Written about the rise over the course of the 20th century in your book. What is the instrumental university . Where did it come from . How does the history of the rise of the instrumental university help understand the landscape . Thank you very much for having me here. The institution said there was a change across the course of the 20th century. They particularly broke out after world war ii. That has University Leaders came to view the university as an instrument for solving social problems and promoting economic growth. I argue this shift is grounded in some of the political thought of the earliest political thought of the earlier 20th century. Certain ideals and fields coming aboard. Universities were not just going to turn out graduates. The universities themselves would actually be institutions or instruments as the language sometimes went. I identified a number that tended to have allegiances with democratic politics. City planning, different kinds of efforts in Public Administration as well as different periods of economic development. I also talked a lot about how external entities came to use the university to achieve their own ends. And what happened to a structure called the organized Research Unit. But then you see things called the center or institute of some sort. Some of the big ones that cropped up in the middle of the 20th century the institute of industrial relationships in the university of california. There was even some that were tied to policymaking such as the role of the university of wisconsin and coming up with policies for the Great Society programs, for instance. So certainly by the 1960s, the way of seeing the university was up and running at full pitch and just to speak more into how that may be pushed out other modes of inquiry, i think in the founding days of the Research University in the United States in the late 1800s, there were still a lot of ideals of character and virtue formation, even though they looked different than what they had in the classical college, in early days of academic disciplines you had ideas of these disciplines which shape people with particular character traits but as you move into the 20th century, there is more and more of the idea of developing expertise that particular techniques and if you read the post world war ii writings of the leaders of Higher Education there was a lot of focus on technicians, that word was really prominent. So the notion of liberally educating people for specific virtues that pushed out as the attention of leaders went to a instrumental projects during that era. Ben so how does understanding the rise of the instrumental university help us understand the political character or ideological atmosphere on campus at present . Peter i think the 1910s are a key decade. That was the decade in which american faculty took a lot of steps towards being professionalized, the notion of a factor faculty role in their professional identity crystallized during that decade. You saw the formation of the american formation of University Professors in 1915 and one thing contacted connected with that is the notion that academic departments should have if not all the say, most of the say in hiring decisions. Because they have the expertise. Im the older generations of american Higher Education, the president trustees and administrators played a larger role. I have a story about this from princeton. I did research on princeton in the middle of the 20th century and they set out in 1946 and the president wanted to fill a vacancy in velocity on this philosophy and they still had the idea that princeton was a Christian Institution at that time and another they should have another philosopher friendly to religion. They ran into resistance with members of the Philosophy Department and it took them nine years to fill the position. Im the guy that ended up getting the spot was an ordained christian minister, very far to the left, his wife was a member of the communist party i believe, so that is a rather curious story that illustrates the issue. Another response i would give your question is just thinking how do University Leaders conceptualize the role of the humanities . Looking at a very influential president at that university of california wrote the uses of the university in 1953. He was a labor economist and in the field of industrial relations and develop with colleagues and idea of inexorable industrialism taking over the world. It is really striking to look at some of his inaugural addresses where he talks about education being the handmaiden of industrialism. What would happen with the liberal arts in these new industrial errors is that everyone would be on the 20 hour work week by 1980 so liberal arts would provide an opportunity for people to fill leisure time wisely today became assigned to a category of ornamentation rather than essential disciplines for forming citizens of the American Republic. Ben so the marginalization of the liberal arts and dominance of faculty and departments in the role of university hiring. Peter, you have been writing about the more recent history of the academic landscape on college and University Campuses and you used the term postmodern progressivism. Can you describe what that is and how it shapes what is going on on campus . Peter yes, thank you for the opportunity to be with you here. The short answer is postpartum progressivism is a fancy way of saying wokeism. So may be way to approach it is to break it down. Postmodern progressivism. Postmodern, after modernism. Modernism is a specific modern tradition of freedom. They think of this as the tradition that emerges in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries with the development of science and technology, commercialized spread, quality of conditions spread. On the political tradition comes into focus. The political tradition that holds really for the first time that humans are free and