“The Treason of the Intellectuals,” with Niall Ferguson | Uncommon Knowledge

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is acquired the suppression of free speech the rigid imposition of a narrow ideology and the rise of anti-Semitism German universities between the wars and American universities today historian Neil Ferguson on Rare Knowledge Now Welcome to Rare Knowledge I'm Peter Robinson, Fellow at the Hoover Institution Neil Ferguson received his BA and PhD at Oxford before coming here to Stanford he held positions at Oxford Cambridge NYU Harvard and Ferguson Professor at the School of London Economy is the author of more than a dozen major works on history, including The Pity of War, which explains the First World War, and Kissinger, the Idealist.

The first volume of the late Henry Kissinger's projected two-volume biography of him. Our topic today. The essay that Professor Ferguson published last month. the betrayal of

intellectuals

Neil welcome nice to be with you Peter Neil Ferguson in Free Press quote December 10 for almost 10 years I have marveled at the betrayal of my intellectual colleagues throughout that period, my friends have assured me that I was exaggerating who could oppose greater diversity, equality and inclusion on campus such arguments fell apart after October 7 close quote, let's slowly analyze the betrayal of your intellectual peers that, of course, you are playing in a famous essay by a Frenchman of 1920, something or rather that is correct but you use the word betrayal of your own experience of your fellow academics, what exactly are they betraying when Bender wrote that book which is usually translated as betrayal of

intellectuals

in interwar France?

He was talking about what seemed like a great betrayal of academics and intellectuals by siding with the political right, so when you use the phrase today, the initial response is surprise, people say, but surely the academics of today they are leftist, why would you want to invoke the spirit of de Benda and the interwar period and the answer is that it is a betrayal of your role as a professor or, for that matter, public intellectual if you pursue a specific political objective pretending that you are involved in an academic activity. activity, let me go back even further in time Max vber, perhaps the founder of sociology, a great German thinker, gave a memorable lecture over a hundred years ago in which he argued that there should be a clear distinction between politi and visen axis between politics and science or let's call it scholarship and that is betrayal when you forget that separation and use the privilege that you have as a professor to pursue a political agenda and it doesn't matter if you lean to the right in your politics or to the left it is betrayal of the ideals of the university using motorcycles like uh Veritas uh or de fright V if he uses his position to participate in political activism and the generation of academics in America today is equally guilty of that betrayal. like the interwar generation of academics who align themselves with the far right you say this for almost 10 years I have marveled at the betrayal of my fellow intellectuals you have been an academic I am very sorry to say that I In fact, I spent a moment or two telling you, Neil, but you got your PhD over three decades ago and you've been a public intellectual at least since the moment that first book about the First World War became an international bestseller, a while ago, what?

It happened 10 years ago, well it was almost 10 years ago that I think my wife and I, Ali and I, came into contact with the counselor culture for the first time and that's when she was invited to give a commencement speech at the Brandise University and Then, shortly before the event, he was told that he had been disinvited because a strange coalition of progressive and Islamist elements in Brandise had signed a petition demanding that he be disinvited and it was at that point that cancel culture began. to be something like that. A recurring phenomenon at universities in the United States, people were being disinvited and I remember researching it and trying to understand what was going on and being a little bewildered by this unholy alliance between radical leftists, rights activists. from the homosexuals and Islamists who thought that Someone like my wife should be publicly humiliated because of course they should be publicly disinvited like that and I think that was when I started to worry that something was going wrong and I realized that it was going wrong at that time at Harvard, where I was a professor and I started talking about this curious illiberal turn that I was observing and it is in the space of about 10 years that what we could call wokeness has gone from being a fringe fad to being the ideology dominant of the Major universities are so dominant that they have led to two appointments like that of the now former president of Harvard, Claudine, gay, someone who would never have been put in that position in the previous decades, so one last part of that quote opening, my friends assured me that I was exaggerating such arguments their arguments the friends' arguments fell apart after October 7th you are talking about a phenomenon that you have been following for a decade and that you made very public several years ago why the response to October 7th was different because then I think for many American Jews who had maybe been to Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton and left many years ago and went on with their lives, whether it was in technology or finance in the world Really, for them it was a tremendous shock. to see more than 30 Harvard student groups issue a statement condoning the atrocious behavior of Hamas, the violence, the rape, the atrocities of October 7, 1,200 massacred, and that, as a result of those public statements, the Harvard university authorities and other places seemed unable to express. anything uh Beyond the boring Brom Ides I think that was the moment when many American Jews realized that something had gone terribly wrong.

