Glenn Loury on The Role of Universities in America’s Social Unrest Over Race and Inequality

[0:00:00 Speaker 0] Mm hmm. Welcome to Policy McCombs. A data focused conversation on trade offs. I’m Carlos. Car value from the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. I think we’re live. All right. Welcome, everyone. And welcome to a special event at the Salem Center for Policy. Part of the celebrations around free speech week we’re delighted to have with us today. Glenn Lowry. Glenn is the Merchant P. Stoltz, professor of social science and economics at Brown University. Glenn has done extensive work in microeconomic theory. Industrial organization, natural resource economics and economics or race and inequality. Glenn, welcome. Welcome to policy at McCombs. That’s what we thank you, Carlos. Thank you. Thank you. Carlos Got to do with you. We also have with us today. Richard Lowry, finance professor and Salem Center senior scholar. So I guess, Richard, you’re gonna start today just to follow up on the welcome. Thanks very much, Glen, for joining us during free speech week. I want to be clear. This is the week where we talk about free speech, Not the week where we have free speech. So ut, in a recent ranking by the Foundation for Individual Rights in education ranks 54 out of 55 schools in support for free speech. Uh, and I think that’s a fairly generous ranking. Um, So, however, the university has encouraged us to participate in this free speech week and as an attempt to let 100 flowers bloom. And we all know how that ended up last time. So we should probably be a little careful. Um, don’t get the reference. You can google it and find out all sorts of interesting things about now. Um, so but with that, let’s get started. So, Glenn, how would you assess the current status of free speech and academic freedom at American universities? Well, there’s something to be concerned about. For sure. We’ve all heard all these different anecdotes and so on. I can’t take them off chapter and verse. I’d be curious to know what’s going on in Austin that cause you just say 54 out of 55 is a generous ranking. Um, uh, You know, I I, uh I I think, uh, there is, uh, there is the, you know there’s repression there. There’s legislation where, you know, you make you make it illegal to say something And then there’s the social pressure and the kind of tyranny of consensus where you, uh you don’t have a robust debate because people are, um are so vicious. And they told that they exact from someone who elects to deviate. Um, I tend to think that the latter is the more insidious. But I haven’t heard your stories from Austin yet. Well, I mean, I could jump in, Uh, we did have a recent proposals sent around that was going to require all applicants and all people applying for promotion two to include a commitment to inclusivity and support for diverse populations and their, uh, experience and future plans in this area and that we wanted to put basically a diversity and inclusion member on every promotion committee and every hiring committee to make sure that people were which is similar to what happened. And, I mean, in California, this is basically being used as a political filter at this point. So that’s one of the things that I’m sort of referencing, which I would say tends towards the first rather than the second. Well, it would be easy to just kind of get hysterical here and start saying really loyalty off. I have to. I have to indicate my commitment to a very particular sort of ideological, uh, position in order to be considered credible. Uh, I think that’s pretty much what they’re proposing, though Every hiring committee, every hiring committee and this is promotion committee. This stuff is so laughable. I mean, sometimes I’m just wondering, it’s the theater of the absurd. And, of course, it’s all going to collapse. It can’t it can’t possibly be. And maybe we’re all we’re missing is ridicule. Maybe maybe a willingness to Carlos Spade a spade, so to speak, to working on the river. So, for example, every hiring committee here, let me simply observe the following. There are not enough committed diversity and inclusion activists who have the competency to assess the fitness of candidates that you can even begin to scratch the surface of putting someone on every hiring committee who would be helpful. What you’re doing is you’re putting a cop or a chaperone on the hiring committee. You’re putting a diversity chaperone on Huckabee, and in fact, you’re saying the problem of racial bias refusing to acknowledge people of color who are qualified is so severe that we have to look over the shoulder of every hiring committee to vouchsafe that they are in fact being objective. That’s just madness. I mean, wait a minute. Am I the only one who can see that? That’s self evidently ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. Yes, yes. Well, we got a letter, Uh, somebody leaked this proposal to the Foundation for Individual Rights in education, and they wrote a rather stern letter in response, so at least they see it, but yeah, but all the ridiculous, ridiculous Glenn it’s not. It’s not. The state of California has actually put that in place, And there’s a few other institutions that already have that in place and and at least not necessarily the cop. But the these statements right? And in the state of California, my understand is that all those statements are graded by the cops before the applications can move forward. So there’s a filter put in the very first step of the application process that somehow dictates, gives a grade on people’s essential views on those on those issues. Okay, so now why isn’t the obvious response here and refuse to participate in this and then litigate refuse to refuse to sign, refuse to submit. And then if there’s any consequences, your refusal to participate in this process to go to court and and test the issue of whether or not uh these, uh I mean again, you know, you hyperbole is on the tip of my tongue, and I’m holding myself back from calling people Nazis and things like that, because, I mean, that’s unproductive. I realized that that’s unproductive, but it’s gonna sound a little corny, but I just have to say this slippery slope, Slippery slope. What do you think? This ends? You think they’re finished? Okay, if you don’t stop them now, Slippery slope. Okay, so this is a battle worth fighting. I mean, really, Yeah, that’s what Let me Let me Let me. So you’re pointing to the slippery slope aspect of this. You You, uh, I’ve heard you mentioned before, and some of the interviews, the notion that we cannot have the only I think you’re quoting Thomas all on that, that the only way we can get to a situation where there’s no disparities of any kind of society is a totalitarian society. Right? Um, my concern here, and maybe that’s, you know, tongue and cheek a little bit and bringing that up. But the concern here is that is that this this these ideas of imposing equity on us, which is coming up, right, the notion that equity is equality of outcomes, we need the outcomes to be equal, regardless of any other aspects that we need to control for. Um, if we’re able even to do that, even if that’s legal and we don’t win any kind of like this court battles that might be coming up as a result of these policies and so on. Uh, at the end of the day, that’s not gonna solve anything, right? And my concern in terms of the slippery slope is that what do you see happening once, Once disparities still gonna appear, even if you’re trying to put forward the most severe aspects of policies that try to create equity? Once those disparities appear later on, what’s the next step? Right? I think it’s a very deep point, Carlos, that you’re making. I I think it’s a very let me first of all, explain what I meant channeling soul. I don’t know if I was quoting him. I I don’t know a specific soul quote. But it’s very much in the spirit of Thomas Sowell’s writings over the many decades about race and culture. The groups are different. I mean, they have different cultures. They have different, socialized, reproduced, historically engendered for whatever the reasons, uh, patterns and practices of behavior and values and norms and traditions and ideals and aspirations and institutions and, uh, etcetera rituals. And, you know, it’s a groups are different. Okay, so they are going to come out the same. Have you noticed that the Jews tend to be overrepresented in certain lines of pursuit? I mean, they’re more Jews in academia. They’re Jews are overrated. Over outnumbered, overrepresented, I should say amongst the people, you know, in the at the top of the legal profession and the arts and the etcetera. Okay, So groups are different in Nigeria, the Ebo are relatively disproportionately etcetera, etcetera