the minute they enter a day care center, there's two months, six months, it is required, required by the state, that they have real books, not throw away books in that day care center. i don't think if it's six kids, four kids and that begins early. we wait until they get to preschool or to first grade to introduce books to them and then we wonder why our kids are behind, you have to start early and start hard. >> here in new york there's a program where they have books and they have them with pediatricians and so it's a program where the pediatricians introduce books to parents. so if your local hospital doesn't have that program, look for it. but with the amount of time that we have left, i'm sorry, i can't take audience's questions because i have five minutes left. okay, quickly. [inaudible] [inaudible] >> what can we do today? i want to go back to my panel and start with stacy, quickly, what can we do today and then vanesse and laz with -- last with javaka because he's an author. >> it can really make a difference and just getting them started on a book, maybe they have to get over the hump of opening up the book and reading that first chapter. >> thank you. syntychia. [inaudible] >> something you can do today right now, gets children's authors who are selling books at the book fair. start here. when you go out the store, by somebody's book, that's how you support the industry and as a young lady morgan taylor, she didn't see princesses that looked like her and her mother went out and published the book. i'm hoping that we begin to understand that it is our responsibility to make sure that we have books that reflect our images and enrich our children's lives. >> javaka. >> i think today's kids are not like they used to be 20 years ago, 30 years ago or 40 years ago. it's an interactive world and they need to receive information in a different way. so you need to be experimental, you need to make reading fun. you need to find alternative ways in order to get books into churn's hands and books into children's hearts. when i go to schools, i do a lot of theat -- that why they with not sitting, reading, saying this is boring, i'm engaging them in a way the world is engaging them. find ways that the children in your environment need to engage with books and then help them get there. >> all right. well, i want to thank our panel. sorry we ran out of time for q&a, i was given the director from the stage manager. i'm sorry that i cannot answer your question but when the panel steps down if you have a question for the panel, i'm sure they'll be more than happy to answer any questions or comments . >> thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> we are on location in clermont, california where we are talking with professors here. joining us now is john shields. he's written this book passing on the right, he is the coauthor, professor shields, page one. progressives rule higher education, conservatives are so scarce that marxist outnumber them. >> about 18% of social scientists are marxists so they are even badly outnumbered by marxists. >> do you identify as a self-identifying conservative? >> i do. >> the thought is that conservative professors on liberal art campuses are intimidated. >> right, there is a sense that conservatives are moving into enemy territory if they become professors but that's not what we found. we interviewed over a 150 conservatives professors in the social sciences and humanities and we found that they -- they tell us that the university is a much more tolerant place than we sometimes think and certainly more tolerant place than right-wing critics that the university tell us it is. >> what did you learn, what specifically did you hear from the professors in. >> yeah, well a lot of them felt surprisingly at home in the university and that's partly because large swaths of the university are not as politicized as sometimes think they are and conservatives often gravitate towards the least politicized corridors of the economy. they often become economists or enter subfields in other disciplines that aren't deeply politicized, american history, conservatives are more inclined to be ancient historians, military historians, areas that aren't deeply criticized by the left. if they do stray into more politicized subfields, they can have a rough time with that and that's true and we profiled their experiences as well. but it's also the case that, you know, they -- they make friendships across the political divide in the academy and they are much better in carving out than we think they are. >> host: what are some of the areas where professors, it's a little more troubling to be a conservative? >> guest: yeah, that's a good question. certainly if they study race or the american family or feminism, the histio of the left or the right, areas that are important to the left and areas that are really dominated by the left and so some disciplines are much more politicized than others. sociology, for example, you know, is a pretty leftist discipline, about a quarter of socialists self-identified as marxists. if you're a conservative, you have to have thick skin and pretty politic about how you present yourself and you have to be cautious. didn't come until after tenure when it was safe to do so. >> host: has it benefited conservative political movement to think of college campuses as liberal intolerant places? >> guest: well, no, i mean, i certainly understand the reaction of conservatives to the liberal university. their response is utterly unprovoked, right. it's troubling when conservative authors are disinvited from campuses because of their political views. so on the one hand, i understand where conservatives are coming from, on the other hand, i i think they've often overreacted to the intolerance and the sense to the university and that's unfortunately because i think it may steer some young conservative aways from higher education. some may decide that they don't want to become professors because it's -- they see it as a much more intolerant place than it, in fact, is. >> host: have you personally had any issues here at claremont mckenna being a conservative scholar? >> guest: you know, a few. not enough to make me not want to be a professor, right. so on the whole, i've been very happy and we don't claim that the university is -- doesn't present challenges to conservatives. it does. we just think they're manageable and we need more conservatives in higher education and in particular in the social sciences and so we hope to encourage more of them to become professors. >> host: have you been critiqued from the right because you're saying universities are not such bad places for conservatives? >> guest: we have, although notably by conservatives from outside of the university. the conservatives inside the university as we report in the book, tend to have a very different view of it than those conservatives who are lobbying bomb on the university from the outside. >> host: what are some of those critiques? >> guest: they claim that we understate the intolerance. if this was some other minority, racial minority or if it was women, we -- you know, we wouldn't be understating the intolerance that exists there. and, you know, i mean, i think that we -- i think that the right should not, you know, copy the sort of grievance politics of the left by overstating the intolerance that does exist. >> host: professor, have universities always been largely liberal institutions? >> guest: yes. for a very long time. that's certainly the case. you know, we don't have very good survey data prior to the 1960's, but a lot of the evidence that does exist that they were -- university faculties were quite liberal throughout the 20th century, certainly so they've been liberal for a very long time. they do seem to have become more liberal in the 60's and 70's as the new left and feminist entered the university in the 70's, it did drift to the left but it's been a broadly liberal institution for a long time. having said that, in the political makeup of the university various a lot by discipline. so it's much more conservative than the natural sciences, for example, than in the social sciences or humanities and it's -- within the social sciences it various as well. so economics it's a much more conservative discipline than the other social sciences. in fact, economics is real the one discipline that looks like america with a rough balance between liberals, conservatives and moderates. >> host: what do you teach at claremont? >> guest: american politician. >> host: freshman course, sophomore course, senior? >> guest: i teach a course called the american cultural wars which looks at social conflict of moral questions. i teach on social movements and i sometimes teach courses on religion and politics as well. >> host: all right, student body comes in. is it pretty split, do they have a predefined attitude towards these issues? >> guest: yeah, they're mostly liberal. duo get some conservatives. for liberal arts college, we get more conservatives than lots of other elite liberal arts colleges do and that's part because we have -- we do some conservative professors here. that makes us a little bit unusual compare today our competitors like williams. >> host: jon shields have written this book passing on the right, conservative professors in the progressive university. is it bad that colleges are overall liberal? negative, i should say? >> guest: i think more conservatives is a good thing or the academy needs to look like america, i don't think that's true but i think that in more

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