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. The
Speaker 1: president of Saint John's College, Jay Walter Sterling, stops by
Speaker 1: to talk to us about why the classics.
Speaker 2: Matter even more than ever.
Speaker 1: But first we have Volts newsletter David Roberts to talk
Speaker 1: about climate change and what it all means.
Speaker 2: David Roberts, I always want to call you, doctor Volts.
Speaker 3: Welcome back, Hello, Good to be back.
Speaker 1: Is it a bad time to write about climate Not really.
Speaker 4: It's sort of like, you know how they're always seeing
Speaker 4: like the media liked it when Trump came back, even
Speaker 4: though it's horrible for the country, it's good for them.
Speaker 3: It's a little bit of that going on right now.
Speaker 4: There is no shortage of things to write about, no
Speaker 4: shortage of things going on, good and bad.
Speaker 1: I'd love something good since we're all so fucking depressed.
Speaker 1: Though I did just eat four pieces of chocolate to
Speaker 1: drink five die Cokes, so I'm actually feeling pretty good.
Speaker 1: But give us something to not want to die over.
Speaker 4: Well, the things that have been going on for the
Speaker 4: last decade are still going on. Basically, solar and wind
Speaker 4: are getting cheaper and cheaper, batteries are getting cheaper and cheaper.
Speaker 4: Business models are updating to help spread those things. You know,
Speaker 4: Electrification is proceeding like crazy. China is producing so much
Speaker 4: cheap solar panels that they're decarbonizing their neighbors, Pakistan and
Speaker 4: what Vietnam, Africa Now they're starting to import solar panels.
Speaker 4: So all the rest of the world, like literally the
Speaker 4: rest of the world is going forward.
Speaker 2: It's going to be going before we are.
Speaker 4: We are literally getting off a train that has just
Speaker 4: now sort of reached a speed that it's unstoppable. It's
Speaker 4: unstoppable freight train towards clean electrification, and right at this juncture,
Speaker 4: we're basically hopping off the train trying to kill our
Speaker 4: domestic solar and wind industries and trying to double down
Speaker 4: on fossil fuels. So no good news from within the US,
Speaker 4: as you're very aware, but lots of good news elsewhere.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about this because this has along been
Speaker 1: the thesis of my long suffering spouse, which is solar
Speaker 1: and wind is going to be so cheap that it's irresistible.
Speaker 3: Well, it already is.
Speaker 4: I mean, I forget the exact figure that the IEA
Speaker 4: came out with, but something like eighty to ninety percent
Speaker 4: of the new power generation being built in the world
Speaker 4: is solar and wind like it already is irresistible. It
Speaker 4: already is the cheapest thing. And batteries now are getting
Speaker 4: just as cheap, and that is solving a lot of
Speaker 4: the you know problems of variability. You know, it comes
Speaker 4: and goes with the weather. Batteries are smoothing that out.
Speaker 4: Demand response is smoothing that out, So that is already happening.
Speaker 4: That's why most of the new power generation that is
Speaker 4: going into effect in the world is clean.
Speaker 1: So building coal plants or building fossil fuel plants or
Speaker 1: build a drill, baby drill or coal, they're just much
Speaker 1: more expensive, right. I mean, we're going to do it
Speaker 1: here because Trump wants to help those industries. But that's
Speaker 1: why our electricity is going up here.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, there are a couple of things going on
Speaker 4: with the electricity prices going up that is not generation.
Speaker 4: The actual costs of generation are going down, mainly because
Speaker 4: all of the solar and wind is coming onl what's
Speaker 4: going up, what's pushing prices up is mostly what's called
Speaker 4: T and D transmission and distribution. It is getting the
Speaker 4: power to us. Those are where costs are going up
Speaker 4: and up because we have not maintained our transmission system.
Speaker 4: We haven't built enough new transmission. All our distribution systems,
Speaker 4: the local systems are very old and aging and very analog.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of just updating of the system side.
Speaker 4: That the the infrastructure side of things, that's where a
Speaker 4: lot of costs And there are a lot of other
Speaker 4: things pushing costs up here and there, like wildfire costs
Speaker 4: in California or in Georgia they built this giant nuclear.
Speaker 3: Plant that they're paying off.
Speaker 4: You know, there are a lot of different and in
Speaker 4: Virginia it's data centers. There's a lot of different things
Speaker 4: going on. They all point to the need to build
Speaker 4: a more robust electricity system basically.