equal by nature and it is the job of government to protect that freedom and equality. The postmodern claim is we live in an era after that tradition. That means all grand narratives have collapsed and as an implication, there are no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of phenomena. That means all tradition, including the modern tradition of freedom, is now up for grabs. That is postmodernism. What is progressivism . It is familiar to all of us. It is the tradition that comes into focus in the u. S. Towards the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century and the basic idea is that democracy in the u. S. Has become very complicated. Our constitution of limited welldefined powers is inadequate to the task so we need to develop a core of highly educated, well credentialed technocratic experts to administer government on behalf of the people. The problem being that people are often mistaken about their interests as they express them at the ballot box or through purchases in the market. But the technocratic experts, what we call elites these days, will make the decision and it will bring forth a Political Society in which freedom and equality are more adequately spread and enjoyed. You might say the very idea of postmodern progressivism is therefore a contradictinga contradiction in terms. Postmodernism, we reject all grand narratives. Progressivism, a strong claim about how the world ought to be organized. Setting this is a contradiction in terms, you would be right. But we have to appreciate that it turns out that humans are not only capable of holding contradictory versions at the same time, we do it often. While suppressing the contradiction to ourselves and choosing various ends of our contradict three notion for various political purposes. If i may, i want to go back a bit. This postmodern progressivism did not arise suddenly at universities, although as you said, it has come into focus for many only recently after the october 7 atrocity. But there have been other moments. 2015, the controversy over the regulation of Halloween Costumes at Yale University. But that was not the beginning of it. The first moment in the development of postmodern progressivism at universities is the late 1940s, early 1950s, written about in a book by William F Buckley published shortly after he graduated from Yale University. In his book, he managed to publish is only boring book because he could not make the analysis of College Syllabi riveting. But he read the syllabus after syllabus in humanities and social sciences. He discovered the syllabi courses were devoted to teaching atheism. In the social sciences class, his analysis of yellow social science department, he discovered, or he proved his hypothesis, that the classes were devoted to teaching collectivism. If he is him and collectivism atheism and collectivism. Strong terms but effectively the curriculum was already organized around the promotion of progressivism. A few decades later in the late 1980s when allan bloom published the closing of the american mind, built around his experiences in the 60s, 70s, 80s on campus, things have changed. At this moment what dominates is when allan bloom calls soft relatives of relativism. Students were encouraged to believe there is no ultimate good, no final truth. There were not quite postmodern but most students roughly accepted the established order. They thought it needed to be changed here and there but even this was what bloom called gentle relativism is not really relativism. Such matters as classical philosophy, even the essential claims of the American Republic were treated as a child who tells stories that series people do not believe. A third moment was recorded in a book by harvey silver glade and published in the late 1990s. The late 1990s, 25 years ago, a book called the shadow university. The book is about the trail on american campuses of the basic principles of a liberal immunity, a community that protects free speech and due process. It is a long book that documents case after case of universities throughout the country where faculties and administration attack or fail to defend abuses of Academic Freedom and of due process and various disciplinary cases concerning student and faculty and all of this by the way is in the name of advancing what we now call social justice. The fourth moment inaugurates the present era and does deserve to be considered postmodern progressivism. When Yale University students in the fall 20,000 2015 reject, screaming and shouting and denouncing faculty members who gently suggest that yale students should be responsible for their own halloween parties. And that when a yale student encounters a fellow student wearing a costume of which he or she disapproves, the student has two choices. One, ignore it. Or two, take the student to the side and explain why they think the costume is an appropriate. But no, students demanded that leaders were effectively removed from their positions. Yale university proved incapable of recognizing that the word master in the english language has two definitions. One definition means effectively the boss of someone else. The other means someone who has achieve excellence in the field. When i means by the coming into existence of this post modern progressivism area is these two ideas become combined. One is the collapse of all grand narratives mean all the old traditions and established practices and claims of universal standards, including the one at the foundation of the American Republic, have been discredited. We have to change things from the bottom up and from the top down. Second, and this is why it is different from even the closing of the american mind, we now know the final truth about matters, we know exactly how things have to be changed, we know the professors who believe students ought to regulate their own parties, not the administration, are immoral, engaged in the