Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is deep background to show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. As the school year starts up again,
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about a form of power that
Speaker 1: we often overlook, and that is the power of universities.
Speaker 1: Universities are not just centers of learning and of research
Speaker 1: and of teaching. They're also powerful actors in the socialization
Speaker 1: of young people into the values that our society cares about.
Speaker 1: There are places where common sense is created, where new
Speaker 1: knowledge is formed, and there are also places where there
Speaker 1: are internal power dynamics, with faculty, students, deans, and administrators
Speaker 1: all involved in a sometimes collaborative but sometimes antagonistic effort
Speaker 1: to determine who controls what happens in the university. To
Speaker 1: discuss power in the American university today, I'm joined by
Speaker 1: Tamar Gendler. Tamar is the Dean of the Faculty of
Speaker 1: Arts and Sciences at Yale University, where she's also the
Speaker 1: Vincent Scully Professor of Philosophy. For those of you who
Speaker 1: aren't academics, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and
Speaker 1: Sciences is an extremely important and powerful person. Her job
Speaker 1: is both to talk to the president and the provost
Speaker 1: on the one side, the faculty on the other, and last,
Speaker 1: and not least, the students and the people who actually
Speaker 1: make the university run every day, the clerical and technical
Speaker 1: workers who actually make sure that the lights are on
Speaker 1: and the classrooms are ready, and that students have food
Speaker 1: to eat. All of that cycles back to the power
Speaker 1: of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Speaker 1: And because Tamar was and remains a brilliant philosopher whose
Speaker 1: job is to think about the deeper meaning of the
Speaker 1: world around us, she brings a distinctively thoughtful take to
Speaker 1: questions of power in and around the university. Tamar, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for joining me. The organization of power
Speaker 1: in the university has evolved a lot. There used to
Speaker 1: be an ideal of a university as a self governing
Speaker 1: institution where the faculty more or less collectively ran the show.
Speaker 1: But that's not been true for decades in the US,
Speaker 1: and it's probably even less true today than it's ever been.
Speaker 1: So when you want something to happen, to what degree
Speaker 1: can you get it to happen? So governance in the
Speaker 1: university is fundamentally a collaborative exercise. But I do have
Speaker 1: resources that allow me to shape the segment of the
Speaker 1: university for which I'm responsible in various ways. For example,
Speaker 1: I control the budget importantly, I control the hiring of
Speaker 1: faculty in certain areas, and I oversee the process of
Speaker 1: tenure and promotion. One of the primary things that I
Speaker 1: need to figure out how to do is to determine
Speaker 1: whose voices to trust in making decisions, and how to
Speaker 1: encourage people to speak honestly about things. But something that's
Speaker 1: distinctive about academic management, at least in the US, at
Speaker 1: least these days, still is that people in powerful positions
Speaker 1: like you didn't come up through a managerial chaining process.
Speaker 1: You came up by being a professor, in your case,
Speaker 1: a philosophy professor. How does the fact that you and
Speaker 1: other senior administrators were professors rather than professional managers affect
Speaker 1: do you think the way that you exercise the lens
Speaker 1: and responsibility that you have. So the kind of managerial
Speaker 1: work that I do with regard to staff has been
Speaker 1: a skill that I acquired only in and on the
Speaker 1: job sense, and I found it enormously gratifying to learn
Speaker 1: from people on what we sometimes call the backstage vice
Speaker 1: presidential side of the academic house. How it is that
Speaker 1: one engages in things like HR management, budgeting, thinking about
Speaker 1: how we relate to the Office of General Counsel, the
Speaker 1: city and state, how we relate to federal relations. All
Speaker 1: of those are skills that are acquired through the course
Speaker 1: of engaging in managerial work. Let me ask a question
Speaker 1: about the relationship between those two parts, the front of
Speaker 1: the house and the back of the house. To use
Speaker 1: the analogy that you just use, which if I am
Speaker 1: not mistaken, comes from the running of restaurants, may be appropriate.
