Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is deep background to show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. As the school year starts up again, I wanted to talk about a form of power that we often overlook, and that is the power of universities. Universities are not just centers of learning and of research and of teaching. They're also powerful actors in the socialization of young people into the values that our society cares about. There are places where common sense is created, where new knowledge is formed, and there are also places where there are internal power dynamics, with faculty, students, deans, and administrators all involved in a sometimes collaborative but sometimes antagonistic effort to determine who controls what happens in the university. To discuss power in the American university today, I'm joined by Tamar Gendler. Tamar is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University, where she's also the Vincent Scully Professor of Philosophy. For those of you who aren't academics, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is an extremely important and powerful person. Her job is both to talk to the president and the provost on the one side, the faculty on the other, and last, and not least, the students and the people who actually make the university run every day, the clerical and technical workers who actually make sure that the lights are on and the classrooms are ready, and that students have food to eat. All of that cycles back to the power of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And because Tamar was and remains a brilliant philosopher whose job is to think about the deeper meaning of the world around us, she brings a distinctively thoughtful take to questions of power in and around the university. Tamar, thank you so much for joining me. The organization of power in the university has evolved a lot. There used to be an ideal of a university as a self governing institution where the faculty more or less collectively ran the show. But that's not been true for decades in the US, and it's probably even less true today than it's ever been. So when you want something to happen, to what degree can you get it to happen? So governance in the university is fundamentally a collaborative exercise. But I do have resources that allow me to shape the segment of the university for which I'm responsible in various ways. For example, I control the budget importantly, I control the hiring of faculty in certain areas, and I oversee the process of tenure and promotion. One of the primary things that I need to figure out how to do is to determine whose voices to trust in making decisions, and how to encourage people to speak honestly about things. But something that's distinctive about academic management, at least in the US, at least these days, still is that people in powerful positions like you didn't come up through a managerial chaining process. You came up by being a professor, in your case, a philosophy professor. How does the fact that you and other senior administrators were professors rather than professional managers affect do you think the way that you exercise the lens and responsibility that you have. So the kind of managerial work that I do with regard to staff has been a skill that I acquired only in and on the job sense, and I found it enormously gratifying to learn from people on what we sometimes call the backstage vice presidential side of the academic house. How it is that one engages in things like HR management, budgeting, thinking about how we relate to the Office of General Counsel, the city and state, how we relate to federal relations. All of those are skills that are acquired through the course of engaging in managerial work. Let me ask a question about the relationship between those two parts, the front of the house and the back of the house. To use the analogy that you just use, which if I am not mistaken, comes from the running of restaurants, may be appropriate. A lot of faculty, a lot of my faculty colleagues, especially my colleagues who are say, ten twenty years older than I am, talk a lot about how there seem to be many more layers of sub deans, dean lits, deanlings, people who are effectively professional administrators and when they're being described negatively, bureaucrats who are crucially involved in running these huge, rich institutions. And I think it's true even at the less rich institutions. And my older colleagues tend to talk about this as something that they feel has changed significantly over their time in the university. Do you think of that. First of all, is that perception accurate or is that a nostalgic perception that they have, And if it is accurate, how is it changing our universities if they're being run by people with increasingly with people with more professional training and how to manage things, but with less knowledge of the academic side of the job. The deans and deanlets about which your colleagues complain are very often people whose assignments are either regulatory in the sense that they are asked to make sure that the university remains in conformity with either an internally or externally imposed constraint a process that needs to be followed in order to achieve a certain outcome. Or they are involved in various aspects of student services and student life where they interact directly with students for whom college may be an unfamiliar familial experience. That's two thirds. And in addition, as we know from sociological theory, any bureaucracy develops systems which it then perpetuates. Tomorrow, we've talked so far about the way that the power operates within the university. I want to turn now to the question of how universities exercise power and influence or don't exercise power and influence over the society more broadly, which is something that I think we often take for granted. Rather than breaking down and thinking about I want to begin that by asking you, how do you think a university does influence the society more broadly, and then we can move to how it should do that. Yeah, that's a terrific question. So the fundamental purpose of a university is to preserve, create, and transmit knowledge, and so at its most fundamental level and in its ideal form wandwich In university has power in society and empowers society is through the preservation, creation, and transmission of knowledge. But one of the most powerful things that universities do, in addition to transmitting knowledge is certify that the transmission of knowledge has taken place, and in so doing they create and sustain the professional class. And of course that operation brings with it the incredibly important socialization function, and universities in America in particular, but in the world in general, play an incredible role in forming and socializing the elite and in differentiating among those who have been present at this incredibly formative time of life between the ages of eighteen and their early twenties, and those who have not been formed in that kind of environment. What universities and colleges do is, in addition to provide training that isn't