Trump’s looming attack on higher education

Episode Summary

The second term of Donald Trump has officially begun, but despite all the things he’s unveiled in the past several weeks, we don’t know fully what his policies are going to be over the next four years.

That is in part because Trump himself is a very erratic figure who says things that are nonsensical, even by his own standards. While there are documents such as Project 2025 which were created by Trump's ideological allies in the reactionary movement, that document itself is not particularly detailed in a number of ways.

But one thing we can be sure is going to happen in the second Trump administration is that he will conduct a full-scale assault on America's colleges and universities. As a candidate, he promised repeatedly to create taxes on private university endowments. And he also talked about removing the funding for universities that don't bow to his various censorship demands, which are already being imposed on federal government agencies such as the National Institute of Health.

Unlike a number of other Trumpian boasts and threats, he is very likely to follow through on his promised attacks on higher education because Republicans in a number of states and localities have enacted many of the policies that Trump talked about on the campaign trail.

Joining me today to talk about all this is Nils Gilman, a friend of the show who is the chief operating officer at the Berggruen Institute, a think tank in Southern California that publishes Noema Magazine. He is also the former associate chancellor at the University of California-Berkeley, where he saw first-hand just what the [00:02:00] Republican vision for education in the United States is. He’s also the co-author of a new book called Children of a Modest Star, which we discuss at the end of the episode.

The video of our December 18, 2024 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

03:31 — The Milo Yiannopoulos incident at Berkeley

13:34 — Trump has learned from other authoritarians' playbooks

22:36 — The crisis of legitimacy in higher education

32:24 — The role of sports in universities

34:55 — DeSantis's attack on Florida universities will be Trump's model

39:52 — Historical parallels: Germany in the 1930s and the rise of the American university

43:39 — Despite the right's wholesale assault on education, many academics still don't take it seriously

46:43 — The deadly myth of "non-partisanship" in an era where the far-right is assaulting all knowledge

51:17 — Liberalism's epistemic inability to use power politics

55:24 — 'Children of a Modest Star' and a future-oriented liberalism

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So before we get too far into the topic of discussion for today, let's just briefly talk about your own personal direct experience with some of these issues and some of the ideas and people that are surely going to be a factor in what Trump is going to do with education.

NILS GILMAN: Sure, well the last seven years, I've been working at a. Research center and think tank in Los Angeles called the Berggruen Institute. But my previous job to this was working as the associate chancellor and chief of staff to the chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, where obviously I dealt with a lot of local issues. But I also saw and had conversations with many people across the higher education landscape in the United States. So I have a lot of experience knowing the way in which universities operate as well as some of the ways in which they've been targeted. As you can imagine, Berkeley is kind of a symbolic lightning rod for a lot of opinions that people have about higher education, particularly on the right, has been that way since at least the 1960s. And so I've seen the way in which Berkeley has been targeted, particularly, but I think it's just emblematic of the way in which, you know, the right regards higher education more broadly.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And specifically, like, some of the things that you encountered, can you talk about a couple of, well,

The Milo Yiannopoulos incident at Berkeley

GILMAN: One of the first real encounters I had with this was actually just 10 days after, maybe 12 days after Trump was inaugurated in 2017 for his first term. At that time the, I think it's fair to say provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos was doing a kind of and the previous stop and he had, he'd been scheduled by the young Republicans at Berkeley to give a talk on February 2nd, 2017, and that had been scheduled before the [00:04:00] election had been scheduled back in September, I think, of 2016, and this proved to be an extremely controversial episode on on numerous different levels.

First, there were quite a number of faculty and especially students who. Wanted him to be banned from campus, and I have to say the administration was adamant that he be allowed to speak. Berkeley has a long tradition of free speech and any accredited student group or faculty member is allowed to invite anybody they want to speak on campus.

And that's been a, you know, a standing policy on the part of the University of California, Berkeley, since the free speech movement back in 60 years ago in 1964 now. You know, there are some limits on free speech, the so called time, place, and manner restrictions. You can't, you know, bring a bullhorn into class and start yelling at a professor that way.

Obviously, that's disruptive. But these are all sort of established. The limits on free speech are well established by Supreme Court jurisprudence, and particularly University of California, because it's a public university is required to have a you know, an open an open posture towards any political opinion that might that might be expressed 1 of the political opinions that got expressed.

Of course, it was many people on campus wanted Milo not to be allowed to speak. And we said, no, he will be allowed to speak. And and then what unfolded on the evening of February 2nd, 2017 was really quite quite a striking episode because You know, we tickets have been sold for the main auditorium in the student in the brand new student union.

I think there were about 500 people who were planning on attending this thing. Berkeley, as you know, with protocols for this kind of thing, we'd set up a line for people to line up to get into the venue. And there was also a separate space that had been cordoned off for people to protest. You know, we had about, I think, maybe 100 police officers University police officers who were there to make sure that good order would be would be maintained at 1st, you know, up until nightfall.

The talk was set to go on. I think it's 30 or something like that. So, you know, it was in it was in [00:06:00] February. It was quite dark. And everything was going fine. You know, there were people lining up to go listen to Milo talk. And then there were people who were in the Kordendorff area that were protesting, and it was all sort of going according to protocol.

And then right as it became completely dark, an unexpected, an unprecedented event in the history of Berkeley took place, which was About 150, that's an estimate anarchists from Oakland came and arrived using black block tactics to shut the event down. They came on the campus from, you know, it's an open campus in an urban setting.

They just. Float onto campus from the south side of campus and basically started attacking the building in order to disrupt the event. And by the way, there were thousands, literally thousands of people who had gathered around Sproul Plaza, which is the main square at the center of Berkeley to see what was going to happen.

And with that many people, there were not enough cops to do crowd control and to make a long story short, the cops decided for the safety of Milo himself. That they had to, they had to pull the plug on the event. Milo was whisked out of the building in an unmarked vehicle, and he drove off immediately to the Fox News studios in San Jose.

By the way, you know, a riot broke out that were. Television television helicopters—

SHEFFIELD: Wasn't there also dumpster fire ?

GILMAN: There was a fire that was set in the middle of campus right next to our brand new student union. I was really worried. I was in Spall Plaza observing this this all unfold. I mean, the scene, Matt, I have to tell you, is the closest approximation I've ever seen to what I imagined hell would be like.

You know, there was fire burning. There's helicopter music. People had like plugged in and were Playing death metal. There's a riot breaking out. It was really it was a terrible scene. You know, this made national news. It was a huge embarrassment for the university that we had failed to properly prepare for to be to be fair and unprecedented event.

But we, you know, in the event, we were not able to pull that event off. But what happened next, I think, is really characteristic and telling and really gave me a clue right at the very beginning of the [00:08:00] first Trump administration, what things were likely to be like. So Milo you know, this makes him more of a celebrity than he's ever been.

He drives off to San Jose, goes immediately on Fox News, talks about all those terrible liberals at Berkeley who won't let him speak, and makes national news. He gets invited onto a bunch of more talk shows the next day. And meanwhile, the riots sort of continued for several hours, and then eventually it died down.

