CSPAN - Amherst College President Discusses Higher Education

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Feb. 18, 2025 16:31-18:06 - CSPAN

01:34:53

Amherst College President Discusses Higher Education

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frederick hess

10:31

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pedro echevarria

cspan 03:43

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rollye james

00:04

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unidentified		You know, as compared to doing what's wrong.
		And also help perhaps even make Jerusalem an international city with no flag and protecting what is the new borders of Israel and the Israeli people within it while protecting the Palestinians.
		It would be a show to the world that we're doing the right thing and it would work for us.
		It would alleviate a great deal of animosity against this country and help us in so many ways.
		And, you know, that's the solution.
		We should talk about solutions and we should be real about them.
		Thank you.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Pat New York, the New York Times reporting that Russia released another American held on drug charges Monday.
		What the Kremlin acknowledged was a goodwill gesture in the eve of those talks between senior Russian officials and the U.S. officials in Saudi Arabia.
		The American Caleb Byers Wayne was arrested February 7th in a Moscow airport on charges of carrying a small amount of marijuana in response to the United States.
unidentified		We'll leave this here with a quick reminder that you can watch it in its entirety if you go to our website, c-span.org.
		And now to a discussion on higher education, hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.
		Live coverage on C-SPAN.
		There you go.
		There you go.
		That's what we like to hear.
		I spent some time in the Hudson Valley of New York, not far from western and central Massachusetts, and I know how beautiful Amherst is.
		And I have friends who went there, and I visited the campus often, and I always admired it greatly.
		And so I'm particularly happy that you're here, Michael.
		AI is also very involved in the discussion of what needs to change in higher education.
		So I begin by saying what we love about the great colleges and universities of our country.
		But I want you all to know, and I certainly want Michael to know, that we think there needs to be some change.
		Confidence in higher education in colleges and universities is way down.
		Polls show that.
		Only 36% of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education.
		That's down from 57% in 2015.
		Worse, 32% had little or no confidence compared to 10% in 2015.
		So 32% of Americans have little or no confidence in higher education.
		So our view is that part of this is because of actions and leadership and behavior that's taken place on the major universities of our country.
		A lack of respect for viewpoint diversity, not enough viewpoints from maybe the right of center in politics in America, and students and others feel that that's something that's missing.
		An insufficient respect for our country and a respect for the values that our country stands for and the accomplishments our country has had.
		And maybe even a sort of loss of commitment to the canon, to the great works of scholarship and literature and art instead of a sort of favoritism toward new disciplines that aren't quite as, in our opinion, liberal as they should be.
		So there's a lot to be discussed, a lot to talk about.
		We're involved in it in a big way, not only with our head of education policy, Rick Hess, who's done an outstanding job on all of these issues for a long time, but also with Yuval Levin and Ben and Jennifer, who are active in the movement to bring schools of civic thought to universities.
		This is something we are committed to, we're involved in, we play a big role in, and we're looking for allies and friends like President Michael Elliott to join us in this fight.
		Thanks very much.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Thanks, Robert.
		So today's specific conversation is about restoring faith in elite higher conversation, restoring faith in elite higher education.
		Michael Elliott, President of Amherst, the 20th president of Amherst College, was kind enough to join me today.
		You know, there is so much heat and so much frustration and so much anger, much of which somebody like me tends to feel is justified, that it can crowd out the sensible, useful, constructive dialogue and just our opportunity to remind ourselves that we can engage in this work like educators and grown-ups who are serious about the importance of institutions like Amherst and its brethren.
		Michael's the 20th president of Amherst, as I said.
		He's also a 1992 alum, a scholar of public history and the history of fiction.
		He spent nearly 25 years as a professor and administrator at Emory University before being dragged back to the North.
		His books include Custerology and the Culture Concept.
		He holds an MA and PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia.
		Michael, let me start with this.
		What's it like to be a college president at an elite institution right now?
unidentified		Yeah, it's a great place to start.
		Do I get to lie down and on the couch and tell you everything?
		Listen, there are lots of challenges.
		There are lots of hard things.
		The environment of mistrust, which I would say is not just external but internal to colleges and universities, makes it much more difficult to address some of the challenges that we were facing.
		And we're going to talk, I think, about some of the hard things that we know need to improve.
		We won't get to them all.
		But I also want to say, maybe just to start, that one of the things I think is missing from the conversation about colleges and universities and what it's like to be in leadership is actually there's a great deal of joy on college campuses.
		And as college president, I get to experience that.
		I don't know if all of my comrades do who are leading their institutions, but I really feel like I get to be part of an institution that believes in advancing knowledge for the common good.
		I get to see young men and women develop over four years and become better versions of themselves.
		I get to work with incredibly smart people who are interested in tackling difficult challenges and who actually engage in fairly robust, divergent conversations about them.
		I don't think there's nearly as much orthodoxy or monolithic thinking as Robert was just suggesting on college campuses.
		And it's a fun place to be.
		If you love being a part of a place that takes on hard problems, I suspect you do, that's why you're here.
		It's a fun place to be.
		And I'll put in a particular pitch in case anybody in the room or out there is thinking about becoming a small college president.
		It's particularly fun to do it at a small college because you can actually get to know individuals.
		And, you know, I do know some students by name.
		I do get to go to games, lectures, those kinds of things.
		So I'm having a good time.
		I know you're worried about it.
		So I wanted to put you at ease.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		It's a nice thing.
		You know, for viewers who may not be specifically familiar, a lot of the, you know, we hear a lot about the Yales and the Harvards and the Ohio States.
		So Amherst is a small...
unidentified		Safety schools.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, safety schools.
		Amherst is a small, selective liberal arts college.
		You guys are much more focused on what's happening in the undergraduate program.
unidentified		Entirely focused.
		We don't have any graduate programs.
		So our entire purpose is educating students during those four years of their undergraduate education.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		So how much of the backlash over these big institutions is playing out internally, externally at a place like Amherst?
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		And that decline that Robert alluded to in public trust, has it played out for you guys in the same way that it's played out at bigger institutions?
unidentified		So, you know, I don't know what it's like to be at those IVs over the last couple of years, but certainly that's played out on our campus.
		You know, one of the challenges of being an institution that's not in the news all the time is that your constituents, whether they're alumni, parents, assume that some sort of analog of what they're reading about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post is happening on your campus.
		So some of it's just education.
		This is a different campus.
		Things are not always playing out on the same way here, which is also true of campuses of that size.
		But I think the larger thing, and Robert was right to allude to it, is the declining trust in institutions.
		And we feel that too.
		I feel that personally.
		And it's not just from one side of the aisle.
		I know that it's more pronounced among conservatives and people who identify with the Republican Party.
		But the polls also show that there's a decline in trust from people who identify as Democrats and who are left of the aisle.
		And this has been something that I've been talking about with faculty and something that concerns me greatly.
		You hear it obviously in things like philanthropic conversations, but also skepticism from parents, even skepticisms from students and faculty.
		And I will say there's a great deal of anxiety on campuses right now about our institutional future.
		And I think it's fair to say that anxiety has been heightened by the political environment of just the last four weeks and counting, where it feels like our credibility is being undermined constantly by new orders coming from the administration.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Now, at public universities, I would get how that distrust immediately translates in a conversation with the legislature.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		How does that play out at a private elite institution?
unidentified		Yeah, it's softer.
		It is not, and you're right, it's not through the legislature, and we definitely enjoy a lot more autonomy than a small institution.
		But every campus, colleges and universities are places where power and influence are diffuse, they should be.
		Where while we're not democratically run, the best decisions come through a kind of combination of bottom-up and top-down energy.
		And it makes it harder to have those kinds of difficult conversations about everything, future resource allocation, the nature of our intellectual mission, when everybody is skeptical of one another.
		And we are in a place where I think there's a lot of skepticism and cynicism.
		And that's just where we are.
		And the best way to work through that, or at least one way to work through that, is to be able to have conversations like this one.
		I think it's a fair criticism that elite selective institutions have not done as much outreach as they could to people who fundamentally disagree with some of the things that are going on there and that they haven't always been willing to engage in public dialogue with people who think profoundly differently Than they are.
		So that's one reason I'm here.
		I'm glad.