and you know, etcetera. I mean, I could give many, many examples. That would be Thomas. Soul groups are different. So now if you insist that in every venue of human engagement there be some kind of proportionality of representation of people participating in every particular endeavor in line and whatnot, that’s going to cut against the consequences. I almost want to say the natural, inevitable implications of the differential patterns of tradition, custom behavior, ritual and practice that constitute the very essence of differentiated groups. You say we’ve got groups. Well, if we’ve got groups, can we take the group’s seriously enough to recognize that we will then not have a even pattern of human behavior and at the acquisition of various talents and skills and specializations and mastery across all of those groups? Now, if you nevertheless insists that the outcomes have to be representative across all these different things, then you’re gonna cut against that. And in order to really assure your outcome of equality, you’re basically going to have to override the prerogatives of autonomy and liberty that they create the sphere of private life within which the group’s manifest they’re different fruit and whatnot. Nobody’s better than anybody else in this argument. No group is higher or lower. Their just different Okay, so that was That’s the principled argument that if you insist on parody, you’re gonna get tyranny. But I have. But But there’s something else here, and it’s called history, and as a consequence, of history. This is an argument that I would make. I don’t know who else would endorse it. African Americans suffer disadvantages with respect to some of the resources within our community required to develop our full human potential. You can’t You can’t have slavery and Jim Crow, And then all of a sudden, everybody’s going to Harvard. They were bad schools. They were segregated neighborhoods. There was poverty. There was discrimination. I agree. History, doughnuts, a bad hand. It had consequences in terms of development. So if you don’t and this is the point, address yourself to the underlying developmental deficits induced by a history of oppression and instead do a cosmetic end run around the hard work by creating titular equality, optics, equality. It’s a horrible thing. Not only does it not address the development problem, it invites contempt, lying, uh, shame, because everybody really knows what’s going on. And I could go on about this for a long time because I’m very, very concerned. I’m very concerned that we have bought in hook, line and sinker to this diversity, inclusion and equity thing. Such that not enough black physics professors becomes an issue for the physics department whereas in fact, it’s an issue for quantitative education at the secondary. In early college education level, people are not learning calculus and differential equations and functional analysis, which is what they need to do in order to be able to engage the literature and become a physicist. I just give physics as an example you could have given a dozen different fields. So So this is horrible, in my opinion. I mean, this is, uh and I just want to underscore this. Everybody knows mediocrity when they see it. If you insist on 10% because blacks are 10% of the population in all these fields and you haven’t done the developmental work, you’re going to get mediocrity. I did not say any particular person. This is statistics. This is an inevitability. If you are selecting at the right tail of a normal distribution and you’re taking the top 2.5% Brown admits 1800 out of 30,000 applicants and you have different cutoffs for the kids that you’re selecting their S A. T scores and whatnot for black and white. Either the selected criterion s a T scores un correlated with post admissions performance. It’s uncoordinated. In which case why are you using it in the first place? But, well, no, it’s not un correlated. Or there’s going to be a difference on average and posted missions performance between the two racially defined populations who were selected according to different criteria. We can run the Monte Carlo experiment. There’s no way around this. This is going to happen every time if you have enough people. So here’s the fact. The fact is that in the most elite venues committed to affirmative action and using different criteria to constitute the student bodies by race, there are objective differences in the performance of those students after they are admitted. That’s a mathematical necessity. Now what happens? Great inflation happens. What happens? People switch out of the stem disciplines, and they go into the soft social sciences because they can’t cut it in physics and biochemistry, what happens? People lie and pretend like the differences and performances don’t exist. What happens? Disappointed students, unable to realize their human potential because they’ve been mis assigned, end up bitter and blaming racism for the failures that they have been that have been foisted upon them. Uh, I said I could go on for this About a long time. You’re going to say I’m against affirmative action. Well, actually, I’m in favour of African American dignity. I’m actually you know what’s really equality. What? What? What kind of equality? What’s the quality of equality? Is that equality of representation and headcount? Or is it equality of actually being able to hit the ball over the fence? Which is how they make you into the Hall of Fame? I mean, what kind of equality? Equality of honor. You know, where you don’t have to prove anything because it’s already manifested what it is that you do or a kind of bluff equality, kind of phony equality. When you tell people to shut up, when they ask you to put up they asked you to put up you tell him to shut up. You’re racist because you asked me to show that I was actually qualified. Mhm. If I can follow up just a second, there does seem to be this very big focus on sort of representation at the upper level and getting 10% of the professors of physics and my senses. I don’t see nearly the level of concern for, say, the fact that high schools in certain areas are pretty terrible and the emphasis does seem to be very much on. People we talked to are very worried about representation within the university, and nobody seems to be the set of people are interested in, like school reform at the level that you would be, Uh, I would sounds like you’ll be arguing we Maybe we should fix low income schools. What do you think? Um, do you have any idea what the source that like? Why do people care so much about what’s happening up here? And so little about what’s happening to people are actually sort of suffering at the at the low end and primary and secondary school. Well, Richard, I think I think what people are going to say is you can do both. It’s two different things. Um, and, uh, then we because I’m inclined to agree with the spirit of your question, I put in the position of justifying the relative weight that we want to put on the one versus the other. Uh, and then they’re going to make these all these various kinds of arguments about role models and you know, the elite venues being gatekeepers into access to positions of influence and remuneration. So, uh, you know, they’re going to say, as I heard, um, a believe City Council member in New York City and African American. I don’t remember his name. This is the argument over the specialized exam schools in New York, the Bronx High School of Science and the Stuyvesant and what not and how they admit students and the under representation of blacks because they use a single exam. You have to score high on the exam in order to get in. Asians are vastly overrepresented amongst those students, and the Asians are arguing. Don’t take away to test. That’s the way that we get in and it’s actually neutral. It doesn’t favor anybody. It’s a test, and you can study for it and you can do well on it or not. I don’t think that’s our lifeline and the guy the city councilman very much against the current status quo. Um, wanting to see more blacks and wanting to get rid of the test, he said, Well, we can you know, uh, you all are arguing that we should work on the other schools who are not feeder schools preparing these kids for their. But we can do that, too. We can, you know, he’s saying, we can do that also, so that’s what they’re going to say. But they don’t seem to actually ever get around to doing that part as far as I know. And you need a political analysis with you, I mean the squeaky wheel kind of thing like that, and the way people can miraculously find their own self interest somehow implied by the thing that they think is necessary for justice. So, I mean, I was struck by a prince to put out a faculty Progressive