David Bromwich has taught literature at Yale University since 1988. His books include Hazlitt: the Mind of a Critic, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, How Words Make Things Happen, and Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Bromwich discuss why Americans have lost faith in universities, how grade inflation and political conformity undermine academic credibility, and whether the opacity of elite admissions processes can be reformed.
Note: David Bromwich asked us to be clear that the views he expresses are his own and not those of any institution or group within an institution.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I’ve been hoping to have you on the podcast for a long time, and we have a good occasion now because you were on the faculty committee at Yale University that was tasked with trying to figure out why people have lost faith in higher education in significant numbers in the United States, and what universities—and particularly Yale—can do to regain the trust of the public.
What do the findings of the committee suggest lies at the heart of this loss of faith in universities in the United States?
David Bromwich: Several things. You use the word “faith.” The official name of the committee was Trust in Higher Education. But trust, as anyone who has studied moral philosophy or just speaks English knows, is mutual. It depends on a shared understanding of what the purpose is of this or that institution, this or that custom or ritual.
The understanding that was lost is how public higher education—and specifically liberal arts education—prepares you for life in a way that will serve students well in getting jobs, but also make them thoughtful citizens. There is some effect from the education that they wouldn’t get just from reading a lot of books or even watching a lot of television.
Some of the causes of waning trust that we looked at were the process of admissions. Yale is an elite school, so this is particularly dealing with the loss of trust in schools that have that sort of prestige. The price of the school is very high, although most people don’t pay the sticker price. That relates to a lack of transparency in things like how you pay, what tuition costs are, how it may be deferred, what loans are available, and how much tuition can be covered for people who aren’t rich.
Recently—and this overlaps with the work of the committee—an announcement came out about a month or two before our report was put into its final draft. The president of Yale, Maurie McInnis, announced that families making $200,000 a year or less, per household, would not have to pay any tuition. If you know how low on the scale of disposable income $200,000 for a whole household actually is, that’s not surprising. It’s not extraordinarily generous, but it is more generous than most people imagine the Ivy League schools are.
Mounk: For probably most of the households that send kids to Yale, that threshold is above their income. The median household income in the United States is something like $70,000 a year, so for the median American family that is able to get their child into Yale, they are going to have a free ride.
Bromwich: There is what we should call opacity rather than transparency. I like the 18th century word for it: publicity—making public, in a neutral sense, the criteria that are used by a university like Yale to accept or not accept students. This is all the more important because we’ve acquired an excess of bogus prestige from rejecting a lot of students. There are more and more applicants, more and more people think they might make it, but admissions are now lower than 5% at Yale and at places like Yale.
So how to account for the distrust? There seems to be a kind of false advertising in which the institution has been unconsciously indulging.
Mounk: The report is also quite explicit about the problem of grade inflation. In Yale, the median grade is now an A or an A minus, I believe. How is that contributing to the loss of trust in universities?
Bromwich: A student reporter writing for the campus newspaper, the Yale Daily News, found in an article published about a year and a half ago that the average grade given at Yale was in the A family—meaning As or A minuses—something like 70% of grades. As a teacher in the humanities (and we are usually charged with being the great culprits on grade inflation) I was shocked to discover that even in the natural sciences, grade inflation of this sort prevails. In order to distinguish among students—non-invidiously, but to discriminate—some much greater separation of degrees of distinction would seem desired.
That is one of the suggestions made in the final section of our report, which is called “Recommendations.” There are 20 recommendations, and one involves making it easier to calibrate how well students are doing against the cohort of people in that class. If a class is 80% A’s, your A in that class is going to count less than an A in a class where there are 30% A’s. That can seem like a small recommendation, but it may mean that students demand classes where distinction can show up. If they demand classes like that, they may gravitate more towards courses that have some real rigor and be a little less shameless about attending big lecture semi-gut courses in the social sciences or even the humanities that assure them of a good grade, thereby mingling with the respectable crowd of Ivy graduates.
Mounk: One topic that has been broadly discussed in the media, but also felt by many professors—including left-leaning professors at universities—is a sense of political conformity and a fear that one may, in some explicit or implicit way, be punished for expressing unpopular views. The report mentions that the number of students and faculty members at Yale who fear sharing a political view is quite substantial. How has the problem of political conformity contributed to a loss of trust in universities?