And I went home around midnight that night, and about five, four o'clock in the morning, my phone starts buzzing, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. And, you know, I was a little bit sleepy, having barely gotten any sleep. And I look at my phone and my phone is blowing up because Lots of friends are texting me. Hey, have you seen what Trump tweeted?

Have you seen what Trump tweeted? And I had not seen it, so I walked on, saw what real Donald Trump had to say, and I'm going to paraphrase. I don't remember the exact phrase, but he said something to the effect of, if Berkeley won't let conservatives speak, we're going to yank Federal funding. And I thought, okay, this is nonsense.

I just put it down. I went to work. And at this point, like when I by the time I got to work at about 8 30 in the morning, the PR and crisis communications team was all up in a lather because phone calls were coming in from local media and national media asking things like how much federal funding does Berkeley get?

So if he yanks it, I happen to know that the approximate number was something like seven or eight hundred million dollars, if you count all the various contracts and, you know, NIH money and NSF money and, you know, large amount of money goes to Berkeley from various federal sources. But I also knew that there was actually no way that Trump could unilaterally yank funding from us.

And so I said, let's just ignore that. And the PR people were like, oh, my God, we have to. You know, we have to, we have to respond to the New York Times. We can't just ignore them. Like, ignore them. It's a silly, it's a silly question. Trump's just bullshitting and trying to jit us up and troll us, and we should just ignore that.

Don't feed the troll, even if he's president. Even if it's the New York Times responding to the troll, we don't have to [00:10:00] do that. But the PR people just wouldn't, you know, they start calling around different departments to figure out how much money it is and and I just was like, okay, forget it. If you guys insist on doing this, go ahead.

But what unfolded over the next two days was actually really, really interesting because What the media kind of realized is actually, if the federal government wanted to yank funding from Berkeley, they probably couldn't do that. They'd have to yank it from the whole UC system. So then calls started going into all of the other nine campuses at the UC system asking them, how much money do you get from the federal government?

And then people realized, well, actually, they probably couldn't target just the UC system. They'd have to target Like all federal systems, because the money runs through these, you know, things like the NSF grant making process, which is, you know, it's not it's controlled by scientists and so on. So if they want to yank money, they have to make money from all the universities.

And all of a sudden, all the universities in the country were being called by local and national media, asking them how much money they get from the federal government. And this took up 2 days of Executive time that was basically completely disrupted the operations of all the universities in the country based on one tweet that Donald Trump types, you know, with his thumbs in 30 seconds over breakfast.

The ROI in terms of disruption of what he regards as adversary institutions was just incredible, right? I mean, 30 seconds of tweeting. Two days and lost productivity for the executive for executives at universities across the country. It really gave me a sense of two things. One is what Trump's methods are for kind of trying to throw the you know what he regards as opposition institutions offline and also the inability of those institutions to see what he's doing and realize they're being played for suckers.

And that includes both the media institutions who were being his useful idiot and propagating his his trollishness into these universities and the inability of university to say we're just not going to play that game. And I think of that to me has become a microcosm that I personally experienced of the way in which Trump has just outplayed both the mainstream media and many of the institutions in the country over the last, you know, now going on, going on eight years.

SHEFFIELD: [00:12:00] Yeah, well, that certainly has been the case and, and it was an episode also that, I mean, it was one of many of. Of that, those early years of his political career that did illustrate not only that the institutions didn't know how to respond to them, but also there were no countervailing institutions or individuals.

To really push back adequately and actually explain this is what he's doing you know, and, and that, and he's continued this, you know, this, this litigious or, and trollish threatening approach ever since. And, you know, like, just most recently, he was in the news for launching a lawsuit against the Des Moines register for a poll that was done that showed him losing the state of Iowa.

And of course that was not. It was way off by Ann Selzer. But obviously this is not a real lawsuit. It's designed to intimidate and to make things costly for people. And, you know, this is, it's just not for some reason. People who have these institutional positions, they don't want to say that that's what's happening.

And they don't and they also don't want to talk about just the gross hypocrisy of this, that if you claim that things are being censored, you know, you're, you're against censorship. You're a free speech absolutist. And that's what they're, you know, what Trump and Elon Musk and all these other people are constantly claiming to be.

And yet they're the only ones who are using literal government. Power to try to forcibly control the speech of others and penalize them for

GILMAN: yeah.

Trump has learned from other authoritarians' playbooks

GILMAN: So, I mean, the I think what's interesting about this retribution campaign that Trump and his minions are promising to deliver. I mean, the 1st thing I would say is we don't actually know if they're going to do all of these things that they're threatening to do.

And they may just be saying, I mean, you know, in 2016, the campaign slogan was locker up, locker up, locker up with regard to Hillary Clinton. And then, you know, once he actually took office, he didn't pay much attention to Hillary Clinton anymore at all. Right? [00:14:00] He had moved on and it may be that that's going to be the same case here.

He's claiming, you know. Various people are claiming he's going to go after people like Liz Cheney or, you know, various people who are involved in trying to prosecute him and in various in various venues and, you know, maybe he's going to go after those people. Maybe he's just going to ignore, but I do think that the the Des Moines register lawsuit is actually a telling about another part of what his strategy Thank you is likely to be if he's serious about the retribution campaign.

So, this is actually something that, if you look at other authoritarian illiberal democratic governments, that is very common, actually. I mean, I'm thinking here of people like, you know, Erdogan, or in Turkey, or Orban in Hungary, or Putin in Russia. or Bolsonaro in Brazil. These are all people who get elected in elections, so they're Democrat, they're Democrats in that sense, but they're deeply illiberal.

And the strategy they have for dealing with their political adversaries, the political, the political opposition, is actually has two different dimensions to it. So on the one hand, Yes, there are high value targets that they try to go after. So, you know, if I were Liz Cheney, I would be pretty concerned that she might, she's made herself into a lightning rod, and they might specifically want to go after her.

You know, in the same way that Putin went after Navalny, for example, as the leader of the opposition in Russia. But then the other part of the strategy And I say it's a strategy because these people are also all learning from each other, right? Like Orban came and gave a series of talks at the Heritage Foundation back in June.

Maybe it was May of this year. CPAC organized an event in in Budapest this fall. So they're all mutually learning their strategies and tactics from one another. So this is not just that there's similarities, a vibe or whatever. These are actually like Programmatic elements. And if you look at what's been done in some of these other [00:16:00] countries, yes, they go after high value targets, but they also select kind of at random, lower level, lower profile people to go after.

And the at random point is really critical because going after somebody like the Des Moines Register and Am Seltzer, you know, she's just a pollster. Who's been doing this job for a long time. There's literally hundreds of people like her across the country and various guises going after her this way and bringing down, bringing down this kind of heavy handed you know, lawsuit against her puts fear and people at a totally different level, right?

When people go after, you know, whenever anybody who's very high profile gets targeted, you know, that's bad, but it doesn't like make other people who aren't high profile scared. It's when they start going after the little guy that makes all the other little guys. Sort of sit up and think twice about what they're doing.

