Andrew Clavin skewers modern campus culture, mocking Jeb Bush’s "kill baby Hitler" joke while framing the Little Sisters of the Poor case as a moral quagmire. He slams Missouri’s protests—where hunger strikes forced President Tim Wolfe’s resignation—as performative victimhood, then dissects Yale’s Halloween email fiasco, playing audio of Nicholas Christakis being berated by a student demanding "safe spaces" over free speech. Clavin blames universities for surrendering to political correctness, citing Edward Said’s Orientalism as "specious reasoning" and PragerU’s claim that federal loans fund worthless degrees like gender studies. He ties this to C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures, arguing postmodernism’s rejection of objective truths leaves students debt-ridden and historically illiterate, all while elite schools prioritize emotional comfort over education. [Automatically generated summary]
A new survey shows our nation's youth are suffering from a lack of education, sinking into ignorance, small-mindedness, and stupidity.
And that's just at Yale University.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right, we're going to talk a little bit about Yale and the things that are going on at our universities.
I actually have some thoughts about this.
I don't think you'll hear elsewhere, so it might be worthwhile.
Meanwhile, we have to wish a happy birthday to Jonathan Hay, who is running the show.
Yeah, come on.
Jonathan came in.
What's the name of that thing you had?
He has a robot.
What is it?
BB-8.
BB-8?
Yeah.
Okay, that's from the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, and it's been running around the floor.
I've been trying to stomp on it.
So it's your 12th or 13th birthday, obviously.
Actually, it's a very cool toy, a very cool toy.
And I assume it has like a drone camera on it so you can send it into the bathroom and things like that.
But a quick look at the big news of the day, Jeb exclamation point Bush, maybe Jeb Bush.
I don't know how you pronounce that.
Jeb Jeb.
He has announced that he would, in fact, go back in time to kill baby Hitler.
This is the level of our political discourse.
Jeb Bush has announced he would go back in time to kill Baby Hitler.
And I am announcing that if he comes back successful, I will vote for him.
I'll be the first guy to greet him as he comes back.
You know, it's big talk.
It's big talk.
It's easy to say you would go back in time and kill baby Hitler.
Once you got there, you know, oh, you'd be this baby with a cute little mustache, you know, little polished, shiny black booties.
You know, how can you kill a baby?
What's wrong with you?
We'd have to send like.
Yeah, exactly.
We'd have to send like some kind of heartless psychopath, like somebody from Planned Parenthood, to go back.
And that's no good, because once they start killing babies, they don't know where to stop.
And why Hitler?
He'd just help out.
Come on, do something fun.
Anyway, speaking of that, we also have the news that the little sisters, the Supreme Court is going to hear the appeal of the little sisters of the poor, the nuns, who Barack Obama is trying to force to fund abortions.
So it's really hard to know who to root for on that one.
It's like a James Patterson novel.
James Patterson, obviously this hugely successful thriller writer, and I don't mean to knock him, but one of the reasons he's hugely successful is there are no gray areas in his books.
Like his hero is a quadriplegic black man who takes care of his grandmother, and the villain is like a serial killer who bites the heads off children.
That's a James Patterson novel.
The grandmother is always gave him, she gave him a hug that was the huggiest hug since hugs were huggy.
That's the way those books are.
So this is what this is like.
This is like the little sisters of the poor.
Please don't make us kill babies.
Yes, you must kill babies.
I am Barack Obama.
You must.
We're the little sisters of the poor.
Anyway, that's going to be an exciting case.
I mean, I really do believe, I seriously in my heart believe that when we get to heaven, evil is going to seem like comedy.
Now that we're here and we're suffering in the flesh, it's not so funny.
It's hard to laugh when there's real evil.
But I really do believe that when we get to heaven, we're going to sit around going, remember that time they elected a baby killing president, tried to make nuns kill babies, and they called that hope and change.
What was that about?
That was crazy, wasn't it?
But we don't have that perspective now, so it has to go to the Supreme Court before we can figure out who's right and who's wrong.
Should we kill the babies or let the little sisters of the poor tend to the poor?