Bromwich: It is a reductive way of framing this, but not without its own revelations, that 90% or more of faculty at universities like this tend to be registered Democrats and to have, let’s just say, left-liberal politics. Why is that? That’s a long story. I have my own speculative explanations. But there’s no doubt about the enormous, sharp divide in the political culture of the United States right now. It’s a 51-49 politics, counting it simply as Democrat versus Republican, and it keeps going back and forth. So it’s about even, and what these two parties stand for is not quite clear very often, even to themselves. To have it all leaning with great imbalance on one side doesn’t seem an adequate representation, or an adequate preparation for society, among the students who go to college.
That’s not to say that there’s a great deal of political indoctrination that is just part of the ethic of campus life. I don’t think that’s true at Yale. I think it’s been overplayed as a problem about universities in general. But there’s no doubt that the actual disproportion of political tendencies among faculty members was a factor in creating more distrust.
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Then there’s the question of free inquiry and free speech—related to politics, but related to cultural and social issues too. Are there questions that could be important moral topics for discussion in a university that are pretty much off limits, or where it’s understood—with nobody having to say so—that there’s one right answer, one right response, one right side to take, so that students are, imperceptibly but nevertheless, discouraged from getting into animated discussions about these things in class or outside of class?
Mounk: Part of what makes students afraid to speak up in class is the threat of social media. If a student says something that a classmate finds offensive, that classmate may go on TikTok or some other social media platform, perhaps misrepresent what was said, and call it out—leaving that student with no friends, with nowhere to sit in the dining hall, and so on.
Broomwich: Students are wary of saying something controversial because it might be reported in such a way as to harm their reputations early on, and how that affects people’s willingness to speak is pretty easy to guess. One of the recommendations—and it is one I’m most proud of on behalf of this committee—is a no-gizmo classroom: no laptops, no iPhones, no recording. It was suggested that we propose Chatham House rules for all classes, which means you can report things that were said, but you must never report who said it. I don’t think we went that far, and I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. But you want to stop well short of permissiveness towards creating gossip around comments made in class, either by a teacher or a student.
Mounk: I want to double-click on a few of these because there are a lot of interesting things in there. I’m struck by your first observation that there is a lot of opacity. I don’t think that opacity is by design exactly—in some areas perhaps more than others—but it has been created over time.
It’s true that a lot of the things that universities do, that supposedly are meant to serve worthy goals like equity, in fact have the result of favoring the people who know how to play the game. Personal statements are meant to give admissions officers a richer view of a personality and allow students to share when they’ve dealt with some kind of genuine hardship. In reality, it is often the most privileged students, from the most privileged backgrounds, who have the cultural knowledge to understand what you do and don’t say in a personal statement, and who have had the money to go volunteering on some wonderful project somewhere.
With the financial aid system, there are some really strong reasons why universities have embraced the models they have. The logic is that students who come from very rich households pay a lot, and students who don’t come from rich households are not charged any tuition, or are perhaps even given full living expenses. The top universities with big endowments are now very generous in that regard. But the result is that if you come from a genuinely underprivileged background, you may not know that. You may only have heard in general conversation that going to Yale now costs about $100,000 a year all in. So you may not even apply.
Not to mention that there are surely some parents who are smart about how they plan their finances and income—if you’re self-employed, you might frontload some losses to your business in the year your kid goes off to one of these schools, and because you really know the system, you’re able to come in under $200,000 that year, even if in the years before and after your kid attends college you’re way over $200,000 a year.
These are all examples in which a system—often designed quite earnestly, for example to make college accessible, which it now factually is for most people who are not very affluent—remains so opaque that people may not know it. If your kid gets into Yale, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and so on, you do actually get tremendous aid. But the system is so opaque that people may not know it. How did that come about, and is it fixable?
Bromwich: I don’t know how it came about. As the scholarship process became more intricate, with more kids from public schools being admitted to elite schools—the Ivies, Chicago, and so on—I suppose they found it difficult to explain the intricacies. There is also the gradual advent of what came to be called the holistic approach. This is what Harvard got hit very hard for in the fairness in admissions case before the Supreme Court, because the holistic approach could be shown to disfavor Asian students on personality criteria that are very obscure. They kept receiving low grades on those criteria to compensate for their high SATs, so that the university wouldn’t have to admit too many.
