Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: we don't have a great show for you today. Wesleyan
Speaker 1: University's own Michael Roth stops by to talk about how
Speaker 1: universities can push back against Donald Trump. But first we
Speaker 1: have Harvard professor and How Democracies Die author Steven Levitsky
Speaker 1: here to talk about why he's a little more optimistic
Speaker 1: about Trump failing after a year into his presidency.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 3: Steven, thanks for having me back.
Speaker 2: Before we were.
Speaker 1: Talking and you were talking about how you're more optimistic
Speaker 1: now than you were say in March. I think we
Speaker 1: were all pretty freaked out by the Trump two point zero.
Speaker 2: Talk to me about why you're more optimistic now.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, it's Trump has done a tremendous
Speaker 3: amount of damage, and we were seeing the beginning of
Speaker 3: it March and that continued almost done, abated and unchecked
Speaker 3: for nine months. And it's done damage to our society,
Speaker 3: to our culture, to our institutions, to the US State,
Speaker 3: to the world, particularly the US standing in them. So
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five was a terrible year. It was worse
Speaker 3: than I anticipated, and I've been a pessimist for years.
Speaker 3: What makes me less pessimistic is the fact that Trump
Speaker 3: is weakening politically. For he began to he has suffered defeats,
Speaker 3: some defeats in the courts, He's suffered some defeats at
Speaker 3: the ballot box. Public opinion is gradually but importantly shifting
Speaker 3: against him, and he's suffered defeats within the Republican Party,
Speaker 3: which is a bad side for him. And the principal
Speaker 3: reason why Trump was able to do as much damage
Speaker 3: as he did in twenty twenty five is he had
Speaker 3: ironclad Republican support. He could not have done even a
Speaker 3: fraction of what he did had he not had ironclad
Speaker 3: support in the Republican Party. Basically, the willingness of the
Speaker 3: entire Republican Party leadership to abdicate their oversight role in
Speaker 3: Congress and to just let him, in many cases, just
Speaker 3: flat outbreak the law or violent the constitution. There are
Speaker 3: signs that that is beginning to change, but in particular,
Speaker 3: it's clear that he's overreached, he's made mistakes, and that
Speaker 3: he is beginning to really count in terms of public opinion.
Speaker 3: And one thing we know about autocrats is they do
Speaker 3: a lot more damage when they have majority support than
Speaker 3: when they don't. And so somebody like Bukele and Alsalvador
Speaker 3: with eighty eighty five percent support can do much much
Speaker 3: more damage than a president who's at forty one or
Speaker 3: thirty nine. And Trump is entering a territory where he
Speaker 3: could still do a lot of damage, but his ability
Speaker 3: to impose his will without contestation political contestation, media contestation,
Speaker 3: societal contestation that's being reduced.
Speaker 1: Right after Trump got reelected, my brother called me. He said,
Speaker 1: you know, even Hitler had to be popular, like do
Speaker 1: you can't just do unpopular stuff. Obviously, I'm not comparing
Speaker 1: Trump to Hitler because they're wildly different. But there has
Speaker 1: not been a ton of like care in Trump two
Speaker 1: point zero.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 3: I think that they overestimated their support. I think they
Speaker 3: were overconfident and they overreached. Trump had not faced any
Speaker 3: serious contestation in the Republican Party for years, not for
Speaker 3: several years, and I think they've taken all of that forget.
Speaker 3: I think they over all of us kind of overblew
Speaker 3: the fact that he won the popular vote, which he
Speaker 3: had never done before, and they took that as a
Speaker 3: mandate which never existed. You're right, they've done a series.
Speaker 3: Almost all of their major policies are things that the
Speaker 3: public either is indifferent to or as opposed to, and
Speaker 3: that's that's hurting them. It's not hurting them the way
Speaker 3: that it would have hurted a politician in the old days.
Speaker 3: Because Trump has a thirty five percent base that's very
Speaker 3: hard to chip away at. But at this pace he's
Speaker 3: he's going to continue to decline towards that thirty five
Speaker 3: percent floor.
Speaker 2: They're sort of intractable.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: It's bad politics, so you can get away with it
Speaker 3: if you control the security forces. You can be like
Speaker 3: Nicola Baduro in Venezuela and have an eighteen percent approval
Speaker 3: rating and fail and fail and fail and fail, and
Speaker 3: still still stay in power if you control the security forces.
Speaker 3: And you know, Trump has taken some initial steps towards
Speaker 3: politicizing our security forces in really really dangerous directions, but
Speaker 3: he's not at the point where he can just do
Speaker 3: whatever the hell he wants and rely on repression.
Speaker 1: Part of it was that it's just not that easy
Speaker 1: to go from democracy to authoritarianism, right, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: just there's sand in the gears.
