Purdue Presidential Lecture Series | J.D. Vance

[Music] good evening everybody [Applause] thank you every uh one for coming as as one of those variety show your host used to say you're a beautiful audience and i think we'll have a very uh illuminating evening there are probably very few folks here who aren't well aware of tonight's guest and the sensational book that he's written um reviewers once in a while will use words only reviewers use like searing and now that i've read this book i know what they're talking about i think it qualifies and you may have you'll have your own adjectives but i'll just say that um i've been fortunate enough to strike up some modest acquaintance with um our guest over the course of the last year and he is uh as interesting a person as authentic uh and insightful as the book he has written and i know you're going to enjoy the next hour please welcome j.d vance [Applause] my next announcement is there aren't going to be any trump questions at least for a little while there are [Applause] actually you can ask all you like and i i'll probably have one or two but but uh as has been our practice and i think it works pretty well i'll i'll try to get the things going and jd and i will converse for the first few minutes and then uh after a few questions maybe 15 minutes or so in please feel free to approach the mics and we'll take as many questions from from you let you let you guide the discussion as as we can fit in so i would like to start i know that many maybe most of the audience has read the book jd but not everyone and even for those who did uh i'd i'd like for you to paint um verbally the picture you paint so so uh impressively on paper um [Music] let me just try to introduce the topic by uh asking you to comment on a couple of searing comments you made one you said early in the book you wrote this book to let people know why you might nearly give up on yourself and what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it what made you feel that way and how close did you come to giving up sure well uh first everybody can hear me right and uh thank you for having me um the the way that i sort of the background with which i'll frame this is that you know the the book is really a sort of family a multi-generational family portrait and it starts with my grandparents very impoverished circumstances in eastern kentucky they moved to southwestern ohio my grandfather works in a steel mill it's sort of the land of opportunity they do very well for for themselves materially um you know sort of stable middle class life by the time that i come around sort of all the family income they had generated it evaporated and we were in a pretty pretty rough rough rough circumstance and the the argument that i make in the book or you know why i almost gave up on myself is that in a lot of ways i didn't see a path forward that made much sense it seemed like all of the options that were out there were either way too hard or even actively foreclosed to people like us there was a certain sense of of hopelessness that i had about my own life about whether people who were like me were the type who made successful lives and so i really try to to unpack that in the book through my own experiences but also some data and try to explain you know what is it that's really going on in the mind of a kid you know who who obviously has some external barriers but at the same time is also struggling with other things that aren't quite as easy to quantify so when you said that you grew up in a culture that that uh encourages social decay rather than counteracts it what what were some of the elements that you that you had most uppermost in mind sure so i i want to start this by just offering a caveat on that word culture because i think a lot of times when culture is discussed in the way that we you know think about some of these really broad sociological problems it comes with a certain baggage right and so what i mean when i talk about culture is is not necessarily um this sort of argument that there's something deeply pathological about the people that i grew up around um it's more that there's something it's it's effectively i'm arguing that the things that you see around you the attitudes that you see around you they inform the attitudes that you develop they inform the habits that you develop they inform the expectations you have about your own life um and so i just think that that's sort of important because it it colors the way that people think about what we talk about when we talk about culture um but but to your question about the elements that sort of i um i write about so one is what i mentioned earlier a certain sense of hopelessness of low expectation i really didn't think that success be an emotional success in a stable family or material success in a stable job were things that belonged to people like us i saw us as sort of fundamentally disconnected from those things in a way that was very hopeless um i i i talk about how i had acquired certain habits for my family uh related especially to family relationships i had seen a lot of trauma growing up that trauma necessarily informed the way that i approached not just family relationships myself but also informed i think the way that i related to other people um i had uh you know grown up in in a church that was you know not or sorry i should i grown up in a religion that was not especially connected to a physical institutional church where people got together where people offered social support where people you know sort of reinforced each other but i had acquired my religion in an incredibly sort of um a sort of really i had acquired religion in a very odd and amorphous way where it was sort of passed down through conversation but it wasn't really connected to a real brick and mortar institution so just you know all of these things created i think a person who didn't have a whole lot of help from hope for himself didn't see a whole lot of people succeeding around me had a lot of emotional baggage because of the way that i grew up and on top of it had you know all the the standard disadvantages that people sort of associate with lower income people so it sort of conspired into a pretty a pretty terrible mixture you identified the as i recall the single most um damaging or disagreeable or uh maybe hurtful element of all as the rotating door of men or father you call them father figures it wasn't clear that some of them were father figures at all but anyway for men and your mom's life and this has been a growing pathology in america in all sorts of places and we know empirically it's it's connected especially in young men sure and boys to all sorts of other problems and you got it and you got it really in the 50 caliber version of it yeah that's that's definitely true um it is a unique factor of american life that lower income working-class american children are so consistently exposed to what i call this revolving door of father figures i mean the number of of people that were in and out of my sister's life when i think back on it when i you know really did that for the purpose of writing this book my sister and i were sort of trying to catalog this stuff and i you know we were just like my god it's sort of amazing there are people whose faces we remember we don't remember their names and even when we just remember the names that's 15 people who lived with you for a time yeah who lived with us who you know some in some cases we moved with them and you know it's very easy to i think discount how powerful of a negative influence that can be when you grow up in a relatively stable circumstance you don't necessarily know where you're going to live you sort of attach yourself emotionally to people you start to grow fond of them and then all of a sudden they're gone um and and when we sort of connect and see how the way these you know the sort of high number of partners shuffling in and out of our lives