Speaker 1: A lot of faculty, a lot of my faculty colleagues,
Speaker 1: especially my colleagues who are say, ten twenty years older
Speaker 1: than I am, talk a lot about how there seem
Speaker 1: to be many more layers of sub deans, dean lits, deanlings,
Speaker 1: people who are effectively professional administrators and when they're being
Speaker 1: described negatively, bureaucrats who are crucially involved in running these huge,
Speaker 1: rich institutions. And I think it's true even at the
Speaker 1: less rich institutions. And my older colleagues tend to talk
Speaker 1: about this as something that they feel has changed significantly
Speaker 1: over their time in the university. Do you think of that.
Speaker 1: First of all, is that perception accurate or is that
Speaker 1: a nostalgic perception that they have, And if it is accurate,
Speaker 1: how is it changing our universities if they're being run
Speaker 1: by people with increasingly with people with more professional training
Speaker 1: and how to manage things, but with less knowledge of
Speaker 1: the academic side of the job. The deans and deanlets
Speaker 1: about which your colleagues complain are very often people whose
Speaker 1: assignments are either regulatory in the sense that they are
Speaker 1: asked to make sure that the university remains in conformity
Speaker 1: with either an internally or externally imposed constraint a process
Speaker 1: that needs to be followed in order to achieve a
Speaker 1: certain outcome. Or they are involved in various aspects of
Speaker 1: student services and student life where they interact directly with
Speaker 1: students for whom college may be an unfamiliar familial experience.
Speaker 1: That's two thirds. And in addition, as we know from
Speaker 1: sociological theory, any bureaucracy develops systems which it then perpetuates. Tomorrow,
Speaker 1: we've talked so far about the way that the power
Speaker 1: operates within the university. I want to turn now to
Speaker 1: the question of how universities exercise power and influence or
Speaker 1: don't exercise power and influence over the society more broadly,
Speaker 1: which is something that I think we often take for granted.
Speaker 1: Rather than breaking down and thinking about I want to
Speaker 1: begin that by asking you, how do you think a
Speaker 1: university does influence the society more broadly, and then we
Speaker 1: can move to how it should do that. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a terrific question. So the fundamental purpose of a university
Speaker 1: is to preserve, create, and transmit knowledge, and so at
Speaker 1: its most fundamental level and in its ideal form wandwich
Speaker 1: In university has power in society and empowers society is
Speaker 1: through the preservation, creation, and transmission of knowledge. But one
Speaker 1: of the most powerful things that universities do, in addition
Speaker 1: to transmitting knowledge is certify that the transmission of knowledge
Speaker 1: has taken place, and in so doing they create and
Speaker 1: sustain the professional class. And of course that operation brings
Speaker 1: with it the incredibly important socialization function, and universities in
Speaker 1: America in particular, but in the world in general, play
Speaker 1: an incredible role in forming and socializing the elite and
Speaker 1: in differentiating among those who have been present at this
Speaker 1: incredibly formative time of life between the ages of eighteen
Speaker 1: and their early twenties, and those who have not been
Speaker 1: formed in that kind of environment. What universities and colleges
Speaker 1: do is, in addition to provide training that isn't professional training,
Speaker 1: training of a kind that says, beyond the twelve years
Speaker 1: of universal education, I have gone on to explore something.
Speaker 1: And one of the astounding things about the way that
Speaker 1: the American collegiate educational system works is, with the exception
Speaker 1: of areas like engineering, it is largely content indifferent. And
Speaker 1: what that suggests is that it is the acquisition of
Speaker 1: a certain kind of mastery of something complicated and the
Speaker 1: co presence with others who are also engaged in study.
Speaker 1: That is what college is providing, in addition, of course,
Speaker 1: to the particular skills that are being provided, skills of writing,
Speaker 1: skills of mathematics, and knowledge of some or another subject matter.