Speaker 3: Democracy is particularly hard to kill one because the nature
Speaker 3: and the strength of our institutions. We have a constitution
Speaker 3: that's not easy to push over. We have a very
Speaker 3: independent and judiciary. We have federalism, which, as we've seen,
Speaker 3: matters a lot, and we have a highly professionalized armed forces, which,
Speaker 3: despite Trump's attempts, is not easy to policis. We also
Speaker 3: have a much much more vibrant society, a much wealthier,
Speaker 3: better organized society than say elsalvad or Russia or other
Speaker 3: places where democracy has been has been crushed. So Trump
Speaker 3: has undermined democracy. I would argue he's sort of pushed
Speaker 3: us mildly over the line into what I would call
Speaker 3: competitive authoritarianism. But because of the strength of our institutions,
Speaker 3: in the strength of our society, every step of the way,
Speaker 3: he is going to be pretty contested, and actually consolidating
Speaker 3: something like Putin style rule is going to be really difficult.
Speaker 3: I'm curious when.
Speaker 1: You could talk about the importance of that Jimmy Kimmel
Speaker 1: moment Trump wanted to cancel Kimmel. I mean, what are
Speaker 1: the moments when you look back at twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: where you feel like the critical mass was able to
Speaker 1: sort of push back against him.
Speaker 3: Very very difficult to isolate the turning point. We still
Speaker 3: know for sure that it's going to be a turning point. Ultimately,
Speaker 3: I think the election outcome is going to be very
Speaker 3: very important. The response to the initial Libration Day tariff
Speaker 3: move was also that was sort of the first blow.
Speaker 3: He never really recovered politically from our public opinion, from that.
Speaker 3: But you're right, you know, other than Harvard and a
Speaker 3: couple of other cases, very few elite actors in American
Speaker 3: society pushed back on Trump in the first nine months,
Speaker 3: and that's one of the reasons why we're in this mess.
Speaker 3: The level of elite abdication, from Supreme Court justices to senators,
Speaker 3: to business people to media owners, to law firms, the
Speaker 3: university presidents has been really, really consequential. And initially, initially
Speaker 3: obviously Disney was also giving in, but I haven't seen
Speaker 3: the definitive account of why that was reversed. But the
Speaker 3: public outcry and the public mobilization in response to that,
Speaker 3: I think was significant, and Disney's decision, whatever the basis
Speaker 3: of his calculation, to kind of reverse course. Yeah, pretty
Speaker 3: important move.
Speaker 1: I want you to say more about that the elites,
Speaker 1: because from that moment when you had those billionaires at
Speaker 1: the inauguration, to Sherry Redstone canceling Colbert to just at
Speaker 1: every point we saw billionaires, millionaires, senators. I mean, we
Speaker 1: just saw such a level of craven I was kind
Speaker 1: of shocked.
Speaker 3: It was shocking. I was shocked as well. In fact,
Speaker 3: one of the reasons why, even though I've obviously been
Speaker 3: writing for years about Trump's authoritarianism, one reason why I
Speaker 3: was always relatively confident in US democracy was again that
Speaker 3: we have such a wealthy, well organized, well connected society
Speaker 3: that's not dependent on the government the way they say
Speaker 3: Russian oligarchs are, and that have the resource, We have
Speaker 3: the muscle in our society to push back easily against Trump,
Speaker 3: and we didn't do it. We didn't do it at
Speaker 3: the top. So had you asked me prior to Trump's
Speaker 3: selection whether it's a positive or negative that We've got
Speaker 3: eight nine hundred billionaires and more than twenty million millionaires
Speaker 3: in this country, I would say that's a good thing,
Speaker 3: because Trump cannot buy all these folks off, and they're
Speaker 3: going to provide resources for the opposition, and the signal
Speaker 3: that Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg and Tim Cook and all
Speaker 3: these guys is said, from the moment Trump got elected
Speaker 3: was really really powerful because people looked at many many
Speaker 3: men of your citizens looked out and said, And Columbia
Speaker 3: University is another case. If the most powerful law firm,
Speaker 3: the most powerful media comme, the most powerful CEOs, the
Speaker 3: most powerful Ivy League universities, if they can't push back
Speaker 3: on Trump, what chance do the rest of us have.
Speaker 3: It was a very very demobilizing signal from the very
Speaker 3: very beginning, and hugely consequential. I think we're still trying
Speaker 3: to figure out exactly why that happened. It doesn't always happen.