They found themselves marveling that 30 student groups, more than 30, should explicitly approve an act of terrorism and then realized that pro-Palestinian elements were so dominant in universities and among young people in general that there was a new anti-Semitism of the that they hadn't realized that woke left anti-Semitism existed and this was a big shock to people who hadn't been paying attention, uh, so the only good thing that happened on October 7th was that it made people in the United States and elsewhere in Britain also realized that the Anglosphere as a whole has a major problem with a new It is a kind of anti-Semitism and it is entrenched among young people and it is entrenched because the universalities have been teaching a particular type of politics and history that depicts Israel as the latest manifestation of settler colonialism and portrays Palestinians as the latest victims. of white supremacy of which somehow Jews have become the main exponents because that's what happened and at the heart of the essay that you published that remarkable essay on December 10 that no one else was about to say in this country in any country could have published because no one else has the deep historical

knowledge

and intellectual audacity to draw the parallels, we will get to all this, but let me quote, continue with the essay.

I am quoting the essay again, it could be It was considered extraordinary that the world's most prestigious universities had become so quickly infected with a policy imbued with anti-Semitism, but exactly the same thing happened before academically trained Germans were unusually willing to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader, lawyers and doctors. Those with university degrees were substantially overrepresented within the na party, as were university students, quote, so if you were looking for characteristics that predicted membership in the Nazi party, you would have looked at the right educational level, how could there have been been good first? Let's go back to the German universities 100 years ago, it's 1924, and the most important universities in the world, and not Harvard, Stanford and Yale, the most important universities are Heidelberg and Marberg Tuban kbur, the great German universities, they really dominated in almost all fields 100.

Years ago, by comparison, American universities were country clubs, Nobel prizes were won by German professors, if you were an ambitious scientist or a classicist and you had your first degree from Oxford Cambridge, you had to get your PhD in Germany if you wanted to be accepted. Seriously, that's the context we see in the movie The Oppenheimer, where there's an interlude where he feels compelled to go to Germany to study the latest developments in the field because physics was really being done in The Cutting. Edge, think of all the big names in physics at that time, most of them actually had some kind of experience at German or at least central European universities.

Well, that's the context now. The fascinating thing if you look at these institutions is that they were right even before the First World War, now we tend to assume that the role of universities was liberal, but that's not right, it's just that historically universities tend to have a tendency and the trend in Germany before 1914 was conservative, uh, and maybe that shouldn't surprise us because it was the social elite that went to university. It was a much smaller sector of society then than today. The trauma of the defeat in 1918 provoked a tremendous reaction, a reaction not only against the Viar Republic, the successor. to the imperial regime, but I think generally speaking it was a reaction against many other things associated with the defeat, a reaction against the Anglo-Saxon powers who had won the war, and it was in this context that many students and teachers were very attracted to a exciting new demagogic figure Adolf Hitler and it is the National Socialist German Workers Party now the word workers is an interesting term here because in fact it was not particularly attractive to the workers the workers in the 1920s gravitated towards the social democrats or the communists uh and that's why the nsdap In fact, the Nazi party in its initial phase, when it grew in the 1920s and made its way electorally in 1932 and 33, was a party that was very attractive to people with university degrees and we can find that in the social life of, say, Marberg. which is one of the typical universities where we have studied very well the way in which the radical right penetrated the student body and the teaching staff and anti-Semitism was institutionalized so that, for example, in Marberg, the Student Association for the Jewish students were effectively prescribed long before Hitler came to power, again, according to you, a critical factor in the decline and fall of German universities.

Jews begin to leave Albert Einstein is the most famous, but many Jews leave with the fall of German universities. it was precisely that so many high-level academics were Jewish for some Hitler's anti-Semitism was therefore and you put this in parentheses not unlike the intersectionality that awakened in our time Hitler's anti-Semitism was therefore a career opportunity, explain that well, if you think about why an ideology spreads, there are typically two driving forces, the obvious one, which is that people are just convinced that they think, oh my gosh, we really need to have more diversity, equity and inclusion, and we should really try work towards that, but the other reason why ideology spreads is that there are people who benefit from them, who is always the good question.

