Jan. 16, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is the president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, the author of Not a Daycare, The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth, and a staunch defender of intellectual freedom on campus, Dr. Everett Piper. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I'm honored to join you today, Dave. | ||
| I'm glad to have you because you are writing about and talking about and living many of the ideas that obviously I focus on here. | ||
| Before we get to any of that though, your other book, your first book, I want to get the title exactly right because it's just perfect, the title is Why I'm a Liberal and Other Conservative Ideas. | ||
| One of the things that I've been saying lately is that defending my liberal principles is becoming a conservative position. | ||
| And I think that probably sort of puts us in a similar spot. | ||
| What does liberalism mean to you? | ||
| Why do you consider yourself a liberal? | ||
| Well, I would argue that what you're doing right now is the historic definition of classical liberalism. | ||
| Let's go back to the founding of the liberal arts institution. | ||
| Let's just say Oxford one thousand years ago. | ||
| Why was a liberal arts academy established? | ||
| It was to educate a free man, a free woman, a free culture, a free church, a free people. | ||
| It was an education in liberty, an education in freedom. | ||
| So the classical definition of a liberal was somebody who argued for and defended human | ||
| liberty. | ||
| And it was in the context of that education, a liberal arts education, that Chesterton | ||
| told us some 100 years ago, that without fences you don't have freedom and without honoring | ||
| the big laws you don't have liberty. | ||
| So it's this tension within the liberal arts academy of pursuing truth with a capital T | ||
| that actually has the paradox of releasing you for the greatest measure of human liberty, | ||
| human freedom, in the course of human history. | ||
| So a classical liberal is somebody who understands the conservation. | ||
| You're a conservationist. | ||
| You're conserving those time-tested truths that actually work to provide human liberty. | ||
| So you ended on the word work there. | ||
| What happened to liberalism? | ||
| I mean, if you look at it, especially through an American context today, the people that call themselves liberals, and I'm not really talking about the classical liberals anymore, who have far more in common with, say, libertarians than progressives, what happened to liberalism? | ||
| Because I believe, as I think you do, this is the right set of ideas, the ideas that I'm constantly talking about, about the individual. | ||
| and laissez-faire economics and limited government or the light touch of government. | ||
| I think these are really the right ideas to move a free society forward and yet what modern liberalism is has almost nothing to do with that. | ||
| Let's go back to Richard Weaver in 1948. | ||
| Why did he write his seminal work, Ideas Have Consequences? | ||
| We hardly even need to crack the cover to understand what he's saying. | ||
| Ideas have consequences. | ||
| They matter. | ||
| Good ideas bear good culture, good kids, good community, good country, good fruit. | ||
| Good ideas bear good fruit, and bad ideas have the opposite effect. | ||
| Now, why is 1948 critical in this analogy, in my answer to you? | ||
| It's because Weaver was writing to his culture a handful of years after what? | ||
| The Nazi Holocaust. | ||
| And he was saying we should have seen this coming. | ||
| We imbibed terrible ideas for decades, and we bore the consequences therein. | ||
| So we need to attend to the ideas that have been tested by time, defended by reason, proven by experience, and I would argue as a Christian, given by revelation. | ||
| It's those permanent ideas, it's the conservation of those ideas that are big. | ||
| rather than dumbing down the conversation to the million ideas that are small. | ||
| Again, Chesterton, get rid of the big laws and you don't get liberty. | ||
| You'd rather get thousands and thousands of little laws that rush in to fill the vacuum. | ||
| And if that isn't the definition of our culture today, I don't know what is. | ||
| Yes, we are over-regulated and everyone thinks that there's just another answer that lies in a law somewhere and usually it doesn't. | ||
| So then what, Do you consider yourself a conservative now, then? | ||
| Or do these labels even matter to you that much? | ||
| Well, I would say a conservative is somebody who conserves, okay? | ||
| I believe in conserving an owl and a tree and clean water and clean air, but I also believe in conserving something perhaps even more important, and that's ideas. | ||
| ideas that work. The Wesleyan quadrilateral, and it's actually Augustinian too, but let's go back | ||
| to John and Charles Wesley of the mid-1700s. They had something they called the quad, the | ||
| quadrilateral. And it was a worldview. It was the four things that you should sift any idea through | ||
| as you evaluate its veracity. Tradition, reason, experience, and scripture. | ||
| Revelation, if you will. | ||
| If you want to get outside of the bounds of a Christian language, we'll call it revelation, natural law, common sense. | ||
| All right, so tradition, history. | ||
| Grandma and grandpa might have actually known something. | ||
| The old ideas, as C.S. | ||
| Lewis said, are often better than the new ideas. | ||
| If you want to read a new book, fine, go ahead, said Lewis, but you might want to consider reading, oh, a dozen or so old ones first. | ||
| Why? | ||
| You mean Grandma and Grandpa weren't automatically backwards, racist? | ||
| They weren't automatically stupid, in fact. | ||
| And I use that, obviously, as an analogy. | ||
| The old ideas that have been around for a while may be there. | ||
| Not necessarily, but they may be there because they've proven themselves over time. | ||
| So, history, tradition, experience. | ||
| It's the Dr. Phil question. | ||
| How's that one working for you? | ||
| We should always respond to ourselves as we're evaluating our own ideas, our own worldview, as well as our adversary, or even those that agree with us, and say, how is it working for us? | ||
| Is there a pragmatic value to this? | ||
| Does it work over time for social health, personal health, physical health, whatever? | ||
| Does it work? | ||
| So tradition and experience, reason, you've got to brain use it, the rationality, facts versus feeling. | ||
| We're in a culture right now that's dumbed down everything to feelings rather than facts. | ||
| Facts be damned! | ||
| We're not pro-science any longer. | ||
| We ignore science for the sake of a political popular agenda. | ||
| We're going to get to plenty of that. | ||
| And then finally the fourth component of the quad, the quadrilateral, is revelation. | ||
| Those things that are true and it doesn't have to be tested in two. | ||
| For example, The materialist would say, if you can't taste it, touch it, feel it, see it, it just isn't so. | ||
| And I would disagree with that, and I can prove it just by asking a simple question. | ||
| Do you believe that rape is wrong? | ||
| Do you believe the Holocaust was a bad thing? | ||
| Was antebellum slavery something that should have been reviled? | ||
| And the answer we all hold, if we're decent human beings, is yes, all of those are objectively wrong. | ||
| Well, how do we know? | ||
| You can't put it in a test tube. | ||
| We know because it's a revelation. | ||
| Apostle Paul, one of the greatest philosophers in human history, I would argue, suggested in Romans that this is the truth of God laid on every human heart. | ||
| Others have argued, the Catholic Church and whatnot, that it's natural law, common sense, the revelation that causes both of us to agree, both of us to agree, that slavery is a bad thing. | ||
| No, it's not open for debate. | ||
| We don't have to test it in a tube. | ||
| We know slavery should be reviled. | ||
| All right, there's a lot there that's bouncing around some of the ideas that I talk about here. | ||
| So basically, without that bedrock, we'll do these backwards, so we'll start with the fourth. | ||
| Without that bedrock, that everything then would be left to some sort of subjective nature, right? | ||
| That's the crux of that? | ||
| Well, it all digresses to power. | ||
