Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2: Welcome to a special edition of the Wall Street Week podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm David weston President Trump's epic battle with some of
Speaker 2: America's most prestigious universities has been a long time in
Speaker 2: the making, like over two hundred years in the making,
Speaker 2: and it all started on the other side of the Atlantic.
Speaker 2: America's move to merge scholarship with scientific research was inspired
Speaker 2: by Humboldt University in then Prussian Berlin at the beginning
Speaker 2: of the nineteenth century. A Yale graduate named Daniel koit
Speaker 2: Gilman saw for himself the possibilities when he traveled to
Speaker 2: Berlin in the eighteen fifties on a European tour. It
Speaker 2: took him a while to start something similar in the
Speaker 2: United States, but he finally got his chance when he
Speaker 2: was tapped to be the founding president of a new
Speaker 2: college in Baltimore in eighteen seventy six, making JOHNS. Hopkins,
Speaker 2: the alma mater of our company founder and majority owner
Speaker 2: Michael Bloomberg, the first true American research university. Over time,
Speaker 2: others followed suit, with MIT taking the idea in a
Speaker 2: somewhat different direction for what it called applied research in
Speaker 2: the early nineteen hundreds, funded not by the wealth of
Speaker 2: a private donor like mister JOHNS. Hopkins, but by some
Speaker 2: of the large corporations of the day, such as General
Speaker 2: Electric and AT and T. It wasn't until World War
Speaker 2: II that the federal government really got involved. Then along
Speaker 2: came fdr who reached out to the universities to help
Speaker 2: him win the war. Roosevelt put the dean of MIT's
Speaker 2: Engineering school, vanavar Bush, in charge of the effort. That
Speaker 2: partnership gave the world innovations like radar and the atomic
Speaker 2: bomb that did just what the President had envisioned. It
Speaker 2: helped determine who won the war. Having seen what the
Speaker 2: government academia team could do together, vanovar Bush developed a
Speaker 2: post war plan for ongoing federal government funding of university research,
Speaker 2: and what began as two hundred fifty three million dollars
Speaker 2: in grants in nineteen fifty three turned into some sixty
Speaker 2: billion dollars as of twenty twenty three. Leon Botstein has
Speaker 2: more perspective than most on the history of academia's relationship
Speaker 2: with the government and what's at stake for the United
Speaker 2: States and the world. The son of Polish Jewish physicists
Speaker 2: who fled the Nazis. He was born in Zurich and
Speaker 2: immigrated to the United States at the age of two.
Speaker 2: After studying both history and music, he went on to
Speaker 2: become the youngest college president in US history at the
Speaker 2: tender age of twenty three. Five years later, in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy five, he was named president of Bard, a position
Speaker 2: he has held for fifty years. So who better to
Speaker 2: ask about the state of American universities today in light
Speaker 2: of the challenges? So give us your assessment of the
Speaker 2: relationship between the federal government the United States and universities
Speaker 2: and colleges right now, well.
Speaker 3: Right now, it's in a kind of disintegration mode. The
Speaker 3: pattern which has been that the university and the government
Speaker 3: have collaborated on research agendas. It was really reached a
Speaker 3: high point of during the Sputnik and the space exploration age,
Speaker 3: but it has a long history dating back to the
Speaker 3: Manhattan Project to the making of the atomic bomb. The
Speaker 3: mating of the atomic bomb was the decisive historic event.
Speaker 3: America could not have done it without the universities, and
Speaker 3: the universities could.
Speaker 1: Not have done it without the government.
Speaker 3: It was a collaboration which ended tragically but also brilliantly
Speaker 3: and brought in the atomic age. And since then America
Speaker 3: has been the premiere place for higher education for two reasons. One,
Speaker 3: it has the most imaginative and open and free environment
Speaker 3: for research. There's a lot of academic freedom, and there's
Speaker 3: no hierarchy. There's no top professor telling the young professor
Speaker 3: what to do in the sciences, quite as there is
Speaker 3: in the old European tradition, which has been imitated both
Speaker 3: by the Russians and by the Chinese. And there isn't
Speaker 3: a constraint. And also new departments can be created, new
Speaker 3: fields can be created. There's a lot of flexibility in
Speaker 3: problem solving, which has placed American science in the fore front.