Speaker 1: But the fact that American industry typically hires people regardless
Speaker 1: of area of studying college suggests that that certification process
Speaker 1: is a process of certifying a different kind of knowledge
Speaker 1: and skill acquisition. Although aren't a lot of students at
Speaker 1: least voting with their feet and hinting that they don't
Speaker 1: anticipate that it's going to be that way in the
Speaker 1: long run. I mean, when you and I were in
Speaker 1: college thirty plus years ago, we thought that majoring in
Speaker 1: the humanities was something that could lead you to a
Speaker 1: job teaching of the humanities is you and I both
Speaker 1: ended up doing. Or it could lead you to working
Speaker 1: for an investment bank, or could lead you to become
Speaker 1: a poet, or could lead you to almost any sort
Speaker 1: of thing. But today fewer and fewer students, not only universities,
Speaker 1: but at elite universities, are interested in majoring in more
Speaker 1: abstract humanities fields, which they don't perceive as leading to
Speaker 1: a job so measured by a market stance. At least,
Speaker 1: that idea of a general certification seems to be increasingly obsolete.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting question what explains the decline of majors
Speaker 1: in humanities, And I teach at one of the very
Speaker 1: last universities that continues to have almost a third of
Speaker 1: its students majoring in humanities fields. It is certainly the
Speaker 1: case that students in university today are increasingly taking courses
Speaker 1: in what we might think of as technical areas in
Speaker 1: computer science, in data science, and in social science, fields
Speaker 1: that have quantitative aspects like economics. But even though there
Speaker 1: aren't as many students majoring in humanities, it remains the
Speaker 1: case that the skills that are acquired through humanistic education,
Speaker 1: the capacity to analyze argument, the capacity to take evidence
Speaker 1: from an ambiguous source of information, the capacity to appreciate
Speaker 1: what is esthetically valuable in addition to what is practically valuable,
Speaker 1: remain things in which students are interested, and the remain
Speaker 1: things that allow people to do, even in practical fields,
Speaker 1: more interesting and more fulfilling work. So I don't know
Speaker 1: whether the explanation for why it is that students aren't
Speaker 1: studying humanities is solely that they think that it isn't
Speaker 1: useful for careers. It may be in some ways just
Speaker 1: a crowding out with the recognition that there are other
Speaker 1: things that also need to be acquired, that are skills
Speaker 1: that are at this point not yet taught fully in
Speaker 1: high school. They require more than the twelve years to master. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I should be really clear that I am very
Speaker 1: sad about the general decline in the humanities focus of students,
Speaker 1: mostly because my own view is that without the humanities,
Speaker 1: you can make stuff, you can build stuff, you can
Speaker 1: solve certain kinds of technical problems, but you'll never know
Speaker 1: what the right thing to do is. I mean, humanities
Speaker 1: is interested fundamentally in normative questions and questions of what
Speaker 1: the world ought to be arranged, like whether it's ethical
Speaker 1: or moral, or esthetic or political. And in that sense,
Speaker 1: in my view, at least, if you don't have the humanities,
Speaker 1: your whole system is going to grind to a halt
Speaker 1: because you're just I mean, well, it won't purely grind
Speaker 1: to all, because people will still make decisions about what
Speaker 1: they should do, but they'll do it without thinking. And
Speaker 1: then you get the consequences that we have in the
Speaker 1: world where new technologies emerge and are immediately deployed, and
Speaker 1: then people look back a few years later, sometimes not
Speaker 1: very many years later at all, and say, oh, no,
Speaker 1: what did we do? And often the answer is you
Speaker 1: didn't stop to think about the way you wanted things
Speaker 1: to turn out. You only thought about the fact that
Speaker 1: you had this cool new technology to play with. And no,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. The world doesn't stop because you're not
Speaker 1: asking the normative questions. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: humanities and the humanistic social sciences cause people to realize
Speaker 1: is that there are always normative questions, whether attentive to
Speaker 1: them or not, and that if you just move forward
Speaker 1: without attending to them, you will end up with patterns
Speaker 1: in the world which aren't the patterns that you would
Speaker 1: have wanted. Tomorrow. When I asked you about what the
Speaker 1: university is in fact to do powerwise, you started with
Speaker 1: the ways that they transmit knowledge through certification and through socialization.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you one more question about that aspect,
Speaker 1: and then I want to switch to the question of
Speaker 1: the making of knowledge. But before we get there, I
Speaker 1: do want to ask one more question about the idea
Speaker 1: of intellectual socialization, which I think is a phrase that
Speaker 1: you use or something similar to that, and I wonder
Speaker 1: what you mean by that, because one of the things
Speaker 1: that a sociologist would say, or that a Martian would
Speaker 1: say if they came and looked at our universities is
Speaker 1: that the students do seem like they leave thinking a
Speaker 1: little differently on a whole range of issues, or maybe
Speaker 1: a lot differently than they do when they came in.
