I actually think one of the reasons why some of these universities have made changes without provocation from the Trump administration is because they wanted to. They wanted to and they thought that this was a good thing, and they were tired of being held hostage by their left wing. Right now, people are arguing about whether cancel culture is back and this time, coming from the right. And it certainly looks like the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and other controversies do represent a kind of conservative revenge for the great woke cancellations of 2020 and 2021. But I really think that you need to understand the conservative cultural strategy right now, much more in terms of institutions than celebrity individuals. “They care more about identity politics. They care more about diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Long before the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Trump White House saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity to try and push America’s cultural institutions, movie studios and TV networks meaningfully to the right. “Well, we want the museums to treat our country fairly. We want the museums to talk about the history of our country in a fair manner, not in a woke manner or in a racist manner.” This week, I want to talk about the most significant of these efforts, more important even than the late night TV wars. And that’s the administration’s attempts to change elite academia. “They want to directly review who we hire on our faculty.” “I mean, this is about science. It’s about curing cancer.” “I don’t think that we should believe any of these people are interested in good faith reforms of how higher education works.” My guest this week, May Mailman, is the perfect person to discuss the Trump White House’s higher education strategy, because she’s been the person in charge of it. So May Mailman, welcome to Interesting Times. Thanks for having me. So I just want to start with a very, very big picture question. Tell me: what is wrong with the American University? Yeah, and I don’t think it’s every university, but I would say in general — you’ve got a lot of different problems. And the biggest one that comes for me is a culture of victimhood, a glorification of victimhood that is ultimately bad for Western civilization and bad for the country. And I think you can notice it in little pieces, like when Justice Kavanaugh was going through his confirmation hearings, the need for grievance sessions, the need for coloring books, the amount of emotional support people needed to suffer through Trump’s electoral victory. And I think that there’s this culture that universities have been perpetuating. Maybe — I call it Meghan Markle syndrome as well — where the greatest good, the greatest height that you can be is a victim. So I think that’s one thing. And I think then pieces of it trickle down to racism and admissions, racism in hiring. You’re hiring people to do things based on their identity rather than their ability. But I think at the end of the day, it all boils down to a glorification of victimhood. What do universities teach their students that they are victims of in your view? Yeah, and so it’s not necessarily that they are victims, but that they should be victims. That it’s good to be a victim. That in admissions, what is it better to be? It’s better to be in a minority class, whether that’s a sexual minority class or that’s a racial minority class. There’s something better to being underrepresented, to being somehow downtrodden that should be treated as preferential or better. And that type of behavior is not only illegal right? Which is can’t treat people differently on the basis of their race, but it’s harmful for so many reasons beyond that. You just want the best people, no matter what they look like. The type of students that you want, you obviously want diversity. And I think Justice Thomas, when he’s talking about this — he’s in favor of diversity, not aesthetics — but the whole idea of treating people differently based on whether they are oppressed or oppressors… And if it’s seen as Meghan Markle— why does she want to appear like a victim? Because then she’s special. There’s something good about the queen not liking you because you can then be a victim. And that— I’m not sure it’s worked out actually that well for her. She has a TV show. She does, she does. She does have a TV show. I don’t have a TV show. Not yet. But then, so you just mentioned that it’s reasonable for universities to want diversity, right? And so, I think an argument is obvious argument that a university might make in thinking about how these issues impact admissions is to say: Well, obviously if you’re trying to have a diverse student body, you do to some extent want to look at the actual experiences people have. Right? And if someone has been victimized in some way by some set of forces in their life — material, financial, familial, whatever, racism included, let’s call it adversity. Can you rule out adversity entirely as a reason to maybe give someone a kind of preference? So I think experience is obviously relevant. Maybe a 3.8 student body president is a better applicant than 4.0 video game basement dweller. So I think it’s perfectly fine, obviously, to take into account experience, and it does create a much better student body than if it was just totally blind based on your SAT score. But I think the question is, what you’re celebrating. Are you celebrating the fact that this is somebody with nothing. Or are you celebrating the fact that this is someone who has shown that with nothing, they can be somebody. But so at bottom, your argument is that what universities are failing to do is adequately reward merit, whether in their applicant pool or in who they’re hiring to get on the tenure track, do research and so on. And in many ways, fail to reward merit in ways that are illegal and violate our civil rights laws. So the failure to reward merit is, I think, not only just a problem with the universities, but it is then therefore relevant for its relationship with the federal government. And you said at the start that, it’s not every American University that has these problems. Talk a little