Speaker 3: And with the forefront of American science comes its dominance
Speaker 3: in technology and in economics. So you have a collaboration
Speaker 3: which has worked wonderfully. For reasons that I do not understand,
Speaker 3: the Trumpet administration has decided to break this up. To
Speaker 3: unravel this. The claim is that the universities are woke. Well,
Speaker 3: universities have always had majority opinions. You know, the universities
Speaker 3: were in the forefront of the America first movement which
Speaker 3: opposed America's entrance in World War Two. Every generation has
Speaker 3: had its political incarnation on the university. But the point
Speaker 3: is that this claim of wokeness is widely exaggerated. And furthermore,
Speaker 3: there is the illusion that the real problem here is
Speaker 3: the failure to protect the Jewish students and Jewish staff
Speaker 3: and faculty. I'm a Jew and active member of the
Speaker 3: Jewish community, and I think this is also wildly exaggerated,
Speaker 3: and anti Semitism has been part of American culture. It's
Speaker 3: been part of university culture. However, the university has been
Speaker 3: the most open and responsive to the aspirations of the
Speaker 3: Jewish community. The idea that the university's anti semitic is
Speaker 3: ironic and not actually true. So for reasons that are political,
Speaker 3: there is a destructive intent to demolish what has been
Speaker 3: for decades America's signal competitive edge throughout the world.
Speaker 2: When we talk about colleges and university of the United States,
Speaker 2: the country is blessed with a wide range of institutions.
Speaker 2: Are the challenges you identify right now across the board?
Speaker 2: Are they more targeted on what I would call the
Speaker 2: elite institutions?
Speaker 3: Well, they're not at elite institutions. They are at the
Speaker 3: research one universities.
Speaker 1: So you're right.
Speaker 3: America has a kind of patchwork quilt of many different
Speaker 3: kinds of institutions, much more varied than other developed societies
Speaker 3: in the West particularly, and so you have public research
Speaker 3: universities as well as private research universities. Then you have
Speaker 3: smaller universities that aren't quite as research heavy, and then
Speaker 3: you have purely undergraduate institutions. Then you have community colleges.
Speaker 3: So you have a really wide variety of institutions that
Speaker 3: serve different constituencies. There's one that these institutions all have
Speaker 3: in common. America suffers from an antiquated financing.
Speaker 1: Scheme for its universities.
Speaker 3: Our great public university system was really created during the
Speaker 3: presidency of Lincoln with the Moral Act and the creation
Speaker 3: of the Great State Universities. After all, the majority of
Speaker 3: Americans go to public institutions, not private institutions. We always
Speaker 3: talk about Harvard, Yale, Princeton, but they're not the real
Speaker 3: place where Americans get educated. They get educated in public institutions,
Speaker 3: many of which are terrific, and the state universities in
Speaker 3: the Midwest and in the South and the West. Our
Speaker 3: first class places. I don't know why both the public
Speaker 3: and the news media and now the White House has
Speaker 3: an obsession with these marginal in a way, statistically institutions,
Speaker 3: the whole issue about admissions and discrimination applies to a
Speaker 3: handful of institutions. Most of us are in the business
Speaker 3: of recruiting students, of welcoming students to us, not selecting,
Speaker 3: not making a cut. We're not a sort of a
Speaker 3: World Series baseball team. There are a couple of teams
Speaker 3: that are in that kind of world, but most institutions
Speaker 3: are not. And the best of our students in this
Speaker 3: country don't necessarily go to these elite institutions. There's a
Speaker 3: myth that somehow your career will be better if you
Speaker 3: go to one of these institutions.
Speaker 1: That isn't the case.
Speaker 3: And so it is an odd situation in which there
Speaker 3: is an unnatural focus on a very small portion of institutions. However,
Speaker 3: they reflect a problem that affects all research universities. The
Speaker 3: cutting of overhead, the dismantling of everything from USAID to
Speaker 3: cutting the funding for medical research, and generally the cutting
Speaker 3: of funds to bring graduate students and postdocs. America has
Speaker 3: been a net importer It also ties in with this
Speaker 3: anti immigrant policy, which is completely ridiculous. Factually, without the
Speaker 3: great immigration from Europe in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties,
Speaker 3: America would not have emerged after the Second World War
Speaker 3: as a leader in the world in higher education. We
Speaker 3: owe our greatness to the migration of scholars and scientists
Speaker 3: and engineers who came to this country fleeing oppression.
Speaker 1: Now we are.