Mounk: To expand on this for a moment, there is a dark history here. Those personality scores were explicitly introduced to keep down the number of Jews at these schools some 50 years ago, and now they are being used to keep down the number of Asian students. The figures were just remarkable. I believe it was on a five-point scale, and the personality of the average Asian applicant was determined to be more than a standard deviation lower than that of any other racial group. Basically, Harvard University’s institutional judgment is that, on average, Asian students have remarkably terrible personalities—and all of this is just part of this opaque system.
Bromwich: It’s all a cultural and racist cliché, but it fits all the old models. Black people are just more interesting, more animated, more lively than everyone else—they have personality. Asian people, on the other hand, are harder to read; they all seem to have, somehow, not enough personality. White people are somewhere in between. It was absurd what came out of that.
All these schools have been practicing some version of holistic admissions. That system depends on the spontaneous judgment and tact of the people working in admissions when reading an application. They should presumably be people who have been taught some basic rules: what are the good schools, what are the hard schools, what are the districts where, if a student has really done something exceptional, it means a lot—and so on. Nevertheless, that system, because it is so personal and so subjective, is liable to particular abuses. No doubt about it.
A well-meaning democratic desire to present a welcoming face to students of all kinds is also largely responsible for some of the obscurity of the process. One recommendation from our report is that schools not advertise sticker price alone, but actually go into some of the intricacies, showing just what kind of chance an applicant has. But a subjective element remains. There will be students who feel prompted to try their chance at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, or elsewhere, but who, on objective measures such as the SAT, aren’t quite up there with the best students—students who do come from more privileged backgrounds but are more academically prepared for a difficult university.
Mounk: One of the interesting things that the report suggests is that over time the mission of the university has broadened explicitly, and with it the criteria for the kind of students you want to admit. The report suggests that the university should refocus its mission much more narrowly on the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge, rather than those vague goals of educating future leaders and all kinds of other things. Going with that, it suggests that academic merit should be the core criterion for admissions, in a way that evidently it is not always now.
How far should we go with that? Why shouldn’t we do what other top universities in most other countries do? The report acknowledges that in most other countries, universities like Yale and Harvard—as we have recognized in the last year during the Trump administration’s attacks on these universities—are private universities with large endowments, but they do actually receive a lot of public funding. One obvious way to preserve trust in them is to have a very transparent, clear academic metric for who should get in, whether that is a national entrance examination or a university-specific entrance exam—something where people are graded without knowledge of their identities. The people who come out on top are admitted. That is broadly speaking the system that most other democratic countries in the world use. Why not go the whole way and get rid of holistic admissions altogether?
Bromwich: I am probably closer to that view than some of my colleagues on this committee, but we went a distance towards it. As you mentioned, what these mission statements import is a hard thing to say. They started becoming inspirational—part of the brochures sent out to prospective applicants—about 30 years ago or so. For example, all of these elite universities will speak of their virtues as being a “second home.” The word “home” is used, I would say, even half as often as the word “community”—as if the university is a whole separate community. That leads to some fallacies about the sort of concord or comity that ought to exist among everybody, fallacies that are very hard to erase but should be erased. If you want what John Stuart Mill called the clash of ideas to happen in a university, that clash means friction, some abrasiveness—not necessarily wounded feelings, but surprise, startlement, shock, the feeling of being rubbed the wrong way in an argument, hearing for the first time an argument made well that you didn’t think you had to take seriously. You want that to be part of what goes on in universities.
As a University of Chicago philosophy professor once told me, we respect you here if you can defend your ideas. That’s a nice way of putting it—maybe a little less forbidding than “clash of ideas.” Students, by the time they are some way into university life, should be interested in defending their ideas. If they are going to, for example, a lecture or a political speech by a person whom they dislike, distrust, and are opposed to, they should have some pride in their ability to ask a hard question instead of shouting the person down. Why? Because it’s a university.
That seems to me to move towards wanting people who are qualified. Are the people who are qualified the people who score the highest on these merit tests? On the whole, I think that should be a guiding line. I believe it is one of the recommendations in our report: that a baseline be set explicitly—which is not there yet in Yale’s advertisements for potential applicants—that if your SAT score is below a certain threshold, and it’s going to be a pretty high one, you are not encouraged to apply because you’re probably only in for disappointment. They don’t do that yet. In fact, in previous outreach to potential applicants, they say don’t worry too much about SATs.
