May 7, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
14:34
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, Stephen, we are in your neck of the woods here in Savannah, Georgia. | ||
| Beautiful day, beautiful city. | ||
| My first time here. | ||
| Chris, have you been here before? | ||
| No, it's my first time. | ||
| Your first time as well. | ||
| This is to the backdrop, the event that we're doing tonight is to the backdrop of everything we're seeing on other college campuses across America right now. | ||
| Which let's say are not quite as peaceful as this at the moment. | ||
| So what is it that you guys set out to do with Ralston College and maybe what is allowing it to be a bit different than what we're seeing elsewhere at the moment? | ||
| Well, it's great having you two fellas here. | ||
| I think, to put it simply, our aim is to create one of the finest universities in history by emulating the great universities at their best moments in history. | ||
| So you might say it's a pretty simple objective. | ||
| I'm not saying it's easy to achieve, but it's fairly simple to state. | ||
| And, you know, one thing I might say is that the... Let's take something that we all know. | ||
| You know, being a parent. | ||
| Well, you know, you could probably take six good parents, put them in a room for an hour, and at the end of that hour, they would be able to tell you, you know, what are the fundamental ingredients to being a good parent. | ||
| It's not a secret, right? | ||
| It's like, you know, a certain amount of discipline and unconditional love and creation of opportunities that realize the potential of each other. | ||
| And you could take that list of things they'd come up with over an hour, And probably workshop it through a thousand people and it would not change very much, right? | ||
| Does that mean that being a parent is easy? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's very hard. | ||
| Ask anyone who is a parent. | ||
| It's hard to be a parent. | ||
| But it doesn't mean that the elements of being a good parent are a mystery. | ||
| And something similar is true at the university. | ||
| That the elements are actually not that complicated. | ||
| You need extremely gifted scholars who love their subjects, who want to transmit that to the young. | ||
| You need students who want to learn those things. | ||
| You need buildings and a physical plant that enables the conversations, that can enable that transfer. | ||
| And you need a certain kind of sense of community and the rituals that bring you together towards those purposes of seeking the truth, of discovering and transmitting knowledge. | ||
| Unlike with parenting, what I would say is that our culture is at a moment where we have forgotten what the fundamental ingredients of a university are. | ||
| That doesn't mean they're complicated. | ||
| It doesn't mean they're easy to implement. | ||
| But what I would say Rolfson College is doing is trying to tap into the key elements, you might say the paradigmatic aspects, of what makes a great university great and reinvent that here and now here in Savannah. | ||
| Chris, I suspect that's very refreshing for you to hear in light of some of the work you've been doing over the last couple years and trying to clean up the institutions. | ||
| I mean, I guess When you're here to see the difference between some of the things that we're seeing in Columbia and everywhere else, you're probably the least surprised guy on earth as to what's going on at places like that right now, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I mean, it's certainly the subject of the book that I wrote recently. | ||
| It's a subject of a lot of my journalistic and activist work is to expose a lot of the institutions that have been corrupted and then to really try to support alternatives. | ||
| And I think You know, there's a process that is, I think, just beginning of creative destruction. | ||
| And you can't have, you know, just creation. | ||
| You can't have just destruction. | ||
| You need to have a nice balance of both. | ||
| And so, for me, it's been an interesting last day being here because You know, I've been so focused lately on the destructive work, to be honest, which I delight in. | ||
| I have a fun time doing, you know, challenging institutions like Harvard, exposing other institutions. | ||
| You know that's the clip that they're going to take, Media Matters, when they see this. | ||
| They can absolutely take that clip. | ||
| You delight in the destruction. | ||
| I do, but it's always purposeful because it's destruction not To destroy, but it's the destruction to create the possibility of new creativity, new growth. | ||
| And so coming to a place like Raulston is great because you see the other side of that process, the genesis of a new institution that is trying to root itself in some old principles that provides a stark contrast with what you're seeing in so many other places. | ||
| And I think that's the big opportunity for all of us that want to see a successful country. | ||
| We need new institutions, we need to kind of re-articulate old principles, and I think that that's what you're going to see happening, and that's where really the brightest students are going to want to go. | ||
| I mean, what's happening at these kind of encrusted, ideological universities, it kind of forecloses the possibility of good thinking. | ||
| Smart kids are not going to want to do that anymore, but they need alternatives. | ||
| They need some other place to go, or we'll send our brightest young people out into the wilderness on their own. | ||