terrible act of invalidating student humanity and must be removed from their positions. That was 2015. It is now 2024. I think we remain in this era in which the universities are to a significant extent if you are not countervailing developments in this does not describe every last person on the campuses but we are deeply rooted in the era of postmodern progressivism on campus. Ben with this historical background, the instrumental university undermining the rise of Departmental Authority over hiring an ideological lines, i want to turn now to more precise questions of the political composition of faculty and administrations at this present moment. Let me offer you all a couple of arguments that are proffered in defense of the left toward slant. One is made by a book called what is liberal about liberal education which was published 20 years ago but which makes the argument that still has a lot of purchase. It says the political right is fundamentally authoritarian and intrinsically opposed to free open inquiry. And a lot of people see confirmation of this point of view about the right in the trump right era. In the new york review of books, it was said authoritarians depend on degrading real knowledge and expertise and if the right is authoritarian, authoritarianism depends on degrading real knowledge and expertise, it makes sense the political right would just be a foreign element on campus. So this argument that the authoritarian right belongs excluded from campus, that it is essentially authoritarian and such belongs excluded from campus dovetails with another common view that liberals are more intelligent and care more about social justice than conservatives. And that conservatives tend to be greedier and go into more lucrative lines of work. On the intellectual side of this some argue the academic mind is intrinsically progressive so it makes sense that conservatives would end up elsewhere. So for all these reasons, people suggest it is perfectly natural that campus should have a leftward aslant and perhaps an extreme leftward slant. What do you make of these elements . Ha they remind me of things from the past. I do not think these arguments are new. The Columbia University historian wrote a book on antiintellectualism in american light and the paranoid style in american politics made some of these arguments in the 1950s and 60s and even earlier john dewey, considered the voice and conscience of liberal america from the 1920s and 30s spoke extensively about the danger of authoritarianism and he denigrated catholics for being authoritarian and he was one of the founding figures of the American Foundation of University Professors i mentioned earlier so there is a connection there. Going back to the founding and going back and looking at documents they talk about what qualifies someone to be a professor and to have Academic Freedom and there are some notions of scientific expertise they throw around, kind of implying that they are neutral. A lot of people would argue they are typically not neutral. So those are a few historical precedents to that situation. Ben peter, what do you think . Peter i think these are ignorant and frivolous arguments. Lets start with authoritarianism. The idea that conservatives are up to authoritarians and have no place in the universities. This myth is that there, it is not authoritarian, a necessity of submitting to authority at all education. There is a discipline after all and this by the way goes to every activity. If you are learning basketball, dancing, music, learning to read, you do not just start making things up, expressing your own freedom. You submit to the discipline of an authority, presumably someone who knows how to read or to dance or to play basketball. And in the course of your education, acquiring the skills in these various activities, of course you eventually reach a condition in which out on the court, and the constantly new situations you find yourself, or on the dance floor, you know how to dance, you know how to use your teammates or dance partner. But this is a result of years of study and condition and practice. The equivalent in liberal education is that of course we want to develop students moral imagination and their ability to think for themselves but students cannot learn to think for themselves unless they first master the basics. So first i hear in those criticisms and aversion to the very notion of discipline, therefore in ignorance of what all education, not the least liberal education, consists of. Second, remember another one of your points, conservatives care less about social justice. Social justice is designates a partisan interpretation of justice. Social justice means leftwing justice. So by definition i suppose conservatives care less about leftwing justice but that does not mean they do not care about justice. In any case, why would someone think that the purpose of liberal education is to pursue social justice . I would have thought the purpose is to pursue knowledge about the country in which we live, the founding principles, the constitutional traditions. I would have thought the purpose of education was to pursue knowledge of the civilization of which the u. S. Is a part, to learn how to think about the treasures of the civilization, to learn arguments on both sides , bring questions, so that the critics i think are right in that conservatives reject the idea that liberal education should be about the pursuit of social justice but in rejecting it, conservatives show a much better appreciation of what is the core mission of a liberal education. I think i might have missed one of the criticisms. Ben the last one was that conservatives are greedy and that is why they do not opt into poorly paying academic jobs. And we can testify that academic jobs to pay poorly. [laughter] peter it would be interesting to run that experiment. First of all, in general we are not allowed to put forward