As you know, schools like Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, and Harvard, around the time of the George Floyd protests and COVID in 2020-2021, abandoned the SAT for a while and then gradually took it back because it was so impractical not to have it be a factor at all. There shouldn’t be a hangdog attitude about using this test—it’s merely objective. It should be a good test, one that tells you something about the student.
Mounk: One of the interesting things about the SAT test is that it went test-optional in most of those universities, which of course meant that if you had a very good score, you would include it. But if you had a bad score—yet otherwise had a great experience volunteering in Ecuador, or teachers who were really pushing you—you would omit it. The effect of that in the incoming class was, in many universities, very negative: there was a serious drop-off in intellectual quality.
The other thing this speaks to is exactly the nexus of admissions and opacity, and perhaps—I don’t like the term too much—a form of mollycoddling that has just become the background hum of the American elite class. There is a very odd mix of a highly meritocratic culture, with outsized returns for getting into Yale or into the investment bank you want to work for, and a culture that is very reluctant to be explicit about criteria. You see that in admissions and you see that in grading.
Part of the advantage of not having minimum SAT cutoffs, let’s be clear, is that you can do all kinds of social engineering. That’s one reason why universities are reluctant to adopt them. But part of it is simply that it feels mean to tell people that if your SAT is below 1300, you probably don’t stand a chance of getting into Yale. So let’s not say that explicitly—even though in reality, I’m sure these admissions offices that claim to read every file holistically probably discard every application below certain criteria without looking at it for more than two seconds. By not writing it on the website, you are actually inviting lots of students to spend a great deal of time on these applications, to get their hopes up, to think that perhaps they are such a unique student that their wonderfully neglected talents will be recognized—only to be disappointed six months later. It’s a kind of fake niceness.
That is related to grade inflation. I am a relatively soft teacher in the sense that I don’t want my students to be punished for taking my class rather than the class of some colleague of mine. Because grade inflation has become the practice, my grades are about as inflated. I try not to make them more inflated than those of my colleagues, but I don’t think they’re less inflated either. There is just no individual incentive to hold firm. But I think that’s also fake niceness. My students deserve to know whether the piece of writing they have handed in is poor, decent, good, or exceptional. At the moment we don’t have the signals to send them for them to know that about themselves. At the moment that feels nice, but it isn’t actually nice if we take intellectual development seriously. Universities should have a stronger sense of mission and be able to stand up against this better than they have. But it’s a downstream effect, I think, from a broader set of cultural attitudes that have become very widespread in the American professional-managerial class.
Bromwich: There is a well-meaning and rather innocent democratic idealism reflected here: we want all kinds of people, we don’t want to feel that we discriminate, we don’t want to feel we’re an aristocratic country. As the Ivy League—which was an aristocracy if anything was—began to become more democratic, at least in its surface presentation, holistic considerations began to take hold: find a student who has overcome an obstacle, a student who is a fascinating, strong personality and intellectually good enough. That kind of exception started to be made, and it is one form of diversity.
The word “diversity,” before Trump—who uses it to cover everything having to do with civil rights, gender, and whatever else—really meant devoting special attention to race, gender, ethnic background, immigration status, and cultural and ethnic issues. But diversity is also just wanting different types of people, and that impulse goes far back.
This is touched on briefly in the preface to our report. Anti-intellectualism—or, to put it more politely, non-intellectualism—has been a major strand of American life. It seems wrong for the academy to present itself as participating in this unprejudiced non-intellectualism, but there is a little bit of that too. It leads to unfortunate effects when you try to have a popular face while not really being a popular institution.
Mounk: I find the idea that you need to put together a diverse class very strange. I was an undergraduate in England at Cambridge, and the admissions system is so fragmented that there’s no chance of putting together a unified class for the whole university, because colleges do their own admissions per subject. There’s no real way of doing that. Yet the university orchestra somehow always had a second violinist. The idea in America is that you need to make sure that you have this kind of student and that kind of student. But there is a law of large numbers in statistics: if you admit the smartest students, you’re going to end up having one student who happens to be interested in music and one student who happens to be interested in sports. I just don’t buy the premise that active curation is necessary to create a diverse class. My class at Cambridge was every bit as diverse in terms of interests, talents, and the way students spent their free time as a class in America—without any constituency being able to say, we need to make sure we have somebody who can do this sport or that.