professional training, training of a kind that says, beyond the twelve years of universal education, I have gone on to explore something. And one of the astounding things about the way that the American collegiate educational system works is, with the exception of areas like engineering, it is largely content indifferent. And what that suggests is that it is the acquisition of a certain kind of mastery of something complicated and the co presence with others who are also engaged in study. That is what college is providing, in addition, of course, to the particular skills that are being provided, skills of writing, skills of mathematics, and knowledge of some or another subject matter. But the fact that American industry typically hires people regardless of area of studying college suggests that that certification process is a process of certifying a different kind of knowledge and skill acquisition. Although aren't a lot of students at least voting with their feet and hinting that they don't anticipate that it's going to be that way in the long run. I mean, when you and I were in college thirty plus years ago, we thought that majoring in the humanities was something that could lead you to a job teaching of the humanities is you and I both ended up doing. Or it could lead you to working for an investment bank, or could lead you to become a poet, or could lead you to almost any sort of thing. But today fewer and fewer students, not only universities, but at elite universities, are interested in majoring in more abstract humanities fields, which they don't perceive as leading to a job so measured by a market stance. At least, that idea of a general certification seems to be increasingly obsolete. It's an interesting question what explains the decline of majors in humanities, And I teach at one of the very last universities that continues to have almost a third of its students majoring in humanities fields. It is certainly the case that students in university today are increasingly taking courses in what we might think of as technical areas in computer science, in data science, and in social science, fields that have quantitative aspects like economics. But even though there aren't as many students majoring in humanities, it remains the case that the skills that are acquired through humanistic education, the capacity to analyze argument, the capacity to take evidence from an ambiguous source of information, the capacity to appreciate what is esthetically valuable in addition to what is practically valuable, remain things in which students are interested, and the remain things that allow people to do, even in practical fields, more interesting and more fulfilling work. So I don't know whether the explanation for why it is that students aren't studying humanities is solely that they think that it isn't useful for careers. It may be in some ways just a crowding out with the recognition that there are other things that also need to be acquired, that are skills that are at this point not yet taught fully in high school. They require more than the twelve years to master. Yeah, and I should be really clear that I am very sad about the general decline in the humanities focus of students, mostly because my own view is that without the humanities, you can make stuff, you can build stuff, you can solve certain kinds of technical problems, but you'll never know what the right thing to do is. I mean, humanities is interested fundamentally in normative questions and questions of what the world ought to be arranged, like whether it's ethical or moral, or esthetic or political. And in that sense, in my view, at least, if you don't have the humanities, your whole system is going to grind to a halt because you're just I mean, well, it won't purely grind to all, because people will still make decisions about what they should do, but they'll do it without thinking. And then you get the consequences that we have in the world where new technologies emerge and are immediately deployed, and then people look back a few years later, sometimes not very many years later at all, and say, oh, no, what did we do? And often the answer is you didn't stop to think about the way you wanted things to turn out. You only thought about the fact that you had this cool new technology to play with. And no, that's exactly right. The world doesn't stop because you're not asking the normative questions. And one of the things that humanities and the humanistic social sciences cause people to realize is that there are always normative questions, whether attentive to them or not, and that if you just move forward without attending to them, you will end up with patterns in the world which aren't the patterns that you would have wanted. Tomorrow. When I asked you about what the university is in fact to do powerwise, you started with the ways that they transmit knowledge through certification and through socialization. I want to ask you one more question about that aspect, and then I want to switch to the question of the making of knowledge. But before we get there, I do want to ask one more question about the idea of intellectual socialization, which I think is a phrase that you use or something similar to that, and I wonder what you mean by that, because one of the things that a sociologist would say, or that a Martian would say if they came and looked at our universities is that the students do seem like they leave thinking a little differently on a whole range of issues, or maybe a lot differently than they do when they came in. And that involves a whole bunch of different things. But it's approaches to how they think about problems ideally, but it also seems often to include solutions to those problems, including sometimes political solutions. And so I'm wondering what did you mean by intellectual socialization. Yeah, universities are like cities in the sense that they bring together people from a wide range of previous life experiences in a tightly socially knit space that produces a lot of nonintended accidental encounters that require people to recognize that the way in which they happen to have lived up until the point when they arrived at the university is just one of many, many ways to have lived. So this is about the way in which the socialization function almost inevitably results in an unseating of what it is that had been accepted as the natural or only or marked way of being. So, in addition to the socialization an example of that because that was that was that seemed correct to me, but also abstract. Yeah, So, a student who grew up in a particular religious community, a student who grew up with a particular set of political values, a student who grew up in a particular language, a student who grew up in a particular social class. All of those are ways of being that are felt very, very naturally to students, and they typically grew up in a town. Towns have a certain degree of heterogeneity to them. But to the extent that you grew up in a particular locale, you've had a particular set of experiences. You grew up on a farm in the Midwest, or you grew up in the Upper West Side of New York City, and