So it's actually in some ways from an intimidation perspective. Going after an Anselter is a much more dire thing than going after a Liz Cheney. We don't know that they're going to do these things. You know you've got to imagine that the, You know, the first amendment rights of the Des Moines Register and the press in particular.

You know, the Supreme Court has 60 years of jurisprudence on this, but we don't know what this court's going to do in terms of upholding those kinds of rules about, you know, very loose definitions of what defamation against public figures looks like. And, we'll see what the where these lawsuits go.

You know, trust in the court system in the United States just hit a low an all time low since polling began on the matter, and it's not totally clear to me that the court system is going to be something that we can rely on going forward.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it seems not. And I mean, just recently there was a judge who got rebuked for publishing an essay criticizing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for lying about his wife flying flags outside of his house that were insurrectionist and linked to Christian supremacism and Christian nationalism he wrote a New York Times op ed about that.

And, The judge got reprimanded [00:18:00] for a breach, a supposed breach of ethics, not Samuel Alito, the guy who actually did the gross violation of his supposed judicial impartiality. I mean, it's, you know, that's, it's, and, and, and it's just, just this very common vein. I do, I think that a lot of people. They think that this Trumpian, you know, flavored authoritarianism is going to ignore them, but these cases like against Ann Selzer and other ones, which we will see, and certainly like the lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos for stating a judicially derived fact.

About Donald Trump being found liable for rape. You know, he was sued over that and these there. It's exactly what you're saying. It's to it's to make it so that people not only are they not only to confuse the public about what is true, but also to prevent people from saying what is true, whether through force of law or just their own acquiescence.

GILMAN: Yeah, I am. I think one distinction that's really useful for thinking about what we might be coming up against is the distinction between the rule of law. Which is a basic foundational principle of liberal governance, and then rule by law. So the distinction that's often made between those two things, rule of law assumes that the process of law the process of adjudication is impartial.

You get the same set of facts, people, you'll get the same results regardless of who the person is that's being accused, who the judge is that's doing the adjudication, who the jury is that's evaluating the facts. Rule by law is something different. Rule by law is uses the same sort of mechanisms. There's a court case and so on and so forth, but the results are preordained.

And you know, Navalny, for example, to go back to that example, to go back to the Russia example, you know, he was tried in a court of law. They went through a process that looks [00:20:00] like a court case and looks like there's a, you know, fair minded evaluation of the evidence, but it was a foregone conclusion.

How that would go the, the, the, the legal the legal process was a kind of theater for making it seem legitimate and seem like an even handed decision. So it's sort of drafting off of the reputation of the law as an even handed force to produce a totally preordained and uneven handed result. And, you know, we may be heading into that kind of a scenario where.

The judicial system is simply no longer reliable to provide a fair minded result that is, you know equality before the law, no matter who's coming in front of the judges and juries.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and also especially given their very pronounced ability to and interest in revenue shopping for lawsuits and like that.

That one judge in Texas whose name I can't remember off the top of my head you know, his. He's declaring half the laws unconstitutional in the United States because he doesn't like him and they go against his religion, but oops, I can't say that in but he all but, you know, says that in his in his opinions.

And so that's, I mean, you know, and, and I think also we can get a flavor of, especially from the academia side. I think that that's. You know, one of the areas where they have shown their hand the most about in terms of what their intent are is because, you know, overwhelmingly there isn't. Any right wing domestic policy on most issues you know, not, notwithstanding project 2025, like the document, if you actually read it, you know, it has all kinds of contradictory proposals and that were in many cases, very immature and just almost childish in terms of their quality of writing.

And like the policy ideas, you know, they could all be done, like they'll, they'll spend 30 pages on something. That essentially, if you were to be able to do [00:22:00] it at all legally, it would be done in a week. And so the whole paper is it's pretending to be a policy for an entire administration, but it's actually an outline for one week of work.

And so, but, you know, but whereas in the realm of public education, they have actually began to develop more of a you know, a larger policy domestic policy apparatus. And, you know, there's a lot of things and you're in your own observations that you have talked about in terms of what like Rhonda Sanness, for instance, has done and what he would do.

That's, we can get some flavor of what might be in store.

The crisis of legitimacy in higher education

GILMAN: Yeah, I mean, I think that the way to cut into this topic, Matt, might be to start with the fact that I think there's a much broader crisis of legitimacy in. In the Academy, particularly in the elite Academy.

Used to be, you know, I'll talk about California because that's where I'm from. I went to Berkeley. I worked at Berkeley. And I noticed the various educational systems here, both the Cal State system and the UC system quite well. But I think what I'm about to say is probably pretty true of most places in the country.

It used to be and when I say used to be, I mean, as recently as the 1990s, maybe even the 2000s, that support for the University of California and California state system was a pretty bipartisan affair. You know, if anything, Republicans were probably a little bit more inclined to fund the UC system as they saw some of the.

You know, the value that was provided by having a well trained workforce that the state was training for, you know, without requiring that the companies train them, they saw the IP that was coming out of these organizations. And so they were, you know, they were in favor of they were in favor of higher education.

There's been a kind of a triple critique. I think of higher education that has emerged over the last 10, 15 years, 15 years, really on the one hand. We'll get to the right wing critique [00:24:00] last, but there's two other critiques that I think are important because it shows the vulnerability that universities are in.

So one critique is what I would call kind of left wing critique, which is that people say from this perspective, that the elite universities in particular are basically engines of elite reproduction, neoliberal reproduction. So, you know, they're very expensive. They favor people who have privileged positions.

They reentrench privilege. You know, you go to, you know, high percentage of the people who go to the Ivy League have parents who went to the Ivy League. And so the privileges of those people just gets replicated generation in generation out. So, rather than being an engine of social mobility, it's become an engine of.

Class reproduction and and privileged reproduction. So that's kind of a left wing critique of the academy. There's also a libertarian critique of the academy, which most prominently is probably been promoted by people like Peter Thiel says that, you know, it's just a waste of money. It's a waste of time and money.

Forget it. Don't go to the university. I mean, he went to Stanford, but like he sponsors people. I know some people who have actually been through these programs to say, listen, don't go. If you get into the Ivy League, it's I mean, he's kind of admitting that the Ivy League maybe is actually admitting high, you know, highly talented people.

If you get into the Ivy League, don't go to the Ivy League. Instead, I'll pay you all this money to come live in a group house in San Francisco and just start a business. You don't need to do anything. You can just cut out, cut out that whole phase of life and just don't waste the money. Don't waste the time.

Just go get right into it and get into business. So there's kind of a critique that it's just a waste of time and money, libertarian critique, if you will. And then there's the right wing critique, which is that, you know, universities are basically sites of woke indoctrination, right? Not always entirely clear.

We'll get into some of what they mean by that in a second. But the thing I would just say about those 3 critiques is each 1 of them is Probably pretty unfair as a overall critique of universities, even specific universities. But they all also have an element of truth to them. It is true [00:26:00] that, you know, elite universities tend to bring a lot of kids who are already from elite families into them.