Speaker 3: We can point to countries and even the United States
Speaker 3: in the first Trump administration where elites have been a
Speaker 3: little more responsible and put some money and some and
Speaker 3: some Kurds on the line and took on Trump. I'm
Speaker 3: still trying to explain why that didn't happen this time,
Speaker 3: but it was hugely consequental. We would not be in
Speaker 3: the mess we're in today had it not been for
Speaker 3: the behavior of our elite people who knew better, people
Speaker 3: who had private speak very differently, but who were unwilling
Speaker 3: to stand up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it just seemed like the most craven
Speaker 1: calculus largely. I mean there were other things, but you know,
Speaker 1: we want to do business.
Speaker 3: Really, the whole project of twenty of Project twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five man very clear to business owners that if you want,
Speaker 3: if they wanted to continue making money over the next
Speaker 3: four years, they had to be on good term for Trump.
Speaker 3: And they did it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was sort of equal parts.
Speaker 1: They understood Trump, these organizations like the Heritage Foundation, so
Speaker 1: they were able to sort of put in place a
Speaker 1: kind of intellectual not intellectual, but a kind of structure
Speaker 1: behind his basest instincts.
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah, every government and in every political regime is
Speaker 3: a coalition and a confluence of different forces. But two
Speaker 3: of the major players in this government are on the
Speaker 3: one hand, Trump and his loyalists, his appointees, who are
Speaker 3: just simply hacks who depend entirely on him and do
Speaker 3: his bidding. Trump has no ideology, his very authoritarian instincts,
Speaker 3: but it's hyper pragmatic. People can sort of figure out
Speaker 3: how to please him pretty easily and then aligned with him.
Speaker 3: I mean, Heritage is somewhat different and people like Stephen
Speaker 3: Miller and Russ Vaught are much more ideological. There are
Speaker 3: ideological authoritarians in this government who do have a project
Speaker 3: which is pretty similar to draws quite a bit on
Speaker 3: Victor Orbon in Hungary and others, which is not to
Speaker 3: politicize the state just to get rich and to make
Speaker 3: sure nobody questions you when you pursue your goals like Trump.
Speaker 3: I mean, these guys really do see this country's public
Speaker 3: and private institutions as being corroded by choose your term,
Speaker 3: cultural Marxists or leftists or socialists, and they have a
Speaker 3: project of packing this country's institutions with basically ethno nationalists
Speaker 3: and purging left liberal ideas from this country and kind
Speaker 3: of rolling back the steps that this country's taken towards
Speaker 3: multiracial democracy over our lifetimes. It's a radical authoritarian agenda,
Speaker 3: but it's coherent, and Trump doesn't live and die with that.
Speaker 3: It's an alliance talk us through sort of.
Speaker 1: If you look at the broad sweep of American history,
Speaker 1: what do you think it is?
Speaker 3: Multiracial democracy is a really hard thing to pull off.
Speaker 3: I'm talking about a democracy in a diverse society in
Speaker 3: which the rights of individuals of all ethnic groups are
Speaker 3: protected equally. We've had that on paper since nineteen sixty
Speaker 3: four or sixty five. We tried it in the aftermath
Speaker 3: of the Civil War. It triggered a very, very violent,
Speaker 3: very authoritarian reaction that resulted in nearly a century of
Speaker 3: authoritarianism in the US South. So our first experiment with
Speaker 3: multiracial democracy in the late eighteen sixties was violently and
Speaker 3: thoroughly derailed. We attempted it again with the Civil Rights
Speaker 3: Revolution in the fifties and sixties. On paper, we got
Speaker 3: there in nineteen sixty four sixty five, and that began,
Speaker 3: along with the massive wave of immigration that we experienced
Speaker 3: also since the mid nineteen sixties, began a long, slow
Speaker 3: march to a country that was much more diverse and
Speaker 3: much more egalitarian than ever before in history. And that
Speaker 3: was a pretty radical experiment. I don't think any country
Speaker 3: has ever achieved a truly multi racial democracy. Yet what
Speaker 3: certainly never happened is you've never had a democracy in
Speaker 3: history in which the long dominant ethnic majority loses that
Speaker 3: dominance and loses that majority. And that's what the United
Speaker 3: States is experiencing in the twenty first century. That's a
Speaker 3: big deal, and it turns out it's a bigger deal,
Speaker 3: I think than most of us expected, certainly including me.
Speaker 3: I think fundamentally there are a lot of things going on.
Speaker 3: There's never one cause of a political crisis or a
Speaker 3: political conflict. It would be ridiculous to suggest that there was.
Speaker 3: But I think the principal source of our conflict in
Speaker 3: the twenty teens in twenty twenties is a reaction to
Speaker 3: the pretty significant steps that we've taken towards multi racial
Speaker 3: democracy over our lifetimes, to the challenges, the unprecedented challenges
Speaker 3: to racial and gender and social hierarchies that we've experienced
Speaker 3: just in our adult lifetimes.
Speaker 2: And that's why they're so obsessed with South Africa.
