Department in san francisco. It is just over one hour. I just want to set the scene for our event today. They are going to be talking to us about the administrative bloat and running universities, the deepening ideological skew as faculties aggravating the problem of campus conformity, University Enrollment is already starting to decline because of demographic reasons, and of course, the issue of the Oberlin College dispute where the bakery was awarded 44 Million Dollars in damages, which was a very exciting thing and the people at Oberlin College are beside themselves. Charles cousin went to oberlin and it turned her into a marxist communist. Im not a big fan of oberlin. Steve hayward is the senior resident fellow of the institute of Governmental Affairs at uc berkeley and a visiting lecturer at the Uc Berkeley Law School and of course a senior fellow at pri. I heard steve back in december 1991. He was our second hire. Steve has been affiliated with us for a very long time. He was a Ronald Reagan distinguished professor at pepperdine and also was the first conservative professor in a special program at university of colorado boulder 20132014. I think the most exciting thing about stevie as he is one of the people behind powerline. If you dont read powerline every day, you should. The best thing on saturday morning is the weekend pictures. Charles and i were in hysterics every saturday morning looking at the week in pictures that steve sends out. If you dont get it, you must. Our other speaker worked with larry silverman. We were with him in corsica a few years ago for one of his conferences which was great fun. He clerked for Supreme CourtJustice Clarence thomas. He has been a fulbright distinguished chair in italy, the university of chicago, he has written several books and he hails from philadelphia. When his wife doesnt want to go on trips with him, his mother is very keen to go. They are going to machu picchu in peru very soon. Please welcome our panelists. Dr. Steven hayward, and Professor John yoo. [applause] are we using this might . Are using this mike . Yes, it is live. What john and i thought we would do is have a bit of a conversation, i will throw out a few initial propositions and we will have some backandforth. Then we will take some questions from the audience and see where it goes. I thought that was better than just giving standard speeches. Sally gave me headlines and i think i will dilate them slightly. College today, beyond the headlines one of my old mentors used to have sufficient paranoia, which holds that no matter how bad you think things are, its invariably the case that when you look closer, you find out that things were even worse than you thought. In the case of administrative bloat on College Campuses, people think that is what is running up the cost of universities, the number of administrators has soared much faster than faculty, they are all paid very large salaries. That is true, however there is a second part of it, which is, and theres been a little bit of work on this, it has made the press, and even the New York Times. The administrators tend to be even worse than the faculty when it comes to deranged radicalism. A lot of these deans of diversity and inclusion, remember diversity on College Campus means people look different but think the same. A lot of them are drawn from some of the more politicized ideological departments. Your average college liberal professor is relatively sane compared to a lot of administrators. Its especially true at private liberal arts colleges. Sally made mention of the Oberlin College verdict. If youre not following it closely, you might be wondering why did the court find a private college liable for the actions of students off campus. . One of the chief reasons was that the dean of students, an advisor to the president for diversity and inclusion, participated actively in the student protest, help the students organize, passed out their flyers, sent lots of incriminating emails about how awful the bakery was. Reinforced the harassment about some totally bogus charges. The nice thing about america is that we still have trial by jury. The jury in that part of ohio did not take too kindly to all of this. I think that the remedy and i will come back to this in a couple of minutes is just about every university ought to fire half of their administrators. It would matter which have. Health things would get better if you fire half the administrators. There are few universities that have announced cutbacks in administrative positions. The reason for that is declining enrollment. We are already seeing a decline in enrollment, and that is putting a downward pressure on tuition. You have not seen colleges cut their sticker price, but the actual price you pay is falling fast a lot of universities. That will get worse for demographic reasons. Think back 1011 years ago and the financial crisis. The birth rate fell by quite a lot. So the pool of young people that colleges need to draw on to fill up their classes is starting down, and its really going to go off the cliff and another four or five years. Colleges know this, so that will put more downward pressure on tuition and the ability to price. That is going to make a lot of them have to say we cannot afford these 300,000 administrators, so we will see. I hope that is what happens. The second thing is, we have a science dataocial showing that college and university faculties, which have always been liberal, for decades and decades, this is not a new thing. There was always a certain quotient of visible radicalism. That is where radicals should be. If they wreck a few English Departments, thats better than having them out on the street. The problem with universities is their borders are porous, and sometimes these guys sneak out. Who would not have preferred that barack obama remained a law professor, right . There used to be at least some conservatives around. 