faculty put out a statement, a list of demands of what they wanted from Princeton University, and I struck. How many of demands where we want a person of color to be the director of this center. We want more resources to go to this institute, and I thought Princeton could respond. It was tongue in cheek, uh, ice grouper. I believe that’s the name of the president of Princeton University. I was recommending tongue in cheek and my podcast that he might respond as follows. He might respond. We are deeply concerned about race and racial inequality in America. And we’re going to take all of that money that we would have used for minority faculty and recruitment. And we’re going to create a center where we’re gonna study poverty. We’re going to get the best sociologist. Whatever color they are, we’re going to put people in the field to gather data. We’re going to do experimental research. We’re gonna partner with a hospital to do a public health thing, and we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our endowment attacking the question of poverty. But in the the instrumentality that we’re going to use to do it, we’ll be color blind. We’re going for the best people were because we’re serious about solving the problem. OK, yeah, and let’s see how that would fly. And it would get nowhere because it doesn’t feather anybody’s nest. I mean, I’m sorry, but I think that’s part of it. It isn’t it. You know, if you really so this this If you’re if you’re really interested in helping the broad population instead of the elite, you want the very best people, regardless, if it all turns out to be, you know, Asian kids and Indians who are most adept at helping the lower classes. That would seem like I think, that that’s sort of part of the that idea, right? Well, that would be my idea, but it would be a radical idea in this content, you know, in the diversity and inclusion universe. And then again, people are going to have that they’re gonna have their identity. Epistemology arguments. You’ve heard of identity politics? Well, I’m worried. I’m worried about identity epistemology, which, which is the claim that your your racial identity somehow gives you an insight on what it’s true or gives your voice more credibility in stating what is true to a larger public than someone else’s voice would have. Like, This is this is not where we want to be. Uh, but, you know, I mean many, many examples, even uh, the white ethnographer who embeds herself in an inner city community and lives there for three years and gets to know everybody in the housing complex and what’s going on in their lives and then sits down and writes a book about it. Turns out that if you’re Alice Goffman and you write such a book, called on the run. There will be a cottage industry of ethnic studies professors who will attack the validity of your reportage because of your race. And they will say your motives because you’re a white person examining the lives of black people must be exploitative, and you’re objectifying them. When I heard this argument, this is an actual argument that actually happened and ethnography. But it could be repeated in other fields of this kind anthropological and, uh, socio, uh, logical link. When I heard that argument, it made me sick to my stomach. Really? Oh, the black person who goes in in beds has no motives. They don’t have an agenda of their own. They’re they’re not grounding. It acts. They don’t have class resentments for these people that they’re dealing with. They don’t have their own racial ideology that they might be using those people to project. But a white person, in virtue of being white, necessarily has a nefarious agenda. This is supposed to be academia. These people are supposed to be seeking truth. Let me Let me let me get back. All right, let me let me get back to To to the so again going back to the sort of notion that that, uh, the academic freedom and the freedom of speech that we need. So that’s essentially somebody being attacked by their ability to conduct work because of their their their their group identity like, Well, you cannot. Therefore, you’re not allowed to speak in this particular direction or to study this particular topic. Carlos, let me just mention there were other criticisms of Alice Kaufman’s work that did not have to do with the race. And I’m putting those to decide. I’m not. I’m not unaware of them. Okay, but But this did happen when I said happen did happen and it made me. That’s right. That’s right. That’s 111 of the asked. So so this this This probably has implications not only in things they are directly related to to raise anything associated with race these days, but in other areas of social science as well. Where perhaps some preconceived ideas or some notions that are now you know not to be said in front of polite company, for example are being stifled as as a result of the environment around us. So can you think about other facts other issues in terms of, you know, Nikon researches social science research. There are things that you know. I know the answer to it. We might have some facts, but we don’t want to talk about them because it’s really dangerous. Or if I bring it up, you know, you might get cancelled or something like that. Well, I think we can all think of some of these examples there in front of us every day. I’m not an expert epidemiologists, but you can’t tell me that the battle over the covid, the complex of issues about covid all of them about public health practices and vaccines and remedy and has not been freight hit by a kind of political. You know, cloud. You know where, uh, the actors and the actors include the president of the United States who was an interested party who has a, you know, whatever. And they also include the Democratic Party and, you know, and they include the academic centers of research for public schools and public health. The one that I have have their own, you know, kind of concerns and and and, you know, who am I going to take? Seriously? So does herd immunity actually have any scientific legitimacy as a construct for thinking about how to react to a pandemic situation? That question is front. I have not to have a I don’t know. And in fact, in fact, part of the reason that I don’t know what to believe is because the camps are lobbying grenades at each other with such intensity that I’m kind of left here wondering, You know what, What? Sources are credible? I mean, you know that, uh, whatever that, uh, declaration, that was just a declaration. Barrington Declaration. And I sent it to my friends who I think know, and some of them right back saying, Yeah, you want to take that other ones right back? Yeah, like that. I don’t even know what happened in Sweden. I can’t get a real good factual account. The sweet said herd immunity. Well, what has happened? Well, it’s up, It’s down, it’s up, it’s down. And everybody is so tendentious in the way in which they get climate change. I’m an economist. I have to tell you, I I don’t You know, I’m not an earth scientist. You know, I read the newspaper like the next person, but I’m pretty sure it’s a hard problem knowing what costs you incur. The dynamic structural evolution both of the climate but also of the economic activity that’s engendering the carbon emissions that’s of contributing appreciates a hard problem. For example, how much weight do I put on present generations versus the future generations? You think you know the answer to that question? That’s a debatable question. I don’t know the answer to that question. For example, how much optimism should I ascribe to the possibility that technological innovation, as yet unknown, will help to relieve some of these issues so that if I have a dynamic program where I’m trying to way past future and what not my discount factor has to take into account the possibility of technological innovation creating a new set of decision nodes on my tree or whatever it is? I mean, you can write this down as a dynamic program. Uh, those are not scientific questions, Not necessarily how much costs. What about the equity implications? What you know. So the people who just say shut it down. I don’t want any more fossil fuels. I mean, come on. And if you speak against that. If you say well, well, I’m not so sure. Or or if you invoke subtle nuances like it’s a multiplayer cooperative game, I don’t have a bludgeon that I can make other people do stuff. Can I define my interest and then act on behalf of my interests? Are you going to force me to be a humanitarian whose objective function is the global community when 9/10 of humanity or not playing by the same game? Did that make any sense for me? Now, if that sounds like something that Donald Trump would say, that’s because although he’s not, he doesn’t know any game theory. It