe this is where there was data where's the data exactly they want to talk about it this is to let the data out yeah exactly they let the data out and i found the data real quick well they didn't john moores who was the head of the board of regents got it and uh richard sander got it but no they didn't let the dad out they have to be dragged into court to let the dad out richard sander this you say a law professor who is the theorist of what i've mentioned before mismatch which is the set your second thesis there um and he's a progressive i mean he has a book out now on desegregation he would like to see somewhat more government involvement in housing desegregation this is you know not that being a conservative should at all uh you know serve as the grounds for questioning one's right to talk about the facts of of racial preferences but he's not one so um is but he's trying to get you see to give them more daddy he's trying to get the california bar to give him more debt and they're all just stonewalling the data you that well but the data you provided you know does show well first of all rather compellingly shows two things that there is that the university is violating that the university was violating the rules in the sense of of having very different sat scores and you know what just one piece of debt i mean there's so much in here but berkeley law school reduced the role of the law school admission test uh lsat and college grade point average in ranking students and it lowered the lsat cutoff score that would disqualify student for consideration previously these lowered expectations had applied only to minorities but then now they detect technically applied all students the school also removed the quality adjuster for high school gpa so that a 3.8 from a school where half the students drop out before graduation counted as much as a 3.8 from a school where the student bodies frantically competing to track uh to rack up academic honors and the purpose of that is is not to lower quality but inevitably it lowers quality right right right they all pretend it's so funny the schools pretend oh well sats they don't matter lsats they don't matter when they're calculating for whites and asians they'll they'll calculate somebody's s.a.t to the point oh five percent you know it matters a lot except for underrepresented minorities but but okay let's let's let me be the devil's advocate here and ask you to present the counter evidence that um the argument is made that uh that if you um if you will that you give people a chance that a lot of people don't and it's true i mean i i lived in in in cleveland and and taught it at a university in cleveland for a while and uh the just seeing the cleveland public schools and going in there which i did and uh seeing the circumstances under which teachers had to teach much less students that teach whether there were no books you know they they literally they didn't have a tax base and and it was just an abysmal environment so there's no doubt that those students regardless of their family environment which also got problematic but and they were primarily black students they were suffering from a disadvantage from a system that wasn't giving them what they should get what they deserve to get so accepting that fact and one makes the argument that okay giving some of them a leg up to have the opportunity to be in a situation where they do have those resources and can flourish is a good thing and i think that's the argument behind a parent of action but you do point out so having said that argument for one points out and you say here contrary to the claims of refer to action proponents the evidence is strong that students with a combined sat score of a thousand say are less likely to do well in competitive colleges that students with test scores several standard deviations above that and you make the argument that there's more evidence from law school from bar exams that that you do a disservice by putting people in an environment where where they feel they can't compete and where they can't but also the evidence once they can't compete they feel they can't compete and it's demoralizing rather than putting them in an environment where they where they are competitive then they can actually do better so maybe do you want to give any of the data or discuss that yeah again there's three points that really need to be made first uh let's let's notice at some point the elitism of this discourse yeah number two what we're talking about is empirically does it work is it it's we talk about the beneficiaries of affirmative action or the beneficiaries of racial preferences are they in fact beneficiaries uh and and uh what's the third point well i'll get to it okay okay but but the fact of the matter is let's take it out of race oh and we're talking about averages not individual cases distribution so if let's take it out of race and make it gender and so mit decides it needs more females in its freshman class and it admits me with 650 on my math sats and all my peers have 800 more or less so that freshman class calculus is going to be pitched to students that are at 800 and as somebody with 650 i'm not going to catch up now there may be you know of course there's going to be individuals that are going to rise to the challenge but on average on average uh you're putting them at a competitive disadvantage now had i gone and this is where the elitism gets in instead of my third point is nobody is saying minorities shouldn't go to college that's the thing it's go to a college where everybody else has empathy your same essays if instead of six going to mit with 650s i went to what let's say boston college or bu let's say they're the average is you're laughing is there are there are these risks no no i'm just thinking of all the people at boston college and bu who are going to be out so upset i'm saying they're yeah it is it is the mits and the berkeley chancellors of the world that are looking down their nose exactly at so-called second and third tier schools the presumption is unless unless you take exactly unless you go to the ivies your life is over yeah unless yeah so the presumption is unless you're we need to let people in here because we are the sole source of knowledge but if you let them go to bu or bc they won't in fact they'll flounder their lives they're open and i i i advise students by the way when i when kids ask me about one of your phds in physics or whatever and and where they should go and again i grew up in canada where things are so different all the universities are more or less the same and you go where you want to go because of geography as much as anything else but i always say if you can get a good education at any institution in the states there's 16 there's so many liberal arts college you can get a good one or a bad one it's up to you come to you do the work and and if you and all and if you do if you do well at a less well-known university if at least in science you'll have no problem getting into the best universities in graduate school right and so it's up to you to choose to learn wherever you are and you can get a fantastic education anywhere or a rotten one right so so so there i am at bu with my 650 sats on math and my peers do as well so the teaching i'm going to be able to it's pitch to my level uh and you know when when california voters did pass in 1996 prop 209 which purported to end preferences gender preferences as well as race preferences in government activities whether it's contracting or university admissions the chancellor of berkeley got up and said well where will we get our leaders of the future well you're going to get them from university of california at riverside i mean why the the the presidents are chancellors of the second third tier don't object to this snobbery is beyond me again there's nothing shameful about going to and obviously i went to yale but i don't think that's the only place you can get an education i went to a small school in canada right yes i did my phd at mit i mean exactly exactly and so the issue is not