we connect that to why the children who grow up in those circumstances have marital problems themselves they tend to undergo and put their children through the same things that they went through it's really sort of obvious to see why again it's not um it's not that we were fundamentally deficient it's that we saw the you know as a chill child i just saw these things i expected these things that developed um i began to develop expectation and norms about what family life required of me that were ultimately not incredibly helpful and things i had to sort of unlearn through throughout my life so so yeah i i think you know it's it's funny there was this really interesting study done by a team of economists led by raj shetty which you may have seen came out a few years ago called the equality of opportunity project and they they looked at dozens of different corollaries between this social factor and whether a kid was likely to you know have upward mobility whether they were likely to experience some movement from lower class america to upper class america and the two factors that he found were the two biggest drivers or one the prevalence of single-parent families in the neighborhood you grew up in and two whether you lived in a neighborhood of concentrated poverty so basically whether you lived around primarily other poor people and whether those people had single parent families and i think that's just a real blind side in the way that we talk about these issues that we don't recognize a lot of people do but many don't recognize how important family stability is and allowing kids to prosper manny in the audience will recall that just a few months ago we celebrated here the uh with the co in a conference the 50th anniversary of the coleman report great one of america's greatest social sociologists james coleman a purdue engineer to start with graduate of this school produced a report 50 years ago in which he studied poor performing schools and came to the same conclusion it's just the conclusion we continue to resist despite a himalaya of evidence a line that really struck me and i bet i'm not the only one from the early sections of the book you wrote that we referring to not just your family but i think but the the the community you're part of we're unaware of our own laziness you say folks talked a lot more about working than they actually worked and uh i was going to say something about college students but i [Laughter] but as the purdue that would be inaccurate so i'm not uh tell me tell us about that sure well the the context in which that line came up is a story where you know there there was a tile factory i was working at for a summer and there was a guy who was working there who was 19 years old had a pregnant girlfriend was just an incredibly bad employee and i kept on talking to him trying to understand you know what is it that's going on with you why are you always disappearing you have some kind of health problem what's going on it was clear he was just not was just not a super driven guy didn't think he'd ever be fired and eventually he was fired and he got really upset about it and the the point of that story which i think is sometimes misunderstood is not to say that everybody who can't find work in these communities is lazy um i think that would be an absurd argument and that's not one that i make it's it's to try to sort of tease out the fact that there there's both a problem with not enough jobs but there's also a problem where there are good jobs for some people and they're still not quite willing to work at them and i i think that what this you know one of the really important parts of this story and again this is something i think you see in the research is that there's a difference between a habit that is formed based on what you see an internalized expectations and a value that is explicitly stated there's a difference in other words between talking about work and really internalizing industriousness as something that that that motivates you and drives your behavior and that's something that's often missed when when we have this conversation because if you pull different people of you know all different groups they basically all say 100 of the time we value hard work and that's often taken as evidence of oh look everybody values hard work there's clearly not a problem with any sort of non-economic factor in these communities and i i think that that that's just not a well-supported proposition [Music] in your uh really thrilling journey from this uh uh from the place you the hand you got dealt in life to where you are today uh uh a graduate of two of the finest schools in the country and a very successful business person and investor and of course author um you identify various uh causal factors so your three stops between middletown and and san francisco sure uh we're uh uh the united states marine corps i haven't got i missed the most obvious mama yep united states marine corps i know ohio state doesn't belong on the list so i'm gonna go straight to yale law school among those three rank them and talk about their their uh their uh different contributions sure well uh mamaw was obviously important because she gave me a lot of the things that i didn't have when i was a very young kid she gave me a stable family she gave me certain high expectations she gave me you know a certain perceptiveness about all of the things that were going wrong in our community and she had you know she just had this unbelievable ability to sort of understand what was going on in my head and to translate it into something that was very real world and useful to sort of allow me to to empathize with me in a way that allowed me to sort of understand some of the things that were going on in my community but at the same time to really push me against giving in to the worst impulses um you know she also was was just there's no other way to say it very powerful you know she was not a well-educated woman she did not graduate from high school but she just had this force of personality that was incredibly hard for me uh incredibly hard for me to resist and she also had this real appreciation for education that when paired with the fact that she didn't have any money really stood out in my mind i mean i remember when i was going through a math class and and you know we were encouraged to get one of those fancy graphing calculators and mama was one of these people who you know would buy every article of clothing that she had from goodwill but she bought me one of these graphic calculators with money that she didn't really have and i remember when she told me look if i could afford this frigging graphing calculator you damn well better listen to that mystery stay friggin she knows and no she did not say friggin that was not a word in her vocabulary um so so so she definitely gets a ton of credit and i think the most credit because she really gave me the foundation on which to do anything the marine corps i would rank next because you know i talk about this sense of hopelessness this sense of feeling like there was no real connection between the effort that i put into something and the outcome i just didn't think that i really had much of a chance and the marine corps is this place where you know obviously it gives you you know it prepares america's war fighters it is primarily a military institution but it also is constantly giving you challenges letting you fail with those challenges and then giving you new challenges and sort of coaching you how not to fail next time it's this really impressive organization i think like the entire us military that really is designed in some ways to build character and to build willfulness and i really needed that the other thing the marine corps did which i really think goes under appreciated is that it teaches you a lot of these sort of non-cognitive or soft skills that you don't even realize you need until you get there right so things