those are the set of experiences that you have. Coming into contact with individuals from a wide range of other experiences just makes it in f and coming into contact with them in the particular way that universities and other youth organizations do this right, if you go into the army, you interact with people in an intense environment, in a deeply social space, in an age stratified environment for a crucial period of time. But the disruption of the assumption that the only natural way to do things is the way that you have always been doing things is one of the crucial disruptions that universities bring. And that's a result of the formal structure of the university. We haven't yet gotten to the second question, which is the content question, which is not just that you bring this group of people together, but what it is that you do with them. But let me make sure that I've answered your first question before I move on to the second. I mean, I think you have. I do think we should just acknowledge that the effect that you're describing, you take a lot of bright, young, impressionable people, you put them in a single community, can produce for all that we talk about, the diversity of viewpoints in our universities can produce some degree of homogenization of their views. They come in very diverse, and in principle, one of the reasons that we want a big diverse student body is so that the student body can remain intellectually diverse. So when they graduate, they have many different points of views since they came in with many points where they've been recruited to have many points of view. And yet sometimes it doesn't work that way. I mean, sometimes it leads to people reaching a kind of background consensus on what they think. And critics of elite universities, you know, I'm not one of them, but there are critics of elite universities who say, gee, you know, they come in students come in from a Trump county and then they come into a university where statistically almost nobody on any faculty anywhere in the United States voted for Donald Trump. It's not just elite universities, it's all universities. And then they're in a community where they emerge with a view of, roughly speaking, what people with their education are supposed to think, and that's a kind of liberal or left of center consensus, which over the course of their careers they may or may not sustain that point of view over their lives, but that is the environment that they're in, in in the environment that they that they leave. And it just raises this interesting question of whether the socialization affects are in some way a little bit at odds with our stated goal in our universities of bringing in people from all different perspectives and putting them all together and mixing them up so that they'll come out with lots of different perspectives. So a huge number of interesting questions there. And of course there are students who come to university without religious commitment and get involved with a religious community and leave the university with the more traditional set of values than they entered. But I agree that in the contemporary context that direction of motion is significantly rarer than the other direction of a student who comes from a politically conservative environment and leaves with a certain sense of justice driven concern about the well being of the community. So what I would say is motivating and appealing about the generational passion that you and I think both feel among our students is that it is driven by a deep sense of wanting the world to be a more just and equitable and verdant place. To the extent that I think the two sets of primary concerns that I hear from students on our campus are about racial and political justice on the one hand, and about the long term concern for environment on the other. And some of what's going on is the world is a messy, ugly place in which lots of messy, ugly evil things have happened. And some of our students come to university without full knowledge of the way in which the world that we live in came to be, and some of them come to historical understanding of a kind that they never had before. They continue to have the normative moral commitments that you and I were talking about earlier, and those combine to cause them to take on a sort of passionate social justice picture. But it is certainly the case that the recognition that there might also be politically servative solutions to some of the justice challenges that our students are moved by, that there might be ways in which market, rather than regulation, could best determine the sorts of outcomes that they seek. Environmentally are less prevalent in at least the public voices on many elite campuses, and I think, however, aware one is of the undercurrents that run counter to that. It is undeniable that universities right now are places where the dominant discourse is the discourse of social justice, the discourse of environment, and interestingly, in the case of social justice, it's very domestically focused. I hear much less conversation on campus about issues of international justice, global poverty, global freedom, civil rights of individuals outside the United States than I do about dialogues of the very undeniably important set of questions that we face as a nation around issues of racial justice and social class. We'll be right back tomorrow. Let's turn to the making of knowledge research. Universities are supposed to be places where we get new knowledge, not just transmit it, but discover it, invent it. How does that project express itself in power terms visa via the rest of the world. I mean, assuming that these universities do in fact produce knowledge, which I think they do, how does that affect the rest of the world from a power perspective. It's an interesting question, and I was thinking about the ways in which the United States, I think, both in medicine, in drug development, and in universities, produces a disproportionate amount of what the world gets intellectually in a way whose financing is extraordinary. That is, a large proportion of the world's most highly ranked universities are American universities, and the proportion of the world's discoveries that were made in American universities due to federal funding and student tuition and the other resources taxpayer resources that go into state universities, were really truly extraordinary. And so what I would say is American universities became the place that the world went to gain knowledge. Virtually all of the elite Chinese universities have faculty on them who were trained in American universities. Most of Iran's engineers are trained in American universities. Large number of the world's political leaders were trained in American universities. And so the production of knowledge in American universities gave America as a place where discovery happened a sort of disproportionate role in the world's intellectual economy. It's now the case that Asia in particular, China in particular, but other parts of Asia as well, and in some ways parts of Europe and a little bit in Canada are producing new knowledge at a rate and