The report rightly calls out all kinds of special categories that continue to be given preferential treatment. These include athletes, the children of alumni, and—this is a minor point numerically, but one I find very striking—the children of faculty and staff, who explicitly get a leg up. That is really quite remarkable.
The one thing the report does not include is a treatment of race. That is partially because officially we no longer have affirmative action at Ivy League universities in the wake of recent Supreme Court judgments. But that is where the opacity comes back in. When you look at some of the amicus briefs that various universities wrote in the Supreme Court litigation about affirmative action, they said that the number of black students would decline radically if they were not able to practice affirmative action. In the case of Harvard, one of the calculations presented by Harvard’s side said that without affirmative action, the number of black students at the university would go down from about 14% to something like 2%. Yet after the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action, the number didn’t budge—or it budged only a tiny bit. At Yale, it went from 14% before the Supreme Court judgment to 14% a couple of years later, and I think it has since fallen a little to 12%.
Bromwich: The desire to have the percentage of students in an entering class reflect the percentage in the population goes with, I think, a fallacy that Michael Oakeshott talks about in some of his essays on education, which he calls the reflection theory of culture. That is to say, the idea that higher education and universities should, in all possible respects, reflect the society they are meant to serve. But institutions are good at functioning for different purposes. If you’re thinking about an activity—call it an institution—such as classical music, or engineering at a high level of specialization, or the armed forces, the kind of abilities needed for one thing or another aren’t necessarily going to reflect the distribution in the population. Universities are a large institution and you should perhaps strive to make them as representative as possible. But the reflection theory also carries the trouble that it makes the university think it should reflect attitudes in society as well as populations. Again, I think that’s wrong.
Mounk: That brings us to the question of intellectual diversity. You alluded to this briefly earlier: the vast majority of faculty at the leading schools lean left, many of them registered Democrats. That in itself need not be a problem. But I do think it’s indicative of a deeper problem—that the debate at these universities lies, as I see it, between the identitarian left and the liberal left. There is probably a slight preponderance of the liberal left on most campuses, not necessarily in every department or every field. But everything that falls outside of that range is hard to formulate at those universities without experiencing significant pushback.
Some of the solutions to this problem I view somewhat critically. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t hire colleagues at our universities in order for them to be intellectually diverse. First, it’s very hard for one person to be intellectually diverse in themselves unless they hold a very incoherent view of the world. Second, it’s rather odd to have a colleague who is just there to have a different opinion. But the truth is that political criteria are currently a very large part of the selection process, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, where the quality of work certainly matters, but where people whose views fall too far outside the consensus in a particular department often aren’t even considered in the first place. There is an effective application of ideological criteria that is covert and sometimes not even self-conscious—it’s simply that this person falls outside a reasonable fold, and so they are not considered. That is a very effective implicit political filter.
Unless you are able to upend that, perhaps the only alternative is to sometimes hire people who fall outside that consensus. It’s very hard to know how to fix this. As in the case of a broader reluctance to state criteria explicitly, this too is downstream from a larger transformation of the professional-managerial class. A lot of the problem today is that the Democrats have simply become the party of the professional-managerial class. As professors, university administrators, and (to a significant extent) students are recruited from the ranks of the professional-managerial class and its offspring, there is always going to be some lean in that direction, as long as that is the nature of our political cleavage.
So how can universities improve on intellectual diversity and foster genuine debates on campus, in a way that doesn’t itself run counter to the principles of free inquiry and that avoids political litmus tests for faculty hiring?
Bromwich: It’s very hard. What you’re describing is a standoff between two desirable goods. On the one hand, the intellectual autonomy of departments: departments should be able to choose to hire, and then possibly to tenure, the scholars they consider the best in a given field. On the other hand, if you have very little variety of opinion in a field such as politics—where there is in fact great variety outside the academy—there is something lacking in the education students are going to get.
This is called, by people who do the kind of study this report was working at, the pipeline problem. The pipeline problem of having so few black people represented in the academy was addressed by affirmative action, but affirmative action is no longer constitutional and may have run its course in any case.
Where the left-liberal side got its strongest foothold was in certain departments in the humanities and social sciences, but also in the studies programs—black studies, ethnic studies of various kinds, immigration studies, gender studies, and so on.