Speaker 3: Flirting with autocracy, the very thing that great scientists and
Speaker 3: scholars fled. It's a reversal of roles, and.
Speaker 1: So it is.
Speaker 3: It's a problem that involves every institution because it is
Speaker 3: fundamentally about censorship and freedom. What the government is doing
Speaker 3: is using money, which as a weapon. And you know,
Speaker 3: scientific research, learning, universities, libraries can exist without support.
Speaker 1: It's impossible. You know.
Speaker 3: We think of Harvard as a very rich university, the richest,
Speaker 3: so it has some endowment that's larger than fifty billion.
Speaker 3: But you and I can name several individuals who've earned
Speaker 3: a wealth level more than fifty billion in less than
Speaker 3: twenty years. And that university has been around since sixteen
Speaker 3: thirty six. Who says it's rich. Now they're responsible for
Speaker 3: their own arrogance of saying they're rich.
Speaker 1: They're not rich.
Speaker 3: They can survive as a research university without the collaboration
Speaker 3: of the government.
Speaker 1: They may be a private.
Speaker 3: Institution dependent on the government. Then you take a public university,
Speaker 3: which isn't always public. Berkeley is very very dependent on
Speaker 3: private support, so as the University of Michigan, but their
Speaker 3: state institutions and the state built their facilities by and large,
Speaker 3: so they too are very dependent on the public. So
Speaker 3: that financial relationship has always come with a respect for
Speaker 3: their freedom and independence. What do they do their research on?
Speaker 3: What kind of problems? Now, certainly the government's interest in
Speaker 3: practical results, whether it's vaccines, new technology, no faster computing, chips,
Speaker 3: all that, all the things we talk about in the
Speaker 3: modern world AI, it's all university dependent. Without the world
Speaker 3: of university, we wouldn't be where we are now. Why
Speaker 3: a president and a government wants to destroy that is
Speaker 3: apsolutely unclear to me, especially under the slogan of making
Speaker 3: America great again. If America was and is great, one
Speaker 3: of the sources of one of the sources of its
Speaker 3: greatness is its university system, its knowledge production, and the
Speaker 3: connection to the economy. The universities have done a terrible
Speaker 3: job in talking to the general public. They haven't made
Speaker 3: their case clear.
Speaker 1: The people who.
Speaker 3: Live in the Boston area or the New York area
Speaker 3: will think, well, Columbia is an elite place. Well, a
Speaker 3: high portion of the quality of their medical care derives
Speaker 3: from those universities. The public doesn't really quite realize that,
Speaker 3: God forbid, they should have a terrible illness, God forbid
Speaker 3: they should be an accident. Where is the best place
Speaker 3: for them to be treated in great university hospitals. Where
Speaker 3: do the great university hospitals get all their talknology, all
Speaker 3: their drugs or their diagnostic equipment, equipment, the MRI, the
Speaker 3: cat scans, all from the research labs of universities. But
Speaker 3: these institutions have believe.
Speaker 1: Their own rhetoric. You know, they've.
Speaker 3: Drunk their own kool aid. You know, they smelled their
Speaker 3: own perfume. You know, they they said we're rich, we're
Speaker 3: in vulnerable, you know we you know, we're independent, when
Speaker 3: in fact they're dependent. Now, the liberal arts colleges, the
Speaker 3: cond of intitution that I am responsible for, are not
Speaker 3: research heavy, so we're not as impacted by the current
Speaker 3: attack on funding. But the federal government's crucial to financial aid.
Speaker 3: All of our universities, public and private, are hampered by
Speaker 3: an antiquated system of financing. The in state tuitions of
Speaker 3: state universities are too high, much too high for country
Speaker 3: of our wealth. This is not a welfare giveaway. The
Speaker 3: more education you have, the more you earn, and that
Speaker 3: term returns in tax revenue.
Speaker 1: The fact is we.