is something that Donald Trump would say. Okay, it also happens to be, in my mind a relevant factor to bring to the table when you’re trying to make a decision. It’s a decision problem, okay, about how much cost to weigh in the benefit and the inter temporal problem that you’re trying to solve. These things don’t have simple answers, but the combatants, I will be called a climate denier for what I just said. They’re gonna call me a deny or they think they’re often they think the arguments over because they can call me a name when I’m simply asking a question that no one really knows the answer to anyway. So So the answer is yes. I think you could, uh, you could race and I Q. Charles Murray. I just read this book. Human Diversity. It’s not a bad book, you know, take what you want to think about it. It’s not a bad book. It’s interesting book, Brave man. He takes on a impossible issue. But is it possible that in the long, uh, evolution of, uh, the homo SAPIEN species as we have come to constitute the contemporary world through our migrations out of East Africa? And it’s, you know, living apart for eons and whatnot? Is it possible that any consequences of that separation of the human species into these relatively isolated, uh, sub populations that bread within themselves for a long time could have any biogenetic residue that would have any implications for social outcomes? How can you rule that out our priori? You can’t possibly know that I didn’t say anything was true. I just said that you could not preclude inquiry about these things are priority and think you were dealing with the truth. If you did that, that’s a political move. It you’re saying, um, I don’t want to know something, but at least be honest. If that’s what you’re saying And don’t put yourself up on a high horse and think that you’re defending morality, I could give many, many examples. So so in mass incarceration, I just want to put one more thing on the table. It’s supposed to be about racism. Maybe it’s about violent criminal behavior in a relatively small number of people within a marked population. I mean, you know, uh, James Q. Wilson and I have been a critic of this is the late political scientists at Harvard and then at U. C. L. A. Um, James Q. Wilson, a conservative, maybe godfather of the, you know, build up of prisons that started in the 19 eighties and really reached very high levels by the end of the 20th century. This is James Q. Wilson. Uh, he wrote a book with Richard Herrnstein called Crime and Human Nature, and, uh, in the book. They tried to understand what were some of the factors the, uh, including the factors that were that had to do with temperament and how the glandular system works and different, you know, brain functions and whatnot that that might be correlated with criminal behavior. Now, I’m not I’m not I’m not endorsing that particular research strategy is something that I would fund If I were at the National Institutes of Justice or something. Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. But they were called Nazis for that book. They they were They were, you know, Wilson Hornstein, you can’t hide. You believe in genocide. I still remember the chance that rang out around Harvard Square this going back 30 35 years. But but you know, so So they’re all of that is out there. All of that and much, much more. Have many examples beyond my knowledge. I’m sure it could be cited. So, uh, we talked a bit about the environment. He and Richard brought up some some issues that we maybe are concerned about where we’re moving as an institution here. But recently, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, you the president Brown wrote a letter that you took a lot of you are, I think, quoting you that you were offended and upset by the letter. Um, and I guess that probably speaks to some of these dynamics they were talking about in terms of creating environment around us. So tell us a little bit about what was your reaction to the letter and the things that you want to you felt compelled, compelled to respond to. It was a dear colleague letter that came from the president of the university and that declared the university solidarity with the movement for against anti black racism and on behalf of racial justice, that that’s what it was. It was signed by the president of University, the provost by the, uh, top administrative offices, the university from the general counsel, down to the portfolio manager and the deans of the major sub units of the university. The dean of the faculty, the dean of the School of Public Health and so forth. Um, and it was political. It was a letter that basically could have been written by black lives matter enthusiast. I mean, it basically declared America’s out of crisis racism unrelenting white supremacy has had its and we have black people. Every hour of every day must bear up under the stars, um, and and uh, it offended me and I’ll tell you about I mean, I first want to simply note I published the letter in the City Journal. I wrote it to a friend. It was a letter I wrote to a friend in which I was reacting to the letter, saying, This is what I think And I decided to send it to the City Journal so that the world could see it. And nothing I have done, maybe ever in my life has engendered so much response. And the City Journal tells me that a gazillion people are leading, you know, it’s gotten retweeted and whatnots gone small, viral, not viral, the way real viral. But, you know, it’s it’s gotten a lot of place, so there’s a lot of, you know, response out there, and I’ve been asked many, many, many times about it. So here’s why I was offended. I think there were really mainly to, uh, it was signed by every administrative officer of weight in the university community. So it was a document stating the policy of the university where University, a university So now the university had taken a position. It’s as if the university had come out and said, Vote for Biden or something. It’s as if the university had come out and said, Um uh, I think we should go to war against China or against whatever you know, it really it gets The university has taken a position in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I’m not saying professors having ideas. Of course they should have ideas. I’m saying the university. Yes. Um, I suppose you didn’t think what that letter said. Amazingly, these people are so smugly self righteous that it doesn’t even occur to them that serious people might not share their view of the world. It was put forward with such, uh, self confidence. You know, she could not have had a moment of doubt. I can’t imagine anybody in the room raising their hands saying Maybe we shouldn’t do this, Okay, because we’re righteous. We’re on the right side of his. Well, those riots, the looting of those burning down of those bodegas, the attacks on those police officers, the riots. We’re not exactly, um uh with, you know, unimpeachable. We just they were they were not what you’re supposed to do in the face of that kind of outbreak in your society is not straightforward. It’s not. You know, Evelyn, it’s not one thing. Um, some people are going to say, Well, people have a lot of pent up frustration, and we do have a ignoble and shameful history, and we ought to cut him some slack. And other people are gonna say the first order of government is to secure me in my person and my property. No grievance justifies burning down a immigrants bodega where their whole life has been in that because you’re angry. Nothing. Just other people going to say that some people are gonna say the cops are are bigots. Uh, and they are kind of, uh, you know, force that has been imposed upon the community and that meets out of etcetera, punishment and violence. And other people are gonna say the cops are what brought the murder rate in New York City down from 2500 a year to under 500 a year within a single mayoral administration or two. They’re going to say that. Okay, now, here’s what I say. Could they please be space within the university for us to discuss these matters civilly because they’re not self evident. But what did my president do by blasting this thing? To every alumnus, to every member of the student body and to every member of the faculty and the staff with the in premature of the entire upper rank of the university? She precluded the deliberation about the substantive matters at hand for which the university exists to carry out. What kind of malpractice is this? What kind of leadership of your precious institution of reflection and edification and and human excellence is this? She joined the parade. Christina Paxson and her colleagues jumped on a bandwagon That’s despicable, in my opinion, for the leadership of a university to do. We are there to