bit about your own experience. So you went to a red or reddish. Kansas is sometimes politically complicated but a reddish state flagship University for undergrad. And then you went to a school in Cambridge, Massachusetts of some note for law school, right. So you had two kind of distinct experiences of different forms of elite education in America. I’m curious both whether you saw the problems that you think the Trump administration is fighting at work in those places. And also, if you felt like there was a big difference between Kansas and Harvard. Yeah, I would say my experience at the University of Kansas, I felt more a diverse student. Kansas is not it’s a white. It’s a fairly white state. I think we can say that I’ve noticed that on my visits. And so I participated on the multicultural board my freshman year, which is this. Anybody can come and talk about your experiences and what needs to change. And everything. My sorority that I was a part of sororities and fraternities pair with each other for all these events, and I wanted to pair with a black fraternity associations rather than just the traditional IFC fraternities. So I really like, I think, identified or felt like I was. I don’t a diverse person and I really wanted to think about those issues and pay attention to them in ways not like victimhood necessarily, but cohesiveness and bringing everybody together. And then I did teach for America just to locate us. When were you an undergrad. So I graduated in 2010. O.K before, some of the larger racial issues. So my last year in law school, which was the Ferguson, Missouri, and you had hands up, don’t shoot riots all the way around the country. And I went to a few of the Ferguson die ins just to walk around and see what people were doing. And it was a bunch of professors, and it was a bunch of students, and nobody did anything crazy. They just went to the middle of a road and laid down, and there was a community feeling to it. And there was something about chanting with all of your friends. The same thing. No justice. No no peace. No racist police. That felt communal and maybe you weren’t achieving anything, but you were doing it with your friends. And as the president of the Federalist Society, I felt a little bit of pressure, I think, to have a position on what I thought about all these things going on in the country. And were you and did you think of yourself as a political conservative or a Republican through all this when you were in college and afterward. Yeah, I definitely saw myself as a conservative, which I think made me way more attracted to the Trump movement than I did a traditional Republican. And I don’t exactly know why that is. I think it’s just growing up in the middle of nowhere, you don’t there’s no where did you where did you grow up on the Kansas Colorado border is a small town called goodland that is, in fact, the middle of nowhere. It actually is not no judgment. But it is. It is actually. Yes, definitely. Statistically Yes, Yes. Yeah, it was definitely conservative, but kind of weighing in on societal issues, especially on some of these really tough ones was a tough spot for me because why can’t we all just get along as a wise man once said. So Well, I mean, I’m interested in this because when we’re going to get into the actual things that the Trump administration is asking of universities in just a second. But one thing that’s striking about the argument about universities is obviously, in a way, it’s one that’s been going on since William F Buckley first emerged on the political scene and wrote God and man at Yale. The conservative argument that campuses are too liberal, too ideologically conformist that they reward victimhood over merit, that they use affirmative action in discriminatory ways. These are arguments that are decades and decades old. But there’s a clear sense, both among conservatives and some liberals, that something substantially changed in the middle of the 2010s. That took all of these existing things that conservatives complained about and just made them much worse. And it seems like that’s what you think. I’m curious why you think that happened and how much worse it got. Yeah the why. And maybe everyone was already this liberal. And I think people, smarter people than me, have blamed social media and the iPhone. You found your community in Facebook groups over campus groups, and you were able to retreat and hold your positions more closely. I buy into that. But I think there and I think the shutting down of speech. So what we used to call political correctness and now call wokism. And I felt that. So this was Obergefell decision was right after my third year of law school. And this was the same sex marriage, the same sex marriage decision. And most people that are young and educated are in favor of gay marriage in some way, shape, or form. But you could always talk about it in some way, what about this and that and talking, and I felt like the speech each element where all of a sudden now. Oh, I’m sorry, you said traditional marriage. What do you mean by that. What does that mean. And as the speech got more constrained than the ideas had to be pushed aside a little bit. And actually, people at Harvard will say currently that some of that had to do also with the rise of social media because you could be shamed a little bit easier. So I got in trouble. One day at Harvard because I had an event with Chick fil A sandwiches. And the Chick fil A people left their hot bag that you put all the sandwiches in. And so I threw it in a room with all of the student groups lockers. And somehow this bag was in front of the gay student groups locker. And so there was a group chat going around saying that the Federalist Society is trying to basically threaten the gay student group because there was this chick fil A bag saying, no, that didn’t happen. But the same type of discourse that might have previously happened or benefit of the doubt or conversation now is much easier for them to go to their group and say, I’ve been discriminated against and then actually have a conversation, and that got cleared up. But I do think this shift, which involved both a curtailing of speech and retreat to groups online, does have