Speaker 1: And that involves a whole bunch of different things. But
Speaker 1: it's approaches to how they think about problems ideally, but
Speaker 1: it also seems often to include solutions to those problems,
Speaker 1: including sometimes political solutions. And so I'm wondering what did
Speaker 1: you mean by intellectual socialization. Yeah, universities are like cities
Speaker 1: in the sense that they bring together people from a
Speaker 1: wide range of previous life experiences in a tightly socially
Speaker 1: knit space that produces a lot of nonintended accidental encounters
Speaker 1: that require people to recognize that the way in which
Speaker 1: they happen to have lived up until the point when
Speaker 1: they arrived at the university is just one of many,
Speaker 1: many ways to have lived. So this is about the
Speaker 1: way in which the socialization function almost inevitably results in
Speaker 1: an unseating of what it is that had been accepted
Speaker 1: as the natural or only or marked way of being. So,
Speaker 1: in addition to the socialization an example of that because
Speaker 1: that was that was that seemed correct to me, but
Speaker 1: also abstract. Yeah, So, a student who grew up in
Speaker 1: a particular religious community, a student who grew up with
Speaker 1: a particular set of political values, a student who grew
Speaker 1: up in a particular language, a student who grew up
Speaker 1: in a particular social class. All of those are ways
Speaker 1: of being that are felt very, very naturally to students,
Speaker 1: and they typically grew up in a town. Towns have
Speaker 1: a certain degree of heterogeneity to them. But to the
Speaker 1: extent that you grew up in a particular locale, you've
Speaker 1: had a particular set of experiences. You grew up on
Speaker 1: a farm in the Midwest, or you grew up in
Speaker 1: the Upper West Side of New York City, and those
Speaker 1: are the set of experiences that you have. Coming into
Speaker 1: contact with individuals from a wide range of other experiences
Speaker 1: just makes it in f and coming into contact with
Speaker 1: them in the particular way that universities and other youth
Speaker 1: organizations do this right, if you go into the army,
Speaker 1: you interact with people in an intense environment, in a
Speaker 1: deeply social space, in an age stratified environment for a
Speaker 1: crucial period of time. But the disruption of the assumption
Speaker 1: that the only natural way to do things is the
Speaker 1: way that you have always been doing things is one
Speaker 1: of the crucial disruptions that universities bring. And that's a
Speaker 1: result of the formal structure of the university. We haven't
Speaker 1: yet gotten to the second question, which is the content question,
Speaker 1: which is not just that you bring this group of
Speaker 1: people together, but what it is that you do with them.
Speaker 1: But let me make sure that I've answered your first
Speaker 1: question before I move on to the second. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think you have. I do think we should just
Speaker 1: acknowledge that the effect that you're describing, you take a
Speaker 1: lot of bright, young, impressionable people, you put them in
Speaker 1: a single community, can produce for all that we talk about,
Speaker 1: the diversity of viewpoints in our universities can produce some
Speaker 1: degree of homogenization of their views. They come in very diverse,
Speaker 1: and in principle, one of the reasons that we want
Speaker 1: a big diverse student body is so that the student
Speaker 1: body can remain intellectually diverse. So when they graduate, they
Speaker 1: have many different points of views since they came in
Speaker 1: with many points where they've been recruited to have many
Speaker 1: points of view. And yet sometimes it doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1: I mean, sometimes it leads to people reaching a kind
Speaker 1: of background consensus on what they think. And critics of
Speaker 1: elite universities, you know, I'm not one of them, but
Speaker 1: there are critics of elite universities who say, gee, you know,
Speaker 1: they come in students come in from a Trump county
Speaker 1: and then they come into a university where statistically almost
Speaker 1: nobody on any faculty anywhere in the United States voted
Speaker 1: for Donald Trump. It's not just elite universities, it's all universities.
