Themselves. Oberlin. Big fan of Steve Hayward is the senior resident fellow of the institute of Governmental Affairs at uc berkeley and a visiting lecturer at the Uc Berkeley Law School and of course a senior fellow at pri. I heard steve back in december 1991. Steve has been affiliated with us for a very long time. He was a Ronald Reagan distinguished professor at pepperdine and also was the first conservative professor in a special program at university of colorado boulder 20132014. I think the most exciting thing about stevie as he is one of the people behind powerline. If you dont read powerline every day, you should. Charles and i were in hysterics every saturday morning looking at the week in pictures that steve sends out. If you dont get it, you must. Speaker worked with larry silverman. We were with him in corsica a few years ago for one of his conferences which was great fun. He clerked for Supreme CourtJustice Clarence thomas. He has been a fulbright distinguished chair in italy, the university of chicago, he has written several books and he hails from philadelphia. When his wife doesnt want to go on trips with him, his mother is very keen to go. They are going to my to picchu in peru very soon. Please welcome our panelists. [applause] yes, it is live. What john and i thought we would do is have a bit of a conversation, i will throw out a view additional propositions and we will have some backandforth. Then we will take some questions from the audience and see where it goes. I thought that was better than just giving standard speeches. Sally gave some headlines and i think i will start late them just slightly. One of headlines my old mentors used to have sufficient paranoia, which holds that no matter how agitated things are, its invariably the case that when you look closer, you find out that things were even worse than you thought. Case of administrative bloat on College Campuses, people think that is what is running up the cost of universities, the number of administrators has soared much faster than faculty, they are all paid very large salaries. And that is true it would however, there is a second part of it, which is, and theres been a little bit of work on press, ands made the even the New York Times. The administrators tend to be even worse than the faculty when radicalism. Deranged remember diversity on College Campus means people look different but think the same. A lot of them are drawn from some of the more politicized ideological departments. Your average college liberal professor is relatively sane compared to a lot of administrators. Its especially true at private liberal arts colleges. Sally made mention of the Oberlin College verdict. If youre not following it closely, you might be wondering why did the court find a private college liable for the actions of students off campus. One of the chief reasons was that the dean of students, an advisor to the president for diversity and inclusion, participated actively in the student protest, help the students organize, passed out their flyers, sent lots of incriminating emails about how awful the bakery was. It reinforced the harassment about some totally bogus charges. The nice thing about americans, we still have trial by jury. The jury in that part of ohio did not take too kindly to all of this. And ihat the remedy will come back to this in a couple of minutes is just about every university ought to inspire half of their administrators. It would matter which have. Things would get better if you fire half the administrators. There are few universities that have announced cutbacks in administrative positions. The reason for that is declining enrollment. We are already seeing a decline in enrollment, and that is putting a downward pressure on tuition. Colleges cutseen their sticker price, but the actual prices falling fast a lot of universities. That will get worse for demographic reasons. Think back 1011 years ago and the financial crisis. The birth rate fell by quite a lot. So the pool of young people that colleges need to draw on to fill up their classes is starting down, and its really going to go off the cliff and another four or five years. Colleges know this, so that will put more downward pressure on tuition and the ability to price. We cannot afford these 300,000 administrators, so we will see. The second thing is, we have a lot of data showing that college and university faculties, which have always been liberal, for decades and decades, this is not a new thing. There was always a certain quotient of visible radicalism. If they wreck a few english departments, thats better than having them out on the street. The problem with universities is their borders are porous, and sometimes these guys sneak out. Who would not have preferred that barack obama remained a all professor, right a law professor, right . There used to be at least some conservatives around. Jean person20 of faculties overall. 15 20 . The number has dwindled dramatically. It has been cut by about two thirds. The reasons for that are complicated and disputed. Colleges are more of an echo chamber than they have ever been. Ofpractice, it grows out what you know as think. The more people as groupthink. The more people with ideological opinions spend time together, the more radical and narrowminded they get. Thats why you see these repeated instances on college where students are a ulty member or anybody unreasonable is too mild a word. It is completely insane and off the hook. That is a big problem. I think it has two consequences. One that is obvious and wellknown, one less so. The first consequence is, the number of students majoring in the humanities and social sciences has also been plummeting in the last 25 years. A number of history majors has fallen off the cliff, english majors, philosophy. But also Political Science is holding its own, but ought to be doing better in some ways. Economics is the one exception. Of