September 21, 2025 • 27 mins
President Trump's efforts to redefine federal relations with higher education have major implications for how the US funds research. From his 50-year tenure as President of Bard, Leon Botstein brings a broader perspective to what he believes is at stake for the country. He speaks with David Westin on this special bonus edition of the Bloomberg Wall Street Week podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Welcome to a special edition of the Wall Street Week podcast.
I'm David weston President Trump's epic battle with some of
America's most prestigious universities has been a long time in
the making, like over two hundred years in the making,
and it all started on the other side of the Atlantic.
America's move to merge scholarship with scientific research was inspired
(00:44):
by Humboldt University in then Prussian Berlin at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. A Yale graduate named Daniel koit
Gilman saw for himself the possibilities when he traveled to
Berlin in the eighteen fifties on a European tour. It
took him a while to start something similar in the
United States, but he finally got his chance when he
(01:04):
was tapped to be the founding president of a new
college in Baltimore in eighteen seventy six, making JOHNS. Hopkins,
the alma mater of our company founder and majority owner
Michael Bloomberg, the first true American research university. Over time,
others followed suit, with MIT taking the idea in a
somewhat different direction for what it called applied research in
(01:27):
the early nineteen hundreds, funded not by the wealth of
a private donor like mister JOHNS. Hopkins, but by some
of the large corporations of the day, such as General
Electric and AT and T. It wasn't until World War
II that the federal government really got involved. Then along
came fdr who reached out to the universities to help
(01:47):
him win the war. Roosevelt put the dean of MIT's
Engineering school, vanavar Bush, in charge of the effort. That
partnership gave the world innovations like radar and the atomic
bomb that did just what the President had envisioned. It
helped determine who won the war. Having seen what the
government academia team could do together, vanovar Bush developed a
(02:10):
post war plan for ongoing federal government funding of university research,
and what began as two hundred fifty three million dollars
in grants in nineteen fifty three turned into some sixty
billion dollars as of twenty twenty three. Leon Botstein has
more perspective than most on the history of academia's relationship
with the government and what's at stake for the United
(02:32):
States and the world. The son of Polish Jewish physicists
who fled the Nazis. He was born in Zurich and
immigrated to the United States at the age of two.
After studying both history and music, he went on to
become the youngest college president in US history at the
tender age of twenty three. Five years later, in nineteen
(02:53):
seventy five, he was named president of Bard, a position
he has held for fifty years. So who better to
ask about the state of American universities today in light
of the challenges? So give us your assessment of the
relationship between the federal government the United States and universities
(03:14):
and colleges right now, well.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Right now, it's in a kind of disintegration mode. The
pattern which has been that the university and the government
have collaborated on research agendas. It was really reached a
high point of during the Sputnik and the space exploration age,
(03:42):
but it has a long history dating back to the
Manhattan Project to the making of the atomic bomb. The
mating of the atomic bomb was the decisive historic event.
America could not have done it without the universities, and
the universities could.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Not have done it without the government.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
It was a collaboration which ended tragically but also brilliantly
and brought in the atomic age. And since then America
has been the premiere place for higher education for two reasons. One,
it has the most imaginative and open and free environment
(04:23):
for research. There's a lot of academic freedom, and there's
no hierarchy. There's no top professor telling the young professor
what to do in the sciences, quite as there is
in the old European tradition, which has been imitated both
by the Russians and by the Chinese. And there isn't
(04:47):
a constraint. And also new departments can be created, new
fields can be created. There's a lot of flexibility in
problem solving, which has placed American science in the fore front.
And with the forefront of American science comes its dominance
in technology and in economics. So you have a collaboration
(05:12):
which has worked wonderfully. For reasons that I do not understand,
the Trumpet administration has decided to break this up. To
unravel this. The claim is that the universities are woke. Well,
universities have always had majority opinions. You know, the universities
(05:37):
were in the forefront of the America first movement which
opposed America's entrance in World War Two. Every generation has
had its political incarnation on the university. But the point
is that this claim of wokeness is widely exaggerated. And furthermore,
(06:01):
there is the illusion that the real problem here is
the failure to protect the Jewish students and Jewish staff
and faculty. I'm a Jew and active member of the
Jewish community, and I think this is also wildly exaggerated,
and anti Semitism has been part of American culture. It's
(06:24):
been part of university culture. However, the university has been
the most open and responsive to the aspirations of the
Jewish community. The idea that the university's anti semitic is
ironic and not actually true. So for reasons that are political,
(06:45):
there is a destructive intent to demolish what has been
for decades America's signal competitive edge throughout the world.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
When we talk about colleges and university of the United States,
the country is blessed with a wide range of institutions.