Speaker 1: But data centers, we are just having to pay for
Speaker 1: Google using more electricity.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, there's a lot of people working right now. There's
Speaker 4: a lot of thinking going on. I mean, one of
Speaker 4: the sort of hot topics in Maya area of the
Speaker 4: world right now is how because these data centers need
Speaker 4: to hook up to the grid. If you build a
Speaker 4: data center and you're waiting to hook up to the grid,
Speaker 4: you are literally wasting millions of dollars a day in
Speaker 4: opportunity costs. So these people desperately want to hook up
Speaker 4: to the grid, but there's no room for them on
Speaker 4: the grid. So how can we get them to pay
Speaker 4: for the reforms that would make room on the grid?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: How can we get them to pay for grid upgrades
Speaker 4: rather than us paying for them? How can we get
Speaker 4: a little money out of them to pay to upgrade
Speaker 4: our grid? And the amount of money molly that is
Speaker 4: going into AI and data centers, you would need like
Speaker 4: two or three percent of that money and you could
Speaker 4: transform the US electricity system just a little bit of
Speaker 4: money from that world. You could make a much more
Speaker 4: robust and resilient electricity grid. And there's lots of people
Speaker 4: thinking about how to work that. So, you know, the
Speaker 4: data center comes to the utility says I want to
Speaker 4: hook up. The utility says, well, we don't have any room,
Speaker 4: and the data center says, well, okay, I'll go pay
Speaker 4: to put solar and storage systems on residential houses. I'll
Speaker 4: go pay to replace electrical resistance heating with heat pumps, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 4: I'll go pay to do all that stuff, you give
Speaker 4: me credit for it, then let me on the grid.
Speaker 4: So then the actual rate payers get something out of it,
Speaker 4: utility gets something out of it, and the data center
Speaker 4: gets something out of it.
Speaker 3: There's lots of people trying to figure out how that works.
Speaker 2: Is that going to happen.
Speaker 1: It's hard for me to imagine that something where we
Speaker 1: don't get fucked as a consumers.
Speaker 4: The thing is like data centers have bungled like these
Speaker 4: companies in terms of their PR and their public approach
Speaker 4: are so incompetent.
Speaker 3: They have made enemies of everyone.
Speaker 4: Everyone hates data centers, so they desperately need some good PR.
Speaker 3: And this is good PR for them.
Speaker 4: If they could pay for ordinary people to become more
Speaker 4: resilient and have more reliable power, then at least they
Speaker 4: could get a little reputational benefit back. They need a
Speaker 4: PR win. So I think they're kind of over the
Speaker 4: barrel here. And it's kind of the same with utilities.
Speaker 4: Everybody hates utilities too, you know. And if the utility
Speaker 4: is seen to just let this data center come and
Speaker 4: hook up, and then everybody else's costs go up.
Speaker 3: Then everybody hates the utility too, so they also have.
Speaker 4: An incentive to get some money out of a data
Speaker 4: center to pay for this thing. So everybody sort of
Speaker 4: right now everyone hates everyone. So everybody needs to figure
Speaker 4: out how to get some a pr win out of this.
Speaker 4: And one way to do that would be to sort
Speaker 4: of like get something out of the data centers in
Speaker 4: exchange for letting them hook up.
Speaker 1: But let's talk about this thing you wrote about governors.
Speaker 1: You can salvage sustainable transport, but you need to do
Speaker 1: a quick.
Speaker 4: There are provisions, I mean these are somewhat obscure wonky,
Speaker 4: but there are provisions in federal transportation dollars that give
Speaker 4: governors the power to shift those funds from highways to
Speaker 4: non highway spending.
Speaker 3: And all those funds, as.
Speaker 4: You know, are about to get either cut off or
Speaker 4: become much more capricious. Let's say, so the money that
Speaker 4: governors have got sitting in their funds right now is
Speaker 4: probably like all that they can rely on, especially for
Speaker 4: non highway stuff. They so a lot of governors just
Speaker 4: don't know they have this power. So the whole point
Speaker 4: of that pology is flag for them, Like you can
Speaker 4: still transfer a bunch of money into transit, public transportation,
Speaker 4: bike paths, et cetera. You can still do that with
Speaker 4: the money you've got now, and you better do it
Speaker 4: because nobody's, at least at the federal level, nobody's going
Speaker 4: to be paying for that stuff for much longer.
Speaker 1: So the rest of the world has gotten on the
Speaker 1: green energy train, right because it's cheaper. You think that
Speaker 1: means we will eventually, I mean, we're going to have
Speaker 1: to write.
Speaker 4: Well, no, I mean one of the more fascinating things
Speaker 4: to think about in my world is what they call
Speaker 4: the mid transition. Like you can imagine when the transition's
Speaker 4: done and everybody's self sufficient with renewable energy, a lot
Speaker 4: of good things in that world, right, being self sufficient
Speaker 4: for energy rather than importing fossil fuels from elsewhere. It's
Speaker 4: a really fundamental change for a lot of countries, and
Speaker 4: it's going to, I think, bring good things. But the
Speaker 4: road from here to there, So as oil demand declines,
Speaker 4: who is selling those last barrels of oil? Who is
Speaker 4: buying those last barrels of oil? What I sort of
Speaker 4: foresee in the next decade or two. Is the the
Speaker 4: rest of the world sprinting ahead with electrification and basically
Speaker 4: a shrinking cabal of fossil fuel states clinging to fossil
Speaker 4: fuels for as long as they can, and that could
Speaker 4: go on for decades. That could go on for a
Speaker 4: long time until China has basically left us behind because
Speaker 4: they what China understands that we don't understand. I really
Speaker 4: want to make this point to everybody who will listen.