And so, and insofar as they're gatekeepers to You know, high quality jobs and other kinds of opportunities in society. That's pretty unfair. And that's not the only thing they do, but that is one thing that definitely is in effect. And there is no doubt that within the panoply of institutions in this country, the right wing is not wrong that.

Universities are more to the left more on the liberal side than churches or the military or corporations or what have you. Right? So that's true, too. And, you know, it is incredibly expensive to go to 1 of these private universities. So, you know, the, you know, and the opportunity cost of spending 4 years of your life and.

You know, if you go to an Ivy League university, I think the sticker price right now is something like 350, 000 for a four year education. So, you know, that's a lot of money and a lot of time to spend on something and you better be sure you're getting value out of that. Now, it's also important to note that, like, these three critiques sort of can't all be true at the same time.

They have dimensions of truth to them, but they're not mutually. I mean, if, in fact, it's an engine of neoliberal reproduction for elites, then how can it really not be adding value for those elites, right? You know, and then for the people who aren't necessarily elite who get into those institutions, doesn't that give them a leg up to get onto the, you know, the ladder to the upper class, right?

So there's ways in which, you know, maybe they're hearing a lot of woke stuff, but then they're going and joining investment banks, right? So, like, how much are they actually being indoctrinated if they're going and, like, then Joining up at corporations and so on. And the reason why these things are not complete truths about any of them, but also have partial truths about them is, of course, universities.

Are highly diverse, highly complicated places with very different things going on with different segments of the student population, different parts of the university. What goes on in the business school is very different from what goes on in the ethnic studies department and so on and so forth. So these are these are highly You know, back in the 1960s, the president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, said that universities really ought to be thought [00:28:00] of as not as universities, not as a singular thing, but as multiversities, right?

And that multipli that multiplicity of what universities are has, you know, used to be a strength for them because they could appeal to lots of constituencies, but now it's turned into a weakness as the, there's, there's something for everybody to find critical about universities. And so the right has found a pretty juicy target.

Okay. In universities, because there's always it's really easy to not pick at universities. There's a lot of people saying a lot of crazy things at universities, people with tenure, you know, 18 year olds who don't have a lot of sense of what you know how the world actually works, who will be happy to go on camera or to publish in, you know, to tweet something in moderate.

And then, you know, they can say, Oh, my God, look at these students at this university. Look how crazy they are. You can pick like 3 tweets and all of a sudden you have a trend story. On OAN, right? So, like, the, the, the way in which the media can represent what's going on at these universities by picking the most extreme and most ridiculous elements of what's going on there is, is a really easy thing for them to do.

SHEFFIELD: I actually think it's very possible that all of those critiques are true. You know, and that I mean, that, you know, there, there's so much of the way that federal funding is done for universities has been on the inputs and rather than on cost control and, and the, the cost to students.

And, you know, if, if, if things were, if costs were lowered rather than buildings were built, That would be a much better way for the federal monies to be spent because, you know, the the monies, the tuition costs just keep going up and, you know, and, and that's, I think is probably the, the Achilles heel for higher education in the United States is that it just keeps getting more expensive, you know, whereas, and if you can, I mean, that was one of the policies of Kamala Harris that she didn't talk about very much, but, you know, free community college.

That would have been a great thing and then a lot of, a lot of good for a lot of people. But she almost never talked [00:30:00] about it, unfortunately.

GILMAN: Well, I'll tell a story that's not very well known. It's another Berkeley story that might be of interest to people. So back when the so called master plan for California higher education was put together in the mid 1950s by Clark Kerr, who I mentioned earlier originally, you know, there'd been Berkeley, you know, the University of California used to be just one campus.

It was Berkeley. And then that was set up in 1869. And then the so called Southern campus, which was a branch campus that would eventually grow into UCLA was set up in 1910. And then eventually, you know, a bunch of additional campuses were built. There was also the the state colleges, which became the California state system that was basically serving local communities, and then there was the community colleges and originally what in order to control costs the idea was that when they made the master plan, the UCs were going to be designed To train technical elites at the undergraduate level, graduate students and most importantly, produce original research.

And the faculty would be chosen based on their research credentials. And then, you know, for mass education for people who need to be county, you know, county lawyers and accountants and dentists and so on, they would, you know, go to the Cal State systems and for people who just wanted basic introductory courses, they could take the community college system.

Now, the thing that was originally proposed was that. The uc system would only be for people in their last two years taking upper division classes that all people would be expected to go to community college to take their gen ed classes for their freshman and sophomore years. And then, you know, if they did well in those, they could then transfer, they could finish their AA and go into the workforce, or if they wanted to, if they were showed.

Academic promise they can then transfer to one of the UCs to finish off their last two years taking upper division courses. The idea was that the senior research faculty didn't make much sense for them to teach introductory courses. It's kind of a waste of their time and talent made more sense for them to teach specialized courses in the upper division and the graduates course.

[00:32:00] So that was the original idea. And the reason why that was defeated. hilariously, is that school boosters of the football programs at UCLA and Berkeley did not want that to happen because if they didn't have freshmen and sophomores, they would not be able to field effective football teams. And so the football program basically kiboshed the system that would have massively cost controlled the entire UC system down to this present day.

The role of sports in universities

GILMAN: Um, so there's, there's many irrationalities, right? To the way in which universities, the fact that universities have. You know, there's a half a million people who participate in N. C. A. A. sports. This is totally, the United States is a total outlier. In no other country in the world is mass sports a major part of university education.

Yeah, there's maybe some rowing teams and people can do intramural squash if you go to Oxford or Cambridge. But the idea that like, there's a mass entertainment industry of college students participating in sport is just a totally weird American thing. And it ends up deforming lots of aspects of Of higher education.

I mean, I think the biggest single surprise for me when I started working in the upper administration, Berkeley was what a huge percentage of the time for the senior administration was taken up by managing the sports programs. I mean, I would say something like 20 percent of the senior leadership's time went to sports and it's because it's the alumni.

It's the donors, the potential for corruption. It's the underperforming, underperforming students. There's a ton of things that are associated with sports. That are just deforming of universities, and that's a microcosm for so many other things that go on at universities that are not very rational and that don't lead to a, you know, effective cost management of universities.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. College sports. And that's in addition to the exploitation of deck of the athletes for decades. But hopefully is coming to an end. We'll see. But I guess that's another, that's another show for another day. But yeah, I mean, but, you know, so there are, as, as, as you said, you know, plenty of critiques that are valid that people can make and it's an easy target these you know, you know universities and colleges.

[00:34:00] But of course for the reactionary right. Ultimately, that's not their, their main motivation. Their main motivation is that you know, for the people who, who run Donald Trump, so the people who set the agenda in the Republican party you know, William F. Buckley, I mean, his career started with an attack on Yale and it's saying that Yale was full of godless.

