00:03:31.820Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate the introduction.
00:03:33.800So why are we talking about these people? Maybe one little anecdote to get people started, right? During the recent attacks on Columbia University, there were a lot of people asking me like, hey, how come the university caved so hard to the Trump administration's demands?
00:03:51.640And I kept having to explain to them that like, this was not the Trump administration negotiating really with a bunch of faculty or a bunch of administrators at Columbia. It was the Trump administration really negotiating with the Board of Trustees, which, spoiler alert, is a little bit more aligned with the Trump administration than, you know, if you had asked the English department at Columbia University, let's say.
00:04:15.280You could even tell in the coverage, which was very much driven by the Wall Street Journal, the fact that a lot of financial journalists appear to be very well informed what, quote-unquote, Colombia was thinking about the negotiations with the Trump administration.
00:04:28.680Well, that's because they didn't hear it from whoever the interim president of Colombia was that day, who changed like every three minutes anyway.
00:04:36.960It was because they had the cell number for the board of trustee members who really were making the decision.
00:04:45.280Well, cell number, or maybe they were in a signal group chat.
00:04:50.000So Lauren, is it accurate to say that campus stories often don't focus on the trustees
00:04:54.380because sort of their demographics and politics, by and large, don't lend themselves to the
00:05:00.420kind of left-wing censorship framing that campus critics tend to like?
00:05:04.360Yeah, the campus critics who like to rail against left-wing censorship are almost always
00:05:08.540talking about students, those censorious and powerful 18 to 24-year-olds.
00:05:12.960But yes, I'm sure a trustee has probably never been accused of being, say, like a Marxist, just because it's the opposite worldview required for a trustee's job.
00:05:23.540So the job of the trustee is to be a fundraiser and a fund manager of the institution.
00:05:28.640And this differs somewhat between private and public schools.
00:05:31.280So I'll concentrate on private colleges because those are the ones that always make a splash in the New York Times and the Atlantic op-ed pages by some of this show's favorite cultural critics.
00:05:41.380But yeah, the trustees are the ultimate authority over the university.
00:05:46.380So anytime you see a headline that's questioning, you know, the motives or the activities of college students, that's something I would recommend readers sort of like second guess, right?
00:05:57.520So the trustees tend to focus on their fiduciary responsibilities, but they technically have the final say over every matter of the institution, right?
00:06:05.480So strictly speaking, trustees have the final say over everything from awarding degrees to hiring groundskeepers to approving book manuscripts acquired by the university press, though they will delegate those tasks out.
00:06:17.360So, yes, if the question is how come Columbia caved, these are the people we're talking about.
00:06:22.600We're not talking about, like you said, the English department.
00:06:25.680And so we might add the nomenclature differs, right?
00:06:28.880Like by the trustee, a regent, a supervisor, those are not substantially different, right?
00:08:29.660So where did this institution or like forum for funding universities come from?
00:08:36.000Is this like a Gilded Age invention or did it arise earlier?
00:08:40.760Like where does the tradition of the board of trustees begin in the history of U.S. higher education?
00:08:48.280Yeah, it's actually it goes back way further than that.
00:08:50.680One of my colleagues in critical university studies, Ashish Kapur-Sadiq, has explained this the best way that I understand it and the way that I explain it to my students.
00:08:59.280So the trustee model as it exists for colleges in the U.S. is a vestige of the British Empire.
00:09:05.560So during the 16th century, European states were creating corporations over all of their colonies, right?
00:09:11.180So it's just a legal arrangement that allows the European monarch to grant investors to run an institution, such as a college, in the colony in the name of the king, right?
00:09:21.880While they assume all the expenses and all the risks.
00:09:23.980So these investors are the trustees.0.99
00:09:26.300But it's an interesting question because many people will know that the U.S. college model goes back to, like, early medieval European institutions meant to train the clergies.0.51
00:09:36.900But those actually did not have boards of trustees, right?0.88
00:12:01.760She hated this guy, Edward Allsworth Ross,
00:12:06.120partly because he criticized exactly the kind of place
00:12:10.400where the Stanford family had made its name, right?
00:12:13.400There's also some racism thrown in there,
00:12:15.220so we shouldn't, like, under no circumstances
00:12:17.800do you have to hand it to Edward Allsworth Ross.