with investment of a kind that are as intense as in the US. Certainly that's the case in China in terms of scientific knowledge, and the question of whether that will ultimately undermine the fragile ecosystem that is the American university system is a really interesting one. How close are we to that kind of an undermining I mean, how much do you see that decline as imminent versus being something that's still some years off. I mean, it still remains the case that people from all over the world want to send their children to study in American universities, even people who don't particularly care for the United States. Somehow, our educational system remains highly desirable from a global standpoint, even as the power of the United States more generally is often perceived by many to be in decline. So I think there's a number of questions there. American universities do much more than transmit knowledge. American universities are places where a crucial kind of socialization happens, and where the creation of a certain kind of cultural capital is provided to the individuals who attend them, and a set of social connections are established. So the rise of research in places other than the United States, I think doesn't undermine the particular socialization role that American universities play. And of course American universities have this very interesting structure whereby the value of the degree of their alumni depends in part on the contemporary status of the institution with which the alumni are affiliated. So every American university has thousands and thousands of people across generations in whose self interest it lies to keep that university leat and respect it. So there's a very interesting set of interest in parties keeping the socialization and social network role of American university's intact. When I was talking about the rise, particularly of investment in Chinese universities, I was thinking about the ways in which there is serious investment in scientific research, And you're right, in the biological sciences, in the physical sciences, and in engineering and applied sciences, and in some of those cases, with regard to the capacity to make discovery that comes most effectively at scale, that is, if you have a thousand of a particular machine as opposed to a hundred or ten of them in that domain, I think it is imminent that discoveries will take place of a kind that won't take place in this country. But with regard to the socialization role of diversities, I don't think that change is imminent. Do you think, tamarrow that seen as a whole, that elite US universities have too much power in the world, or too little power in the world, or just about the right amount of power. I mean, is there a kind of Goldilocks answer to this? I would say, as gate keepers to a certain kind of social elite, that one's ability to enter that world is determined at age seventeen, is I think non ideal if what it is that we're trying to do is identify and cultivate talent and allow a certain kind of flourishing. The United States is one of the few places where you have flexibility throughout the life course with regard to education, but not with regard to access to elite education. So I would say with are to the socialization role that they play and the fact that it requires an identification of skill and talent so early in life in a country that has invested so little in its public education system is problematic and is a way in which the particular gatekeeping role that universities play, or elite universities play, is problematic against a backdrop of uninequitable K twelve and in fact pre K system. On the other hand, I would say that the information and discoveries and insights that universities have take longer to permeate culture than would be ideal. It took behavioral economics as a way of understanding human decision making longer perhaps than it should have to affect how it is that we think about governance and behavior. So there's a way in which universities have too much power the socialization at seventeen, and ways in which they had too little the role that information plays in determining our activities tomorrow. I want to thank you for a fascinating conversation and for being so candid about the upsides and downsides of the way power is deployed in universities. I feel very lucky to know that a person as thoughtful as you are is deeply involved in that process and as thinking so hard about how it happens. So thank you for the work that you're doing now in running one of the great American universities. Noah, thank you for a characteristically insightful, provocative, and thoughtful set of questions. It is always a joy to interact with you. We'll be right back. Talking to Dean Tamar Gender, I was really struck by the dual way that she conceives of power in and around the university. First, there's the question of power within the university, and in that context, Tamar was very clear that it's a mistake to think of the university's power as emanating either from the top or the bottom, or anywhere in between. Rather, power in a university is complexly negotiated between all of the different actors who are involved. It's not like the dean can speak and expect the entire faculty to listen. Similarly, it's not like the faculty can express their views and expect the students to fall into line. In fact, what we see within the university is a lot of different actors trying to work out how they can function collectively while still pressing for the things that they believe in the most simultaneously. With respect to the role of the university in the world, Tamar spoke extraordinarily thoughtfully about how important it is for universities to train people and to generate ideas about what our values are and what our values should be. Those are the topics that the humanities covers, and without them, our society would be adrift, full of technologies, full of new financial instruments, but with no idea what we should do with them, what's ethical and what's not, and what overall objectives we should be aiming to achieve. Simultaneously, the university's power in the world also stems from the social sciences, which study the ways that human beings actually interact with each other and actually deploy power relative to one another, and the sciences, which themselves explore in the deepest sense, the nature of the world around us. In those senses, the university plays a crucial role in helping to shape a healthy society, and where the universities go awry, the society's own troubles are unlikely to be far behind. So as you send your kids off to school, or go back to teaching or studying yourself. Remember that, whether you like it or not, you're participating in multiple great power dances that shape the way the world around us operates. Until the next time I speak to you, Breathe deep, think deep thoughts, and, if circumstances will allow it, have a little fun. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is ben Toalliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover bloombergsals late of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is Deep Background.