Communists who said the Bible wasn't true and we have to stop them. And that has been the agenda for, you know, the, the ruling part of the Republican party. You know, I mean, you know, for, for a long time, there was kind of this mix of, you know, more traditional conservative types along with the reactionaries and but now, you know, the conservatives have basically all been expelled along with Liz Cheney and people like her and Adam Kinzinger.

And so now the reactionaries are finally getting to do what they want fully.

DeSantis' attack on Florida universities will be Trump's model

SHEFFIELD: And you know, and, and with Florida as you, you had did a, went, did a very viral Twitter thread about some of the policies that, because I, I think a lot of academics. You know, they have tenure and whatnot. And so they think that they're safe from all this stuff.

But the reality is that they're not. And you talked about that in your thread.

GILMAN: Yeah, so let's talk about the Florida situation in some detail, because I think it's, it's it's emblematic where things might be about to go. So, you know, Ron DeSantis obviously was. trying to get the Republican nomination for president this year failed in that effort, got steamrolled by Trump.

But as part of trying to burnish his right wing credentials, um, his reactionary credentials, if you will, one of the things he did was decide to take on what he characterized as some of the woke Universities in in Florida and specifically the new college in Florida, which is the kind of public, but it's a fairly small liberal arts college in Florida.

And basically what he did was he, replaced the I don't know if they're called the board of [00:36:00] directors or what have you. But, you know, he decried them as essentially a kind of a propaganda mill instead of a college and has systematically sought to push out faculty members who are preaching what he regards as leftist, Marxist, woke, you know ideas.

And the idea of academic freedom which, you know, first emerged Actually, in response to another attack on universities that took place during World War One, there were people who were peaceniks criticized Woodrow Wilson's decision to bring the United States into World War One and Woodrow Wilson, you know, went after Columbia University.

Again, it was Columbia that was a lightning rod for this. And one of the most prominent academics there France Boas in the anthropology department who, you know, In some ways could be seen as the, you know godfather of a lot of what we might what the right would today described as as woke activity in the sense that he believed in cultural relativism.

He believed that, you know, all human societies had their own dignity that needs to be understood on their own terms. And this idea of a kind of You know a relativism that did not place Western and Christian ideas at the top of the hierarchy of human knowledge and morality was central to his philosophy and his approach to anthropology and he led the charge to demand that the university protect faculty members.

From the attempt to censor them by the federal government on that is what resulted in what we now call academic freedom. And there's a lot of details to that story. You get into if you want, but this was really a signal moment that took place over a century ago now. And since then, there's really been a standard that academic freedom that, you know, professors have academic freedom.

And the reason why they're granted tenure is the idea is that if they're if they're if you can fire them. Then they don't really have academic freedom, because if they propose an idea that's considered heretical in any way, you know, their enemies in one way or another could yank their contracts from them.

So the idea that [00:38:00] you the liberal, small L liberal idea that you need to have free inquiry in a free society is false. Grounded in the notion of academic freedom in the academy that provides professors with the ability to ask any question that they can answer it with any, you know, any in any way that they see fit, and they need to be able to be protected from being fired if they say things that are considered, yeah, at odds with received wisdom in one way or another. And those received wisdoms could be scientific or technical, but they could also be political or methodological or what have you. But the notion of academic freedom and tenure have been conjoined, have been joined at the hip really for the last century.

This is exactly what DeSantis decided at the behest of Chris Rufo to take on right. And so Chris Rufo, I think, is really the person who's kind of the intellectual mover and shaker behind this movement to try to really take a hammer and tongs to universities. So, you know, practically the way they did this was to go in and take control over the board of directors at the new college.

And to start, you know, defunding them and demanding that certain kinds of courses not be taught. And and it really has resulted in a wholesale evisceration of what was once one of the best public liberal arts colleges in the country. You know, people, professors have fled, enrollments are way down.

It's mostly, you know, mostly most, it's mostly student athletes now. And and it's really, you know, Destroyed what was a really good university. In terms of the tweet thread where I talked about this, I think the reason why it went viral is that I made another point, which is that building a great institution of higher learning and research is a very complicated and arduous process that takes.

Decades to do. And but destroying it is really quick. And once you destroy it, it's really hard to put it back together again.

Historical parallels: Germany in the 1930s and the rise of the American university

GILMAN: And the example I gave of this was looking back to what happened in Germany in the 1930s. So if you go to [00:40:00] You look at the survey, the world of academic research, scholarly research in the 1st 3rd of the 20th century.

There's just simply no doubt the German University, German research universities are by far the best in the world. And you can see this. If you go and look at who wins all the Nobel prizes you know, Germany has an enormous lead over every other country.

SHEFFIELD: And I'm sorry, and it doesn't even matter what the fields were and whether it was even science or arts or whatever, whatever science,

GILMAN: arts, you know, literature you know, obviously all the Nobel fields, but also many of the leading economists were were German really in every field in every intellectual field, Germany was really, really the powerhouse country.

The U. S. Was basically a provincial backwater. Of of of of of Europe. They're, you know, Cambridge and Oxford were very good. You know, there are some good universities in Italy, you know, when Hitler came in. And by the way, many of the faculty members at these German universities were Jews. And so when Hitler came in in 1933, one of the first things he did was get all the Jews fired.

And, you know, many of them left and some of them, the physicists, especially ended up in the United States and Became the backbone of the Manhattan Project which is part of what helped the United States win World War Two. The United States ended up being a huge beneficiary of this exodus from German universities and the power the, the way in which the United States became the number one academic powerhouse in the world in the post war era was very much predicated on, well, there were You know, several different factors.

One factor was the exodus of European intellectuals to American universities that provided a supercharging of intellectual capital into American universities. Another one was massive funding of universities by the federal government, which allowed for the massive expansion of the university system.

And the people who went into those university systems were Students under the GI Bill, which is one of the, I think, most underrated pieces of social legislation this country's ever had. Everybody who came out of World War 2 and these programs continue to this day. One of the major reasons why people have an incentive or want to join the [00:42:00] military is you will get your university education funded by the military.

And so this continues to be a major way in which universities you know, get funded is through that kind of that kind of a program. So those things built up the United States into the academic superpower that it has been for the last 75 years. And German universities have never recovered. I mean, this is the key point.

Once they were destroyed, you know, Hitler lost 12, lost the war 12 years later, the Nazis were totally repudiated from a political perspective. But German universities and German research you know, there's many good people in Germany now, but Germany is nowhere close to where it was. It's, you know, again, I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but if you look at the number of Germans, people at German universities who win Nobel prizes now compared to the number of people at American universities who win Nobel prizes, I don't know what the ratio is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 20 to 1, and it's got to be at least 10 to 1 and you know, the numbers would have been almost the reverse prior to.

Prior to Hitler's destruction of the German university system. So, you know, I, I made that point last summer and, you know, Chris Ruffo himself screenshot retweeted me and said, you bet this is exactly what we're planning on doing. So you know, I got an affirmation, you know, the things I'm saying on this podcast to you, Matt, are, are not things that.

