Earlier episode, Harvard Veritas:
https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/harvard-veritas-interview-with-a-recent-graduate-anonymous-18
Chapter markers:
Chapter markers:
- (00:00) - Introduction and Guest Welcome
- (02:12) - Campus Protests and Media Perception
- (06:29) - Student Political Views and Academic Freedom
- (21:44) - Intellectual History of Wokeism
- (35:46) - STEM vs. Humanities: A Cultural Divide
- (54:30) - Future of Academia and Closing Thoughts
Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.
--
Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on Twitter @hsu_steve.
Creators & Guests
What is Manifold?
Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Join him for wide-ranging conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.
Anonymous Student: There have been like lots of cases where conservative professors have gone like tenure strapped on pretty flimsy grounds for touching certain forbidden subjects that would offend more of a left-wing audience. It's kind of a mess and there aren't very many people who have a consistently like pro-free speech, pro-academic freedom view. But I think there's just like a huge amount of hypocrisy and kind of lack of clear thinking on this issue.
Steve Hsu: Welcome to Manifold. Today my guest is an anonymous STEM student at an Ivy League university. We're keeping him anonymous so he can have full freedom of expression to explain to us what is the situation at our leading universities today from the viewpoint of a student who's still young, not from a viewpoint from an old guy like me.
Welcome to the podcast, Anonymous.
Anonymous Student: Good to be here. Thanks, Steve.
Steve Hsu: It's great to have you on. I read some writing that you posted on the internet, which I think, and from my perspective, showed a lot of insight into how we got to the situation that we're in today.
And also more precisely, what is the exact situation on campus these days, particularly at elite institutions like Ivy league schools. So that's what I hope to talk to you about, today. And this is kind of a sequel to another episode that I did. some time ago in which the guest was also anonymous.
He is a recent graduate of Harvard College. And, that guest is also doing a STEM PhD at another elite university. So, so, in a way, like, that conversation and this conversation are bookends. So welcome to the show.
Great to be here.
All right.
So let's start with the situation on campus and, maybe we could start with something very topical, which is the protests that are taking place.
It's around graduation time now, and there are tons of protests happening against the situation in Gaza, U S involvement, in that war. maybe just tell us what you're seeing on campus.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, sure. So, one of the things I've observed sort of actually being on campus and You know, reading the student newspaper every day and also just like talking to people and my friends and my PhD program is there's a bit of a disconnect between the way the sort of online discourse works on Elon Twitter and what people sort of on campus are kind of privately thinking, where a lot of, The internet discourse around, like, campus protest is driven by, like, viral videos and shocking and extreme clips that you see floating around, but, and some of those clips do capture real things, but the actual situation is kind of different. And what I would kind of recommend, people look at, to really sort of understand about what's been happening over the past year with the sort of Israeli Palestinian conflict and the protesters on both sides is sort of read through the demands, because I think if you actually read through the demands where the protesters on both sides sort of lay out their demands, Their philosophies, you can kind of get a very, a much clearer view of what, where both sides are coming from.
Because with any sort of protest movement, whether that's like Occupy Wall Street or,the Tea Party or something like what Fox News famously did with like Occupy Wall Street, it was, they would send like a reporter down to interview someone and they'd find like the craziest person and then share a clip of a crazy person saying, kind of extreme or shocking things.
And there are crazy people involved in every protest movement, but it didn't really fully capture. And similarly, like with, The Tea Party maybe, like liberal media outlets would send reporters down to protests and like find some conservative boomer saying a crazy thing about Obama being like a secret Kenyan Muslim or something.
And sometimes these viral clips that go around don't really fully capture what's happening. Really the median pro or what the overall tone of the protests is like. And so if you actually go through kind of the protest demands by the pro Palestinian side and the pro Israeli side, I think you can kind of get a bit of a clear understanding of, like the philosophical roots of, both sides is thinking, and it's obviously a very.
weighty moral issue. But I think, if people kind of read and, different Ivy League schools are all different, but usually the student newspaper like publishes editorials and kind of demands and, you can sort of fully grasp what's going on there, but on Elon Twitter, there wasn't really. Much of a discussion of like the, like reading through these demands, it was more like there would be one shocking video per day that would go completely viral and then that would sort of dominate discourse.
Steve Hsu: So let me try to drill down on the way that students actually think, on campus. So.
What fraction of the students, we're not talking just about protesters, but what fraction of the, of all the students on campus roughly, and you can, you can differentiate between undergraduate and grad students if you want, would accept terminology like settler colonialism to describe Israel?
Anonymous Student: I think that would probably be a mod, My minority position, but within sort of certain academic sub fields, I think, if you kind of like to look at the political affiliation by different academic departments, famously like, these conservative professors, John Shields, I think is his name. He did a survey back in 2015 by academic departments and found anthropology departments were like a hundred to one.
Democrat to Republican, whereas a business school might be two to one Democrat to Republican. So I think. among anthropology PhD students, that would be like a, a far more common view. And there would be, that would be much, very much the norm, but in a lot of STEM fields and like business, these are fairly apolitical and people don't, in grad school, at least, and even undergrad people sort of don't, the vast majority of students would be more like liberal, but not I don't think they would really subscribe to that, like, hyper woke, er, framework.
Steve Hsu: Okay. And, what about, sort of, the opposing extreme view, which is that, oh, Hamas started this, and Israel has a right to exist, so they should just be able to kill, they should just be allowed to kill as many people as necessary to ensure their national security?
Anonymous Student: Yeah, I think, that sort of, like, very, extreme, like, pro, like, Likud party view would not be very widely held.