like how to iron a uniform how to prepare yourself for work in the morning how to shave properly like little things like that that really do matter if you want to be a successful adult and you know things that are a little bit more obvious like how to shop for a car loan how to you know not go to the dealer and get a 20 interest rate bmw but how to go to you know a local credit union and get an eight percent interest rate honda right that was sort of that was a lesson that i needed and and the marine corps made sure that i haven't had it and then you know ohio state which uh despite your before you skipped one yeah i gotta ask how chubby were you when you went in there uh well i've unfortunately put on a fair amount of the weight that i lost in the marine corps um i i probably was you know maybe 20 30 pounds heavier than i am now so yeah i was a big kid but it turned you into whatever marine has to be yeah no that's yeah that's that's absolutely right um and then ohio state gave me you know a lot of educational opportunities a couple of really good mentors that that helped me help me through and the the last thing i'll say there is that the the the thing about my book that i think is definitely not true is that it's not a pull yourself up by your bootstrap story because the way that i see it is that not just those three things but 20 different things had to go right in order for me to have much of a chance and it was mamaw but it was also papal that's my grandma and grandpa it was my aunt and uncle it was my sister who was only six years older than me but really stood in and and did things for us when she was a teenager that i think most 30 year olds probably are expected to do for their families um there there was really this sense that when i look back at my life so many things had to go right and that's one of the reasons i wrote the book is because i wanted to give people a sense that there are a lot of non-obvious things that have to go right in the life of a low-income person for them to have the right opportunities and that's i think important to appreciate yeah i i said to jd earlier that i don't know those who read the book felt like this but if if mama had been a fictional character she'd have been a fabulous one i mean just complex and sometimes contradictory but just very fascinating i used to love those you could be a redneck jokes that jeff foxworthy and there was one that was if if your mother or your grandmother doesn't take the cigarette out of her mouth when she tells a state trooper to kiss her behind [Laughter] i remember when i first enlisted the marine corps and the marine corps recruiters like to make these home visits just to so that the families are prepared for what comes next and they have a good sense of of what their their you know young kids about to go through and the marine corps recruiter was not popular with mammal i mean this is right after the iraq war it started and she did not want me to go to the marines you know very protective very defensive very patriotic woman but just was not happy about the idea of me deploying and the marine corps recruiter he came you know it was it was the summer time and you know he walked up to our porch and mamaw said if you set one foot on my porch i will blow it off and i remember and i remember they had a 20-minute conversation where he stood in the grass and she was looking down on him from the porch and he and he later told me i asked him how tough is marine corps boot camp you know pretty nervous 18 19 year old kid and he said well those drill instructors are mean but not like that grandma yes i had exactly the same thought at least you don't you already heard the same vocabulary that's right i want to ask you about i mean so so jd's book came out well over a year ago i don't know exactly what publication date was but i first about six months ago actually the whole book no because i was i've talked to you before that anyway people you may got an advanced copy somebody may have because people started to call in and ask i'd seen it and it was obvious that to me at the time that it's become so much more obvious since that one reason for the fascination with it is that it opened up a world that many of our um uh i'm gonna use the worn out word now elite people in society did not know existed it's huge it's massive we're talking about millions and millions of people spread across you know what we think of as the heartland of the country yeah and it was as though um this was a giant revelation that there were people like you and in large large numbers and uh i'm just uh i'm just wondering why you think that blind spot was there and uh what's it like now to travel the country as more or less the ambassador from appalachia and me folks who only recently discovered there is such a place yeah well i i think that the the answer to the first question is just how else would they know in some ways right you know i i think that after the election there was a lot of self-reflection on this idea of data journalism and how different it was from traditional journalism because you have all these people who live in d.c or new york or san francisco they crunch numbers they're very good at reading studies they're very good at connecting those dots but they're not actually in the places that they're very often reporting on and i think a big part of it is just that we live such different lives in different geogra geographic segments of the country that it's it's very hard if you grow up in a certain area to understand what it's like to grow up in middletown ohio or eastern kentucky and frankly if you grow up in eastern kentucky it's very hard to know what it's like to grow up in san francisco i don't think that the bubble just moves in one direction um how you know this question of feeling like an ambassador on behalf of the white working class whatever you want to call it somebody in the media dubbed me the trump whisperer don't get me started one honestly it bothers me a little bit the idea that a single person could represent a region that i know has incredible complexity um you know even you know i i don't feel like i could be a good very good spokesperson for my own family much less this entire broad community so i i try to just one recognize that and recognize that i need to be a little bit careful in the words that i choose when somebody asks what does the white working class feel about this to sort of appreciate that i shouldn't try to substitute my view too much for what an entire group of people thinks but you know i also think that it's it's it's not good but it's better than if there was no one there so i at least try to try to represent folks as well as i can because i do think that it's a voice it's too bad there's only one voice but it's better than zero it's much better than zero the um you know i've those who haven't today i think probably today's most insightful social scientist charles murray wrote a book a few years ago called coming apart it's entirely devoted to white america to some extent it presages your book it's not nearly as dramatic it's more scholarly but those who haven't there's a test in there about 20 questions which um i'd predict that jd probably got the highest score ever but it has to do with the it measures really the sense of social distance sure it has questions like uh have you ever had a job where you're back hurt at the end of the day have you ever worn a uniform since you left college uh did you ever live in a in a town with fewer than x people that sort of thing and um and it goes i think to this really serious problem that we have the the the distance where people don't not only don't empathize with each other they didn't even know they were there right so there's been as you say there's been a lot of reflection since the uh recent events of and uh november i'm talking about and uh in which people have said folks who are very unhappy about that like i said