Is some deranged, you know, Rants of some liberal these are like what they say explicitly and then when I say what I think they're planning on doing They say you're right. We're planning on doing that so that is the intention of of the Of the radical right in terms of what it wants to do to eviscerate what they regard as these, you know, engines of will conduct indoctrination.

Despite the right's wholesale assault on education, many academics still don't take it seriously

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, and it's incredibly disturbing. And, you know, what's but perhaps what is equally disturbing, I think, is that even now, after the Florida example I think a lot of a lot of academics still are not aware of what they're up against and still. Don't want to defend, [00:44:00] you know, the university, like there's, you know, there's just in the same way that you see in the the mainstream media, you know, does not really defend itself.

It just kind of says, well, oh, look, this is happening. It's, it's not good. Well, well, yeah, I think

GILMAN: I think that's right. And, you know, look, the there's the basic assumption that's pervasive in the academy and sometimes people will question it, but it's still the baseline assumption that people have that the funding system that has been around.

More or less in this form for the last, you know, 7 or 8 decades is not going to change in any radical way. Maybe the money will go up and down a little bit, you know, but like, the basic, the idea that, like, everybody who's ambitious wants to send their kids to an elite university, all the ambitious kids want to do that, that they're all going to get good jobs at the end of that, that all that whole structure.

No longer really is something that a lot of people outside the academy buy into, but it's still the overwhelmingly dominant ideological belief of the academy about itself, and that complacency is part of why I think that very few certainly rank and file members of the faculty have any idea what's about to hit them, much less have a plan for what to do when it hits them.

I don't think people are are ready for this at all. You know, I'll make another point, which is a little bit political, and I want to pick up something you said right at the opening of this conversation, Max. I think it's a really important point is that in general, you know. Whether it's newspapers or or, or the Democratic Party or universities, they're not organized to be in opposition.

You know, if you look at a parliamentary system like they have in Britain, for example, right? There is an opposition party. The, whatever the second largest party in parliament is, is the official opposition. And every, every member of the cabinet has a shadow member of the cabinet in the opposition party that is immediately shadowing them so that if the government falls and the other party [00:46:00] comes in, they're able to walk in overnight, right?

So when Keir Starmer won the election on July 4th this year, like literally the next day, everybody comes in and all those cabinet positions were filled by members of the cabinet. Labor shadow cabinet that had been actually shadowing all of these dockets all along. There's nothing like that in our system.

We don't you know, who's the leader of the opposition now? You couldn't say I mean, is it hakeem jeffries? Not really. Is it nancy pelosi? Not her. Is it gavin newsom? It's not her Right? You know, so there's there is no organized opposition party. You know, so that that makes it a lot easier for whoever is in power to just kind of do things automatically and not really find a systematic pushback against anything in particular that they're doing.

The deadly myth of "non-partisanship" in an era where the far-right is assaulting all knowledge

GILMAN: This is compounded by the fact that, particularly in the case of the Academy and the mainstream media, they see themselves, their self conception is that they are non partisan, right? That they aren't taking sides. They're merely objective and calling balls and strikes. That's also really different from other countries, right?

In other countries, almost all the newspapers are very explicit about their party affiliations. They're often like Literally arms of the party of a party in question, right? They don't think of themselves as, you know, engaged in objective reporting. They see themselves as presenting the point of view of majority party or the opposition party as the case may be right.

So therefore, they're very clear about what their function and their role is within the political ecosystem. That's nothing like that here. The New York Times does not think of itself, the right thinks of it as being, you know, the media arm of the Democratic Party, and it's true, probably, that, I don't know, 90 percent of the people who work in the New York Times news desk are Democrats, but their self conception is not that they're doing the Democrats bidding, right?

That's why they do things like publish the, you know You know, publish the story about Hillary Clinton's emails you know, a week before the election in 2016, right? And, you know, publish things like articles that say Trump can win on character. That was a famous op [00:48:00] ed that the New York Times put out back in this fall, right?

I mean, like, you know, they just don't have a coherent perspective on what What they are you know, you know, I mean, I've said this, this is veering away from the Academy, but I've said this about the New York Times for years, the, you know, and this is true of other parts of the media to like the like, like CNN or Huffington Post or places like that, you know, they can't decide and Whether they are the gray lady, the newspaper of record telling the truth, you know, that's the way it is Walter Cronkite style or are they woke clickbait right for their, you know, liberal audiences and they don't think they don't realize they think that those things are basically identical and they don't understand that that those things are not identical.

Those are different functions altogether. Right? And so the result is that they're kind of incoherent when they're faced with it. You know, an organized party and government that Is implacably hostile to them and is well organized and understands that it has a clear political agenda at every at every moment.

And that objectivity is not what they're trying to do ever.

SHEFFIELD: No, absolutely. And the best illustration of your point, I think, is to for anyone who doesn't understand it from the right or from either side is, you know, look at how if you look at how the New York Times conducts its analysis. Editorial page and columnists and whatnot, and then compare it with the Washington Times.

The Washington Times has zero liberal columnists on its staff. It has zero people who prefer Democrats over Republicans. Whereas, you know, the New York Times has. Quite a few. They've got Bret Stephens. They've got Ross Douthat, they've got, you know, and, and, and over the years have had a number of people starting with William Sapphire back in the 1970s.

And so that's because, as you said, they don't view themselves as an organ for the Democratic Party, but weirdly enough, I think there's this also the reverse concept is that [00:50:00] Democrats, the Democratic elite. Also believe that the New York Times is on their side and is rooting for them. And so that's why they're constantly complaining about the Times, you know, making these various policies or articles or headlines.

And they're saying, look, this is not fair. You can't do this. You're supposed to be on our side. And the answer is they were never on your side. And if you don't like that about them and you wish that they were different, then you need to start your own thing. We're like, where's Where's the left wing Washington times you know, or, or New York times or whatever, like they don't think in those terms in part because liberalism, you know, so complete secular liberalism, so completely, you know, destroyed in the marketplace of ideas.

You know, Christian fundamentalism, which was really in the United States, the only you know, opposition that there really was they so destroyed it that liberalism in the U S in particular, but not just here, but other countries. Lost all ability to advocate for itself and lost all interest in even trying to because they, you know, they're like, well, look, this is what the studies say.

So this is obviously everyone's going to believe that. It's right there, guys. Here's the policies. We have good policies. We should win

Liberalism's epistemic inability to use power politics

GILMAN: Totally. I mean, but it actually goes to a deeper point about the pathology of liberalism under the current circumstance, which is that The idea of politics as a whole for liberals is predicated on the notion that it should be inclusive and that the best answers come out of compromises between different factions within society, right?

So, like, you know, one of the things that Democrats have been doing, I don't know how long this has been going on for, but certainly since Clinton, the idea is that every time there's a Democrat who gets elected to the White House, They need to appoint at least one Republican to the cabinet, right? The idea that a Republican would appoint, a Republican president would appoint any [00:52:00] Democrat to any position, you know, dog capture, postal service, whatever, right?