		I appreciate your invitation to me to come and share the stage.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Hey, happy to do it.
		So let's take that.
		So obviously, as you've alluded to, there is a lot of anger at higher ed, elite higher ed on the right, some on the left, but certainly on the right.
		We've seen that in a number of the executive orders issued by the Trump administration.
		We've seen that manifested in concerns that colleges have few or no conservatives and Republicans on faculty, especially in places where that actually really seems to matter, like in the social sciences and humanities, that they have been had a double standard as far as policing campus speech, where microaggressions were a subject of deep concern up until October 7th, after which suddenly anything seemed to go.
		Which of these criticisms or concerns do you think of as reasonable, legitimate?
		And which of these do you think are unfair or caricatures?
unidentified		Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
		One of the criticisms you didn't mention that I would start where I think the criticism is very valid is about cost, which I think, to my mind, is one of the things that fuels the anger over higher education, which is the sticker cost and then the actual cost and the confusion over how much it costs and the lack of transparency around that.
		I think that's a place where higher education has failed to contain the price.
		And honestly, I don't know what the answer is to that is going to be.
		But that's a criticism that I think is very valid.
		We're in the high 80s and we'll be over $90,000 next year.
		Although I have to talk to my board of trustees about that.
		But we are now our net tuition cost because of our financial aid has been basically flat with inflation for the last 10 years.
		So we have a model where we have a very high sticker cost, but many of our students receive substantial financial aid policies, packages.
		This is how I attended Amherst, so I feel passionately about need-based financial aid.
		Students from half of American households, anybody in the bottom half of the income in an American household, would receive basically free tuition room and board if they were to attend Amherst.
		If you're in the 80%, the bottom four quartiles, bottom four quintiles, you're going to receive roughly the equivalent of tuition as part of the financial aid.
		So that's the model that we have.
		It's a model that most other institutions in our sphere have.
		And there's things that are good about it and things that are not.
		But our costs are primarily driven by the rising costs of personnel.
		And to get to another fair criticism, I think that we have, as institutions, been very reactive in the last, say, 10 to 15, maybe 20 years, to the needs of students and sometimes overreactive.
		And this gets to your kind of microaggressions point.
		And the way that I would say this relates to cost is that we've often tried to meet student needs by hiring more staff to address problems.
		And they often do great work and sometimes they actually make the problems go away.
		So at Amherst, for instance, 15 years ago, I've seen this data, we had an achievement gap between students who came in who are on the more affluent side, tended to be white, they were graduating at higher rates than low-income students and students of color.
		We've closed those gaps.
		So that's a real result that I think we should care about.
		But we've kind of solved every problem by hiring more people, and that's one of the reasons the cost has gone up.
		And that simply can't continue.
		And we know that we have to figure out how we're going to rein that in.
		So that's one big area where I disagree.
		The sense that we have probably been too reactive, too responsive to students in the moment and without really thinking through what we were doing.
		Sometimes, especially through and after COVID, erring on the side of flexibility at the cost of responsibility, I think is a fair criticism.
		And I think a criticism that I don't think is just from the right, but is also from the left, that we treat students too much like consumers who are involved in a financial transaction and not enough like students who are there to be educated and all of the challenge and difficulty that comes with that.
		I think that's a place where I think there is agreement on the right and the left, that we need to get back to a model where we are forcing students to, places like Amherst at least, engage in a very difficult, rigorous education that will cause them at times discomfort and stress.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		How about the concerns that campuses are home, primarily home to one intellectual perspective, to one ideology?
unidentified		Yeah, so I would certainly, first of all, I don't necessarily think of most things as just having two approaches and two ideologies.
		And I certainly think that if you believe that a campus is intellectually monolithic, you should come join me at an Amherst faculty meeting where I can get 150 people in a room who can barely agree on what to order for lunch.
		They have a lot of different perspectives.
		There are serious arguments that are taking place.
		And I would also say that a crucial part of academic freedom is the responsibility to ensure that you're engaging with viewpoints that are different from your own and bringing those into the classroom, bringing those into the academy, and that we haven't always lived up to that responsibility.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		How do you know how effectively faculty are doing that?
		If the point is like, look, you know, if you surveyed our faculty, they might be mostly Democrats, but that's not the point because they're engaging different.
		How do you know whether they're doing that or not?
unidentified		It's a hard thing to gauge.
		And I really appreciate your first point because I don't think we would ever want to get to the point where I'm asking faculty how they vote when they hire them.
		That feels like a very slippery slope to go down and could lead to all kinds of unintended consequences.
		There are ways that we ask those questions.
		The most rigorous one at Amherst is through the tenure process, where we look very carefully, I have to say it's a very impressive process, where we not only look at individual teaching evaluations from students, we actually ask Amherst students to write what we call retrospective letters.
		That is, we survey them letters.
		Say, Rick, you took a class a year ago with Professor Hoare.
		Can you tell us about that experience?
		Not all students do, but that offers a more comprehensive way for students to reflect on that experience.
		And that gives us an insight into whether or not teachers really are engaging fully with students, whether they are making room for them in the classroom to have principal disagreement, and whether they're living up to their responsibilities.
		A premise of academic freedom is that after tenure, we afford them greater latitude to be able to fulfill that responsibility.
		It is an ethic of the profession.
		And I think the country has been served very well by embracing academic freedom over the last century.
		I think it's driven a lot of the great scientific discoveries.
		I think it's driven a lot of the great research in the humanities.
		And I would be loath to give that up for a system where we're scrutinizing and supervising and micromanaging the teaching in the classroom.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Of course, the concerns of some of the critics are that, you know, for instance, DEI statements functionally have become that.
		Many of these institutions, in both recruiting students and in hiring faculty, are actually asking, do you share these perspectives in talking about issues like abortion or criminality and disproportionate arrests, that it can be very hard for faculty at some of these institutions to ask questions which are deemed politically incorrect.
		Right, right.
		So I guess part of the question, so I very much respect what you're saying, but to the extent that the danger is that there are social norms, that there are ideological blinders on campus or professional associations, how do you as a leader of a liberal arts institution make sure that faculty are encouraged and embracing that broader inquiry you're talking about?
unidentified		That's a really good question.
		I can't say I have an answer to that that I'm fully satisfied with myself.
		This is something that I think a lot about.
		And I'd start by saying when I talk to faculty, they do express some of this concern.
		And actually, a lot of what they talk about is not just the atmosphere from their peers, but actually from students.
		And I will say one of the challenges of this environment of mistrust and anxiety that I've been describing is a sense that faculty have that if they say something that gets judged in a certain way, that it will be brought to the attention of administrators, that it will be circulated on social media, that you notice that there are various websites that love to publicize things that, it's just an era,
		and this I think is one of the things that drives institutional mistrust, not just in the academy, but in the world in general, that has very little room for error and grace, right?
		And a classroom should be a place that's full of error and grace, right?
		Including, you know, I've made lots of mistakes in front of a classroom.
		Luckily, I stopped doing full-time teaching, sort of shifted to administration about the same moment when iPhones became ubiquitous.
		And I do think there are faculty who actually do fear being filmed in class and that a clip might be circulated in some way that takes something that they say out of context or just records them at an off moment.
		But to get back to your larger question, I think first of all, as a leader, I have to very clearly articulate the value of both academic freedom and freedom of expression to the campus.
		Those are not the same things, but they overlap.
		And I've been trying to do that over the last three years.
		I need to model that for myself and sometimes embrace and show up for speakers and visitors with different viewpoints on issues that are contentious.
		We really tried to model that on our campus last year in the aftermath of October 7th by inviting through the president's office a variety of speakers who occupied a wide range of opinions on what was transpiring in Israel and Gaza.
		And that was, I think, one way of putting that into practice.
		But it's more than events.
		It has to be an ethos.
		And how you inculcate an ethos into an institution is something that I'm kind of working on every day.
		So we have groups on campus who are reading Cass Sustein's book on free speech on campus.
		I'm doing a lot to make sure that everybody on campus understands that we do have a statement of academic and freedom of expression that includes the idea that people will encounter ideas that are offensive and that the response to that should be more speech rather than shutting it down.