15 20 of faculties overall. You can find one or two in social sciences. That number has dwindled dramatically. It has been cut by about two thirds. The reasons for that are complicated and disputed. The point is that colleges are more of an echo chamber than they have ever been. In practice, it grows out of what you know as groupthink. The more people with a common opinion, especially and ideological opinion spent time together, the more radical and narrowminded they get. Thats why you see these repeated instances on College Campuses where students or a faculty member or anybody unreasonable is too mild a word. It is completely insane and off the hook. That is a big problem. I think it has two consequences. One that is obvious and wellknown, one less so. The first consequence is, the number of students majoring in the humanities and social sciences has also been plummeting in the last 25 years. The number of history majors has fallen off the cliff, english majors, philosophy. But also Political Science is holding its own, but ought to be doing better in some ways. Economics is the one exception. Of course that is the most robust and successful of the social sciences. And also the one where you find the most libertarians and conservatives and nonleftist professors. For the most part, i think that is correct. I think there is a connection there. A lot of people say students are not majoring in history anymore because they are more concerned about getting a job. They want to study stem subjects and business and economics. There may be some truth to that. Although there is a reason to dispute that. I think it is because the increasingly radical content of those humanities and social Science Department simply turn off a lot of students. The majority of students are not radical or leftist themselves. The majority of students are not. The Largest Group describe themselves as moderate, to some extent. I mentioned economics. A curious thing is happening right now that i think the canary in the coal mine, at a number of prominent universities, columbia, m. I. T. , im trying to think of where else have applied with the federal government to change their official classification. Its a funny little thing i did not even know existed. It has to do with various bureaucratic ways they are classified. Economics departments are classifying themselves as stem, like engineering or physics or chemistry. Why are they doing that . I think part of it is that even liberal economists who are datadriven, they look around at the other social sciences and humanities and say we dont want to be in the college of arts and sciences with all these loons. We wouldve rather be in the more rigorous part of the university. I think it is the canary in the coal mine. I think you are seeing a de facto divorce in universities taking place. Especially big research universities. We are moving toward a situation where you are going to have a university that is stem subjects, economics, business, prelaw, Political Science, and the rest of the university, humanities and social sciences which will wither and die. Everyone will understand they are all crazy people. Fewer students will want to be in those departments, and that will be interesting. I will mention a couple of remedies. I already mentioned firing administrators. Second, one thing to do is figure out ways to create competition within universities. A lot of you are familiar with things like the Hoover Institution at stamford. The James Madison center at princeton that was founded 20 something years ago. Arizona State University has set up its own new school on economic thought and political thought that is independent of traditional departments. It now has a competitive curriculum with traditional departments. Faculty are not happy about that, but the Legislature Said this is going to happen. That was nice. Another idea that has been floating around is somebody needs to step up and start a new university or two. We havent seen Something Like that since brandeis, which was 70 years ago. Finally, i wont say the craziest idea, but the one that is most remarkable not remarkable, but unconventional, and this is something the Trump Education Department might pick up just to scare people and say, what is all this fixation with a bachelors degree . Why dont we create some alternative way of certifying that someone is educated and capable, like we do for example with the cpa exam. So you can take alternative methods of education, online classes, study on your own. The Kim Kardashian approach to passing the bar exam. [laughter] we should experiment with these things. Part of the story is the cartel of accrediting agencies and the nature of reinforcing that you are nothing if you dont have a ba. Maybe create a competitive avenue. That the world that wants to employee people want snow. Lot of employers use the ba as a screening mechanism to find young people that show they can create a course of study, and thats not bad. Maybe we should be even bolder than that. I will stop there. I want to thank Stephen Sally for inviting me to join you today. Getting steve to join berkeley is probably the only thing i have done on behalf of ideological diversity at berkeley other than continuing to exist and not leave the campus. [laughter] you can be the judge of whether it has been successful. I quite agree with the diagnosis. Let me also say i am not a , scholar of Higher Education policy. I think i am here more because, unlike Robinson Crusoe on the island. You are just curious, how did he survive, and what lessons can we draw just by looking at how he made it on the Desert Island . I am very happy to share stories. Everything i see from being one of the few conservatives at berkeley quite