rank comprehensive generalizations about classes of people. Some conservatives are greedy, but my experience, you can find a few greedy people here and there on the left. Second, we should run this experiment because the fact is in ways that are explicit and covert, the dominant forces are universities make it next to impossible for people with conservative sensibilities or people who wish to study subjects that have been designated as conservative to even gain a foothold in the university. Wi an argument that is used to explain the left tilt of the university that i find more plausible. The argument was put forward by neil gross in a book called why are professors liberal and why do conservatives care . He argues the academic profession is typecast by both sides as a liberal profession. Liberals reject that campus is the place for them. Conservatives when they encounter students who might be interested in academic careers say that is not really for you. It creates the pipeline problem and keeps Young Conservatives who might be interested in academic careers from going in. Peter it is made clear to undergraduates that places in graduate programs are reserved to people who care about social justice. Indeed, some large percentage of colleges and universities, now we have a requirement to diversity, equity, inclusion. Moreover, let us say you care deeply about politics and you want to study war or religion or the free market or plato and aristotle. The opportunities in graduate school are very slender. If you are fortunate enough to obtain a position in graduate school, finding a mentor would be very difficult, if you are lucky enough to find a mentor and obtain your phd, the number of positions open for somebody who studies war or religion or the free market are very limited if the person is lucky enough to find such a position, the chances of getting tenured given the preponderance of this persons colleagues will regard such a subject as inherently less serious or, in this case projecting beliefs that anybody who studies war must be a warmonger or anyone who studies religion must be one who prophesies his religious faith. So when that respect i suppose it is true that thoughtful conservatives will look at that and say, this is not the world for me. What i object to is the suggestion that somehow this is a good state of things. Instead, what we would ordinarily say if the universities have become explicitly hostile environments for certain class of people onset of ideas, we would normally say the University Needs to be reformed, we would not say it, too bad for that class of people and that set of ideas. Ben you are welcome to jump in on that point. Ethan there is a tendency for a good number of conservatives to value place in the family. Those things can present obstacles to the kinds of long years of education and perhaps very specific places, even before postdoc, going to graduate school, suggesting there may be a very small number of advisors willing to work with students on some of these topics that interest conservatives more. One might have to be willing to leave home and family and in terms of things like marriage and children perhaps to delay because of not only the moving around but also the low income associated with graduate students. Ben so you accept the notion that there may be some measure of conservative selfselection out of the academic profession. In order to go back to something peter pointed to, and what way does the imbalance, if it does, distort the activities intrinsic to academic life . That is, in what ways does it distort teaching and research on our campuses . Peter it distorts it fundamentally. It is needed, because to deliver a liberal education, all other things being equal, you need an even balance of people who vote for democrats on for those who vote republicans but we live in a world in which a significant proportion of faculty have adopted the view that it is their job through the curriculum , through the courses they teach, to promote a partisan leftwing view. To promote social justice. It is another problem we have not mentioned which is not political and which is the idea that professors should use the College Curriculum to teach their specialty, which is also inconsistent with providing a liberal education. In any case, we have the testimony from last month of harry lewis. Harry lewis is a former dean of Harvard College. He graduated from Harvard College in 1968 and is a longterm professor of computer science. He has been at harvard for 50 years and part of the establishment of the university. He wrote a column for the harvard princeton in which he said the real problem on campus is not antisemitism, the real problem is the curriculum has been hijacked by professors who think the purpose of their courses is to promote their leftwing identity politics view. He calls for a return to a kind of curriculum where professors have an obligation to teach the great folks and great ideas and present the arguments on both sides. Even then, all other things being equal, you would not need people who vote republican to do that but the present faculty has so significantly proved itself incapable of creating, maintaining, delivering a curriculum which deals with the great ideas and the arguments on both sides of them but seems to me significant measures need to be adopted to make up for that. Ben ethan, what would you say . Ethan going back to provide Historical Perspective on the notion of Student Choice of courses and even getting back to the notion peter was talking about a few minutes ago of students wanting to think for themselves and what kind of basic knowledge and fundamentals are required for that, i think we have to go back to harvard at the turn of the 20th century under the presidency of Charles William elliott, one of the most influential figures in the history of american education. He was president of harvard for 40 years