		So we're going to have to build this over time.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Well, I love this point about Anita.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		In fact, let me quote from your commitment to free expression statement from last summer.
unidentified		a nightmare.
unidentified		My words are being thrown back.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		No, no, it's actually, I think it's, I wish every college president would issue a statement like this.
		You said Amherst has a responsibility to foster a community where this open exchange can thrive, where curiosity is unfettered by political pressures or the temptation to seek easy answers to difficult questions, where we learn together in a spirit of mutual respect, and where we support the right of others to disagree with us.
		I mean, I think I find that a hugely admirable statement.
		I guess I'm curious, how have you gone about putting that into practice and where have you encountered challenges?
unidentified		So obviously it's a set of ideals.
		It's not easy to do that.
		It was easy to write, but it's not easy to actually do that.
		If it were easy, it wouldn't be education, right?
		It wouldn't be learning.
		And I do think that one of the things that we have to remember and kind of remind ourselves who work on college campuses is that this is something we're trying to teach students over the course of four years.
		They're not going to come, especially in this moment, having necessarily embraced this set of ideals.
		We are trying to make it into an ethos.
		I am trying to spend time with different groups on campus talking about what this means.
		We're doing even some reframing of admissions materials around the idea of curiosity as being a driving value of the institution.
		We're thinking about how we can build this into programs like orientation, but it is going to take time and it's going to be an ideal.
		We're never going to fully execute on that statement.
		You're always going to find places where we fall short.
		I would say the pushback that I have received is maybe not what you had in mind when you asked the question in terms of people standing up and saying, well, I don't believe that to be true or you should shut that down.
		It's more along the lines of what I was trying to describe earlier, where faculty and some staff as well say, well, that's great, but we're really afraid that if we try to push our students too hard, they're not ready for it, they're going to resist, or I can't get them to talk in the classroom.
		One of the things that we're going to do this spring is use some questions from a national survey of college students about their willingness to speak up inside and outside the classroom on difficult topics.
		We've stolen, borrowed, if you're out there listening from the Heterodox Academy, some of their questions, and we're going to do our own survey.
		I suspect our results will mirror the national results, but it'll be nice to have some amorous data that we can then chew on ourselves and think about what that means.
		And even that act of asking that, I think will send a signal that it's important to us to think about how we're going to address it.
		I'll say the other challenge, in all the challenges that we've talked about, that I think we probably share our concern about that really cuts against this is the mental health challenges that I'm sure I know you because you work especially in K-12 are very familiar with the rising levels of especially anxiety and oppression among young people.
		That's true on our campus.
		is true on every campus.
		Those forms of mental health challenges make people less interested in taking risks, intellectual and otherwise, less willing to engage with people who disagree with them.
		And that, I think, in some ways is a bigger form of resistance than anything else, right?
		How do we move beyond this moment where people in fact seem to want to retreat into the most comfortable versions of themselves and of a peer group and break them out of that?
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, let me ask you a question that ties together a couple of the strands you've talked about.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		You know, you alluded to devices on campus in terms of cameras in the classrooms, but also, you know, iPhones in students' hands.
unidentified		Sure.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Surgeon General, we know that college-age youth are spending seven hours a day on their phones.
		You've alluded to kind of the mental and emotional fragility, especially coming out of the pandemic.
		And we also know that the amount of time that students report working in college nationally, not at Amherst, I don't know specifically, but nationally, is down dramatically.
		It's half what it was half a century ago.
		It's down over the last 20 years.
		So full-time four-year college students now report between class and homework doing maybe 20, 22 hours a week.
		They're spending the rest of the time not with friends as much, but much more on phones, social media, and gaming.
		So I guess one of the challenges, the Atlantic did a long story on this last year, which suggests it's now safe for even my friends on the left to talk about, is whether we have relaxed expectations for students too much, whether we have too much grade inflation, whether out of sensitivity to emotional well-being, we've cut back on rigor.
		Curious how you've wrestled with these questions of distracted youth, workloads, and ensuring that an Amherst degree is a rigorous education.
unidentified		This is a great set of questions, and you packed a lot in there.
		I will say I definitely think that my friends on the left share your concern about phones and about mobile devices.
		The Jonathan Haight book, I think, was a really seminal moment.
		And I'll say I'm hopeful about what I'm reading, about what's going on in K through 12.
		By the time they get to college, in some ways, this behavior has already baked in.
		I will say, not long ago, a student stopped me in the dining hall.
		I was having lunch and said, well, President Elliott, if you could do anything, wave your hands, make one thing change at Amherst, what would it be?
		I said, well, I would have a big box, and when you all showed up, you would put your phones in there, I would lock it up, and I'd give them back to you in four years.
		And this student looked at me like I had six heads.
		Like, how would I possibly survive?
		And we have actually done some programming around this.
		We invited this year, we have a common read every year, like many campuses do.
		We invite the author to lecture.
		This year, we invited somebody who wrote a book called How to Do Nothing, which is all about unplugging from the attention economy and smartphones.
		So we've tried to do some work around that.
		I would also say that my Amherst colleagues would probably say that their experience of students and their engagement with academic work mirrors the national trends.
		I can't verify that with data, but I think that they also share that concern.
		What they would say, though, is it's probably less about them being on them phones, their phones by themselves, and more about their desire to fill up with other kinds of activities, the kind of hyper-credentialing, the worries about internships and other kinds of activities that can translate into work as well as other kinds of social and non-social activities.
		So this is something I think we really have to work on.
		Here too, I don't have an easy answer.
		We are worried about grade inflation at Amherst.
		We are worried that during COVID, for very good reasons, every faculty member and the Amherst faculty are incredibly devoted to their students.
		But the Amherst faculty bent themselves out of shape to be flexible with deadlines, with assignment structures, and that we need to move back to instilling more responsibility into students.
		And so, we're going to have to figure out how do we start talking to students about what that responsibility entails.
		One of the great things about Amherst, I think you might disagree about this, we have an open curriculum, which means that students need to fulfill a major, they need to take a certain number of courses, have to take a first-year seminar, but otherwise they do not have any divisional or distribution requirements that they have to fulfill.
		The value of that, and there are pros and cons, is that it enables us a chance to talk to students about the fact that they are responsible for their education in a way that's not true at many other institutions.
		And I think we are going to have to fold this into this, you know, the flip side of freedom is responsibility.
		And that being an Amherst student requires a lot of responsibility.
		And that includes the rigors of the classroom.
		And that academic rigor is not, in fact, something that is detrimental to one's mental health.
		But in fact, engaging in academic rigor at the highest level is the most mentally healthy thing that one can do.
		It's made my life so much richer and I hope made me a more resilient person.
		I've never learned how little I knew than in the Amherst College classroom.
		For me, being on Amherst College's campus for four years was an exercise in learning what it means not to be the smartest person in the room.
		And I think that's been a great life skill.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		That's my day-to-day.
unidentified		Mine too.
		And I think, you know, I think that we've somehow, again, worried about mental health challenges, worried about student success, all coming from good impulses.
		We've lost some of that.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		You know, I mean, one of the things that I think crops up is for individual faculty, it's a dilemma.
		Because I've talked to a lot of faculty who would like to get back to assigning students 100 pages of reading a week.
		But on Rate My Professor, you get torched if you're, you know, students passed a word with there's no upside.
		Most institutions, it's not like you get any praise or attaboys for being a rigorous classroom teacher.
		So it feels like we've stacked the deck for teachers to kind of lean into this.
unidentified		So this is the downside of using teaching evaluations as part of your evaluation process.
		And I don't know a way out of this.
		We're actually talking about some ideas about how we could change the teaching evaluation process to try to recalibrate this.
		But you're right.
		Individually as a professor, listen, if I have a room size of this, if I give you all A's, you don't show up at my office hours, you're all happy.
		You may be giving nice ratings on my professor, which I may want or don't want.
		But it's certainly a lot of my life might be more pleasant.
		We need to be hiring faculty who believe in the value of rigor, who believe in the education of students, and we need to, again, return to that language of education.
		What does it mean to engage in a rigorous education?
		We are a liberal arts institution, and not every institution in the United States is, and that's fine.
		I think institutions in the United States should do different things.
		That's a value and should be a strength of the American system.