think it’s true. I raised on Tetra. It’s to think it through. She thinks she knows the answer. Despicable. It infuriates me even now. Yeah, I mean, we got our own version. We got the letter from our dean. Uh and you know, it included the maybe the same boilerplate. But what struck me was we had silence is not an option. And I found that particularly, like not only is this the position of our business school that these are this is the righteous side, but you are required by your dean not only to not speak against it, but to speak out. I thought that that really was like a dick. But again, people have no sense of self conscious this because this is ridiculous. It’s absurd. The only fit response is ridiculed. The only fit responses, some satire, some kind of cartoon or something where you depict these people and grotesque caricature, and you represent the idiocy of what it is that their their silence is complicity. You must speak out in a firm What I say. I mean, well, what are the reactions of your colleagues and I? Did Christina Paxton engage with you after your response? No, she didn’t. Um and and I don’t know. I mean, some of your colleagues problems said, uh, you know, thank you. And we agree. And I expect most most didn’t. Although the ones who haven’t haven’t said very much me covid shutdown has interrupted the social intercourse so that I’m not passing people on the sidewalk walking from my office to my classroom, which would allow me at least to read their body language or whatever, Uh, you know, armed security at this talk. By the way, the covid shutdown is also why we don’t need armed security at your talk, as we had to have in the past that some of our more controversial events. Well, you know, that’s thuggery again. It needs to be called what it is. That’s thuggery. They should be called thugs. Their faces should be put on posters. They should be one adds wanted thug who would not allow me to speak. The only reason we’re here, by the way, is so that people can speak to each other. This thug, uh, arrogated to themselves the right to determine what can be said here. Are you okay with that? Put a put a banditry mask on them and and put a bounty on their heads. Of course, they would accuse me of fomenting violence if I did that against violent thugs. Mhm. All right, so let’s move on. Move on to okay. We identified the problem. We know that that we live in a place where maybe some ideas are not tolerated these days, or or the social sort of norms around us makes us, you know, have to abide by some Some norms, some, some some some views that if we don’t share, we just better be quiet and and just walk with our heads down. That’s that’s what it seems to be. The what we need to do right and part of it is, is because there is a monolithic or or a tendency that universe have had in the past 40 years to become very uni dimensional in their thinking, especially in social and social aspects. Um one. Do you have a view why that is the case that we got to a place where now the type of intellectual diversity viewpoint diversity at the university. So when I want to contrast, for example, the notion of I don’t want to call conservatives because that’s that’s loaded with a political party. I don’t want to talk about political view of the world. I want to talk about things like, for example, this agreement between folks that might think from a classical liberal perspective to think that equality of opportunity is what we should be focusing on versus equity of outcomes, which is like a ganda Orthodoxy seems to be put in front of us, right? That kind of lack of viewpoint diversity seems to be overwhelming at this point. And, of course, the correlates with things like representation in political parties as well. What kind of parties faculty them to vote for or kind of money, places they give money to, etcetera, etcetera. So we got to a point where there’s very little intellectual diversity in those directions. Um, so why is that? And is there something to be done? My understanding is, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to either question. I can talk for a bit. Um, I think you need some, you know, very big think kind of culture. His cultural historian, who could who has read every book that’s been written since 1945 and can track the, you know, the evolution of a lot of different strands. I mean, of course, there is the civil rights movement and the black power movement in the sixties and what not? And there is the anti war sensibility. There is the economic evolution of, uh, you know, the people’s belief about American social policy and economic policy, and, uh, there is a cold war that has come, and that has gone. There is postmodernism and other trends of intellectual enthusiasm. There is African Afro American, uh, Latino Hispanic women’s studies, gay studies and whatnot, which have these areas studies have created their own, uh, kind of dynamic. Uh, I mean, so there’s a lot of there are a lot of strands. I mean, so I don’t know what accounts for the evolution again. I could I could opine I could We could talk about various cases and whatnot. What’s going on in the stem area? I’m very, very interested in the kind of relativistic. You know, kind I I used the word postmodern. I may not be using it entirely correctly, but but this sensibility of kind of, you know, you think science has got, uh, rock bottom answer That’s objective and independent of power relations in society. But in fact, science is a vehicle for structural. The propagation of structural racism or the perpetuation of patrimony or the, you know, whatever. I mean, I’m sure those books are out there. I have not read those books. I would have hoped that the scientists weren’t listening to those books, but it appears to, you know, with the various things that I can see happening, probably some of the scientists Or at least the committees that are are are reading those books. Um, in the social sciences and the humanities. A very, very different story. If I say Christopher Columbus discovered America, people are just gonna go crazy. They gotta They will go. They will hang me. They would take me out and they will hang me. If I say a person who is gay has a sexual preference, I will get. I will get strung up because I can’t suggest that it has anything to do with preference. They have an orientation, not a preference. You you know, Don’t you know that that’s offensive? Whatever the humanities, I guess the way novels are red in 2020 is very different from the way classic novels we read in, uh, you know, 18 50. I don’t know that you can write a romantic novel anyway, etcetera so that you know, he man and the social sciences again, the sociology anthropology is very different. So, you see, is economics and economics has suffered from this as well. Well, suffered. It depends on your point of view, but yeah, Yeah, I would say so. I would I would say that when people suggest, as has been suggested, that we economic scholars must tend to cite inclusively. Okay, What that means is make sure, if you can, that there’s some women and people of color cited in your in your citations. Now it might seem like a small thing because after all, citation counts count for evaluation of the influence of a person’s research, which counts for assessment of the fitness of a person for promotion and so on. So citations matter. Writing an article gets a lot of citations is a good thing. But when they said site inclusively, I my thought was, What What’s the What’s the predicate there that heretofore before this, uh, diversity inclusion education seminar I was not citing inclusively, which means to say I was citing dead white males. I was. I was citing my people. Well, no, I wasn’t. I was reading the journals of citing the relevant articles. Why would you, in Pune my motives in my integrity, Why do you put this honest on me to work on behalf of social justice when I’m just trying to write a paper, Okay, I mean, and then the subtext of that, of course, is mhm. If a person wrote a paper that wanted to be cited because it got the attention of people at the frontier of the discipline who were doing innovative work. You wouldn’t have to tell me to cite their paper. I decided, because it was good. Your campaign to cite inclusively is a cover for the lack of the acuity and the, uh, research relevance of the of the productivity of the people whose careers you’re trying to boost. Uh, you know, economics is racist because we use advanced mathematical methods and statistical inference, and in the model manipulation or whatnot, we’re racist because we’re not sociologist, and we don’t inquire into the, you know, you know, Uh, all right, what do we go from here? What do you go in terms of, like, you know, is a solution. I think I remember you