It's a difficult, you know, great or tough one to figure out.
All right, let's talk about our universities.
A lot of stuff happening in our universities, two big ones.
The New York Times ran this big series saying all across the nation there are these incidents going on.
And I kind of went through the list, and it wasn't really that impressive a list.
It was really these two incidents that happened yesterday or been happening over the past couple of weeks.
The first is at the University of Missouri.
The president has stepped down, and the chancellor says he's going to step down.
Over these protests, there were, I think there were two incidents.
Was that it?
There were two incidents.
One where a black student, somebody shouted the N-word at a black student, and the other where somebody took human feces and painted a swastika on the wall.
That was probably for arts and crafts in Mizzou.
That's right, Mizzou arts and crafts.
But somehow this turned into a protest.
One kid started a hunger strike and said he was not going to eat until something was done.
And then the football team, the Tigers, they came in and they said they weren't going to play.
They were going to boycott the next game, which would have cost the university a million dollars in cancellation fees.
And so the president now has to resign and the chancellor's going to resign.
And the president, let's just take a look at the president, what's his name, Tim Wolfe.
Let's just take a quick look at his statements as he stepped down.
Use my resignation to heal and start talking again, to make the changes necessary.
And let's focus on changing what we can change today and in the future, not what we can't change, which is what happened in the past.
I truly love everybody here in the great institution, and my decision to resign comes out of love, not hate.
It's painful to watch these things.
They really are reminiscent of Soviet apologies and Maoist apologies.
You know, after this was over, a bunch of black students staged a protest, which became a little ugly when the press showed up and the students threatened to call the police if the reporters invaded their safe space.
The police, of course, the protesters being a bunch of unarmed blacks, would have presumably showed up and shot them all down.
But that didn't seem to register.
They were very upset that the press were trying to ask them questions and they chanted no comment, no comment.
And the question, of course, the question that you asked was, what was this guy supposed to do?
What was the university supposed to do?
And I think we know that basically they were supposed to come down and put the kibosh on free speech.
I mean, I think that's where all of this is going.
It's always using the power of your victimhood to silence the people that you don't like.
And the other thing that this really reminds me of is reminds me of Lawrence Summers at Harvard, the president of Harvard, who had to resign in 2006 after he made a comment.
He made a comment that why weren't there more women in the sciences?
And he said, you know, we don't know why there aren't more women.
One possibility is that men have a greater predilection for the sciences than women do.
Those weren't his exact words, but that was the idea.
And of course, the feminists, to prove that they were just as rational as men, became hysterical and started fainting and crying.
There's like Islamists.
You know how you call an Islamist, you say, Islam is kind of a violent religion and he kills you to prove that that's not true.
Feminists are like that.
If you say like, you know, you're kind of irrational, they start screaming and crying and all this.
And they forced him to resign.
And that was really a shame because Summers was a good man and he was just being very honest and straightforward and speculating.
And it was what Christina Hoffsom was called fainting couch feminism where they fall on their, you know, they're so weak and frail that they fall down and faint on their couches.
All right, now we have this incident at Yale.
And this is the one that I have to say, one of my kids graduated from Yale, full disclosure.
I have to say, this one really bugs me.
But it's so easy to rant about this stuff that I've been trying to think about it in terms of the ideas that went into it.
So let's just take a quick look just so we understand what happened.
The Yale University before Halloween put out an email.
I can't remember one of their stupid, useless administrative bodies put out an email saying, let's be sensitive in our costumes.
So, you know, don't go out and blackface as a Muslim Bruce Jenner.
You know, that's that kind of thing.
Check out treat for Giad, and I'm a woman.
It's like you can just insult everybody all at once.
So you're not supposed to do this.
And this has been a meme that's been going on.
Did I send a Bill Maher cut?
Bring up the Bill Maher cut.
I mean, even Bill Maher, now Bill Maher has been pretty good on free speech, but he is a stone leftist, but he's still enough of a libertarian to hit on this.
And here's his comment about Halloween.
New rule, the PC police have to stop lecturing us on which Halloween costumes are inappropriate or insensitive and leave Halloween to the people it was created for.