		But we are a highly selective, elite institution that should be preparing students not just to get a job, but to contribute to society as productive citizens and actually be leaders in all different ways.
		And if we are not offering them the challenges of a rigorous education, we're selling ourselves short on that mission.
		Every generation has to answer in a new way what that means.
		I do think that there are students who are working very hard at Amherst academically.
		I think there are faculty who are pushing them as hard as they can.
		But I don't think we've necessarily developed the right vocabulary for what a liberal education actually entails.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, you talked before about an ethos around inquiry.
		For instance, an ethos around the notion that a full-time student is somebody who's engaging in academics full-time, 35 hours a week instead of 22 hours a week.
		Are there things that, especially, again, a liberal arts institution, so there's other institutions with other missions, selective institution where you know folks want to come to you, you know they have excelled or they want to make it in the doors, there's some sense that we've created an environment where they expect to get a B or better, they expect to graduate, and so there's...
unidentified		You've got to up your game, I think B plus, A minus.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		You know, at Harvard it's a 3A, right?
		So you've got to make sure you keep it up with the next.
		Right.
		But what can you do from the president's office?
		What can the leadership of institution do to start to get professors back so that we can start to reset that ethics?
unidentified		So I think what you just said is really critical.
		It's just that the leadership can emphasize that they have professors back when they do this and that they're going to, and they and their teams, and you know, I have a lot of people who do student advising, are going to support faculty when the students come to their advisor and say, oh my gosh, so-and-so is an ogre, they're so inflexible, they're assigning a novel a week, and that's impossible.
		Actually, this is actually an Amherst education.
		It's also to lift up and support the faculty who are willing.
		So we have a department on campus right now where I understand the faculty have talked together about this problem and that they are going to be talking to all of their classes using some of the same language about what a distribution of grades will look like and that they think that by doing this all together they will have each other's backs.
		And I'm not saying the department in part because they're just starting and I want to let them see how the experiment works.
		But if it works, I will be talking about it a lot more and seeing if other departments are willing to emulate this.
		It is true that authority and influence at a college or university is diffuse.
		That's a strength of the system.
		Places that have tried to mandate kind of from the top down some reforms, it mostly hasn't worked.
		And we do have to figure this one out or else we're going to not just devalue our degree.
		That makes it sound like it's a monetary problem.
		Our problem right now is that we have too many students who come in and think that our purpose is to credential them so that they're on a path to whatever professional goal they have, whether it's Wall Street or coming to work for AI or Capitol Hill or med school.
		And yes, if you receive an Amherst education, that will be an excellent credential to moving you to any of those places.
		I think you should hire some Amherst graduates here.
		But only if it's an Amherst education.
		And the education has to have a value for its own sake.
		I also think that's one of the places where the right and the left can agree, that there's something intrinsic to education that should be more than just skills training.
		Those are different things.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		You know, I can't believe it's taken us this long to get to it, but I feel like I'd be remiss.
		DEI.
		Supreme Court in 2023 obviously struck down race-conscious admissions as violating equal protection for a college like Amherst, which is highly selective.
		I'm curious how you've adjusted to that.
		And given, for instance, the new guidance from the Department of Education over the weekend that that holding has now been extended more generally to DEI activities on campus, curious kind of how you're thinking about admissions and where you think the conversation about DEI were the critics off base and where do you think they have a point?
unidentified		Yeah.
		So let's start with admissions.
		First of all, we both disagreed with the ruling and are complying with it.
		Just to be very clear, we actually wrote an amicus brief against the plaintiffs.
		I can't remember who were the plaintiff, who were the defendant in the lawsuit, but in favor of being able to consider race as part of admissions, which Amherst had been doing for many years, because we believe that talent is equally distributed across the country and that outcomes are not based on the way our K through 12 system is currently structured.
		And we also believe that having a racially diverse class is a critical part of preparing future citizens and future citizen leaders for the country.
		We lost the case and we also follow the rule of law, which is something else that Amrist believes in.
		So we are no longer considering race as part of the admissions process.
		We are trying to think about how are we making sure that we have a robust pipeline of diverse applicants, which is, I think, something that is both fully supported by the Supreme Court decision and something that even conservatives would agree with, and that we make sure that those people that we do admit understand that Amherst is a place where they can be successful.
		So we were less racially diverse this last year.
		We were actually not as successful in those strategies as we had hoped to be, and we hope to be more successful this year, but we will fully comply with the law because we do follow the rule of law.
		You know, the new Department of Education guidance, which I imagine many people listening or here in the room may not be up on, has a very expansive view of what that ruling means.
		We're still digesting it.
		You know, it only came out on Friday night before a holiday weekend.
		And so we're trying to fully understand.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		This is what we do in D.C.
unidentified		I was going to say, you're keeping us busy.
		I will say that there's a presumption in a lot of what's written into that dear colleague letter and in a lot of the rhetoric around DI that what we're engaged in is racial discrimination of whites and Asians on behalf of other students of color.
		We don't believe that we are doing so.
		We believe that our programs are there to support all students and that allowing them to think about what race means in America is a crucial part of their education.
		So we will look at that dear colleague letter.
		We will try to understand what it actually means.
		We will comport with the law.
		But our first reading is that what we're doing on our campus already complies with how we understand federal discrimination law based on that, based on the letter.
		And I think there are going to be further interpretations to follow.
		What I think has really been lost in all of this is what are the principles and how do we get here?
		So when I think about the principles, the principles are that we do want a heterogeneous population of students on our campus.
		We want everybody who has the talent and academic ability and the temperament to engage in a liberal arts education, have access to Amherst.
		That's why diversity matters to us.
		I think that's something that we might have in common.
		We want that heterogeneous group when they come to campus, whether they're students or staff or faculty, to have the opportunity to thrive.
		And then when we look at outcomes, if there are disparate outcomes among groups, we want to know why and ask if there are steps that we can take to help everybody be successful.
		That doesn't mean lowering the standards for one group or prohibiting people from accessing resources.
		But that's how we've been approaching what it means to be an equitable campus.
		We might disagree on what the best ways are to do that.
		And at Amherst, and like most institutions, there are some things that we've done that we no longer do, right?
		It's a work in progress.
		And even this language, none of those things are actually new to the mission.
		This has been going on for a long time.
		We've called it different things.
		Probably when you and I were in college call it multiculturalism.
		We will probably use different words for it in the future.
		But I think those are things that we can continue to work on together.
		And I hope that we can be talking about the principles driving the work rather than simply thinking about DI as some monolithic bureaucracy that is regulating intellectual life instead of what it should be,
		which is about expanding the intellectual life of the college so that it can reach more people and so that everybody there can participate in the academic freedom of the college in the spirit of curiosity, in unfettered inquiry, in the way that we want.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		And I want to open it up a little bit at this point.
		But just to clarify, because I'm curious, so I like the way you frame that.
		Do you think there are examples, not necessarily at Amherst, examples out there in higher ed, where DEI got used in ways that you regard as problematic, that you see as, that you would regard as problematic, that have fueled some of this frustration?
unidentified		Absolutely.
		You know, I think that there have been incidents that I've read about where DEI has been used to infringe on academic freedom.
		There do seem to have been programs that have been launched that do feel exclusive.
		And I understand the reaction, the reaction to that.
		That said, I think those are a relatively small number of examples.
		I think there are a couple of critical mistakes that the Academy writ large made.
		One was focusing on demographic diversity as though that were the marker of success itself and not explaining the value of what diverse heterogeneous groups can do together on campus.
		I have faculty who say that I am able to have different kinds of classroom conversations.
		I'm able to teach my subjects differently because of who is in the Amherst classroom now versus when I started my career in, say, 1990.
		And I don't think we've told that story very well.
		I also take very seriously, although I don't believe it to be the case, The worry that diversity, equity, inclusion has come at a cost to academic excellence.
		To me, the most damning sentence that appeared in the millions, and I'm not using hyperbole, of op-eds written about higher education last year was from Farid Zakaria, where he talked about how he felt that the academic excellence of the American Academy had been eroded by DEI.
		And it was so hurtful to read because he is such a supporter of the liberal arts and of the kind of education that we want to provide.
		As I said, I don't believe that's the case.