Like, I think, you know, if you look at polling for support of Israel in the United States, it's more like, conservative boomers and evangelicals and, you know, Orthodox Jews. And I think there aren't too many evangelicals at Ivy League universities. So I think among, you know, Jewish students, there would be higher support.
But even if you look at like Haaretz and polling ofJewish Americans, I don't think, like, majority of Jewish Americans, I think, oppose Netanyahu and think that is too far, but obviously, political discourse in Israel is very far from the truth.much more right wing than American Jewish, views of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Steve Hsu: Okay, let's move now to, what I think is a little bit more toward the center. How about claims that criticism of the actions of the State of Israel regarding the Palestinians are anti Semitic in nature?
Anonymous Student: Yeah, so I think that's sort of the build that Congress has been, yes, debating, which I think is not really, I'm not a constitutional scholar, but that doesn't really seem in line with the First Amendment amendment to, view criticism as of Israel as being a constitutional scholar.
like ipso facto evidence of anti semitism. I think that's kind of,the Republican party in the U. S. is like very, very pro Israel, like 110 percent pro Israel, but that's not a widely held view on campus, and I don't think by any sort of reasonable, definition of the word anti Semitism, that's a very delicate topic as well, like, these protests are not, they're not like passing out copies of Mein Kampf in the Palestinian tense, so I think there's kind of a very shallow, discussion of what it is.
Why, a lot of these students are protesting Israel and they're not really doing so out of like Nazi ideology, so far as I can tell.
Steve Hsu: Is there a feeling on campus that wealthy alumni, hedge fund billionaires, et cetera, are trying to impose some kind of speech regime on campus that more or less prevents criticism of Israel over this matter?
Anonymous Student: Yeah, so in the congressional testimony,there clearly is, like, an attempt by a lot of pro-Israel, like mega donors to these universities. And I'm not an expert on Ivy League finances, but like there's sort of like this power law dynamic where,like one or two very, very wealthy alumni of a school can put up huge amounts of money.
So those mega donors do have a, the president's ear of, or of whatever university. And I think if you kind of look at the boards of most Ivy league universities, they're, you know, generally people who make money like hedge funds or businessmen. And, I think like some of them are Jewish, but, and would probably be pro Israel, but some are just kind of
politically moderate business types who kind of think, you know, a lot of this Wokeness stuff has gone too far but are not super hawkishly pro Denyahu or pro Israel. So I think that's There is definitely a pressure campaign going on to sort of, fire,certain professors. but I think if you've been sort of following this issue for like the past couple of decades, there have been like lots of cases where conservative professors have gone like tenure strapped on pretty flimsy grounds for opposing, sort of,certain, touching certain forbidden subjects that would offend more of a left wing audience. So I think,there's, it's kind of a mess and there aren't very many people who consistently like the pro free speech, pro academic freedom view, which I think I'm, sort of inclined towards a free speech absolutism, as Elon Musk would put it.
But, I think there's just a huge amount of hypocrisy and a kind of lack of clear thinking on this issue.
Steve Hsu: It does seem to me that, you know, right up until the point where You know, Gaza, you know, the, what was it, October 6 events happened right until that point, most of the super donors and members of the board of trustees at these schools were very protective of the administrators and professors that were sort of far left woke and willing to tolerate. You know things like discrimination against Asian American applicants. Yeah
Anonymous Student: I don't personally know like too many billionaires or like how i'm not super familiar with the thought process, but I always like enjoyed watching cnbc as a kid and like Watching like a lot of these hedge fund talking heads, like Bill Ackman, who's been in the news recently. And there was just kind of reading Bill Ackman's like Twitter posts and it has been kind of wild because he.
I mean, conservatives very famously going back to like William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale have been criticized, which was in the 1950s, has been criticizing how universities in America have been run, and that's been sort of like a central argument conservatives have been making for like, Many, many decades at this point.
So it's kind of a weird Johnny come lately thing to finally realize in 2023 that, universities are like, teaching wokeness or something when this has been going on for many, many decades. And, it was also like people, another billionaire. I don't know personally, but I've watched his sort of public statements like, what's his name?
Ken Griffin from Citadel, which is this, he, he, pretty successful guy and he was in 2022, like to put up this huge donation to Harvard. And even in 2022, I like it. Those of us who have been around have been kind of making this criticism of universities and that a lot of, you know, conservative billionaires should not be donating money to these universities because they have, like, Many, many issues, long standing issues.
But then, he was also like someone who kind of got upset with Harvard over there, sort of not being, not banning like pro Palestinian protests, which is just kind of bizarre to kind of realize that like a lot of billionaires. Even Ken Griffin, who seems like a smart guy and was like a Harvard math major at Harvard, and I would think would be plugged into this thing, like didn't realize how bad things have been getting and how it's like progressively gotten worse.
It's just, you don't, You didn't really hear about it until, this sort of recent,conflagration in the Middle East, but, and it really shouldn't have taken this as kind of a precipitating event, but it, it kind of revealed, I think maybe for certain billionaires, like a, a kind of rot that had been at work for quite some time.
And, I think it's getting a little more focused now, but, I really wish this had been, people had been talking about this, these issues beforehand.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, I think the recent issues involving Gaza and Israel brought it to the forefront. In my own circles, I actually am in various sorts of social media groups where, you know, on the various platforms where billionaire type people like Ackman and, and Ken Griffin are chatting about this kind of stuff.
And, Yeah. I mean, it seems like they weren't really following, some of them were already aware of crazy wokeism and stuff on campus, but a lot of them only became aware of it because of this stuff, the recent stuff with Israel. And so now, I think discourse has moved into high gear, but, but in a way they might be overreacting because I think they're trying to, in a way, like they're not, as you said, they're not very careful about the principles of free speech.