00:12:21.200But she very clearly just took issue with a member of, quote unquote, her faculty engaging in public speech that she deemed inimical to the interests that, yes, had made this very, very rich university possible.
00:15:51.280So here we have really this kind of, I think, what you would call the monarchical model of the school's founder.
00:15:56.940That's no longer really the case for any university, nor was it even normal back then outside of what was, you know, pretty recent acquisition in terms of territory.
00:16:08.080Normally, a bunch of trustees will kind of jostle for influence or will be joined on a board.
00:16:15.460You tend not to make yourself dependent on one single sugar daddy because there are inherent risks that come with it as young Stanford University learned to its own chagrin.
00:16:24.700And so I thought we could talk about another example. We could call this episode two, No Child of Mine. This is Charles Walgreen v. the University of Chicago. What happened there?
00:20:21.160Because I'm wondering, like, did he have this shit fit over like because like wasn't tuition like bupkis?0.98
00:20:26.460Like he's like forty five dollars.0.99
00:20:30.640That's it. I'm talking to the Illinois state legislature.
00:20:32.940And they're like, well, I mean, you at least have to give him his money back.
00:20:36.160This is a situation where a, I'm guessing, like, teenage girl who's teasing her uncle and trying to get a rise out of him accidentally, like a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world, winds up setting off a chain of events that ruins several Latin American economies, right?
00:20:55.780So, like, ladies, you never know the influence you can have just when you're trying to make fun of the old guy in your family.
00:21:03.540Yeah. What is that famous video that's going around right now? We'll adapt that to say,
00:21:07.600are you reading Karl Marx in school? Shut the fuck up. Don't tell your reactionary uncle.1.00
00:21:14.880Don't let him know, even though he might really like the lesson.
00:22:47.500So William F. Buckley Jr., listeners will know, was the son of an oil magnate, Bill Buckley Sr.,
00:22:53.580And then on his mom's side, he was the descendant of Southern planters and a 1950 graduate of Yale, where he was a member of the Storied Skull and Bone Society.
00:23:02.980So you really couldn't design a more fitting caricature of an American conservative, actually.
00:23:07.360And maybe the only mark against him was the fact that he was a devout Catholic in Waspie, Connecticut.
00:23:11.940it. And we should say that he then reacted to graduating from Yale and having a gilded future
00:23:19.160ahead of him in the most healthy way possible, which is he wrote a book about all the things
00:23:22.780he didn't like, which I have to say is the last relatable thing that he did. But the idea of like
00:23:28.780everyone graduating college should like writing a teardown screed of it a year later. I think more
00:23:36.200people should do this. That's phenomenal. That's some Larry David shit. But yeah, he uses this
00:23:42.160experience he had at Yale, which appears to have been not at all negative, really,
00:23:46.200for a full frontal attack on liberalism. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody should write a screed
00:23:52.860after graduating college and launch your career and launch a political movement because it's
00:23:56.620basically exactly what this book did. But yeah, there's no greater champion of power or enemy
00:24:02.880of liberalism than Buckley, who in 1951 published the book you just mentioned, God and Man at Yale,
00:24:08.820The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. Superstitions. Exactly. And academic freedom,
00:24:14.840by the way, is in quotes. It's in like scare quotes in the actual title. But the book's
00:24:21.800central claim was that Yale faculty were indoctrinating the sons of the elite with
00:24:26.580socialism and atheism. And his prescription was for parents, alumni, trustees, and anybody else
00:24:33.880with power to quit cutting checks to the school until it righted the ship and went back to
00:24:38.340professing Christianity and capitalism. It's really similar to Trump's approach to the Ivies
00:24:42.660today, actually. But yeah, God and Man at Yale both launched Buckley's career as a thought leader
00:24:49.060and the post-war conservative movement. It really kind of like put his name out into the public,
00:24:54.260Like, even though the book wasn't well-received at the time, it got lots of negative reviews.
00:25:00.340Let me read real quickly from Buckley here, because this really emblematizes what is essentially an autogolpe for the board of trustees.
00:25:09.700Like, the people who graduated from this institution and who have somehow sustained it financially ought to be seizing the reins of power from the freaks that teach and study there.