Speaker 1: And then they're in a community where they emerge with
Speaker 1: a view of, roughly speaking, what people with their education
Speaker 1: are supposed to think, and that's a kind of liberal
Speaker 1: or left of center consensus, which over the course of
Speaker 1: their careers they may or may not sustain that point
Speaker 1: of view over their lives, but that is the environment
Speaker 1: that they're in, in in the environment that they that they leave.
Speaker 1: And it just raises this interesting question of whether the
Speaker 1: socialization affects are in some way a little bit at
Speaker 1: odds with our stated goal in our universities of bringing
Speaker 1: in people from all different perspectives and putting them all
Speaker 1: together and mixing them up so that they'll come out
Speaker 1: with lots of different perspectives. So a huge number of
Speaker 1: interesting questions there. And of course there are students who
Speaker 1: come to university without religious commitment and get involved with
Speaker 1: a religious community and leave the university with the more
Speaker 1: traditional set of values than they entered. But I agree
Speaker 1: that in the contemporary context that direction of motion is
Speaker 1: significantly rarer than the other direction of a student who
Speaker 1: comes from a politically conservative environment and leaves with a
Speaker 1: certain sense of justice driven concern about the well being
Speaker 1: of the community. So what I would say is motivating
Speaker 1: and appealing about the generational passion that you and I
Speaker 1: think both feel among our students is that it is
Speaker 1: driven by a deep sense of wanting the world to
Speaker 1: be a more just and equitable and verdant place. To
Speaker 1: the extent that I think the two sets of primary
Speaker 1: concerns that I hear from students on our campus are
Speaker 1: about racial and political justice on the one hand, and
Speaker 1: about the long term concern for environment on the other.
Speaker 1: And some of what's going on is the world is
Speaker 1: a messy, ugly place in which lots of messy, ugly
Speaker 1: evil things have happened. And some of our students come
Speaker 1: to university without full knowledge of the way in which
Speaker 1: the world that we live in came to be, and
Speaker 1: some of them come to historical understanding of a kind
Speaker 1: that they never had before. They continue to have the
Speaker 1: normative moral commitments that you and I were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: and those combine to cause them to take on a
Speaker 1: sort of passionate social justice picture. But it is certainly
Speaker 1: the case that the recognition that there might also be
Speaker 1: politically servative solutions to some of the justice challenges that
Speaker 1: our students are moved by, that there might be ways
Speaker 1: in which market, rather than regulation, could best determine the
Speaker 1: sorts of outcomes that they seek. Environmentally are less prevalent
Speaker 1: in at least the public voices on many elite campuses,
Speaker 1: and I think, however, aware one is of the undercurrents
Speaker 1: that run counter to that. It is undeniable that universities
Speaker 1: right now are places where the dominant discourse is the
Speaker 1: discourse of social justice, the discourse of environment, and interestingly,
Speaker 1: in the case of social justice, it's very domestically focused.
Speaker 1: I hear much less conversation on campus about issues of
Speaker 1: international justice, global poverty, global freedom, civil rights of individuals
Speaker 1: outside the United States than I do about dialogues of
Speaker 1: the very undeniably important set of questions that we face
Speaker 1: as a nation around issues of racial justice and social class.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back tomorrow. Let's turn to the making
Speaker 1: of knowledge research. Universities are supposed to be places where
Speaker 1: we get new knowledge, not just transmit it, but discover it,
Speaker 1: invent it. How does that project express itself in power
Speaker 1: terms visa via the rest of the world. I mean,
Speaker 1: assuming that these universities do in fact produce knowledge, which
Speaker 1: I think they do, how does that affect the rest
Speaker 1: of the world from a power perspective. It's an interesting question,
Speaker 1: and I was thinking about the ways in which the
Speaker 1: United States, I think, both in medicine, in drug development,
Speaker 1: and in universities, produces a disproportionate amount of what the
Speaker 1: world gets intellectually in a way whose financing is extraordinary.
Speaker 1: That is, a large proportion of the world's most highly
Speaker 1: ranked universities are American universities, and the proportion of the
Speaker 1: world's discoveries that were made in American universities due to
Speaker 1: federal funding and student tuition and the other resources taxpayer
Speaker 1: resources that go into state universities, were really truly extraordinary.