Speaker 3: Right, What else explains that? Right? These guys are I
Speaker 3: guess ethno nationalists is a polite way of putting it.
Speaker 3: There are other ways of putting it. They're pretty white supremacist.
Speaker 1: Right, because the South Africa stuff never made any sense
Speaker 1: to me really. I mean, I know that a lot
Speaker 1: of billionaires in Trump's orbit are from South Africa, but
Speaker 1: that makes more sense if you think about it in
Speaker 1: the way of white people worried that their stuff is
Speaker 1: being taken away.
Speaker 3: Their status is being taken away. They're dominant status. I mean,
Speaker 3: white coasts are doing fine in this country. But the
Speaker 3: days in which all of this country's political leaders, all
Speaker 3: of the top CEOs, all of the judges, all the
Speaker 3: football coaches, all the university presidents, all the TV talking heads,
Speaker 3: all the people you watch on television commercials, if anyone
Speaker 3: watches televit commercials anymore, all of those people when we
Speaker 3: were kids were white. Those days are gone, and that's
Speaker 3: what's being reacted to.
Speaker 1: That's why there's so much talk about the fifties and nostalgia,
Speaker 1: and those are sort of code words.
Speaker 3: I think so. And of course it's not just race. Gender.
Speaker 3: Hierarchies have also been seriously challenged. Hierarchies that were in
Speaker 3: place for two centuries, for generation after generation after generation
Speaker 3: after generation after generation suddenly in one generation having seriously challenge.
Speaker 1: So you think it's just a sort of like overturning row.
Speaker 1: These are the kind of pushbacks to the arc of progress.
Speaker 3: I think that's a big part of what's going on.
Speaker 3: Sometimes we don't appreciate, I think how much progress we've
Speaker 3: made since the middle of the twentieth century. If you
Speaker 3: care about things like racial, social, and generar equality. But yeah, again,
Speaker 3: there are other things going on, the underlying economic issues,
Speaker 3: growing inequality, declining social mobility, all those things matter a lot.
Speaker 3: But fundamentally, I think this is a reaction towards towards
Speaker 3: our steps towards equality.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I talked to someone who's like a straight journalist who
Speaker 1: was in Europe covering the disastrous Trump witkof negotiation with
Speaker 1: Russia and Ukraine, which has completely gone off the rails
Speaker 1: if it ever was on the rails, And this person
Speaker 1: told me there was so much anxiety in Europe about
Speaker 1: creeping authoritarianism. And my friend said, but I told them
Speaker 1: Trump is not popular here, but the Europeans it does
Speaker 1: feel like they have a whole other level of anxiety
Speaker 1: about us, which I feel like after the twenty five elections,
Speaker 1: we see a way out of this.
Speaker 2: What do you think, Well.
Speaker 3: First of all, there's always going to be a bit
Speaker 3: of a lag between public perceptions elsewhere in the world
Speaker 3: and sort of how we're seeing things in the day
Speaker 3: to day here. But this is obviously a very big deal.
Speaker 3: The United States, for better or worse, probably better and worse.
Speaker 3: Was the leader of the Liberal world it has been
Speaker 3: since World War Two, and it really sort of picked
Speaker 3: up that role again after the fall of Blin Wall.
Speaker 3: The US was in an increasingly multipolar world. I mean,
Speaker 3: for the nineteen nineties, we had it easy because the
Speaker 3: liberal West was hegemonic in the world. But that wasn't
Speaker 3: gonna last forever. And with the emerges, the slow rise
Speaker 3: of China and the resurgence of Russia as an aggressive
Speaker 3: anti liberal power, this became a more difficult, scarier world.
Speaker 3: And the United States was the military, economic, and ideological
Speaker 3: leader of the liberal West. And Donald Trump threatened to
Speaker 3: switch sides, to leave the liberal team and join forces
Speaker 3: with the bad guys. And if you are anybody, including America,
Speaker 3: the liberals in the United States, and I mean liberalism
Speaker 3: in a classical sense to include a large number of
Speaker 3: even Reagan Conservatives, if you're a liberal and you see
Speaker 3: the leader of the liberal West switching side to the
Speaker 3: other team, that's really scary. What Europeans have had to
Speaker 3: conclude is even in the best case, even if twenty
Speaker 3: five elections portend, you know, relatively good news of the
Speaker 3: United States second time around, after we brought back Trump,
Speaker 3: after everything, the Europeans know that they can't rely on
Speaker 3: us in the best case scenario where we're vulnerable to
Speaker 3: the flip flop between reasonable governments and unreasonable governments. So
Speaker 3: the days of being able to rely on the United
Speaker 3: States as a leader of the liberal West.
Speaker 2: I think we're over so interesting. Will you please come back?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Sure, happy to.