it's always seen like you're saying black shouldn't go to college no i'm not i'm saying they should go under the same conditions as everybody else it is a unique burden to be put into an environment where you are going to struggle i it's it's painful it's painful and i mean but we've all been there and it is painful some i mean it's useful on the other hand to struggle i think we all have to learn because we're all going to go into environments that are we're going to struggle and that's another thing is that everyone thinks they everyone well i think somewhere one of these again we'll see if we get to the quote but it's like everyone is excellent that's not true right we all kids nowadays everyone is is brilliant there's one quote when somebody one of these schools which is everyone everyone is brilliant and it's not true and and you and i and and we need to we need to realize that we need to struggle because sometimes we're not doing as well as we should and or or maybe it's not what we should be doing and and uh it's just part of life in a job and in a relationship and everything it's so so struggle is not to be avoided i think but you're absolutely right to be systematically to be systematically find yourself in a class that that and and i i've found that even in my career when i went when i you know just decided to pick something i don't think i'm um it's right for me and i should go somewhere else and do it it's it's it's okay but one of the problems of this that i find besides the fact that you present a lot of data suggesting that systematically students that are admitted by affirmative action don't pass the bar as as effectively as students who who go to other institutions and of law schools where they where they don't feel out of place right i don't know if you were going to remember any of those statistics but i was impressed reading that yeah that's why he wants to get the california bar association that has extraordinarily detailed data to be able to make just this point to compare mismatch students with non-mismatched students but what we see i mean what we do see is with the duke university as well with the attrition rate of black males from stem because they're admitted to duke with over a standard deviation difference in uh sats and he the the guy that was the expert witness in this recent harvard lawsuit he's an economist at duke he found that black males actually come into duke with a higher rate of wanting to major in stem than white males but by the time senior year comes around the stem major graduates are overwhelmingly white and asian because again the blacks have not been able to catch up the perverse thing but the brilliant thing about this whole diversity racket is the co-dependency between these students that are being taught to think of themselves as victims and the bureaucracy so what happens is when schools are exercising to a school there's not a single selective school that is not implementing very large racial preferences the the so-called beneficiaries of those preferences do struggle academically they are then encouraged to blame their struggles on circumambient racism and so they then present a whole new set of demands you know more diversity more mental health more faculty of color more ethnic studies more diversity bureaucrats and more critical mass of minority students which then they in order to get that critical mass you have to dig deeper in the pool creating more academic mismatch and even greater degree of it and the cycle just starts up again but you have both the the alleged beneficiaries of this scheme and the diversity bureaucracy all saying that reinforcing interpreting the data differently saying interpreting that duke data and saying there's clear evidence of racism because more black students come in wanting want to do stem and fewer if you graduate therefore we the the system must be racist right and i mean and that's a possibility i mean there's lots of people some names i mean i go to these classes name some names you tell me who are the bigots when peter salve the president of yale peter salve who's just done one genuflection before the race hysteria over the years so i've you know you say yale's always been that but well maybe i i didn't wasn't exposed to it but it seems to me that salvi is like one of the worst i have to say i've known some pretty bad yale president okay well that may be you can inform me about that i have no no stakes i'm not a big fan of university presidents i've ever anyway well the other they're they're they compromise a lot of them they used to be intellectual leaders but he keeps he has this theme about well we're we know we need to struggle so hard it still is just this desi dorado that lays decades in advance of being able to have equal opportunity at yale and fight injustice name some names peter salvi please tell me who among your faculty are are grading uh with bias who are not allowing their black students to talk in class who is giving them you know unfair assignments nobody i can guarantee you there is nobody at yale or any other college well there may be one or two but there but in general you say nobody feels you're right you and again you're absolutely right you don't see that and in fact you point out that a lot of these grading is blind grading anyway right and it's in and and and so it but i think the point i want to make before less people well i know what people think but but is that this is a question that i have about affirmative action beyond race because we're gonna get to gender next and as i said we're gonna push another set of buttons but uh is universities are probably not just the place to solve a problem that needs to be solved at a much different level we would just said the issues as i pointed out in cleveland are social issues i don't think i suspect neither are you or i just think there's some intrinsic intelligence gap between the melon the pigment in your skin but there are social issues and the place to resolve them is where the social issues are being manifest which is k to 12 families in the social structure i would argue differently because i think because i come from what you would call a welfare state i come from canada where which is you know which where there's actually social welfare and people are provided for but but however you want to solve it the place is probably not in universities and and and it's even worse when you try if you're trying to solve it for university students if you want to solve it at the faculty level right where you know when you say look we don't have if you look at the faculty here it's not it doesn't represent demographically the the region you can't solve it when you don't have the the the infrastructure of students coming up uh through the system in the first place and so every time you try and solve it at a higher level you you're making it more artificial and as we'll talk about i think uh uh i do agree with you uh impacting on what should be a meritocracy well the degree of irrationality is i mean one shouldn't be stunned anymore because there are so many blatantly counterfactual propositions adopted by universities but whenever there's some student protest about we need more faculty of color in engineering uh what what do the adults do they go into a fetal position and they say oh maya culpa we're not trying hard enough we're going to do another five-year diversity report and gather diversity metrics and you know now you know the pressures are enormous on faculty hiring committees but nobody says in like 2016 in the entire united states there were like seven graduates who are black of phd programs in electrical engineering so you tell me how can every engineering department in the country have its critical mass of 13 black professors which is the representation of the population because that's always the benchmark yeah they're not you're not allowed to say okay who's actually qualified you use a population benchmark it's not possible mathematically it's impossible but the the administrators rather than telling the truth about the pipeline