Speaker 4: If you want AI dominance, which everybody in the government
Speaker 4: says they do, everybody says I don't. Let's just grant
Speaker 4: the premise if you want AI dominance, you can't get
Speaker 4: that with just models and ideas. You need to own
Speaker 4: the physical substrate that makes it possible, and that is
Speaker 4: electric motors, batteries, magnets, things that you produce like if
Speaker 4: you want AI dominance, you also need to dominate or
Speaker 4: at least have a foot in the supply chain. And
Speaker 4: we have let China eat our lunch on this. They
Speaker 4: own the electrifica technologies, they own the electrification supply chain.
Speaker 4: So even if we achieve something in AI, we're still
Speaker 4: going to be buying all our AI equipment from China,
Speaker 4: who can cut it off anytime they feel like it.
Speaker 3: Right, So, like, even if you.
Speaker 4: Don't care about climate at all, even if you don't
Speaker 4: care about pollution at all, electrification is a national security imperative,
Speaker 4: even if you only care about AI.
Speaker 1: Right, we're kind of coming into this in the most
Speaker 1: fucked up wid possible right most things.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure exactly where you're referring to, but I.
Speaker 1: Agree to get into wind and solar, Like, we'll be
Speaker 1: set up in the worst way possible for this.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, it It depends obviously depends on what happens
Speaker 4: in the next few years. And I don't know, you
Speaker 4: don't know, and nobody knows what's gonna happen in next
Speaker 4: few years.
Speaker 3: I mean, maybe Dems.
Speaker 4: Will take power, and like you know, if you listen
Speaker 4: to the Dems talking about their new energy plans, most
Speaker 4: of it is just putting IRA back into place.
Speaker 3: Like we like IRA.
Speaker 4: The Inflation Reduction Act was a great bill designed to
Speaker 4: accelerate primarily you know, these industries. So it wouldn't be
Speaker 4: that hard just to put those tax credits back into place.
Speaker 4: You can imagine that happening, and then we wouldn't have
Speaker 4: lost too much time. You know, you can imagine things
Speaker 4: going a lot of different ways, to say the least
Speaker 4: in coming years. So it's not lost yet.
Speaker 1: What about the sort of temperature damage, like the hydrocarbons,
Speaker 1: microplastics in our brains, Like what about the irreversible stuff?
Speaker 3: Yes, this is true for climate.
Speaker 4: Every bit of it is practically speaking irreversible.
Speaker 3: And it's bad and it's still happening.
Speaker 4: And like you know, Trump won and it's just like
Speaker 4: he won by like point zero zero zero one percent,
Speaker 4: and everybody across the nation, just everybody on our side decided, well,
Speaker 4: I guess we suck now and we lose, and everybody
Speaker 4: hates us, and we should stop talking about trands stuff.
Speaker 3: We should toop talking about climate.
Speaker 4: We should stop talking about all the things we care
Speaker 4: about and try to sound.
Speaker 3: Like muted versions of them.
Speaker 4: This is, of course, it's like always the way the
Speaker 4: democratic establishment regards to any loss. So climate has completely
Speaker 4: dropped out of democratic discourse. Like no one talks about
Speaker 4: it anymore, no one, you know, everybody's just decided to
Speaker 4: ignore it. But it is still out there and it
Speaker 4: is still happening, and it is still bad, and I
Speaker 4: think people are still underestimating how bad it's gonna get,
Speaker 4: because there are all these you know, what are they called?
Speaker 4: They call tipping points out there. There's all these thresholds
Speaker 4: that you might pass where things start reinforcing themselves and
Speaker 4: become effectively unstoppable. Where are those tipping points? We don't know.
Speaker 4: We're just enough fog of uncertainty about it and barreling forward. So, yes,
Speaker 4: the imperative to reduce carbon emissions is just as important
Speaker 4: as ever. But I will say I just talked to
Speaker 4: Senator Brian Schuttz about this. His point was just, yes,
Speaker 4: it's true climate is still a problem and still important.
Speaker 4: But if you have a message that says the stuff
Speaker 4: that's going to solve climate change is cheaper, right, you
Speaker 4: should use that message, you know what I mean? Like
Speaker 4: you should like exploit that message if you've got it,
Speaker 4: if it's true, and it is, then why not lean
Speaker 4: into that, right? So, I mean, the point is just
Speaker 4: that the need to decarbonize, like you could take climate
Speaker 4: out of that picture entirely, and the need to electrify,
Speaker 4: to clean, to do clean electrification would still be just
Speaker 4: as imperative as ever. You can justify it based on AI.