00:25:21.000So here's what Buckley says in God and Man at Yale.
00:26:11.700Yes, but I mean that book has really left a legacy, but the book's complaints were not original to Buckley, right?
00:26:17.820We just talked about the Walgreens case in Chicago, and that was from 15 years before.
00:26:22.980And in fact, one of the anniversary reprints of the book, in that Buckley credited much
00:26:27.920of its content to his mentor, self-described right-wing radical Frank Chortorov, who was
00:26:33.280himself a disciple of the anarchist libertarian Albert J. Knott.
00:26:37.480And Chortorov is one of my favorite figures when it comes to enemies of the college.
00:26:41.320He was sort of like a neocon 100 years before neocons.
00:26:45.220He's a secular Jew born on the Lower West Side, Manhattan, to Russian parents in 1887.0.54
00:26:51.760And he attended Columbia at a time when the Ivies were doing everything they could to keep the, quote, socially undesirable out, meaning Jews, Catholics, other Eastern and Southern European immigrants.
00:27:03.160And Columbia and Penn were both pretty exceptional for their small Jewish enrollment at the turn of the century.0.85
00:27:08.920But it was something that they were trying to tamp back on.
00:27:11.440But at Columbia, Chordorov, again, this is the person that Buckley credits with lots of the arguments in his book. Chordorov was a contemporary of the educational philosopher John Dewey and others that he thought were like socialists. And he drew a lot of energy by doing battle against his classmates. And from those experiences, he determined that colleges were in need of a revolution, but the only way to achieve it was to train an entire new generation of faculty for the right.
00:27:41.120So by the 1950s, Chodorov had gathered enough financial backing from sympathetic millionaires
00:27:46.280to create a counter to the intercollegiate socialist society.
00:27:50.720So he called his the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, ISI, which actually still
00:27:56.340exists, but they're the Intercollegiate Studies Institute today.
00:27:59.780But yeah, Chodorov branded this as an alternative university within the university.
00:28:05.260So this is like a long-term subversive project because it's happening on your campuses.
00:28:10.300But basically, the way it works is that conservative faculty could identify promising undergraduates and connect them with donors who would pay for their PhDs to make sure that they joined the faculty.
00:28:22.580And then we will just have future generations of faculty for the rights clauses.
00:28:27.020And Buckley was ISI's first president.
00:28:29.040That's right. And I mean, we might point out that like things like ISI, when you look at the kind of demands that the Trump administration just sort of sent to Harvard, which finally sent the universities into rebellion against the kind of dogefication of higher ed.
00:28:44.560And for those of our readers who've not been fortunate enough to be blessed with the incredible letter that Harvard University got from the task force on anti-Semitism that the Trump administration created across various departments, here is one thing that this letter says.
00:29:04.760By August 2025, the university shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.
00:29:27.620The letter goes on, quote, every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity.
00:29:41.520Every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.
00:29:49.620diversity. So you just got to keep adding students, apparently, until enough of them
00:29:55.040check the Republican box on, I don't know, on a survey you give them? Are you going to
00:30:00.040depose them, right? When someone applies for a faculty position at Stanford, I don't ask
00:30:04.700them how they vote. And if they're, you know, a specialist on Johannes Brahms, like, how
00:30:08.800the fuck am I going to know how this person votes? Well, the one way you can know is through
00:30:13.020the ISI Rolodex, which is essentially what the suggestion is, right? I'm not saying,
00:30:17.500Harvard, you need to hire people who have conservative thoughts or feel conservative
00:30:21.740feelings is to say people who travel in our right-wing networks, right? Like pick the people
00:30:28.660that have been funded by IISI, that are in our speaker roster, that have had a sinecure at the
00:30:34.800American Enterprise Institute, et cetera, et cetera. In some way, they've been creating this
00:30:39.420kind of shadow university in order for it to, at some point, supplant the real thing.