problem will cop to phony charges of racism and this is another thing that is happening in the real world paul weiss this very elite uh law firm in new york city and of course it's global now but it is very left-wing it gets diversity awards all the time for its pro bono work blah blah it had recently it was so again another naive thing it put on the web a picture of its latest partner class and they were all white um and so this the two new york times blasted them front page article about paul weiss's racism bs well you know but but they but paul weiss the managing partner was not willing to speak the truth about the pipeline problem and i've talked to a partner there who said the problem is you know and sander has shown this as well that law firms hire black associates first-year black associates out of law schools at a vastly disproportionate rate than whites they're wanting diversity again but they're they've the black thanks to racial preferences in law schools they graduate overwhelmingly in the bottom quintile of their class and so they don't have the skills they don't have the writing skills in particular so anyway what's bizarre about our current moment with this anti-racism religion is that the elites are would rather cop to phony charges of racism than speak the truth about the academic skills gap and i agree with you it cannot be solved at college it needs to be solved before you gave a i have to say a uh statistic surprised because about arizona state where i taught um which where which where the president raves about about um about the demographics and and and trying to to serve the people because it is a state university but he said and this is in the implicit bias area i think he said at arizona state university a white with the same academic credentials as the average black admit had a 2 chance of admission in 2006. that average black had a 96 percent chance of admission so that so uh that's surprising yeah and i'm not surprised you know given the that's the effort to to say that that that you know it's sort of open to to to i mean what's often said and i've always admired the statement that the asu is open to any student who can pass the minimum requirements and and what i'm hearing here if this is true is that it well maybe 2000 things have changed since 2006 i don't know anyway let's let's move from from from race to gender there's lots of aspects of that you talk about in your book uh not just uh affirmative action related to gender but of course uh beyond that um the the the victimhood which you start out by talking about in terms of the camp what you call the campus rape myth which which which certainly you try and justify as a campus rape myth you say um the campus rape industry central tenet is that one-fifth to one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college year completed rapes outnumbering rapes by a ratio of about three to two three to two the girls assailants are not terrifying to change strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guy sitting next to them in class at the cafeteria and when you when you hear that number um you you it's obviously wrong if 25 of people are being raped i mean so maybe you want to talk about that yeah if that were the case there would have been a stampede to create single sex colleges all over again where females could study in in safety now what we have is these fanatically status obsessed mothers i guess they're no longer baby boomer mothers what would they be like i don't know gen y gen x that are trying to get their daughters into harvard 18 years in advance you know the stampede of females to get into colleges grows more and more intense by the year uh and so none of the behavior either females are too stupid to take self-protective behavior uh or the campus represent epidemics not going on because every weekend you know rugby road we had the famous rolling stone hoax the every weekend the the coeds are still trooping to the frat houses for the parties so are they going knowingly into rape rape dens or is in fact something far more ambiguous uh far more doubly you know mutually complicitous going on here and i argue the second well i think one point you make the point is that when it um that when it actually comes to reporting rapes to uh to to justice officials the numbers are very different than 45 percent yeah it's like 20 at most and the really thing that's so funny is the schools they're angry if they have low rates that's what i was going to say one of the things that in your i'll interrupt because you claim that i was going to get to this and it's amazing to me you claim that universities try to promote the number of rape cases and there's a competition between universities to get a higher incidence of rape that seems highly non-intuitive you want to explain that well because with it's different audiences at that point it's the title ix administrators on campus and it's the self-righteous feminist harpies that are crusading on this thing they want to show that their numbers are up now if parents were to ever believe the campus rape ideology and say well i'm not sending my my child to harvard it's a bastion of rape you know what would happen the president of harvard would turn on a dime and say there's no safer place in this country and probably the world for your daughter than at harvard believe me she is going to get through it fine you know but but the the parents aren't really listening to the clary act reports it's the title ix administrators who are yeah and speaking of title one administrators and and that uh by the way let me point out one area of disagreement here um which i found interesting it's some you i don't know the word blame is right but you but you certainly attribute the 1960s sexual freedom you know liberation as result ultimately producing the kind of sexual promiscuity that lends itself to the to the uh to to misunderstandings that get reported as rape and that and so i think you give equal weight to the current victimhood uh dilemma or delusion and the and the uh promiscuity that came out of the 1960s well i think that yes the 60s sexual liberation misread the male and female libido i think it assumed that the male and female libido are equal in their voracious appetite for as much non-consequential sex as possible and that by ris by removing and and you know disparaging traditional norms that serve to try to equalize the power and balance between males and females uh that everything would be fine so you know male chivalry was deemed as oppressive and female prudence and modesty uh were also deemed as a as oppressive and so the drunken hookup uh where you know there's no consequent sex and you don't necessarily know your partner all that well was assumed to benefit both parties equally well it turns out and i think we have you know the biological evidence that hormonally males and females respond to coitus differently that for females it does produce a surge of of the hormone that you know wants to have emotional bonding and so there's a lot of females who are walking around the night after you know and there's the guy you know with his lacrosse bodies or whatever and not feeling any particular tug of of empathy and longing uh and and regret and embarrassment i mean these are sex is very very complicated yeah so now we're we're regulating it like a contract which is ridiculous well yeah that's the that's the problem and we're also giving you know we're not taking case-by-case exam well we're not listening to everyone involved which is a part of the problem i think that we're going to get to when we talk about uh uh uh the problem of what's capping on campuses i i just want to say that you know having grown mid-60s the the part of the the sexual revolution that i that i do think was really important was women being allowed to be viewed as sexual beings as there's nothing wrong with women uh you know having sex and and before marriage or you know it there was a there was a a clear double standard before the 60s which i think was inappropriate that that women who had sex