Are the challenges you identify right now across the board?
Are they more targeted on what I would call the
elite institutions?
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Well, they're not at elite institutions. They are at the
research one universities.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
So you're right.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
America has a kind of patchwork quilt of many different
kinds of institutions, much more varied than other developed societies
in the West particularly, and so you have public research
universities as well as private research universities. Then you have
smaller universities that aren't quite as research heavy, and then
(07:47):
you have purely undergraduate institutions. Then you have community colleges.
So you have a really wide variety of institutions that
serve different constituencies. There's one that these institutions all have
in common. America suffers from an antiquated financing.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Scheme for its universities.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Our great public university system was really created during the
presidency of Lincoln with the Moral Act and the creation
of the Great State Universities. After all, the majority of
Americans go to public institutions, not private institutions. We always
talk about Harvard, Yale, Princeton, but they're not the real
place where Americans get educated. They get educated in public institutions,
(08:34):
many of which are terrific, and the state universities in
the Midwest and in the South and the West. Our
first class places. I don't know why both the public
and the news media and now the White House has
an obsession with these marginal in a way, statistically institutions,
(08:54):
the whole issue about admissions and discrimination applies to a
handful of institutions. Most of us are in the business
of recruiting students, of welcoming students to us, not selecting,
not making a cut. We're not a sort of a
World Series baseball team. There are a couple of teams
(09:17):
that are in that kind of world, but most institutions
are not. And the best of our students in this
country don't necessarily go to these elite institutions. There's a
myth that somehow your career will be better if you
go to one of these institutions.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
That isn't the case.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
And so it is an odd situation in which there
is an unnatural focus on a very small portion of institutions. However,
they reflect a problem that affects all research universities. The
cutting of overhead, the dismantling of everything from USAID to
(10:00):
cutting the funding for medical research, and generally the cutting
of funds to bring graduate students and postdocs. America has
been a net importer It also ties in with this
anti immigrant policy, which is completely ridiculous. Factually, without the
(10:22):
great immigration from Europe in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties,
America would not have emerged after the Second World War
as a leader in the world in higher education. We
owe our greatness to the migration of scholars and scientists
and engineers who came to this country fleeing oppression.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Now we are.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Flirting with autocracy, the very thing that great scientists and
scholars fled. It's a reversal of roles, and.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So it is.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
It's a problem that involves every institution because it is
fundamentally about censorship and freedom. What the government is doing
is using money, which as a weapon. And you know,
scientific research, learning, universities, libraries can exist without support.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
It's impossible. You know.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
We think of Harvard as a very rich university, the richest,
so it has some endowment that's larger than fifty billion.
But you and I can name several individuals who've earned
a wealth level more than fifty billion in less than
twenty years. And that university has been around since sixteen
thirty six. Who says it's rich. Now they're responsible for
(11:48):
their own arrogance of saying they're rich.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
They're not rich.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
They can survive as a research university without the collaboration
of the government.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
They may be a private.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Institution dependent on the government. Then you take a public university,
which isn't always public. Berkeley is very very dependent on
private support, so as the University of Michigan, but their
state institutions and the state built their facilities by and large,
so they too are very dependent on the public. So
(12:20):
that financial relationship has always come with a respect for
their freedom and independence. What do they do their research on?