having a conversation where you pointed out like, Well, maybe we should create a department of Conservative studies. Uh, I was just idle speculation. That’s probably not a very it’s probably not probably not a very good idea. Uh, you know, and I’ve also said maybe people who give money to universities ought to stop doing it. You know, maybe the consequence of the year of covid cloistered, zoom mediated virtual. And of course, we’ll take some of the monopoly power, the kind of entry cost of, uh, the sunk brick and mortar and campuses and, you know, kind of, you know that that’s very hard to replicate. It’s hard to break in, you know, getting into the Ivy League as they no votes start up. That’s, you know that’s essentially impossible. We’ll take that away because perhaps people like your humble servant here, Glenn Lowry, who might want to give a lecture on Let’s Say, free speech in the academy or might even want to give a course. I would be able to have 10,000 people subscribed to my course. We get some assistance and we work it out, and we put the rest of these jokers out of business. Why? Why pay to fly across the country and sits in place for four years and be lectured at by a Marxist by cultural relevance by someone who knows better than you And and, uh, you know, it’s just trendy and it’s faddish, Uh, and it’s lightweight and insubstantial, as many of these people actually are. Why not just sign up for Glenn Lowry’s course? Read the great books. Lorry goes to the bank with a gazillion dollars. Uh, you know, I mean, of course I’m joking. I’m joking, but not really. Why? I mean, I’m joking about Lori because I’m too old to do anything. But there’s still time to shake things up a little bit because the smugness I’m sorry, the smug certitude of these people who are wrong, in my opinion, about an awful lot of stuff. So I wanted to just follow up on that a little bit. Uh, it’s like when you see firms in this sort of situation, like in any other industry. If you saw firms with this level of groupthink and inability to respond and we don’t expect the firms to get better, we expect them to kind of fail and be sold for scrap, right? Yeah, but it seems like in our industry, we like entry is incredibly difficult. And no matter how badly you’re doing your job, nobody exits. Right. We never see Brown University closing shot because the president is uh right. So not very clever letter that sends the university down a bad path. we don’t. There won’t be any level at which you can screw up a university. The point where it actually closes down. And this seems like a kind of interesting I owe issues like we’ve insulated ourselves from entering exit so much, but you seem to be proposing entry, right? You think that we’re proposing? Yeah. Kind of proposal, quote unquote proposal. I was just gonna say, you know, you got strata of institutions. There may be, uh, exit down toward the bottom end of connected at the bottom. But I’m just gonna say you got a lot of, uh, you know, non competitive forces in the market. So I have I’m not expert on the economics of higher education. It is an interesting set of i o questions. I agree, but technology is on the move, so All right, jump in. We have one sort of a proposed question in the Q and A from a wisely anonymous attendee who’s asking, um, it was suspected this. Thanks for the work and great discussion. What would be your advice to non tenured faculty who would like to combat the suppression of free speech on campus in its various forms? Whether conformity or other. Do you have any advice, or is it just keep your head down and don’t. Yeah. So the natural thing to say is, keep your head down And, uh, you know, this is not a fight that you need on top. Everything else that you that you got going. And if you actually do have contrarian views, you can be sure that any ambiguity and the 10 year evaluation process will be resolved in your disfavor. So you don’t want to give us a cudgel to beat you with, Uh, on the other hand, you know, uh, if it’s war, it’s war. I mean, if we’re fighting for the integrity of Western civilization that we have to know, I exaggerate. But you know what I mean. I mean, if it’s if it’s a fight we’re fighting, it’s a flight were fighting. So these loyalty owes, you know, tell me that you’re committed to diversity and inclusion. I’m coming next. I I I think a principled argument could be made that I’m not signing that. Yeah, and you’re not hiring. Meet up to, uh or maybe that you are hiring me to further your political agenda, but, uh, This isn’t This is supposed to be a university. I mean, if I asked you to pledge a loyalty to the United States of America before you were permitted to teach here or the Catholic Church, of course you would run screaming from the room, but you’re being asked. But I’m I’m asking you to pledge loyalty to, um, the program of diversity and inclusion. What Suppose I think there is no issue, I suppose. I think the university is not racist. Suppose I think groups are underrepresented because they haven’t measured up in terms of the criteria of selection. I’m from this part of the country, and my heart goes out to the people who live there. I’m not. We’re global institutions. Everyone who comes here. I mean, that’s another factor altogether. We we are open global institutions. Every recruit who comes here from Southeast Asia, it’s supposed to identify with your political crusade to deal with quote unquote people of color. We’ll have you taken a look at the planet amongst the many billions are mostly people of color, and they’re mostly living on $15 a day. How about we concern ourselves in this great institution with them and not with, um And then this is where the ridicule would enter in and the caricature would enter in because you would exaggerate the disfavoring features of some of these people who are making these ridiculous arguments. Well, I like the character. Sure. You know, I’m a I’m Brazilian by origin. I grew up in Brazil. I moved to the West as 26 years old. I think so. We can maybe tell them my accent. I have no idea what I make. Racial background is Brazil is a It’s a, you know, a big mix of lots of different people. Um, when I see our our people in leadership positions say that our faculty should reflect the composition of the state of Texas, I was like, Oh, there goes my job because, you know, I don’t think they are not Brazilians here, So I don’t know where I fall, and I don’t think there is a share for resilience anyway, So I do worry, even on a personal level about this just observed. I mean this to me. This is really so important because we have 50 years down the line on this were you know, this is 2020. I mean, affirmative action goes back to 1970 the black in cases like 1978. Uh, you know, there this is an argument that country’s been having for a half century. So basically, we need to own up to the fact that diversity and inclusion enthusiasts that your institutionalizing as a permanent regime, the use of racial characteristics to assess the fitness of people to engage in these in these various enterprises. Now, you okay with that? I mean, you know, I’m not. I mean, I think that’s a deep mistake. I think it’s a it’s a tragic mistake, and I could elaborate on that, but I do think we ought to be cognizant of what it is. In fact, we bought into this not transitory anymore. So underrepresented minorities, historically underrepresented groups. They make up these acronyms, hugs, historically underrepresented groups. Do you know what that is? That’s a way of excluding Asians from the people of color. It’s transparent. How can it be justified? It’s very sad. I have to explain to my seven year old half Korean child that he’s going to have trouble getting into college because people don’t like the fact that he’s part Asian and he should never use his middle name because that might reveal the fact that he’s part Asian strikes me as very sad that well, I hope he doesn’t have trouble getting into college. But you could be right. And that’s another question here from the Q and A, um, what would be your advice to university administrators who share your concerns about homogeneity of thought on campus? So what would be the first steps, for example, University University president could take to move things in a better direction. You just haven’t seen anything in the past. Any other administrator that actually had had a positive impact. You know, I have to confess the not being well enough informed. I’m not a part of the university administrative community of people going to conferences and stuff like that. There are thoughtful people out there. I I know I have been ranching. I know that I have been, you know, very angry and whatnot. There are, I mean, some of my friends, the president of