Speaker 4: You can justify it based on international economic competitiveness. You
Speaker 4: can justify it based on particulate air pollution. I mean,
Speaker 4: you don't even need to bring climate into it at all.
Speaker 4: The reasons for clean electrification are. It's overdetermined, as they say, right, there.
Speaker 2: Are so many reasons to go to solar.
Speaker 4: And when I'll add one other thing, Trump is busy
Speaker 4: giving a bunch of other countries additional reasons to do
Speaker 4: that by going to them, putting them over the barrel,
Speaker 4: twisting their arms, and forcing them to buy our liquid
Speaker 4: natural gas exports. Right, He's been doing this to countries.
Speaker 4: He's been saying, we won't give you any aid. We'll
Speaker 4: do this and that too. You will punish you with
Speaker 4: tariffs if you don't buy our liquid natural gas.
Speaker 3: Now, short term, that.
Speaker 4: Might get a little bit more of our LNG sold,
Speaker 4: But long term, what do you think those countries are
Speaker 4: taking from that? We do not want this to happen again.
Speaker 4: We do not want to be over the barrel like this.
Speaker 4: We need energy self sufficiency. We need to stop importing.
Speaker 4: He's just going to accelerate all this progress by being
Speaker 4: a dickhead like he is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, is there any where you feel there's really
Speaker 1: exciting climate legislation going on, Climate science advance is going on.
Speaker 4: I haven't really tuned into the science a lot recently.
Speaker 4: I sort of like most of my professional work now
Speaker 4: is pivoted away from climate as such, to decarbonization, to
Speaker 4: the solutions, because like, what you need to know about
Speaker 4: climate we already know. Like if you're a scientist, I
Speaker 4: guess the details are interesting, but like we get it,
Speaker 4: you know, like get we get what we need to do,
Speaker 4: let's just do it.
Speaker 3: Doing it is to me the fun part, the interesting part.
Speaker 1: And do you feel optimistic about the decarbonization It sounds
Speaker 1: like you.
Speaker 3: Do on some timescale.
Speaker 4: I think all this stuff is inevitable for a lot
Speaker 4: of other reasons, but that timescale matters a lot. Those
Speaker 4: We're in a very crucial decade, so every day matters
Speaker 4: a lot, So no one, At no point do I
Speaker 4: feel sanguine about anything. But it is just the case
Speaker 4: that clean technology is better. It is just the case
Speaker 4: that lighting poisonous gases and fluids on fire to create
Speaker 4: controlled explosions is an insane way to do things.
Speaker 3: If you don't have to.
Speaker 4: Do it that way, if there's you know, there's if
Speaker 4: there's a different way to do it.
Speaker 3: You're gonna do it a different way.
Speaker 4: And that is just happening, no matter what anybody says
Speaker 4: about anything in politics, it's just happening. Like those farmers
Speaker 4: in Pakistan are not asking anyone's permission. The government of
Speaker 4: Pakistan had nothing to do with that. It's just farmers
Speaker 4: in Pakistan buying solar panels because they can get a
Speaker 4: little bit of energy and self sufficiency. Nobody has to
Speaker 4: tell them to do it. They don't care about climate change.
Speaker 4: It's all just cheaper power. You know, that's gonna like
Speaker 4: it's inexorable.
Speaker 2: So interesting, also terrifying.
Speaker 4: It's terrifying to be in this decade ruled by these
Speaker 4: people is just very not ideal Moni.
Speaker 3: It's not great.
Speaker 4: And like seeing Ira, seeing the policy program that Democrats
Speaker 4: put in place playing out for four more years would
Speaker 4: have been so transformative. It just like for a lot
Speaker 4: of reasons, it had barely gotten underway. It was like
Speaker 4: barely visible yet it was just starting, so it's easy
Speaker 4: to kind of cut it off without anybody caring much.
Speaker 4: But like four more years we would have made so
Speaker 4: much progress. It is tragic, you know, like you can't
Speaker 4: dwell on it forever, but it is tragic.
Speaker 2: Hw oh David, thank you for coming on.
Speaker 1: We have exciting news over at our YouTube channel. The
Speaker 1: second episode from our Project twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Nine series is out now.
Speaker 1: It's a reimagining where we examine what went wrong with
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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,
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Speaker 2: And help us spread the word.
Speaker 1: Jay Walter Sterling is a president of Saint John's College.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 3: Walter. Thanks so much, Molly. It's great to be here
Speaker 3: with you.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about the remarkable college you are
Speaker 1: the president of, and it is a college called Saint
Speaker 1: John's College. I would love you to explain to us
Speaker 1: what Saint John's College.
Speaker 2: Is happy to do.
Speaker 5: So I'm here on the Santa Fe campus of Saint
Speaker 5: John's College, where I'm the president. We have our sister
Speaker 5: campus in Annapolis, Maryland, and we are often known.
Speaker 3: As the Great Books College.