		I'm happy to be talking to Dr. Farid as I'm talking to you and tell him why I don't think that's true and why I think we have evidence to the contrary in the success of our graduates and what I see on campus, how I think we pursue academic excellence every single day, and how I think including the kinds of people and supporting the kinds of people we have on this campus have made us a better institution in every way.
		But if somebody like him believes that, we have clearly not told our story effectively.
		And that's something that we have to take seriously because we do receive tremendous public benefit and therefore we should be holding ourselves accountable to the public.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Well said.
		All right, let's go ahead and open this up.
		We've got a couple of mics coming around.
		When you see the mic, if it comes to you, please tell us who you are, where you're at, and please actually ask a question.
		We don't see a question coming pretty quickly.
		We'll give somebody else a chance.
		Annika, I see Rick Bechter.
unidentified		So hi, Rick Collenberg with the Progressive Policy Institute.
		Thanks for this discussion.
		I thought it was wonderful.
		I have a question about the decline in diversity at Amherst because your decline was much larger than at many other institutions.
		And I'm wondering if there are lessons from those other places that you're looking to implement at Amherst in the future in order to be more successful with racial diversity.
		Sure.
		And so what Rick said is correct.
		Our racial diversity took a bigger hit than many other places.
		And, you know, in part, we were a leader in racial diversity beforehand.
		And so that pullback was larger.
		And I think there are a couple of different lessons that we learned from the process.
		One is that you know, admissions, I assume you know, is an art, not a science.
		We use a lot of science and mathematics as we try to model the class and predict who is going to enroll.
		And we're a fully residential campus, so we have to hit a target class.
		If we go over by 30 students, we have tenths on the quad, and that's not a good look.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Again.
unidentified		Exactly.
		Exactly.
		No, no, we had no tenths.
		Too soon, I know.
		But so, you know, we do a lot of modeling, as every campus does.
		And some of the things that we predicted in terms of student behavior turned out to be inaccurate.
		And one of the things we didn't realize, basically we've been doing a lot of things for a long time to recruit a more racially diverse class that are race neutral for socioeconomic diversity, working with certain partner organizations that work with certain public schools.
		So we were kind of in the pool with both feet.
		And then what happened last year is a whole bunch of more people got into the pool.
		This is a bad metaphor.
		I'm not sure I'm going to find my way out of it.
		But so basically, the competition for some of the students that we were trying to recruit just became much stiffer.
		And so, you know, we've learned a little bit from that, and that'll change our modeling, we think, this year, and we'll see what happens.
		It's also, you know, the size of Amherst, and Amherst is small.
		For any of you who don't know, we have an entering class of about 475.
		I'm off by a few.
		My dean of admission will be texting me in just a minute.
		You know, so we're small numbers, so every year there's also just some natural statistical variation.
		You know, I've talked to many presidents who had different numbers this last year, and most of them have said we don't know what's going to happen the year after next.
		And so, you know, one of the things I've always been cautioning people on my campus is don't interpret too much from a single class.
		We've always had some ups and downs in the diversity of our class.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Anne?
unidentified		Hi, I am representing the online community.
		Wow.
		Yes.
		So this question is for President Elliott, and it has to do with the notion that you've talked about previously of professors as judges rather than as advocates when it comes to students debating politically challenging topics in the classroom.
		Can you talk a little bit more about that or talk about it at all?
		And why do you think this is important to use this as a technique in the classroom?
		Sure.
		So I wonder if this person is also referencing.
		I did an online conversation recently with a member of my faculty who is working on the history of academic freedom.
		And he was one of the, he draws parallels between the academic freedom of the professoriate to judicial independence in the United States.
		And he does talk about that symmetry between judges and professors.
		And I think one of the things he articulates very nicely, and I want to give him credit for it, even though I'm about to say it and agree with it, is that one of the possible violations of academic freedom would be to present in a classroom a question that is debatable as though it were already settled.
		And it doesn't necessarily mean the role of the faculty member is to settle a question, or that the role of the faculty member is not to present a viewpoint.
		Like judges, professors have opinions and have consciousness that they must articulate and do so in the classroom.
		But they also have to make room for competing evidence and allow for and explain to students that there are different possible conclusions that one could reach.
		And I think that's really a critical part of the professional code of ethics that comes with academic freedom.
		It is a responsibility.
		And I will say it's also very difficult to do.
		Great professors, and we have great professors at Amherst, strive to do this all the time.
		They don't necessarily get it exactly perfect every single day, but it is the standard to which they aspire and certainly the standard to which they should aspire.
		All right.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Emerica?
unidentified		Good job.
		Hello, thank you for coming to AEI.
		I'm a scholar here and a former professor.
		And I'm curious to know why you think there are so few conservative professors.
		You spoke about talents being equally distributed among the American people, and I don't know what you think about the premise of them being equally distributed among people with different political affiliations, but if it carries over to that, why are there disparate outcomes in this situation?
		Yeah, this is also a question I've thought about.
		We are in a kind of negative feedback loop at this point on that question.
		I think where the declining number of conservative faculty and therefore is leading to a declining number of conservative graduate students and therefore leading to a smaller pool from which we hire faculty.
		I'm not sure I have a great, in fact I'm sure I don't have a great answer to that.
		I'd say one of the challenges with academic freedom is that it's vulnerable to groupthink and maybe the Academy has not always done as good a job of checking that impulse in itself.
		I assume in this point we're talking about conservative with a kind of small C, not necessarily voting a particular way, but thinking about fields in a very different way than they're always thought, going back to first principles, reasoning from moral philosophy, teaching the canon in the European sense of the term.
		I think that it's not to say that it's biased in an overt way, I think would be to miss underestimate the size of the concern.
		And it would also be to suggest there's an easier answer than I think there is.
		I will say I think we were talking about this beforehand.
		At this moment, I hear desire from faculty to broaden the intellectual diversity of the faculty, and they're not necessarily seen in the candidate pool.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Is this an argument?
		You talked about jumping in with both feet before, for instance, in terms of broadening the pipeline for students in terms of racial and socioeconomic diversity.
		Do you guys do the same thing when you're seeking faculty, kind of jumping in with both feet in terms of trying to broaden that intellectual?
unidentified		Faculty hiring, there's lots of different things that are going on.
		We are looking for intellectual diversity and for different ways of approaching the subject.
		That's not necessarily going to be ideological diversity, and it shouldn't be.
		And sometimes we're looking for people, obviously, to fill a very particular niche.
		We want some of the teachers in a certain field, you know, Latin American politics, the literature of Central America, you know, the list goes on.
		I do think that we look for people who can think differently than what's already on the campus and can expand the ways that we teach, but I don't think that necessarily is translating into an active search for people who are conservative with a small C. All right, I think we have time for one more question.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Annika?
unidentified		What do we got?
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		My buddies?
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Right here.
unidentified		There was a hand over here.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there we go.
unidentified		Hi, I'm Artie Mafa.
		I'm an Amherst graduate.
		I am also a former admission dean for Amherst.
		You can answer all the questions.
		It was a while ago in a much kinder era before cell phones.
		I would not want to be an admission dean in the era of cell phones.
		You mentioned very briefly retention when you were talking about diversity and other ways of diversifying.
		Certainly when I was an admission dean, diversity was put as one of the most important things on my list.
		I'm wondering about other levers there might be to pull, whether that's for faculty or for the student body.
		I know that there's admission and recruitment, there's retention.
		Are there other tools in the toolbox?
		I'm sorry, to what?
		In terms of political or ideological diversity.
		Ideological diversity of viewpoints.
		There's the intake, the beginning of the funnel, right?
		I'm used to being told go get a defensive line, go get three oboists, and go get students from all 50 states from many different ethnicities.
		There's a lot that's put on admission.
		I know.
		But I was not also told, go get 50 young Republicans, three Libertarian.
		And that would be a nightmare.
		Just as you said with the faculty that you would not want to impose a sort of a litmus test.
		But what is there, if there's anything, besides recruitment and retention to increase?
		Well, I mean, so what's missing is what do we actually do with the students when they get there?
		I will say one thing that we are doing in terms of recruitment is we've joined a network that we did not found, so I don't want to take credit for it, that is focused on recruitment in rural areas, where I think we will find students who come with a very different set of cultural experiences and may broaden the set of political opinions that students bring to campus.