What kind of problems? Now, certainly the government's interest in
practical results, whether it's vaccines, new technology, no faster computing, chips,
(12:42):
all that, all the things we talk about in the
modern world AI, it's all university dependent. Without the world
of university, we wouldn't be where we are now. Why
a president and a government wants to destroy that is
apsolutely unclear to me, especially under the slogan of making
(13:05):
America great again. If America was and is great, one
of the sources of one of the sources of its
greatness is its university system, its knowledge production, and the
connection to the economy. The universities have done a terrible
job in talking to the general public. They haven't made
(13:28):
their case clear.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
The people who.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Live in the Boston area or the New York area
will think, well, Columbia is an elite place. Well, a
high portion of the quality of their medical care derives
from those universities. The public doesn't really quite realize that,
God forbid, they should have a terrible illness, God forbid
they should be an accident. Where is the best place
(13:53):
for them to be treated in great university hospitals. Where
do the great university hospitals get all their talknology, all
their drugs or their diagnostic equipment, equipment, the MRI, the
cat scans, all from the research labs of universities. But
these institutions have believe.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Their own rhetoric. You know, they've.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Drunk their own kool aid. You know, they smelled their
own perfume. You know, they they said we're rich, we're
in vulnerable, you know we you know, we're independent, when
in fact they're dependent. Now, the liberal arts colleges, the
cond of intitution that I am responsible for, are not
(14:38):
research heavy, so we're not as impacted by the current
attack on funding. But the federal government's crucial to financial aid.
All of our universities, public and private, are hampered by
an antiquated system of financing. The in state tuitions of
(15:03):
state universities are too high, much too high for country
of our wealth. This is not a welfare giveaway. The
more education you have, the more you earn, and that
term returns in tax revenue.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
The fact is we.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Push the cost of our education on the consumer, and
that is completely irrational. It's an investment in the country,
it's an investment in our own people, and that investment
pays off. So it is simply a problem for all
of us because if the attack continues, it'll turn to
(15:39):
squeezing out the financial aid options which aren't strong enough,
the loan options, loan forgiveness options. And then we come
back to the immigration question. Much of our graduate infrastructure
and science is based on students from abroad, students who
come to get their PhDs in chemist, through biology, physics,
(16:01):
information science from abroad. We don't produce enough of our
own scientists through our own educational system, and the university
has bear some responsibility for that. They've sort of given
that task off to schools of education. But the physicists
of America, the chemists of America, the biologists of America,
(16:23):
are not training high school teachers and middle school teachers
and elementary school teachers. So through the pipeline of our schools,
we don't produce enough students with the determination and hard
work that's required to make a career in science and
technology and biomedical sciences.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
You mentioned that the federal government right now is using money,
as I think you said, a weapon we call a
weapon or a leaver, whichever you want to call it.
Have the universities to some extent given some of that
leverage to the government by being too dependent upon federal funds.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, it's a good question.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
I'm not sure that there's an alternative.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
The scale of research.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Requires that you get the money from a large source.
Now the large sources are the government the other companies. Now,
it's a very very delicate issue about having let's say,
big pharma or big industrials fund research. They have Historically,
(17:33):
chemical companies are all kinds of companies have invested in
research that's related to their business, and that can be good,
but it can also be corrupting. The tobacco industry, for example,
in its beginning of its fight against the argument that
smoking is related to cancer. Was willing to fund research
(17:57):
where they already expected a certain kind of out come,
and that's not good. So one has to be very
careful about the industry research relationship.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
The third are private individuals.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
And although we have the most unbelievable inequality of wealth,
and we have a fantastic number of very rich people, billionaires,
not all of them are philanthropic, and we're very grateful
for the few that are. But you can't rely to
(18:30):
fund this on individuals. On private philanthropy, you need large
sums of money, and the only two sources are, to
some extent, industry and the other is the public sector
taxpayer support. And taxpayer support is justified because, as I
(18:52):
said earlier, it returns to the wealth of the nation,
the taxable wealth of the nation. Education is crucial, crucial
now to economy. There is no We are in a
knowledge economy century.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
From your perspective, which includes a remarkable experience leading a
distinguished university. Where does this go? It's impossible to know.
But as you look at what do you think the
future path is?
