Course, the whole of the issue of the Oberlin College dispute where the gibsons bakery was awarded 44 million in damages, which was a very exciting thing and people at Oberlin College are beside themselves. I think one of charles cousin went to oberlin and totally turned her into a marxist communist. Im not a big fan of oberlin. So Steve Hayward is the senior resident fellow at the institute of Governmental Affairs at uc berkeley and a visiting lecturer at Uc Berkeley Law School and, of course, a senior fellow at pri. And heard steve back in december 1991, our second hire, steve has been affiliated with us for a very long time. He was a Ronald Reagan distinguished professor at pepperdine and the first conservative professor in a special program at university of colorado boulder 20132014. I think the most exciting thing about steve is hes one of the people behind power line. If you dont read power line every day, you should. And the best thing on saturday morning is the weekend pictures. Charles and i were in hysterics every saturday morning looking at the weekend pictures that steve sends out. If you dont get it, you must. And our other speaker is Professor John yoo, who clerked for Larry Silberman. We were all with Larry Silberman and john in corsica a few years ago from one of johns conferences, which was great fun. He also clerked for Supreme CourtJustice Clarence thomas. Hes been a fulbright distinguished chair, in law at the university of trento in italy, the university of chicago, chapman university. Hes written several books and he hails from philadelphia, and when his wife doesnt want to go on trips with him, his mother is very keen to go and theyre going to peru soon. So please welcome our two panelists, dr. Steven hayward and Professor John yoo. [ applause ] you want us to put on this lab mic or i think were just using this okay, good. And, yes, it is live. Okay. Does this mic work . That old saying. So i thought what we thought we would do is have a bit of a conversation. Ill throw out a few initial propositions and then well have some back and forth. You can throw out your own propositions and then well take questions from the audience and see where it goes. I thought that was better than just giving your standard speeches. So sally gave me a few headlines. I think i will dilate them slightly. So the College Scene today, beyond the headlines i think are some, well, put it this way, one of my old mentors used to have his first law of insufficient paranoia, which holds that no matter how bad you think things are, it is invariably the case you look closer, you find out things are even worse than you thought. So in the case of administrative bloat on College Campuses what people think is thats whats running up the cost. Universities. The number of administrators soared much faster than faculty, all paid very large salaries. And thats true. However, there is a second part of it, which is and there has been a little bit of work on this, it made the press, even the New York Times, the administrators tend to be even worse than the faculty when it comes to derange radicalism. And thats because a lot of these, the deans of diverse taken inclusion, which remember the diversity on a College Campus means people look different but think the same. And a lot of them are drawn from some of the more politicized and ideological departments. And so, you know, your average college liberal professor is relatively sane compared to a lot of administrators, thats especially true at private liberal arts colleges. Sally made mention of the Oberlin College verdict and if youre not following it closely, you might be wondering why did the court find a college, a private college liable for the actions of students off campus. And one of the chief reasons was is that the dean of students and adviser to the president for diversity and inclusion participated actively in the student protests, helped the students organize, passed out the flyers, sent lots of incriminating emails about how awful the bakery was and reinforced the harassment about some totally bogus charges. And the next thing about america, we still have trial by jury. The jury in that part of ohio didnt think this was didnt take too kindly to all this. I think that the remedy and ill come back to this in a couple of minutes, just about every university ought to fire half of their administrators. It wouldnt matter which half. Things would get better if you hired half your administrators. Ill say that there are few universities just in last few weeks that have announced cutbacks in the administrative positions. And reason for that is declining enrollment. Were already seeing declining enrollment putting downward pressure on tuition. You havent seen colleges cut their sticker price, but the actual price you pay is falling fast and a lot of universities. And thats going to get worse for demographic reasons. Reason for that is just think back, 10, 11 years ago, the world comes to an end with the financial crisis and what happens then, 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 it is really going to go off a cliff in another four or five years. The colleges know this. This will put more downward pressure on tuition, their ability to price, and i think thats going to make a lot of them have to say we cant afford all these 300,000 administrators. So well see. I hope thats what happens. Second thing is we got a lot of good social Science Survey data showing that college and University Faculties have which have always been liberal for decades and decades, not a new thing, had a certain quotient of very visible radicalism, my own view is thats where radicals ought to be. If they wreck a few english departments thats better than having