		But I think what we really have to focus on is what actually happens to them when they're on campus.
		Are they forced to confront ways of thinking that are not like their own?
		That was very much my Amherst experience.
		I came into the classroom and literally people in this room were exposed to habits of mind that were 180 degrees different than anything I had experienced before.
		And I hope it prepared me to sit down and talk to people who think about the world very differently, very differently than I did.
		We need to make sure that that is part of every Amherst College's, every Amherst College student's experience.
		Some of that is going to be in the classroom.
		Some of that's going to be outside of the classroom.
		And I think we also have to signal that we want this intentionally to be part of the experience.
		That it's not just about getting there, getting a degree, going to med school or wherever, and coming to AI.
		That in fact, learning to think differently is not going to be about being reaffirmed in the convictions that you already have.
		It's going to be about learning to speak to people who hold convictions that are different than yours.
		And great professors do that.
		Great professors bring into the classroom convictions that are not necessarily their own, that unmoor people.
		A great college education should include a sense of disorientation.
		It should not always be pleasant.
		There should be moments when you are profoundly confused, where you maybe are upset, and then maybe you also somehow find some joy on the other end of it.
		Like a great carnival ride, right?
		It makes you a little bit sick, you scream a lot, and then you tell everybody you had a good time.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		I had a midterm like that once.
unidentified		Exactly, exactly.
		B plus.
		And I think we have to recommit to that and figure out what that looks like for this generation.
		And this generation is different.
		They are coming in with different things.
		They are coming in with habits of mind that have been formed by the devices they carry around in their pockets.
		And they're presenting us with new challenges.
		And it's not necessarily going to be easy.
		But one of the things I've always said is I never came to Amherst.
		I came to Amherst because a dean like you convinced me it was going to be the hardest education that I could encounter.
		And I was going to get something much more rigorous than at those other places that you were mentioning at the beginning.
		And that's a promise that we have to continue to deliver on and figure out what that looks like for generations to come.
		And that's why my job is so fun, I get to think about that incredibly difficult problem.
frederick hess ▲ ● ▼		I can't think of a better note to close on.
		Michael, really want to appreciate what you said.
		I want to thank you for taking the time today.
		You know, we're wrestling with big questions here.
		You guys are actually wrestling with them.
		Those of us in this town are at least talking about them a lot, which is, okay, not nearly as hard, let's be honest.
		But thank you for all you do.
		Thank you for taking the time.
		Thank you all for joining us today.
		Good luck.
		Thank you, my friend.
unidentified		Thank you.
		Later today, former Republican New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu discusses democracy and Trump administration policies at an event hosted by George Washington University.
		We'll be right back.
		Watch live at 6 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN.
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pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		This is Scott Paul joining us.
		He's the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing here to talk about the state of manufacturing, particularly with new initiatives from the Trump administration.
		Good morning to you.
unidentified		Good morning, Pedro.
unidentified		Great to be with you.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		How is it best?
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		How do you describe who you represent to people?
unidentified		Yeah, we're pretty unique in Washington.
		We have the steelworkers, the United Steelworkers Union, which is North America's largest industrial union, and domestic manufacturers who have steel workers in their plants.
		And so it's a select group and in mostly what I think people would call heavy manufacturing, very domestic-oriented.
		And we've been around for about 16 or 17 years now.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		As far as those who represent, how would you describe the state of the steel industry?
unidentified		Well, the state of the steel industry, I would say, is stable, okay?
		Not great, not horrible, but stable.
		And, you know, in a lot of ways, that's pretty good because it had been in freefall for several decades.
		And so there have been some developments in the economy lately, the infrastructure money, there have been tariffs in place on important steel since 2018.
		So there's been a fair amount of stability in steel, whereas in the decades prior to that, it had been just on a pretty downward trajectory.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Do tariffs, how much do tariffs lend to the stability or instability of the market, the steel market?
unidentified		Well, when it comes to steel or aluminum or kind of commodity materials like that, they can be extraordinarily helpful.
		And the reason is this.
		We're a big steel consumer in the United States.
		We don't supply all of that market from here at home.
		And our market is generally very open to imports.
		The challenge has been, particularly with China, is that you have these massive firms that are owned by the Chinese Communist Party that have dominated the steel industry.
		They make more than half the world steel now.
		They can't possibly consume all of that at home.
		So that ends up somewhere else.
		Again, not necessarily a problem, but the problem is that they're going to sell it at bargain basement rates, unfairly traded.
		It doesn't reflect the actual price of even making the steel sometimes.
		And that drives other firms out of business.
		And so we saw that happen in the United States about 15 years ago, and it was devastating to the steel industry.
		And so that's why you have this need for tariffs so that you have a support level of steel in the United States that can satisfy the rest of our manufacturing needs and that it doesn't get any lower.
		We're down to the point now where there's a couple of kinds of metals where there's only one or two plants that make it.
		That didn't used to be the case at all.
		But that's left us pretty vulnerable.
		And so what we've said is, look, look, we can't go down any further.
		It would be detrimental to national security.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		You probably saw this question coming.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		So when the president says I'm going to put tariffs on steel and aluminum, exactly what does he mean by that and how does it work?
unidentified		Yes.
		And so I would, first of all, characterize this as a restatement of policy because, and there's a couple of layers to it.
		Over the last couple of decades, there have been some tariffs put in place on some steel that has been what we would call unfairly traded, which is what I just described.
		It's very selective, depends on the country, depends on what the problem is.
		In 2018, President Trump utilized one of the aspects of trade law called Section 232.
		We get into all this trade jargon.
		But basically, it means I can impose tariffs if there's a national security rationale.
		And he did that on steel and aluminum in 2018, 25% for steel.
		The issue was there was a process put in place to exempt a whole bunch of different products, thousands of them, as a matter of fact, and exempt some countries from that as well.
		Now, what has happened over the last six or seven years is that you have seen those imports creep back into the U.S. market.
		And so that relief didn't, you know, was no longer as effective as it once was.
		And you've seen some surges in steel come from Mexico and from Vietnam and some other places, not necessarily China, but it's like whack-a-mole.
		It's working its way around.
		And so this is basically pressing the reset button on those tariffs and saying we're going to start this over again at the 25% level with all countries and all products.
		And you're going to have to work very hard, basically, if you want to get an exemption or an exclusion to that.
		And aluminum, which had also been covered at 10%, that's rising to 25% as well.
		All of this is scheduled to take effect next month in March.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		So for those who depend on steel for manufacturing in the United States, what happens to the price they pay or ultimately the price they charge for the things they make?
unidentified		Yeah, it's a good question.
		Obviously, it depends on what the demand is as well.
		And what we learned from the last round of steel tariffs is that a net effect at the end of it is that because of currency devaluation and some other things like that, there was not a lot passed on to the end-use consumer.
		And let's think about, let's take an automobile as an example here, okay?
		Because I think there's a lot of steel in an automobile, but the actual price component of steel in an automobile is pretty low.
		And so it's impacting a very small percentage of that price of an automobile.
		So that doesn't necessarily need to be passed on to consumers.
		And what we found with the last round of tariffs is that there was an ability to renegotiate some manufacturing contracts.
		There was the ability to seek some efficiencies.
		There was part of this currency devaluation that really meant there wasn't a large price impact.
		And I will say, I would go talk to audiences of steel consumers, and I would defend the tariffs, which is not an easy thing to do.
		And I will tell you, Pedro, the principal complaint I heard is that I can't find enough workers.
		I'm still hiring.
		I can't find enough workers.
		I can find a way to deal with the steel tariffs if there's a transparent process and I know what it's going to be, but I'm still struggling finding workers for my factory.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Scott Paul with us, and if you want to ask him questions about manufacturing in the United States, particularly in light of tariff policy and other issues, 202748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8,000 for Democrats, and 202-748-8002 for independents, you can text us at 202-748-8003.
		Post on the social media sites as well.
		What about the idea of retribution by these other countries?
		And what does that ultimately do for the price of steel?
unidentified		Yeah.
		Well, I mean, there was some retaliation to the tariffs.
		And let's be clear, it's not only the steel and aluminum tariffs.
		There's a lot of tariffs, as you know, with respect to China and other potential tariffs down the road.