Speaker 3 (19:30):
I think the future path is to persuade the public
and also are elected officials that supporting universities and high
education is in the nation's interest. If you're a patriot,
which i am. I'm an immigrant. This country gave me
(19:50):
and my family, my parents and my siblings, an opportunity
they could not find anywhere else in the world. So
there's a deep loyalty to what this country represents. It's
represented by the Statue of Liberty, It's represented by the Constitution,
It's represented by its long history of welcoming refugees and
(20:12):
people seeking freedom. So it seems to me that you
need to persuade the public and the elected officials that
this is not the place for partisan politics. This is
not the place to fight cultural wars. Cultural wars have
always existed. It's like fashion, you know, big shoulders on
(20:34):
your suits and narrow shoulders on your suits. It is
always the case that universities have young people, and young
people are fiery, and they're committed to ideas. They're not
always right, and they're not always as capable of seeing
the gray, the ambiguous, the complexities, and you have to
(20:56):
have patience. And we're not in the pun business when
they're teaching business. So, whether it's the Vietnam protests, or
it's protests about any public issue, the environment, civil rights,
whatever you want. The fact is that the energy of
young people is an opportunity to teach. And this has
(21:18):
been wildly politicized, and I think the universities have been
lax in providing leadership. But you have to remember that
universities have become giant corporations and they need corporate leaders.
And how do we define corporate leaders people who don't
have opinions of their own, but say yes to everyone
(21:39):
in a little different way and engage in compromise. The
truth isn't always in compromise. The truth isn't always in
yes you're right, Yes you're right, Yes you're right, and
creating some kind of bland soup out of a variety
of opinions. It's about striking out and showing leadership. And
(22:02):
in order to become a university or college president, you
have to demonstrate throughout your career your willingness to abandon
any principle you might have held, because if you actually
compete for the job with real opinions, you won't get it.
So we have a lot of managers, and we don't
(22:26):
need managers. We need leaders. And those leaders are hard
to find because in the current Internet environment, a university
or college president is a semi public person, and it
is unimaginable the vitriolic, hostile environment that the Internet creates
(22:50):
for any public official. The sad thing about the Internet,
which is a great advance, is that it's unleashed the
darkest side of human nature. People will write things, send
you things, use the language they would never use in person,
(23:10):
they would never use even on the telephone. So there's
a kind of isolation which creates a kind of road
rage that gets funneled into the Internet. And that's what
you're overwhelmed with, and people are frightened by it. And
if you speak out, you'll get ten times what you
(23:33):
said in hate mail. No matter what you say has
nothing to do with the substance of it.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
So who wants this job?
Speaker 3 (23:42):
We complain how poor our politicians are. I mean the idea,
this is not a criticism that a man of business
without any public experience, without an education that really fits
to lead a complex, without a long history of public services.
(24:03):
The president of the United States is an indication of
how few very good people want the job. And the
job is decreasingly attractive, and you know, if you're a
judge and now you have to make a decision on
some executive order from the president, and you act against
(24:28):
the president, you're a target. And one person with a
family with some measure of sanity wants to put themselves
in the line of fire. So we are eroding democracy
by diminishing the attraction.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Of public service as a career. So the fact is.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
That the university needs more leadership, and leadership that is
print and it seems to me that the people that
choose the president, which is not only the governing board
but the faculty, have to be more willing to take
(25:13):
risks in finding leaders that stand for something. What I
believe they should stand for is excellence and research, freedom
of inquiry, and respect for every individual. When we give
a diploma, every university, every college in the country, what's
on that diploma just your name, nothing about your identity.
(25:39):
You're not a member of a group. You're just John Smith,
Jane Smith. You're an individual, that unique person that you are.
That's your degree, that's your accomplishment. We don't teach groups.
We teach individuals, and we need to treat all of
them fairly. That's why the old days in the movies.
(26:01):
You see people in universities with gowns. Why were their
gowns to camouflage their origins, their mode of dress. Everybody
was a learner, even the faculty. So that ideal of
a place where the individual is treated as an individual,
(26:22):
but not as a representative of some political group, some
ethnic group, some way we segregate ourselves from another. That
ideal of university is what has to be defended quality
of teaching, quality of research, and that has to be
supported by the government, not eroded by the government, not
(26:44):
co opted by the government. And one of the things
that history teaches us is when autocrats take control of
universities and dictate who should teach there, what they should teach,
what curriculum is allowed, what is not allowed, the quality
of the work of the scholarship goes down. This kind
(27:07):
of autocratic intervention spells the death of American excellence in the.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
University that does it for us. Here at Wall Street Week,
I'm David Weston. See you next week for more stories
of capitalism.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Welcome to a special edition of the Wall Street Week podcast.
