| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much for having me. | |
| We'll now begin our final panel of the day. | ||
| Coming up, we'll head to the White House for a briefing with Press Secretary Caroline Levitt. | ||
| She'll take questions from reporters live here on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN now and at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Joining us this morning is Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow and Constitutional Studies Director at the Manhattan Institute and also author of this book, Lawless, The Miseducation of America's Elites. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's start with your book, Mr. Shapiro. | |
| What do you write about here? | ||
| I talk about the illiberal takeover of higher education and especially legal education. | ||
| And I focus on law schools not just because I'm a lawyer, but because whatever craziness is going on in English or sociology departments, law schools graduate the gatekeepers of our legal and political institutions. | ||
| And the problem is you have these illiberal mobs, again, people that don't agree with the basic academic missions or the core classical liberal values of any educational institution like free speech, due process, equality under the law. | ||
| They want to burn it all down and remake it according to a different kind of privilege hierarchy, viewing all issues through lenses of race, class, sex, and other identity categories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not good. | |
| And I talk about the failures of ideology, bureaucracy, leadership, and what we can do about it. | ||
| So what's at the root of this? | ||
| Well, a number of things. | ||
| First of all, is the return of critical theory, or in the legal context, critical legal studies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
These are kind of postmodern theories that when I was in law school 20 years ago, we had heard about it. | |
| It was something from the 80s and early 90s. | ||
| We thought it had been put back in kind of a niche corner of sociology department, but now the crits are back. | ||
| And as I was saying, the idea is our institutions, our law is illegitimate because it has imbalances of power structures built in, needs to be torn down, rebuilt in a host of different ways. | ||
| And there's sub-areas there, critical legal, critical race theory, queer theory, all these other things. | ||
| But the problem isn't just the ideology or the faculty bias towards activism rather than education. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the bureaucratic explosion. | |
| And especially in the last decade, non-teaching staff has ballooned, and most of that growth has been in the DEI space. | ||
| And the problem there isn't with those words. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Diversity is a good thing. | |
| You can have people from different perspectives bringing a richer conversation, preventing groupthink. | ||
| Equity means treating people fairly. | ||
| Inclusion, people feel welcome where they're working or they're studying. | ||
| The problem is how this has been implemented here with a focus on higher education is in an Orwellian way the opposite of those things, to prevent intellectual diversity, to go for equal outcomes rather than opportunity, and to exclude those who dissent from the prevailing progressive orthodoxy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's been a negative trend on campus culture where people are afraid to speak in class. | |
| They want to just keep their head down lest they be canceled. | ||
| Programs that indoctrinate rather than educate. | ||
| And I think people recognize that there's a crisis in higher education and there's these different facets that have driven us there. | ||
| Well, what's the methodology that colleges and universities are using and what evidence do you have to back up your arguments that you just made about the impact of them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The methodology, I mean, in terms of teaching, there are classes across the board that skew away from traditional disciplines, history, political science, economics, what have you, and more have an activist bent. | |
| In terms of faculty hiring, there's discrimination by viewpoint or ideology as well as by race, which is illegal, the Supreme Court has held. | ||
| And these bureaucratic growth of non-teaching staff, where especially in the so-called elite places, Yale, Stanford, there are many multiples of non-teaching bureaucrats and often diversity officers rather than faculty themselves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And what are the numbers? | |
| Have you seen the numbers? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, it's all in my book. | ||
| I've written it up in many, many op-eds over the months. | ||
| At a place like Stanford, the number of non-teaching staff have grown 30% from 2017 to 22% alone. | ||
| There are now six times the number of administrators than undergrads, about triple the number of faculty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's replicated across the board. | |
| We're seeing, you know, this is part of what's driving tuition increases, the student loan crisis, all of these other things that we talk about. | ||
| But it's not so much the finances that are, that's the problem, but the reorientation of the mission of universities. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And for example, the average university of the old Power Five football conferences. | |
| Now it's kind of a little bit different, but 65 large universities, according to a study in 2022, have an average of 45 DEI officers, which is more than the number of history professors, more than the number of people providing legally required accommodations for students with disabilities. | ||
| And there are more statistics if you really want to drill down. | ||
| We're talking with Ilya Shapiro this morning of the Manhattan Institute about the Trump administration's policies towards colleges and universities. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro, the President signed an executive order to withhold federal funding for colleges and universities that allow illegal protests. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Define an illegal protest. | |