Middle-aged gay men.
The fake outrage people get 364 days a year to be hypersensitive about everything.
There has to be one day where going too far isn't just okay.
It's celebrated.
Okay, so even Bill Maher realizes that this is going too far.
So Yale sends out this letter and a married couple who were in charge of one of them is a woman named Eric Christakis and her husband Nicholas.
And Erica is a lecturer in childhood education.
And she and her husband oversee some of the student residences.
So they're kind of the house mother and father.
And she sent out a note saying, this is being silly, basically what Bill Maher just said.
This is kind of being silly.
You know, can't we be a little obnoxious from time to time, a little offensive?
And quoting her husband, he said, if you don't like a costume someone is wearing, look away or tell them that you're offended.
Talk to each other.
He said, free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.
Now, you'd think that would be pretty unimpeachable, hard to argue with that.
Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.
Not at all.
He is surrounded, this guy, Nicholas Christakis, he's surrounded by a mob.
It's really a frightening Maoist scene.
And it's a little hard to hear what they're saying, but he is saying, they're saying, questioning him, why did you say this?
And he says, because I believe in free speech.
And he says, my job is to help form an intellectual community.
And this one girl comes up to him and says, no, that's not your job.
Your job is to make us a safe home.
And when he says he disagrees with her, you can listen to, let's hear what happens.
The exception is because other people have rights too, not just one way.
It doesn't deserve to be a lesser degree in one thing to be here for all students.
Be quiet!
For all students.
Do you understand that?
As your position and master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Siloman.
You have not done that.
By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master.
Do you understand that?
No, I don't agree with that.
Then why the f did you accept the position?
Now there's a broad who needs a smack and a kisser.
I mean, really, I'm against hitting women in general, and one of the ways to avoid that is to avoid women who need a smack.
But that's actually not a woman.
That is a child.
That is a spoiled, poorly behaved child.
And it's not good for her to be allowed to speak to her elders and her betters like that.
It's not good for her to be allowed to lose control of herself and let her ignorance gather authority.
And of course, what you would hope would happen is that she would either be expelled or suspended.
You would hope that her parents, and I'm not going to make a comment about her parents, but you would hope that her parents would withdraw their funding or punish her or that the university would.
And of course, what happened is Yale, one of the premier educational facilities in the country, issues an apology, we failed you.
And they're promising basically to curtail free speech at one of our major universities.
As I say, I have a child who graduated from Yale.
There are no victims at Yale.
These are the 1% of the 1%.
This is the cream of the cream.
These are the people who are going to run the country.
They're going to be the richest business people.
They are making contacts there.
Even if they never learn anything, they're making contacts there that are going to last them their whole lives.
They join those skull and bones type clubs, and they meet people who are going to be president and are going to be in high places in government and in business.
They'll be able to pick up a phone for the rest of their lives, as I'm not able to do, and probably most of you aren't able to do.
They will be able to pick up a phone for the rest of their lives and say, hey, it's me, class of 2015.
Give me a break.
I need a job.
I'm in trouble here.
And they will find something to do.
So I just wanted to say that personally.
I wanted to get that in personally because it's really, really offensive and aggravating to me to see somebody see a little girl, essentially, a poorly raised little girl, screaming at one of the people who should be in authority over her life, and then Yale caving in.
It used to be that the college was in loco parentis.
It was the parent on the scene.
They would stand in for the parents.
Then they said, well, we're not that.
Now they are that, but they do it badly.
They spoil.
They actually spoil these kids and just cave in whenever they scream and yell.
Now, a lot of these ideas, in one sense, just to look at the ideas where they're coming from, it's really easy.
Because conservatives don't concern themselves with the culture, because they concern themselves, they think politically, everything always seems to be happening in the moment.
And it's easy to look at a girl like that and just say she's an idiot.
All she cares about is whether she feels good or whether she's offended.
But no, she's actually being taught bad ideas.
Orientalism and Misunderstandings00:04:27
These ideas come from someplace, and they are, you know, if you raised your child and taught him the wrong names for things, he would be screwed up for the rest of your lives.