I'm David weston President Trump's epic battle with some of
America's most prestigious universities has been a long time in
the making, like over two hundred years in the making,
and it all started on the other side of the Atlantic.
America's move to merge scholarship with scientific research was inspired
(00:44):
by Humboldt University in then Prussian Berlin at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. A Yale graduate named Daniel koit
Gilman saw for himself the possibilities when he traveled to
Berlin in the eighteen fifties on a European tour. It
took him a while to start something similar in the
United States, but he finally got his chance when he
(01:04):
was tapped to be the founding president of a new
college in Baltimore in eighteen seventy six, making JOHNS. Hopkins,
the alma mater of our company founder and majority owner
Michael Bloomberg, the first true American research university. Over time,
others followed suit, with MIT taking the idea in a
somewhat different direction for what it called applied research in
(01:27):
the early nineteen hundreds, funded not by the wealth of
a private donor like mister JOHNS. Hopkins, but by some
of the large corporations of the day, such as General
Electric and AT and T. It wasn't until World War
II that the federal government really got involved. Then along
came fdr who reached out to the universities to help
(01:47):
him win the war. Roosevelt put the dean of MIT's
Engineering school, vanavar Bush, in charge of the effort. That
partnership gave the world innovations like radar and the atomic
bomb that did just what the President had envisioned. It
helped determine who won the war. Having seen what the
government academia team could do together, vanovar Bush developed a
(02:10):
post war plan for ongoing federal government funding of university research,
and what began as two hundred fifty three million dollars
in grants in nineteen fifty three turned into some sixty
billion dollars as of twenty twenty three. Leon Botstein has
more perspective than most on the history of academia's relationship
with the government and what's at stake for the United
(02:32):
States and the world. The son of Polish Jewish physicists
who fled the Nazis. He was born in Zurich and
immigrated to the United States at the age of two.
After studying both history and music, he went on to
become the youngest college president in US history at the
tender age of twenty three. Five years later, in nineteen
(02:53):
seventy five, he was named president of Bard, a position
he has held for fifty years. So who better to
ask about the state of American universities today in light
of the challenges? So give us your assessment of the
relationship between the federal government the United States and universities
(03:14):
and colleges right now, well.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Right now, it's in a kind of disintegration mode. The
pattern which has been that the university and the government
have collaborated on research agendas. It was really reached a
high point of during the Sputnik and the space exploration age,
(03:42):
but it has a long history dating back to the
Manhattan Project to the making of the atomic bomb. The
mating of the atomic bomb was the decisive historic event.
America could not have done it without the universities, and
the universities could.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Not have done it without the government.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
It was a collaboration which ended tragically but also brilliantly
and brought in the atomic age. And since then America
has been the premiere place for higher education for two reasons. One,
it has the most imaginative and open and free environment
(04:23):
for research. There's a lot of academic freedom, and there's
no hierarchy. There's no top professor telling the young professor
what to do in the sciences, quite as there is
in the old European tradition, which has been imitated both
by the Russians and by the Chinese. And there isn't
(04:47):
a constraint. And also new departments can be created, new
fields can be created. There's a lot of flexibility in
problem solving, which has placed American science in the fore front.
And with the forefront of American science comes its dominance
in technology and in economics. So you have a collaboration
(05:12):
which has worked wonderfully. For reasons that I do not understand,
the Trumpet administration has decided to break this up. To
unravel this. The claim is that the universities are woke. Well,
universities have always had majority opinions. You know, the universities
(05:37):
were in the forefront of the America first movement which
opposed America's entrance in World War Two. Every generation has
had its political incarnation on the university. But the point
is that this claim of wokeness is widely exaggerated. And furthermore,
(06:01):
there is the illusion that the real problem here is
the failure to protect the Jewish students and Jewish staff
and faculty. I'm a Jew and active member of the
Jewish community, and I think this is also wildly exaggerated,
and anti Semitism has been part of American culture. It's
(06:24):
been part of university culture. However, the university has been
the most open and responsive to the aspirations of the
Jewish community. The idea that the university's anti semitic is
ironic and not actually true. So for reasons that are political,
(06:45):
there is a destructive intent to demolish what has been
for decades America's signal competitive edge throughout the world.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
When we talk about colleges and university of the United States,
the country is blessed with a wide range of institutions.