outside of marriage were somehow uh evil and men who did weren't and i think the so i think the the healthy thing that came out of that is that we are all sexual beings and that sex has to be understood as implicit and as a part of life and uh and be dealt with by everyone and not labe and it is true when we'll talk about a biological differences and to argue there aren't biological differences is ridiculous but the fact that that um women shouldn't be held to a different standard in terms of engaging in sex i think is a healthy thing yeah well um i would say that you know the defaults for premarital sex have now been reversed and that those defaults before the default was again and you're right there's a double standard for females in particular you the default for premarital sex is no you can you can waive the default by agreeing to it but the default means you don't have to argue every single time when the guy's petitioning you he has to argue you to yes now the default is yes it's just assumed that this is how we behave and it's the females who have the burden of getting to know and i would say that that that arranged the previous uh structure i think was more realistic about unequal bargaining power unequal desire and and unequal consequences uh but you're right i mean literature is filled with stories of the females in the 19th century who become castaways and and are you know go into exile because they are pregnant so there was a double standard i would say on the other hand the consequences of unprotected sex for females uh is much higher much higher sure so uh something that is more sort of female protective uh you can always point to the individual cases of injustice and that's the problem norms are going to have consequences and now we're very reluctant as a society to have stigma with consequences attached to anything other than phantom white supremacy i mean we're still still yeah there's under the stereotypes which are just yeah which are the problem part of the problem here is a and you point out and having been at university i've seen the impacts of it is was this dear colleague letter uh uh from the obama administration uh which was just which responded to a potentially real problem that certain universities were protecting say football players who were absolutely and that was a real problem and so you know it was well intentioned but the net of effect of it was to basically get rid of due process and any burden of proof and um and then that effect as you point out is to is to uh say in in in the case of of uh a drunken hookup of two students that the male is always responsible and the female is not responsible to to remove responsibility but i i you give i mean there's just so many examples one can give but uh uh like you described one at washington lee that take just an example of what goes on and i want to read read it because people may not be familiar with how um unfortunate the situation is as a result of of of of of uh the implicit assumption that one person is that people are guilty and that that evidence doesn't matter which of course is the basis of of due process which is what keeps our country going take the case at washington lee university after a late night party with the usual heavy drinking the female accuser jane doe told her male companion i usually don't have sex with someone i meet on the first night but you were really interesting guy jane dole began kissing john doe took off her clothes and led john joe to his dough to his bed where she took off his clothes they had intercourse that was on february 8 2014. jane later denied using that pickup line on the ground that she often had sex with someone that she often had sex which is someone she had just met um jane and then i'm skipping a little bit jane started psychological therapy after seeing john's name on a list of applicants for study abroad program that she'd also applied to she told one of her therapists that she had quote enjoyed the sexual intercourse with john doe but was advised that her actions and positive feelings during their first sexual encounter didn't negate that it was sexual assault during one of those talks washington lee's title ix officer informed the audience that the emerging consensus that regret equals rape after jane doe learned that john had been accepted to her study abroad program she decided to initiate her campus as sexual assault machinery against him a travesty of proceeding followed in which the title ix officer rejected john doe's request to consult a lawyer with dantesque warning that a lawyer can't help you here and the school expelled him um and uh and so that the the the danger of of taking a highly charged situation of young people uh uh uh unfortunately yeah and courage to have to drink and to and to and um and not realizing that that um that there are different responses to it and always having an institutional structure that always um assumes one thing without the necessity is in this case the the preponderance of evidence 51 evidence whatever that means um is problematic maybe you want to talk about yeah well i mean my reaction ultimately is just like throw everything to hell with all of this it just and conservatives have been taking the easy way out i think which is to really harp exclusively on the due process problems which are legion and and again you have a betrayal of the the major truth-finding mechanism that has been worked out over centuries in western jurisprudence which is cross-examination the right to confront your accuser and that is essential absolutely essential but to let we need to step back that there's something just weird can't we see how weird this is that we have these bureaucrats and these tribunals to adjudicate the the subtleties as like how much pressure somebody's applying you know because we're doing this a whole affirmative consent thing now and so you have students that at the start you mentioned the sexual liberation era which was you know the students demand to get the adults out of the bedroom we want to have as much sex as possible while in college and get rid of the parietal rules and you know we should all be able to visit at all hours of the night now turning around and saying they want the adults to create these tribunals where they can replay every group in front of this sort of voyeuristic uh administrator it's just bizarre sex guys a single individual usually who makes that decision right at universities now yeah kettle nine is generally a single investigator in many universities well that's different that means you've got both a investigator who's also the adjudicator adjudicator exactly but sometimes there can be a group of people but but this ain't happening once you graduate you know you're gonna have to deal with this on your own but again we're talking about something that is the very realm of the catholic and the irrational that has defied the ability of poets for for millennia to describe and then we were subjecting it to these bizarre you read some of the the school's contracts definitions of affirmative consent they go on for 25 pages it's like a mortgage contract well and and but the and the as someone pointed out and and you quote uh university of western points out that universities are not are equipped to handle plagiarism not rape that rape is that we have laws against rape and we have laws against sexual assault and we and that probably the place to adjudicate these is not in a university if there's a if there's a case of rape or a case of sexual assault it should be handled in legal system yeah well then people will say that of course they're under-reported because people feel the legal system is biased against them yeah well no the reason is that they don't think that they they know that these cases will be thrown out initially because the evidence of there being mutual codeterminancy is is so great uh and you know my point is again as you mentioned that it's just a bizarre double standard that it's always the male who's at fault they both can be drinking equally both you know losing their rational