So now they're just trying to suppress, you know, certain types of, you know, anti Zionist speech or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, the funny thing I read also that kind of described this was, Bill Ackman. There was kind of a profile of Bill Ackman in New York Magazine, which was kind of funny and, the writer had kind of a, a number of good quips about Bill Ackman.
And it sort of seemed like even before this kind of War in the Middle East, like, Bill Ackman talked about how his daughter, he, he was a Harvard alumnus himself and he sent his daughter there and she came, she like got into, Marxism and like a lot of these 1950s, like European intellectuals that you, I, I'm familiar with from having like read a lot of Old books like Lukács and, these sorts of people, but he seemed, if you sort of read the profile of Bill Ackman, he sort of seemed surprised that his daughter would be into, like, Marxism, even though, if you've read, like, history books, like, the concept of, like, a trust fund socialist isn't, like, a new thing where, The author of, like, Ten Days That Shook the World, which is, like, kind of a propaganda piece for, like, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, was, like, a trust fund baby who went to Harvard, and even in the 1960s, like, a lot of these student protesters were, came from, like, very privileged backgrounds, and were, like, Getting into extreme far left ideology, like even Foucault came from an upper class family, not like a working class, his parents weren't like French truck drivers and like,working class people, like, so this sort of phenomenon of like, you know, radical chic, as Tom will famously said, had has been like, Going on for quite some time.
And I went to school with a lot of people like Bill Ackman's daughter. So I'm sort of familiar with the ideological trajectory trajectories of a lot of these young women, but a lot of these like. Headphone managers didn't seem to fully grasp what was going on, which was kind of surprising because I'm not any sort of public intellectual or philosopher.
I'm just like a STEM grad student, but these things seem like fairly obvious to me, but like, No one really had been pointing them out, so it was kind of wild to see.a lot of these billionaires who you would think would be like, fair, much smarter than me, like, seemed a little slow to grasp. what was, what's been going on?
Steve Hsu: I think a lot of this is just the generation gap because even though they may be very talented people They're, you know, they're the wrong generation So it's harder for them to know what's really happening Even if it's their own kids take it from me, you know as an as a parent I don't necessarily know exactly how my kids feel about things.
I want to get into this sort of intellectual history of wokeism or, you know, liberalism on campus and which you've written about, but before we get into that, I, I want to do a little bit more just descriptive stuff, questioning about, you know, what is happening on campus. So when I was in grad school or when I was in undergrad, you know, there were very active political discussions.
And so if you, if you went into the. common room in the physics department, you know, you could, you could have all kinds of debates about, you know, anything apartheid or nuclear war or, you know, whatever it is, affirmative action is, does that still take place? So can you walk into the, you know, either the cafeteria where a bunch of other grad students are, or the, I don't know if you guys still have like a coffee room or something in your department, but the moral equivalent of that, you know, Can you come in and have these discussions or are people walking on eggshells because things are very polarized and people are sensitive?
Anonymous Student: Yeah, that's a good question. I think it really depends on international students versus domestic students because I'm in a STEM PhD program and so American students are definitely a minority and so I have a lot of friends from India and China and Turkey and Korea and all over the world.
And I, you know, to them a lot about these things and they don't, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush and it depends obviously on countries, but it really, they, for the most part, seem to be kind of, not really engaged in American, like political, they don't seem to be like, have too much of an interest.
Like, I had like an Indian, Indian friend who, and I was like asking about the, like, Russia Ukraine war a year or two ago, and he was very, very, skeptical of Ukraine, which, a lot of Indians and like, that would be a view that would be, much more common in India, but like in American culture, that would be a very verboden, view.
So in STEM programs, it really can vary a lot based on nationality and for the most part, like Chinese and Indian. And you know, a lot of these foreign students don't really get involved in protests for whatever the current thing is, they mostly just sort of stick to their work, whichI fully understand as a STEM person, like they're just focused on deadlines and getting work done.
And then for the American, domestic students. I think, the person who I think captured this pretty well was a professor at Harvard called James Hankins, and he's a history professor at Harvard, and he's sort of been around for 30 years and can write really well, and I think describes pretty accurately the environment he witnessed with undergrads, which is that, you know, when he was a professor in the 1980s, conservative students were definitely like a minority, but it was sort of treated as like sort of, it was tolerated and you could be sort of a conservative in a discussion group and people wouldn't like ostracize you for like talking about like Edmund Burke or something, or obviously in the 1980s, you couldn't have been like, I love Hitler or something or very, very extreme right wing stuff.
But as long as it was within normal, like.grounds that, most, like, Republican, like, Republican kind of, I think that was mostly fine. There would be, like, a little social ostracism in, or, it was always, you had to be careful, but you could be, like, an open conservative in your history or philosophy class and it wouldn't really cause you to be excommunicated from your friend group.
And then he's been sort of writing these articles. I think he wrote one like a year or two ago, which I think kind of captured this well, which is that when he's at Harvard and in his classes, like, basically, no one will feel comfortable, like, voicing, any sort of openly conservative view at, in his discussion groups, but during office hours when they privately meet with him, they might privately confess to, like, certain views, but I think we've sort of been reached a bit of a tipping point in a lot of humanities disciplines where, sort of more conservative or even moderate people are just so,outnumbered that they kind of all sort of keep quiet and really kind of walk on eggshells with what they say around certain, taboo subjects.
And I think we sort of know what those subjects are. It's like racism and sexism and lots of isms and phobia, like homophobia. And you sort of.things in particular are very and climate change, of course, are like very, difficult subjects to talk about. And I think most. Intelligent, conservative or moderate people like at Ivy League schools would not really openly talk about their views.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, you know, I, I know, I know Neil Ferguson fairly well and have had discussions with him about this. And I guess I can't remember exactly when he moved to Hoover. but it might have been five or 10 years ago already. And before that he was a professor at Harvard. And he said that not only were there only a few quote conservative professors that, you know, he could have good conversations with, but they started, the real reason he left Harvard was they started harassing his PhD students.