Are the challenges you identify right now across the board?
Are they more targeted on what I would call the
elite institutions?
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Well, they're not at elite institutions. They are at the
research one universities.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
So you're right.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
America has a kind of patchwork quilt of many different
kinds of institutions, much more varied than other developed societies
in the West particularly, and so you have public research
universities as well as private research universities. Then you have
smaller universities that aren't quite as research heavy, and then
(07:47):
you have purely undergraduate institutions. Then you have community colleges.
So you have a really wide variety of institutions that
serve different constituencies. There's one that these institutions all have
in common. America suffers from an antiquated financing.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Scheme for its universities.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Our great public university system was really created during the
presidency of Lincoln with the Moral Act and the creation
of the Great State Universities. After all, the majority of
Americans go to public institutions, not private institutions. We always
talk about Harvard, Yale, Princeton, but they're not the real
place where Americans get educated. They get educated in public institutions,
(08:34):
many of which are terrific, and the state universities in
the Midwest and in the South and the West. Our
first class places. I don't know why both the public
and the news media and now the White House has
an obsession with these marginal in a way, statistically institutions,
(08:54):
the whole issue about admissions and discrimination applies to a
handful of institutions. Most of us are in the business
of recruiting students, of welcoming students to us, not selecting,
not making a cut. We're not a sort of a
World Series baseball team. There are a couple of teams
(09:17):
that are in that kind of world, but most institutions
are not. And the best of our students in this
country don't necessarily go to these elite institutions. There's a
myth that somehow your career will be better if you
go to one of these institutions.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
That isn't the case.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
And so it is an odd situation in which there
is an unnatural focus on a very small portion of institutions. However,
they reflect a problem that affects all research universities. The
cutting of overhead, the dismantling of everything from USAID to
(10:00):
cutting the funding for medical research, and generally the cutting
of funds to bring graduate students and postdocs. America has
been a net importer It also ties in with this
anti immigrant policy, which is completely ridiculous. Factually, without the
(10:22):
great immigration from Europe in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties,
America would not have emerged after the Second World War
as a leader in the world in higher education. We
owe our greatness to the migration of scholars and scientists
and engineers who came to this country fleeing oppression.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Now we are.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Flirting with autocracy, the very thing that great scientists and
scholars fled. It's a reversal of roles, and.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So it is.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
It's a problem that involves every institution because it is
fundamentally about censorship and freedom. What the government is doing
is using money, which as a weapon. And you know,
scientific research, learning, universities, libraries can exist without support.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
It's impossible. You know.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
We think of Harvard as a very rich university, the richest,
so it has some endowment that's larger than fifty billion.
But you and I can name several individuals who've earned
a wealth level more than fifty billion in less than
twenty years. And that university has been around since sixteen
thirty six. Who says it's rich. Now they're responsible for
(11:48):
their own arrogance of saying they're rich.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
They're not rich.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
They can survive as a research university without the collaboration
of the government.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
They may be a private.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Institution dependent on the government. Then you take a public university,
which isn't always public. Berkeley is very very dependent on
private support, so as the University of Michigan, but their
state institutions and the state built their facilities by and large,
so they too are very dependent on the public. So
(12:20):
that financial relationship has always come with a respect for
their freedom and independence. What do they do their research on?