a lot to do with iPhones, social media and the way that we communicate. And what about protest culture. You clearly had, in the mid 2010s, the rise of a general, a general new atmosphere of protest culture on campuses. And part of the argument from the Trump administration has been that this led to a culture of overt physical intimidation for Jewish students, in particular, when the protests were around issues related to Israel and Gaza and so on. But just I think generally that protest became a means of intimidating speech. So I somewhat attribute the rise of this protest culture, which I will agree did occur around then to the same actually underlying cause that I just mentioned of people retreating online. As people get lonelier, they want to find groups. So the George Floyd protest, when everybody was locked down and no one could do anything and you couldn’t see anything, and here’s this community. I mean, it was a community. It’s your buddies, it’s your friends. And I can’t actually fault that feeling. That’s a very human feeling that you want to be a part of. And then, especially if you lose a friend group and you lose some of the things that you otherwise would have done, then Yeah, protests seem very attractive. Tractive so I want to be concrete because we’re going to talk about the universities as institutions, because that is obviously where law and policy come in. What you’re describing is a cultural shift, right. How is it the responsibility or to what extent is it the responsibility of universities as institutions to have some kind of reaction. Like, it’s not the universities fault that all their students were on iPhones, right. And it’s not the universities fault that students started protesting and so on. What did the institutions themselves, in your view, do wrong in response to this shift towards political conformism, protest culture and so on. So I think the universities were too late. So on just basic safety issues. So let’s just take the post. October 7. Anti-Semitic asymmetric, violent episodes breaking out across college campuses. If you’re letting a Tent cities fester on your campus. And then we’ve heard a lot from Harvard specifically that they were concerned about shutting some of those down or citing students because you can’t just say, hey, leave. The students aren’t going to leave. There has to be lever, I’m going to suspend you or I’m going to write you up, or there’s going to be some consequences here. But if you’ve got a bunch of international students and such a thing might threaten their visa, then you’re not going to do that. So I think there was fear. Discipline discipline would threaten discipline. Yeah Yep. So I think there was too much fear from University officials that by taking basic safety measures that somehow that would reflect badly on them, and they were scared because they didn’t want to be criticized. And I think there has been some learning on that of like, no, we’re going to protect our students. And I think universally people learn some lessons after October 7 and University presidents were fired and replaced, including at Harvard, at Penn, Columbia. But in general, what should they be doing about this. I think it’s just buying into the notion that there has to be some community aspect that’s continually fostered around a culture of excellence. Otherwise, you will let a culture of victimhood and intimidation and harassment and negativity thrive. And I think recognizing that there was a problem, which I don’t think they still have done, but that’s an opportunity that just has not been seized. So just for maximum clarity. So then you have a problem that is in part about a set of ideas having to do with the value of victimhood that undermine the academic and professional mission of the universities. You have that, and then you have concrete failures to provide basic public safety. Is that a fair. That’s a fair distillation. Yes O.K, good. So let’s now let’s talk about what the Trump administration is trying to do about it. So why don’t you describe for me, from your perspective as the point person for this strategy, how the Trump administration has thought about its conflicts with universities and its attempts to of attack both of those problems. So I think day one or day 2 is an executive order that discusses universities specifically. Title Vi says that for any federally funded educational institution that they can’t discriminate on the basis of race or national origin. And so this has been used both on the anti-Semitism front, which is national origin and race, and then also on what I people broadly describe as die front. And so if you’re going to be federally funded, then we’re going to make sure that you don’t discriminate on the basis of race. So it started with investigations sending letters. And I think some people just changed their policies at the beginning. So pause there for a moment. So you how did you first of all, how did you pick which schools you sent letters to. So I think the Department of Education. We primarily relied on to pick what they either knew based on complaints that had been received. And you had House investigations. So a lot of this information was public here and there was in government databases. Some of them are just very out loud the Uc system. So I think there was some flag waving by certain universities. And then I think where they would basically say, we’re primarily hiring minorities for these positions. Exactly that kind of thing. Yes just give me an example. Let’s just take Harvard, for example. Harvard has since taken down its statistics, but they used to have a big comparison chart of what their new hires used to look like and what their hires looked like. I don’t three years ago, something like that. And it used to be pretty heavily white male. And then now it’s not. And then they deleted that website. So you have all of the pieces where it’s like an overt focus on this where we want, we absolutely want to lower our white males. And then there’s an embarrassment piece of it where they then took the thing down. So that’s what I would consider flag waving. So the Trump administration has lots of data and you can’t do everything all at once. And so there is a