00:30:44.220Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up AEI. I like that description too, as like the Rolodex of
00:30:51.060members who could be like qualified faculty for diverse perspectives when they literally all like
00:30:56.340talk and read about the same things. Okay. So I have this like grand theory about the right and
00:31:01.240its relationship with higher education. They sort of have like three approaches on how to
00:31:05.020control it. One is like work from within. So that's ISI. That's the model that Chodorov set
00:31:11.260off. But another approach is to set up like an alternate model. So going back to the 1920s,
00:31:17.920there were religious conservatives who were sort of like horrified by the scientific consensus
00:31:23.460around the theory of evolution. So they like trailblazed the separatist approach. So Bob
00:31:28.140Jones College, now Bob Jones University, was founded in 1927 by the son of a Confederate
00:31:33.840veteran who envisioned an evangelical college that would serve as this like Christian training
00:31:38.940Center. And then shortly thereafter, getting into the 1930s, about the time of the Walgreens
00:31:44.760University of Chicago debacle, there are all of these like anti-New Deal industry magnates that
00:31:50.540provide seed money to create these free market think tanks, including American Enterprise
00:31:56.420Institute, but also the Foundation for Economic Education, which Chordorov was a part of.
00:32:01.560And these research centers are that separatist approach, right? The whole idea behind them at
00:32:07.800the time was to produce capitalist educational materials as part of a propaganda war against
00:32:12.880FDR's administration. Listeners will remember that Roosevelt had this brain trust,
00:32:18.340a cadre of academic experts behind the president's Keynesian solutions to the Great Depression. So
00:32:23.500these conservative groups saw the importance of having parallel academic institutes to sort of
00:32:30.420like challenge the singular authority of academics in the college, right, on the U.S. economy in this
00:32:35.360case. Yeah. And so just in case you thought that Bari Weiss ever had an original thought in her
00:32:40.140life, right? She's running a virtually antediluvian model, right? Like you found an alternate
00:32:47.100institution, you grift rich right-wing dudes into supporting it, third step, profit, right? Like
00:32:55.040what is the phrase that then comes up, I think, in the 70s is the lunatics have taken over the
00:32:58.920asylum and it segues straight into a pitch. We have to build our own institutions. All I need
00:33:04.500is a couple of hundred million dollars
00:37:31.340We had a wonderful interview with Saita Grundy about the Morehouse man.
00:37:34.520And she pointed to the fact that it just creates this very basic disconnect where almost, as you said, almost all trustees at major institutions are alumni.
00:37:46.160And HBCUs find themselves steered by people who, as you say, until the late 90s, really overwhelmingly were not.
00:37:54.560Meaning you really are in a situation where of a kind of paternalistic model, right?
00:38:00.060But the Buckley thing doesn't sound quite as awful and tin-eared when you're saying, well, it's people who graduated recently, who were students not too long ago.
00:38:08.960It's very different when it's like, oh, it's this nice white man who takes a great interest in you, but would never send his kids here, right?
00:38:21.800Matt Seabold has, if I can do another podcast recommendation, Matt Seabold has a really great podcast called American Vandal.
00:38:29.040This past season, season 11, I think he's done a lot of discussions of HBCUs and the problems that they face when they accept multi-million dollar grants from people who are sort of like kind of nefarious actors, right?
00:38:43.040People who are interested in AI-ifying the school and things like that.
00:38:47.320Jelani Favors is someone who's talked about this a lot as well.
00:38:51.920Yeah. So as our final act, I thought we could talk about the next interesting permutation and the evolution of the trustee, which is the, wait, does he even go here version? You know, this is a figure that I've become very, very interested in in my own work on Silicon Valley, which is the dropout.
00:39:09.420As you say, a lot of time-building trustee relations is about the university intersecting with these, frankly, dynastic families that have long intergenerational connections to this particular school.
00:39:22.520Well, this becomes a problem if the most famous people making boatloads of cash around you famously don't finish college.0.97
00:39:31.040But after a year and a half, they're like, fuck it, I'm out.0.90
00:39:34.000I'm going to be a billionaire now.0.99
00:39:35.620And then you're now chasing their cash.
00:39:38.280That's not to say that like most of our trustees today, I mean, are still obviously like graduates, but it has sort of changed.
00:39:46.380The Silicon Valley-fication of wealth has, I think, put pressure on some parts of the trustee model, hasn't it?
00:39:52.480Yeah, I don't think the trustee model will go anywhere just because it's so baked in.