self-control but but the male is now being turned into the guardian of the female well-being again which which is one victorian value which i'm not against but let's let's you yeah well that's right i think it's becoming a victorian value and i think your point about that and and more generally as you talk about me too and we'll get to it in the in the in the community is that is that it's in in the context of feminism it's it's it's hurting because what it does is it it makes women appear to be um incapable of handling themselves and need to be need to be either chaperoned or males have to be uh excluded right and here's the here's the real active agency that will prevent you i ask campus rape administrators this okay if you believe there's an epidemic of campus rape that's serious that is scary uh dangerous you could end it overnight if you persuaded every female on this campus to not drink herself blotto often to the point of unconsciousness not get into bed with the guy you barely know and take your clothes off that would end it because these are not instances of some stranger crawling through your window at 2am with a knife these are people that you know you're fraternizing with them and you are you are deliberately drinking nobody's got you like a fish you know with the the the wooden pike stake in the in the mouth pouring down liquor into you you are you are doing this yourself and what the campus rape administrators always tell me oh i would never send a message of that sort of personal responsibility because rape is never a woman's fault which means that they would rather preserve the principle of male fault than to protect females and i would say if they really think females are undergoing this epidemic of the most traumatic crime a female can experience short of being murdered the first consideration is how do we end this and the first consideration is personal responsibility so either they don't believe it which i think is what's going on or they are so political that they want to keep going these phony examples of rape culture just so they can continue prosecuting their case against part of patriarchy part of the problem and i agree with you on this part of the problem if you need to do if you need to circumvent rules of evidence and due process then you must feel that the examples are ambiguous and too ambiguous to be dealt with uh in in in a way which as you said is clear violation of a person that um and and that's problematic i think yeah and and uh uh and it is uh and it it's unfortunate for me as a as a uh person on the left politically that right now um one is seeing that this effort at least at universities to try and and in other places to try and get due process and in some sense encourage species tends to be uh the province of the right right now and um and and it shouldn't be and it shouldn't and you know and universities should be should be places of not only free speech but uh but uh open debate and uh and uh uh places where if anything uh uh individual rights should be should on all sides should be guaranteed they should be places because they're places of open discourse and places who have critical inquiry where that should apply in all aspects of the of of universities and they're not well as i get older i feel the yearning and i think this has been one of the great yearnings of western civilization which is to craft a system where human beings can be confident that they are being governed by neutral principles and law not partisan passion yeah and it's terrifying to think and you know as somebody again who came out of deconstruction i still have imbibed deconstruction that i don't believe in truth actually even though you know i live it as if i do i write because i do believe i'm counteracting falsehoods and yet there's a part of me that still is too wedded to the idea that there's infinite number of interpretations well you know but but but again the hope is that you can have some kind of neutrality a tribunal where you don't have to worry is the judge a democrat or a republican that there's a possibility of the rule of law and again my my deconstructive path said oh come on give me a break you know interpretation and and bias will always come in but but these these procedures that we have developed in western jurisprudence are so precious to try and check the human instinct for revenge for partisanship and yes for a university of all places to be discarding them and scoffing at them is is truly an irony you talk about colombia you know having they required all students to basically uh uh uh take certain classes to show uh you know basically show that there was gender bias and and if they didn't they would lose academic standing and and i think um i think your statement basically if colombia felt compelled to take on the issue of sexual respect quote unquote it could have done so in a way that actually had intellectual value how to remember its primary mission is to fill the empty noggins of young with the least passing knowledge of mankind's greatest works what you're saying is instead of forcing kids to take these these these cl these classes with ridiculous names and i and and and some fluff it's content-free content-free fluff that they should be for getting them to look at at these issues in terms of let's say yeah yeah or read works or great literature yeah right yeah okay but let's go beyond the classroom because uh uh you know the next thing you do is policing sexual desire the metoo movements impossible premise um and and uh you point out um you know well again these things are well intentioned uh as the as the obama letter was well intentioned it was designed in principle to to uh to address what appeared to be a problem uh but in some sense it's it's it's it's gone way overboard and and uh um uh you say i think um the the resulting metoo movement formed out of other workplace predators inevitably adopted the epistemology of campus rape movement overly broad definitions of what causes sexual misconduct are now being legitimized in the work workplace uh a partner of warstein burst llp said um and um and again you give many many examples of not just how that's happening but how institutions are supporting that and the most recent one because i read i thought you wrote a brilliant article uh after this book but on on the placido domingo case why don't you talk about that because that's a clear example i i sort of want a a poster child for for for much of what we're seeing reported in the newspapers over and over and over again about uh powerful white males who are being brought down for sexual misconduct and and and why don't you talk about placido domingo and your views about that well this really exemplifies the what is driving this i think is hatred for a civilization deemed as too white and two male and and the model and theatrics of the rape victim rhetoric placido domingo is now 78 years old he's a extraordinary spanish tenor raised in mexico his parents had a zaudwela company this is the spanish folk opera tradition uh and he early on in his career was spotted an extraordinarily beautiful voice subtle taught erotic capable of expressing rage and and sorrow and desire and but he was also very charismatic he was also a brilliant entrepreneur for music and classical music and opera in particular he created opera companies in los angeles a world-renowned opera competition for young singers he mentored thousands of people and he there are testimonials to his kindness his generosity the fact that on in an opera house he was uh you know gracious towards everybody thanked all of the staff yeah well in in europe they they they said that the the head of the upper company said that you know that he went out of his way to treat everyone and thank his staff right we read that from your article right um so and then he brought opera to millions more as he was one of the three tenors with placido domingo and jose carreras that you know did soccer world cup stadiums and stuff so a real ambassador for the forum so uh last summer the ap the associated press had