Speaker 3: Push the cost of our education on the consumer, and
Speaker 3: that is completely irrational. It's an investment in the country,
Speaker 3: it's an investment in our own people, and that investment
Speaker 3: pays off. So it is simply a problem for all
Speaker 3: of us because if the attack continues, it'll turn to
Speaker 3: squeezing out the financial aid options which aren't strong enough,
Speaker 3: the loan options, loan forgiveness options. And then we come
Speaker 3: back to the immigration question. Much of our graduate infrastructure
Speaker 3: and science is based on students from abroad, students who
Speaker 3: come to get their PhDs in chemist, through biology, physics,
Speaker 3: information science from abroad. We don't produce enough of our
Speaker 3: own scientists through our own educational system, and the university
Speaker 3: has bear some responsibility for that. They've sort of given
Speaker 3: that task off to schools of education. But the physicists
Speaker 3: of America, the chemists of America, the biologists of America,
Speaker 3: are not training high school teachers and middle school teachers
Speaker 3: and elementary school teachers. So through the pipeline of our schools,
Speaker 3: we don't produce enough students with the determination and hard
Speaker 3: work that's required to make a career in science and
Speaker 3: technology and biomedical sciences.
Speaker 2: You mentioned that the federal government right now is using money,
Speaker 2: as I think you said, a weapon we call a
Speaker 2: weapon or a leaver, whichever you want to call it.
Speaker 2: Have the universities to some extent given some of that
Speaker 2: leverage to the government by being too dependent upon federal funds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good question.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure that there's an alternative.
Speaker 1: The scale of research.
Speaker 3: Requires that you get the money from a large source.
Speaker 3: Now the large sources are the government the other companies. Now,
Speaker 3: it's a very very delicate issue about having let's say,
Speaker 3: big pharma or big industrials fund research. They have Historically,
Speaker 3: chemical companies are all kinds of companies have invested in
Speaker 3: research that's related to their business, and that can be good,
Speaker 3: but it can also be corrupting. The tobacco industry, for example,
Speaker 3: in its beginning of its fight against the argument that
Speaker 3: smoking is related to cancer. Was willing to fund research
Speaker 3: where they already expected a certain kind of out come,
Speaker 3: and that's not good. So one has to be very
Speaker 3: careful about the industry research relationship.
Speaker 1: The third are private individuals.
Speaker 3: And although we have the most unbelievable inequality of wealth,
Speaker 3: and we have a fantastic number of very rich people, billionaires,
Speaker 3: not all of them are philanthropic, and we're very grateful
Speaker 3: for the few that are. But you can't rely to
Speaker 3: fund this on individuals. On private philanthropy, you need large
Speaker 3: sums of money, and the only two sources are, to
Speaker 3: some extent, industry and the other is the public sector
Speaker 3: taxpayer support. And taxpayer support is justified because, as I
Speaker 3: said earlier, it returns to the wealth of the nation,
Speaker 3: the taxable wealth of the nation. Education is crucial, crucial
Speaker 3: now to economy. There is no We are in a
Speaker 3: knowledge economy century.
Speaker 2: From your perspective, which includes a remarkable experience leading a
Speaker 2: distinguished university. Where does this go? It's impossible to know.
Speaker 2: But as you look at what do you think the
Speaker 2: future path is?
Speaker 3: I think the future path is to persuade the public
Speaker 3: and also are elected officials that supporting universities and high
Speaker 3: education is in the nation's interest. If you're a patriot,
Speaker 3: which i am. I'm an immigrant. This country gave me
Speaker 3: and my family, my parents and my siblings, an opportunity
Speaker 3: they could not find anywhere else in the world. So
Speaker 3: there's a deep loyalty to what this country represents. It's
Speaker 3: represented by the Statue of Liberty, It's represented by the Constitution,
Speaker 3: It's represented by its long history of welcoming refugees and
Speaker 3: people seeking freedom. So it seems to me that you
Speaker 3: need to persuade the public and the elected officials that
Speaker 3: this is not the place for partisan politics. This is
Speaker 3: not the place to fight cultural wars. Cultural wars have
Speaker 3: always existed. It's like fashion, you know, big shoulders on
Speaker 3: your suits and narrow shoulders on your suits. It is
Speaker 3: always the case that universities have young people, and young
Speaker 3: people are fiery, and they're committed to ideas. They're not
Speaker 3: always right, and they're not always as capable of seeing
Speaker 3: the gray, the ambiguous, the complexities, and you have to
Speaker 3: have patience. And we're not in the pun business when
Speaker 3: they're teaching business. So, whether it's the Vietnam protests, or
Speaker 3: it's protests about any public issue, the environment, civil rights,
Speaker 3: whatever you want. The fact is that the energy of
Speaker 3: young people is an opportunity to teach. And this has
Speaker 3: been wildly politicized, and I think the universities have been
Speaker 3: lax in providing leadership. But you have to remember that
Speaker 3: universities have become giant corporations and they need corporate leaders.