And, so he just couldn't take it anymore. And that's why he moved to Hoover. So yeah, I think it's very. likely that, any right of center opinions, at least in certain classrooms at Ivy league universities, those opinions just aren't expressed, out in the open in front of all the other students.
Anonymous Student: Yeah. And I think that's right. And the thing about STEM is like, if you're a computer science student, you don't really talk about politics. So it's a way of kind of, 18 year old undergrad to it, and you have certain,wrong think views, you can just go become a computer science major and have a good career and not have to walk on eggshells.
And so these sorts of politically neutral fields are a lot safer. And I think, If, I think the surveys are to believe like there are certainly like closet conservatives and moderate people at Ivy League universities, but they're much more likely to be like computer science students who are hosting their views under anonymous pseudonyms and not publicly, explaining their views,
Steve Hsu: The recent Harvard grad that I interviewed who works in a kind of machine learning type area, described his situation, and he's gay, described his situation at Harvard as being quite closeted. And he wasn't referring to being gay. He was referring to being slightly right of center political sympathies. So he felt closeted in terms of his political beliefs.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, I definitely know that. And because I think the other weird thing about if you're sort of a conservative minded person in an Ivy League school is like, you don't sort of fit the stereotype of what your average like, NPC liberal person imagines like a conservative person is like where they're all like wearing a cowboy hat and like riding a pickup truck around. And so in my real life, people like will just assume I agree with them and we'll start like talking about lots of, their views and, like, assume I agree, but, like, I don't really discuss politics in my, personal life, and I think that's kind of the safe way to go about things.
Steve Hsu: You know, it's funny because in my generation, it would have been very, like, of course, the stakes were not as high because you were allowed a wider range of views, without being ostracized.
But I, I, you know, especially in grad school or undergrad, when you're pretty young, it's pretty tough not to express your true beliefs. Like, if somebody comes up to you and says, you know, A is obviously true, and, and you, you really pretty strongly suspect not A is true, and you're only 19 or 23 years old, It's very tough not to just blurt out like, no, you're wrong, right?
Because just a moment ago, you might've been arguing about something like, you know, some theorem in computer science or math or something where if the other person was wrong, you would have just at that age, you would have just savaged them. Right? but on these political things, at least in my generation, also, you would not hold back.
You would just say, well, wait, what about this study and blah, blah, blah. Right? So is it true that young people today are just, they just have an extreme sense of self control because they realize the stakes are so high? Right?
Anonymous Student: Yeah, I think the other kind of thing that might be different now is just like everything's kind of, recorded electronically.
So like, if you were a conservative student in the 1980s, you could write something for the campus newspaper and make your point there and it wouldn't really show up on your Google results. if you were like applying for a job
So it's, you have to be very careful about anonymity. And, that, that I don't think is really a healthy thing because people are really walking on eggshells with what they say, if they know things can be like, on their permanent record and like potentially affect like, employment opportunities and romantic prospects where, the vast majority of, like, young women, if you're a heterosexual man and interested in these sort of things, will have, like, left liberal views, so it's That's another thing that you need to really be careful about and not leave any sort of electronic, record of these things because it could come back to bite you.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, this point was made to me last week. I was hanging out with some Bay Area rationalists and some of them who are dating on the apps were saying that, you know, they have slight, some slightly right of center beliefs. And they, they said, like, this is a real problem in dating because women tend to be shifted more to the left.
And so a lot of the women will just exclude the possibility of dating some guy who disagrees with them politically. So they have to, they have to be very careful about what they say about their political beliefs.
Anonymous Student: Yeah. So it's like the double eggshell of employment stuff and then romantic stuff, which is not great.
Steve Hsu: The situation I was specifically thinking of is not like a person writing, you know, something that goes in the school newspaper, but just sitting around, you know, like shooting the shit over dinner or coffee or something or drinks with some other people. people in that age group, at least in my recollection, wouldn't be able to hold back.
Like they're just, you know, especially kids who are at Ivy League schools, they're, they're sort of good at argumentation and advancing their beliefs. So just that, the fraction of kids that could have held back, even if they knew the stakes were high, at least in my generation, would have been quite low.
Most people, even if they knew it wasn't good for them to say certain things, they would just blurt it out because they were young. And, and so I guess maybe The way students are today is just very different psychologically.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, I think some of that comes out a little bit in group chats, like with your friend group where you can be reasonably sure.
Like if you have a male friend group and you've been friends for a while, like they're not going to get you in trouble for those views, but, and I think group chats are a healthy phenomenon, but, yeah, so I think it might come out a little bit. In, like, male friend groups and, like, over beers, but not in the campus newspaper.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, or in the classroom, which is, I think, really bad for examination of ideas. So, okay, so I, I think we're, your, your view of what the intellectual life is like on these campuses is pretty similar to my previous guest, who had been at Harvard.
So maybe we can move a little bit to how you think things got this way.
And, you wrote some nice things, which I read on the internet about this. Maybe if you, if you, if you feel comfortable, maybe you can go through a little bit of what your thesis is on this.
Anonymous Student: Yeah. So I'm full disclosure. I'm not an intellectual historian, historian, or professionally trained. And one of the things about being like a STEM person is you can sort of always be accused of being like a philistine and not treating ideas.