Speaker 1: We have exciting news over on our YouTube channel. This
Speaker 1: second episode from our Project twenty twenty nine.
Speaker 2: Series is out now.
Speaker 1: It's a reimagining where we examine what went wrong with
Speaker 1: democrats approach to politics and how we can correct it
Speaker 1: and deliver changes to help people's lives. The first episode
Speaker 1: dove into the very sexy topic of campaign finance reform,
Speaker 1: and our second episode deals with an even sexier topic,
Speaker 1: antitrust and regulation. We look at how antitrust and regulation
Speaker 1: can protect American citizens and make America thrive in an
Speaker 1: era of rampant corruption and predatory crony capitalism. We talk
Speaker 1: to the smartest names in the field like Lena Kahn,
Speaker 1: Elvero Bedoya, Elizabeth.
Speaker 2: Wilkins, and Doha Mecki.
Speaker 1: Republicans were prepared for when they got the levers of power.
Speaker 1: We need Democrats to be too, so please head over
Speaker 1: to YouTube and search Mollie John Fast Project twenty twenty nine,
Speaker 1: or go to the Fast Politics YouTube channel and find
Speaker 1: it there and help us spread the word. Michael Roth
Speaker 1: is a president of Wesleyan University. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4: Michael Roth, Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
Speaker 1: You are a president of the closest thing I have
Speaker 1: ever come to college, Wesleyan University. I wanted you to
Speaker 1: come on for any number of reasons, but what I
Speaker 1: really wanted to talk to you about first was you
Speaker 1: have been one of the very very very few brave
Speaker 1: college presidents who has talked about how important education is
Speaker 1: and democracy. So I would love you to start by
Speaker 1: talking about what it took to be brave like that,
Speaker 1: and why you decided to make that calculus and how
Speaker 1: it's gone.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, I had no idea it was brave,
Speaker 4: frankly right. If I had, I probably would have kept
Speaker 4: my mouth shut. I thought, everybody knows if you're in
Speaker 4: the college and world, and if you're in education, that
Speaker 4: education depends on freedom. If you interfere with you believe
Speaker 4: people to think for themselves, express themselves. I mean, of
Speaker 4: course there's always some pressure listener or that. But you know, basically,
Speaker 4: if you're going to experiment and discover things about yourself
Speaker 4: in the world, you have to have freedom. Everybody knows that.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's not like college presidents didn't know that.
Speaker 4: Professors know, their teachers know that. But when the current
Speaker 4: president got elected, suddenly people said, I can't say that,
Speaker 4: And everybody knows. We've been saying this for so long.
Speaker 4: Everybody knows that you learn more when there are people
Speaker 4: in the room who don't share your opinion and it
Speaker 4: don't come from the same background as you. And we
Speaker 4: all know that you learn more in a diverse environment,
Speaker 4: and that you learn more when people feel they belong
Speaker 4: to the same endeavor, they're on the same team. I've
Speaker 4: been saying this stuff for a long time, but everybody
Speaker 4: else stopped talking. It seems so almost everyone. And it's
Speaker 4: like those old If Hutton commercials where somebody whispers and
Speaker 4: it seems very loud because everyone has stopped talking about
Speaker 4: that case the stock market, in this case democracy. You know,
Speaker 4: many of my fellow presidents, certainly my students, that they're
Speaker 4: to the left of me. My progressive credentials are, let's say, uneven.
Speaker 4: It seems so obvious that if we don't stand up
Speaker 4: for democracy and education, our educational values and our political
Speaker 4: possibilities will be vastly diminished. So I've been saying that
Speaker 4: as often as I can, because I really do believe
Speaker 4: the threat is profound right now.
Speaker 1: I think it's very interesting that the Trump administration has
Speaker 1: in this second term really focused on education, and I
Speaker 1: wonder if you could explain to us why you think
Speaker 1: that is.
Speaker 4: It's been the case for a long time that people
Speaker 4: who want to centralize power, people who are prone to
Speaker 4: tyrannical rule, whether they're in this country or anywhere else
Speaker 4: in the world, they feel, and rightly so, they need
Speaker 4: to control educational institutions and cultural institutions. Fascists knew this,
Speaker 4: but even people who take over like monarchies know that
Speaker 4: if they don't coordinate their power into civil society, into
Speaker 4: places like education and entertainment, even things like the law
Speaker 4: firms and certainly journalists, that if they don't get those
Speaker 4: things in line, the chances of centralizing power is greatly reduced.
Speaker 4: For the current administration, they also thought well, colleges and
Speaker 4: universities have tilted so far to the left over the
Speaker 4: last say twenty years, or so, and that that has
Speaker 4: been a subject discussion that many people won't object if
Speaker 4: we attack them for being too elitist. I mean, you
Speaker 4: can't attack the State University of Iowa or you know,
Speaker 4: the branch campus of the University of Connecticut for being elitist.