| If you don't have a principle, an enduring, permanent, immutable principle, it all digresses to power. | ||
| And we see that. | ||
| It's proven in human history. | ||
| I'm fond of telling my students at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. | ||
| In fact, I often give the commencement address in May. | ||
| It's often very short. | ||
| I give them a gift. | ||
| It's a guaranteed standing ovation, by the way, to tell everybody before the speech starts that this will be five minutes max. | ||
| A five-minute commencement speech? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| They're not here to listen to me. | ||
| They want to celebrate. | ||
| But what I tell them often, and it's a repeat almost every year, today I'm not going to celebrate your opinion. | ||
| In fact, today I don't care what your opinion is, and you shouldn't care about my opinion. | ||
| I'm not going to pat you on the back when you walk across the stage and approach me in your funny cap and gown and me standing there in mine. | ||
| I'm not going to hand you a diploma and say, congratulations, you've got a degree in opinions. | ||
| That's absurd. | ||
| I hope you paid $35,000 a year to learn something that's right and just and real and true. | ||
| Something closer to the truths of your discipline than what you knew when you came in as an 18-year-old four years ago. | ||
| And the proof to that, you know, some people may say, well, that's just your opinion on education. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| Well, I'll say this. | ||
| Opinions always enslave, but truth sets you free. | ||
| Pol Pot had an opinion. | ||
| Mao had an opinion. | ||
| Robespierre and Chavez and Hitler and Mussolini, all the despots of history, had opinions and it didn't end well for millions of people. | ||
| But Christ said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. | ||
| There's power in the immutable, unchangeable truths that set us free. | ||
| And there's always bondage in the opinion. | ||
| So what do you make then of sort of what I would say are the well-intended progressives? | ||
| And I think there are some people without good intentions, maybe at the top of that. | ||
| But I think the average young person that you're probably encountering as a freshman, that has been sort of indoctrinated with these ideas, that follows through with them? | ||
| Like, what are the ways that you've been able to sort of wake them up to why this is wrong? | ||
| Why opinion-based learning is wrong? | ||
| Why there actually are facts? | ||
| Why that matters? | ||
| Well, I find the progressive mind and the progressive agenda is so easy to knock down by a rhetorical question. | ||
| In fact, Again, obviously in this interview thus far, I've showed my cards. | ||
| I'm a committed Christian. | ||
| I believe the words of Christ make a difference. | ||
| In fact, George MacDonald once said, in my attempt to obey the words recorded as his, I have found grandeur beyond the realm of any human invention, and therefore I cast my lot with those of the crucified. | ||
| That's good stuff. | ||
| So what do I do? | ||
| Well, if I believe that this guy named Jesus was actually who he claimed to be, I'd have to kind of conclude that he's probably the smartest guy to ever walk the face of the earth. | ||
| He knew the answer. | ||
| He knew how to win the debate. | ||
| But often, this guy, that millions if not billions of people have claimed to be God incarnate that walked among us, didn't engage in an argument. | ||
| I mean, you read the story of Christ, and he almost never argued with his opponent. | ||
| He could have won the debate. | ||
| He knew how. | ||
| He could have crushed them, I would conclude. | ||
| But he never argued. | ||
| What did he do? | ||
| He asked a simple question. | ||
| Which one of you wants to throw the first stone? | ||
| Why do you call me Lord? | ||
| Whose face is on this coin? | ||
| And then he shuts up and he lets the worldview of his adversary implode as they drop their stones and they walk away. | ||
| So what do you do with the post-modern, the progressive question from a 20-year-old? | ||
| Well, can you tolerate my intolerance? | ||
| Do you hate hateful people? | ||
| Are you sure that nothing is sure? | ||
| Do you know that nothing can be known and are you absolutely confident there are no absolutes? | ||
| And then just shut up and listen. | ||
| They don't have an answer. | ||
| They saw off the branch upon which they sit, and it comes tumbling down. | ||
| And it's at that point I think you can rebuild the argument with some common sense rather than this nihilism and nonsense, literal nonsense, because it makes no sense for you or me to look an adversary in the eye and say, I can't tolerate your intolerance. | ||
| It makes you the very thing that you find intolerable. | ||
| It's self-refuting. | ||
| I feel like you're sort of like a college administrator from the future. | ||
| This is sort of like the Terminator. | ||
| You've come back to warn us about what's gonna happen in the future. | ||
| So let's back up a little bit. | ||
| Just tell me a little bit more about how you got interested in these ideas. | ||
| Were you always sort of political? | ||
| Did freedom and liberty and ideas always matter to you? | ||
| Was that something you were taught? | ||
| Well, now you've asked a question that could take way too long to answer, so let me try to discipline myself to be brief. | ||
| I was a blue-collar kid. | ||
| My mom and dad didn't graduate from high school. | ||
| My dad was a truck driver, my mom was a nurse's aide and a stay-at-home mom. | ||
| Odd jobs here and there. | ||
| We were lower middle class, where it was paycheck to paycheck. | ||
| When I graduated from high school, I went to work in an apple orchard with some migrant workers, and I also worked in a local factory. | ||
| I did two jobs. | ||
| and work in third shift lunch, which what time is third shift? | ||
| I think that's three o'clock in the morning or something like that. | ||
| I sat down for lunch one night and this gentleman who was working two jobs, | ||
| he was a private business owner. He had a flower shop, so he was working the factory to help make payroll. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| But he had a master's degree in international politics or affairs or something like that, | ||
| an esoteric degree. | ||
| And he looked at me over the picnic table in the factory and he said, why are you here? | ||
| And I said, to make money like you. | ||
| He said, why don't you go to college? | ||
| So I washed off the grease and I got in my expensive factory rat car that I could afford as an 18 year old kid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I drove up the road a half hour and enrolled at a Christian liberal arts college that I was aware of. | ||
| And the rest is history. | ||
| Those doors opened up for me to be able to do things, like be on this show and challenge one another with some reasonable debate and good thinking. | ||
| Those doors opened up because of a classical liberal education, not a progressive one, not a leftist one, but a classical liberal education that liberated me to move into various different venues of life that I never would have been able to do otherwise. | ||
| So, as it stands now, are you kind of shocked at the state of what's going on with young people at colleges? | ||
| I mean, the whole purpose of your book, right? | ||
| That it's become daycare, sort of, or some basic... | ||
| training session for students for things that they should have learned a long time before that. | ||
| Not that you should know everything the day you walk into college, because of course you're supposed to learn, but that they've missed a series of extremely important ideas before they've even got there. | ||
| Was that when you first realized that was happening? | ||
| A, when was that? | ||
| And B, were you shocked? | ||
| No, I'm not shocked because I've been seeing it coming for decades and you're accused of being an alarmist when you warn people of these things. | ||
| Well, that'll never happen. | ||
| Where are we right now? | ||
| So when did you first sense that something was wrong? | ||
| I've been a college president for 16 years. | ||
| I would say about the time maybe 20 years ago when I was a vice president of various different segments within the academy. | ||