Like, who are you to make these arguments, as a STEM person. and so I think, there've been a lot of, so over the past year, and even before that, I've been sort of rereading a lot of what people had been saying about political correctness in like the 1980s in You know, by people like Alan Bloom or Camille Paglia, and a lot of those books in the 1990s were kind of mocking the trends then, like, in women's studies departments, where probably, like, the most extreme case of this was, like, Judith Butler, who's this really famous professor at UC Berkeley and is kind of seen as like the kind of intellectual progenitor of like transgenderism, arguably, and she has a PhD in English from Yale, which was like the most famous English department in America and had been like importing a lot of kind of goofy French theories that actual French people, I get the impression kind of roll their eyes at.
But we're kind of captivating to an American audience and seem like, Oh, wow, these French people, they really know what they're talking about. But, the big thinkers, I think in the 1970s and 1980s were people like Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. And a lot of these were very, very smart people who came out of the French educational system and would have been very, very well read.
But to a lot of Americans, they didn't really, like, fully grasp what they were saying, because not only was it very intellectually deep, it was also, like, in French, so a lot of it got kind of lost in translation. And so,a lot of what the Sokol hoax, for instance, in the 1990s was making fun of was like this kind of impenetrable academic jargon that was like very hard for normal people to get their minds around, but kind of had this, left wing valence and, like kind of Judith Butler's arguments, and I'm not Giving them full justice are like, Oh, you know, what even is a man?
What even is a woman? Like these sorts of arguments that are like, intellectual kind of, I don't know what the right word is like jujitsu or like obscurantism that are kind of, If you just were to ask like a normal American, you're like, Oh yeah, there are like two genders and it's like biological, but she came up with like a very, very complex highbrow formulation that kind of like scrambles a lot of these things.
And it's hard if you don't have, if you're not like a French philosopher to criticize her because. It's like, oh, who are you? You're just some Philistine who can't really appreciate Maurice Merleau Ponty and, like, the brilliance of his ideas. And so I think a lot of the arguments being made by conservative and moderate people, like, Camille Paglia wasn't a conservative.
She was just like a moderate Democrat basically, who just thought a lot of the crazy things going on at campus were kind of ridiculous and kind of did a good job of making fun of that. And she was at the Yale English department herself. So she fully knew what these people were talking about.
And, I think, based on my own personal experience and, like, knowing what's actually on high school curricula these days, and what, like, college freshmen And, are being kind of introduced to a lot of these ideas that are now on college syllabi, like kind of were from a lot of this goofy French theory, Judith Butler, craze and academia that was going on in the 1970s and 1980s.
And I think it's fine to teach both sides of the argument. For instance, in some of my intellectual history classes, we read like Karl Marx, and then we also read Adam Smith and we 're encouraged to like, identify, you know, problems with their respective worldviews. But I think what's going on in a lot of high schools and college curricula is curricula.
Is there a way to put Judith Butler on the syllabus, but not. putting a critique of Judith Butler on the syllabus. And so you kind of see this as very one-sided. I think young people are, I sound like a boomer for saying young people, but,yeah, they need to get off my lawn. they're getting kind of one side of the argument, but not, you know, I think it's always a healthy thing to try and hear both sides and then work through what the issues are with both sides.
And I don't think people are being exposed to things like evolutionary psychology and the sort of critique that would offer Judith Butler's ideas or Camille Paglia or those things. So,I think that's kind of the issue is there, like in some of my, Language classes also, like, there would be, like, very, very one sided, accounts of, like, oppression, and sexism, and racism, and, homophobia, and I, I think it's, good to be sensitive towards those things, but I think there should also be, like, a other side being offered.
Steve Hsu: You know, it's, it's amazing to me to hear you mention all those names because I was in graduate school in the late eighties at Berkeley, and Judith Butler was obviously a big figure on campus.
My wife did a PhD in comparative literature at Berkeley and took classes with Judith Butler. So, I'm familiar with all of these books because I've seen them around our house, you know, like, Judith Butler's book, Gender Trouble, for example, is prominently on my wife's shelf. And, yeah. so i'm pretty familiar with all this stuff.
You haven't
Anonymous Student: burned it yet?
Steve Hsu: No, no. Well, well, okay Let me let me say a few things. So so and also Camille Paglia or PagliaI actually after I left Berkeley, I was a junior fellow at Harvard and that's a very interdisciplinary organization So it mixes up You know, STEM science people with humanists and literary people.
And, I actually invited Camille Paglia to dinner at the Society of Fellows, back in the early nineties. And actually I, I remember her as being a little bit.of a reactionary against some of this stuff, because she was from a working class Catholic, I think, background. And she readily acknowledged, I think, differences between male and female sexuality and personalities and things like this.
So, I think she's kind of in a different category from Butler for sure, even though she comes from the same kind of academic tradition. But anyway, so, the funny thing is back then, like, a lot of this stuff was argued as a kind of exercise, so in other words, you know, your article that you would write, you know, for your dissertation, you know, in comparative literature or something, or philosophy, you know, you might, you might take on some of these articles, some of these issues like performativity of gender and stuff like this, right?
And, And, you know, they had a point, right? They had a point that, you know, there were some people who, you know, maybe had X, X chromosomes, but, you know, felt male. And then how do we think about this? Right. So they kind of had a point to explore these edge cases. Like they're really a small part of the, as a fraction of the population, but okay, fine, that's okay.
But if we explore philosophically, what does it mean that these people exist and what does the world look like to them? And what should it be? how should it inform our thinking about the broader population? You know, at that time, it was all kind of, Pretty theoretical, okay, academic stuff, but I knew the people who actually were engaged in this and if you, if you were having a drink with them, they, they weren't necessarily activists.