a story that nine females came forward all but one of them anonymously to accuse him of sexual advances most of these incidents happened in the 80s and the 90s this was again last year where domingo was a very according to their stories and these were people who were either in mostly in opera choruses or very minor singers that may have hoped for some walk very brief walk on role that domingo made unwanted sexual advances to them and was very persistent you know he would whisper in their ear gee i wish you could go home with me tonight or you know uh do you have to do you have to you know stay home and and rides in cabs where he would make an advance on them uh in one case a female presumably uh completely voluntarily they did have sex he's been married to one woman all his wife all his life um and she broke off the agreement and by all accounts whenever they actually explicitly told him to stop this or when this this affair is over he accepted it but nevertheless because they felt like he was unduly persistent um that he was a sexual harasser and his career should end again all but one of these was anonymous uh the one woman who was on the record she was a soprano he'd never touched her once but again after curtain calls he would keep it whispering or sure you have to go home at night so this created the first ap report in august created this massive uproar and immediately the philadelphia orchestra that had him scheduled for a gala opening concert in the fall cancelled the san francisco opera canceled his engagements after these nine reports um this the philadelphia orchestra again another example of the spread of the of the nauseating victim rhetoric from universities outwards said well you know our our communities are unsafe by placido in other words our audience members are unsafe by placido on stage in other words if you're living in west philadelphia and and and placido domingo is performing the kimmel hall you are at risk if you're a female this is absurd so a second ap report came out with another uh 11 i guess anonymous accusers uh one again was on the record and he's her story was that domingo in a dressing room he'd been pestering her sort of grabbed her breast and she said she said this to the makeup man did you see what happened they contacted the makeup man he doesn't recall any about this to me that's not determinative it could have happened now my point point and so and so then that all these other media outlets wanted to jump on the bandwagon uh only ap got the anonymous accusers npr then wrote a story except two stories actually in a row about this revolt at the metropolitan opera in new york which had said we're going to wait for the la opera which is the company that domingo founded and was still the general director and again domingo put opera on the map in los angeles he got hollywood money to the ordinarily philistine hollywood money to contribute the la opera invest started an investigation metropolitan opera said okay he's slated to open in verdi's macbeth in in september with this russian superstar soprano on a trebko um we're to wait to see what la opera concludes before we make any decisions well the weekend before uh domingo was going to open in the metropolitan opera's macbeth i went to the dress rehearsal for that the orchestra members and the chorus in the met then had this meeting with the met general manager peter gelb raising bloody hell saying we are unsafe the fact that a 78 year old man is in our house makes us as females in the orchestra pit unsafe this is ridiculous the idea that a 70 year old man places a threatened and under current microscope you really think that he is going to make an advance to you and even if he does how about you say no you know is this like so impossible so so the met after this came out and there was this revolt among the staff uh peter gelb decided on a moment's notice to cancel domingo and and basically domingo will never sing again at the met and he's his career in the united states is over now there's two ways one can approach this as a skeptic the easy way is the due process argument which is to say domingo had no due process he is facing anonymous accusers these are incidents that happened 20 30 years ago how can he possibly defend himself we don't know the facts yet this is uh way premature to make these judgments it's like the campus kangaroo courts but there hasn't even been that this is purely he's being hanged in the media my position is more radical which is that i am willing to grant for the sake of argument that all of these things happened and that if we went through due process that there we would be able to find females who in fact domingo was pursuing let's notice domingo throughout his career has been pursued mercilessly by females by female singers we are living in a bifurcated existence more and more as females enter more and more workplaces where we have the realm of ideas and then we have the inevitable incursion of erotic desire let's take the a point that you actually told me about today about another up which is you know people could argue with you and and and uh and i'm sure will but uh let's take this other uh opera tenor i think vittorio grigolo something equally significant happened to him for something that seems absolutely ridiculous do you want to yeah he was touring with uh royal opera the the british opera company in japan and it was a performance of faust by gunno and the staging had uh griego the tenor he's a very very charismatic very exuberant stage presence um the staging had him during as faust you know he's an old man starts out as an old man he's given eternal youth uh in a pact with the devil he apparently a a pregnant woman during the course of the opera presents him his bel her belly her pregnant belly to pat and this is part of the stage business so during the curtain call the ballerina who played this voiceless part with the belly she was on stage with her prosthetic pregnant belly and so grigolo apparently went up and sort of gave it a just a good-natured pat mimicking what the stage business was she got all upset about this and felt like she was being sexually assaulted that he was patting her prosthetic belly and apparently there was some exchange where he then got sort of hot in the cold but this was all in sight of the audience the entire company was on stage he wasn't dragging her to his bedroom and raping her it was a pat that was visible to everybody else so this created bloody hell again the man is a sexist and uh as of yesterday both the metropolitan opera and royal opera have fired grigolo from all up upcoming performances okay so i think that's a you know a clear example of of something that i think is almost easier to see is perhaps an overreaction uh and but but your point you make and i want to move you know i want to move off this in a second because it's highly emotionally charged to the other aspect of this which is continuing the the the diversity delusion institution the other aspect of of of this complaint is not just sexual harassment which you're talking about but also sexual inequity uh namely gender inequity in in universities and other places and i want to talk about that delusion which i think you deal with uh very well and i want to end with that but but you before we do you make a key point if the argument is made that there are different that that and that men and women need to know that that they respond differently to sexual suggestion sexual uh innuendo etc etc and men need to be more to me to be sense about this you make the point that that woman recall from this same behavior reveals and i'm quoting you reveals a fundamental divide between male and female experiences of the body and sex and there are and i mean there are unambiguous for people to disagree that there have been studies of no doubt that women and men treat sex and sex and and even smiles differently um feminist tick of blaming males for every female behavior that contradicts their ideal of gender equality undercuts the very claim of equality your point is that the point you're