| That's not responsible for us as a society. | ||
| So to that point, do you see what's happening now at all these universities as a massive opportunity? | ||
| Because it's not just The kids that are there now that are being failed, but I suspect that there's a whole lot of parents of 15 to 17 year olds who are looking at what's going on, going, oh, I thought we were sending our kid to UCLA or to Columbia or to Northwestern, and now that's completely gone, and they're going to be looking for new places. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| I mean, I think this is the fundamental state of, let's call it the marketplace, is that the situation we're in right now is something like if The grocery stores didn't have any food. | ||
|
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Well, if you could build a grocery store that had good... Patience, patience. | |
| If these guys get their way. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| That could happen, yeah. | ||
| If you could build a grocery store that had, you know, good ingredients and healthy, nutritious food, well, people would flock to it, because that's what human beings need to eat. | ||
| And so when it comes to the level of the human spirit, comes to the level of how do I live a good life, comes to the level of what's worth consecrating my life to. | ||
| How do I live a life that at the end of it, I can be proud of it? | ||
| How do you live a life worth living? | ||
| You might say, The fundamental universal human question that all human beings at all times and places throughout all history care about, you know, can you pass the deathbed test? | ||
| Get to the end of it and say, you know what? | ||
| This life was worth it. | ||
| And so that is, I'm trying to suggest here Dave, that's a fundamental human question and nothing is of greater value to a human being than be able to answer that question. | ||
| And so what enables you to do that? | ||
| Well, you have to know something about what the good life is. | ||
| You know, what is worth consecrating my energies to for the rest of my life? | ||
| And you might say, that's where, at this moment in time, we have a kind of wide-open competitive field. | ||
| Because many of the legacy institutions, I'm not a catastrophist, | ||
| but many of the legacy institutions have simply lost their way. | ||
| They've forgotten their fundamental purpose. | ||
| If you ask young people today, where can I go and learn the secret to live a good and worthwhile life, their first answer is not going to be the university. | ||
| And that's like saying, where can I buy a jar of mayonnaise and people don't say the grocery store. | ||
| It's the fundamental value proposition. | ||
| So from my point of view, the worse things get, the greater the opportunity becomes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Chris, do you think there was a moment at these institutions that things could have turned the wrong way? | ||
| Or do you think once the capture was there, whenever you would argue the capture occurred, that that was the beginning of the end? | ||
| Like, is there something Columbia could have done, say, 10 years ago to not be in this spot? | ||
| Or was this really just the result of the capture in the 70s, or some people would say even earlier, that led to this, and it was inevitable? | ||
| It's a long process. | ||
| None of it was inevitable. | ||
| It could have been forestalled at many different periods. | ||
| I think what's happened though is that the criticism of the university, let's say even emerging from the political right, has been a tradition for about a hundred years. | ||
| You can go through some landmark books from each era. | ||
| I think the difference though, where it started to become visible to average people, where it started to In 1968, you had still Ronald Reagan as governor of California. | ||
| inside the institutions was not in the last great upheaval in 1968, | ||
| but in the great upheaval surrounding 2020. | ||
| In 1968, you had still Ronald Reagan as governor of California. | ||
| You had a sense that the institutions were maintaining a kind of classical, | ||
| liberal hegemony, and they were resisting some of the worst impulses from the | ||
| left-wing, violent, radical movements from the outside. | ||
| I think after 2020, we no longer have that pretense. | ||
| I mean, it's actually, in some ways, hard to figure out who's on whose side. | ||
| You know, you have the students fighting the administrators, but the administrators are probably, in truth, more sympathetic to the student position than the public's position. | ||
| You know that for sure, at least at Columbia. | ||
| At Columbia, I think that's for sure. | ||
| Elsewhere, it's not as clear. | ||
| But what I think is clear is that something has gone terribly wrong. | ||
| And I think the average person can now feel that in a way that he or she could not have in, say, 2004. | ||
| So should we be, is that the argument that we should somehow be thankful for what's going on right now? | ||
| Because it's actually, it's actually fully exposing for everybody, or at least for the people that don't pay as much attention as we do, what really has been going on here. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| I mean, imagine that you have a serious disease, but that it could be cured, but if you do nothing about it, you will die. | ||
| The worst thing you could do was not know that you were sick. | ||
| The best thing you could do was get an accurate diagnosis so you could go seek the care that you need. | ||