They weren't trying to impose this on, you know, I don't think they ever thought this would be something that would be taught like in a high school gender studies class or something like this. So, the weird thing for me is that it marched all the way from. some very highfalutin, you know, literary or philosophical salons at elite universities, all the way to like something that's taught to like every freshman on a university campus.
That's the amazing part to me.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, like one, one funny thing, for instance, that was kind of a similar idea is like one of the most famous kind of, Kong Chicano studies, names like the Judith Butler of Chicano studies, for instance, is like this woman, who also has a PhD in English called Gloria Enzaldua.
And like, That was a book that if you go back in time, like conservatives were making fun of in the 1980s and 1990s, like that kind of thinking, but it was on my high school Spanish class, like reading list, and we all, we all read it. So, and not any sort of critique of that. So it's kind of. weird, like, blast from the past thing going on where, like, kind of half the argument has been kind of lost, it feels like.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, I think the part that really shocked, shocks me, and that, you know, I guess I was just too dumb to realize this was happening, was, you know, to what extent does sort of what is taught by Joe average sociology or anthropology professor, or even Spanish language professor to ordinary kids at public universities, you know, how is that driven by what elites, you know, these super hyper elites are thinking at Berkeley or Yale. You know, or Harvard, 20 years before that, like, I just didn't realize this was going to trickle down into the, into the general population.
And, you know, I stupid me, I've said this before to Sokol, who's a mathematical physicist, after he sort of demonstrated that the intellectual standards in these fields were very low and that you could publish garbage deliberately in public, what he did was deliberately publish junk in their top journals. That people would just not take this stuff seriously. But rather, rather than that happening, it sort of ended up dominating the sort of ordinary discourse of, you know, ordinary kids at public universities. That part is an amazing story to me.
Anonymous Student: Yeah. And just to give Judith Butler her due, I think she actually is a pretty smart person.
it's just that her views are kind of unsound and like, If you've been in the real world, it kind of, it's easy to laugh at her, but she was making very, very kind of high brow arguments. And it is kind of an interesting thing to study that like, even though people at UC Berkeley at the time might've been able to make fun of that, like it does have a weird way of trickling down over a decade or two.
Steve Hsu: That's the part that I did not anticipate and, you know, still don't. fully understand the dynamics of how that works. Like I said, I think at the time you might disagree or not find what Judith Butler was writing, but you know, it wasn't completely uninteresting, right? Like she was a lesbian, she is a lesbian and She was interested in gender issues and, you know, all these things were sort of, quote, under theorized back then. Like you could tell there were differences between these different categories of people and the way they view the world and how we should categorize them. And yeah, it was under theorized. Certainly someone should sit down and say, well, if you're You know, if you were, you know, born biologically this way, but your mind works this other way, you know, shouldn't we broaden our categories to deal with that, et cetera? It's all reasonable.
But you know, the, the, the way it eventually went in the general population just is, just shocking to me.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, I think Camille Paglia in some of her essays like made kind of a similar point where often the ideas that like sound reasonable at first can kind of over time snowball into kind of crazy ideas because one of the things that points she made that I didn't realize was, like women's studies as a discipline. When she was starting her PhD in the 1970s, a lot like Yale or something would set up a women's studies department. And at first, like women's studies on the face of it, isn't necessarily a bad field. Like, Just as there's Russian studies or Japanese studies or, like, Italian studies, there's no reason there shouldn't, at least in theory, be women's studies, which talks about, like, women's literature, just as there are groups of literature for all different cultures.
Over time it snowballed to be like women's studies in practice was like 99. 9 percent from the same ideology and you can be a Russian studies professor and have different takes on Dostoyevsky on Tolstoy, and there can be some dialectical argument that takes place. Whereas in women's studies, there's like certain taboos and it kind of snowballs from there.
Steve Hsu: Yeah. I mean, look at the time women were really second class citizens. I mean, you know, that, you know, this sort of first wave feminism, at least in my mind, was really quite necessary because, you know, there was a long period of time where no one would take. women seriously as intellectuals and they were all told to go home and make babies and stuff and. And so, you know, there was some correction needed for that.
And, and if, if people didn't take women writers seriously, then maybe they, the place they would find people who are interested in their work was in women's studies departments and things like this. So, that first stage of it, like, didn't seem crazy to me. It's, it's, as you said, like once it becomes like a very, ideologically polarized activist department, which now is interested more in maybe in campus, campus activism than really deep intellectual stuff, then, then you have a problem because you have all these departments on campus that are really focused on, you know, promoting certain causes or ideologies and not, not what I would call pursuing truth.
Anonymous Student: Yeah.
Steve Hsu: Now, I don't, personally, I guess I'm pretty pessimistic. I don't see how this ratchet gets turned back because, you know, like if you, if you've been sort of an administrator at a university like me, you realize how hard it is to remove a department. Like, once departments are established, it's extremely hard. The amount of energy or blood you have to shed to remove the department or shrink the department is, you know, very, very difficult. And so once they're there, they're there. And then, and, you know, the people in those departments have tenure and they have their own cohesive culture for what they think they should be doing. They have their own value system. And, you know, a point that I made in some other interview was that, you know, they have all day to do their activist stuff. Whereas, you know, maybe you and I have to study chemistry of molecules or something. It's, and we don't have time to engage in any kind of ideological struggle on campus.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, that's something I think also people sort of picked up on a lot in the 1980s and 1990s, how like STEM professors then as in now are just like very busy with like deadlines and like lots of work stuff and,
if you kind of, like, go back and read about what was happening in a lot of the 1968 campus protests, there was, like, very famous, very similar dynamics where, like, If you read accounts like physics professors were all just kind of like completely tuned out of the protests and we're just like not really threatened in any way by like the kind of campus activism and they kind of just kind of laughed it off and went and did their lab work and kind of ignored this.