making which is interesting is that by saying that males are different but they need to be the same but they're different violates the claim the the the feminists claim that that that that everyone's equal anyway and i think so maybe you could say it more more eloquently than i just did but yeah i mean why do we if if there's no difference between males and females why should we have gender quotas in politics you know why should we have gender quotas in corporate boardrooms because everybody's fungible so there is no difference so you can't play it both ways well that i'm glad you said that way because that leads to the final thing i want to discuss with you which is should there be janitor equity should we demand gender equity in every environment possible and um uh and you actually started in classical music saying it's happening in classical music this demand of gender equity means that people are are not able to find uh allow have male conductors or or in fact in one i think in one music course they were you couldn't someone was saying well who is this mozart yeah who is this beethoven where you know it's columbia's core curriculum yeah and there was not so gender but as a person of color saying how and so we need to see everywhere in order for us to learn or experience or enjoy a concert we need to see people that look just like us well it's logically impossible i cannot stand the role model argument how could marie curie discover radiation she didn't have a female role model it becomes logically impossible if you can only do something that somebody's already done before you of a particular you choose the categoristic characteristic it's arbitrary why gender why not blue eyes why not i don't know if somebody's five foot four but if you can only do something that somebody's already then you can never do something the first time oh and if you start thinking about diversity in that extent it's it's not just gender it's why short people it's red-haired people but it's more than but understand because you love it not because you have to have a female role model but there's also getting back to something we talked earlier than the the the uh artificial nature of imposing something at an inappropriate time i was at the i was at the nobel prizes in 2004 and um and i i was really impressed when they at the awards um there was one woman who won the nobel prize and and and they came up before the king gave the prizes and and uh and said and made a statement said you know you'll notice there's one woman on stage and you know seven men or whatever and some people are concerned about that however the nobel prizes are given often for work that's 40 years old and in many of these fields there weren't women in these fields and we're hoping that you know as things go on 40 years from now you'll see you'll see it's different but no one i think would argue i hope not no one would actually i'm sure some people would argue no one would want you to say we need when we're giving the nobel prize to to to not think of the best work that's done but make sure we have 50 women up there even if there aren't 50 percent in the field even if because the 40 years ago they were they weren't working on it and and we're seeing that more and more uh you you give examples in university departments where where at at the assistant professor level there's more gender equity than there is at the at the full professor level in a field where all women are only starting to enter into the field so it's not too surprising since usually you have to be you know have been in academia for a number of years before you become a full professor if they're just entering the field you wouldn't expect as many female full professors so requiring that or or when justin trudeau in canada who's loved by everyone made a remarkable statement 50 of his cabinet were going to be women now the question is 20 it turned out 25 of the elected representatives were women so was that an appropriate thing to do let me throw it over to you well the other thing we didn't talk about with preferences is the stigma attached um you know and i from now on i'm not going to be confident that any female who gets the nobel prize from here on out that that's a fair playing field i don't i'm not going to be confident maybe it is but you will never know exactly no there was a law professor at at the yale law school stephen carter who wrote a book in the 1990s called reflections of an affirmative action baby and he wrote about the sort of mental challenges emotional challenges of living in a world pervaded by racial preferences he never knew whether he was chosen for something because he was the best or because he was the best black and that goes for females too you know i'm sure i have been the so-called beneficiary of gender preferences in my career and it annoys it annoys the hell out of me i don't want to be chosen because i'm the best female but i was actually contacted by a produce producer recently for tv who was explicit they wanted me on some panel on income inequality something that is not my expertise and they said we want a female that's ridiculous it's demeaning absolutely ridiculous and you're right but it also i think the real point is that to me it puts the asterisk on on if there were a female who was an expert on it on that panel i vote against you know what your readers are listeners are really going to hate this every proxy ballot that i get from like a mutual fund that i have shares in if there's females on that board i vote against them every single one without knowing more because i am confident that they are there there's companies that are moving out of california now they are desperate to find females to get on their boards they have can find no one with the expertise and so they're leaving california well and i think to come back to the university again and end with the universities what we're seeing is universities bending over backwards the same way with race to admit to maya culpa in a situation which they initially aren't even guilty but that but creating an infrastructure which makes them which makes it implicit that they're guilty and and the thing that i i when you talked about the creating the bureaucracy to handle diversity gender diversity and racial diversity i was just but gender diversity was just amazing to me the university of california there was a new diversicraft position that and he said and he said it would augment uc san diego's already massive diversity apparatus which included the chancellor's diversity office the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity the assistant vice chancellor for diversity the faculty equity advisor the graduate diversity coordinators the staff diversity liaison the undergraduate student diversity liaison the graduate student diversity liaison the chief diversity officer the director of development for diversity initiatives the office of academic diversity and equal opportunity the committee on gender identity and sexual orientation issues the committee on the status of women the campus council of climate culture and inclusion the diversity council all the directors the cross cultural center the lesbian gay trans gender resource center and the women's center it's all about identity it's ridiculous it's ridiculous and it's creates this environment where where narcissism it's naval gazing and narcissism well and it it it it replaces the focus on knowledge on knowledge knowledge equality and excellence and excellence and accomplishment right but also but by being there it it it encourages it teaches them yes but it implicitly uh makes the assumption anyone going in with your victim it yeah you go and you say there must be it must be inequity where in fact in in in in in the stem fields at least it it it there's every evidence that there's the opposite alessandra strumia you've probably talked about this on your show before he showed that females are now getting hired with much less research background earlier in their careers than males well you you i mean you you give some evidence in the