What kind of problems? Now, certainly the government's interest in
practical results, whether it's vaccines, new technology, no faster computing, chips,
(12:42):
all that, all the things we talk about in the
modern world AI, it's all university dependent. Without the world
of university, we wouldn't be where we are now. Why
a president and a government wants to destroy that is
apsolutely unclear to me, especially under the slogan of making
(13:05):
America great again. If America was and is great, one
of the sources of one of the sources of its
greatness is its university system, its knowledge production, and the
connection to the economy. The universities have done a terrible
job in talking to the general public. They haven't made
(13:28):
their case clear.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
The people who.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Live in the Boston area or the New York area
will think, well, Columbia is an elite place. Well, a
high portion of the quality of their medical care derives
from those universities. The public doesn't really quite realize that,
God forbid, they should have a terrible illness, God forbid
they should be an accident. Where is the best place
(13:53):
for them to be treated in great university hospitals. Where
do the great university hospitals get all their talknology, all
their drugs or their diagnostic equipment, equipment, the MRI, the
cat scans, all from the research labs of universities. But
these institutions have believe.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Their own rhetoric. You know, they've.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Drunk their own kool aid. You know, they smelled their
own perfume. You know, they they said we're rich, we're
in vulnerable, you know we you know, we're independent, when
in fact they're dependent. Now, the liberal arts colleges, the
cond of intitution that I am responsible for, are not
(14:38):
research heavy, so we're not as impacted by the current
attack on funding. But the federal government's crucial to financial aid.
All of our universities, public and private, are hampered by
an antiquated system of financing. The in state tuitions of
(15:03):
state universities are too high, much too high for country
of our wealth. This is not a welfare giveaway. The
more education you have, the more you earn, and that
term returns in tax revenue.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
The fact is we.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Push the cost of our education on the consumer, and
that is completely irrational. It's an investment in the country,
it's an investment in our own people, and that investment
pays off. So it is simply a problem for all
of us because if the attack continues, it'll turn to
(15:39):
squeezing out the financial aid options which aren't strong enough,
the loan options, loan forgiveness options. And then we come
back to the immigration question. Much of our graduate infrastructure
and science is based on students from abroad, students who
come to get their PhDs in chemist, through biology, physics,
(16:01):
information science from abroad. We don't produce enough of our
own scientists through our own educational system, and the university
has bear some responsibility for that. They've sort of given
that task off to schools of education. But the physicists
of America, the chemists of America, the biologists of America,
(16:23):
are not training high school teachers and middle school teachers
and elementary school teachers. So through the pipeline of our schools,
we don't produce enough students with the determination and hard
work that's required to make a career in science and
technology and biomedical sciences.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
You mentioned that the federal government right now is using money,
as I think you said, a weapon we call a
weapon or a leaver, whichever you want to call it.
Have the universities to some extent given some of that
leverage to the government by being too dependent upon federal funds.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, it's a good question.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
I'm not sure that there's an alternative.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
The scale of research.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Requires that you get the money from a large source.
Now the large sources are the government the other companies. Now,
it's a very very delicate issue about having let's say,
big pharma or big industrials fund research. They have Historically,
(17:33):
chemical companies are all kinds of companies have invested in
research that's related to their business, and that can be good,
but it can also be corrupting. The tobacco industry, for example,
in its beginning of its fight against the argument that
smoking is related to cancer. Was willing to fund research
(17:57):
where they already expected a certain kind of out come,
and that's not good. So one has to be very
careful about the industry research relationship.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
The third are private individuals.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
And although we have the most unbelievable inequality of wealth,
and we have a fantastic number of very rich people, billionaires,
not all of them are philanthropic, and we're very grateful
for the few that are. But you can't rely to
(18:30):
fund this on individuals. On private philanthropy, you need large
sums of money, and the only two sources are, to
some extent, industry and the other is the public sector
taxpayer support. And taxpayer support is justified because, as I
(18:52):
said earlier, it returns to the wealth of the nation,
the taxable wealth of the nation. Education is crucial, crucial
now to economy. There is no We are in a
knowledge economy century.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
From your perspective, which includes a remarkable experience leading a
distinguished university. Where does this go? It's impossible to know.
But as you look at what do you think the
future path is?