Lenin wasn't wrong about that, and in the case of Germany in the 1930s, who was it? Gentile professors could screw Jews, Jewish professors. They were removed from their jobs because the teachers were civil servants in the German system, they were expelled from their jobs, it's one of the first things the Nazis do when they come to Paris to purge the civil service of Jews, that's an excellent career opportunity uh if you are not Jewish and you can avoid the purge uh and then you see the self-interest that motivated certain people to become Nazis uh there is the expression uh the Fallen of March the mat gelin the people who became Nazis once that it became clear that the Nazis were really in power, the massive increase in Nazi party members after Hitler is clearly establishing a dictatorship, I find this a very interesting time in German history because it is the time when the opportunists They join those convinced that it was.

It was risky to be a NaziBefore 1933 you were part of an opposition movement and were very likely to be involved in violence because street fighting was part of the name of the game in late Germany, but after Hitler clearly established a dictatorship and the Nazis have won to the herd of opportunists. Now you might think this is too broad an analogy, but I don't think it is because the fascinating thing about academic life in America in the last 10 years is that the ideology of equity in diversity and inclusion, let's call it Labor, It has certainly been a great career opportunity for some people and it has also been a great opportunity to expel from the Academy anyone suspected of conservatism, so the systematic discrimination that has been going on and is now quite open in most the universities. against people who are ideologically right-wing has been, of course, a professional opportunity for others, that's a good way to think about how institutions are captured is the combination of believers and opportunists and opportunists once again from your essay and here I want to make sure that I understand whether you are making a strong or weak version of the argument that I tend to make strong, you tend to Neil, I know I'm quoting you, the lesson of German history for American academia should now be clear in Germany to use the language legalistic speech of 2023 crossed in conduct, the final solution of the Jewish question began as the speech, to be precise, began. such as lectures, monographs and academic articles, close quote, okay, German universities failed to stop Hitler, that's clear, but are you making the much stronger argument that universities helped produce the Holocaust?, say in words of the late Milton Himar no Hitler no no Holocaust, are you arguing that there are no universities, there is no Holocaust?

Well, Hitler was not a tremendously sophisticated thinker. What's in Camp M is a lot of ideas about race. About living space. Borrowed from various sectors, including the United States. Many of Hitler's ideas about race. They actually come from the United States. The same goes for the Nazis. The adoption of eugenics. There is no very clear path in my field to find a solution, in quotes, to the Jewish question. To achieve the fusion of approximately six million Jews. Something is needed. people to articulate the mechanisms and what strikes me a lot about German academia in the 1920s and 1930s, before the outbreak of World War II, before the Holocaust began, in fact, is the amount of research which was produced to, for example, explain why I want to annihilate the mentally ill to explain why you would want to expel the Jews and slaves from Eastern Europe to create a new German living space and this production of the details of what we have come to calling the Holocaust is not the work of the gbl propaganda ministry, much of it is the work of people working in German departments and universities, there are even doctrinal theses on how to make use of gold fillings in Jewish skulls, so I believe which is a very important characteristic of narcissism that is not understood enough, perhaps because we don't teach the history of the Third Reich in universities like we used to.

What distinguishes the Third Reich from the Soviet Union is the extreme sophistication with which a program of systematic mass murder is carried out, eh, it is a much more sophisticated operation than any other genocide or democide if you want to use that term in the history and that is because he had at his disposal the most sophisticated technocratic elite that the world had at that time and that was the German technocratic elite. I'm sure some of our listeners will agree with their friends and say that this is all fascinating as a matter of history, but here goes Neil Ferguson. exaggerating again what happened there could not happen here because the cases are virtually opposite.

German universities glorify the German State and the dominant ethnic group the so-called Aryan race. American universities do not glorify the United States. They are very happy to have the borders erased. They are one-worlders. They are internationalists, they are not committed to glorifying the dominant wasp, the ancestry of the old wasp, on the contrary, they are committed to humiliating it in the name of other ethnic groups, so the cases are not only different but almost opposite to each other, why is it wrong? Well, if it becomes the conventional wisdom on campus that, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free and Israel should be wiped off the map and that Hamas is legitimate because it is engaged in a legitimate struggle. uh, anti-settler insurrection, then at least you have a significant proportion of educated America supporting a second Holocaust because that's what Hamas had in mind, that's what we saw in a preview on October 7th, uh, we shouldn't have doubts in our minds. about the intentions of Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, they want to wipe Israel off the map and they are explicit about it and they intend to achieve that goal, any Jew or non-Jew in the Western world who is willing to do so.