| I could see the shutting down, the foreclosed mind, the unwillingness to entertain anything that might challenge you and move you out of your comfort zone. | ||
| Which way was it coming from? | ||
| Was it coming from the students, or was it coming from faculty, or was it coming from administration? | ||
| Was it coming in every direction? | ||
| I think it comes, we've created our own monster. | ||
| In fact, when I originally confronted this daycare thing, it's interesting. | ||
| If I may, set the context for the daycare story. | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
| Is that a fair segue? | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| I like a guest that sets up their own segue. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| Okay, so what's the daycare thing about? | ||
| So, at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, we still have required chapel every Wednesday and Friday. | ||
| All the students and faculty are in chapel. | ||
| This particular day, it was three years ago Thanksgiving week, Thanksgiving week, so just before the break, one of my vice presidents was the speaker in chapel. | ||
| And I know this particular guy very well, obviously, and I know he always speaks from a script. | ||
| He never ad-libs. | ||
| So it's always a 15, 20-minute homily, at best, and he's done. | ||
| And it's from a script. | ||
| Well, after he was done, I wasn't in chapel that day, I was working or something, so anyway, he called me after he was done, and he said, hey, Dr. Piper, I need to give you a heads up. | ||
| I had one of our own students today play the victimization card. | ||
| He came up to me after I was done with my chapel talk, and he pointed his finger in my chest, and he said, you offended me. | ||
| You singled me out, and you singled my peers out, and I don't like it. | ||
| And I said to Kyle, the VP that was calling me to give me this warning, I said, well, what was your talk about? | ||
| I was wondering, was it political? | ||
| Was there sarcasm? | ||
| What was going on? | ||
| He said, you won't believe this. | ||
| 1 Corinthians 13. | ||
| Now, for those that don't remember, 1 Corinthians 13 is the quintessential love chapter of the Bible. | ||
| Love is patient, love is kind. | ||
| You've probably heard it read at a thousand weddings. | ||
| OK. | ||
| So I said, what? | ||
| He said, yeah, I know. | ||
| I spoke on love today. | ||
| I'm a monster. | ||
| And we had one of our students that was offended by it? | ||
| And I said, send me a copy of your speech. | ||
| Again, knowing that he talks from a script, or speaks from a script, and doesn't ad-lib. | ||
| I knew if I read it, I'd find if there was anything offensive in it. | ||
| Did he throw in a joke? | ||
| Was there some off-putting humor or sarcasm? | ||
| I read it. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| 1 Corinthians 13, love is patient, love is kind. | ||
| A 15 minute I'm a Lee. | ||
| I'm love. | ||
| And I've got one of my kids offended by it. | ||
| So I wrote this article. | ||
| I've been writing for the local newspaper for the last 15 years or so, and usually when I write for the Bartlesville Examiner Enterprise, five people read it, three people care. | ||
| On this one, I was a little frustrated, so I popped off my op-ed, and I basically said, young man, that feeling of discomfort you had when you heard that sermon is called your conscience, and you might want to attend to it. | ||
| And if you came here expecting us to coddle you rather than confront you, if you think we're going to comfort you rather than challenge your character, you're in the wrong place. | ||
| And then I went on for another 700 words or so, and I concluded by saying, my land, this is a university. | ||
| It's not a daycare. | ||
| We expect you to grow up. | ||
| And that article, by the end of a week, week and a half, had three and a half million hits. | ||
| Yeah, we're gonna link to the article down below, because people should read it, yeah. | ||
| Now, here's the point, and I don't know if I'm off task and I'll shut up and let you. | ||
| Oh, you're doing your own segway? | ||
| I'm with ya, I'm with ya. | ||
| But here's the point, when I wrote that, three and a half million people paid attention to it. | ||
| By the way, NBC Today cited it as one of the top 10 news stories of 2015. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It went nuts. | ||
| Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Oxford England, Drudge and Dreher and Limbaugh and Beck and conservatives and liberals and progressives all covered it. | ||
| The college president that called out his students and said this is not a daycare, grow up. | ||
| Why is this important? | ||
| What grandpa or dad or mom hasn't said that to their kids? | ||
| I mean, this was not rocket science. | ||
| This was not high scholarship. | ||
| I basically said what everybody was thinking. | ||
| So why did 3.5 million people care? | ||
| We did a statistical analysis internally. | ||
| Out of all the comments on those 3.5 million views, how many were positive and how many were negative? | ||
| 97% were positive. | ||
| And this was on the Internet? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ninety-seven percent were positive, and three percent were negative. | ||
| The poster child for the positive? | ||
| The atheist from a very well-known university in Florida, Fulbright Scholar, writes me a letter and said, Piper, I read you're not a daycare thing. | ||
| Period. | ||
| I went to your website to figure out who you are. | ||
| Period. | ||
| As an atheist, I can easily dismiss your religion and your politics. | ||
| And I do. | ||
| Period. | ||
| But on this issue, thank you. | ||
| Kudos. | ||
| It needed to be said. | ||
| Please carry on. | ||
| That guy knew that we had created a monster. | ||
| It was our fault. | ||
| Our industry's fault. | ||
| The Academy, the ivory tower, has created this mess. | ||
| And he understood it. | ||
| And the monster is turning around to consume him. | ||
| And he knows it. | ||
| You know who the poster child of the negative was? | ||
| The church. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The church. | ||
| How so? | ||
| You offended the poor kid. | ||
| You hurt his feelings. | ||
| So what was the offense taken, though, specifically? | ||
| You tell me. | ||
| He felt uncomfortable. | ||
| Right, but he never addressed, like, a specific point. | ||
| No, he felt uncomfortable. | ||
| He felt that sermon was directed toward him. | ||
| Well, maybe it was. | ||
| There was a time where the church was supposed to confront those things that are selfish and narcissistic, and the self-focus was supposed to be corrected by selflessness and confession. | ||
| I actually said in my article, I'm not going to start issuing trigger warnings before altar calls. | ||
| A good sermon is supposed to wake you up. | ||
| A good sermon is supposed to, perhaps, instill some guilt. | ||
| So he was offended because he felt guilty for not showing enough love. | ||
| So, all right, there's a lot there. | ||
| So let's talk about first this atheist professor in Florida for a moment. | ||
| What do you make of someone that can take a principle stand like that, that in your view of the way they look at the world is missing sort of a critical piece, or let's say one of those four that you discussed before. | ||
| What do you make of someone like that? | ||
| I assume, and I've had a lot of discussions like this, on a micro level, you probably think he's, | ||
| I don't wanna lead you too much here, but you probably think he's a perfectly decent person | ||
| who may be living a very moral, good life. | ||
| But at a macro level, you see more of a societal problem. | ||
| Is that a fair estimation? | ||
| Well, I think ideas have consequences, again. | ||
| And I would in no way suggest that people that disagree with my religion are all immoral people. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't take five minutes of research to prove to the contrary. | ||
| These folks that agreed with me in my article, that when I say this atheist from the University of XYZ Florida agreed with me and was the poster child of that. | ||
| It's interesting, many within the secular community rather than the sacred community, if you want to draw that distinction, were all about this message in my speaking until they figured out I was a Christian. | ||
| And then it kind of went cold. | ||