course that is the most robust and successful of the social sciences. And also the one where you find the most libertarians and conservatives and nonleftist professors. For the most part, i think that is correct. I think there is a connection there. A lot of people say students are not majoring in history anymore because they are more concerned about getting a job. They want to study stem subjects and business and economics. There may be some truth to that. I think it is because the increasingly radical content of those humanities and social Science Department simply turn off a lot of students. The majority of students are not radical or leftist themselves. The majority of students are not. The Largest Group describe themselves as moderate, to some extent. I think the canary in the coal of prominentmber universities, columbia, m. I. T. , have applied with the federal government to change their official classification. Its a funny little thing i did not even know existed. Economicswith departments are classifying , likelves as stem engineering or physics or chemistry. Why are they doing that . I think part of it is that even liberal economists who are , they look around at the other social sciences and humanities and say we dont want to be in the college of arts and sciences with all these loons. We would rather be i think it is the canary in the coal mine. Eventually big research universities. We are moving toward a situation where you are going to have a university that is stem subjects, economics, business, prelaw, Political Science, and the rest of the university, humanities and social sciences which will wither and die. Fewer students will want to be in those departments, and that will be interesting. I will mention a couple of remedies. I already mentioned firing administrators. Second, one thing to do is figure out ways to create competition within universities. A lot of you are familiar with things like the James Madison center at princeton that was founded 20 something years ago. Arizona State University has set up its own new school on economic thought and political thought that is independent of traditional departments. It now has a competitive curriculum with traditional departments. Faculty are not happy about that, but the Legislature Said this is going to happen. Another idea that has been floating around is somebody needs to step up and start a new university or to. We havent seen Something Like that since brandeis, which was 70 years ago. Finally, i wont say the craziest idea, but the one that is most remarkable not remarkable, but unconventional, and this is something the Trump Education Department might pick up just to scare people and say, what is all this fixation with a bachelors degree . Why dont we create some alternative way of certifying that someone is educated and capable, like we do for example with the cpa exam. So you can take alternative methods of education, online classes, study on your own. The Kim Kardashian approach to passing the bar exam. We should experiment with these things. Part of the story is the cartel of accrediting agencies and the nature of reinforcing that you are nothing if you dont have a ba. Maybe create a competitive avenue. Ba asof employers use the a screening mechanism to find young people that show they can create a course of study, and thats not bad. Maybe we should be even bolder than that. I will stop there. Thank Stephen Sally for inviting me to join you today. Getting steve to join berkeley is probably the only thing i have done on behalf of ideological diversity at berkeley other than continuing to exist and not leave the campus. [laughter] you can be the judge of whether it has been successful. Diagnosis. With the i am not a scholar of Higher Education policy. I think i am here more because, unlike Robinson Crusoe on the island. You are just curious, how did he survive, and what lessons can we draw just by looking at how he made it on the Desert Island . Everything i see from being one of the few conservatives at berkeley quite comports with everything that steve gave in his diagnosis of what is wrong with the universities, the academic blow to personnel. For every one new professor added to a faculty, universities are adding more than 10 administrators, over the last 2030 years. There has been a huge rise in tuition. Often subsidized by the federal government, proved very cheap student loans. Universities are not using them to add professors. They are using them to add things to attract students like , severalrms, gyms universities have added water amusement parks to their campuses. I always thought eating bad food was part of the college experience. I would not have met my wife had it not been for bad food on College Campuses, because we had to go out somewhere to eat. One thing i would emphasize that steve did not emphasize as much, though he did mention it, i think one of the main problems with Higher Education today is the elevation of identity politics and racial diversity and gender diversity, above all other valves values at the university. I think if you look at what the university was before, and this is where it started and now it is spreading to other parts of society. You have a Great University like berkeley, maybe a secondplace kind of place like stanford just teasing. The deal was you wanted to have a faculty that did the very best research for the benefit of society. At the same time you want students to the best professors were not doing the best teaching. They were doing cuttingedge research. They would teach students to learn how to take their place and do that. I think that has been replaced at most of the Top Research Universities by a desire to meet racial and gender diversity goals. Once that becomes the highest value of the university and start to suffer. You should add that at oberlin, it wasnt just an administrator, there are a lot of faculties involved in this lynch