Mounk: Is that where the left-liberal or the identitarian left got its foothold? My sense—and I know Harvard much better than Yale—is that at Harvard, the government department and the main faculties have a left-liberal predominance.
Bromwich: Correction taken. I meant consciously political and consciously left, but you’re right—that would better be described as identitarian.
In any case, if you want a pipeline going the other way, you can’t do it by political affirmative action. That is, as you said, a litmus test. But universities—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, and so on—have created what they call centers or institutes, which aren’t quite academic programs, let alone full departments, but where people can have a permanent presence on campus and teach credit-bearing classes. It is imaginable that, at some places, if done with imagination and scruple, these centers could provide more room for people with academic training to hold views that inform their teaching without becoming dogma—or to hold views that are libertarian in ways that fall outside the usual range. That is one solution, but it is a standoff. It is a hell of a problem, how to change the composition of faculties without somehow compromising intellectual and departmental autonomy.
Mounk: What about the student side of this? The report refers, at surprising length I thought, to the famous Halloween incident, in which there was an email from the office of intercultural affairs urging people to be very sensitive in the Halloween costumes they chose. There was then a response to that by Erika Christakis, who was—as it was then called—the master, along with her husband Nicholas Christakis, the associate master, of one of the residential houses at Yale. Her response suggested that students should be able to think for themselves about these kinds of things. There was a huge eruption of anger that did look rather like some form of cultural revolution—an effigy of Nicholas in the courtyard and so on. A subsection of students, but an influential subsection, saw it as their calling to impose a certain identitarian orthodoxy on campus. That included intimidating senior faculty members, as in this instance, and sometimes intimidating their fellow students. There is some discussion in the report about the norms that should be established so that people feel free to share their opinions in class without the fear of being canceled afterwards on social media or in other ways.
I have personally found that that moment has somewhat passed. For the last few years of teaching, I’ve been struck by the fact that for many students, these ideas are now the received wisdom of what they’ve been told in high school, middle school, and sometimes elementary school. It depends a little on where they grew up—if they grew up, for example, in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area like New York, Los Angeles, or Boston, these are largely just the ideas their teachers have always taught them. As a result, they tend to take them for granted. It’s the world they’ve grown up in. But they no longer think of themselves as bearers of a flame whose goal is to impose it on others. It’s more that this is what their teachers told them and, like most things their teachers told them, they assume it’s true—until somebody has a different opinion, which surprises them, and they find they want to talk about it. It feels somewhat less fraught.
What is your impression of campus culture at Yale—has it somewhat improved? And more broadly, how big is the challenge today and what are some possible solutions? One of the recommendations in the report is to remove electronics from the classroom. The report also entertains but ultimately dismisses the idea of a Chatham House rule prohibiting attribution of remarks made in class. Where do things stand and what can be done?
Bromwich: I agree with your impression that the pressure zone, so to speak, has lifted somewhat in the last two or three years. A person I’m very close to in this household, who is a psychologist, speculated that in the year 2020 this country had a nervous breakdown—the whole country had a nervous breakdown. COVID was an element of it, but so were the George Floyd protests and the disorders in cities. The Halloween event you mentioned came in 2015-16, so that is an earlier BLM moment, and it had been going on for a long time—really from Obama’s second term into recent days.
But I do agree that there is more tolerance and interest in the exchange of ideas, and more animated talk and susceptibility to humor in the classroom, as far as I am able to discern. That is a good thing. It means that younger teachers, who tend to be cautious because they worry about student evaluations, will not constantly develop twenty different tones of voice for saying that’s interesting—and may instead learn how to say, I don’t really think that’s true and here’s why, or that’s absolutely true but let’s go further with it. That kind of give and take in a classroom is very important.
One of the things you could hear from conservative students in the worse recent years—here at Yale, which is not as badly off as other places because it has a conservative political union and a conservative presence in the background, so those students don’t feel entirely isolated—is that sometimes in class, when they made a remark that showed their traditionalist sympathies, they would not get denounced or shamed by anyone in the class or by the teacher, but the teacher would be silent for thirty seconds and then move on to something else. That’s not good. A greater openness that reflects a community with divergent, somewhat disharmonizing points of view is a good thing, to the extent that it really is coming back. I think it may be.