Speaker 5: Our Annapolis campus is over three hundred years old. Our
Speaker 5: Santa Fe campus is sixty years old. But really we
Speaker 5: date our identity from the introduction of a program in
Speaker 5: the nineteen thirties that was intended to be a kind
Speaker 5: of great renewal of liberal education, of the ideal of
Speaker 5: an undergraduate education being broad and deep and anchored in
Speaker 5: you could say, the classics, the great books, from classical
Speaker 5: antiquity to the present. People who know a little bit
Speaker 5: about us probably think of our students correctly as reading
Speaker 5: Homer and Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare and Chaucer, and
Speaker 5: that that list winds up sometime in the twentieth century.
Speaker 5: And that's right as far as it goes. But our
Speaker 5: students also do a great deal of math and natural science.
Speaker 5: They all study music. It's an extraordinary multidisciplinary program, but
Speaker 5: without traditional electives majors departments. Our faculty teach throughout the
Speaker 5: interdisciplinary program. They're called tutors, and this goes very deep
Speaker 5: for us. They sit at the table with the students,
Speaker 5: they don't lecture from elector, and all classes are small,
Speaker 5: student driven, and every student will learn ancient Greek up
Speaker 5: to a point and translate a tragedy of Sophocles or
Speaker 5: something comparable to that. And every student will work through
Speaker 5: Einstein's nineteen oh five paper on special relativity equation by equation.
Speaker 5: It's an extraordinarily to borrow a phrase from Milton. A
Speaker 5: complete and generous education and one that I believe is
Speaker 5: needed now more than ever. And I'm sure we'll get
Speaker 5: into that.
Speaker 1: My father in law went to Saint John's and was
Speaker 1: a person who became very successful and believes that the
Speaker 1: education changed his brain. And I have a child who
Speaker 1: goes to Saint John's now so and is almost done
Speaker 1: with his four years there. So I wonder if you
Speaker 1: could talk about what it was that got these schools
Speaker 1: started in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 5: I think that it was a reaction to several things.
Speaker 5: I'll frame it as a reaction to three things that
Speaker 5: to me feel very relevant today. So one was a
Speaker 5: view that undergraduate education was being overdetermined by the model
Speaker 5: of the research universities, So the idea that universities were
Speaker 5: going to drive knowledge creation in the sciences, the way
Speaker 5: that that was rolling back in to the undergraduate experience
Speaker 5: in the form of narrow, more specialized majors and disciplinary
Speaker 5: commitments and divisions in what could maybe should be thought
Speaker 5: of as a more holistic kind of educational experience. Related
Speaker 5: to that, the pre professionalization of the undergraduate experience, so
Speaker 5: a kind of loss of the ideal that some people
Speaker 5: might view as a luxury or something like that. Again,
Speaker 5: we can get into that, I think it's quite the opposite.
Speaker 5: But the ideal of your undergraduate experience being first about
Speaker 5: becoming a free and full human being and secondarily about
Speaker 5: career preparation, that that was being flipped and this was
Speaker 5: a reaction to that. And then the third thing that
Speaker 5: I think matters a great deal, This program was put
Speaker 5: in in the nineteen thirties by educational philosophers that were
Speaker 5: involved at Columbia and the University of Chicago and other
Speaker 5: places in comparable efforts over a decade or two in
Speaker 5: which they saw liberal democracy threatened by the rise of
Speaker 5: totalitarianisms of the left and the right. And I think
Speaker 5: it represented a reassertion that we needed something like this
Speaker 5: might sound like an old fashioned phrase, but something like
Speaker 5: a liberally educated citizenry if democracy is going to survive.
Speaker 5: And all of those questions seemed to me to have
Speaker 5: their current and contemporary analogues. But those were the things
Speaker 5: on the minds of the folks who crafted this experiment.
Speaker 5: And again there are related experiments that were happening in
Speaker 5: other places, but Saint John's went all in on it,
Speaker 5: and the whole college became defined by that kind of
Speaker 5: reassertion of those values and building those into the educational
Speaker 5: program that we have.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about the nineteen thirties in totalitarianism,
Speaker 1: was this thinking that education could protect democracy and if so,
Speaker 1: how so.
Speaker 5: There's a lot in there. But I would start from
Speaker 5: the idea that those folks, if you read their writings
Speaker 5: as I do, and they're sort of carried forward by
Speaker 5: the leadership of our college, the view that there's something
Speaker 5: about modern mass society, modern technology, modern communications, that's going
Speaker 5: to make it harder for individuals to own their own freedom, thinking,
Speaker 5: be able to judge for themselves, sort of assert themselves.
Speaker 3: And their agency.
Speaker 5: You know, you might think of arguments that are made
Speaker 5: by Hannah rant in the Origins of totalitarianism, arguments made
Speaker 5: by Alexis to Toakville and democracy in America that suggests
Speaker 5: that modern democracy is going to be vulnerable to things
Speaker 5: that all modern mass societies are going to be vulnerable to.