comports with everything that steve gave in his diagnosis of what is wrong with the universities, the academic bloated personnel. I think i read a figure, for every one new professor added to a faculty, universities are adding more than 10 administrators, over the last 2030 years. There has been a huge rise in tuition. Often subsidized by the federal government, proved very cheap student loans. Universities are not using them to add professors. They are using them to add things to attract students like better dorms, gyms, several universities have added water amusement parks to their campuses. I always thought eating bad food was part of the college experience. I would not have met my wife had it not been for bad food on College Campuses, because we had to go out somewhere to eat. One thing i would emphasize that steve did not emphasize as much, though he did mention it, i think one of the main problems with Higher Education today is the elevation of identity politics and racial diversity and gender diversity, above all other values at the university. I think if you look at what the university was before, and this is where it started and now it is spreading to other parts of society. You have a Great University like berkeley, maybe a secondplace kind of place like stanford. [laughter] just teasing. The idea was you wanted to have a faculty that did the very best research for the benefit of society. At the same time you want students to surround those faculty so they can learn from the very best. The best professors were not doing the best teaching. They were doing cuttingedge research. They were teaching the students around them to learn how to take their place and do that. I think that has been replaced at most of the Top Research Universities by a desire to meet racial and gender diversity goals. Once that becomes the highest value of the university and other values take second place, universities start to suffer. You should add that at oberlin, it wasnt just an administrator, there were a lot of faculty involved in this lynch mob mentality to go after this bakery which had done nothing wrong from the case i read. The most important thing for a to achieve now is diversity. I think at berkeley, we spend many millions of dollars on racial and diversity bureaucracy. 1 million could put about 50 undergraduates free through berkeley. Instead, we are choosing to spend taxpayer money on gender and racial diversity issues. Every school, every department has an officer who is paid to do this every time you do a search for a new faculty member, you have to write a lengthy report about how it meets gender and racial diversity goals. Of course, we get to the terrible scandals in admissions now. Look at Harvard College. One or two people came up to me before the event who admitted secretly they had gone to Harvard College like i did. [laughter] i cannot believe the amount of distortion that has gone on in the admissions process to hit certain racial diversity goals to the extent that you take asian students in particular, of the the five criteria that students are measured on, they are in the top quintile of the fifth is personality where asian students suddenly rank at the bottom. No stereotypes there. [laughter] even though the harvard admissions director admitted most of the students had never been interviewed. I think asians have no personality will come to a big surprise to the billion and a half people in china and the other billion in india that might be eating our economic lunch these days. What do you do about it . What is the remedy . I differ with steves idea of disassociating i think its true in terms of diagnosis that universities can live in this world and even prosper, because what they are selling is a selling is a credential used by businesses to hire because it shows that students can crawl through the mud and cracks of universities and they are so disciplined and can persevere, they can do anything a corporation wants them to do. I can see why you would say why do we over from these leftwing crazy people at universities who are just performing credentialing function . Lets move the credentialing function somewhere else. I know they do things like this in germany and other countries. Im not sure its a great idea. My little effort at reform is inspired by being one of the few conservatives at yale law school. We have something called the Federalist Society in law schools. The head of the berkeley federal society is over there. She just graduated. She is alive, too. She didnt get killed off by anybody. This is a debating club. It brings conservative ideas to law schools, libertarian and conservative ideas. I would have to say that was the only exposure, the only time i heard about scalia and thomas was at Federalist Society events, not in class. One thing we could do with reform is rather than complain about bureaucrats and how much money the university of spending, try to create programs to bring speakers and visiting faculty to expose some students to conservative ideas and get a debate going. Donate toof you that schools, the best thing you can do we all want to support our alma maters. We dont have to give a blank check to the university to say spend another lazy river amusement waterpark to attract the best students. Instead, give money and focused ways to programs like i think the one steve is running, and there is another one from brad, to bring conservative speakers to campus. More and more can actually hear them. This is where the universities have to step up, in a setting where there is no riot, where police are going to allow people who are so scared of hearing different ideas that they want to engage in violence to suppress it. Unfortunately, berkeley witnessed two of those, and it has been spreading all over the country. That is right think, alums if you want