well i wish we had been a little more we listened a little better frank rooney was one of your predecessors in this series very tremendous talent at the new york times he he wrote about he talked about the smugness and sanctimony that he felt without meaning to he had expressed and many of his of his colleagues uh you know i wrote down a quote from another one in the huffington post a woman named johnson houston wrote somewhere along the way we speaking of folks who see the world as she does we stopped fighting for the little guy became the party of the smug educated elites who look down on such people and think that they are no longer worthy or they're not worthy of being able to make personal decisions for themselves do you run into some of that on your trip uh yes [Laughter] um yeah this is this is to me a very significant problem in our country right now and i wish that i could say that it's gotten better since november and i don't know that it has it may have even gotten worse um there was this this article that ran not too long after um you know after trump was elected but before he became the president where you know effectively there was some some reporting that people who had voted for trump were now worried that they were going to lose their health insurance you know they weren't nearly as ideological maybe as certain voters they they just wanted some sort of change one form or another and the article basically was almost saying good these people should lose their health insurance let them die they were stupid to have voted for trump in the first place and i i think that that level of smugness is something that is really really destructive to our political culture and it's something that you know frankly you see it all the time right i mean i i remember when i was i don't believe this story is in the book but i was a second or third year law student and one of the senior if not the senior marine corps jag officer was in town i believe he's a full bird colonel so pretty high-ranking marine corps officer he was there to talk just about military justice and the the professor that day who was hosting and moderating the conversations pretty small group of students asked this guy this you know well-educated lawyer full bird colonel what it was like to have to advise young uneducated stupid enlisted marines about their rights and he said he called them unintelligent and this colonel was just absolutely aghast and i think that anyone with even a hint of cultural iq was also aghast and i really it was everything i could do not to speak up and say excuse me i'm a former enlisted marine and i don't think that i'm uneducated or stupid but it just goes to show that not that he would make that remark but that he would make that remark in a public place and not even notice how smug it was is just which is really bothering well like a lot of biases and like a lot of uh stereotypes it's unconscious people yeah you know um and uh and i firmly believe there's all kinds of evidence that this was a critical in a very close election and this was a very critical factor that it wasn't just economic frustration as very real and big as that is in places that sort of put trump over but this cultural disdain which people expressing it like your professor don't even hear themselves saying sure but it just drips off them and it uh and these the folks on the other end are smart enough to know when they're being looked down on okay so um i've got a couple last questions and those who have uh their own can start mustering the uh courage to come forward but um to me you know what makes me so um excited about your book a lot of things jd but most of all we have to you're is all about social mobility sure it's all about the what has been the heart of this country and it's not only been the engine that drove the greatest prosperity in human history but it's the glue that has kept us together as a functioning sure republic as a functioning government by consent of the govern and um and and so it's the most important topic in the country and you you have some very i think uh pointed things that you've said to folks in situations much like yours um now mamaw as always may have said it best when she said to you never be like one of those blanking losers who think the deck is stacked against them all the time um but but you talk about um the uh the uh that you say social mobility isn't about money or economics it's about a lifestyle change and yet you said you didn't do it all by yourself so where do we look you you told us where not to look government at the fringes where do we look if we would love to see in america uh millions of jds well i definitely think government has a role and an important role to play in this i i wouldn't say that i'm a complete skeptic i i just my fear is that we tend to think in very technocratic terms about this stuff and if we presume that the entire solution is going to come from government i think we're going to be disappointed because a lot of the things that went right in my life those 20 factors i mentioned aren't totally amenable to being created by um by by a public policy solution and i and i and i also think you know it's important i say this in the in the very beginning of the book that there is a strong economic element to this right i mean i don't think that we should uh ignore that look if if there were if we were a little bit better at training a modern workforce if there were better jobs available in some of these areas that would obviously help again i just don't think that's a whole solution so you know my sense is that if if we're looking to create answers or we're looking to really figure this stuff out we've got to one think about the space in our society that exists between the individual and the state i think folks on the left are really good at talking about the state and folks on the right are very very good at talking about the individual and the self but there there are so many things that exist in the middle you know churches unions civic institutions things that are really important at creating social cohesion at creating values that creating support that are very very important and often get neglected in our conversation i think partially because it's overly technocratic like i mentioned um but i i i think that it it really starts with a recognition of what is the real nature of the challenge right if the problem if the biggest driver is concentrated poverty the biggest driver is too many single-parent families the biggest driver is low social capital which is another big thing that came out of that study something i certainly believe when i see how do we build social capital how do we you know how do we create more stable families in our country or when families break down how do we put kids in more stable backup situations how do we break that cycle of concentrated poverty i don't think i'm not a pessimist about this i don't think that there's nothing that we can do and there's no solution to that problem i just think we have to really appreciate the scale of what's happening if we're going to design solutions at the policy level or at every other level that are actually going to work well among its many many contributions you have helped us all understand the scale of what's happening so thank you for that and i think that i have completed my rounds and kept my resolution did not mention the name of the new president so i'm leaving that to the to the audience i'll bet it comes up somewhere let's let's start over here and we'll toggle from from our left to our right yeah thank you for coming here my name is jack gandor i'm a purdue faculty retiree i grew up in a small town along the ohio river in west by god virginia and read your book with great personal interest i was especially intrigued with the chapters describing the culture shock and alienation you experienced at ohio state in yale they reminded me of the saying you can