Speaker 1: And so what I would say is American universities became
Speaker 1: the place that the world went to gain knowledge. Virtually
Speaker 1: all of the elite Chinese universities have faculty on them
Speaker 1: who were trained in American universities. Most of Iran's engineers
Speaker 1: are trained in American universities. Large number of the world's
Speaker 1: political leaders were trained in American universities. And so the
Speaker 1: production of knowledge in American universities gave America as a
Speaker 1: place where discovery happened a sort of disproportionate role in
Speaker 1: the world's intellectual economy. It's now the case that Asia
Speaker 1: in particular, China in particular, but other parts of Asia
Speaker 1: as well, and in some ways parts of Europe and
Speaker 1: a little bit in Canada are producing new knowledge at
Speaker 1: a rate and with investment of a kind that are
Speaker 1: as intense as in the US. Certainly that's the case
Speaker 1: in China in terms of scientific knowledge, and the question
Speaker 1: of whether that will ultimately undermine the fragile ecosystem that
Speaker 1: is the American university system is a really interesting one.
Speaker 1: How close are we to that kind of an undermining
Speaker 1: I mean, how much do you see that decline as
Speaker 1: imminent versus being something that's still some years off. I mean,
Speaker 1: it still remains the case that people from all over
Speaker 1: the world want to send their children to study in
Speaker 1: American universities, even people who don't particularly care for the
Speaker 1: United States. Somehow, our educational system remains highly desirable from
Speaker 1: a global standpoint, even as the power of the United
Speaker 1: States more generally is often perceived by many to be
Speaker 1: in decline. So I think there's a number of questions there.
Speaker 1: American universities do much more than transmit knowledge. American universities
Speaker 1: are places where a crucial kind of socialization happens, and
Speaker 1: where the creation of a certain kind of cultural capital
Speaker 1: is provided to the individuals who attend them, and a
Speaker 1: set of social connections are established. So the rise of
Speaker 1: research in places other than the United States, I think
Speaker 1: doesn't undermine the particular socialization role that American universities play.
Speaker 1: And of course American universities have this very interesting structure
Speaker 1: whereby the value of the degree of their alumni depends
Speaker 1: in part on the contemporary status of the institution with
Speaker 1: which the alumni are affiliated. So every American university has
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of people across generations in whose self
Speaker 1: interest it lies to keep that university leat and respect it.
Speaker 1: So there's a very interesting set of interest in parties
Speaker 1: keeping the socialization and social network role of American university's intact.
Speaker 1: When I was talking about the rise, particularly of investment
Speaker 1: in Chinese universities, I was thinking about the ways in
Speaker 1: which there is serious investment in scientific research, And you're right,
Speaker 1: in the biological sciences, in the physical sciences, and in
Speaker 1: engineering and applied sciences, and in some of those cases,
Speaker 1: with regard to the capacity to make discovery that comes
Speaker 1: most effectively at scale, that is, if you have a
Speaker 1: thousand of a particular machine as opposed to a hundred
Speaker 1: or ten of them in that domain, I think it
Speaker 1: is imminent that discoveries will take place of a kind
Speaker 1: that won't take place in this country. But with regard
Speaker 1: to the socialization role of diversities, I don't think that
Speaker 1: change is imminent. Do you think, tamarrow that seen as
Speaker 1: a whole, that elite US universities have too much power
Speaker 1: in the world, or too little power in the world,
Speaker 1: or just about the right amount of power. I mean,
Speaker 1: is there a kind of Goldilocks answer to this? I
Speaker 1: would say, as gate keepers to a certain kind of
Speaker 1: social elite, that one's ability to enter that world is
Speaker 1: determined at age seventeen, is I think non ideal if
Speaker 1: what it is that we're trying to do is identify
Speaker 1: and cultivate talent and allow a certain kind of flourishing.