Speaker 4: But if you attack Harvard and Penn and Princeton and
Speaker 4: so on, people say, yeah, those bathroards. You know, I
Speaker 4: didn't get it. I didn't get in Harvard. I'm glad
Speaker 4: of getting smacked. That was it not a hard decision,
Speaker 4: I think to go after them. And I think this
Speaker 4: president actually has you know, there has so many chips
Speaker 4: on his show. He must have more than two shoulders.
Speaker 4: He has so many chips on his shoulders because he
Speaker 4: feels like they've never really respected him. And so there's
Speaker 4: a kind of personal dimension to this. But I think politically,
Speaker 4: people who aspire to be tyrants, people who aspire to
Speaker 4: central power want to control education because education is a
Speaker 4: place where independence thinking can take off. It should be
Speaker 4: and tyrants or people who want strong central power object
Speaker 4: to that. And last time, the first Trump administration, there
Speaker 4: are lots of things that got in the way. We
Speaker 4: keep hearing this, right, there is the general said no,
Speaker 4: you can't do that, or the chief of staff has
Speaker 4: gotten the way, or a lot of people said protected.
Speaker 4: They said they protected the Trump in prison, Trump from
Speaker 4: his worst instincts. That's what education does. It gets in
Speaker 4: the way of people who are trying to push other
Speaker 4: people around. At least that's part of what it should do,
Speaker 4: because it says, well, well that what you're saying isn't true,
Speaker 4: or you haven't considered this other argument. These are the
Speaker 4: things people in education say. So the administration said, we
Speaker 4: have to stop that. And what we really want I
Speaker 4: have to say, I was so surprised by this. I'm embarrassed.
Speaker 3: I surprised, I was.
Speaker 4: What we really want is loyalty. We want the college's
Speaker 4: universities to say, we will play ball and we will
Speaker 4: express the views that don't get you upset with us.
Speaker 4: We are going to be loyal like this Compact for Excellence.
Speaker 4: It's really just a loyalty of I'm shocked at how
Speaker 4: many educational leaders fall over themselves to express loyalty to
Speaker 4: a regime they despise. I do think they despise the regime,
Speaker 4: but they're so afraid of it because it's so powerful
Speaker 4: that they wind up expressing loyalty or at least being
Speaker 4: silent when disloyal people are punished.
Speaker 2: I have a lot of schools side on.
Speaker 1: I know there's been pushback, and I think I've been
Speaker 1: really proud to see a lot of pushback. And some schools,
Speaker 1: like the schools that have conservative backing right that are
Speaker 1: in states like Texas where the state government has gone
Speaker 1: completely insane, have gone along with stuff. But have you
Speaker 1: seen it in other places where you've been surprised?
Speaker 4: Well, I think with the compact, very few schools have
Speaker 4: accepted that as a general program. I've described it in
Speaker 4: an essay as you know, basically a loyalty program, you
Speaker 4: know of a kindly get it at Sam's cloud or
Speaker 4: with an airline. And most schools have said no to
Speaker 4: parts of that. And so the administration's mo has been
Speaker 4: to try to strike separate deals with very important schools,
Speaker 4: very wealthy schools, schools with extraordinary research profiles, and sometimes
Speaker 4: with hospitals that depend on funding. And these schools have
Speaker 4: made deals with the administration. And I can't say I
Speaker 4: blame them because they're in a hard spot.
Speaker 2: I need you to explain why they're in a hard spot.
Speaker 4: Well, because it's if you're the president of university and
Speaker 4: you have a hospital attached to the university and there
Speaker 4: are lots of patients getting their medication for clinical trials
Speaker 4: that are supported with federal research grants, and they freeze
Speaker 4: the grant, the patient's medication goes away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're talking tens to hundreds of millions of dollars
Speaker 1: dollars that could not be made up to philanthropy.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 4: The research universities have gotten extraordinarily dependent on the federal
Speaker 4: government because the research done there is so good for
Speaker 4: the United States. Right, It's not like they're just giving
Speaker 4: these schools money because these schools are nice or something.
Speaker 4: They're giving researchers money who do a lot of work
Speaker 4: in exchange for the support they get so that we
Speaker 4: can make discoveries about diabetes, or about average space, or
Speaker 4: about cancer research in Alzheimer's. And so that ecosystem has
Speaker 4: survived many transitions. You know, over the last sixty or
Speaker 4: seventy years, publicans democrats like ohsaw this ecosystem as being
Speaker 4: one of the great strengths of the country. This administration
Speaker 4: seems not to care about that side of things, That
Speaker 4: is that it's one of the great strengths of the country.