the University of Brown, whom I was very critical of, because I think that letter was a mistake. Is a good person um, she’s a competent administrator, but I think she made a mistake. Okay, that’s my opinion. The provost of the University of Band called Richard Locke, political scientist, a colleague of mine, a friend of mine. He’s very effective human being a great manager of this institution, its faculty and his resources and and so forth. There must be many thoughtful university administrators. There have to be some who are so thoughtful that even as they undertook the necessary politically necessary task of issuing these platitudinous statements looked in the mirror and said, God, I hate that I have to do this. There’s gotta be some people like that. Um, so, yeah, you know, I don’t know how they collaborate with one another and what the forms would be. I assume it’s a management issue. You can, you know, the thing can blow up. I mean, it would be very easy to have a bunch of students sitting in your office for six months. You know, all you have to do is say, Columbus Day should be maintained. And don’t change the name to indigenous Peoples Day. Now, there had to be some people at places like Brown. I’m not implicating anybody in particular who thought Columbus State was just fine. Who thought, It’s complicated, man. The history of the world is very complicated. Yes, indeed. The native people of the North American and South American continent were decimated as a consequence of the European incursion. Yes, yes, indeed, that’s true. It’s also true that we walk on the on the ground created by that history. That is the modern world. That’s the world that we live in. Okay, It can’t be that our only response to the monumental transformation of human existence on this planet which has incurred in the last 500 years. It’s the wag a finger at a fucking racist. It can’t possibly be that That’s the only thing to say. It can’t be. It can’t be. Let me push the point further. Our civilization sits on the European Foundation in very substantial part. I did not say that. No one has contributed. I did not say that. I’m saying the modern world astrophysics uh, the computer. What do you think? You know, sit. You can trace the evolution of our understanding of the world. The origin of the species. Okay, economics. Now, Now, their reasons for that. Why the industrial revolution happened where it did. What about the creation of the, you know, political environment in which universities can flourish? What about the accidents of the You know? I mean, you know, whatever, but but the idea that I have to avoid dead white men when in fact, I live in a world that was created by them in very substantial part can we, you know, sort of keep balance on these things. So I’m afraid I’m wandering from the point a little bit. University administrators, uh, some of whom I have to have a more nuanced and complicated view, but have to be very careful about what they say. Because if they say the wrong thing, uh, you know, they will, in effect, be rendered, uh, neutered because, you know, the institution has to function and they have to maintain peace. So we can try to find prominent public intellectuals from outside of administration to come in and take leadership roles and shake things up at the university. Would that be an effective Well, you need trustees who were willing to put institutions in the hands of people. And if you’re trying to recruit me in the university administration. You can forget about the adventures. Number two. I’m not going to give up. It would be so much fun. And our regions would go for it if we could just get them to listen to us. Well, I don’t know. You know, I got to do something with the rest of my time. I’m 72 years old, but I had rather imagined the more quiet life, you know, just kind of reading and, you know, doing webinars and what you’re doing. No, no, no. But that’s not what you’re doing lately, though. I mean, perhaps we can. You pointed out that your letter somehow sparked a lot of interest from people. More than maybe some of the papers you’ve written. Great papers are written through your career. Right? Um, you and you reacted to that. You’ve been very vocal. You’ve been in a lot of podcasts. You have your show. There’s a lot. I think you engage more on those issues of late. Wouldn’t just say that. Yeah, I have. I’ve been pressed into service by the, you know, evolution of events. Uh, the you know, there’s just so many things I don’t know when there was a moment, but it’s it’s, uh I guess, George Floyd. I guess that’s the And then the riots. I wrote a piece in Colette saying renounced and denounced the violence. Now, you know, unequivocally calling off all people to just speak out and say, this is, uh this is this is unacceptable because I thought so, Um, but, uh, things, uh, you know, just spun out of spun out seem to spin out of control. So, you know, my conversations with John McWhorter, my partner at the blogging heads, have gone in this kind of direction. And there’s just been such a outpouring of interest expressed by people have given interviews to, I don’t know, a dozen foreign outlets, uh, in Australia and Austria in, uh, Russia and Ireland and Italy. Um, there is a full page photograph of me in Lamont. You know Lamond, the French newspaper in their Sunday magazine like The New York Times, Sunday Magazine. The glossy I think there’s a full page photograph of me in this French magazine because I’m one of four contrary and black intellectuals who have been willing to be critical of black lives. Matter is me the young Coleman Hughes at, uh, I guess he’s at the Manhattan Institute now. He was at Columbia as an undergraduate. A very brilliant young man, John McWhorter and, um um and God, he’s the guy. He’s actually on the cover of the magazine. I think it was the name momentarily. Uh oh, God, I can’t think of his name. Oh Thomas Chatterton Williams Thomas Chatterton Williams the writer If we are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as far as the liberals are concerned as far as the town of Haci coaches and the Nicola Hannah Jones’s and the Ava Duvernay’s and, uh, you know, the cognoscenti of woke black intellectual itty you know, the people with three names is what, John, Big word that calls them Michael Eric Dyson. And, you know, uh, etcetera, Uh, we are the apocalypse, but, uh, there we are. There we are. So a lot of people all over the world are interested in what’s going on in the United States and because of the technology. Now I’m in communication with them. So has it been has it been fun, or do you get you get a lot of, uh, you have any negative press as well. You’ve got a lot of positive, I think feedback. But, I mean, you know, the likes are, like, 20 to 1 over the thumbs up versus the thumbs down in the social media thing. Um, I put out something on the 16 19 project. All I did was retweet, uh, a newspaper report about how the New York Times is in something of turmoil about the 16 19 project. Because Bret Stephens, they’re relatively conservative. Uh, editorial page columnist. I bet wrote a column criticizing the newspapers on 16 19 project, which was this massive journalistic, um, undertaking to, um, a firm of view about the American founding that would place the year 16, 19, uh, ahead of the year, 17. 76 in terms of when the country’s truly came into existence. A long story. If you don’t know what it is, I’m not gonna try to tell you now. Bottom line is, um it had, like, I don’t know, 3000 likes it. Got retweeted 800 times, you know, So there there are a lot of people out there who just are like, and I get these letters. These left letters Really? From from People were watching my podcast, saying, You are the reason that I am still saying Thank God for, you know, I mean literally. I’ve gotten hundreds of notes like this over the last six months of people saying your podcast is a lifeline. Thank God for what you’re doing. Please don’t stop. How can I help? I got people saying, Give me your home address and I’ll mail you a check and I won’t give it because I’m not sure that it’s not somebody who wants to mail me something else. But so there’s a hunger out there for there to be a kind of point, because and I mean, I just have to say this Since you guys let me talk without restraint, journalism has failed us massively. I mean, you got you got some people with integrity, like, uh, Matt Taibi. Uh, like Glenn Greenwald, you can probably name a few others, Uh, who You know who I read it. And I say, Yeah, this person seems to be an honest broker, and they actually are thinking about the concern. But but the the capture of newsrooms by, uh, ideologically driven people who think they have think about the temerity of it, the arrogance of