No way. It's only going to be Republicans, right? That's because the Democrats think that politics is about compromise. The Republicans, and this comes out of their base's view of, you know, absolutist ideas of morality, they believe in total victory, right? They believe that they should win completely. You can't compromise with Satan,

SHEFFIELD: yeah.

GILMAN: You can't compromise with Satan, right? Like, that's ridiculous. We need to win completely. So it's two totally different models of how politics is supposed to work. And one of the problems I think that liberals have in this country now is that when you're dealing with an opposition of that sort, Right? Or now, now the dominant, now the in power party, you have, you can't continue to, you know, bring a butter knife to the gunfight, right?

That's just not going to work. You have to fight on their terms or they will kill you. And the problem is that fighting on their terms is at odds with the conception of politics that liberals want to have, which is reasoned discourse. Matt's got a perspective, Nils has perspective. The correct answer is somewhere between Matt and Nils, and we're going to hash it out with reasoned discourse.

That model of politics is just at odds with a party like what the Republicans have now become under Trump. They've been going that way for a long time, I would argue since Newt Gingrich, but like, you know, over the last eight years, it's become completely that way, and so if you continue to sort of say, well, You know, they have a point, right?

I mean, you can look at the postmortems that are happening after the election. A lot of people, a lot of liberals saying, well, you know, Donald Trump kind of had a point about this. We kind of had a point about that or, you know, whatever. And like kind of conceding and they're doing the liberal game of saying, hey, We're now going to play nice and like, maybe we can do some bipartisan stuff, right?

And, and then, you know, of course, if they don't do that, then they get accused of being hypocrites by the Republicans, who themselves have no intention of behaving that way. But they say, you guys all claim that it's all about compromise, all about bipartisanship, and then you ram through things. So as [00:54:00] soon as the Democrats start acting like the Republicans, the Republicans start accusing the Democrats of betraying their own principles.

And they're right, because those were the principles and have been the principles of liberalism. So you can't fight illiberalism. With liberal tools. And by the way, this is an idea, this, this conundrum is one that goes back to the very earliest days of political liberalism, Voltaire, you know, the French, you know, great philosopher of democratic liberalism from the middle of the 18th century.

It's famously said that the one thing that you can't tolerate is intolerance, right, as a liberal society. You cannot tolerate intolerance. You have to draw the line there. You should be inclusive, you should be, you should be tolerant, but not of the people who want to destroy the system as a whole. You cannot have that attitude towards them.

And somehow that Voltairean idea, which is a quarter millennium old, has simply not gotten into the noggins of people on the liberal side of the aisle.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, it hasn't. And you know, and there you have I've constructed this really small ball politics that is just incredibly unambitious, you know, and it just walked completely away from the grander visions of FDR or LBJ or Truman, you know, who, who not, not just said big things, but actually did big things, both foreign and domestic and you know, and that, Is something also that you and your co-author talk about.

'Children of a Modest Star' and a future-oriented liberalism

SHEFFIELD: Uh, I we're gonna slide this in here at the very end. I wanna make sure we do that in a book that you guys published recently called children of a Modest Star. So talk about it in, I mean, it's a little bit of a, I don't think it's entirely. Inappropriate to put into this context here. I think.

What do you think?

GILMAN: Well, so yeah, so I just I just published along with my co author, Jonathan Blake, who's also a colleague of mine here at the Institute, a book called Children of Modest Star, which is really trying to think about, planetary what we call planetary challenges, challenges that don't can't be solved by nation states.

[00:56:00] They are, you know, a planetary in scope and that the governance systems we have, whether they are national governance systems or the global governance architecture that's made up of member state institutions that answer to those national states simply are not fit. To deal with and you know, one of the critiques we've gotten of this book.

So our book is we're not calling for world government We're calling for kind of new administrative agencies to deal with things like pandemic risk or climate change you know specifically carbon carbon emissions abatement and stuff like that. It's a series of narrowly tailored Administrative units that can deal with things like, you know, also things like space junk or oceanic plastics These are all things that You know, humans are not trading, so it's not part of the world trade system, per se, but and therefore it's not governed by the WTO or whatever but that we don't have adequate systems for dealing with right now.

The, you know, the critique we've gotten a lot, and it's only gotten louder since Donald Trump won re election, you know, 6 weeks ago is that, you know, you guys are really at odds with the times, right? I mean, it seems like. Neonationalism than nation first politics is is kind of the current wave of the 2020s and people are there's a lot of backlash happening against against any systems of you know, that are perceived to be quote unquote globalist.

I don't think of myself as being a globalist, particularly because I think that that is predicated on a kind of economic integration, which is not, I think, the most important thing for us to be dealing with at a planetary scale. I think a lot of economies can be better done at a more local scale. I think that some of the things that the Biden administration.

Try to get off the ground during its during its time in office around you know, investment in various kinds of infrastructure projects is the kind of thing that should be done at a national scale. So I think those things were good. I believe a lot of those things will actually continue under the Trump administration, partly because a lot of the money from those systems were going into something like 90 percent of the money from.

The inflation reduction act, which was actually an industrial policy act. 90 percent of that money is going into red district. So I'm not sure a lot of those people are going to want to yank the money that's going into their own district. So I [00:58:00] think some of those things will bear fruit over time. So those things that, you know, economic issues are properly dealt with at a national scale, but these planetary issues are not ones that can be dealt with at a national scale.

You know, even if we reduced our carbon emissions to zero overnight, it wouldn't solve the problem. Okay. Climate change problem, the United States is going to face because there's all these other emitters. We have to have some kind of an agency that's going to enforce emissions limits across all the different, you know, actually existing and potential emitters in the world.

Likewise, you know, we clearly saw during 2020 that you can't control pandemic 1 country at a time. Even if you shut your borders, the viruses don't care about that. They move across the borders anyway. So you really can't unless you're like a tiny island and you can really Step things out, you know, it's almost impossible to deal with this, you know, one country at a time.

So the argument that we make in the book is that we need new kinds of governance systems that can adequately deal with that. And we propose basically two ideas, one of which I mentioned earlier, which are these narrowly tailored agencies that can deal with these planetary challenges, but also, and I think this is something that I don't think is necessarily at odds with some of the nation first politics we're seeing, although some people might look askance at some of it, is What we call network translocalism.

And let me explain to you what I mean by that. You know, if you listen again, give a climate change example. You know, I'm not sure it makes sense for Washington, D. C. the federal government to be setting climate change adaptation policies for the whole country, because the kinds of challenges that say, Miami is facing, which are, you know, hurricanes and flooding and you know, wind and things like that sea level rise.

It's totally different from the kinds of challenges that, say, Los Angeles is facing, which is drought and heat waves and fires and so on. Right. So these are both climate change adaptation problems, but they're totally different. On the other hand, the challenges that Los Angeles is facing. Is very similar to the challenges that other cities in the southwest corners of continents with Mediterranean climates places like Lisbon or Cape Town [01:00:00] or Perth, Australia.