| Because Canadian broadcasting. | ||
| I could tell when they figured out that I thought the solution was to return to what Chesterton called big laws that would give us the maximum amount of human freedom, whether you're Christian or whether you're not, whether you're agnostic, Anglican, atheist, or Buddhist or Baptist, it doesn't make a difference, but these ideas that Chesterton defined as the big laws, the simple laws, and others likewise, I would argue Adams and Jefferson and Washington would agree that these big laws were contextualized to give Everybody freedom, not just those folks that went to church on the weekend. | ||
| And I would argue that history has proven that true. | ||
| Even Martin Luther King Jr. | ||
| proved it in his letter from the Birmingham jail. | ||
| The context for the fight for freedom and justice was what? | ||
| The natural, irrefutable, common sense, natural law of God. | ||
| That's what MLK told us. | ||
| So we see these examples time and time again in our march for freedom. | ||
| You can't have freedom without a fence, said Chesterton. | ||
| In fact, Chesterton said, if you want to build the biggest playground in the world, this was one of his analogies, let's assume that this community, this neighborhood, wants the biggest, the best playground in all of the United States, and you spend all of the money to create the bells and the whistles and all the toys, and you want the kids in this community to enjoy that playground, Chesterton said, build a fence. | ||
| Because if you don't, what will happen? | ||
| One of two things. | ||
| Either you'll start policing these poor kids and haranguing them and yelling at them and creating all these little rules to control them so that they are safe within the playground, or they'll run out into the highway and get killed. | ||
| So either way, the kids will be restricted or hurt if you don't build a fence around the playground. | ||
| It's the paradox of freedom and fences of liberty and law. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of current analogies there with, you know, obviously there's a debate in the country | ||
| about having a physical wall at the border right now. | ||
| And you can make an interesting analogy to what's happening in the digital space | ||
| where we were all, we all had free access to all of these platforms. | ||
| And then they start censoring different people. | ||
| And because there are no fences, they put imaginary fences all over the place, | ||
| depending on who you are. | ||
| But you mentioned something really interesting there, which is that he thought, | ||
| or that some of the people thought that your ideas were good until they figure out | ||
| that there's a link back to religion. | ||
| How much of that has been a struggle for you in sort of the more secular academic world generally? | ||
| Maybe not at your university, but when you talk to other academics who usually probably shy away from religion or scripture, that sort of thing? | ||
| Well, it's always a challenge, but let's have a debate. | ||
| Are you really a classical liberal? | ||
| Are you an open-minded academic? | ||
| Do you want to pursue truth or do you want to construct it? | ||
| Do you want to protect your opinions? | ||
| Is that more important to you than understanding what the answer is at the end of the day? | ||
| Are we going to trust a referee on the game? | ||
| And if we don't trust the referee, if we don't define the boundaries, if we don't have some rules for the game, it's chaos. | ||
| You can't play basketball without boundaries. | ||
| You can't play soccer without somebody blowing a whistle. | ||
| It's the paradox again of liberty and law. | ||
| If you're a musician, you know this. | ||
| If you don't learn the rules, Of rhyme and rhythm and cadence. | ||
| You're not performing a concerto. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
| And if you're an athlete, if you don't discipline yourself to the rigor of the sport, if you don't memorize the plays, if you don't attend to the rules, if you don't pay attention to the coach, if you don't go day in and day out even though you may not be that good yet, you will never be able to be free to actually perform in the game. | ||
| And that paradox is relevant when we're having an academic or an intellectual or a political or a theological or whatever discussion and debate. | ||
| What are the higher standards for the discussion so that we can actually be free to do this? | ||
| How much of this do you think boils down to what seems to be a degradation in personal responsibility amongst young people in the last, let's say, 20 some odd years? | ||
| That there's more of an, you know, people are spending more time, say, playing video games, and I say this as someone that, like, I tried to get you to play PlayStation a half hour ago, you know, that I like video games, but that people are spending all sorts of time doing things that are almost the, The obvious success of a society, that we have everything, we really just have everything, doesn't mean that every individual has everything they want, but you have the world at your fingertips all the time with the phone in your pocket, and that because of this access to everything, the personal responsibility part, the part that says, I gotta go get that job, and at three in the morning having third lunch, and all of these things, that that has sort of just disappeared. | ||
| There are a variety. | ||
| You could claim that the church is responsible for its own demise. | ||
| The schools are responsible for educating their own monster that's consuming them right now. | ||
| You could also lay blame at the feet of parents that are helicopter parents and they don't allow their kid to feel or sense or experience any adversity in life. | ||
| We're going to coddle. | ||
| We're going to comfort. | ||
| We're never going to confront and build character. | ||
| We're just going to make life easy for our kids. | ||
| And I see that over and over again when the parents drop their kids off at my campus. | ||
| I can tell you in five minutes whether the kid's going to be a problem or not based on how the parent is behaving. | ||
| Is mom angry because she doesn't like the drapes in the dorm? | ||
| Do they attend to every single desire that the kid has? | ||
| If the kid ever has any conflict with a roommate, I want it changed now, rather than forcing their son or daughter to deal with relational conflict and become a more mature human being as a result. | ||
| The helicopter parenting is greatly responsible for a lot of the softness of the soul and the softness of our culture. | ||
| It's called the agon, agonistes, the wrestling match. | ||
| If there's no agon, if there's no agonistes, if there's no wrestling match, if there's no agony, that's where we get the word, then you're going to be soft. | ||
| As iron sharpens iron, let one man sharpen another. | ||
| There is testing by fire as we become adults in life. | ||
| And if that testing hasn't taken place, you're not going to perform on the field, you're not going to perform in the band or in the orchestra, you're not going to perform in a variety of venues in life, because you expect everything to be comfortable. | ||
| Or in the intellectual battlefield. | ||
| I mean, that's the point. | ||
| Well, that's why I do try to link this back to personal responsibility, whether ultimately it's from helicopter parenting or a poor education system or a series of things, because if you've If you've ceded that personal responsibility, then all of the offerings that say the left offers now of free this, free that, take from some, give to others, it all sounds really great because you've already abdicated your responsibility as a human. | ||
| So that seems to be the core issue, if we could just get these young people to wake up. | ||
| So okay, so a kid walks into your school, mom's complaining about the drapes, the kid doesn't like his roommate, whatever the other series of things are. | ||
| Are you actually personally involved at any point in this? | ||
| Or tell me just a little bit about how the structure of the university works so that you can get some of these ideas across. | ||
| Oklahoma Wesleyan is a small institution. | ||
| We're about 1,500 total, all in. | ||
| That's healthy for us. | ||
| That's a financially healthy institution. | ||
| But it's got the magic of community. | ||
| You're not lost as a number, and you actually engage with the PhD. | ||