		What we saw the last round is that there was some retaliation, but Congress and the administration put into place some mechanisms to compensate the domestic producers for that.
		I would anticipate that there'd be a similar mechanism this time.
		I would also say this, is that people talk about trade wars, and it's a little more complicated than that because there's differing trade tariff rates, trade disagreements that happen all the time.
		And so I know it's a catchy headline, but that doesn't really capture the truth.
		But here is the truth.
		We're the largest consumer market in the world.
		We consume 20% of the world's products, even though we're 5% of the people.
		We know how to consume.
		Our market is generally very open.
		We actually are not nearly as trade exposed as a lot of other countries are that depend on their imports coming into the United States to generate national wealth.
		And so we hold far more cards than any trading partner that we're dealing with.
		And so we should not be afraid to utilize that.
		I mean, we have more ability to escalate than most, if not all, of our trade partners do.
		So it would be very dangerous.
		And we saw this with the China tariffs as well.
		And we may be talking about that.
		But China decided when Trump applied the latest round, the 10% tariff, just to do basically a nominal amount, like to investigate Google, which doesn't do a lot of business in China, to reopen a case against NVIDIA and to do some very, very narrow tariffs that were much more of a symbolic than what we're doing.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Push policy initiatives to get that done.
unidentified		Yeah, absolutely.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		When you talk about then assistance from the government, if these tariffs, if the tariffs do impact steel ultimately or other things, isn't that picking winners and losers then if the government gets involved to compensate?
unidentified		Not necessarily because fundamentally, trade policy has been picking winners and losers over the years.
		And the bargain we made is that we're going to give up market access and we're going to expose our manufacturers.
		In return, we're going to have allies first in the Cold War.
		And then hopefully, with respect to China, 25 years ago, that didn't work out.
		And we'll also make gains in services and financial services and what have you.
		What we've learned from all of this is that it's been very one-sided.
		We have a trillion-dollar trade deficit in goods annually, a trillion dollars that we're bringing in more than we're taking out.
		And we're a very entrepreneurial, innovative country, and we can be very cost-competitive, too.
		And that's called a trade policy out of whack.
		And so this is resetting it a little bit.
		And traditionally, with respect to trade policy, there has been some compensation of people who have been impacted by trade.
		It hasn't been generous enough.
		But there's been a long history of that since the early 1960s in the United States.
		So again, that's not an unusual circumstance for our economic or trade policy.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		This is Scott Paul joining us, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
		First call is from Akiva in New Jersey.
		Republican line, you're on with our guests.
		Good morning.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Good morning, Pedro.
unidentified		Good morning, Pedro.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
		You're on.
		You're on with the guests.
unidentified		Paul?
		Mike.
		Good morning, Pedro.
		Good morning, Representative Paul.
		I have a question for you, Mr. Paul, and that is he just a few.
		And that is, well, during the 2019 and 2019, they said we have the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years.
		And meanwhile, Democrats say that if we have tariffs, we will have taxes raised and every middle class, or at least most Americans, will feel the pain and feel the impact.
		And so my first of two questions is: one, why do Democrats think taxes might go up, even though during the first Trump administration in 2017, 2018, 2019, the unemployment rate was low?
		And second of all, during the first Trump administration, some alleged comedians like Seth Meyers said that Trump has made things worse for some people, like farmers, in Ohio and Pennsylvania, saying that they are having their things worse on us because of tariffs.
		Is that true, or is that a fabrication or is that a lie?
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Akiva, there in New Jersey.
		Thanks.
unidentified		Akiva, very good question.
		And I would say this.
		The question about passing along costs to consumers is an unsettled one.
		There's a couple of ways that it could go.
		I mean, if a tariff is charged, there's definitely going to be revenue collected.
		And it's going to be up to that company whether it passes along the cost to consumers, whether it absorbs it, whether it renegotiates contracts, whether it moves the manufacturing out of China to another country that's not impacted by tariffs.
		There's all sorts of things that could happen there.
		And it is true that the evidence based on that round of tariffs was that there was a negligible contribution to inflation compared to other things like energy costs or housing costs.
		Now, I will say that doesn't necessarily mean that's always going to be the case.
		If there is a universal tariff applied to every product everywhere, again, depending on what these companies depend to do, there could be some costs passed on to consumers.
		And so, I don't want to pretend like there is not a cost associated with this.
		There certainly is.
		There's also a cost of inaction, which is what I was describing, is that we saw decades of erosion of our manufacturing base in this country, and that impacted millions of lives, hundreds and thousands of communities across the country, and put us in a national security position that is dangerously exposed.
		And so, again, there's going to be a trade-off to this.
		Think about it like the Cold War, where we built up the military in part to make sure that the Soviet Union couldn't challenge us.
		And there was a cost to that because there were different priorities within our budget.
		It took 40 years to see that come to fruition.
		And so, I don't expect that things are going to turn around with respect to China or any other country right away if we do some application of tariffs.
		It's going to take some patience to do that.
		But I would argue that it is worth the cost of having that national and economic security for the United States.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		By the way, viewers, if you work in the manufacturing sector and you want to give your thoughts there as well, 202748-8003 is the number to give your perspective on this topic.
		Independent Line in Indianapolis.
		Ishmael, hello.
unidentified		Good morning, gentlemen.
		Good morning to you all.
		Quick comment on a couple of questions.
		A quick comment is: you know, tariff is very complicated.
		With a different administration, whether Democrat or Republican, you know, they can't put those tariffs or lift those tariffs.
		My question to Mr. Paul is: what is the long-term impact for tariffs?
		And which sector of the economy and our country will get direct hit that they will see that?
		And then what are we going to sustain to be independent for steel manufacture in the future?
		Those are the questions.
		And I thank you very much for your time.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		College, thanks.
unidentified		Ishmael, great question.
		And I would say, you know, Indiana is the largest steel-producing state in the country, so it's relevant to that state.
		So again, what happens with respect to tariffs?
		I don't want to get too much into history here, but for most of our history, we've used tariffs as an economic development tool and for some revenue collection as well.
		It's less important for revenue collection now, but it was called a Hamiltonian model.
		We'll put some tariffs in place, we'll build up our industry, we'll do some internal improvements, and we'll be able to develop economically.
		And it is what made us the second industrial, industrialized country in the world after Great Britain.
		And it is a model that Germany and Japan and Korea and many others have followed.
		And so it is a very legitimate tool in economic policy.
		Now, what happens in the 21st century with all of this, especially when we have all of these relationships and we've been bringing tariffs down over a number of decades?
		And that's a really important question.
		You know, honestly, with China in particular, and I'll answer it this way, because the question is very broad.
		You know, we, you know, if you look at the goods that China supplies to us and that we buy a lot of, it includes Christmas and party decorations, but also smartphones and laptops.
		And you can kind of laugh at the first one because we can probably source that from anywhere else.
		But truthfully, it won't be the easiest thing in the world to shift laptop and smartphone production to other locations, much less to the United States.
		Now, that's underway.
		Some companies are doing it.
		But that's where you could see a little bit of an adjustment issue.
		Now, and again, with respect to steel, we need a base capacity of steel in the United States to preserve our economic security.
		And the tariffs are part of that guarantee.
		We also need a healthy economy.
		We need to be making investments in our economy.
		And I think that's an important aspect that we can't lose sight of as well.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		When it comes to steel, how much comes from China, say, compared to Canada and Mexico?
unidentified		Yeah, well, these days, and in part thanks to the tariffs, we see less and less steel coming in directly from China, Pedro.
		The challenge is that Chinese steel ends up going to Vietnam or to Malaysia and then coming to the United States indirectly, not necessarily subject to a full tariff.
		And then we've also seen steel imports surge from Mexico.
		There is a lot of North American trade in steel.
		And our challenge is not with Canada.
		There's generally fair trading relationships there.
		There are some issues, but there's generally fair trading relationships there.
		I think they are a little bit with Mexico because we have seen a surge of steel coming in.
		And I think the Biden administration recognized that too and was prepared to take some actions on it.