prioritization issue. And I think people have picked up that the Ivy League has been prioritized, which they’re not the only ones. But when you’re thinking about what the consequences are if you are violating Title Vi or just otherwise have bad policies, the federal government doesn’t have to give you grants. But is there also a sense in which the Ivy League sets the tone for elite education. And if you effectively make an example of these schools, you would assume that other schools will fall into line. Is that part of it, too. So you want leadership but leadership in the right direction. So I think that’s actually something that Harvard would agree with if you were to ask Harvard, what makes Harvard Harvard. Why is it special. Why don’t you just shut Harvard down, not have it, but you can have all the rest of the Ivies and will the world be the same. And Harvard would say, no, the world would not be the same. We must have Harvard. Why is that. Because they’re leaders. Like they I mean, also, the federal government doesn’t actually have the power to shut down Harvard University. But I would just in theory, defund. You can defund Harvard. What’s Harvard’s special thing. right. And it is that in theory, a leader. And the question is a leader in what direction. And so if you get signals from the heights of the leaders in academia that we’re making these changes, then Yes, that’s obviously hugely influential for the rest of the country. So what are schools supposed to do to prove to the Trump administration that they are being good examples for the rest of higher education. So we actually do plan to have a formal way that universities can say we’re doing the right things. So I think the Trump administration does not want to be all whack-a-mole or all negative, but these are the principles that universities and the Trump administration and frankly, private donors can ascribe to say this makes a great University. So those have not been public yet, but they will be public. And I think we’re going to have a lot of great universities signing up as the forerunners and saying we affirm these things, but nothing will be shocking. It will be things like merit based admissions, merit based hiring. I think we’d also to see some attention to the cost of admissions. So things that are going to just vary directly benefit students. Some look at what your foreign student base looks like. Are you importing radicalism and how are you assessing that. So a commitment to cleaning that up foreign funding. Is that primarily about the ideology of students admitted or is it a problem with the numbers. Like does the Trump administration have a problem with how many foreign students elite universities admit. So I think there’s a fairness issue that the president has talked about with the numbers. These are universities that have huge amounts of federal funding and are supposed to serve American students. And instead, they’ve taken on I think Columbia’s numbers were close to percent. Harvard’s are around 30 percent of foreign students. And that’s not to say anything bad about foreign students. It’s about what are the opportunities remaining for American students. So Yes, I think there will be some focus on what’s the right sizing there. And as a University, are you relying on foreign students for money or is your number calculated to having a good student experience. And what I think about with the foreign exchange program is that this was supposed to be a program where students come. It’s an exchange program. You come to the United States, you learn about the United States, you learn about the US culture, and then you take everything that you’ve learned about how great our country is, and you go back to your home country and you spread those ideas. And instead, if you have so large of a number, then you don’t get that. You don’t really understand because the percentages have grown so much that you can actually just end up having your own siloed culture. How qualified is the federal government, whether it be the White House, the education department and any other unit to assess some of these things. So I think you would concede that it is already tricky to some degree, to assess how fully in compliance a University is just with the Supreme Court’s admissions decision. I mean, just a minute ago, you said, well, we wouldn’t want universities to just use SAT scores to admit kids. But it seems like if you wanted to have a system where you could rigorously assess racial discrimination in admissions, aren’t there just endless gray areas where it’s just going to be really hard to say who’s complying and who’s not. So definitely, and I think nobody in the Trump administration is trying to run a University. It is too taxing. And nobody actually wants to run a University. Nobody ever. Yes so I think there’s a line of how do you ensure compliance with civil rights. And that your taxpayer money is going to a good place versus a bad place, which is broader than a civil rights question. So you need some level of control. But at the end of the day, you want independent entities. Like on one hand, there’s just the Hillsdale model. Like if you’re going to take the money then Yeah, there’s going to be strings attached. But you don’t have to take the money. And if your research was Hillsdale College, just so listeners is the conservative liberal arts school in Michigan one of a few schools that doesn’t take federal funding. right. And so that’s always an option. Like if anybody thinks that any of this is too burdensome, especially very well-funded universities, then just do none of it. Just be Hillsdale. And it’s funny, because for research, I mean, people don’t really understand the massive amount of money that goes to research. There’s billions and billions like Harvard right now, I think has something like $7 billion of promised grants. These are huge, huge numbers. But if all of the research was good, if these were research that was going to create something that was going to cure cancer, then a donor would love to fund that. I mean, to be the person that cured cancer. And so. Well, wait, wait a minute, though. I mean, everybody wants to cure cancer. But donors have finite resources. One of the