Speaker 1: The United States is one of the few places where
Speaker 1: you have flexibility throughout the life course with regard to education,
Speaker 1: but not with regard to access to elite education. So
Speaker 1: I would say with are to the socialization role that
Speaker 1: they play and the fact that it requires an identification
Speaker 1: of skill and talent so early in life in a
Speaker 1: country that has invested so little in its public education
Speaker 1: system is problematic and is a way in which the
Speaker 1: particular gatekeeping role that universities play, or elite universities play,
Speaker 1: is problematic against a backdrop of uninequitable K twelve and
Speaker 1: in fact pre K system. On the other hand, I
Speaker 1: would say that the information and discoveries and insights that
Speaker 1: universities have take longer to permeate culture than would be ideal.
Speaker 1: It took behavioral economics as a way of understanding human
Speaker 1: decision making longer perhaps than it should have to affect
Speaker 1: how it is that we think about governance and behavior.
Speaker 1: So there's a way in which universities have too much
Speaker 1: power the socialization at seventeen, and ways in which they
Speaker 1: had too little the role that information plays in determining
Speaker 1: our activities tomorrow. I want to thank you for a
Speaker 1: fascinating conversation and for being so candid about the upsides
Speaker 1: and downsides of the way power is deployed in universities.
Speaker 1: I feel very lucky to know that a person as
Speaker 1: thoughtful as you are is deeply involved in that process
Speaker 1: and as thinking so hard about how it happens. So
Speaker 1: thank you for the work that you're doing now in
Speaker 1: running one of the great American universities. Noah, thank you
Speaker 1: for a characteristically insightful, provocative, and thoughtful set of questions.
Speaker 1: It is always a joy to interact with you. We'll
Speaker 1: be right back. Talking to Dean Tamar Gender, I was
Speaker 1: really struck by the dual way that she conceives of
Speaker 1: power in and around the university. First, there's the question
Speaker 1: of power within the university, and in that context, Tamar
Speaker 1: was very clear that it's a mistake to think of
Speaker 1: the university's power as emanating either from the top or
Speaker 1: the bottom, or anywhere in between. Rather, power in a
Speaker 1: university is complexly negotiated between all of the different actors
Speaker 1: who are involved. It's not like the dean can speak
Speaker 1: and expect the entire faculty to listen. Similarly, it's not
Speaker 1: like the faculty can express their views and expect the
Speaker 1: students to fall into line. In fact, what we see
Speaker 1: within the university is a lot of different actors trying
Speaker 1: to work out how they can function collectively while still
Speaker 1: pressing for the things that they believe in the most simultaneously.
Speaker 1: With respect to the role of the university in the world,
Speaker 1: Tamar spoke extraordinarily thoughtfully about how important it is for
Speaker 1: universities to train people and to generate ideas about what
Speaker 1: our values are and what our values should be. Those
Speaker 1: are the topics that the humanities covers, and without them,
Speaker 1: our society would be adrift, full of technologies, full of
Speaker 1: new financial instruments, but with no idea what we should
Speaker 1: do with them, what's ethical and what's not, and what
Speaker 1: overall objectives we should be aiming to achieve. Simultaneously, the
Speaker 1: university's power in the world also stems from the social sciences,
Speaker 1: which study the ways that human beings actually interact with
Speaker 1: each other and actually deploy power relative to one another,
Speaker 1: and the sciences, which themselves explore in the deepest sense,
Speaker 1: the nature of the world around us. In those senses,
Speaker 1: the university plays a crucial role in helping to shape
Speaker 1: a healthy society, and where the universities go awry, the
Speaker 1: society's own troubles are unlikely to be far behind. So
Speaker 1: as you send your kids off to school, or go
Speaker 1: back to teaching or studying yourself. Remember that, whether you
Speaker 1: like it or not, you're participating in multiple great power
Speaker 1: dances that shape the way the world around us operates.
Speaker 1: Until the next time I speak to you, Breathe deep,
Speaker 1: think deep thoughts, and, if circumstances will allow it, have
Speaker 1: a little fun. Deep Background is brought to you by
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Speaker 1: ben Toalliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial
Speaker 1: support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine,
Speaker 1: Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You
Speaker 1: can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I
Speaker 1: also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can
Speaker 1: find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover bloombergsals
Speaker 1: late of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts,
Speaker 1: and if you like what you heard today, please write
Speaker 1: a review or tell a friend. This is Deep Background.