00:39:57.100But I definitely think, you know, the Silicon Valley model, I mean, those guys brag about how they drop out.
00:40:03.800They brag about how they never finish college.
00:40:05.940So I'm not sure how that relationship is going to play out. But another sort of tendency I've noticed, though, is the broligarchs wear as a badge of honor the fact that they dropped out.0.91
00:40:17.200But also, it seems like they are trying to create their own parallel institutions, right? It's like on-the-job training or, you know, we do the inventions here.1.00
00:40:25.800It's sort of like, I mean, higher ed has long had this relationship with private industry where, you know, certain departments are sort of like in the bag of the RAND Corporation or what have you.
00:40:35.320But this does seem to be something a little bit newer.
00:40:38.320So, yeah, I mean, to be determined, it doesn't look good for the colleges.
00:40:49.540You cannot get that fellowship unless you drop out.
00:40:53.040And they are positioning the right wing money, the right wing sort of professional pipeline as an education that rivals or indeed surpasses that of the university.
00:41:05.660Yeah, I think I do think it has some institutions sort of shaking a little bit, but but it almost seems like this is something that the Democrats have been faced with, like where it's like they're having to constantly try to move to the right because they feel like American opinion is moving to the right.
00:41:22.760So if colleges feel like their perspective student body is no longer interested in going to college, they're going to have to do something to make themselves look like disruptors of, you know, the things that they are.
00:41:35.800So, I mean, in that way, maybe some elite institutions, maybe some Stanfords might chase after potential students that way.
00:41:44.500It's curious to live through and keep an eye on.
00:41:47.360Yeah. And I think the place where people can watch these kind of dynamics play out is actually, I think, in the recent fights around Harvard. So not the most recent ones, but the ones from last year, right? This is the Bill Ackman v. Harvard part of the episode. This is not about Ackman himself, but I was very struck by this. I don't know if you guys read this recent piece in The New Yorker by Nathan Heller. I think it's called Will Harvard Bend or Break?
00:44:48.560Well, international listeners, I'm so sorry to burden you with this.
00:44:51.740Hillsdale College is a religious college in Hillsdale, Michigan, and it has been touted by
00:44:58.640right-wing thought leaders, people like the Christopher Rufos of the world, as like an ideal
00:45:03.400model institution. It is an avowedly religious, I shouldn't even say religious, it's a Christian
00:45:10.000institution, and they teach the classical liberal arts curriculum that the right is so excited about.
00:45:16.500Now, I want to be very clear, when they say classical liberal arts, they want to focus on the history and philosophy of Europe, right?
00:45:24.940The great books of Western literature, classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, legal and religious histories.0.95
00:45:31.960But it's telling what those subjects leave out, always the history ideas and literature of non-white America, right, and the rest of the world.0.88
00:45:40.420So, for example, at Hillsdale, your American history lessons about the founding will leave out the horrors of settler colonialism.0.78
00:45:48.020They won't even mention indigenous genocide.0.52
00:45:50.720They present American history as like of uniquely northern European heritage, as if the U.S. has only ever had a white past.
00:45:59.180And descriptors of this type of education as classical will point to its openness and its humanness.0.51
00:46:05.760but it's ironic because they only ever focus on the works of so-called dead white men, right?0.55
00:46:10.860No other civilizations prize humanism.
00:46:12.900So you can sort of see how this is like a departure from like the actual openness, right?
00:46:19.220So when they talk about ideological balance or ideological diversity,
00:48:51.400Thank you so much for sharing your time with us.
00:48:53.760Yeah, I appreciate the invitation. It was great to be here.
00:48:56.780We should, again, emphasize for people that, you know, we can really barely scratch the surface in the hour that we have here. Please check out American Campus. It's an absolutely phenomenal and really just impressive work. It really is what it says on the tin. It is a history of higher education answering questions you didn't even know you had.
00:49:17.440Like I didn't, the dorm stuff, for instance, I just forgot that I had had that question.
00:49:22.400I was like, oh, thank God, American campus is there for me.
00:49:24.860And every time you find something fascinating to draw out with your guests, the only sort
00:49:30.400of negative side effect it has is that it makes it even more impossible to engage with
00:49:35.360these kind of bad faith, very distortive campus narratives, because you just end up sputtering