take the boy out of the country but not the country out of the boy and now you've reached the pinnacle of literary success number one new york times best sellers list so my question and now where is that country boy [Laughter] well i guess he you know he's sitting right up here [Laughter] um yeah you know this my mama always said you can take the boy out of kentucky but you can't take the kentucky out of the boy so i've heard a very um similar statement it i i have always thought to myself that in the past couple years especially that there is you know i occupy these two different worlds very uneasily right so when i'm an investor in silicon valley it doesn't quite make sense to me my life doesn't quite make sense to me certainly when i'm up here with all you people listening to listen to me and i wonder you know what the hell is it that i have to say that would cost so many people to sit here and listen to me it's very weird it's sort of uh you know there there's a little bit of of just a culture shock that comes with that i do think that where i came from and some of the the things that i saw growing up are some of the you know really i thought of myself when i was 14 or 15 as a kid who had the deck stacked against them as a kid who was very disadvantaged and of course objectively that was true but now when i think about my life i really just think it was an incredible blessing to have so many of those experiences because it's given me a perspective that frankly a lot of the people that i spend my time around these days don't have so i really appreciate that fact that i'm i'm still a country boy i still have those roots because i i just think i'd be a totally different person without them thank you good friend of mine has always said uh like me he from eastern tennessee as i was originally said when you stop talking like where you grew up you have a problem so we're glad you're he's still in there sorry that sounds good my name is eric myers i'm from a little town of frankfurt right over here i wanted to ask you a some public policy question i jotted down three short ones okay how do you fight the it's your fault mentality you know the blaming of people you know for their circumstance and do you see any benefits in the charter school system or is the answer in some type of family support units and thirdly and finally what's your opinion of citizens united and the ability of elite you know to essentially purchase elections and i would refer to mr robert mercer who's a high frequency trader who's developed a philanthropy program and is bankrolled some people thank you yeah well thank you for the question so um to to the very first question how do you how do you fight that attitude i think i think part of it just comes from public leaders taking the right approach these conversations i think part of it comes from actually giving people more opportunities one of the big problems one of the areas where i think policy really could help is to is to enable there to be more bridges between high school and a decent middle class dignified job i think we're very bad at providing kids options we effectively say go work in a service sector job making minimum wage or go get a four-year degree and it's a real indictment on our society that we don't provide more pathways the second question um sorry i the third one's a church yeah yeah sorry about about about the the sort of family and community aspect one policy idea and i have very few policy prescriptions in the book but one policy idea that i i do have is that in the united states i think we look at the the sort of breakdown of families as primarily a new through a nuclear family lens so a kid goes to the foster care system and we're looking for a licensed foster care agent to place them with we've improved on this a little bit but we have a lot of room to go to actually thinking about what if we put them with aunt or uncle what if we put them with a grandparent that could be a really you know the data suggests that would actually help a lot when families break down to sort of rely on the extended network as opposed to the nuclear family um that that's one answer there but i also think this question of family breakdown is sort of what civic institutions charters or so forth replace that family breakdown is tough it's not necessarily an easy answer and the question on citizens united i probably you know as qualified as the least qualified person in the world to answer this question um i i i will only offer one answer to that um for that reason for the fact that i'm not an expert that's something i heard really interesting from a guy who helped run jeb bush's super pac in the most recent election and one of the things he told me is he thought that the way that we did campaign finance reform followed by the way that the supreme court reacted to it had really weakened parties as institutions and had really elevated the sort of role of super pax's institutions and you can make a good argument if you look at american politics in the past couple of years that we actually want parties to be a little bit more powerful and we want these super pacs to be a little bit less powerful and i and i do wonder if that's um if if we should be thinking through that lens as we think about how to reform our campaign finance system but no i mean my intuition is that i'm not the world's biggest fan of of multi-billion dollar contributions or you know multi-million dollar contributions but my expertise really stops there all our expertise he stopped the guy who spent almost nothing won the election he was outspent thousands to one that's right um request uh let's try to be concise in our questions and if we can keep it the one to a customer will get to every customer so there's a quote on your wiki page talking about uh hillbilly culture leading to a social social rot so not in any instance of our com of the conversation tonight have you looked at or addressed mental health as being an issue amongst a a a redneck culture which i'm a member of uh nor nor have you addressed the debilitating aspects it has on someone trying to provide for their family when they're making seven bucks an hour 10 bucks an hour tramping hillsides with a big ass chainsaw or framing a house or whatever or you look up in the northern parts of the state somewhere in question mark so try to get there so so that so the question is why don't you address those two very core basic issues which isn't you know which lead to the degradation of families which lead to to kids not seeing their parents because they're in jail for drugs or whatever those those are core issues not not you know the family's gone it's it's why is the family gone now well first i i disagree that i don't think of mental health or i haven't talked about mental health up here i mean one of the things that i talked about is the multi-generational and enduring effects of childhood trauma so we can sort of argue the causal element where did the childhood trauma come from and i think the answer is complicated it comes from multiple different places but once it's there we know that it has long-term and enduring effects so i i would disagree that i don't think that mental health is a factor here or an important factor um you know i i think the the question that you asked to me presumes that sort of all of these social ills necessarily come from some core structural starting point and i think that i'm agnostic about where these social ills came from i think that you could make an argument that you know a lot of sociologists have made that the the sort of the poverty came first and these social ills came afterwards but even if that's true the social ills become self-perpetuating on their own we know that childhood trauma independent of any economic factor continues to have negative externalities we know that the attitudes and habits that people form when they grow up in incredibly unstable families continue to