To accept that outcome is to accept a second Holocaust, and I think your skeptical listeners should pause for a moment and ask themselves if they want to live to see that happen after the horrific events of the early 1940s and the leaders' repeated confessions. Westerners. that this should never happen again, we glimpsed on October 7th, we glimpsed in the sadistic violence perpetrated against Israeli civilians the spirit of a second Holocaust, and I shudder when I see that opinion polls on both sides of the Atlantic clearly show that Young Los Americans and young Britain disproportionately side overwhelmingly with the Palestinians against Israel and are even willing to contemplate that outcome: wiping Israel off the map.

Have no illusions about what that means in practice, because it is precisely illusions about what it means in practice that persisted through the 1930s into the 1940s and led many people to not believe that the Holocaust was being committed, even as the extermination camps carried out their horrible work in recent weeks. had happened in his Elma mats Bill Amman has become famous I have to say that three weeks ago I didn't know who he was today I'm tempted to write it for president um he has been researching the prevailing ethics in his Elma moer Harvard where he was not only an undergraduate, but rather gave him about 50 million dollars.

This is from one of his Twitter posts of him now known as I quote it as E. for equity and Dei Dei, as you said, means diversity, equity and inclusion, the E for Equity is about equality of outcomes AC when rights, not equality of opportunity under Dei, the degree of oppression of one is determined based on where one resides in the so-called intersectional pyramid. of Oppression where whites, Jews and Asians are considered oppressors. Dei is racist because reverse racism is racism even if it is against white people and it is notable that I even need to point out this close quote that stands out to me because I think it seems possibly late to you.

Recognition wouldn't have had to wait until just a couple of weeks ago if you'd been reading all these years, but a pretty accurate summary of what Dei is. Here is my next question. We can understand that this is not to excuse him, but we can. Understand where anti-Semitism came from in Germany. Germany had been defeated in the First World War. You have an entire nation that is looking for a scapegoat. What, ha, was it the Jews who did it? It didn't make much sense, but you can see how. filled a psychological longing. The United States represents the most powerful nation in the world.

The academics now in tenured positions came to their positions during a quarter-century of unparalleled prosperity and relative peace. How do you explain the rise of Dei in American universities well, um Billman? he was very well known to me, long before you knew him, as one of the most successful activist hedge fund managers in the world and he simply diverted his activism away from corporations that were being mismanaged and onto the Harvard Corporation and Harvard. College and I just wish he had done it sooner. I also share your admiration for his recent writings, which were models of Lucidity, but I think I could put it more bluntly, because diversity, equity inclusion is kind of news talk. o Wels feels that it actually means exactly the opposite of what he says: diversity, asart is uniformity, the universal uniformity of ideological perspective.

Equity is actually completely absent because there is no due process when the Dei bureaucracy kicks in, and as for inclusion, the real goal is the exclusion of those who do not conform to the ideology of the progressive left, so thats the reality. Where he came from? It's pretty easy to explain. I think it's okay in universities in the 1960s, they were already liberal. Did you mention the last one? Henry Kissi was already unusual in the 1960s to be a conservative Republican professor. The problem in the 1970s and 1980s was that liberals had a tendency to hire Marxists over other liberals and then in due time the Marxists would hire cultural Marxists for the job. 1989 version of Marxism that changed economics in favor of identity politics when the class war was lost as the left did spectacularly in the 1980s and the Cold War was lost.

What turned out well turned out that the answer was identity politics and identity. Politics is designed to be hostile to individual freedom by insisting that no one is an individual. Each freedom belongs to some identity category or another, ethnic, sexual, sexual, racial, religious, whatever and once you have identified the identity category to which an individual belongs, then you can classify him according to the level of victimization and if you are a white man and I'm afraid we are both almost dead white men, we are right at the bottom of the rankings and if we were women of color who had consistently voted for Democrats and maybe if we also had a certain sexual orientation we would be near the top and that's pretty much how it works, it's a very insidious ideology because it's very divisive and at the same time, it just abstracts the identity of the individual and replaces it with some group identity.