| You don't just get an education in a classroom of 800 to 2,000 students where you're being taught by the graduate assistant that doesn't care. | ||
| We've got a ratio of 1 to 15, 1 to 16, and you're actually learning from the scholar, which I would argue is good education as opposed to somehow inferior education just because you're smaller than the big guy down the street. | ||
| I think we've lost the power of education as we've started worshiping this altar of size and the behemoth and the football program and whatnot. | ||
| That somehow is better education than actually learning like this. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| In fact, if you go to Oxford now, all of the various different ancient colleges are really not much bigger. | ||
| than Oklahoma Westland. | ||
| They've just been around for 1,000 years. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty incredible. | ||
| I've been there twice in the last year. | ||
| I spoke there, which was probably the biggest honor I've ever had professionally, and then I went back with Jordan Peterson a couple months ago. | ||
| And it's shocking when you see that these small colleges, the way they, it's so brilliant, actually, that they set it up with all of these small colleges in this truly, I mean, it feels magical. | ||
| It feels like a Harry Potter book. | ||
| This magical little place, it's just incredible. | ||
| Well, and it's good education, because you're being taught by somebody who has wrestled the Agon for years and years and years, and he may disagree with you vehemently, but that Socratic method draws the conversation to a close, where if you're going to disagree with the scholar, you better know why, and you better be able to defend it, otherwise he will challenge you. | ||
| Tear you down and send you back to do your homework so that you can come again another day to carry on the battle. | ||
| That's good education. | ||
| It's not soft education. | ||
| It's not coddling education. | ||
| It elevates the value of confrontation. | ||
| It elevates the goal of actually being a responsible human being at the end of the day that actually has character more than just wanting a career. | ||
| In the United States, we think that somehow good education is one that just gives you the ability to get a career. | ||
| I don't disparage that. | ||
| You should be able to get a good job. | ||
| But really, is that where we are in the United States, where information is more important than ethics, and money is more important than morality, and getting a career is more important than character? | ||
| There was a time not that long ago where all of those things were important in a liberal education because we wouldn't be free as a culture without them. | ||
| So what went wrong there? | ||
| When did that go wrong? | ||
| You could argue that it preceded Weaver's work in 1948. | ||
| I would argue it goes back to Dewey and the model of education that prevailed at that time, where we stopped caring about the Socratic logic and the facts of education. | ||
| We started caring more about the feelings that come with education and the Common Core debate. | ||
| And I'll really get people stirred up with this. | ||
| Common Core is a joke. | ||
| Why in the world would we want to dumb down education to the common? | ||
| To the average. | ||
| Don't we believe that education should pursue what's excellent and exceptional? | ||
| Common Core puts everything on a level table of average. | ||
| Of common. | ||
| That's why it's called that. | ||
| It doesn't release my faculty and others to do what they know how to do best. | ||
| I don't need the government telling my faculty how to build a syllabus. | ||
| I just don't need that. | ||
| If I have hired a math professor that doesn't know 2 plus 2 is 4, there's a solution. | ||
| I fire him and I go get somebody who knows how to come to the right conclusion. | ||
| I don't need someone else trying to intrude and govern that discussion. | ||
| And Oklahoma Wesleyan's faculty has been ranked by CBS News Money Watch as having the best faculty in the nation for three successive years by student review. | ||
| By student review. | ||
| So why in the world would the Fed think they need to tell me how to structure education? | ||
| So what's the structure? | ||
| We do it small. | ||
| We can engage as a faculty and as an administrative body to develop a curriculum that works because I hire scholars and educators that know what they're doing. | ||
| And we have dialogue and relationships with students as we get them to pursue truth. | ||
| That's one of the cornerstones of our mission statement. | ||
| You pursue truth. | ||
| You don't construct it. | ||
| And at the end of the day, you practice wisdom. | ||
| You practice what you preach. | ||
| You just don't have the cognitive and the intellectual. | ||
| You actually develop into a person of character that engages culture with integrity. | ||
| Do you find that you get other administrators, other school presidents and board members and probably donors, all sorts of things from other schools that are reaching out to you going, how do we fix this mess? | ||
| Because I find now that it's, people ask, and this has come up on the show many times, it's like, how do you fix this thing? | ||
| And it seems like it really can't come from the academics because they've been sort of in it too long. | ||
| And you mentioned to me briefly before we started how they're often not brave and we should explore that a little bit. | ||
| But that it really has to come from the donors, that only when the money starts getting cut off will the schools be willing to do the right thing. | ||
| But I assume people look at you and see what's going on and go, that's what we should be replicating. | ||
| Well, some do, but any industry protects its own. | ||
| And until there's a huge crisis, people are never forced to change. | ||
| And I'm not sure we've reached that point of crises in the educational industry in the United States yet. | ||
| We will. | ||
| Yeah, do you know, what do you think that would look like, actually? | ||
| Because I think a lot of people are watching this going, we're in the midst of it. | ||
| The crisis is here. | ||
| It is here intellectually. | ||
| It is here morally. | ||
| I mean, you see it in the Snowflake Rebellion. | ||
| This is education. | ||
| Were they gonna protest Ben Shapiro at Berkeley? | ||
| And Berkeley's supposed to be the birthplace of the free speech movement? | ||
| You're basically protesting a guy who says the same things that Ronald Reagan said, that were mainstream conservative ideas. | ||
| And you're protesting a conservative Jew and calling him a Nazi? | ||
| This is an upside-down claim that makes no sense, and anybody with half a brain can figure that out, but yet Berkeley silences Ben Shapiro and others because of what? | ||
| They don't like his ideas. | ||
| That's not the birthplace of free speech. | ||
| That's ideological fascism. | ||
| That is not academic freedom. | ||
| In fact, where do we get the word fascism? | ||
| It comes from the root word fascist. | ||
| A fascist was a Roman bundle of sticks that was bound together so tightly that it could not be broken. | ||
| You see it in a lot of the frieze work and the sculptures in the United States, the Supreme Court, and in our Capitol. | ||
| You see a fascist which often has a hatchet head in the top of it. | ||
| What does it represent? | ||
| The power of the bond, the common bond, which isn't necessarily bad. | ||
| But it's from that we get the word fascism, that you must be one of us. | ||
| You must look like us. | ||
| You must think like us. | ||
| You must walk like us. | ||
| You must talk like us, or you're verboten. | ||
| You will be expelled. | ||
| We will crush you, Berkeley, Ben Shapiro. | ||
| We will crush you with the fascist. | ||
| It's intellectual, it's ideological fascism that is not academic freedom. | ||
| It's the antithesis of a classical liberal. | ||
| So I'm curious, Peter Boghossian, who you may know, who's a professor up at Portland State, who I've had on the show a few times, and just did these faux academic papers, we have him on again in a couple weeks, he calls this postmodern set of ideas a secular religion, because it has all the markings of a religion, but there's no redemption narrative, and certainly if you're a white, cisgendered, heterosexual Christian male, you better bow forever, and never challenge it, because you have original sin, basically. | ||