have negative effects so i i would just disagree with the premise because i think i'm a little more agnostic about this question of where these problems came from i just think that they're there now and they have long-term and enduring consequences and we've got to deal with those and understand them great question great answer uh hello mr vance um so after the election you wrote an interesting article about like the bubbles that we place ourselves in sure and at the end of the article you wrote um about like your own bubble when you're kind of surprised when a friend told you about their the younger brother getting these like racial attacks and we've actually had a recent issue of hate speech posters on our campus and many individuals viewed that the response by purdue's administration wasn't quite adequate enough or they did one thing or another how do you think the purdue's administration can help commute pull our own community out of their bubble and understand the effects of this sort of thing sure well thanks for the question i won't comment on purdue's administrative response to something in the past just because i don't know and i'll give mitch the benefit of the doubt um but i i i will say i will say this i mean my my sense of this and i think because i live a life where i am constantly uncomfortable wherever i am especially in silicon valley it's given me a certain appreciation for the fact that there are probably other people who are also uncomfortable where they are um and and i i think it's it's incredibly important especially now that the people that i wrote about in the book are sort of politically triumphant to not assume again that this sort of bubble or vacuum mentality goes in one direction there are people who are very worried about donald trump being president of the united states and whether you agree with the substance of the worry i just think that it's important to recognize that people are pretty smart and they they tend to act in pretty good faith so if they're expressing something whether it's a trump voter who feels left behind is upset about the heroin epidemic and is just going to vote for a change no matter what form it takes whether it's you know a black student who is incredibly concerned about some of the rhetoric that comes if not from the president and from you know sort of supporters of the president then it's probably rooted in something real and we should be cognizant of it and and and listen a little bit more than we do i mean i just think that we sort of instinctively go to defensiveness about these issues and i think that's just a terrible posture to take and i say that as someone who like i said is pretty uncomfortable most of the time which goes back to this question of i think that discomfort is a benefit in my life now not not so much a problem over here hi there hi um so your story really touched me a lot because i grew up in as mentioned before in the poker nose in a very depressed areas wilkes-barre scranton area um i kind of wanted to ask you this question kind of really education um since you called for personal responsibility in your book with produce campus body mainly comprised of people with no exposure to the world outside indiana like myself before i moved out of pennsylvania how can we see how can we assist the university students to become personally more responsible especially when it comes to education and how the system is stacked against minorities yeah that that's an interesting question it it's it's always easier to diagnose problems than design solutions for these problems so i'm going to caveat that by saying that what i'm about to say is probably not going to be super satisfactory but i i think you know one thing that was incredibly powerful to me was recognizing that people who were successful were not fundamentally different from me and i remember it was actually the morning that i proposed or the morning i asked my now wife whether when i asked her parents whether i could propose her i just wanted their their blessing sort of an old-fashioned thing and i i remember telling her dad that i thought they he you know they had raised two very successful daughters two very smart daughters and he pushed back and he said they're not very smart they're just hard working and i think there's something incredibly valuable to recognizing that there is not something fundamentally different about you and people who are successful maybe they've had a few more legs up maybe you've just sold yourself short and you know that i i hear this a lot from teachers where they talk about their students and how their students assume that those who achieve great things are just smarter they're just so much more different from them and and i think to the degree that you can dispel people with that notion that's a good thing the last thing i'll say and this is advice that i took from my mamaw and you know the president said something about this that you'd never be like those people who think the deck is stacked against you but the other thing that she often told me is life is unfair for people like us but never let people think that never let never convince yourself that the deck is stacked against you she recognized that there was sort of this unfairness about certain things but that wasn't an excuse to sell yourself short and i think that balance is obviously very hard to strike but people from whatever background from whatever disadvantage they've had and i certainly think that there's a lot of disadvantage to go around in our country you mentioned minority students i'm not one of these people who say that minority students aren't disadvantaged but what i do think is there's something very powerful about continuing to believe that you still have some control and again i think if you look at the data that's true and when people believe that it's true they actually do a little bit better great over here hi um mr vance it was good to meet you today yes ma'am and i wanted to just say that i am so encouraged by your humility right so i grew up in north carolina um at fort bragg i'm a military brat my father was in the air force i believe in 82nd year born right that's right and uh second amendment all of those things but you wouldn't know it right just to see me i'm a university professor right but i know about what it means to work second shift i work for rotc in the summer so one of the things that i value about your conversation here today and that i'd like you to comment on is we can talk a lot about divisions and divides and fly over states but what i hear i signed your book in my course and my students read it and i asked them to think about how are their lives like or different what they read about in your memoir and one of the things that is encouraging about your conversation here is how the lives of people white working class america or flyover states they're not so different than how we talk about urban areas or urban poverty or places where institutions have crumbled and that one of the solutions is actually to figure out how to come more together and there's some room there right there's there's a space there and i'd like for you maybe to to comment comment on that the bridges that can connect us rather than only the divides thank you sure thank you and it was good to meet you too and i appreciate talking to you you know i i think one of the reasons that i wrote the book and there are a lot of reasons i wrote the book but one is that i wanted people who grew up in my community to read it and to sort of recognize that maybe we weren't quite as good as we thought we were that it is very often you know we i sort of mentioned how fraught this conversation about culture is and i think one of the reasons that it's fraught is the way that it's been deployed against certain groups of people but not deployed against other groups of people and so i i think that there's something very useful in recognizing that a lot