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, all schools have policies that protect free speech but draw a clear line between speech and expression and things that disrupt classes or student programs or block access for students to go to the library, go to their academic buildings, go to their dorms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've seen lots of protests and encampments that harass and intimidate students, that vandalize takeovers of academic buildings, most notably at Columbia. | |
| And the universities have largely been absent, have not been enforcing their own rules. | ||
| They've allowed this stuff to fester, and I think that is what the administration is targeting, as well as general campus climate going on longer than just the last year, year and a half, where they're not protecting student and faculty civil rights and free speech rights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the president has said that he has the power to act when it comes to campus free speech. | |
| What federal laws exist that give the president that power? | ||
| Well, it's not just the president. | ||
| He signs executive orders to direct the various executive branch agencies and officials to enforce laws in certain ways, to prioritize certain kinds of investigations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so most of the action hasn't been from the president. | |
| It's been from the Department of Education, investigating, blocking funds going to universities. | ||
| Most of it is centered in Title VI, which provides that universities that get federal funding have to abide by certain civil rights regulations. | ||
| There are other federal strings attached to funding. | ||
| This is nothing new. | ||
| We don't need a new law to do this. | ||
| When you accept federal funds, whether you're at Harvard or whether you're a school that less people know about, and you take those funds, you have to abide by everything from accounting standards to anti-discrimination law to a whole host of other things. | ||
| And so the Education Department and its Office of Civil Rights is focused on looking at anti-Semitism, looking at free speech, and those schools that for too long have allowed a toxic environment to fester where students are sometimes afraid to go to class, can't speak up, are being, have complaints filed against them for various reasons. | ||
| That's what the administration is targeting. | ||
| And we've seen the settlement, for example, from Columbia that is looking to reform its ways. | ||
| It's interesting how this is playing out as a campus-by-campus negotiation rather than lawsuits. | ||
| We'll go to calls. | ||
| Terry, Bellwood, Illinois, Democratic Caller. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Hey, good morning. | ||
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, we can. | ||
| Question or comment. | ||
| Hey, I was asking, Mr. Shapiro, why does me as a black person feel like when I hear DEI, it's just like a slash on my door towards the black society? | ||
| And I don't think that's fair from my point of view. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro? | ||
| Yeah, if I can understand that, I mean, DEI, you have to understand, has nothing to do with federal and state civil rights laws. | ||
| So that count I gave of the average number of DEI officers, for example, I think the biggest school is Michigan, which had a full-time 261 people, double that if you count part-time, $30 million a year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
None of that has to do with legal requirements, either federal or state. | |
| Title IX with respect to gender equality, equal employment opportunity, anti-discrimination laws under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, none of that is DEI. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So those things, the compliance officers, the lawyers and their staffs, they were there when I was in college and law school 20, 25 years ago. | |
| They're still there. | ||
| DEI is an overlay that claims to be part of that tradition, but really it's this noxious postmodern ideology that forces people to view issues or tells people to view issues through these narrow identity categories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It balkanizes campuses. | |
| And Greta, here is the bitter irony of all of this. | ||
| They fail on their own terms. | ||
| That is, campus climate surveys show that student feelings of belonging on campus generally, comfort with racial diversity specifically, is inversely correlated to the size and budgets of these DEI offices. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So this has nothing to do with civil rights and everything to do with propagating postmodern racialist theories. | |
| Renee, Pikesville, Maryland, Democratic caller, you're next. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| So tenure person, because I've been taking notes and so like there's so many things over the map. | ||
| But you talk about the president and you're trying to give him a pass. | ||
| What is the president, if he's so busy, why should he be concerned about Columbia University or Harvard or anything like that and to threaten to take their funds? | ||
| The whole point of a university is diversity, equity, inclusion, having folks. | ||
| And just like the other caller just said, we know when you say DEI, you're talking about black people. | ||
| Who has benefited from affirmative action the most? | ||
| Who has benefited from diversity and inclusion? | ||
| It's not black folks. | ||
| So the one thing I wanted to know from you, because there's a couple of things, you were talking about with the Supreme Court. | ||
| Isn't that activism? | ||
| They didn't have to come back with Roe v. Wade. | ||
| It had been decided. | ||
| Isn't the five on there? | ||
| That's activism. | ||
| And one of the things that I'm really upset when we talk about this as far as funding with and the president, DEI, is with the Naval Academy in terms of what is your feel of banning of books, the Naval Academy having to throw out these things. | ||
| We know what's going on when folks say DEI. | ||
| All right, Renee, a lot there. | ||
| Elo Shapiro. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think racial discrimination is wrong. | ||
| And so giving preferences to people who are less qualified based on the color of their skin is wrong no matter who benefits whether it's Asian, white, black, Hispanic, mix of, you know, it's a nefarious game, classification game that we've been involved with. | ||
| But the DEI, the anti-DEI effort, is broader than simply affirmative action or racial preferences or what have you. | ||