Speaker 5: How are you going to strengthen citizens to own their freedom,
Speaker 5: own their agency and so on? And these folks, again,
Speaker 5: all these things are worthy of a great deal of debate,
Speaker 5: but they believe, I believe that one way or another,
Speaker 5: what was once called the liberal education is a way
Speaker 5: to equip yourself to think for yourself, to understand the
Speaker 5: ways in which you can be might be are being manipulated,
Speaker 5: To understand why you believe what you believe. Take ownership
Speaker 5: of it, maybe change your opinions, maybe keep them, but
Speaker 5: develop a kind of free relationship to your own thinking,
Speaker 5: your own capacity to reason and judge, to evaluate the
Speaker 5: arguments and the rhetoric coming at you when they thought
Speaker 5: correctly that the modern world was going to put more
Speaker 5: and more pressure and constraint on that individual freedom of
Speaker 5: the intellect, freedom of the soul, however you want to
Speaker 5: think about them.
Speaker 1: I've seen a lot of universities lately, and I've spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time around academics, and one of the
Speaker 1: things that I you know, especially in the American economy
Speaker 1: as it is right now, college is so expensive and
Speaker 1: the question of like what are these people being prepared
Speaker 1: for feels very important right now. So I'd love you
Speaker 1: to talk about how reading great books makes you more
Speaker 1: prepared for life. And I know it's not just reading
Speaker 1: great books. From what I understand, the curriculum is you're
Speaker 1: reworking through history to remake a lot of the discoveries
Speaker 1: that we've seen over history. And I wonder if you
Speaker 1: could talk about what that does for going into the world.
Speaker 5: Right And you know, one of the phrases that's out
Speaker 5: there that we would embrace is that it's, you know,
Speaker 5: much more about teaching you how to think than about
Speaker 5: what to think. And what you just described, you know,
Speaker 5: we do it with philosophy, we do it math and science.
Speaker 5: I'll just give one example that captures a little bit
Speaker 5: of what our students do. You can learn the Pythagorean
Speaker 5: theorem a lot of different ways students learned in high school,
Speaker 5: and geometry and algebra, A square plus B squared equals
Speaker 5: C squared. Our students are going to work through book
Speaker 5: one of Euclid's elements from the axioms to they're going
Speaker 5: to go much further than this, but to proposition forty seven,
Speaker 5: which is the geometric proof of that. And in a sense,
Speaker 5: they'll all have an Aha moment no matter how they
Speaker 5: learned it in high school, that they were given something
Speaker 5: like a calculator or a black box that they just
Speaker 5: took apart and rebuilt for themselves. And this program's kind
Speaker 5: of designed to do that through engagement with the classics
Speaker 5: across all all disciplines. And I think that's very empowering
Speaker 5: in a lot of different ways. But just to pan
Speaker 5: back to the more general question, I think you could
Speaker 5: have argued it in the thirties, you can argue it today.
Speaker 5: I think many people are arguing that this is more
Speaker 5: true now than ever, that the way in which technology
Speaker 5: and science advanced, the way in which the economy and
Speaker 5: industries are increasingly disrupted and changing and evolving, that that
Speaker 5: diminishes the value of the technical skills that get you
Speaker 5: your first job and puts more of a premium on
Speaker 5: the deeper skills. And we give a long, long list,
Speaker 5: and there's not one canonical list, but the kind of
Speaker 5: critical thinking, critical reasoning, synthesis, analysis, the ability to connect
Speaker 5: things across disciplines and across disparate areas, communication.
Speaker 3: With other human beings.
Speaker 5: And I would lean on this very hard in the
Speaker 5: environment we're in right now, the screen saturated environment, the
Speaker 5: automated and AI driven environment, the ability to connect, listen,
Speaker 5: to learn from, empathize with, and engage with other human beings.
Speaker 5: That all of those things have as high a value
Speaker 5: as they've ever had, and maybe higher as we see
Speaker 5: the effects of technological disruption in the workplace. So there's
Speaker 5: an argument there that the liberal arts have long made
Speaker 5: that there's a kind of illusion that if you choose
Speaker 5: a liberal arts education, you're doing something impractical because you're
Speaker 5: actually getting those deeper skills that are going to take
Speaker 5: you farther. But look, I don't get defensive about this.
Speaker 5: Higher adds on under a lot of pressure from a
Speaker 5: lot of different angles, affordability and the question of whether
Speaker 5: people are going to get their return on investment and
Speaker 5: whether this high stakes bet they're going to place is
Speaker 5: the right bet to get them well launched economically and
Speaker 5: in their career. You know, bring it on, I say,
Speaker 5: bring on that argument. Bring on, and a lot of
Speaker 5: educators want to hear me say this. But bring on
Speaker 5: the political pressure and the political accountability. I mean, we're
Speaker 5: not given a free pass as educators. We have to
Speaker 5: make a case to society, to everybody. We're accountable to them.
Speaker 5: And I don't embrace the hand ringing that's going on.