Speaker 4: If those folks don't express loyalty, if they don't align
Speaker 4: their research priorities with the administration, they will get their funding cut.
Speaker 4: And so the leaders of those schools are in the
Speaker 4: hard place because they have all these scientists who can't
Speaker 4: actually do their work unless they have grand funding. And
Speaker 4: then you have countries like Canada or networks like the
Speaker 4: European Union offerings they will give you money. Come to
Speaker 4: Canada and do research, Come to the Europe and do research.
Speaker 4: China is funding its scientists like nobody's business. I mean,
Speaker 4: they're really investing heavily. So people are afraid of that,
Speaker 4: and then they're afraid of being targeted by right wing influencers.
Speaker 4: They're afraid of being an object of ridicule among the
Speaker 4: kinds of folks who are well connected with this administration.
Speaker 4: That said, there are some people who are speaking out.
Speaker 4: Basically it could be pretty conservative and still think that
Speaker 4: this assault on education, which I think is an assault
Speaker 4: on civil society more generally, that that's just so against the
Speaker 4: American commitment to basic freedoms that we've had for a
Speaker 4: couple of hundred years. Unevenly applied, for sure, but still
Speaker 4: is a great conservative argument to be made and is
Speaker 4: being made against the centralization of power in the Thirdero
Speaker 4: government generally, and especially in the White House in particular.
Speaker 4: You know, maybe this week we see some more Republicans
Speaker 4: willing to express that view, which is a view they
Speaker 4: had long held. But if you're disloyal to this president,
Speaker 4: he will try to find a way to make you
Speaker 4: pay a price, as we've seen over the last several months,
Speaker 4: and many people in higher education seem to say, well,
Speaker 4: why don't I just wait and see? And that I
Speaker 4: do think is shameful.
Speaker 1: Yes, I want to go back for a minute. This
Speaker 1: is very unpopular what Trump is doing. Trump sort of
Speaker 1: took a page from Victor Orbond, went for the universities,
Speaker 1: decided these annoying liberals have always annoyed me. Anyway, let's go,
Speaker 1: let's just crush the universities. What we've seen, and again,
Speaker 1: I've been surprised at how hard it's been for a
Speaker 1: lot of institutions to push back. Now that we see
Speaker 1: that this is so wildly unpopular, that voters hated, that
Speaker 1: even conservative voters hated, and we're seeing numbers that Republicans
Speaker 1: don't want to identify as MAGA anymore. I mean not
Speaker 1: huge numbers. When you think about that and you look
Speaker 1: at the sort of landscape, does it undermine the bravery
Speaker 1: that these people are responding to the popular you know, pushback?
Speaker 2: I mean, talk to me about that.
Speaker 4: I think we just need allies to remind people that
Speaker 4: democracy can be destroyed and that rights can be quickly eroded.
Speaker 4: And people get used to seeing soldiers in the street.
Speaker 4: Lots of things will change. If you get used to
Speaker 4: the government intervening in the classroom, lots of other things
Speaker 4: will change. And people have got used to this. People
Speaker 4: have said, here's my red line. You know, if we
Speaker 4: can't choose the clients we're going to defend without getting
Speaker 4: punished by the federal government from a law firm, that's
Speaker 4: the red line. But that people have crossed that line,
Speaker 4: and once that happens, people get used to this. You
Speaker 4: can't offer the care that your doctors want to offer
Speaker 4: to trans people because the federal government doesn't like that
Speaker 4: kind of care. Once you accept that, it get used
Speaker 4: to accepting that, lots of other things will change. So
Speaker 4: I think it's worthwhile reminding folks that these traditions and
Speaker 4: principles of local autonomy, of institutional autonomy, not because we
Speaker 4: have to separate ourselves from the government. I get money.
Speaker 4: I think the money part has always worked because the
Speaker 4: recipients of the grants haven't been independent enough to do
Speaker 4: their experiments to pursue truth. I mean, and that's so
Speaker 4: really important. We don't want that the educational output of Hungary.
Speaker 2: We don't.
Speaker 4: We don't. And what happens when centralized tyrants get power.
Speaker 4: If rietarians get power, the intellectuals flee, they try to
Speaker 4: get out, and they take their science elsewhere. And we
Speaker 4: don't want that to happen here. And so if people
Speaker 4: are beginning to say, well, I can speak out now
Speaker 4: because it looks like it's not as he's not as
Speaker 4: powerful as he was three months ago, I'm delighted. My
Speaker 4: goal is simply to have people recognize how important are
Speaker 4: freedom of speech, freedom of association, academic freedom to teach
Speaker 4: how you see fit professionally. These are things that we
Speaker 4: should we should really fight for. And the federal government,
Speaker 4: it was elected in the way it was and they
Speaker 4: have certain powers. I don't want to violate the law,
Speaker 4: but I do think the government should obey the law.