Speaker 3 (19:30):
I think the future path is to persuade the public
and also are elected officials that supporting universities and high
education is in the nation's interest. If you're a patriot,
which i am. I'm an immigrant. This country gave me
(19:50):
and my family, my parents and my siblings, an opportunity
they could not find anywhere else in the world. So
there's a deep loyalty to what this country represents. It's
represented by the Statue of Liberty, It's represented by the Constitution,
It's represented by its long history of welcoming refugees and
(20:12):
people seeking freedom. So it seems to me that you
need to persuade the public and the elected officials that
this is not the place for partisan politics. This is
not the place to fight cultural wars. Cultural wars have
always existed. It's like fashion, you know, big shoulders on
(20:34):
your suits and narrow shoulders on your suits. It is
always the case that universities have young people, and young
people are fiery, and they're committed to ideas. They're not
always right, and they're not always as capable of seeing
the gray, the ambiguous, the complexities, and you have to
(20:56):
have patience. And we're not in the pun business when
they're teaching business. So, whether it's the Vietnam protests, or
it's protests about any public issue, the environment, civil rights,
whatever you want. The fact is that the energy of
young people is an opportunity to teach. And this has
(21:18):
been wildly politicized, and I think the universities have been
lax in providing leadership. But you have to remember that
universities have become giant corporations and they need corporate leaders.
And how do we define corporate leaders people who don't
have opinions of their own, but say yes to everyone
(21:39):
in a little different way and engage in compromise. The
truth isn't always in compromise. The truth isn't always in
yes you're right, Yes you're right, Yes you're right, and
creating some kind of bland soup out of a variety
of opinions. It's about striking out and showing leadership. And
(22:02):
in order to become a university or college president, you
have to demonstrate throughout your career your willingness to abandon
any principle you might have held, because if you actually
compete for the job with real opinions, you won't get it.
So we have a lot of managers, and we don't
(22:26):
need managers. We need leaders. And those leaders are hard
to find because in the current Internet environment, a university
or college president is a semi public person, and it
is unimaginable the vitriolic, hostile environment that the Internet creates
(22:50):
for any public official. The sad thing about the Internet,
which is a great advance, is that it's unleashed the
darkest side of human nature. People will write things, send
you things, use the language they would never use in person,
(23:10):
they would never use even on the telephone. So there's
a kind of isolation which creates a kind of road
rage that gets funneled into the Internet. And that's what
you're overwhelmed with, and people are frightened by it. And
if you speak out, you'll get ten times what you
(23:33):
said in hate mail. No matter what you say has
nothing to do with the substance of it.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
So who wants this job?
Speaker 3 (23:42):
We complain how poor our politicians are. I mean the idea,
this is not a criticism that a man of business
without any public experience, without an education that really fits
to lead a complex, without a long history of public services.
(24:03):
The president of the United States is an indication of
how few very good people want the job. And the
job is decreasingly attractive, and you know, if you're a
judge and now you have to make a decision on
some executive order from the president, and you act against
(24:28):
the president, you're a target. And one person with a
family with some measure of sanity wants to put themselves
in the line of fire. So we are eroding democracy
by diminishing the attraction.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Of public service as a career. So the fact is.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
That the university needs more leadership, and leadership that is
print and it seems to me that the people that
choose the president, which is not only the governing board
but the faculty, have to be more willing to take
(25:13):
risks in finding leaders that stand for something. What I
believe they should stand for is excellence and research, freedom
of inquiry, and respect for every individual. When we give
a diploma, every university, every college in the country, what's
on that diploma just your name, nothing about your identity.
(25:39):
You're not a member of a group. You're just John Smith,
Jane Smith. You're an individual, that unique person that you are.
That's your degree, that's your accomplishment. We don't teach groups.
We teach individuals, and we need to treat all of
them fairly. That's why the old days in the movies.
(26:01):
You see people in universities with gowns. Why were their
gowns to camouflage their origins, their mode of dress. Everybody
was a learner, even the faculty. So that ideal of
a place where the individual is treated as an individual,
(26:22):
but not as a representative of some political group, some
ethnic group, some way we segregate ourselves from another. That
ideal of university is what has to be defended quality
of teaching, quality of research, and that has to be
supported by the government, not eroded by the government, not
(26:44):
co opted by the government. And one of the things
that history teaches us is when autocrats take control of
universities and dictate who should teach there, what they should teach,
what curriculum is allowed, what is not allowed, the quality
of the work of the scholarship goes down. This kind
(27:07):
of autocratic intervention spells the death of American excellence in the.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
University that does it for us. Here at Wall Street Week,
I'm David Weston. See you next week for more stories
of capitalism.
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