These are very similar kinds of climates to California, and therefore they're being changed in very similar ways to the way Southern California's climate is being changed. So it makes a lot of sense for you. Those 4 cities, for example, to share expertise, share resources and share technologies for adapting to the climate change challenges.

Likewise, for Miami, it makes more sense for them to be collaborating with other places in kind of hurricane alleys that are low lying. So those could be places like, you know, islands in the Pacific Ocean. Maybe Shanghai and China, right? Those, you know, the adaptation strategies that they're going to have to adopt the kinds of expertise is that they're going to have to develop the kinds of technologies.

They're going to have to develop the kinds of resources. They're going to need to mobilize or are quite similar the way they're going to need to educate their populations about how to prepare to deal with these climate changing worlds. So those are kind of the 2 big policy things that we propose. And by the way, on the 2nd point.

Okay. The network translocalism. A lot of this stuff is already happening. Actually, there's a lot of and a lot of times this is happening, not just at a government to government level, like, you know, not just the city of. Los Angeles collaborating with the city of Cape Town. It's also about, you know private sector organizations, third sector organizations that are doing this kind of collaboration, you know, people, companies that are developing technologies.

They understand this perfectly. Well, if you develop a technology that can help Angelenos, you know. Have their, you know, their gardens adapt to a drier, hotter climate. You can also sell that technology in other places that are facing similar changes. And so they're, they're, they're, they're doing that propagation that's happening through the market.

And it's also happening through you know, NGOs that are propelling best practices across these spaces.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and and also, I mean, just, you know, to the criticism point, you know, just because the circumstance. May not be as auspicious for an idea. It doesn't mean that it's not true. Just because people don't want to believe something doesn't mean that it's not true or false or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, I

GILMAN: just what I've said about that is [01:02:00] that you know, in some ways the election of Trump may actually accelerate the arrival of the world that I'm proposing we need to get to. Because I think it's going to, you know, the deconstruction of the. Administrative state and that's not exactly what we've been talking about here and this podcast, but that larger goal is going to really reveal that the federal government is not going to be capable of doing the things that need to be done to deal with any of the challenges that we're talking about here.

And so it may actually accelerate that process and reveal the necessity of a totally different kind of structure. I'll just maybe close out with one thought about that. You know, we were talking about the durability of educational institutions, and once you break them, it's hard to put them back together again.

But in general, institutional change, which is something that I've studied as a historian in many different contexts for, for most of my career at this point, major institutional change is rare. You know, institutions of governance, but any institutions you know, churches universities, governments even corporations, they're usually set up at a particular moment in time to deal with a crisis of that moment, right?

And they're designed to deal with the way that crisis was perceived at that moment. And if they're successful, they then often become enduring institutions that go on and then the circumstances of the world in which they were originally set up to deal with inevitably changed over time. Now, sometimes they can adapt to those changes, but a lot of times they can't.

And what they often can't do is effectively address. The new and emerging category of challenges. And then you get to a point where there's a crisis of the institutional order, right? And that's the moment when there's a possibility for institutional massive, you know, radical institutional reform. So I'll give an example.

The first idea for a parliament of nations was proposed in 1795 by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. All right. It took 150 years. So 1945. [01:04:00] Before we got to the United Nations, got to the League of Nations about 25 years before that. But, you know, over a century, at least, before we got to a Parliament of Nations and what it took for nations to be willing to give up even the fig leaf of some of their sovereignty, you know, to these, this transnational organization, supranational organization was a massive crisis to enormous world wars, right?

So, you know, The crisis of the old order and the inability to maintain peace is what eventually led to the establishment of the Security Council under the auspices of the United Nations. The Security Council was the big change from the League of Nations to the United Nations, and the Security Council, for all of its flaws, has been part of the reason why there has not been a direct war between great powers since 1945.

There's a lot of reasons for that, but the Security Council is one reason. The five big powers in the world were given You know, you know, primary power over the ability to do interventions and other parts of the world. And, you know, they were also able to veto it so that they couldn't personally be implicated.

They couldn't nationally be implicated by the power of the Security Council. And that structure that structure made sense in 1945 doesn't make that much sense anymore because the challenges we face. First of all, there's other nations that have risen up that are really powerful. You know, does it make sense that it's England and Yeah.

France that have the permanent seats on the Security Council and not Germany, not India, not Japan. That doesn't really seem to make sense anymore. But also the challenge was that they were set up to deal with. Which is basically preventing wars between preventing war in general, but especially wars between great powers, cataclysmic wars.

That's still a challenge we have to face, right? So I don't think they should go away. I think it's still a useful function, but it's not set up to deal with something like climate change, and it's not set up to deal with something like a pandemic not set up to deal with something like space junk or oceanic plastics.

And so it's incapable of doing so. And so it's probably going to take some kind of a crisis. Crisis. Crisis. Or threat, real, [01:06:00] credible, immediate threat of a crisis, of a very large scale before we're gonna be able to get to real institutional change of the sort that Jonathan and I are proposing in our book.

But why? So you know, you might ask, well, you know, how soon is that crisis gonna come about? We don't know. But the key last point, why write this book now? I think the reason is. One of the things we know is that when a crisis erupts, the people who have a blueprint about what they want to do have a huge advantage in terms of institutional reform over everybody who's just bewildered by it.

So actually beginning to have some blueprints and start conversations about what things can look like so that the crisis, when it comes, doesn't go to waste is, I think, a really valuable exercise.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. And although it would seem nefarious in the views of some people. But they're already probably not fans of yours otherwise.

So, you

GILMAN: know, in general Matt, you know, you're a writer too there's no reason to write anything that everybody's going to agree with. That's not a useful intervention.

SHEFFIELD: No, it isn't. And certainly not how anything interesting gets done. So all right, well so why don't you give your social media handles a plug here so people can keep up with you and also the Institute website and all that.

GILMAN: So I am, I'm weaning myself off of Twitter, but not quite fully there. That's @nils_gilman. I'm now. Gearing myself up on blue skies. So I'm @nils-gilman there. That's probably the best ways to see me. If you want to see me bloviating in the way I just have for the last hour, if you want to see that on a daily basis, those are the places to go.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. And then you should give a plug for the magazine too.

GILMAN: Oh yeah. In addition to being the senior vice president here at the Berggruen Institute, another hat that I wear is as deputy editor of the magazine that we published a magazine, Noema, which is mid-length form magazine of ideas. We publish on a whole bunch of different topics ranging from technology to environmental issues to governance issues.

And we're about to have our fifth [01:08:00] anniversary this coming year which we're pretty excited about. We've gained a pretty big readership over the last five years and we published a ton of great people. And if any of your listeners want to pitch us ideas you can you can, you can write to me directly or or pitch us at our online handle, which is, I think ideas at noemamag.com. All right.

SHEFFIELD: Sounds good. All right. Thanks for coming back.

GILMAN: Thanks, Matt. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: all right. So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the discussion. And you can always get more. If you go to theory of change. show with the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you like what we're doing, you can also go to flux. community and get more podcasts and articles about politics, religion, culture, and society and how they all intersect and affect each other.

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