and by the time he was done in 1909, i believe the number of required courses for Harvard Students was down to two. Freshman writing and one other thing. He had a distinctive understanding of liberty on the way students should practice liberty by choosing courses and making mistakes as he said they would inevitably. But that whole idea of very wide choice of courses goes back a long way so there are philosophical roots to that that should be further investigated to add to this discussion. Ben ok. If we take this to be a problem, i do not think it is a problem anyone thinks is easy to fix, are there any measures that you think are particularly promising for addressing the partisan imbalance of the universitys professional ranks . Peter yes. Very briefly. Of course there is the project you are extensively involved in, origins of civic thought, creating within universities small programs centered around political ideas and institutions central to the United States. Beyond that, there are many in this room know, especially in the last couple of years, been efforts to create centers of liberal education at great flagship universities, public universities, around the country. I think we should continue to do our best to work within established universities and within established universities i suppose i would focus on efforts to bring to the attention of faculty, administrators, boards and trustees is that the indispensable importance of curricula covering topics that have always been central to humanity. I have mentioned two of them, war and religion. The study of military history has almost been banished from elite universities and there has been a war on the study of diplomatic history and political history as well. But focusing on filling in the curriculum and begin to restore balance but also finally making an argument for basic requirements. There is basically no elite university in the country who said, some basic ideas and basic books that all educated people must be familiar. I can only think of one university did that does that and we need to do what is in our power to restore the common sense and true opinion about education. Ben let me offer one short comment. Peter, you are describing what jen and i have tried to describe about building programs in which conservatives tend to work as a way to address the problem, which needs to be distinguished from anything like what people sometimes call affirmative action for conservatives or the creation of counter ideology of a programs. You are not suggesting something that will provoke conservative ideology, you are saying peter what i am actually suggesting is not conservative, i am suggesting that the Educational Mission significant measure about conserving the ideas within the state history of western civilization and inking independent thoughts about that. If you did that you would end up hiring quite a number of conservatives but i am also there is a second point that has already been mentioned. Where is the university that actually teaches explicitly conservative ideas . Where you can take a course on 20thcentury american conservatism and you can study russell kirk and frank meyer and Irving Kristol . Since that is a crucial part of american political thinking, it should be part of the curriculum. And if you can find someone who is very knowledgeable, there is a decent likelihood that person could be a conservative. Ben i want to get ethans response. Ethan i think one of the things about the civic thought schools that is particularly important is that they have some independent ability to make hiring and tenure decisions like a traditional academic department. That is a key component. One curiosity is the organized Research Unit that is structure of the instrumental university. It basically involves one or more facng up a center or Institute Based on a number of external grants and funding. Over time, conservatives figured out that this was a structure they could try to use to their advantage to set up programs, institute centers within universities that maybe were not explicitly conservative but at least attempted some kind of Viewpoint Diversity or attempted to be insulated from academic jargon and things of that nature and i talk in my book about what robert is there with think of that, one of those rare conservative sociologists and former scholar here at the American Enterprise institute and he was highly critical of organized Research Units and the degradation of the academic dogma but i wondered if he had lived a little longer what he would have thought of conservatives trying to turn organized Research Units to their advantage. Ben peter mentioned board of trustees briefly but i was thinking especially at small liberal arts colleges, the statistics on some of these institutions have the greatest example of the ideological homogenize 80 and it is almost going to take a wholesale culture change promoted by the board for things to change in those places i think. Ben ok. With that we have some time for audience questions. I am going to recognize you in kind of a vague gesture because i have a lot of light shining in my eyes and i cannot see your faces. This german upfront. This gentleman up front. There are microphones that will come around. What about and rains idea . She said universities were filled with leftwing professors because they could not earn money as producers any other way so they ended up in university and taught a social system where there was a redistribution of wealth because it is the only way they could live . [laughter] peter i do not know how one would check. I would say most of my leftleaning colleagues in the university seemed to be there because they were things they wanted to study so i do not question the since our lady sincerity of academic motive. Ethan i think it is probably unlikely. I am not familiar with all the details of rands perspective on that. A number of leftleaning