assumptions behind public funding of universities is that there are certain goods, including medical research and research, for all kinds of different diseases, that you can’t just rely on donor funding for. And that has been the theory behind public private partnerships in American life going back decades. Do you think that’s good. Like do you think that. Do you think the federal government should be funding cancer research. Absolutely O.K. So it’s not just like donors will pick up the Slack. There is good research that we want the government funded. There is good research. But your same question of how closely can you actually monitor a university’s ability to just do a good job, be merit based, have not be importing radicalism like these are difficult questions. How are you going to assess that. It’s the same question, frankly, for all these grants, how are you actually going to monitor where this is being used, what the types of research are, how great the overhead when you do have the overhead, is it going to the sports stadium or is it going to salaries. If it’s going to salaries who’s these gets a bit difficult questions. And so I think the problem is not whether the government should or shouldn’t be funding cancer research. It absolutely should. But the unwieldiness of it has led to basically an unchecked situation. And so I think it is actually proper to have a right sizing where universities are relying on the federal government to a certain extent, where these are things that are maybe not close to a breakthrough, and that there is an opportunity for the private sector to spend money in ways that are beneficial to society. And to the extent people have problems with billionaires buying an extra jet or an extra yacht, what are we doing to incentivize people to actually spend on beneficial causes. So in effect here, you’re saying basically that. Harvard is very good at getting billionaires to give it money. And you’re saying if some of Harvard’s research funding is threatened, then it’s not a bad thing at all. If Harvard calls up its billionaire donors and says, hey, we don’t like what the federal government is asking of us. We want you to fund this cancer research instead. You’d say, that’s fine. Wealthy people funding universities, funding, science funding. Our future is something that has no history in this country. It’s absolutely a good thing. But I’m just the reason I’m asking about the difficulty of assessing these things is not because you have to have a perfect system. In order to have a federal relationship to universities. It’s more just that you guys are involved in negotiations, specific negotiations with universities that have concrete asks. And so I’m just trying to understand how you get to the concrete ask. One aspect of this is that the Trump administration has been asking, and in some cases has successfully induced elite schools to pay pretty big settlements fines effectively to the federal government. How does that fit into the picture. Is this just punishment. Is it revenue for the federal government. What is the purpose of those kind of settlements. So these are large numbers. And so not to minimize that. But the Brown settlement and the Columbia settlement each represented 1 percent of the endowment. So these are things that the universities can afford. And in a sense, it’s giving back a very, very small percentage of money that goes to these schools every year. So I think there’s a recognition, of course, there’s no recognition of fault. These are settlements. But by paying some of this back, I think there is a somewhat for the public sense of acknowledgment of wrongdoing, not a legal sense, but a mortal sense of we’ve taken all this money and we did it in ways that were not merit based or they weren’t safe for our students. And so we’re paying a small amount of it back. But then I think also having that dollar figure, It actually brings attention to the deals in ways people might not otherwise pay attention. So if you see a headline and it’s Columbia spends $200 million to the Treasury in $21 million, largest ever EEOC religious discrimination case. Actually, when you see numbers like that, then you pay attention and you look and then you’re able to learn a little bit more. So maybe you wouldn’t normally learn. And are the people paying attention, not just the public, but other college presidents. Yeah you want to get in early before the fines are too large. But I think in general, a settlement on its own without a fine might not be taken as seriously by the public or by other universities as when there is a fine, which I said, these are small dollar figures compared to the amounts that they are getting every year from the federal government and from their donors. But I think it provides a seriousness and a focus on these in ways that a promises only wouldn’t. Do you think the biggest schools are just too rich. The federal government now under the first Trump administration, passed a very modest endowment tax. Do you think generally it would be better for America if the biggest schools had smaller endowments. So I think it’s not necessarily the size of the endowment. It’s the application of them. So are you putting your endowment to some positive use, or is this just generating capital so that later. You can have a bigger building. There’s no problem with being wealthy. There’s no problem with universities being wealthy. But what are you using your wealth for. I think you can judge on that. And, so if you’re saying I need all this money for this research, where am I going to find it. Where am I going. Well, I did find some of it. And then if you were using some of that money to fund research, that would generate a patent that would be very valuable, then that would be beneficial for everybody because you have put that money then to good and productive use. I want to ask how ideas, ideology and ideological diversity enter into this. Because in one of the publicized letters that the administration sent to Harvard, there was a specific focus on the idea that Harvard should be looking for intellectual diversity in hiring and considering seriously why there are so few conservative and Republican faculty and trying to