them on the street. The problem with the university is the borders are porous and sometimes these guys sneak out. Who wouldnt have preferred that barack obama remained a law professor . Instead he snuck out and next thing you know hes president of the united states. Okay. But used to be some conservatives around, 15, 20 of the faculty overall and you can always find one or two or three and most of the social sciences and the humanities and that number in the last 25 years has dwindled dramatically, cut by twothirds. The reasons for that are complicated and disputed. The point is colleges are more of an echo chamber than they have ever been and in practice, a lot of good social science on this, grows out of what you we all know as group think, is the more people with a common opinion, especially ideological opinion spend time together, the more radical they get. The more narrow minded they get. And thats why you see these repeated instances on College Campuses of the students, faculty member, visiting speaker, that strike anybody, not on a College Campus, as utterly unreasonable is a mild word to describe it. Completely insane and off the hook. And so that is a big problem. I think it has two consequences. One that is obvious and well known, one less so. First consequence is if you know the data, the number of students majoring in the humanities and social sciences has also been plummeting in the last 25 years. Number of history majors has fallen off a cliff, english majors, philosophy. But also Political Science is holding its own, but ought to be doing better in some ways, sociology, economics is the one exception. And, of course, thats the most robust of the social sciences and the most successful. And also the one where you find the most libertarians and conservatives and nonleftist professors for the most part i think thats correct. And i think there is a connection there. A lot of people say students arent taking arent majoring in history anymore because theyre more concerned about getting a job, want to study s. T. E. M. Subjects and business and economics. And there may be some truth to that, though there say reason to dispute that finding, i think it is because the increasingly radical content of those humanities and social science departments simply turn off a lot of students, the majority of students who are not radical themselves, not leftist themselves. The majority of students are not. The large plurality of students describe themselves as moderates to some extent. I mention economics. Really curious thing was happening right now, that i think is a canary in the coal mine. At a number of prominent universities, columbia, m. I. T. , trying to think of where else, have applied with the federal government to change their official classification. It is a funny little thing i didnt even know existed. But you can has to do with various bureaucratic ways of Higher Education, classified and accredited. Economics departments are reclassifying them receives as s. T. E. M. Fields. Like engineering or physics or chemistry. Why are they doing that . Well, i think part of it is even liberal economists who are data driven, 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 these loanons. We would rather be in a more rigorous part of the university. I think youre already seeing a de facto divorce in universities taking place where rapidly especially big research universities, moving toward a situation where youre going to have the a university that is s. T. E. M. Subjects, economics, business, prelaw to the extent thats still done in a selfconscious way and Political Science and the rest of the university of the humanities and Goofy Social Sciences which will wither and die and everyone will understand, theyre all crazy people and no one will want to not no one, but fewer students will want to be in those departments and that will be an interesting one. Finally, ill mention a couple of remedies and provoke john, i hope. I already mentioned firing administrators. Second, one thing to do is figure out ways to create competition within universities. I know a lot of you are familiar with things here in california, like the hoover institution, of course. Stanford. Also the James Madison center at princeton, Robbie George founded 20 some years ago. Arizona State University has set up its own new school on economic thought and political thought that is independent of the traditional departments. And it now has a competitive curriculum in the traditional departments and the faculty are not happy about that, but the legislature says this is going to happen, thats nice. Another idea that has been thrown around is maybe somebody needs to step up and start a new university or two. Real prestigious elite university. We havent seen Something Like that now since brandeis, which is 70 some years ago. And thats it, we can talk about that some. Finally, the craziest idea, the one that is the most remarkable, not remarkable, reallien conventional, this is something that trump education might take up just to scare people is say, what is all this fixation with the bachelors degree . Why dont we create some alternative way of certifying that someone is educate and capable, like we do the cpa exam, so you can take alternative methods of education, online classes, study on your own, and the Kim Kardashian approach to passing the bar exam. Well, maybe. We should experiment with these things. Part of the story is the cartel of the accreditation agencies, which push colleges to the left. And the nature of colleges reinforcing that. Youre nothing if you dont have a ba. Maybe create some competitive avenue that the wider world that wants to employ people will know, here is a person with some skills. A