colleagues are very passionate about their subjects and disciplines. Peter the teaching enterprise hasnt ended indispensable conservative dimension. It is about developing moral imagination in finding the ability to think for yourself but that can only be done if the mind is first furnished on the treasures of western civilization say i do not think it captures everybody especially during 18 rands heyday ayn rands heyday. I suppose people attracted to the university for the right reason are liberal but it is in the sense of the term liberal education. What is liberal education . Education for freedom. In that sense the best people who are attracted to universities should be liberal. They should understand that their job is to help equip those who are less advanced in these studies to be citizens of a Free Republican part of that coming to be a more responsible citizen of a Free Republic is understanding the republican which you live and that civilization of which you are a part and the wider world but that is in the oldfashioned sense of the meaning liberal. Ben this gentleman back here. Yes, sir. Thank you. Like many others we at u. S. News world report have written about a crisis in Higher Education, the cost issue and many others. The topic this evening, how much do you think it attributes to that in terms of general Public Sentiments versus specific . Ben i will make one comment on this. The collapse in Public Confidence in Higher Education that has been reported on in the new york times, it is described how in the early 2010s, his numbers, these are very impressive, are that in that era Something Like 96 of parents, democratic parents, said they expected their children to go to college. 99 of conservative parents said they expected the same thing. So there was this astonishing love of Higher Education on both sides of the political aisle and i remember this. No one was against college. That has collapsed and the collapse is bipartisan in the sense that the number of americans who say they have high confidence in Higher Education has dropped across all political stripes but it is definitely led by republicans until 2015, i think in 2015 republicans, i think 59 of republicans said they had a high degree of confidence in Higher Education and that has dropped to 19 so there is a very dramatic partisan fall off and conservative confidence in Higher Education and in that sense i think this has something to do with the ideological issue on campus. Certainly the cost issues are part of the equation but there seems to be something ideological about it. Peter around 2000, tom wolf published a regulation. He had been living in manhattan for 30 years. He said he attended endless dinner parties in which he met young couples. He said there was not a young couple, parents of a young child, who did not say to him, my great dream is that one day my child will attend harvard, yale, or princeton. And he says in all of the dinner parties with all of the young couples, not a single couple expressed the slightest interest in the quality of education offered at harvard, yale, or princeton. The idea was the rewards of going to these elite universities was so great, education, ok, maybe well get it, maybe you wont. 2015, the year of the halloween controversy, i suspect what has begun to happen is that parents have really begun to think two things. One, the education question is not neutral. It might be downright harmful. But especially since october 7, parents are thinking, and by the way, that credential which i always assume will be so valuable regardless of what my child learns or doesnt learn, harvard, that credential might now be seen as a detriment, as a stain on the record. After all, by the way, there are at least two federal judges who have said this has to do with Legal Education but they will not consider for the time being hiring clerks that graduate from yellow while school. Yale law school. The cost, the federal government keeps increasing the support. But also i think as the actual substance of the education comes more into focus, i think parents are coming to reconsider the investment or maybe looking again at places like Arizona State university, university of texas, university of florida, with special programs devoted to an older understanding of education. Ethan i would say another couple of factors are probably the dawn of the social media age and the way the changes perception of things as well as the pandemic and the experience of having College Students go home and take courses online from home and parents perhaps being more involved in seeing what is going on on a more intimate and granular level or level. Ben right. This lady right here. This may sound too much like a statement that i will try to end it with the question. 1969i had i was a graduate student at the university of chicago and i had the occasion to read every catalog going back to the founding in 1892. What struck me was the malleability of the curriculum and not just the courses, but the departments in which things were offered, that it shifted and changed over times in a wide variety of ways. What prompted this was the vote on women at the university, the almost total exclusion from the intellectual offerings of the university. I will skip all the details. What you are talking about today is just a point in time, it is a thing that fluctuates considerably, depending on eight wide variety of pressures, some of which come from students, some from world events, some from the government. Trying to identify what might have been crucial at that particular time, have any of you consider the fact that this is simply a point in time in what is essentially a Mississippi River . Ben yes and i appreciate the question. I think the point you are making, which is that the concept of the curriculum, even the organization of the curriculum, changes over time, is perhaps a way out of the dilemma we are