of the problems that are typically i think associated in our collective mind with the urban poor even the black poor are actually really true among the white poor and just recognizing that fact i find has torn down a lot of barriers in the way that i've seen people talk about this issue so um thank you and and i and i hope to sort of continue on that theme because i do think it's really important thank you professor and this is charles murray's point too and you'd get a very high grade on his test i can tell because you get it i'm honorable yes over here hi my name is mike pinto i'm an elementary principal locally here in tippecanoe county purdue grad and we spent a lot of time in our school on the soft skills that you spoke about what resonated with me with your book was the idea of a thumb on the scale to tip in favor of maybe doing something different and so we spent a lot of time in my school talking about those pieces i firmly believe students should leave high school with an identified adult non-family mentor can you talk to us a little bit about your mentors and what that means and am i off base and what can i do as a principal to continue this fight because you're absolutely right in this county we have many of the same students who don't even know that purdue is something besides a building because they don't cross the river so anything you can share with me would be great because tomorrow they're going to be in my door and i'll be hugging them and hoping to get them off on the right steps so thank you well thank you um and and thank you for the work that you do i will say this that every single kid every friend that i had growing up who came from similar circumstances but ended up making you know achieving some measure of success achieving some measure of opportunity for themselves they all had a very significant mentor in our public high school um i think you know for for me there are two people who really stand out one who was just really demanding one who was a little bit more empathetic an english teacher and a math teacher it's true when i think of my friend nate when i think of my friends just just across the board teacher was the demanding one yeah that's right okay that's right the math teacher was the demanding one and i you know i i keep in touch with both of them and uh you know the the thing i'll say about that is it's it can be often very thankless work i probably never said i appreciate what you did until the past year or so to either of those two guys but it really does make a huge difference and we know from various studies on resilience and the way that people really depend on adults that it's it's just incredibly important work so i you know the only thing other thing i'll say is encourage you to keep on doing it and looking for ways to really insert yourself into these kids lives because it does make a difference now we're short on time and i'm counting at least sorry no that's my fault there's six questions i guess so let's do our best all right we'll do rapid fire here yeah lightning round as they say um so i'm going to talk about this liberal elite smugness and so i come from a similar family background that you do very poor broken family but i have had upward mobility and finishing my phd i've lived all over the world um but there seems to be resentment from the white working class towards the professional class now when i go home there's space between my family and i and between my husband and my family and we don't know what to do you know how do we bridge this space because we're not being elite we're not being smug it's just based on the fact that we have educations and that we've traveled and had these opportunities it doesn't make a smug but there's a resentment and we don't know how to fix it that's a very good and a very tough question i know we're in lightning round so i'll try to be quick but this one really strikes at me so i may ramble here a little bit but look one try as hard as you can one of the things i try to think about is that because i've had a lot of opportunities i owe it to my family especially to try to be a little bit more patient and understanding i've certainly felt that distance before i will say that you know there was a point when you know my mom had just had a heroin overdose i was a second year law student at yale i felt like i couldn't talk to anybody there and i felt like i couldn't talk to my family back home because they just didn't understand sort of what it was like to be in these twin environments and i gave my sister a chance and really opened up to her in a way that i hadn't done because i assumed that there was that space and it was one of the best conversations that i have ever had i remember to this day and i haven't since really felt that space at least between my sister and me so i think a lot can be done with just trying i'm not saying it's not there it's just there there are ways to overcome it the second thing i'll say is that i was talking to a professor in ohio state a couple weeks ago and he said he was increasingly worried that his university being ohio state served a sociological function of sort of yanking talented smart kids from their homes bringing them into institutions and then four years spitting them back out in a way that they were culturally condescending to the people that they came from and so i i think that it's not totally the case that that space is created by the people there i think it is very often created by a perception sometimes real that our universities are not quite as involved and understanding of the communities where they often collect students from and so i think you know that's not something you can solve but it's something i try to be mindful of as i talk to universities it is a very delicate and powerful thing especially a land-grant university like purdue what it does to this state it really is amazing if you think about the responsibility that it has and i think that approaching that with a fair amount of caution and humility would go a long ways thank you i had prepared a very eloquent question regarding public policy but you have already answered that as eloquently as i have prepared it so thank you i'll ask you a softball question okay do you plan to run for public office and if so for that's a softball question um well i'd like to declare my candidacy for president in 2020 no i you know the the the politician's answer to this question is i'm not actively considering it the the real answer to the question is i've always thought public service would be something fun and valuable um it's really astonishing for you know it if i ever did it it would be on a time scale that is far in the future um but certainly i've thought about doing it and i think if there's a time where it makes sense for me you know financially and for you know all those personal reasons and i think i got to actually contribute something maybe i'll maybe i'll do it thank you yeah hi jd i just wanted to say coming directly from the hatfield mccoy both sides of the fence myself i am very honored and humbled to be here and i'm so proud of you thank you i'm so proud of you and i uh want to tell you that your book resonated very deeply with me because i used to have the phrase i fit in everywhere but i fit in nowhere and i could never figure out why but i know now a lot more in your book really helped and i also want to say the rich and the poor have one thing in common god is the maker of us all and the reason that we probably have issues in this country in this world is because we don't have enough love going around i think it will do a lot of good for us to love each other a little bit more this year and with my question did you have fallout with your family in your area that you were grew up with et cetera that you wrote about and how did you overcome without being accused of being better then and i just one last thing is my heart is heavy for helping people with