But I think over time a lot, a lot of these ideas, even if they have even really kind of made their way to like STEM fields.
If you apply for like NSF and DARPA and these sorts of things, a lot of them do have like DEI type stuff now, but I'm sure you would know a lot more about this than me and have a better vantage point into like the bigger picture of how universities, because I'm just a humble grad student, so I don't have the bigger picture, but
Steve Hsu: Well, I think it's quite common now in, I would even say, just to reveal something about Michigan State University, even, even we physics professors at Michigan State are required to write DEI statements in our annual reports now.
So, the Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, etc. all require this kind of stuff when you apply for a grant. Internally within your own university, you're required to write these things. If you apply for a job, you're required to write a kind of DEI or diversity statement, just kind of showing that you support the main quote, mainstream thinking on these topics.
So, yes, that's all, it's very pervasive now. And, you probably know this, that MIT caused kind of a stir by being the first university to just ban. I think they stopped their own internal departments from requiring a DEI statement of job candidates who are applying for jobs there.
So yeah, it swept completely through. I think largely due to what I would call the hysteria of 2020, the summer of Floyd. That was the real peak of it. And so now things are kind of rolling back a little bit. But you know, it's like a ratchet, it's very tough to reverse these things now.
And, of course, plenty of young people who get hired, you know, even in math departments or engineering departments are now like politically far left, because some people who are a little bit disagreeable and independent minded looked at these diversity statements and just said, I'm not going to have a career here, I'm not going to write this stupid thing, cause I'm not going to lie.
I don't believe in some of this stuff that they want me to say and I'd rather go work in industry. And so as a consequence, now you have probably, you know, increased polarization of young faculty members, toward, you know, those particular ideological beliefs. And so even less diverse intellectual diversity than you used to have.
Anonymous Student: Yeah. Like, I've sort of. Been going to like academic conferences and they'll all have breakout sessions on like All the current things pretty much. So yeah, I think STEM is behind these trends, but it's kind of still Kind of like a 20 or 30 year time delay from a lot of these trends on the rest of the university.
Steve Hsu: You know, being a kind of left of center at least by the standards of, you know, 1990 or something or 2000, being kind of left of center myself by those standards, you know, I would say it would be great if, say, you take a particular field like chemistry and chemistry says, Hey, there are not enough women or there are not enough, underrepresented minorities in our field, in our discipline. Let's try to figure out if we're doing something wrong. And is there a better way to welcome those people? Is there a way to make sure we're not subtly discouraging those people?
I think that's all healthy. There's nothing wrong with that kind of activity. The problem becomes that when someone says, hey, I think it's really a, for example, this would be a, like a pretty defensible statement in my view.
Hey, it's really a pipeline problem, like we're not going to be able to fix this at the PhD, you know, grad program level. It's really got to be fixed more at the high school and college level, or maybe even earlier. And so therefore, you know, what you guys are proposing is noble, but it's not going to work.
And 20, 30 years ago, you could have that discussion, and people would still respect you, but you could even maybe present some data about how, you know, low GRE scoring students are really just not going to do well in our PhD program, etc., etc. Whereas today, if you, if you express those things, you would be, you know, you would be in real trouble.
I mean, people could lodge a kind of like DEI kind of complaint against you for even making those intellectual arguments. And so that's the part of it that I think is really unhealthy today.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, one idea I think people sort of have been, getting at a little bit is just kind of, this has sort of always been the case that there's been this kind of, gap in thinking between like the STEM part of the university versus the humanities part of the university, but, kind of lately it's feels like way, way, the gap in thinking is just like so extreme.
And I know you sort of said you're pessimistic. I'm a little bit more, cautiously optimistic over the long term because I think if you really kind of think through this, like, and I could completely be wrong, like the, the parts of the university that are engaged in like hyper wokeness, like an anthropology department, they're kind of net drains on the university's finances. Whereas, you know, computer science graduates and computer science professors are the ones who like bringing in the money and are the future big donors to the universities. So it's always hard to make predictions about the future, but I think, we've sort of reached a bit of a tipping point where I think a lot of the donors to these schools and also, Republican Party have realized, like, how bad things have gotten in the humanities parts of universities, where I think it's hard to, like, imagine how those fields won't die out on a long enough time scale because there's kind of a adverse selection effect going on with the students and professors entering those fields and a kind of diminishment of status.
Is that, does that sound, it's, am I being too optimistic there? Or.
Steve Hsu: Well, I would say that the forces that you pointed out are there. So, you know, computer science graduates are going to produce more value in society and make more money and produce a lot more billionaire donors than some of the other majors.
So I think that's all true. And, federal funding tends to flow to the more kind of hardcore STEM subjects. Those are all true statements. But it's also true that especially with a kind of race to the bottom, you know, even at some Ivy league schools, in pursuit of diversity, you have to have these easy majors for a lot, you know, otherwise lots of students can't graduate. They can't make it through the undergraduate curriculum. And so you, you can't fully get rid of these departments. And by other metrics, though people in, so within the academic administration battles over resources, the people from those departments will always point out. Hey, we have 10 times as many majors as you do.
This is not true for computer science, because computer science now is getting a lot of majors, but you know, lots of fields like, which are pretty kind of on the east side, like psychology, or sometimes they call psychology, cognitive science or neuroscience, but actually it's kind of catch all major for, and it's not that rigorous. They account for a huge number of student credit hours. And they might be as woke as anthropology almost, like almost as woke as sociology or anthropology.