book but there there's uh uh every bit of evidence that um there's no as you point out there's no one has given evidence in in spite of the fact that there's the claims inequities and we the claimed inequities are are are simply due to the fact that once again fewer people go on a certain field than than at a certain time than than otherwise uh but you i think you made the claim that no one's actually shown explicitly that someone that there's been examples of people not being hired because they're women where in fact it's quite the opposite and i mean as a chair of a department i'd have to save and this is not new for 20 years yes uh and i was proud when i was chair of the department that we happened to hire the first two female faculty members and we we for whatever reason we had the first all-female matriculant in a physics graduate not all of them accepted the offers but but we were looking at these things and and but as a chair if i hired anyone any faculty member 20 years ago who wasn't female i had to write an explicit letter explaining why so it's not as if it's not as if the system is biased but we but by having all these positions you make it seem like it like it is and then um uh uh and then you know caltech had a program for um uh uh for the future of physics uh and i actually had a this young woman i recommended and she got in but the program basically said you can come to this if you're not male well you know you know about know about mammals mammals are now verboten and these are scientific panels composed you know predominantly of of males and you have the head of the nih now francis collins saying he's never going to part go to a conference if it's predominantly male whereas fatals are okay you know uc san diego recently announced very proudly that it's putting on some biology conference on on microbes and and it's all females families are glorious now are these the most qualified uh researchers who knows yeah and again it puts that asterisk and the nsf actually the woman who's head of the nff said something about the fact that people grants would would not be given if there weren't if there weren't uh basically gender equity an example that i can give which is closer to home because i my background is jewish if we go back to the nobel prizes again uh if you look at in physics the 212 nobel prizes that have been given to physicists 57 of them have been jewish yeah which means 27 percent when the jewish population united states is 2 in europe it's less than one percent there's clearly an inequity for christian people and we and we and we need to do something about it but in fact it's it's a reflection of many cultural factors and uh and uh and and to and you the last thing you'd want to do is the nobel prize is once again to say well we just have too many jews i'm very worried i'm very worried you know well i think i think the i think where we agree is that is that universities in particular should not are not the places to solve social you know inherent problems that are social problems that exist beyond whether it's race or gender but also that in order that that talent should be colorblind it should be gender blind it should be height blind color of hair blind it should be based on on accomplishment and i think that education should be about taking you out of yourself and that is the claim the demand of students to study things that match their the pathetic feeing female is not an accomplishment it's not particularly interesting and i there are some great female writers i love edith wharton i love george eliot uh virginia woolf but i don't read for females i read for great language and you and you and that's where we come back to the where i want to close in to some extent our agreement to disagree if it makes you uncomfortable to read from people who don't aren't like you that's the best thing university can do is to force you to read people that aren't like you that have thoughts that are different from you because that'll take you out of your comfort zone and i think you know you you would stress more the fact that universities are there and affect the last words of your book basically say to to to get you know dump the great knowledge on on students i think that's a part of it i think i think what universities are really in my mind should be to be great lifelong learners to be places where people because probably both you and i i can certainly say i knew more i learned more physics after i got my phd than before but what i learned was how to how to learn and who to and how to tell the wheat from the chaff and to learn how to determine when i'm wrong when my bias my physical bias leads me to a conclusion that is wrong and to be able to question myself at all times so i think university is to instill knowledge but beyond that to perhaps make you uncomfortable by being able to force you outside your comfort zone to ask when you're wrong yeah well first of all i know we're running up against many many time barriers but i would say the lifelong learner meme is one that universities have been using for decades now to compensate for their failure to cram knowledge into the empty noggins of students well you can just look it up and you know learn how to learn no you learn how to learn by first you have to have a knowledge base you can't look something up if you have no idea what happened in world war ii so yes there's certainly basically learn to learn by learning you know how you learn to learn you learn to learn by cracking the books and actually absorbing content knowledge and that's what we're letting universities off the hook okay i think i agree with you there although i think you'll learn that to learn you learn by questioning in my opinion and and i think we teach people that question and and in and and we're in an end to end i guess we're in this environment where after people hear this and they either agree with what you've said or hate it they're going to go to the internet and the internet is this increased to think was this incredible source of knowledge but it's a source of misinformation as well and we have to i think in this next generation teach students the tools to be able to tell the garbage from the sense and that means to know how to ask questions about the material they're reading to know when things may be maybe that that credentials maybe have a maybe there's a reason for credentials and to be able to distinguish with wheat from the chaff and i think the educational system has to respond to a 21st century where people do get much of their information from this little thing i'm looking at uh as i talk to you okay well i'm not gonna i'm not gonna set us off on another we'll have we'll have another chance of conversation we could have gone on we've got for so long and i really appreciate the courage you've had uh to bring up these ideas and potentially infuriate people at least get people talking about these issues which is really the important part of this that and as i said science and culture come together the the necessity to question these things and necessity to look at our culture and i i really appreciate uh your your your uh this discussion with you well i appreciate the care with which you read my book and your willingness to speak about it in a in a a gracious and and understanding manner and try and put my best arguments forward for me so i greatly appreciate lawrence thank you so much thanks again [Music] i hope you enjoyed today's conversation you can continue the discussion with us on social media and gain access to exclusive bonus content by supporting us through patreon this podcast is produced by the origins project foundation a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world to learn more please visit originsprojectfoundation.org

Channel: The Origins Podcast

Views: 57,980

Keywords: The Origins Podcast, Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Project, Science, Podcast, Culture, Physicist, Video Podcast, Physics

Id: A7FEHUW1pio

Length: 126min 22sec (7582 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021