What I think many Jewish liberals had not noticed was their decline in rankings from the oppressed and it would be difficult to say that anyone in the 1940s was more oppressed than the Jews, but strangely the Jews were demoted to the bottom of the table and they became part of the oppressor groups, uh, now, why did that happen? Two things and this one is really important. It has always been this way. Anti-Zionism has been part of the leftist propaganda of the late Cold War and was part of what the Soviets did when they discovered that they were losing badly in the Middle East and that they were gradually being removed from hostility towards Israel's support for the Arabian countries.

Nationalists were part and parcel of Soviet strategy, so anti-Zionism was part of left-wing propaganda, when I was a student in the 1980s, but what you added to that more recently was something with quite an intellectual origin. different: Islamism. political Islam that has become increasingly better represented in universities and in a fascinating way the different elements of the Western movement came together despite their obvious differences why on earth would there be queers for Palestine? To give just one example of the strange phenomena we have. I have seen since October 7 how long a group of young homosexuals in Gaza would last if they proclaim their sexual orientation.

Not for long because that's not really Hamas' bag, but in the strange parallel world of the American campus, the search for Palestine makes a lot of sense. And so we have a great realignment on campus, and it was only after October 7th that people like Bill Akman realized that in that great realignment, his people, his group, the Jews had been big losers, okay, the Claudine gay case. you were at Harvard for less than a decade, as I remember, more than 12 years, oh, you were there for a dozen years, so you know this institution well, it is also the oldest institution in this country and, by any measure , the most prestigious and also the richest. 50 billion dollar endowment here's Claudine gay, then president of Harvard under questioning by Congresswoman Elise Stonic, Harvard graduate December 5, 2023, well let me ask you if admission offers will be rescinded or disciplinary action taken against the students. or applicants who say from the river to the sea or in f advocating the murder of Jews asi have said that type of hateful reckless offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me today that no action will be taken what action will be taken when speech crosses over into conduct that violates our policies, including policies against harassment, bullying or intimidation , we take action and have strong disciplinary processes that allow us to hold people accountable.

Okay, so there's the gay president who draws a distinction between speech, mere words, on the one hand, and action, on the other. Another, what was wrong with that answer, well, the only thing wrong was that that had not been her position before those hearings and we know this because, in her time as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Claudine Gay was quite active . by going after those who spoke out in ways she and other progressive academic administrators found unacceptable. The curious thing about the hearings that we just saw a clip of was the speed with which she and the other university presidents who were testifying stormed about the first amendment, which they had clearly been briefed on before the hearings, that was the point about when speech becomes conduct, because in reality the United States offers really fabulous protections, at least on the part of the states. uh in interference with speech, you can say really nasty things in this country, uh, that's the nature of freedom, but if you were to start acting on your hateful statements, engage in violence against minorities or threaten explicitly with doing so. violent acts then you would really have fallen outside the protection of the First Amendment.

There is a very clear body of law in the United States that goes back many decades that clarifies what free speech means here, the problem is that this is not how things were on the Harvard campus in recent years. On the contrary, numerous professors, including at least two African American professors who I can think of, had gotten on the wrong side of the university administration for things they said not out of conduct but for things that were said and that's really what made his testimony infuriating uh it was this belated discovery that there really should be first amendment rights on harvard campus hadn't been years okay gay claudian resigned as president of harvard on january 2, according to press reports , the Harvard Corporation, the body that has the highest authority at Harvard, the Harvard Corporation supported gay after his testimony before Congress. which we just heard withdraw her support only after charges of plagiarism arose, so plagiarism there are two questions here, the first obvious question we've all seen, this is what she said, this is where she got it from, those photos They have been everywhere.

Internet the first question is was it genuine plagiarism or did they try to keep it up for several days just carelessly paraphrasing forgetting to put in quotes mere inadvertence do you have an opinion on that? What Claudi and Gay did were things that Harvard students were severely disciplined for during my time and any professional academic knew it at a glance, didn't they, yes this was not controversial and of course it was strange that someone should have done it. I tried to rationalize what was clearly very extreme and obvious, and he repeated the plagiarism, the plagiarism even from the acknowledgment section which I had never seen before, quite remarkable, and of course the second question is whether the Harvard Corporation was right in that his testimony was something they could have written, but it was the plagiarism that ultimately made his position untenable.