mob mentality to go after this bakery that had done nothing wrong from the case i read. The most important thing for a to achieve now is diversity. I think at berkeley, we spend many millions of dollars on racial and diversity bureaucracy. Instead, we are choosing to spend taxpayer money on gender and racial diversity issues. Every school, every department has an officer who is paid to do this every time you do a search for a new faculty member, you have to write a lengthy report about how it meets gender and racial diversity goals. Of course, we get to the terrible scandals in admissions now. Look at Harvard College. One or two people came up to me who admitted secretly they had gone to Harvard College like i did. I cannot believe the amount of distortion that has gone on in the admissions process to hit certain racial diversity goals to the extent that you take ,sian students in particular the five criteria that students are measured on, they are in the top quintile of the fifth is personality where asian students suddenly rank at the bottom. No stereotypes there. [laughter] harvardthough the admissions director admitted most of the students had never interviewed. I think asians have no personality will come to a big surprise to the billion and a half people in china and the other billion in india that might be eating our economic lunch these days. What do you do about it . What is the remedy . I differ with steves idea of disassociating i think its true in terms of diagnosis that universities can live in this world and even prosper, because what they are selling is a credential used by businesses to hire because it shows students can crawl through the mud and cracks of universities and they are so disciplined and can persevere, they can do anything a corporation wants them to do. Won the nobel prize for do i can see why you would say why do we over from these leftwing crazy people at universities who are just performing credentialing function . Lets move the credentialing function somewhere else. I know they do things like this in germany and other countries. Im not sure its a great idea. Islittle effort at reform inspired by being one of the few conservatives at yale law school. We have something called the Federalist Society in law schools. The head of the berkeley federal society is over there. She is alive, too. She didnt get killed off by anybody. It brings conservative ideas to law schools, libertarian and conservative ideas. I would have to say that was the only exposure, the only time i heard about scalia and thomas was at Federalist Society events, not in class. We want to at least expose some students to get a debate to conservative ideas. To support our alma maters. We dont have to give a blank check to the university to say lazy riverer amusement waterpark to attract the best students. Instead, give money and focused ways to programs like i think the one steve is running, and from brad,other one to bring conservative ideas to students. More and more can actually hear them. This is where the universities have to step up, in a setting where there is no riot, where are going to allow people who are so scared of hearing different ideas that they want to engage in violence to suppress it. Unfortunately, berkeley witnessed two of those, and it has been spreading all over the country. Actually, i do want to say, because it is true, berkeley will never live down its long reputation going back to the Free Speech Movement before. However, berkeley is actually quite a bit better, especially a lot of these private liberal arts colleges like oberlin, like sarah lawrence. Harvard and yale, for that matter, that behaved disgracefully. The school was running a deficit. She said, i will take whatever it takes do whatever it takes to make sure his free speech hts are not one of the problems with the campus at berkeley is it has porous borders. Realized thend i night before schapiro was going to show up, a truck showed up and installed the barriers around the perimeter and created an opening to have crowd control. They brought out an immense police force. Not want a repeat of the milo riot. Good for her, i think she deserves all the praise for that. Conservatives do get some blame here. Not responsible conservatives, but i could see berkeley likents inviting someone milo or ann coulter, they want to stick it in the face of the campus admission. They want to get the most outrageous, most frequently provocative person. I kind of understand. It is sort of if students on the left invited people from the nation of islam to speak. There would be a campus explosion. I think conservatives should try a bendmay be like schapiro, more responsible, people who are not just there who would not like a riot. I think the problem is with ann anlter or milo, they have interest in things getting shut down. I would like Heather Mcdonald or Steve Hayward show up at and engage in intelligent bates with other side ash debates with other side. That is the point. There was a book a couple years ago called becoming right, how campuses shape young conservatives. At twoterviewed students campuses. Harvard and the university of colorado boulder. Aboutlso talked a lot places like berkeley, santa barbara, ohio state. I will restate the question. Why is it that you will get students, conservative students want to have milo or ann coulter at a place like berkeley, but not yale or harvard or princeton . Its not just because those are elite ivy league schools, is because they have what harvey conspicuouslls speculativ conservativism. Have the William F Buckley program at yale that has a speaker almost every week. Its been growing like crazy. After that ridiculousness at yale a few years ago over halloween costumes, alumni quit giving money to colleges and give it to the buckley program. The point is that for students who have no conspicuous conservativism, it is quite understandable that they wan