Mounk: Is one challenge not explicitly mentioned in the report that there is a minority of faculty who really do abuse their power in the classroom to impose their ideological views? My impression is that most faculty members do not do that, and I certainly think most of my colleagues do not. But I am struck, speaking to students, that they very consistently bring up experiences of this.
I go out of my way, when I explain what I think a good essay is for my class, to make clear that I don’t care whether students agree with me or not. The last thing I want is for somebody to badly parrot my views back to me—that’s not going to earn a great grade. If you write something I agree with, I want to feel that it is a really strong, interesting representation of that view. If you write something I disagree with, the question is not whether I am going to come to agree with you—that is unlikely. What I want to feel is whether the pull of that argument in my mind is a little bit stronger after reading your essay than it was at the beginning. Have you made a case for a point of view I may happen to disagree with, where I find myself thinking: I still probably disagree, but I see the force of that—I see why somebody might believe that.
Because I am very explicit about this, students sometimes say that they feel they can say what they think in my class, because it is not always the case elsewhere. I always listen up at that. When is it not the case? I remember one recent instance in particular where a student said that in high school, a teacher had a set of views—actually a rather woke set of views, views the student largely shared—but the student chafed at the fact that any disagreement was clearly going to be punished.
Are there ways that universities need to reckon with that, even just in terms of training teachers and setting clear expectations? You don’t want to be too intrusive, and you certainly don’t want auditing of every grade, which would be open to abuse in all kinds of other ways. But even if it is one in twenty faculty members, that is an experience most undergraduates are going to have once or perhaps twice during their college career. Is that one of the things that damages trust in higher education, and something we need to deal with?
Bromwich: I don’t know if it is one in twenty teachers, but I agree that it goes against the ethic of teaching. If you have anything resembling a Hippocratic oath as a teacher of the liberal arts and sciences, it should be that a view that is well defended gets the respect of the teacher, and a view that is earnestly and genuinely meant but not well defended receives a response that is not crushing or personally harsh, but reasonable—an example of how to point out the fallacies or the loopholes in a rival argument. Teachers should be exemplary in that way and it should be part of their training. But what is involved in acquiring a PhD is so specialized in other ways that that element of pedagogy is often neglected.
Some of it is intuitive. Some of it is, as I’m sure you have experienced, getting to know what your classroom presence is like and what it’s like to teach different kinds of classes. I remember in my early days teaching at Princeton—I was in my 20s—being morbidly worried about what I thought of as dead time, what disc jockeys call dead air: nothing being said. If I asked a question and there was no answer for ten seconds, I got very anxious. But as a teacher you learn that if a question was well asked, you simply wait.
Mounk: The best piece of teaching advice I’ve ever gotten was in graduate school. The department put on a little meeting for people who were going to be teaching assistants for the first time, and the best piece of advice—which I follow very often—is this: if you ask a question and you look anxious that people might not answer it, and you look like you’re going to jump in yourself, students think they can just sit back and let the teacher do their thing. What you should do instead is lean back, look comfortable, and let an awkward silence arise. Some student always can’t bear the awkwardness and jumps in, and suddenly you have a real discussion. I don’t generally have trouble getting my students to talk in the classroom, but on the occasions when that happens, I do that. Sometimes I even call it out explicitly: I’m happy to sit here in awkward silence for as long as you like. When you do that, somebody always jumps in.
Bromwich: Sometimes you haven’t asked the question well, and that shouldn’t lead to too much self-consciousness either. You learn to listen to yourself and say, a few seconds later, you know what? I posed that badly. Let me try again. There was a philosophy professor at Princeton—modal logic and philosophy of language and other such things—David Lewis, who spoke perfect paragraphs and was an excellent lecturer. When he would walk back and forth on the stage and, in the middle of a sentence, realize he was about to talk nonsense, he would stop and say so, then go back and say the whole thing again. Teachers, in a quieter way, should be able to do that.
Let me read a passage from a British education master of the 19th century that is quoted by Oakeshott, because I think it speaks to exactly what we’re talking about—the kinds of habits and manners that go with thinking in the context of higher education:
A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain, nor need you regret the hours you spend on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions. But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits, for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms.
That last part is obviously what has become most challenging for students in the last generation or so.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and David discuss why the number of students choosing humanities subjects is declining and how colleges and universities can regain public trust. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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