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is deep background to show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. As the school year starts up again, I wanted to talk about a form of power that we often overlook, and that is the power of universities. Universities are not just centers of learning and of research and of teaching. They're also powerful actors in the socialization of young people into the values that our society cares about. There are places where common sense is created, where new knowledge is formed, and there are also places where there are internal power dynamics, with faculty, students, deans, and administrators all involved in a sometimes collaborative but sometimes antagonistic effort to determine who controls what happens in the university. To discuss power in the American university today, I'm joined by Tamar Gendler. Tamar is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University, where she's also the Vincent Scully Professor of Philosophy. For those of you who aren't academics, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is an extremely important and powerful person. Her job is both to talk to the president and the provost on the one side, the faculty on the other, and last, and not least, the students and the people who actually make the university run every day, the clerical and technical workers who actually make sure that the lights are on and the classrooms are ready, and that students have food to eat. All of that cycles back to the power of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And because Tamar was and remains a brilliant philosopher whose job is to think about the deeper meaning of the world around us, she brings a distinctively thoughtful take to questions of power in and around the university. Tamar, thank you so much for joining me. The organization of power in the university has evolved a lot. There used to be an ideal of a university as a self governing institution where the faculty more or less collectively ran the show. But that's not been true for decades in the US, and it's probably even less true today than it's ever been. So when you want something to happen, to what degree can you get it to happen? So governance in the university is fundamentally a collaborative exercise. But I do have resources that allow me to shape the segment of the university for which I'm responsible in various ways. For example, I control the budget importantly, I control the hiring of faculty in certain areas, and I oversee the process of tenure and promotion. One of the primary things that I need to figure out how to do is to determine whose voices to trust in making decisions, and how to encourage people to speak honestly about things. But something that's distinctive about academic management, at least in the US, at least these days, still is that people in powerful positions like you didn't come up through a managerial chaining process. You came up by being a professor, in your case, a philosophy professor. How does the fact that you and other senior administrators were professors rather than professional managers affect do you think the way that you exercise the lens and responsibility that you have. So the kind of managerial work that I do with regard to staff has been a skill that I acquired only in and on the job sense, and I found it enormously gratifying to learn from people on what we sometimes call the backstage vice presidential side of the academic house. How it is that one engages in things like HR management, budgeting, thinking about how we relate to the Office of General Counsel, the city and state, how we relate to federal relations. All of those are skills that are acquired through the course of engaging in managerial work. Let me ask a question about the relationship between those two parts, the front of the house and the back of the house. To use the analogy that you just use, which if I am not mistaken, comes from the running of restaurants, may be appropriate. A lot of faculty, a lot of my faculty colleagues, especially my colleagues who are say, ten twenty years older than I am, talk a lot about how there seem to be many more layers of sub deans, dean lits, deanlings, people who are effectively professional administrators and when they're being described negatively, bureaucrats who are crucially involved in running these huge, rich institutions. And I think it's true even at the less rich institutions. And my older colleagues tend to talk about this as something that they feel has changed significantly over their time in the university. Do you think of that. First of all, is that perception accurate or is that a nostalgic perception that they have, And if it is accurate, how is it changing our universities if they're being run by people with increasingly with people with more professional training and how to manage things, but with less knowledge of the academic side of the job. The deans and deanlets about which your colleagues complain are very often people whose assignments are either regulatory in the sense that they are asked to make sure that the university remains in conformity with either an internally or externally imposed constraint a process that needs to be followed in order to achieve a certain outcome. Or they are involved in various aspects of student services and student life where they interact directly with students for whom college may be an unfamiliar familial experience. That's two thirds. And in addition, as we know from sociological theory, any bureaucracy develops systems which it then perpetuates. Tomorrow, we've talked so far about the way that the power operates within the university. I want to turn now to the question of how universities exercise power and influence or don't exercise power and influence over the society more broadly, which is something that I think we often take for granted. Rather than breaking down and thinking about I want to begin that by asking you, how do you think a university does influence the society more broadly, and then we can move to how it should do that. Yeah, that's a terrific question. So the fundamental purpose of a university is to preserve, create, and transmit knowledge, and so at its most fundamental level and in its ideal form wandwich In university has power in society and empowers society is through the preservation, creation, and transmission of knowledge. But one of the most powerful things that universities do, in addition to transmitting knowledge is certify that the transmission of knowledge has taken place, and in so doing they create and sustain the professional class. And of course that operation brings with it the incredibly important socialization function, and universities in America in particular, but in the world in general, play an incredible role in forming and socializing the elite and in differentiating among those who have been present at this incredibly formative time of life between the ages of eighteen and their early twenties, and those who have not been formed in that kind of environment. What universities and colleges do is, in addition to provide training that isn't