| And DEI is more than about race, by the way. | ||
| It's also gender, sexual orientation, ethnic background, all of these different things that form part of the intersectional matrix if you go all highfalute and academic and philosophical and whatnot. | ||
| And I don't think it's President Trump who is focused on Columbia. | ||
| He's not drilling down in their policies and practices and statistics. | ||
| He's issued some executive orders directing, first of all, the entire federal government to get rid of the DEI commissars that President Biden put in, some of the programs that President Obama put in, the race balancing that dates back to Lyndon Johnson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, I talk to law students and college students sometimes about this stuff. | |
| LBJ might as well be Andrew Johnson, ancient history. | ||
| But some of the seeds of the racial balkanization that we're seeing now that's blossomed under these DEI programs dates all the way to back then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And again, this is not about anti-discrimination laws. | |
| The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a good thing. | ||
| People shouldn't discriminate based on race or these other immutable characteristics. | ||
| What we're talking about now is indoctrination. | ||
| And the purpose of universities, with due respect to this last caller, is not diversity, equity, inclusion. | ||
| It's truth-seeking, it's knowledge creation, it's education. | ||
| Jeff in Spring Hill, Florida, Democratic caller, let's hear from you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| First, I'd just like to make a quick comment to the world and apologize for America's actions of treating our NATO allies, our allies from the North and South, for basically treating them like hostile countries. | ||
| The other part I'd like to make is I find Mr. Shapiro to be a person who's representing something that no longer exists. | ||
| Says it's constitutional studies, but America is no longer a republic as he represents it. | ||
| It is a democracy because the Constitution is dead. | ||
| The Republican Terrorist Party killed it when they refused to prosecute a proven traitor to our country. | ||
| And Jeff, who are you talking about? | ||
| Prosecution of what? | ||
| Who? | ||
| When the Republican terrorist parties in the Senate refused to listen to any information regarding the insurrection of January 6th, and they refused to prosecute a president who proved himself to be a traitor and set up a rally that the theme of the rally was for understood the argument. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro, your response. | ||
| I think that self-rebuts. | ||
| I don't really need to say anything. | ||
| Dan, Palm Bay, Florida, Republican. | ||
| Yeah, I had a question. | ||
| I was watching the other day on my phone, James O'Keefe, where he was doing an investigation into a college here in Melbourne, Florida, called Florida Institute of Technology, where basically, you know how the president basically is saying we're going to cut funding for colleges that have DEI courses, things like that. | ||
| Well, these people, the president was having a meeting with staff, and I guess basically they are just talking about just changing the wording. | ||
| That way they still get the funding. | ||
| So I do want to make people aware of that. | ||
| And also, had a question. | ||
| Every time you guys have a guest on that is funded by George Soros, you guys don't ask how they are funded. | ||
| Like your last guest there, the past year, funded by George Soros, but you guys didn't ask how they were funded. | ||
| And I find that curious. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right, Dan. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro. | ||
| Change in wording. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So just changing titles of people or taking down websites without changing programs or orientations or trainings, moving people around without getting at the underlying substance, that's a violation of federal law. | ||
| And so, I mean, it's going to take a lot of resources for the Department of Education or the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division to look into what different schools are doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I imagine the focus is probably more on the larger schools, your Columbias, your UCLAs, your large state schools, Michigan, what have you, than on FIT, Florida Institute of Technology. | |
| But there are whistleblower hotlines. | ||
| So if you know that some local school is not abiding by federal law, you can call in and maybe they'll investigate. | ||
| But absolutely, this is not just kind of a semantic game where as long as you get rid of the magic words DEI, you're okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it's more about getting rid of these noxious systems and structures. | |
| All right. | ||
| Kevin's in Suitland, Maryland. | ||
| Hi, Kevin. | ||
| Hello, how are you doing? | ||
| I just had a quick question. | ||
| DEIA came about because Caucasian businessmen would not let black businessmen get contracts. | ||
| So white people actually came up with DEIA to counterbalance that. | ||
| And most people that benefit from that is white women. | ||
| That's all my question is. | ||
| All right, Mr. Shiro, you looked at the data. | ||
| What did you find? | ||
| Well, again, this conflates DEI with affirmative action somewhat. | ||
| There's an overlap, of course, but DEI as such didn't exist until about 15, 20 years ago. | ||
| When you're talking about anti-discrimination law and it's morphing into racial or gender balancing or what have you, the caller does have a point that especially at university admissions, women benefited a lot, | ||
|
unidentified
|
White women included, and that's partly why things have developed such that now some people who believe in affirmative action or believe in balancing these sorts of things want to apply it to men, because for a while now we've had on, whether at the undergraduate level or graduate school, there are more women than men in most departments, and so you know I'd I'd rather not get into that one way or another, | |
| but I'm I'm happy to keep the civil rights laws that stop White businessmen from edging out black businessmen improperly. | ||
| We'll go to Wilsonville, Oregon. | ||
| Kurt is a Democrat watching there. | ||
| Good morning to you, Kurt. | ||
| Yes, ma'am. |