do something about that. And the letter took this quite far right. It specifically said that Harvard should consider that each department field or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse. I’m quoting from the letter here, and that there should be a audit that goes on a quote, Department by department, field by field or teaching unit by teaching unit basis as appropriate. End quote. And I should stress, this is an area that as a conservative with a lot of experience of higher education, take very seriously as a big problem for elite academia that it isn’t intellectually diverse. But it does seem like in this ask can see the problem with the federal government trying to micromanage this because it just seems like you get very quickly into an absurd situation where someone in Washington, DC is scrutinizing Harvard’s geology department. I don’t even know if Harvard has a geology department, but you take my point to see if it has enough Trump supporters. This is, I think, the most difficult question, because the answer is on one hand, obviously, I think conservatives want universities to a prepare their students and students are going to be in the real world confronted with all sorts of thoughts, and they should be prepared for that. So a good University would have some level of intellectual diversity. And not only that, but to the extent you have universities that are just hotbeds of radicalism, that’s not good for the student. That’s not good for the culture, that’s not good for the campus, that’s bad for the country. So that is all true. And I think the administration believes that intellectual diversity is a key factor to a good University that we would send our kids to. But at the same time, I think we all acknowledge that the federal government’s role in policing that is necessarily limited in the sense that we don’t want the next administration to come in and say, well, actually, this is the mix that I think is the best. So in meaning a Democratic administration coming in and calling up University of Kansas and saying, why haven’t you hired 17 more leftists for EECS department. Exactly and it’s a ridiculous thing to think through, because how many more leftists can you possibly hire if you’re this saturated already but. Well, but it is. I think that particular example would not happen. But I think obviously, we saw in the Obama administration and to some degree in the Biden administration, right. Democratic administrations were very comfortable using some of the same levers the Trump administration is using to push college campuses in particular directions on how to handle sexual assault and how to handle transgender issues, and so on. And I think one of the critiques from a libertarian perspective of what the Trump administration is doing is that you are of setting up, taking that model and turbocharging it. And a Democratic administration could say, hey, all of these Catholic hospitals seem to be getting a lot of public health care funding, and yet they won’t perform gender reassignment surgeries. Let’s do something about that escalatory spiral once the federal government is providing private institutions that get public money with marching orders. I think that’s a reasonable concern. So civil rights, I think, is easy meritocracy is good. And the hope actually is that if you are actually treating people on the basis of their merit and whether that’s test scores or whether that’s personal successes or whatever, you do tend to handle the intellectual diversity piece by accident, because it’s not going to be the case that every excellent person thinks the same thing. So there’s that. But then also, I think that’s why it’s important that this process come under way, where there’s a conversation with universities and with donors and with the Trump administration altogether, about what it actually means to be a great University and to have buy in. Because I actually think one of the reasons why some of these universities have made changes without provocation from the Trump administration, or in the case of Columbia, even though there was provocation and even though it was a deal, is because they wanted to they wanted to and they thought that this was a good thing, and they were tired of being held hostage by their left wing. And actually, they want intellectual diversity. They don’t want another person who’s just going to have the same we got another climate change person, we’ve got another gender studies person. I think they want it. And so giving the universities the permission to do this sometimes requires a strong statement from the government that’s almost like a scapegoat. But yeah, I think that’s right. Based just based on my own experience living in a college town and speaking to people who work in higher education, that there is some degree first, to which the Trump administration is pushing on an open door, and also some degree to which leaders of universities are happy to say oh, we didn’t want to do this, but the Trump administration made us do it right. But in fact, it’s something that they themselves want to do. At the same time, though, I do think that there is some tension between saying, we want schools to hire just based on merit, and we want schools to have a lot more intellectual diversity, because the reality is and this is where I think the traditional left wing argument around affirmative action always made a certain sense. You have to create pipelines, right. I think it was reasonable in the 1960s to say there just aren’t good pipelines for getting a lot of African-American kids into elite colleges. I think it’s reasonable for conservatives today to say there aren’t good pipelines for getting people who aren’t left wing into certain academic departments. But I just think you aren’t going to get there by saying merit alone. You are. You would have to say no. Universities have to do proactive things that are Yeah, going to be in tension a little bit. The affirmative action for the conservative is it’s an actual reality. When I was in Harvard there, we had maybe 1 and 1/2 conservative professors and I think the University surely Adrian Vermeule counts for at least like 3.7. That is true. But the pipelines thing, I