professional training, training of a kind that says, beyond the twelve years of universal education, I have gone on to explore something. And one of the astounding things about the way that the American collegiate educational system works is, with the exception of areas like engineering, it is largely content indifferent. And what that suggests is that it is the acquisition of a certain kind of mastery of something complicated and the co presence with others who are also engaged in study. That is what college is providing, in addition, of course, to the particular skills that are being provided, skills of writing, skills of mathematics, and knowledge of some or another subject matter. But the fact that American industry typically hires people regardless of area of studying college suggests that that certification process is a process of certifying a different kind of knowledge and skill acquisition. Although aren't a lot of students at least voting with their feet and hinting that they don't anticipate that it's going to be that way in the long run. I mean, when you and I were in college thirty plus years ago, we thought that majoring in the humanities was something that could lead you to a job teaching of the humanities is you and I both ended up doing. Or it could lead you to working for an investment bank, or could lead you to become a poet, or could lead you to almost any sort of thing. But today fewer and fewer students, not only universities, but at elite universities, are interested in majoring in more abstract humanities fields, which they don't perceive as leading to a job so measured by a market stance. At least, that idea of a general certification seems to be increasingly obsolete. It's an interesting question what explains the decline of majors in humanities, And I teach at one of the very last universities that continues to have almost a third of its students majoring in humanities fields. It is certainly the case that students in university today are increasingly taking courses in what we might think of as technical areas in computer science, in data science, and in social science, fields that have quantitative aspects like economics. But even though there aren't as many students majoring in humanities, it remains the case that the skills that are acquired through humanistic education, the capacity to analyze argument, the capacity to take evidence from an ambiguous source of information, the capacity to appreciate what is esthetically valuable in addition to what is practically valuable, remain things in which students are interested, and the remain things that allow people to do, even in practical fields, more interesting and more fulfilling work. So I don't know whether the explanation for why it is that students aren't studying humanities is solely that they think that it isn't useful for careers. It may be in some ways just a crowding out with the recognition that there are other things that also need to be acquired, that are skills that are at this point not yet taught fully in high school. They require more than the twelve years to master. Yeah, and I should be really clear that I am very sad about the general decline in the humanities focus of students, mostly because my own view is that without the humanities, you can make stuff, you can build stuff, you can solve certain kinds of technical problems, but you'll never know what the right thing to do is. I mean, humanities is interested fundamentally in normative questions and questions of what the world ought to be arranged, like whether it's ethical or moral, or esthetic or political. And in that sense, in my view, at least, if you don't have the humanities, your whole system is going to grind to a halt because you're just I mean, well, it won't purely grind to all, because people will still make decisions about what they should do, but they'll do it without thinking. And then you get the consequences that we have in the world where new technologies emerge and are immediately deployed, and then people look back a few years later, sometimes not very many years later at all, and say, oh, no, what did we do? And often the answer is you didn't stop to think about the way you wanted things to turn out. You only thought about the fact that you had this cool new technology to play with. And no, that's exactly right. The world doesn't stop because you're not asking the normative questions. And one of the things that humanities and the humanistic social sciences cause people to realize is that there are always normative questions, whether attentive to them or not, and that if you just move forward without attending to them, you will end up with patterns in the world which aren't the patterns that you would have wanted. Tomorrow. When I asked you about what the university is in fact to do powerwise, you started with the ways that they transmit knowledge through certification and through socialization. I want to ask you one more question about that aspect, and then I want to switch to the question of the making of knowledge. But before we get there, I do want to ask one more question about the idea of intellectual socialization, which I think is a phrase that you use or something similar to that, and I wonder what you mean by that, because one of the things that a sociologist would say, or that a Martian would say if they came and looked at our universities is that the students do seem like they leave thinking a little differently on a whole range of issues, or maybe a lot differently than they do when they came in. And that involves a whole bunch of different things. But it's approaches to how they think about problems ideally, but it also seems often to include solutions to those problems, including sometimes political solutions. And so I'm wondering what did you mean by intellectual socialization. Yeah, universities are like cities in the sense that they bring together people from a wide range of previous life experiences in a tightly socially knit space that produces a lot of nonintended accidental encounters that require people to recognize that the way in which they happen to have lived up until the point when they arrived at the university is just one of many, many ways to have lived. So this is about the way in which the socialization function almost inevitably results in an unseating of what it is that had been accepted as the natural or only or marked way of being. So, in addition to the socialization an example of that because that was that was that seemed correct to me, but also abstract. Yeah, So, a student who grew up in a particular religious community, a student who grew up with a particular set of political values, a student who grew up in a particular language, a student who grew up in a particular social class. All of those are ways of being that are felt very, very naturally to students, and they typically grew up in a town. Towns have a certain degree of heterogeneity to them. But to the extent that you grew up in a particular locale, you've had a particular set of experiences. You grew up on a farm in the Midwest, or you grew up in the Upper West Side of New York City, and