it. You think your moral judgment is of such a certitude that you can impose it on the masses by tailoring what they get to read so as to confirm and reaffirm your view of the world mostly peaceful protests. The news was the violence. I’m not doing a statistical headcount about how many people were peaceful. What I’m saying is, the news was the attack on police officers. The news was the three people who got shot and killed in the records at the edge of the mob. The news was the family that worked for 20 years to build a business that got burned down in the night by a bunch of people who, when you take a very good look at them, well, you know, they’re not exactly so admirable. That was the news. They edited it out. How dare they who they think they are. So let’s take some questions from the audience, see if anybody wants to ask a question. You should be aware of the time because, of course, yes, yes, A few more minutes. We should wrap up, get about an hour. Um, if anybody that’s live in the audience right now. I want to ask a question. If you raise your hand, I can call you up and you can talk. And we have a few in the There’s a few in the community, but I think we’re nice people join in. I can promote you to a speaker if you choose to do so. Yes, we don’t. So go ahead. Read one of the ones in the Q and A All right, maybe the last one is a good one. The last one. You want to read it or? Okay. You want me to read it? OK, yeah. So another anonymous, wisely anonymous attendee is asking, Why can’t we evaluate the performance of affirmative action and diversity, inclusion and equity administrators on their own stated goal if they have failed to solve the problem they’ve identified, When do we get to say that? Assuming they have identified a real problem, they have failed and should resign or be replaced, and we should try a new and different method. Any criteria for judging? Yeah, well, if it’s the headcount criteria, they’re they’re going to be able to say, you know, we raise the proportion of the minority faculty from X to Y. Um, I I guess it’s who are we when you say we judge? Because, um, I’ve begun to think a little bit about the administrative behemoth, which, you know, the office of the associate provost, the deputy vice president. You know of diversity and inclusion. It’s almost a kind of, uh, union or, you know, advocacy group within the university administration on behalf of the interests of the black of the Faculty of color. The the main agenda is faculty hiring. There are other issues, but the main issue is faculty hiring, and they’re they’re a lobby. They’re they’re they’re kind of. So I would evaluate them from that point of view, if I understood their function to be advancing the interests of African Americans, making sure that the, uh, ethnic studies is adequately funded. Making sure that the Scholarship for Students of Color fund is, uh is managed effectively and, uh, whatnot and making sure that the black alumni are happy when they come back for the fifth, the 10th, and the 25th, Uh, you know, anniversary of their graduation, uh, that they feel like they’re institution, you know, Is somehow connected with them. I assume that’s the portfolio of one of these kinds of positions. Um, and they would be judged by their manager at the moment of that portfolio. I would, however, want to take a broader view and ask whether or not the functionality of that office is really rationalize. Double can be made sense of within the context of some broader mission of the university, and I’ve been skeptical about that. I voiced mine. I voiced my skepticism. Here’s what I think. I think all of our great universities that are prepared to put hundreds of millions indeed, in total billions of dollars into diversity initiatives ought to take those funds, um, and use them to enhance our knowledge and our effective response to the problems of poverty and privation. Uh, in our society, uh, they can cure disease. They can enhance the educational effectiveness. They can learn how it is that you deal with people who are behaviorally, uh, impaired in one way or another. They can, you know, whatever. And they can make the society a better place, and then not a penny of it, not a penny goes to somebody with a Ph D who is trading on the color of their skin or their, uh, sexuality? Uh, that would be an extreme view. You could defend it based upon a humanitarian argument that was transracial, and you would have to stand your ground in order to do so, and it’s unlikely to ever happen. But that’s how I would evaluate it based on, you know, uh, in the case of the institution at hand the quality of the faculty and what we’re delivering the students and whatnot. But you know that that would just be me. We had a hand up here from Caroline Thomas. Are you still there? Caroline, Do you want to? Yes. So, Megan, can you try to promote her? To speak? Yeah. There you go. Caroline. Go ahead. Um, my question is, Well, you say that you know the fault. It’s not the fault of the physics department that there isn’t a black professor. It’s the fault of high schools. And we as academics, why would we cite you know, someone who is considered an underrepresented minority? If they were that good, they would have made it into a better adrenal in the first place. But so do we just wash our hands of the issue together? Is there nothing that we can do with their no role for us at all? Just sit, sit back and say that the problem isn’t ours. Okay, Caroline, thank you for the question. No, I wouldn’t, uh, here’s what I would say, I would say focus on developing the capacities of people to compete rather than changing the standards criteria for judging effective performance. So, in the case of the scholars, uh, if you if the goal is that there are not enough women publishing in economics or in physics, and we want there to be more women don’t tell the physicists that they have to go out of their way to cite women whose research would not otherwise have warranted their citation. Instead developed some programs that attract, uh, talented women into the study. In this case of physics that, uh, perhaps underwrite, uh, extra efforts to try to ensure that they are, uh, in undergraduate school, getting the right kind of exposure that would allow them to be effective in competing for entry into really strong graduate programs. That would, at the end of the day, there will be some winnowing down. But that would leave you with a strong population of of women who were in good researchers in that field. Um, and then, uh, relying on the fair execution of the hiring of the Journal Administration and so forth to allow this cream to come to the top. I focus on developing their capacities to compete rather than on jiggering around the criteria. Now let me say this. Having said that, it might be in certain areas of scholarly inquiry that an insider’s club of people who have a particular school of thought have got control of the journal and they won’t let anybody else and stuff in, You know, if it were Marxists and you were, you know, a neoclassical economists, and you couldn’t get your paper published because the Marxists wouldn’t publish your paper. Of course, that’s an extreme example historically not relevant now, but maybe at some point in some places that would have been relevant as an example. But in any case, it might be that an insider’s club of people who have a particular school of thought are unwilling to, uh, judge fairly. And in that case, you were going to need some kind of intervention, but, um, the idea that that is based on race, you know, white people don’t want to allow black scholars to be published. I would seriously question I certainly seriously questioned in any other any of the quantitative fields. It may be that when you get in the literature, uh, the criteria of judgment are gonna somehow be more complicated and intertwined with identity dynamics. What people find to be interesting and compelling may depend in ways on identity. And it may be that those, uh, fields, uh, there’s a sense, you know, women or blacks or gays are shut out. Uh, might have more, uh, more justification for it, but I certainly don’t see that in economics. I will have done for one more question before we have to wrap up anybody else in the audience. Let’s see here. Just see people can raise their hand picture on zoom. All right, Richard, do you have one more before we go? Uh, I’m good. Good. All right. It was going to be too dangerous. I have my limits. Last one here. Okay. Somebody said thanks. Dylan here. And Caroline. Thank you. So, yes. Thanks. Everybody for joining up. Glenn. Thanks so much for your time and for all you’ve been doing lately. It was a pleasure to have you. Thanks for listening to policy on McCombs. Yeah. Mm mm, yeah