| And so I think culturally where we are right now, I don't take any pleasure in the fact that things are bad and dark and the horizon has been darkened and we have this kind of rancorous and alienated and disenfranchised culture, a kind of sense of a war against all against all. | ||
| But the worst it gets, in a sense, The greater the appetite, the greater the natural human longings for coherence, for truth, for beauty, for a route to a life worth living becomes. | ||
| And so, in a certain way, the worse it gets, the greater the opportunity is for renewal and reform. | ||
| This would probably be a good moment for our guys to turn the cameras because this is one of the buildings at Ralston College. | ||
| And you guys are basically picking up buildings, we took a little tour yesterday, picking up buildings all over the place. | ||
| And one really interesting thing struck me, and maybe we can add some video footage in this, of it, but you're taking over a building that basically is probably, what, it's got to be a hundred-some-odd? | ||
| 1870, yeah. | ||
| Okay, so 150 years old, totally dilapidated, but you guys now have the mission of building it into something beautiful, and if you just contrast that with, say, Hamilton Hall in Columbia, where they had something beautiful, but they're in the process of destroying, I think this is what we call a metaphor? | ||
| Well, I think that it is in fact a metaphor for what we're doing in the sense that the right relationship to the inheritance of the past is not to burn it down, but nor is it to act as if it will always be there no matter what you do with it. | ||
| The right relation is to engage with it thoughtfully, to repair it, to restore it, to pass it on in the most beautiful form that you can. | ||
| And so, you know, one thing that I think that our culture is suffering from very profoundly right now is a kind of state of oblivion. | ||
| We don't know where we are in time or space. | ||
| We don't understand where we've come from. | ||
| It's like a situation in which, like let me put it this way to you, Dave. | ||
| You can't even recognize yourself in the mirror without memory, right? | ||
| You can't recognize your mother or the front door of your house without memory. | ||
| Memory is what enables you to see something and recognize it for what it is in the present. | ||
| And right now we're living in a state of cultural amnesia in which you can't see or recognize what's happening | ||
| because we have this, we've annihilated our relation to the wisdom and traditions and institutions of the past. | ||
| And so that's like being in a situation It's as if you're drinking from a fire hose all the time, | ||
| but you don't even know it's a fire hose. | ||
| You're immersed in this kind of indeterminate flow of things that you can't recognize. | ||
| And so what education does, it enables us to recognize, to get memory, to get a longer reach so we can see things for what they are. | ||
| And this building you mentioned that we'll maybe walk by in a minute, is an example of how we take up the mantle and we lovingly restore, sometimes criticize, not simply deferentially, but thoughtfully engage with the record of what human beings in the past have tried to throw forward to us for our benefit today. | ||
| As opposed to the burn it all down crowd, because it would be very easy for you to literally level this building and build something new, but you're trying to do both of those things. | ||
| Chris, are you worried at all that Certain institutions, they've made their choice. | ||
| They're just going to go a certain way. | ||
| Then we'll have new institutions like Ralston that'll do things right. | ||
| But there will be the chasm between those two things will be so wide there will be just like there'll be a missing piece in society connecting people because things will have gone in such different directions institutionally. | ||
| No, I actually think the opposite. | ||
| I think that we should be going in radically different directions along a number of different axes because the consolidation in which all of the universities are ideologically the same, administratively the same, is actually historically an anomaly and I don't think it actually serves people. | ||
| I'd like each State, to have state universities that are different than one another, that are tailored to their own kind of cultures and histories and conditions, and especially for small private universities. | ||
| I mean, we should have some great experimentation. | ||
| If the problem right now is a stagnation of our institutions, the only way out of that is high risk, high reward experimentation. | ||
| You know, we have the richest country in the history of the world, and yet we've stopped establishing new universities. | ||
| What were the numbers that you gave me on that? | ||
| You mentioned some numbers on that yesterday. | ||
| Well, I think we have something like between 3,000 and 4,000 institutions of higher education, I think, in the United States. | ||
| They all had to start sometime. | ||
| Those 3,400, do you think most of them were started in the 19th century? | ||
| 18th, 19th, 20th century? | ||
| So that's a clip of an institution every few weeks at certain times in history. | ||
| And actually, we are at a moment that is wildly historically anomalous because we think it's anomalous to start new things. | ||
| But in fact, that's the pattern of those who built these things. | ||
| They had the courage and the vision to say, you know what? |
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