those are the set of experiences that you have. Coming into contact with individuals from a wide range of other experiences just makes it in f and coming into contact with them in the particular way that universities and other youth organizations do this right, if you go into the army, you interact with people in an intense environment, in a deeply social space, in an age stratified environment for a crucial period of time. But the disruption of the assumption that the only natural way to do things is the way that you have always been doing things is one of the crucial disruptions that universities bring. And that's a result of the formal structure of the university. We haven't yet gotten to the second question, which is the content question, which is not just that you bring this group of people together, but what it is that you do with them. But let me make sure that I've answered your first question before I move on to the second. I mean, I think you have. I do think we should just acknowledge that the effect that you're describing, you take a lot of bright, young, impressionable people, you put them in a single community, can produce for all that we talk about, the diversity of viewpoints in our universities can produce some degree of homogenization of their views. They come in very diverse, and in principle, one of the reasons that we want a big diverse student body is so that the student body can remain intellectually diverse. So when they graduate, they have many different points of views since they came in with many points where they've been recruited to have many points of view. And yet sometimes it doesn't work that way. I mean, sometimes it leads to people reaching a kind of background consensus on what they think. And critics of elite universities, you know, I'm not one of them, but there are critics of elite universities who say, gee, you know, they come in students come in from a Trump county and then they come into a university where statistically almost nobody on any faculty anywhere in the United States voted for Donald Trump. It's not just elite universities, it's all universities. And then they're in a community where they emerge with a view of, roughly speaking, what people with their education are supposed to think, and that's a kind of liberal or left of center consensus, which over the course of their careers they may or may not sustain that point of view over their lives, but that is the environment that they're in, in in the environment that they that they leave. And it just raises this interesting question of whether the socialization affects are in some way a little bit at odds with our stated goal in our universities of bringing in people from all different perspectives and putting them all together and mixing them up so that they'll come out with lots of different perspectives. So a huge number of interesting questions there. And of course there are students who come to university without religious commitment and get involved with a religious community and leave the university with the more traditional set of values than they entered. But I agree that in the contemporary context that direction of motion is significantly rarer than the other direction of a student who comes from a politically conservative environment and leaves with a certain sense of justice driven concern about the well being of the community. So what I would say is motivating and appealing about the generational passion that you and I think both feel among our students is that it is driven by a deep sense of wanting the world to be a more just and equitable and verdant place. To the extent that I think the two sets of primary concerns that I hear from students on our campus are about racial and political justice on the one hand, and about the long term concern for environment on the other. And some of what's going on is the world is a messy, ugly place in which lots of messy, ugly evil things have happened. And some of our students come to university without full knowledge of the way in which the world that we live in came to be, and some of them come to historical understanding of a kind that they never had before. They continue to have the normative moral commitments that you and I were talking about earlier, and those combine to cause them to take on a sort of passionate social justice picture. But it is certainly the case that the recognition that there might also be politically servative solutions to some of the justice challenges that our students are moved by, that there might be ways in which market, rather than regulation, could best determine the sorts of outcomes that they seek. Environmentally are less prevalent in at least the public voices on many elite campuses, and I think, however, aware one is of the undercurrents that run counter to that. It is undeniable that universities right now are places where the dominant discourse is the discourse of social justice, the discourse of environment, and interestingly, in the case of social justice, it's very domestically focused. I hear much less conversation on campus about issues of international justice, global poverty, global freedom, civil rights of individuals outside the United States than I do about dialogues of the very undeniably important set of questions that we face as a nation around issues of racial justice and social class. We'll be right back tomorrow. Let's turn to the making of knowledge research. Universities are supposed to be places where we get new knowledge, not just transmit it, but discover it, invent it. How does that project express itself in power terms visa via the rest of the world. I mean, assuming that these universities do in fact produce knowledge, which I think they do, how does that affect the rest of the world from a power perspective. It's an interesting question, and I was thinking about the ways in which the United States, I think, both in medicine, in drug development, and in universities, produces a disproportionate amount of what the world gets intellectually in a way whose financing is extraordinary. That is, a large proportion of the world's most highly ranked universities are American universities, and the proportion of the world's discoveries that were made in American universities due to federal funding and student tuition and the other resources taxpayer resources that go into state universities, were really truly extraordinary. And so what I would say is American universities became the place that the world went to gain knowledge. Virtually all of the elite Chinese universities have faculty on them who were trained in American universities. Most of Iran's engineers are trained in American universities. Large number of the world's political leaders were trained in American universities. And so the production of knowledge in American universities gave America as a place where discovery happened a sort of disproportionate role in the world's intellectual economy. It's now the case that Asia in particular, China in particular, but other parts of Asia as well, and in some ways parts of Europe and a little bit in Canada are producing new knowledge at a rate and