First of all, those are the kinds of calculations that the Harvard Corporation or any group of trustees of one of these large institutions should be making. and if they were reasonable, if they were right in that kind of calculation, the corporation should never have made claan gay president in the first place, I mean, and if anything predictably followed from that decision, if all that happens at Harvard is that There is a new president. elected by the same Corporation nothing will fundamentally change and we must understand Peter and I do not want this all to be about Harvard this is a problem for all universities it is a problem for Stanford also it is a problem for Harvard Yale Stanford Princeton is a problem for much lesser known institutions because one must realize that these problems are widespread.

Look at the Academy's unorthodox surveys of student sentiment across the country. About 60% of students nationwide say they feel uncomfortable speaking their minds in class, uh, because of the consequences. That could go on, this is true even in Chicago, which prides itself on its culture of free speech, so I think we shouldn't make this all about Harvard. There is a problem throughout American academia. It is a problem of ideological capture of the politicization of the perversion of the institution, its deviation from the search for truth and the search for thought that is truly free. To fix this we need more than a new Harvard president, we need a fundamental change in the nature of university governance, from the top to the bottom. down, well, two quotes, both Twitter posts, quote number one from a post by Constantine Kissen, if I pronounce his name correctly, one of the biggest benefits of Bill Amman's successful campaign to dismantle discriminatory practices at Elite universities is that it proves something many of us have been saying for a long time that all it takes is for a few people with power, money and influence to start standing up to this shit and it will be overquoted Jordan Peterson Bill Akman for all his good job seems to have no real idea of ​​how far universities have come.

Plagiarism may not be the least of your problems, but it is far down the list. Neil, you're right, in a way you're both right. A lot has been achieved in a relatively short time. time uh when since October 7th since October 7th uh and not just because of Bill lman there have been many other people who have publicly or privately expressed their horror at the way things have gone at major universities, that's well and it can just uh I think uh begin the process uh of change and that's where Jordan Peterson is right there's a lot more here that's wrong than just plagiarism I think there's a lot of plagiarism I suspect we'll spend 2024 reading on a more or less weekly basis about plagiarists because part of the problem is that when you set aside academic standards to pursue diversity, equity and inclusion, in other words, you start making appointments not based on ability, performance and achievements, but based of other criteria. plagiarism that's not random, it's not just a correlation, of course, because you're basically going to start giving promotions and preference to inferior academics and how inferior academics fare.

Plagiarism is one of the ways people get away with it. they're not really up to par, that's part of the problem, but Jordan Peterson is right that the problems run deep, uh, and like I said, it's not just that the wrong people have been appointed to top positions, it's not just that there are many things. By the way, it's not just that there is a replication crisis in the natural and social sciences because let's not forget that there are problems there too, otherwise Stanford would presumably still have a president. There are all kinds of problems in academia. that needs to be addressed, but it won't be addressed by simply replacing presidents or even boards of directors, it needs to be addressed by changing the way universities are run and one of the recommendations that I made last month, uh, on behalf of the new University that we are founding in Austin, Texas, is that there must be adequate constitutional protection within the University system of government for free speech and academic freedom and it must be enforced.

It's all very well having the Chicago Principles and they sound great, but if they're not enforced, if college students don't feel free to speak up because they could be consequences, then what good are they doing to make the University of Austin unique in the world? sense that it will model a new type of academic governance in which the freedom of students and faculty alike will be protected and that freedom will be enforced, okay, so you just mentioned it. I want to give you a moment to expand on that topic, but if the question is what should be done in the long term, here's what this layman is thinking about: On the one hand, we have a tax code that has favored universities for decades by allow Harvard to accumulate an endowment of 50 billion, which is by far the largest, not really not because Harvard, Yale and Stanford are all in the multiple tens of billions of dollars Princeton is not far behind these are institutions rich can change the tax code it can be noted that during the Cold War is when federal funding of research at these institutions began to become routine, but this is in the 1950s when the institutions were making common cause with the rest of the nation and now the institutions are completely in a world of their own, their own intellectual world, this woke up the Dei world, so it cut off Republican funding in Congress and then the third alternative.