| I don't know that you've thought about that specifically, but do you like that, as someone that comes from a religious perspective, do you like that framing of this? | ||
| That it has the markings of religion in a negative sense, let's say. | ||
| Yeah, I would argue every worldview has the markings of a religion, either positive or negative. | ||
| I don't think there's any way you can get outside of the box of a religious discussion. | ||
| You and I might disagree on that at another time, another place, but I think everything is going to boil down to these key questions. | ||
| Origin of man, nature of man, redemption of man, and responsibility of man. | ||
| And all of those are religious questions. | ||
| Where do we come from? | ||
| What is our nature? | ||
| What is our redemption? | ||
| How do you fix the problem? | ||
| And then what is our responsibility at the end of the day? | ||
| That's another quad, if you will, quadrilateral of four things through which every human being sifts his worldview in terms of trying to resolve how to function with one another and within life. | ||
| Post-modernity. | ||
| I'm going to butcher this historically. | ||
| Anybody out there that's a good historian is going to just fingernails on a chalkboard. | ||
| Don't worry, we've got YouTube commenters and they'll gladly take your hand. | ||
| I'm sure you do, and I'm sure... I'm going to separate human history into three simple categories. | ||
| Pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. | ||
| What's pre-modern? | ||
| Supernatural. | ||
| In pre-modern, there was this idea that truth could be experienced. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| This table is empirically verifiable. | ||
| I can touch it. | ||
| I can see it. | ||
| I can feel it. | ||
| But there were other things in pre-modernity that were also real, and those were revealed truths. | ||
| Mosaic law, for example. | ||
| There was a revelation that gave truth to man. | ||
| So pre-modern was supernatural. | ||
| Modernity comes along and it became what? | ||
| Simply natural. | ||
| Premodern, supernatural, modernity, simply natural. | ||
| If you can't taste it, touch it, see it, feel it, then it just isn't so. | ||
| Premodern, modern. | ||
| So what's postmodernity? | ||
| If premodernity is supernatural and modernity is simply natural, what's postmodernity? | ||
| Superman. | ||
| The Ubermensch. | ||
| We shall rise up. | ||
| We will decide. | ||
| We will define. | ||
| We will declare ourselves to be as God. | ||
| The original sin is defined in Genesis. | ||
| We don't need anybody telling us what to do. | ||
| Now, whenever humanity comes to that point, what always happens? | ||
| It ain't good. | ||
| Power. | ||
| Power crushes dissent. | ||
| Premodern, supernatural, modernity, simply natural, post-modernity, the Ubermensch, Superman. | ||
| And I would argue that's where we are right now. | ||
| So how dangerous or precarious, let's say, of a position do you think we're actually in, in the United States right now, or just, let's say, the West in general? | ||
| Because this idea is growing. | ||
| We're fighting it back. | ||
| There's definitely some pushback online, But if you look at academia, if you look at the political establishment, if you look at the media, these ideas are gaining and gaining strength. | ||
| If you look at the way the media treats the ideas of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they're making it seem like these are all the hot, right ideas. | ||
| These are pretty radical, socialist ideas. | ||
| But they have incredible amount of momentum right now. | ||
| What kind of position do you think we're actually in right now at the beginning of 2019? | ||
| Well, I'm an optimist. | ||
| I believe I know the end of the story, and we win. | ||
| Truth will prevail at the end of the day. | ||
| What happens between now and then, that's a matter of discussion. | ||
| In fact, I had an old boss. | ||
| He was the president of my alma mater. | ||
| I worked for him as a vice president, and he was afraid of flying. | ||
| And one day I pulled Dr. Chapman aside and I said, what is the deal? | ||
| I said, you're a Christian. | ||
| You're deeply committed. | ||
| Why are you so afraid of flying? | ||
| You know what the end of the story is. | ||
| He said, I'm not afraid of the end of the story. | ||
| I'm just afraid of what happens between 30,000 feet and one. | ||
| I don't relish that two minutes. | ||
| So what's going to happen in that two minute gap of history? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not a prophet. | ||
| But what I can say is these ideas are dangerous. | ||
| And they're nothing to just dismiss. | ||
| And if you're a classical liberal that disagrees with my religion and my politics, if you're a classical liberal that wants liberty at the end of the day, you better pay attention to this debate. | ||
| Because you have things that I just looked at this morning in the news before I came here, where Nancy Pelosi is proposing that laws should be in play. | ||
| That if parents are parenting improperly, as defined by her, And her party, that the government should actually have the right to take the child away. | ||
| So, if I've got a 10-year-old boy, and the way he's behaving sexually is something that I think is unhealthy for him, should I have the right as a parent to pursue counsel for him? | ||
| Or should the government be able to intrude and tell me, no, you don't have the latitude to parent that 10-year-old boy the way you want to. | ||
| Those discussions are in play right now. | ||
| And again, if you disagree with my religion and my politics, that should bother you. | ||
| Because religion and politics will change. | ||
| The power base will change. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what's popular today won't be popular tomorrow. | ||
| And then you'll be on the losing end. | ||
| You better care about something more permanent and enduring, immutable, true, the devastating consequences of abandoning truth. | ||
| Truth will set you free, not Nancy Pelosi. | ||
| Well, I think that we got the promo for this episode right there. | ||
| How enthused are you that these discussions are happening also outside of the academic world right now? | ||
| You mentioned that Jordan Peterson, you reference him in your book, that this guy's on this world tour. | ||
| I happen to be on it with him. | ||
| But that these conversations, even with some guys that maybe you don't agree with on a believer side of things, say a Sam Harris or the rest of this crew, that people really care about these discussions, where I would say five years ago, People online weren't, you know, people were watching cat videos and people being, you know, kicked in the nuts and a couple other things, but they weren't really having these discussions. | ||
| And now they're on fire online. | ||
| So that's pretty hopeful. | ||
| I do think it's hopeful. | ||
| And again, if you trust truth, if you trust the referee, if you trust the whistle, then play. | ||
| Throw elbows. | ||
| Rebound. | ||
| Knock people over. | ||
| Do what you need to do. | ||
| Trusting that the game can be played. | ||
| And I think that's the magic of the conservative worldview, the conservation of those big ideas that allow you to engage. | ||
| That's the beauty of the traditional liberal arts academy. | ||
| Trust truth to win. | ||
| The irony here, I had somebody when Milo hit his Snafu a couple years ago. | ||
| Somebody called me up and said, are you gonna have Milo at your campus? | ||
| Because he had been dismissed from Berkeley or wherever it was. | ||
| And I said, no, because I don't agree with Milo on so much that I don't wanna lead anybody to conclude that somehow I'm elevating his ideas to some level of acceptability within our culture. | ||
| I said, however- Wait, let me pause here. | ||
| So if a student group on campus had invited him, would you have allowed that to proceed? | ||
| Because that's a little bit different than someone asking you, will you have him? | ||
| If a student or a student group wanted to discuss his ideas, let's go at it. | ||
| Those ideas can be discussed robustly and you'll engage with our faculty and the rest of the community in vetting those ideas. | ||
| Who's right? | ||
| Who's wrong? | ||