think, is different than actual affirmative action. And looking at your criteria too. So if what you are prioritizing is how many times you’ve been published in some leftist magazine, then, of course, a conservative is not going to compete there. But I think other universities have found successes in having some adjunct programs. You’re not a professor. You’re not going to be able to compete on those levels. But we’re going to bring you in and you can teach a January course, or you can have a clinic or something like that. So I think this problem starts incrementally solving itself in a way that doesn’t ultimately require affirmative action, and then groups like the Federalist Society. They try and identify people who they think would be good professors and try and teach them how to do that. No, no, I don’t think there’s any problem with the pipeline in law schools, but I think the Federalist Society is a fairly distinctive case. And let me throw out another seeming tension here, which is around issues about anti-Semitism. So, clearly there are certain things that universities have tolerated or allowed in protests in the last few years that are just overt harassment and intimidation of Jewish students. And I think there it’s very straightforward. What the administration is asking for. But then there’s a larger, very blurry zone of critiques of the policies of the state of Israel. Critiques of Zionism. Where the administration has seemed to ask in some cases for something that, again, looks more like micromanaging of particular departments. Saying, well, we’re not going to have radical critics of Israel here and there. And so on. And that, again, seems like a kind of thumb on the scale in intellectual debates. So when you say the Trump administration has asked for them, I acknowledge that there are some letters that were sent by the anti-Semitism task force in some way that either incorporated the IHRA definition or otherwise were perceived to have been speech codes. These are right. These are strong definitions of anti-Semitism that at least some people on the left would say rule out what should be legitimate critiques of right. But when you look at what President Trump and at the Sr. level, what has actually happened. It’s not that. So the Columbia deal, and I think everyone would acknowledge that Columbia had a major anti-Semitism problem, but the Columbia deal in no way creates any speech code, whether it be on Israel or anything else. It does not. It specifically says that this is not intended to create any First Amendment conflict or otherwise govern speech on Columbia’s campus. So there’s a concern and I think there are people in the administration who probably are more in favor of speech constraints and then people who are less in favor of speech constraints. And that’s just the way the Trump administration works, where people have different views of where that line is. And I think it’s a difficult conversation of what’s the line between harassment and being unable to actually function on campus, right versus fair criticism that people, even if they don’t like it, should hear it. That’s not a definable line. That is a difficult line. And I think in sussing that out, at the end of the day, where the Trump administration landed is on the more free speech side of things, which is evident in the final terms of the Columbia deal. O.K, let’s talk for a minute about the legality of the approach the Trump administration has taken. Because I think you have conceded to some degree that, in all of these zones, there are gray areas and blurry lines. However, the administration has also moved preemptively to cut funding to say, it is and correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is what has happened repeatedly is critiques have been lodged, investigations have been opened, and then funding has been cut before the investigation is complete. And this is where the Trump administration has been rebuked in court in, most recently in a case involving Harvard itself for this right that you are essentially assuming the violation before the negotiation is actually finished. Is that a fair critique So that is certainly what Harvard says. Yes, and I think. It’s different than that though. So Yes, Title Vi, which says you can’t discriminate on the basis of race, is a bar on funding. So if you are found to violate Title Vi, that’s not grants that are at issue. That’s your student loans. That’s Pell grants. I mean, that’s a big deal. If you are found, if you are violated right now, what the Trump administration has done is not find a Title Vi violation prior to the process. I mean, the Title Vi violation was found. HHS did find them in violation of Title Vi, and referred that case over to DOJ to litigate and informed the accreditor for Harvard. But this is an entity that doesn’t have share the values, basically of the administration. And there are various statutes and various regulations that give the administration that discretion over how it can spend its own money. And so the lawsuit basically was an argument that oh, well, they’re just saying that, but what they’re actually doing is short circuiting the Title Vi process. Well, right. And it does I mean, it does seem, in fairness, right from our entire conversation, that the goal of the Trump administration’s strategy is not to micromanage how Harvard, how Harvard does cancer research or whatever it is to change University policy on hiring and discrimination and anti-Semitism. So doesn’t it seem like that’s true, that you are picking these grants as a lever to affect something unrelated to them. Having Harvard change its policies would be great, but at the same time, if they don’t, that’s fine. We’re just not going to fund it. And so it’s not like it’s taking over Harvard. They sued us. We didn’t sue them. It’s not a forced change. It is actually just that there’s a portion not even all. There is a portion of Harvard’s grants that we just decide should go to somewhere else. Maybe another University, maybe Brown, maybe Princeton, maybe Yale. I’m just going to express some skepticism that the Trump administration has sat down and said, we really think that the University of Kansas Cancer research program