lot of employers use the ba as a screening mechanism to find people that show they have the discipline to complete a course of study. Thats not bad. Maybe we should be bolder than that. I will stop there. See if you want to add, contest, whatever. Wasni want to thank steve an sally for inviting me to join you today. Getting steve to join berkeley is probably the only thing ive done on behalf of ideological diversity at berkeley other than continuing to exist and not leave the campus h you be t. You be the judge of if it has been successful. I agree with the diagnosis im not a scholar of Higher Education, policy. I think im here more because, like, you know, im, like Robinson Crusoe on the island. Youre just curious, how did you survive and what lessons can we draw by looking around on how we made it on the desert island. Very happy to share stories and lessons. Everything i see from being one of the few conservatives at berkeley comports with everything that steve gave in his diagnosis of what is wrong with the universities, academic, bloat and personnel. I think i read a figure for every one new professor added to a faculty, universities are adding more than ten administrators in the last 20, 30 years. There has been a huge rise in tuition, often subsidized by the federal government through very cheap student loans. And universities are using those theyre not using them to add professors, using them to add things to attract students like better dorms, gyms, several universities that have added water amusement parks to their campuses. I always thought eating bad food was part of the college experience, not i would not have met my wife if it were not for bad food in College Campuses, we had to go off campus somewhere to eat. But one thing i would add or maybe emphasize that steve didnt emphasize as much, though i think he did mention it, is one of the i think one of the main problems with Higher Education today is the elevation of identity politics and racial diversity and gender diversity among all other values in the university. I think if you look at what the university was before this it is not that this came late, this is where it started, now spreading to other parts of society. A Great University like a berkeley, maybe stanford, just teasing, the deal was you wanted to have a faculty that did the very best research for the benefit of society. And at the same time you want students to surround the faculty. So they can learn from the very best people. The best professors were not the best teachers. The best professors doing the cutting edge research. We want excellence and research and they were teaching the students who would be around them 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 gender and racial diversity goals. And so once that becomes the highest value of the university and all other values take second place, of course, universities are going to suffer and so the story about oberlin is a great example. Bureaucrat and professors, you should also add that at oberlin, wasnt just an administrator, there were a lot of faculty also involved in this kind of lynch mob mentality to go after this bakery which had done nothing wrong as far as i can tell from the case i read. And they see that as the most important thing that for the university to achieve now is diversity. Where all the bureaucrats being hired and diversity and inclusion. I think at berkeley we spend many millions of dollars on racial and diversity bureaucracy. I think 1 million could put, what, about 50 undergraduates free through berkeley. Instead were choosing to spend taxpayer money on gender and racial diversity issues. Thats just the tip of the iceberg. Every school, every department has an officer who is paid to do this. Every time you do a search for new faculty member, you have to write a lengthy report about how it meets gender and racial diversity goals. The other thing steve didnt get to, the terrible scandals in College Admissions now look at Harvard College, one or two people came up to me before the event 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 just to hit certain racial diversity goals to the extent take asian students in particular, on the five criteria that students are measured on, they are in the top four and the fifth one is personality, asian students rank at the bottom. Even though the no stereotypes there. No, no. Even though the harvard admissions director admitted that most of those students had never been interviewed by a harvard admissions officer. I think the asians have no personality will come as a big surprise to the billion and a half people in china and the other billion in india who might be eating our economic lunch these days. So i think the interesting thing is what do you do about it . What is the remedy . I differ with steves idea of sort of disassociating what i think is true in terms of diagnosis, universities can live in this world, even prosper because what theyre selling is a kind of credential that is used by businesses to hire because it shows that students can crawl through the mud and crap of universities and theyre so disciplined and they can persevere. Well, they can do anything a corporation wants them to do. I wish this werent true, but a fellow named Michael Spence won a nobel prize in economics about what education actually is. I can see the merits, steve would say, why do we overfund these left wing crazy people at universities who are really just performing credentialing functi functions, lets move the funks somewhere else. I know they do things like this in germany and other countries. Im not sure it is a great idea. My little effort at reform is inspired by being one of the few conservatives at yale law school. Something ca