It's just saying, okay, Harvard may date back to the early 17th century, but the H stands for where we're going to found a whole new set of institutions like the University of Austin, which I think is what formally speaking is now about 2 years old. . and the first students will be admitted next fall. I think it's okay. So how do you classify those possible approaches? What is the rest of the country doing to say stop this nonsense? We're going to make you stop it right. I think the philanthropic culture of the United States is one of its glories.

The fact that universities are not public institutions as they were in Germany, but to a substantial extent are private institutions, is a good thing and we should be careful about breaking that one-size-fits-all model that doesn't really have a counterpart elsewhere, so I'm wary of arguing that this is a problem for Congress that needs to be solved with new taxes, I would say that the solution to Harvard's excessive wealth problem is for donors to stop giving it money it clearly doesn't need and wastes. . I would prefer that they give the money to a new institution that would use it much better and that is why I prefer a truly American solution to this problem, which is that these universities don't work very well, let's create some new ones; that was the spirit that produced the University of Chicago and the university we are at today at Stanford, uh and so the American solution should not be that the government needs to fix this the American solution should be let's stop giving money to these institutions that don't are fit for purpose, let's give the money to new institutions and those new institutions will ideally thrive without federal funds, particularly if the federal funds come with Title 9 and other obligations because remember, part of the problem here, Peter, is that the government got too involved in the universities, got too involved in their finances and then started to get involved in their governance and Title 9. is a good example of the problem: I suppose there are almost as many Title 9 officers at this University as there are Dei officers and everyone is part of the problem.

These universities are rich because they are rich. They were allowed to have. They are allowed. Growing these huge bureaucracies of non-academic people who are not involved in research or teaching and who are purely involved in administration is a big part of the problem and I think it is the only solution because it is very difficult to get rid of these bureaucracies once. time they exist. It's starting over and if we are successful in Austin, if we can create a new model of university that doesn't work like the old ones but actually believes what it says about the search for truth, the ideal would be to force these older institutions to change their methods.

The easiest way to win this fight is to create a better institution that attracts the smartest people as students and the smartest people as teachers. Once you start attracting those people, the money follows you and very quickly people have to adapt and change their ways. This was before Oxford and Cambridge didn't care about PhDs until the German University started doing so and in many ways the American universities were modeled after the German universities in their heyday, nothing stays the same, strange as it may seem, The Academy, for everything that seems supernatural, is a very competitive place and in the end there is still a market for genius and a market for new ideas and the problem is that the market is moving, it is leaving Harvard, eh, and interestingly enough he's headed to Austin, Texas, see you there, okay, last question, Neil, one last question.

Time for your December essay The Betrayal of the Intellectuals quotes only if the great American universities can restore in all theirweaving the separation of visenta sha from poti visent shof which you have already said is science or academia, let's call it erudition from politics. Only then can they be sure to avoid the fate of German universities. close quote: you published that essay just six weeks ago. Are you more optimistic today than the day you posted it? Well, I'm not usually an optimist, as you know. Peter grew up in Scotland, but I'm a little more optimistic because I think it's being forcibly conveyed to trustees across the country, not just at Harvard, that they have to change the way they go. about things that can no longer allow ideologues, progressives, to make decisions and that this has to be a step in the right direction.

You and I are members of the Hoover Institution. The Hoover Institution is a fairly unique institution in the world. It is a semi-autonomous republic and within Stanford University, why is there no Hoover institution at Harvard? Or at Yale, well, they could use a Hoover institution in those places. One of the reasons I believe passionately in what we do here at Hoover is that we are the counterculture of Dei uh and if we can continue to demonstrate that it is possible to engage in scholarship in a way that is not politicized, uh if we can be an institution that demonstrates that liberals and conservatives can work together on academic problems.

If we leave politics at the doorstep, then we will also act as role models, so I have some hope, just a little bit of hope, Peter, that the probability of Hoover institutions existing at other universities has increased from 0% to "no ". I know that maybe five, maybe 5% and the University of Austin, we have people who will hear this and who will hear about the University of Austin for the first time. austin.org is the website U austin.org uatx is the abbreviation we only get accredited because you know we have to go through bureaucratic hoops even in Texas, last year our first students will be admitted, we will start studying in the fall of 2024 .and I think it's the classic American solution to a problem, don't leave it to the government, do it yourself, build something new Neil Ferguson, thank you, thank you Peter, for your

uncommon

insight, the Hoover institution and Fox Nation.

I'm Peter Robinson.