addictions of different various economics and maybe we can all work together and help start an organization with you all and thank you well thank you man for the question and i appreciate your comments um there wasn't fallout with my family i think partially because i really made them part of the writing process i interviewed them i let them see manuscripts i wasn't just sort of conjuring this stuff from my own memory but i asked them to participate so there wasn't a whole lot of fallout for my family not so much from my home but a little bit more and the the way that it's happened is you know people are defensive about their home and so when i write about some of the problems in middletown the the a few folks have expressed a worry that i've painted it into negative of a light but i think most people appreciate that i'm not talking about this is the life of every single person in middletown this is just the life of a very big minority and maybe even a majority in middletown and a much broader community so you know even there i've been relatively spared from criticism so thanks and the last two over here earlier i had asked you since you grew up in both cultures what solutions you might have to bring them together and since i've been here for the last hour you've answered a lot of that so i wondered if you have anything you'd like to add to it you had started out saying the geographic divide was a factor but then i didn't get to hear anymore and i wondered if you have any to add sure um so there's this question about whether we just need to be more empathetic to each other as a country and my sense is that empathy or the lack of empathy is more a symptom than a cause of the problem i think it's very hard to be truly understanding to people you don't know and you don't see it's very easy to caricature somebody that you only see on the tv show or through you know a an article in the new yorker or an article on fox news it's just hard to really have any sort of empathy with people that you don't know and so even though it's not a satisfactory answer to me because i don't know how we're going to bring these people together geographically i do think we have to really think about the fact that we have incredibly strong and we see this in our politics you know cultural divides between people who live in certain areas of the country and the people who live elsewhere and and i i really don't see a way out of this unless those people spend more time with each other and again that's not a satisfactory answer to me but it's the only definite thing that i know that would be helpful is if you know people actually hung out a little bit more i mean you know the one other thing i'll say i know we're short on time but i was in dc after the inauguration or for the inauguration and after and i was in an einstein bagels i think at the right at the train station there in dc and i just listened to this beautiful conversation between these two young women who were there for the women's march and this older woman who was there for the inauguration the day earlier but was getting ready to take a train home and uh the the i i it just sort of encapsulated everything that was right but everything that was wrong about our country in some ways because these people were just having a really substantive conversation about trump and about women's issues and i was like my god how often does this really happen anymore in a society where we're so segregated by geography thank you thanks thank you and you sir the last word hello thank you for coming here today unfortunately you just talked about what i was going to ask but to extend that a little further and i hope i get this paraphrase right in a different interview you talked about how sympathy without moral judgment is a kind of pity and i hope i got that right but i was hoping you could extend on that because you just talked about how what we need to do is empathize and like get to know each other better sure but how does that not how do we judge people and have a moral like judgment about them while trying to empathize with them like how should we feel yeah well i i don't know if that quote is exactly right um but but i i agree with the sentiment and so i probably said it or something like it at some point my sense here and this is especially in the context of the way that we you know think about how do we offer compassion to poor americans and i i think that real compassion has to be a little hard edge it has to be open-eyed about some of these problems and so i i the the point that i try to make is if we're going to have compassion for people we have to treat them as moral agents it's not compassion to children who can't control anything about their lives it's compassion in a much more mature way where we recognize maybe life has been unfair but we also recognize that there are within that group moral agents some who are overcoming the odds some who aren't some are doing very well some who aren't and that necessarily requires i think a a sometimes a certain judgment that people are uncomfortable with um the the and and that's going to be true i mean look if you are a hillary clinton supporter and you think that every single donald trump voter is just a bigot or if you're a donald trump voter and you think that every hillary clinton supporter is just you know a sort of out of touch elite who doesn't care about you you are going to learn a lot about each other i think by spending more time and i think you may have a more substantive conversation that doesn't mean you're going to agree on everything it doesn't even mean that you have to agree with the moral values all the time it just means approaching it in a way that i think is again much more empathetic much more compassionate and that's something that we don't have a whole lot of in our country right now thank you for a great set of questions can i tell them your good news or should i skip that part [Music] we can skip that we'll skip that you'll all have your own reasons for loving this book and the and uh and admiring the person who wrote it i'll just say that mine start with first of all the joy of seeing that a book can really matter a book can really matter more than um than those people and who who drive or would like to drive events in our country now and then a work like yours comes along and opens eyes and introduces people to each other and introduces new thoughts and that all by itself for me at least we're we should be thankful to you for jd and then finally you you end the message you bring go straight to not two of but to my way of thinking the two problems that should that should uh compel our attention as americans and you've talked uh so gracefully about them both tonight increasing social distance in every commencement speech i give here i tell our kids don't get don't wander into the status of a new aristocracy you've got to go go bowling get in a softball league go join a church across town something so that you don't inadvertently separate as society will invite and then closely related your what you've got to say to us all about upward mobility and how we preserve it the heart as it is of the uh the this country and it's uh really its future success depends on maintaining it or recovering it if we have to so all that in one package um is the reason why i bet i'm not the only person who thinks we just heard from one of the most important figures in america today and thank you for coming [Music] thank you you

Channel: Purdue University

Views: 403

Keywords: purdue, purdue university, purdue presidential lecture series, PLS, presidential lecture series, J.D. Vance, Purdue President Mitch Daniels, Purdue President, Mitch Daniels, higher education, west lafayette, west lafayette indiana, education, New York Times bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis

Id: z_Cv-tLan04

Length: 68min 54sec (4134 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022