You know, don't try this at home.
You know, like if you just told him that apples were chairs and all this stuff, and that's how you taught him, that would ruin his whole life.
That's essentially what's happening to these kids.
And a lot of it is generated by a book published in the 70s by a guy named Edward Saeed called Orientalism.
And Saeed was, I think he was half Egyptian and half Palestinian.
I can't remember.
But he was basically an American professor, a very elegant guy.
And I never met him, but I knew some of the people who knew him.
And he was kind of like their Arab pal.
These leftist professors were proud that they had an Arab pal who wasn't a camel jockey, wasn't a terrorist.
He was so elegant.
He was so rational.
He was so thoughtful.
And he really played his Arab identity in the same way Barack Obama has parlayed his black identity to get to the top.
And Saeed was a master of specious reasoning.
I can't think of another word for that.
Specious just means I should be like Bill O'Reilly and have you look it up.
Look up specious.
Yeah, look up pompous, Bill.
Specious reasoning is reasoning that sounds good, but it just has no merit.
It really doesn't.
And Orientalism is a book.
I mean, better scholars than I have debunked it.
Scholarship.
But just in terms of if you picked it up and read it, as I have, its reasoning is no good.
Basically, it puts forward the idea that the West defines itself in terms of the other.
That is how it defines itself.
And the other is a stereotypical idea of the Oriental, including Arabs.
And I think I wrote down a quote.
He says, I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later 19th century took an interest in those countries, which was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies.
To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact, and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.
In other words, the only way we knew these places was through imperialism.
And so he even got to the point where he was reading Jane Austen.
I'm sure you've all seen Jane Austen movies like Pride and Prejudice, and he was reading those books and saying that because they took place in a period of British imperialism, they were essentially imperialist books.
To read them was imperialist.
And a lot of this idea seeped in.
And what's on the very surface of it, what's wrong with this idea, is why should the West be specially taxed with knowing what other people are like?
It's only because our ideas are so tolerant and open-minded that Saeed even thought that we would feel guilty about this.
It's only because of our Christian, Judeo-Christian background that tells us that we are all one children of God, but that you don't find that in other cultures.
Go look at a picture of Peking, you know, go look at a picture of Chinese cities.
Go look at a picture of African cities.
Go look at a picture of Japanese cities.
You don't see what you see in America.
You don't see what you see even in London, that multicultural explosion of different colored faces.
That's only here.
That's because we are the least racist people.
We are the least racist.
I mean, everybody has some racism, but we are the least racist.
And that's why he knew that he could attack us.
And that's what happens ultimately to our, is what happened ultimately to our liberal arts programs in colleges, is that they began to fall apart because they no longer had that Western identity.
They were afraid to say, we represent the ideas of the West.
Shakespeare is important to us because he is the foundation of our humanist ideas of the West.
They were afraid to say that because whenever they were saying that, they were guilty of Orientalism.
They were guilty of defining themselves against another.
Well, why wasn't Confucius just as good as Shakespeare?
Why wasn't the works of the Thousand and One Knights just as good as Dickens?
It never occurred to anybody to say, because only through Shakespeare do we include Confucius.
Confucius doesn't include Shakespeare.
The Chinese aren't reading Shakespeare.
We're reading Confucius.
And that is because of the Greek and Christian and Jewish ideas that went into this.
So that's where this woman comes from, this screaming woman comes from, when she thinks that any word that excludes anybody or offends anybody is somehow a bad thing.
She's guilty of Orientalism.
But why did this become, how has this become possible?
Two Cultures Clash00:07:15
Why did the professors and administrators lose their faith in the Western tradition?
That's a big question.
I'm not going to try and answer it today.
I'll come back to it.
But there is one thing that has really occurred to me that I don't think any of us have realized what we're looking at.
We're looking at economics feeding ignorance, okay?
This week, the Prager University, and I love these guys, they put out excellent videos, most of which are filmed here, right?
I think Prager University put out a video about, they called it the game of loans.
And it stars, again, I'm Charlie Kirk, who is the head of a conservative organization called Turning Point USA.