| There are some times when, here's an example, let's get off Milo for a second for me to answer this question. | ||
| I had another gentleman who's very well known and very popular across the nation who wanted to speak at my commencement. | ||
| But he's of a different religion. | ||
| Now, had he accepted my invitation, which I issued, to be part of a day of co-belligerence, Francis Schaeffer, where he and an evangelical, a Catholic, a conservative Jew, would have come to the table to have a discussion in front of the students in terms of how to be co-belligerent for a common good of common sense and common morality, Pick a topic. | ||
| The preservation of the sanctity of human life. | ||
| That would have been a great thing. | ||
| But putting somebody that disagrees so much with the core tenets of my institution at my pulpit, at my podium, on the key event of the year, commencement, is something that I guard. | ||
| Because it sends a signal to everybody. | ||
| So I didn't. | ||
| I didn't invite him to the commencement. | ||
| I invited him to a day of co-belligerence. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, you know I'll defend your right as a private institution to do what you think is best. | ||
| But let's get back to Milo. | ||
| Would I put Milo at the podium at the pulpit? | ||
| I think I have to guard the message of what we stand for missionally. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But would I put him in a different venue where there would be debate and disagreement and a good exchange? | ||
| That's a different question, if that answers you. | ||
| And I suspect the answer is yes to that question. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| I mean, I'm going to make a decision. | ||
| There are some people I'm not going to because they're so far outside the pale. | ||
| I'm not going to put a white supremacist on my podium because I think it's offensive to, I mean, we were birthed out of the civil rights movement. | ||
| We were actually birthed, the Wesleyan church was an abolitionist church. | ||
| We took a stand against slavery. | ||
| So our history, our mission, is human equality. | ||
| And we stood in the face of the Civil War and said, no, we will not do this. | ||
| And it's out of that we birthed ourselves out of the Episcopal Methodist Church and became the Wesleyan Church, because Orange, Scott, and Luther Lee believed that it was wrong to call a human being less than a human being. | ||
| The definition, the imago Dei, of what it meant to be human was something that they would not forfeit. | ||
| And they forfeit, and they held on tenaciously to that definition, thus the Wesleyan Church. | ||
| So am I going to put somebody at my podium that refutes all of that? | ||
| That's a judgment call that I have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Do you think that... | ||
| Universities, you probably don't want to say this as an administrator, but that perhaps the way we're learning relative to people watching videos on YouTube and conversing online and all these things, that the way young people are learning is changing so rapidly that 10 years from now or 20 years from now that the university system is going to be either completely different, I think that's a far-gone conclusion perhaps, But not just different, but far less relevant, that you will have figured out ways to learn in many other ways. | ||
| I mean, I say this all the time now. | ||
| It's like, if you just watch this show, not that it's a complete version of what you should get in college, obviously, but you can have behavioral scientists and evolutionary biologists and clergymen and a wide set of people from different walks of life. | ||
| You can learn from them and If you want, you can get a pretty damn good education that way. | ||
| That's not the complete piece of why you should be at college. | ||
| But do you sense that that's really changing? | ||
| Oh, there's no question. | ||
| I mean, you've got Mike Rowe, Glenn Beck. | ||
| Tucker Carlson, all have been very aggressive in the last six months on advising parents not to send their kids to college because of the flaws of the academy, this daycare nonsense, the lack of robust debate, the debt that you're incurring to get a terrible education that's basically indoctrination rather than intellectual Hafton Inquiry. | ||
| And I don't necessarily disagree with him. | ||
| I think there are a handful of institutions left that care. | ||
| But literally, I'm not sure it's much greater than a handful. | ||
| So yes, education would change. | ||
| But here's the shame of it. | ||
| When it changes and becomes more online and technologically driven, you're going to lose this. | ||
| And if you lose this, you lose half of what education is about. | ||
| If these same ideas were expressed from a distance, in an email exchange or in a text exchange, or if you saw me speaking online, you might think that guy's a jackass. | ||
| Because we haven't had the opportunity to actually develop a relationship. | ||
| Relationships are part of the core and the soul of good education. | ||
| That's what causes you to become part of the human community. | ||
| Part of being a human being is the relationship. | ||
| And if all we're going to do is transfer information through the internet, rather than engage in a relationship that actually builds to a common understanding of those revealed truths that matter, we've lost the core of what it means to be an educated person and a liberally educated human being. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's funny, I'm so intimately aware of that because in the last year, especially where I've been on the road so much, I see one set of ideas online and a certain amount of hate and anger and resentment and all of that, and then everywhere I go, and I mean this without exception, I meet great people just like this, and you talk to somebody, and it's so much more powerful than the conversation online. | ||
| So even though I'm so enthused about people getting ideas, from these conversations and things like that. | ||
| Yeah, the other part of that, and maybe the colleges will shift and learn to integrate some of that. | ||
| I hope, I suspect- Well, the financial pressures are huge right now. | ||
| I think Forbes put out an article less than a month ago that suggested that 50% of all colleges and universities in the nation will close in the next 10 years because of the financial pressures. | ||
| And as a college president, I understand why Forbes is predicting that. | ||
| I would argue that the handful that will succeed are those that are clear and bold and distinct. | ||
| The marshmallow, the mush, the vanilla will fail. | ||
| Now, you may disagree with my Christian paradigm. | ||
| You may disagree with the four pillars of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, which are the primacy of Christ, the priority of Scripture, the pursuit of truth, and the practice of wisdom. | ||
| That's who we are. | ||
| We have a center for capitalism, free enterprise, and constitutional liberty. | ||
| We are pro-life. | ||
| We're the only university in the nation that operates a mobile ultrasound clinic free of charge to women in our 100-200 mile radius. | ||
| We've saved over 200 lives as a result of doing that. | ||
| Now, how many college presidents are you going to hear this story from? | ||
| Very few. | ||
| And people listening right now may say, I don't want that. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Go get what you want. | ||
| It's a free market, but those that are listening right now that like it, they're not going to find any place else, and they'll knock down my door to buy it. | ||
| Nobody wants vanilla ice cream. | ||
| If you sell a flavor that's bold and distinct and clear and different, the people that want it will buy it. | ||
| Missional clarity is critical for any industry, any business, and especially for the Academy right now, because if we're all just vanilla mush, then why would you pay twice What you need to get an education from me when you could go down the road to the junior college and get the exact same thing. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| You've got to be distinct, otherwise you fail. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about how the sort of the new studies, say gender studies and women's studies and things like that have kind of infiltrated the more traditional disciplines? | ||