Speaker 4: And so you know, when ICE agents don't obey their
Speaker 4: own rules or don't obey the laws of the land,
Speaker 4: I think we should call them out. But I also
Speaker 4: recognize that Trump won the election and there are consequences
Speaker 4: to that, but the consequences should be kept within the
Speaker 4: boundaries of the Constitution. And I feel like at least
Speaker 4: what I think I've been I see myself as trying
Speaker 4: to have done is just remind people of what's when
Speaker 4: the government, already very powerful, violates its own rules.
Speaker 1: Some of what has happened has that the ADMIN has
Speaker 1: figured out ways in which the universities are vulnerable. Yes,
Speaker 1: a good example Harvard has a ton of foreign students,
Speaker 1: and foreign students need more federal support than American students.
Speaker 1: And we see that when it comes to the hospital systems. Right,
Speaker 1: So you have a university that has a hospital, and
Speaker 1: the hospital is relying on both federal grants and the
Speaker 1: problems mushroom. If we ever get out of this thing,
Speaker 1: which I think we're pretty likely to be able to
Speaker 1: get out of it, what are the things that when
Speaker 1: we look to federal regulation that can protect academic institutions
Speaker 1: from presidents who are ambitious in this way in the future.
Speaker 1: Do you have thoughts on what that would look like?
Speaker 1: Just from my own edification.
Speaker 4: The universities have used legal arguments against the overreach of
Speaker 4: the administration, and most of the time in the courts
Speaker 4: they have been successful. But this takes a long time
Speaker 4: and it's very expensive, and the federal government can just
Speaker 4: continue to litigate forever. I do think codifying what's at
Speaker 4: stake with academic freedom and the independence of researchers and
Speaker 4: teachers to do as they see fait professionally that they
Speaker 4: should do, that's really important. I think the chances of
Speaker 4: getting that enshrined in statute are extremely challenging. It's existed
Speaker 4: for a long time by convention or by just norms
Speaker 4: that this administration has violated. Reminding people how much we
Speaker 4: lose when we close our borders to ambitious, thoughtful people
Speaker 4: who want to come here and make their way in
Speaker 4: the world. That we lose, we lose so much by
Speaker 4: the country of their contributions that when the Nobel Prizes
Speaker 4: released recently in a number of Americans is astonishing, but
Speaker 4: the percentage of those Americans who actually came to this
Speaker 4: country within a generation or two is staggering. And that's
Speaker 4: great about America actually is that we become a home
Speaker 4: for people who didn't think this would be their home,
Speaker 4: and then they do extraordinary things. So I think making
Speaker 4: sure that the polititization of the visa process should be
Speaker 4: prevented at all costs. There will always be legitimate national
Speaker 4: security concerns about in the visa process. We don't want
Speaker 4: to admit terrorists, we don't want to admit spies, and
Speaker 4: those things have to happen. But the basic thing that
Speaker 4: we should see, and this is that our due process
Speaker 4: protections are so vital to our integrity as institutions. And
Speaker 4: when a president comes in and says I'm getting rid
Speaker 4: of all those things, and about my administration did some
Speaker 4: of that in their title line work. They said, you've
Speaker 4: got to, you know, change the way you adjudicate claims
Speaker 4: of sexual harassment sexual assault on college campuses. You won't
Speaker 4: have due process actually for people who are accused at
Speaker 4: every school. Kind of found a way to comply. We
Speaker 4: now know that when you just do away with due process,
Speaker 4: the people most likely to suffer in the long run
Speaker 4: will be the most vulnerable people. And so standing by
Speaker 4: our due process protections that people are innocent to proven guilty,
Speaker 4: that you shouldn't politicize criminal or civil disputes, and as
Speaker 4: best we can to defend the local freedom to pursue
Speaker 4: education and economic development without regard to political affiliation. And
Speaker 4: in universities, that will also mean that we need to
Speaker 4: have more conservative voices on campus. We need to be
Speaker 4: less of a monoculture on colleges universities. I mean, the
Speaker 4: trum administration has made that argument, and so I find
Speaker 4: it awkward to make it too. I've been making it
Speaker 4: for ten years. But I do think we have a
Speaker 4: lot of improvements higher education can make and being more accessible,
Speaker 4: being more open minded, and being even more open to
Speaker 4: students from around the world who want to learn here
Speaker 4: and contribute to the country. But we're a long way
Speaker 4: from that right now. I think we're playing defense against
Speaker 4: a White House that is really overreaching in ways that
Speaker 4: bode ill for the future of the country.
Speaker 2: Michael Roth, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3: You're welcome.
Speaker 2: That's it for.
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