		And so that's where you see a lot of the challenges.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		The former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada wrote a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, Christopher Freeland, and wrote this about Canada's perspective and all this, saying in 2018, Canada imposed dollar-for-dollar retaliation on $16 plus billion in Canadian dollars in U.S. steel, aluminum, and other imports, deliberately targeting products from red states like Florida, orange juice, and Wisconsin cheese.
		Mr. Trump may not care about the objectives of people in Canada, but he does care about American workers and businesses.
		If exporters feeling the squeeze from tit-for-tat tariffs start calling the White House, the pressure on the administration to reverse course will grow.
		What do you think of that perspective?
unidentified		Yeah, well, I mean, I think that from her perspective, that's probably the right argument.
		I don't know that ultimately that's going to be a winning argument, and I articulated this before.
		The impact of any trade measures that we would apply to Canada would have a massive impact on their gross domestic product because of the size of the economy there.
		The impact of any trade measure that Canada could apply to the United States, yes, there might be some targeted impact, but it would not be felt economy-wide in any way, shape, or form, because our economy is too large.
		And this would be a very, very small and select subset of it.
		So if there were to be an escalation, I certainly hope there wouldn't be, Canada is not going to come out on this.
		It's going to do a lot of damage to the Canadian economy.
		It would have some impact on some industries in the United States, but it wouldn't impact our economy as a whole because of the size of the GDP that we have.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Edward works in the manufacturing sector from Pennsylvania.
		You're on with our guests.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I would love to talk as far as about the machine tool industry.
		Mr. Trump talks about bringing manufacturing back to America.
		In order to have manufacturing, you have to have a viable machine tool industry.
		And during the 60s, we did right after World War II.
		But our worthy Congress, step by step, allowed people from not only Asia, but also from Europe to come in and basically butcher our machine tool industry in this country.
		The machine tool industry was run by family organizations at that time, and now as far as we have nothing left, you talk about bringing, making more steel here in America.
		Ween United, Mesta, all the large companies that made steel mills.
		Matter of fact, they made them right here in Pittsburgh.
		They're gone, and they're never coming back.
		If you talk to Nucor, they would tell you that all the things that they're buying for their new plants is coming out of Europe, coming out of Japan.
		We've lost it.
		And I don't know how Mr. Trump expects, as far as to build an industry, any industry in manufacturing, without a viable machine tool industry.
		I appreciate your time.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Edward, thank you.
unidentified		I agree with Edward completely.
		I think that, I mean, machine tools are something that people don't see, but when you're in manufacturing, you know how important they are because they're the things that are in the factories that are, you know, that are helping to produce and convert raw materials into something that's useful up the value chain.
		And it's true, we did lose a lot of that industry to Europe, to Asia.
		But I will say that I think a couple things show that if we have a policy, we can do it.
		And I think this is an ode to industrial policy, which gets a bad name sometimes, but it is highly effective.
		Like we've had an industrial policy for agriculture, and that's why we still produce a lot of agricultural products in the United States.
		The same goes for fossil fuels, whether you agree with the utilization or not.
		It's been an effective policy.
		We are producing more fossil fuel output than we ever have in the history of our country.
		That was even before Trump took office.
		Now, the last administration, the Biden administration, took that notion, applied it to semiconductors with bipartisan support in the Congress.
		And so as a result, we've seen a rebirth of semiconductor, high-end semiconductor manufacturing in the United States.
		There are a dozen or more factories under construction in the United States that are going to put us back into the semiconductor game.
		And so I will say tariffs alone, not going to bring machine tools back.
		But if you have tariffs combined with that sort of muscular industrial policy, it's quite possible to do it.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Democrats line from South Carolina.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Jermaine, hello.
unidentified		Hey, how are you doing?
		Good morning.
		I got my original question answered, so I'm not going to ask that one.
		I have another question.
		As far as getting the steel from China and producing it domestically, speaking as a consumer, how is that going to help the consumer?
		Would the price of goods that we buy that contains these products be cheaper, or will the prices remain the same?
		It's a good question, Jermaine.
		And it's important to understand that no one buys a ton of steel directly.
		No consumer does.
		But steel's part of other products.
		And we used the automobile example before.
		And even there's a lot of steel in an automobile, but in terms of the purchase price, it's a very small part of that purchase price.
		And so, you know, and already most of the steel that these auto manufacturers are utilizing is coming from the United States or North America.
		So it might not even be subject to a tariff, okay?
		So there is very little that's passed on to the consumer there.
		But I will say this, If you believe that the overriding responsibility of the government is consumer efficiency, that gets you to a different policy point than if you believe it's the national security of our people.
		And that is fundamentally what the government is supposed to do, is supposed to guarantee and safeguard our national security.
		And so, again, I'm not going to pretend like there is no cost to this.
		There could be some cost.
		The question is, is it a cost worth bearing and how will it be distributed?
		How much will these very innovative companies that can figure out all sorts of different ways to get more efficient, how much are they going to absorb?
		How much are they going to pass along?
		But it's worth it at the end because we're getting to the point where if, God forbid, we had to mobilize for something, we do not have the capacity to churn out the military equipment or the armaments in a way that we did, say, 50 or 60 years ago.
		And that makes us extremely vulnerable.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Does your organization represent U.S. steel?
unidentified		We do.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		I was going to ask you because we saw President Biden push back against the idea of Japan buying the steel and refurbishing it.
		President Trump did the same.
		What do you think about that hesitancy from the presidents on another country buying U.S. steel?
unidentified		Yeah, we haven't taken a position on that because we have stakeholders on every side of that issue.
		I will say this, just, you know, we're at a point in time where it makes sense, no matter who it is, to invest in the steel industry of the United States rather than offload the assets like they were doing for the last 30 years.
		And so the fact that there's investment that may be coming into steel from some source, I think, is a good sign for the industry without stating an opinion on the purchase.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		What investments were the countries interested in making to U.S. steel specifically?
unidentified		I'm sorry, say that again.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		What investments was Japan interested in doing if they were to buy U.S. steel?
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		How would they change that company?
unidentified		Well, I believe that they propose making $3 billion in investments as part of that.
		I mean, there's other companies that have expressed interest in purchasing U.S. steel.
		And in the past, you've seen, again, a lot more interest in investing in the steel industry in general in the United States because they see the United States market as being a good and a healthy one moving forward as opposed to the past where it was shrinking and shrinking because of the import penetration that was coming.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		Is U.S. steel an outlier as far as the need for investment or are other steel companies in the same shape or same condition where they need outside investment to help improve their business?
unidentified		Yeah.
		Well again, the difference is investment versus rescue or having a vulture come in.
		And in the past it was a lot of mergers and acquisitions in steel and a lot of downsizing.
		There was a wave of steel bankruptcies at the end of the 90s, the beginning of the aughts, where you saw more than 30 steel companies, some brand names, Bethlehem and others, that went out of business, just disappeared.
		They had been part of the American landscape for generations.
		And so that's not the situation that we're in.
		But we also can't afford to take the tariffs off because that's where we would end up again, and we don't want to see that.
pedro echevarria ▲ ● ▼		This is Scott Paul joining us for this discussion.
		He's the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
		Kathy is up next.
		She joins us from Georgia.
		Kathy, hello there.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I enjoy watching your show every morning.
		And this one just sort of hit home.
		I don't know if I'm asking.
		I'm not going to really ask a question.
		I just want to make a comment.
		I was born and raised in a small town in the Appalachian Mountains in Spruce Bond, North Carolina.
		And even in high school, and I graduated in 1975, you could, I worked all through high school, a job.
		I didn't have a choice.
		And so I could go from one manufacturing plant to another to get a job.
		We had a hosiery.
rollye james ▲ ● ▼		And this is a small 2,000 population town.
unidentified		Hosi mills, blue gene factories, every major furniture builder, Henry Don, Ethan Allen, Broyhill.
		I mean, there was always some place to work up there.
		And I was very fortunate, and I was able to go to college on a veteran scholarship.
		And so I got out of there and got a better job.
		But I had five brothers and sisters who lived up there.
		And over the course of 20 years, this is in 1975, mind you, when everything was sort of rosy in little Spruce Bund, North Carolina, every manufacturing plant is gone.
		Right now they're ravaged by Halloween.
		We lost every major furniture builder, the hosiery mills, the blue jean factories, everything.
		The largest employer now is Walmart.

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