discussing, if there are significant shifts in the organization of curriculum over time, i think what we are describing is a significant area of study that deserves to be studied and we need to think about the organization of the university and perhaps create new academic units to help us, that is a reasonable course that has a lot of precedents, as you point us to. Ethan i think you are speaking as an epidemic of specialization in that university so going back to what i said earlier about Charles Elliott and harvard at the turn of the 20th century and one of the main transformations of the American University was the advent of specialization and it is connected and professionalization of professors in the early 20th century but what then forms as that Counter Movement to push back against specialization is the general Education Movement and that reminds me of i think an opportunity for faculty to be involved in trying to get more of a common learning for students but peter was talking about earlier, are there certain books that every College Graduate should read, certain principles of free society every College Graduate should be familiar with, and this is something that general education revision is occurring on campuses, there are funding opportunities for a place where faculty can get involved, often involves a lot of work, service work, but it is a place to shape the curricula requirement for every students and again there are some programs like the Eagle Foundation and other places currently that are promoting, reviewing or revising general education for other opportunities. Peter if i may, of course, 20th century, 21st century, times of extraordinary change. I cannot think of a single change that for any reason should dislodge lets say plato and aristotle, augustine and aquinas, the principles of the american founding, the american constitutional tradition, modern literature, the study of war and religion, from the center of the curricula. Have women been neglected . Yes. And you should not be neglected. Have the histories have of historically discriminated against minorities be neglected . They have been neglected. They should not be neglected. But we are talking about core curriculum. And all of these neglected subjects, they are subjects about human beings. And the study, i still think the best we can do in the study of human beings and all of their amazing variety and continuity is what in the 19th century in his great statement on liberal education, [indiscernible] began with the classics and revolved around the governing principles of his own society and stepped through the great ideas and great books of western civilization. Thank you for hosting this conversation. I want to ask about postmodernism as peter presented and related to an observation about the indictment of tension on campus. Peter presents it as the movement where we reject modernism by which he seems to identify with founding, block, montague. But i thought it was rejecting the idea of a technocratic ability to manage the economy, the bureaucracy of modern life, all those kinds of things. That was much closer to the motives that generated whatever postmodernism was or is. So i wonder, and as i see campuses today and see lots of tension, it is by no means a placid realm of ideological agreement, when you talk with student activists for example in the realm of sexual assault, precisely the things they are angry about our the bureaucracy of the university and the modern idea that somehow you can manage all of these things and when a survivor goes into the system of their humanity in some ways being denied. Im wondering if you could talk about that tension to be because that seems that is what is moving universities to have you have to have tension. Peter there is tension but i do not think it is quite right that they are raging against university management. They are not raging against the university managing things, they are raging against the manner in which they manage things. At the universities in the last 25 years we have seen a an expansion of the universities response and with the assistance of the Obama Administration and the Biden Administration giving universities broad new powers in in cases involving allegations of sexual assault. Now, there have been problems on campus but it seems to me as we acquire a better understanding of the issues of sexual assault. We can all agree that rape is a heinous crime. It seems entirely inappropriate that that heinous crime be investigated by the police department, but the postmodern progressives do not want Police Departments investigating allegations of sexual assault. They want deans and they want faculty committees. And they want to eliminate classical due process protections. By the way, they want to do this based on an ideology. What is that ideology . The ideology set forth in the writings of Andrea Dworkin and Cathleen Mckinnon in the 1980s. These authors are no longer read. They dont have to be, because their ideas have been internalized in university administration. The ideology that was internalized and now governs much of the administration of these grievance procedures is that we live in a male supremacist society. Women cannot give meaningful consent to sex. That includes wives, by the way, and therefore, any allegation of sexual assault, if it is agreed that there was some kind of sexual encounter is prima facie rape. And that needs to be adjudicated by the administration. This is what i mean. Its not at all a repudiation of the Administrative State. It is a hijacking of the Administrative State on behalf of a radical ideology. Ben ethan, any thoughts on the relationship between postmodernism and progressivism at universities . Ethan for sure. Definitely interesting to treat the uses of postmodern. The term started appearing in the 1930s. And initially, a lot of religious people saw the postmodern as a sign of hope for them