is just way better than Harvard’s. And we’re just going to cut that funding. It seems like the administration is going after going after the areas where Harvard is, by general agreement, most effective and successful, because that seems like a useful lever to change other areas of administration policy. But at the end that isn’t that that’s a naive reading, a straight A simple reading. It’s not a full comparison of all universities across the nation. But at the end of the day, Harvard reacted to a letter that asked for a few simple changes with a lawsuit that basically said, instead of us showing any amount of good faith effort to commit ourselves to the policies that are important to the United States, we’re going to instead say, we refuse to even answer you. These are billions of federal dollars. And I think that the funder of that can ask for a basic relationship. All right. Well, let’s end by looking at the future. Imagine it is 2030. And I guess we well, we can imagine it’s either a Democratic or a Republican administration. Give me a definition of success in higher Ed policy. In 5 in five years and seven years or eight years, what does the landscape look like if your negotiations with and pressure on universities are successful. So I think universities will return to a merit mission and that’ll be in admissions, that’ll be in hiring, that’ll be in research. And so that’ll be with its relationship to the federal government, that the federal government will be funding institutions that can be perceived as excellent. And maybe they’re not today. Excellent maybe they are these institutions that are trying to be excellent, but that the mission of universities will not be diversity. The mission of universities won’t be equity, but they will be excellence. And that will be rewarded with a tighter, closer and better federal relationship. And so that’s with regard to the federal government, I think policies larger than that, policies like what’s its effect in the world and how does it change our culture. And my hope is that the people who are graduating from our universities carry values that will uplift Western civilization and our country. And so that installation of values is obviously not something that the federal government can necessarily micromanage, but it’s something that the University itself can recommit itself to in determining how can we prepare our student body to be true leaders and to advance our country in ways that will be better for everybody. And to the extent that universities don’t act collaboratively with this change. Do you imagine a landscape where there really is a kind of shift in prestige and where students go, let’s say, from the Northeast to the South or Southwest. Would you imagine a kind of shaken up US News and World Report rankings or something as a possible outcome of all of this. So I do think that as universities decide that they don’t want a merit seeking mission that’s not attractive for parents, that’s not attractive for students, and it’s not attractive for the federal government. It’s also not attractive for donors. And they’ll and they’ll have to be more out loud about that. So that. So I think that’s the goal is you can choose who you want to be. You want to make no changes. You want to commit yourself to victimhood. You want to oppose the idea of merit. Say it out loud so that students, parents, donors and the government can know and that each can dedicate their resources to those universities that are making our country better. Last question then, from my perspective can probably sense this from some of the questions I’ve asked. The core weakness to me of University culture is a kind of stifling intellectual conformism. But that also seems to me just from watching the Trump administration in its battles with universities, the hardest for government policy to address without either falling afoul of the First Amendment or getting into impossible micromanaging. And it seems to me that a really shrewd federal strategy could take you from a world where 2 percent of the Harvard faculty are conservatives to a world where 4 percent are conservative, right. And could get you some slightly more meaningful intellectual diversity. But to get beyond that need as you just suggested, some kind of larger cultural shift. Universities did not become liberal because the federal government told them to become liberal. They became liberal because academic culture moved substantially to the left in a kind of organic way. And the same with student culture. Can you imagine a shift in the culture that would create greater intellectual diversity on college campuses. So if we’re talking about federal and non-federal levers, I think a couple of things. So one, I think the same change that the Federalist Society has brought for law schools could be focused on. And, I want to take a moment for Charlie Kirk and Turning Point, because the quiet loser of the Republican Party when I was in college doesn’t exist now. I think people are braver now, and they have community now. And so you can see a turning point type organization. Try and figure out then how to make professors, how to bring that energy into leadership levels. So think you could do some conservative organizing around already successful groups. And then I think just competition. So President Trump said, he wanted to take Harvard’s money and give it to trade schools. And obviously, you’re not going to take NIH research money and give it to the local cosmetology school. But I think the general idea there is can have a robust intellectual environment in a lot of different places. And it doesn’t have to be the traditional University model. So if you just want to learn about AI or if you want to do something different and it’s maybe not your traditional liberal arts, but you could having more options and universities wanting to still attract those people. That type of competition, I think, will increase the amount of intellectual diversity that universities have to offer. So continuing to find ways to provide competition, I think is also important. All right. May Mailman, Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you.
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