So, it's not, I don't think anything's gonna happen really very fast. I think those disciplines that, you know, that you, you pointed out some reasons why those disciplines will lose prestige or, or resources over time, they also have things going for them. And the people in those departments, or administrators who favor those departments, are very skilled at, at, you know, for example, promulgating the idea that, you know, STEM, that's only some narrow kind of thinking, you know, humanists have a much view of how society works, et cetera, et cetera. And ultimately like people in those fields are completely innumerate.
So they'll often make arguments like, Oh, actually there are more, even more billionaires produced by these soft subjects than the hard subjects. For example, like they're not very good at adjusting things to like per capita per capita basis or something. So, they might just like to claim that there are a lot more billionaires produced by the sociology department. Even if you normalize the number of sociology grads each year, it's not true.
So, anyway, I guess I'm more pessimistic having been in the trenches recently and actually getting trounced and thrown out, you know, during the summer of Floyd. So, so I, I'm, I'm a little more pessimistic, but, but I hope you're right.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, I guess what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So we're, we're both alive. So.
Steve Hsu: Yeah. I, I wanted to ask you how gender polarized do you think this is? Like. I think if you look at, and again, of course, it's very like, not politically correct to mention this kind of things, this kind of thing, but if you look at polling, so let's assume the polling and social science studies are actually accurate, women tend to be much more likely to be super woke than men. And certainly among the people that are, you know, disagreeable and pretty upset about the way things have gone and still sort of support a highly meritocratic, you know, system, elitist system. Those tend to be very disproportionately men.I don't know if you noticed that on campus.
Like, is it like the only bros who you can discuss this stuff with are literally bros?
You know, Korea is a special case because they almost have a full blown gender war going on there because there's still a very strong patriarchy. So the men tend to be more conservative and the women feel oppressed by the system. And so they tend to be more feminist. But there are literally male politicians who are campaigning against feminism in Korea. So it's, it's pretty polarized there.
Anonymous Student: Yeah. I wish I knew more about that subject. I'm actually in Japan right now, which is why that's been a little bit on my mind recently, and I'm not well versed enough in the differences between Japan and South Korea to fully give an educated guess.
But yeah, I'm, I know like the, president of, or Yoon Suk yeol, I think is his name was like, do a, like kind of a big part of his campaign was like, this kind of Trumpian like, comedy type, like Bolsonaro even, but in South Korea.
Steve Hsu: In Japan, I think the men are just kind of accepting that, you know, women, the patriarchy in Japan has to kind of go away eventually. And women should, you know, I think have more, broader participation in the economy. And so I think there's, there's, they're more accepting of that. In Korea, they're fighting it. There's two sides to this.
And in communist China, the, you know, the party, which is overwhelmingly male at the upper levels, is actually trying to push women back into more like mother, mother, mothering, maternal sort of domestic roles. They're starting to shift their propaganda toward valorizing, motherhood and things like this.
So it's quite interesting what's happening in Asia.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, I think,with Japan, for instance, like I know Shinzo Abe and, a lot of Japanese politicians, from what I can tell, like, take a very, like, kind of moderate, light tone on these issues, and don't really go extreme, like, gender war stuff. And, think that seems to be, like, a little bit of a healthier, dynamic.
And the thing I've been observing on sort of U. S. college campuses is, like,even like the keffiyeh symbol that you sort of saw with like,pro Palestinian protesters, it would be like overwhelmingly female and, you know, in my time, just like walking around campus, you like almost never would have seen a man wearing a keffiyeh and, and I think if you look at like any of the signature campaigns or like any of the lead protesters, they're like very, very heavily skewed female.
And in America, the Palestinian cause is sort of seen as a left wing issue on college campuses, whereas the Israel side is more of a right wing coded or at least more politically moderate coded thing. And so. I was just seeing an enormous gender breakdown and, like, just walking around campus.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, I think, to me, one of the most disturbing things, speaking of, like, how gender polarized this stuff is, is that the stuff that we STEM people like, which is like, oh, we, we abstract and think of, you know, systems and, you know, we like thinking about, you know,, non human machine like things and physical systems, you know, all of that, you know, tends to skew very male.
And, you know, with more and more women going to college, more women than men going to college, it's like the level of interest in the set of systematizing stuff that, traditionally, STEMs. It's just going to be harder and harder to defend and harder and harder to get, like the majority of students interested in taking classes in really hardcore STEM subjects. Yeah.
I was going to say, so we've, we've been going well over an hour and, I want to be respectful of your time. So maybe if, if there are any closing topics that we didn't get to in our conversation, maybe feel free to bring any of those up.
Anonymous Student: Nothing really. I think maybe just the one point of optimism I have about the future is kind of like anonymity because, I I'm sort of a long term optimist that a lot of these kind of truths about the world, if people are allowed to be honest, anonymous and speak their mind, have the truth always wins in the long term, at least that's what the optimistic part of me would like to believe.
Steve Hsu: I certainly hope you're right. I think that the more divorced from human emotion the truths are, so if it's special relativity or, you know, the Maxwell's equations, you know, it's much more likely to win out,
But the closer it gets to very cherished beliefs of people the way they see themselves in the world or their, their society, then I don't have a lot of faith in human rationality. So I think, I think societies can delude themselves for a long time.You can even say like, if you're not, I'm not really anti religious, but if you were, if you, you could say like, well, religion is a kind of delusion. Like this is what Dawkins would say, like religion is a delusion that clearly, you know, has persisted for thousands of years and it's not going away anytime soon.
So in that way, like some of the crazy social woke as stuff, It's almost like religion and it would be pretty hard, I think it would be pretty hard to get rid of.
Anonymous Student: Yeah, maybe we'll need to check in, in ten years.
Steve Hsu: Yeah,
Anonymous Student: Yes, I hope you're right and I'm wrong.