| That seems to be a big one lately. | ||
| Okay, now you're pushing me here. | ||
| So I'm gonna answer clearly. | ||
| I let you do your own segues for a while. | ||
| I'm gonna answer clearly. | ||
| It's a compromise of the dignity of the woman. | ||
| Pure and simple. | ||
| Who's losing right now in the academic discussion? | ||
| Women. | ||
| Why do I say that? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Title IX is a 1972 law that was established to give women equal access to the field, to the shower, to the scholarship, to the bathroom, to the sport. | ||
| Great law. | ||
| Good, right, okay. | ||
| We've complied with that. | ||
| Started good. | ||
| We've complied with that since day one. | ||
| Now, Under Obama, I received a letter like every single college president in the nation received, demanding, through a bureaucratic fiat, not through legislation, that we immediately start providing transgender accommodations on our campus. | ||
| I responded and I said no. | ||
| Now why did I do that? | ||
| Because I'm not sympathetic to those that are wrestling with that dysphoria or that particular issue of life? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's not why I said no. | ||
| I responded because I said this, and I actually put it in writing. | ||
| How can I possibly comply with Title IX, which you, DOE and OCR, are telling me I have to do, if I now deny the biological fact of the female and start pretending that women aren't an objective reality, but rather a social construct? | ||
| Who's going to lose if I do this, Mr. DOE and Mr. OCR? | ||
| Women are gonna lose. | ||
| They're gonna lose their scholarship, lose their sport, lose their competitive advantage because they're gonna be supplanted by men who take it away from them. | ||
| And by the way, we see this now in sports all the time. | ||
| Every week there's another wrestler, trans woman wrestler, that's beating a biological woman and people are cheering this as if this is the way it's supposed to be. | ||
| And how is that fair? | ||
| And how is that pro-woman? | ||
| The irony again is, as a conservative, I'm the classical feminist now, because I'm acknowledging the feminine. | ||
| And I'm saying that women are real, they're not a social construct, they're a biological fact, and they should have the protections that Title IX afforded to them back in 1972, and I refuse to compromise that. | ||
| So I sent a letter back to the DOE and the OCR, and I said, no. | ||
| Told them why, and I received a letter back saying, you're exempt. | ||
| At which point, I got criticized robustly, as you can imagine, from anybody that disagreed with my particular defense of the dignity of the woman. | ||
| But you got the exemption. | ||
| I did, for now. | ||
| Well, now Title IX has changed because of the Trump administration. | ||
| Well, they didn't change Title IX, they're just enforcing it in a more pure way, rather than trying to manipulate it through bureaucratic fiat. | ||
| The same thing was true on the Affordable Care Act. | ||
| Oklahoma Wesleyan stood with the Little Sisters of the Poor on the steps of the Supreme Court in defending the right of a bunch of nuns to not have to buy contraception. | ||
| They're celibate. | ||
| Why do they need any? | ||
| Stop and think about it. | ||
| They're nuns! | ||
| Why should they have to buy any contraception? | ||
| And how is it possibly pro-woman for the federal government or anybody to tell these women what kind of products they have to purchase in their health care package when they don't want them, they won't use them, they don't need them, and by the way they're Catholic, they're pro-life. | ||
| So the Fed intrudes into all of that and says, you've got to do this. | ||
| You've got to buy this product. | ||
| By the way, Oklahoma Wesleyan, by definition, hires only pro-life faculty and staff. | ||
| So the women at Oakwood are pro-life too. | ||
| They're not Catholic, but they're pro-life. | ||
| can possibly claim to be pro-woman and ignore the wisdom and the intelligence and the right to choose that these women should have in their health care. | ||
| We were the ones that defended that. | ||
| We were the only university in the nation to challenge the bureaucratic fiat that suggested on sexual harassment That you have to convene a kangaroo court on your campus that you now are required by law to circumvent the local legal channels and persecute the accused on your campus by not allowing him to be adjudicated by people that actually know what they're doing, local law professionals in the courts, and it also compromised the rights of the woman, the rights of the accuser, because you were then required to drag her before | ||
| Committee of her peers and go through the whole thing again. | ||
| It's just completely bananas. | ||
| I mean, we're eliminating due process or that's what, that's exactly what it was. | ||
| Oklahoma Wesleyan was the only university in the nation, a Christian conservative institution stood up and said, no, we will not do that. | ||
| Fire actually represented us and it was thrown out and we prevailed. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I got one more for you. | ||
| If there is a 16, 17 year old, Watching this right now, thinking about what college they're going to go to, I think you've done a pretty solid sales job already, but give them the final sales job of why they should attend Oklahoma Wesleyan. | ||
| Well, decide what you want. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So first of all, what product do you want? | ||
| Do you want a career? | ||
| Do you want technical training? | ||
| Do you want an apprenticeship? | ||
| Then you might not want to go to Oklahoma Wesleyan, if those are the only things that you're interested in. | ||
| If you also want to wrestle with the big ideas, if you also want to do it robustly within the 1,000 year tradition of a classical liberal arts education, which is not progressive and leftist, but grounded in those time-tested truths, you might want to consider coming here. | ||
| And, again, I've got to throw this in, I can't ignore this, we are Christian. | ||
| If you want those four things that I described, The primacy of Christ, because we believe He is who He claimed to be. | ||
| The prior scripture, we believe that the Bible is more than just an interesting, dusty book. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| We believe that it contains the revelation of those truths that actually give us the ability to do this. | ||
| The pursuit of truth. | ||
| Truth is an objective reality rather than just a postmodern construct. | ||
| I'm not going to give you a diploma in opinions. | ||
| I'm going to give you a diploma that demonstrates you learned something. | ||
| And then finally, the practice of wisdom, the practice of what you preach. | ||
| We're integrationists, head and heart, fact and faith, belief and behavior, personal life and public life are integrated. | ||
| We're not segregationists. | ||
| We don't separate things that should be united. | ||
| I'm the president of a university. | ||
| I'm not the president of a diversity. | ||
| And there's a reason for that. | ||
| The unity of veritas, the unity of virtue, the unity of the verities, the university is historically something that celebrated us coming together in unity, bound together by truth with a capital T. It didn't degrade and balkanize culture and humanity into division. | ||
| We should be teaching virtue and veritas, not victimization. | ||
| And when you teach victimization, you get vice, and you get vengeance, and you get violence. | ||
| That's what you see in the protests in the streets right now. | ||
| The solution, to anybody that's listening to me, is get an education in the virtues, in veritas, in truth. | ||
| It's more than a career. | ||
| It's about something that actually builds your character. | ||
| This is the first interview I've ever done where I wish I had a get-into-the-intellectual-dark-web card that I could just hand you right now, because this has been a pleasure, just sitting with someone with a complete set of ideas that knows what they think and is a master at it. | ||
| I've thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| I hope you have as well. | ||
| And for more on Dr. Piper, you can follow him on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, he's on Twitter, for better or worse. |
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