Speaker 5: I mean, I like the things that I'm seeing in
Speaker 5: terms of the pressures on higher ed I think there
Speaker 5: are a lot of negative consequences to them, But no
Speaker 5: time for hand ringing. We're doing something wonderful every day
Speaker 5: on our campuses. We should take joy in it, pride
Speaker 5: and it optimism, and we should believe that we can
Speaker 5: convince skeptics and certainly convince good faith inquirers of the.
Speaker 3: Value of what we do. But you know, just let
Speaker 3: me invoke a couple of names.
Speaker 5: There's nobody who's more future oriented and technology oriented than
Speaker 5: you've all. Noah Harari, the kind of futurist historian. If
Speaker 5: you read his chapter on education in twenty one Lessons
Speaker 5: for the twenty first Century, very explicitly, he's saying that
Speaker 5: what's coming points back to the values that have undergirded
Speaker 5: the tradition of liberal education in the liberal arts. And
Speaker 5: I think you hear that from many different quarters. We
Speaker 5: like to quote as Recline right now because he called
Speaker 5: out Saint John's College this summer in a podcast where
Speaker 5: they were talking about AI and the effect on young minds,
Speaker 5: and he said, look, all of society is going to
Speaker 5: get people prepared for AI related jobs. We need to
Speaker 5: education to be about what it means to be human
Speaker 5: in the age of AI, so that we can go
Speaker 5: out there and engage in a free way, in an
Speaker 5: equipped way, for these disruptions that are coming. And so
Speaker 5: it goes deeper than career preparation, but it converges with
Speaker 5: career preparation. And I think that the narrowly skeptical argument
Speaker 5: is putting so much pressure on colleges to show how
Speaker 5: they're going to get that student their first great job,
Speaker 5: and without giving up on the importance of career, we
Speaker 5: have to pan back a little bit and say, we're
Speaker 5: trying to prepare students for a full life of career,
Speaker 5: citizenship and flourishing in their private and public lives. And
Speaker 5: this kind of education, it gives you those skills, gives
Speaker 5: you that context and gets you out of the narrow
Speaker 5: boxes that so much of the forward momentum of the
Speaker 5: trends in higher education are putting students in gives you
Speaker 5: more than that, gives you something broader and deeper.
Speaker 1: You see, with a lot of colleges, people have specializations,
Speaker 1: even like they applied to certain schools. Right Like, if
Speaker 1: you want to go to University of Michigan, you apply
Speaker 1: to this school or that school. Why does a school
Speaker 1: with no major get a student in a better place?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 5: And it's fair in one way to describe it as
Speaker 5: no major. You could also describe it as a fixed
Speaker 5: interdisciplinary major or a multiple major of various sorts. For
Speaker 5: a long time, we've described it as a double major,
Speaker 5: equivalent to a double major in philosophy and the history
Speaker 5: of math and science double minor and classics and comparative literature.
Speaker 5: That's reasonable, But you could describe it other ways, and
Speaker 5: we'll probably change that description at some point. You know,
Speaker 5: what's missing are all the range of pre professional tracks.
Speaker 5: We do a tremendous amount outside of the four corners
Speaker 5: of the fixed curriculum to prepare our students to launch
Speaker 5: in medicine, in law, in business. We have internship programs,
Speaker 5: internship partnerships. We fund summer study in more technical areas
Speaker 5: beyond our program that students might want to engage, and
Speaker 5: we fund study abroad in the summers. We have a
Speaker 5: lot of curricular programming and career preparatory work that we
Speaker 5: invite our students to take advantage of, and most do.
Speaker 5: And I can talk for a long time about that,
Speaker 5: as you might imagine I do with prospective parents. We've
Speaker 5: already won the battle with you, Molly, so I don't
Speaker 5: have to give you the Heartzell. I'm a parent of
Speaker 5: two high school students right now, and I care a
Speaker 5: great deal about my son's getting preparation for career in
Speaker 5: their college experience, and I hope they'll go to college
Speaker 5: despite the increasing broad skepticism about that. But of course
Speaker 5: they're free to make other choices outside of that as well.