with investment of a kind that are as intense as in the US. Certainly that's the case in China in terms of scientific knowledge, and the question of whether that will ultimately undermine the fragile ecosystem that is the American university system is a really interesting one. How close are we to that kind of an undermining I mean, how much do you see that decline as imminent versus being something that's still some years off. I mean, it still remains the case that people from all over the world want to send their children to study in American universities, even people who don't particularly care for the United States. Somehow, our educational system remains highly desirable from a global standpoint, even as the power of the United States more generally is often perceived by many to be in decline. So I think there's a number of questions there. American universities do much more than transmit knowledge. American universities are places where a crucial kind of socialization happens, and where the creation of a certain kind of cultural capital is provided to the individuals who attend them, and a set of social connections are established. So the rise of research in places other than the United States, I think doesn't undermine the particular socialization role that American universities play. And of course American universities have this very interesting structure whereby the value of the degree of their alumni depends in part on the contemporary status of the institution with which the alumni are affiliated. So every American university has thousands and thousands of people across generations in whose self interest it lies to keep that university leat and respect it. So there's a very interesting set of interest in parties keeping the socialization and social network role of American university's intact. When I was talking about the rise, particularly of investment in Chinese universities, I was thinking about the ways in which there is serious investment in scientific research, And you're right, in the biological sciences, in the physical sciences, and in engineering and applied sciences, and in some of those cases, with regard to the capacity to make discovery that comes most effectively at scale, that is, if you have a thousand of a particular machine as opposed to a hundred or ten of them in that domain, I think it is imminent that discoveries will take place of a kind that won't take place in this country. But with regard to the socialization role of diversities, I don't think that change is imminent. Do you think, tamarrow that seen as a whole, that elite US universities have too much power in the world, or too little power in the world, or just about the right amount of power. I mean, is there a kind of Goldilocks answer to this? I would say, as gate keepers to a certain kind of social elite, that one's ability to enter that world is determined at age seventeen, is I think non ideal if what it is that we're trying to do is identify and cultivate talent and allow a certain kind of flourishing. The United States is one of the few places where you have flexibility throughout the life course with regard to education, but not with regard to access to elite education. So I would say with are to the socialization role that they play and the fact that it requires an identification of skill and talent so early in life in a country that has invested so little in its public education system is problematic and is a way in which the particular gatekeeping role that universities play, or elite universities play, is problematic against a backdrop of uninequitable K twelve and in fact pre K system. On the other hand, I would say that the information and discoveries and insights that universities have take longer to permeate culture than would be ideal. It took behavioral economics as a way of understanding human decision making longer perhaps than it should have to affect how it is that we think about governance and behavior. So there's a way in which universities have too much power the socialization at seventeen, and ways in which they had too little the role that information plays in determining our activities tomorrow. I want to thank you for a fascinating conversation and for being so candid about the upsides and downsides of the way power is deployed in universities. I feel very lucky to know that a person as thoughtful as you are is deeply involved in that process and as thinking so hard about how it happens. So thank you for the work that you're doing now in running one of the great American universities. Noah, thank you for a characteristically insightful, provocative, and thoughtful set of questions. It is always a joy to interact with you. We'll be right back. Talking to Dean Tamar Gender, I was really struck by the dual way that she conceives of power in and around the university. First, there's the question of power within the university, and in that context, Tamar was very clear that it's a mistake to think of the university's power as emanating either from the top or the bottom, or anywhere in between. Rather, power in a university is complexly negotiated between all of the different actors who are involved. It's not like the dean can speak and expect the entire faculty to listen. Similarly, it's not like the faculty can express their views and expect the students to fall into line. In fact, what we see within the university is a lot of different actors trying to work out how they can function collectively while still pressing for the things that they believe in the most simultaneously. With respect to the role of the university in the world, Tamar spoke extraordinarily thoughtfully about how important it is for universities to train people and to generate ideas about what our values are and what our values should be. Those are the topics that the humanities covers, and without them, our society would be adrift, full of technologies, full of new financial instruments, but with no idea what we should do with them, what's ethical and what's not, and what overall objectives we should be aiming to achieve. Simultaneously, the university's power in the world also stems from the social sciences, which study the ways that human beings actually interact with each other and actually deploy power relative to one another, and the sciences, which themselves explore in the deepest sense, the nature of the world around us. In those senses, the university plays a crucial role in helping to shape a healthy society, and where the universities go awry, the society's own troubles are unlikely to be far behind. So as you send your kids off to school, or go back to teaching or studying yourself. Remember that, whether you like it or not, you're participating in multiple great power dances that shape the way the world around us operates. Until the next time I speak to you, Breathe deep, think deep thoughts, and, if circumstances will allow it, have a little fun. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is ben Toalliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover bloombergsals late of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is Deep Background.