And Kirk talks about how by promising loans to college students, they are effectively ending any need for universities to cut their prices, right?
Because they're guaranteeing that money will flow in to the university from the federal government.
The federal government will make back money in interest, and you will get screwed because you're paying back the loan.
It's just the same as what Obama is trying to do to healthcare.
Always go back to technology.
Think about a TV.
A TV comes out, it costs $5,000.
You think, wow, I'd love that TV, but I can't.
I'm not plunking down five grand for a TV.
Within six months, it's $1,000.
Within six months, it's $600, and suddenly you can buy it.
Why?
Because the government isn't promising that everyone will get one.
It's not promising to pay for your TV.
So once they sell it to the goons who are willing to pay $5,000 because they have it, they have the money, they want the TV right away, they pay it.
Now that that customer base is gone, then they come to the rest of us.
They say, all right, now we'll cut it down and we'll make up in volume what we lost in lowering the price.
That doesn't happen to universities because the government is paying for it and you are being stuck in debt.
But here's the kicker.
Here's Kirk's point about why this education has no value anymore.
So take a look at this.
Students were going to college in record numbers to study engineering or computer science or biology, professions with high employment rates.
Maybe these crazy sums would make some sense.
Maybe.
But the most common majors are in the social sciences and communications, in subjects like sociology, cinema history, and gender studies.
Not surprisingly, these majors have very high unemployment rates, as in, they don't prepare you for a job.
And these majors are mainstream.
You can get a degree in storytelling, bagpiping, and puppet arts for your $50,000 a year.
So because these guys do not have to compete, they don't have to compete because the government will pay for your education, and then you will get stuck with that bill down the line, but you're not thinking about that in the same way people don't think about credit card debt, you can now take these courses that will not pay you back.
They won't help you get a job.
Back in 1959, a novelist named C.P. Snow made one of the most famous speeches of the 20th century.
People don't know about it anymore.
C.P. Snow was not just a novelist.
He was also, I think, a chemist.
He was some kind of scientist.
Pretty sure he was a chemist.
And he gave a speech called The Two Cultures.
And this set the intellectual world on fire.
And what he said was, we are dividing into two cultures.
The intellectuals, basically, are dividing into two cultures, one of which know about the arts and one of which know about science.
And he made this point.
He said, a good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have, with considerable gusto, been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists, how silly scientists are because they haven't read Shakespeare.
So once or twice, C.P. Snow says, I was provoked and asked the company how many of them could describe the second law of thermodynamics.
The response was cold.
It was also negative.
Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of have you read a work of Shakespeare.
And then he goes on to say, I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question, such as what do you mean by mass or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of asking, can you read?
Not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.
In other words, there was this divide going on as science became more and more specialized and complex.
Artists knew less and less about it and were writing less and less about the real world as we knew it to be today.
This has only gotten worse, of course, as science has become more and more complex.
And this affects all of us because all of us think we know more science than we do.
The conservative historian Paul Johnson makes the case that moral relativism bases itself on the theory of relativity, which is not a theory about relativism.
It's a theory about what's not relative.
It's a theory about what's absolute.
And everything is relative to that, to the speed of light.
You know, we all talk about genetics.
We talk about alpha males.
There's a stupid idea, alpha males.
We don't even know if we descend from the kinds of apes who have alpha males.
We don't know anything about that.
And if you look at human society, it really isn't based on the way that ape society is put together.
So it's kind of silly, but we all use these terms and they all shape.
You know, we talk about the mind is always, our image of the mind is always based on the most advanced technology we have.
So Freud thought there were these under these subconscious ideas that would burst up because the most sophisticated machine was a steam engine.
And nowadays we talk about being hardwired, we talk about being programmed because our most sophisticated machines are computers.
So science affects the way we think about it, and most of us don't know about it anymore.
And so these people are being sent to school and getting further and further away from the things that matter.
Steven Pinker talks about this.
Steven Pinker is a really good science writer.
I don't agree with him about everything, but he's a really good science writer who has diffidently tried to explain to the left that we really do have a human nature.
There really is such a thing as femininity.