Speaker 5: But again, I don't want to brush away any of
Speaker 5: those concerns. We do a lot, but I think what
Speaker 5: you see in the curriculum itself is the development of
Speaker 5: the kinds of skills and faculties. And I won't belabor
Speaker 5: what I said before, but the kinds of skills and
Speaker 5: faculties of mind, heart imagination that you're going to need
Speaker 5: in whatever direction you go in, and especially if you
Speaker 5: want to rise, right, I mean, there's all kinds of
Speaker 5: evidence that again, if we're not talking about your first job,
Speaker 5: we're talking about rising, that depends much more on communication
Speaker 5: skills well established, right than it does on narrowly technical skills,
Speaker 5: even in technical disciplines. And we could say more about that,
Speaker 5: so you know, for me, just to invoke the image
Speaker 5: that I often do, I say, look our students, what
Speaker 5: are they doing? Almost all the time in class. They're
Speaker 5: sitting around a table, real faces, real voices, a living
Speaker 5: conversation across different points of view, a shared inquiry where
Speaker 5: they're trying to be self critical and learn from others
Speaker 5: points of view. And they're usually doing it with a tangible,
Speaker 5: unhackable book in front of them that they're spending hours
Speaker 5: with that deepens their attention rather than fragments it. And
Speaker 5: just to invoke again another category deep literacy, right, this
Speaker 5: is an idea that's been around for a while. I
Speaker 5: think it's going to become more and more important in
Speaker 5: the post AI world. That became more important really defined
Speaker 5: itself in the post social media world. But as society
Speaker 5: moves towards a kind of postliterate state, in a deep way,
Speaker 5: the value of being able to sit and read Tony
Speaker 5: morrison novel or Homer's Iliot or Newton's Pring Kippie or
Speaker 5: Einstein's nineteen oh five paper or countless other things, to
Speaker 5: sit read, go deeply into those texts, and then be
Speaker 5: able to reason from and about them critically, not reverentially.
Speaker 5: I can't tell you how important I think that is
Speaker 5: for everyone, and how thin those experiences have gotten for
Speaker 5: so many students K through sixteen and so, you know, again,
Speaker 5: let me pause there. But it's those deeper abilities that
Speaker 5: this kind of education develops that apply to so many areas.
Speaker 5: And there are plenty of doors open for our students,
Speaker 5: candidly as there are for philosophy majors and English majors
Speaker 5: and so on, some of the derided disciplines elsewhere. But
Speaker 5: our students also do a great deal of stem, math,
Speaker 5: science and so on, so they're you know, they're Swiss
Speaker 5: army knives of the mind. They're odysseuses of the mind
Speaker 5: that can really journey anywhere effectively. I think that's what
Speaker 5: makes it so powerful for them.
Speaker 2: What are the things that Saint John's kids go on
Speaker 2: to do the most?
Speaker 5: So many go into education. That's not the way they
Speaker 5: think about it. But if you just put it all together,
Speaker 5: K through twelve Higher ed, we're always ranked very high
Speaker 5: in terms of the number percentage of our graduates that
Speaker 5: go on to ourn PhDs and all disciplines, especially humanities
Speaker 5: and social sciences. We're overweighted in jds and lawyers that
Speaker 5: again use those degrees for everything, as you know lawyers do.
Speaker 5: But this education is incredibly powerful for taking that step
Speaker 5: great preparation. Many physicians we don't have pre med but again,
Speaker 5: the way we do science and the kind of blend,
Speaker 5: the rejection of a deep divide between humanities and humanism
Speaker 5: and the sciences is actually wonderful preparation for physicians. And
Speaker 5: many see that, and many people in medicine see that,
Speaker 5: and we produce our commencement speaker last year was one
Speaker 5: of our very successful in and when they talk about
Speaker 5: how this education is a bridge to that, it's very,
Speaker 5: very natural for them. Our standard answer is eric graduate's
Speaker 5: going to do everything, all kinds of things, and there's
Speaker 5: truth to that. We're famous for our Johnny winemakers. I
Speaker 5: can talk about them a lot to you know, entrepreneurs,
Speaker 5: people that go into business, all kinds of disciplines. I
Speaker 5: do believe we lean more towards the things I just
Speaker 5: named than consultants, engineers, computer scientists. We produce some of
Speaker 5: all of those, but if you're highly motivated in those directions,
Speaker 5: you've most likely made another kind of choice with your
Speaker 5: undergraduate education.
Speaker 2: Walter, thank you for coming on.
Speaker 3: Oh it's been a great pleasure. Molly.
Speaker 5: Can I say one more thing we've talked about Saint John's.
Speaker 5: I love Saint John's College, but all the values that
Speaker 5: we've talked about, For me, it matters much much more
Speaker 5: that many many other institutions and educators embrace more, not less,
Speaker 5: of the things that we've talked about. So I often
Speaker 5: finish by saying, we don't need a thousand more Saint
Speaker 5: John's colleges. It's not the kind of thing most students
Speaker 5: will choose. Many will, and I think more will in
Speaker 5: the next generation. But we need a thousand other institutions
Speaker 5: to claw back a little bit of what our students
Speaker 5: do do all the time. And I think a lot
Speaker 5: of educators are waking up to that in response to
Speaker 5: what's going on around us with politics and technology and
Speaker 5: so on. And so may it be so that you
Speaker 5: see more of those tangible, unhackable books, that you see
Speaker 5: more classes where students are seated in a circle around
Speaker 5: the table, and so on and so forth. And I'm
Speaker 5: happy that Saint John's can be a leader and a
Speaker 5: beacon in that movement, but I do think it's a
Speaker 5: movement and a need that goes way way beyond our
Speaker 5: two campuses.
Speaker 2: Agreed. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thanks for the time.
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