Speaker 3: And how do we define corporate leaders people who don't
Speaker 3: have opinions of their own, but say yes to everyone
Speaker 3: in a little different way and engage in compromise. The
Speaker 3: truth isn't always in compromise. The truth isn't always in
Speaker 3: yes you're right, Yes you're right, Yes you're right, and
Speaker 3: creating some kind of bland soup out of a variety
Speaker 3: of opinions. It's about striking out and showing leadership. And
Speaker 3: in order to become a university or college president, you
Speaker 3: have to demonstrate throughout your career your willingness to abandon
Speaker 3: any principle you might have held, because if you actually
Speaker 3: compete for the job with real opinions, you won't get it.
Speaker 3: So we have a lot of managers, and we don't
Speaker 3: need managers. We need leaders. And those leaders are hard
Speaker 3: to find because in the current Internet environment, a university
Speaker 3: or college president is a semi public person, and it
Speaker 3: is unimaginable the vitriolic, hostile environment that the Internet creates
Speaker 3: for any public official. The sad thing about the Internet,
Speaker 3: which is a great advance, is that it's unleashed the
Speaker 3: darkest side of human nature. People will write things, send
Speaker 3: you things, use the language they would never use in person,
Speaker 3: they would never use even on the telephone. So there's
Speaker 3: a kind of isolation which creates a kind of road
Speaker 3: rage that gets funneled into the Internet. And that's what
Speaker 3: you're overwhelmed with, and people are frightened by it. And
Speaker 3: if you speak out, you'll get ten times what you
Speaker 3: said in hate mail. No matter what you say has
Speaker 3: nothing to do with the substance of it.
Speaker 1: So who wants this job?
Speaker 3: We complain how poor our politicians are. I mean the idea,
Speaker 3: this is not a criticism that a man of business
Speaker 3: without any public experience, without an education that really fits
Speaker 3: to lead a complex, without a long history of public services.
Speaker 3: The president of the United States is an indication of
Speaker 3: how few very good people want the job. And the
Speaker 3: job is decreasingly attractive, and you know, if you're a
Speaker 3: judge and now you have to make a decision on
Speaker 3: some executive order from the president, and you act against
Speaker 3: the president, you're a target. And one person with a
Speaker 3: family with some measure of sanity wants to put themselves
Speaker 3: in the line of fire. So we are eroding democracy
Speaker 3: by diminishing the attraction.
Speaker 1: Of public service as a career. So the fact is.
Speaker 3: That the university needs more leadership, and leadership that is
Speaker 3: print and it seems to me that the people that
Speaker 3: choose the president, which is not only the governing board
Speaker 3: but the faculty, have to be more willing to take
Speaker 3: risks in finding leaders that stand for something. What I
Speaker 3: believe they should stand for is excellence and research, freedom
Speaker 3: of inquiry, and respect for every individual. When we give
Speaker 3: a diploma, every university, every college in the country, what's
Speaker 3: on that diploma just your name, nothing about your identity.
Speaker 3: You're not a member of a group. You're just John Smith,
Speaker 3: Jane Smith. You're an individual, that unique person that you are.
Speaker 3: That's your degree, that's your accomplishment. We don't teach groups.
Speaker 3: We teach individuals, and we need to treat all of
Speaker 3: them fairly. That's why the old days in the movies.
Speaker 3: You see people in universities with gowns. Why were their
Speaker 3: gowns to camouflage their origins, their mode of dress. Everybody
Speaker 3: was a learner, even the faculty. So that ideal of
Speaker 3: a place where the individual is treated as an individual,
Speaker 3: but not as a representative of some political group, some
Speaker 3: ethnic group, some way we segregate ourselves from another. That
Speaker 3: ideal of university is what has to be defended quality
Speaker 3: of teaching, quality of research, and that has to be
Speaker 3: supported by the government, not eroded by the government, not
Speaker 3: co opted by the government. And one of the things
Speaker 3: that history teaches us is when autocrats take control of
Speaker 3: universities and dictate who should teach there, what they should teach,
Speaker 3: what curriculum is allowed, what is not allowed, the quality
Speaker 3: of the work of the scholarship goes down. This kind
Speaker 3: of autocratic intervention spells the death of American excellence in the.
Speaker 2: University that does it for us. Here at Wall Street Week,
Speaker 2: I'm David Weston. See you next week for more stories
Speaker 2: of capitalism.