in helping to end their marginalization within the universities. There is a remarkable volume from the 50s called religion and the State University in which you have will herbert and John Courtney murray as boat people for their respective faith communities talking about how promising the advent of the postmoderns. Later on, you get a different understanding of the postmodern, particularly after the mid1960s. And i often focus on richard. Particularly, the way he came out of what i call the princeton complex. Their vision for religion and the humanities. Thinking about his revival of pragmatism in a postmodern sense. He rejected the optimism about science that was characteristic of many of the early pragmatists like Charles Hurst and john dewey. Rodeys vision was that everyone is just making up stories. And really who has the power to tell the most compelling story is the person who will win. For instance, in his essay on postmodernist bourgeois liberalism from the early 1980s, he articulates this basis for why we should have liberal democracies but respect freedoms. Just because we like them, not because they are grounded in anything eternal, or universal, or that can be arrived at by reason or other intellectual modes. Peter i was a young assistant professor, i remember a lecture he gave about diplomacy and foreign policy. His understanding of diplomacy was summarized in a slogan as you are saying, we should go around the world and say about american democracy, try it, you will like it. One more question. Thank you you, ethan and peter, that was great. I wonder whether you could both say a little more about what you take to be the wider Historical Perspective. When if you took us back to bill buckley. The other took us back to president elliott in the 1910s and dewey. Does it make sense to go back further . What im thinking of is unfortunately a book i havent read, that i only learned about this morning, there is a flickr view in the law and liberty this morning of a book by jeffrey paul called winning americas second civil war. According to this review, which i recommend to everybody, although as i said, i havent yet read the book. According to this review, the rise of Progressive Social sciences and of the Administrative State in universities is the direct result of 1930s german universities and what that did to the United States. Im just wondering whether you think there is truth to that at all. And whether there is any truth, just how far back would you be willing to go . Whats the starting point of what one might call the madness . Ethan thats definitely a good question. Some interesting linkages for sure between germany and the United States. Its a pretty complicated story, as emily levine has recently told in her book, allies and rivals, the germanamerican exchange in the era of the creation of the Research University. However it is certainly the case with some of the Progressive Social scientists. They were taking up german ideas. Even in the round of social policy, wilhelmine germany in the early 20th century had a much more advanced welfare state than the United States did. For instance, when the fdr administration wanted to create social security, they looked into what was going on in germany. Its a complicated story, but there are a lot of linkages, for sure. Peter there are two senses in which we could go farther back. One sense is we go farther back to trace the stages of decline. The other sense in which we go farther back is to identify a true and inspiring model for what liberal education ought to be today. Only have a moment or two, so i hope you are a classicist. I do recommend that on the way back, we stopped in 1867. In 1867, john stuart mills honorary rector of the university of st. Andrews, delivered an inaugural lecture. Lecture was on the purpose of liberal education. It is a great and almost entirely neglected speech. Since you are a classicist, i will mention that in one comment, mills says we should not teach greek and latin at the university. The reason is, if you dont know greek and latin by the time he reached the university, its too late for you. At the university we should be studying plato and aristotle. In any case, mill gives an account of liberal education that by the way, that first of all, attempts to explain how we incorporate new subjects. Like the natural sciences. Physiology. Into a standard curriculum. Then he speaks about how liberal education should be an ascent in the humanities, starting close to home in our nations. Basic political institutions, and includes political economy. Expands out into study of international law. And culminates with the study of ethics and politics and religious opinions. It does so aggressively. It does so in the spirit of inquiry, not in a spirit of [indiscernible] and it is an education that culminates with the students whose moral imagination has been expanded. Heres capacity for thinking has been refined and who therefore, will make good citizens in a free society. I go back at least to 1867. Ben one comment. I think peters illustration of the pitiful idea of Education One might find in someone like john henry newman. These are important sources to draw from. But none of these can be stamped onto a moment. One has to understand both the ways in which we would want the substance of liberal education to drill on new draw on new sources that we have learned about in the meantime. And secondly, make use of the tools available to us on the landscape that we face. So, were not simply going to return to the classical college, as it is sometimes described. We will have to build something that makes sense within the landscape of Higher Education that we face right now. We will have to close it there. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to ethan and peter. [applause] host good morning. It is tuesday, february 27. President biden and former President Trump will be visiting e