There really is such a thing as masculinity.
He's gotten more and more afraid to say what he has to say, but he does say it.
And he did start out with a book called The Blank Slate, which said it pretty strongly.
He talks about what has happened since then.
He's asked in this clip about the two cultures.
And here's what he has to say.
I think there's still an enormous gap between large segments of the humanities and social sciences on the one hand and the sciences on the other.
I think especially the parts of the humanities that have been influenced by postmodernism, that deny that there's any such thing as human nature, or for that matter, a real world that we can, where we can empirically test our hypotheses about how it works.
I think that a lot of social science takes place on the assumption that ideas and values and norms float in some layer disconnected from flesh and blood brains and that culture begets culture with the human mind out of the loop.
The Evolution of Narrative in Video Games00:04:09
What you're seeing when you see that little Yale girl starts screaming aside from a spoiled brat, what you're really seeing is a person who is being rendered helpless and useless by a system that is not responding to the free market.
As the social sciences and real science drift apart, as people become ignorant, the social sciences become useless.
It is useless to get a degree in storytelling.
It's not useless to get a degree in English literature if you learn the history of English literature, but someone who studies English literature today won't even read Shakespeare, so he's not really learning anything.
So that person that you see screaming, all these people that you see screaming, they don't know anything about the human mind.
They don't know anything about the differences between men and women, what science says about the differences between men and women, and they're being rendered unemployable because these colleges are being propped up by a system, a non-free market system of loans that has plunged our youth into debt and stupidity.
That woman, when she starts screaming, that's really a scream for help.
She's asking, you know, what really has to happen is people have to go in and teach our kids what is worth fighting for, what is good and what is virtuous and what is worth fighting for.
And they can only learn that by learning about our culture and by defending our culture as it was created by the great artists of the world and is now being sustained by great artists and great scientists.
So I really feel that that child is being failed entirely, really by us, not just by not being disciplined, but by not being taught.
All right, stuff I like.
Here is, you know, I keep saying, oh, I'm going to talk about video games, and I never talk about this.
You know, back in, I don't know, as far back as the 80s, writers started to speculate how computers were going to affect storytelling.
There was a famous essay, and I think it was written, I couldn't find it before I came in, but I think it was written by Raymond Carver, the short story writer.
And he wrote about how there was going to be this new thing called metafiction.
It was going to be very exciting because there were hyperlinks, which was a new thing, that you could jump from place to place in a story, and instead of following a story to its end, you could just hit a link and go off into another story, and you'd have these branching kind of do-it-yourself stories.
And this was supposed to defeat what at the time was called the tyranny of narrativity.
It was the idea that a narrative was coming down from an authority, you know, where the word author, where we get the word author, you know, is coming down from authority, and you could defeat the authority by destroying the narrative.
Well, it turned out that that wasn't really that interesting, that people like stories, and they like to be told stories, and they don't really want to make their own adventure.
They want the adventure to come to them by somebody who knows what he's doing.
But where it did kind of develop was in the realm of video games, and video games have had this really, really, a more interesting effect on narrative than any new technology since the movies, I think.
There's this tension in video games between the gameplay, which has to be fast and fun, and the story, which has to have some kind of free-ranging play so that you can lose and win and go down one road and go down another road and all these different things.
Personally, I still think that most of the best video games are what are called platformers.
Platform games are essentially two-dimensional games like Super Mario, where you just move a character across a board.
Now, they can be three-dimensional, but they limit, they bring back the tyranny of narrativity by limiting where your character can go.
One of my favorites is a game called Braid.
If you've never seen this, you can get it for $10 at the App Store.
It's just a story of a kind of prince trying to rescue a princess, but it really is an intelligent look at the way narrative works, at the way time works, at the way time is tyrannical and captures you in it.
You can play with time, you can go back in time.
You have to figure out when you go back in time what the effect will be on the narrative going forward.
It's really fun.
It's simple to learn how to play.
It's difficult to solve.
It's a real puzzle game.
But anyway, I think you really, if you enjoy these games at all, Braid, and you've never played Braid, $10 at the App Store, it's really good.