The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:19:13 · Scott Galloway, Greg Lukianoff
[00:19:13] S0: Yeah, let's talk about that. My employer, NYU, is it fair to call my employer? Anyways, the the campus I'm affiliated with finished dead last. Yeah. Below little... Below every other school you ranked. How did that happen? Or what what earned them dead last? [00:19:33] S1: A lot of the New York schools has been been to a degree mishandling the Israeli Palestinian stuff, you know, sort of vacillating back and forth between protests that they tolerate at one point and then crack down on another, punishing some pro Palestinian groups and professors have been pretty common in in Manhattan, you know, for example. And what's interesting is I remember when our Columbia ranked dead last, I think, a couple of years ago, and there was a kind of surprise that UVA does as well as it does. When UVA came out and said, listen, we support freedom of speech. We do not allow you though to have indefinite camp outs here. [00:20:15] S0: Yeah. Encampments. [00:20:16] S1: And they're like, how could that possibly be? They just strictly said you couldn't do those. And I'm like, no. Because students can understand that. They're like, well, yeah, sure. You can't indefinitely camp out. But if you try to split the baby in this way and be like, well, we allow it to a point, and then we'll enforce it. We don't really know when. It might be when the president is testifying before congress has happened, you know, at Columbia. They're not gonna trust you after that. Being consistent and honest is always gonna get you more credibility than being wishy washy and mercurial.
00:20:16 · Greg Lukianoff, Scott Galloway
[00:20:16] S1: And they're like, how could that possibly be? They just strictly said you couldn't do those. And I'm like, no. Because students can understand that. They're like, well, yeah, sure. You can't indefinitely camp out. But if you try to split the baby in this way and be like, well, we allow it to a point, and then we'll enforce it. We don't really know when. It might be when the president is testifying before congress has happened, you know, at Columbia. They're not gonna trust you after that. Being consistent and honest is always gonna get you more credibility than being wishy washy and mercurial. [00:20:49] S0: Do you think we as faculty or as institutions should discern between students and faculty in the sense that I was quite frankly horrified by my alma mater, UCLA, when kids were passing out bands to everyone but Jews and then basically sequestering Jews from certain parts of the campus. And my thesis, and I stand by this, is that if me and my fraternity brothers in the eighties had started passing out bans to white kids and then blocked black kids from coming on campus, I think they would have called them the national guard. [00:21:19] S1: Yeah.
00:21:19 · Greg Lukianoff, Scott Galloway
[00:21:19] S1: Yeah. [00:21:19] S0: And there seemed to be a certain tolerance for this type of intolerance that I found very upsetting. And I think you can grant... I think we should cut a pretty wide berth for an 18 year old. I am really glad a camera wasn't following me around when I was 18. They deserve to make mistakes. They deserve to get punished, but they deserve, in my view, a lot of leniency and grace as they try to push the boundaries of what's acceptable and what isn't a culture. I have less empathy and I've gotten pushback, sympathy from my colleagues. And while I respect their free speech rights, when they say things that in my view are hateful or supportive of disruptive of the class or of the educational setting, or just say things in my mind that any critical thinker would go, this just reflects really poorly on our faculty, that we as a private organization have the right to fire that person. And they can go to Washington Square and exercise their free speech. But I felt that the use of quote unquote free speech rights was used to create cloud cover for people who would not be employed in most organizations if they showed up in the lobby and started saying any of these things. That was a bit of a word salad.
00:22:32 · Greg Lukianoff
[00:22:32] S1: Your thoughts, I'm sufficiently obsessed, even though fires extended beyond higher ed these days. Mhmm. I'm sufficiently obsessed with higher education reform that I started on my vacation this summer writing a book about it, which is just gonna probably be a very long substack thing about it. But when it comes to the actual standards of free speech, academic freedom, professionalism, the standards are different for professors and students, and and in a way that actually makes perfect sense. Students have the highest, you know, level of free speech rights of of any constituency on a college campus if it... If it's a public college. When it comes to professors, they have very strong what are called extramural free speech rights, which basically means that they can, you know, spout... Talk about, you know, other topics off campus or in their expertise or not. They have very high intramural speech rights, which basically means they can criticize the university. But, you know, in the classroom, they're expected to be professional, and they're expected to be germane. And that means that if you... And and I and I may have called with a case that I got wrong many years ago. That was at a... At Forsyth Technical Community College, there was a technical writing class, you know, something about, like, how to write for engineers. And of a fifty minute class, a professor spent ten minutes, on her opinion about the Iraq war. And at the time, I think it was my own political bias that made me want to take that case and defend Elizabeth Ito at at that school. And it took me a while to realize I was wrong. That essentially, if you're teaching a technical writing class and you go so far afield to spend a substantial chunk of it talking about your opinion on something that's completely unrelated to technical writing, they can punish you.
00:24:18 · Scott Galloway, Greg Lukianoff
[00:24:18] S0: Yeah. I don't. It's like I say in my house, my kids don't have free speech rights. And I'm not sure if I were working at Google and I went downstairs and said with a big Israeli flag and started, you know, they would have the right to say, this is disruptive. You teased you're writing a book on higher ed reform. Give me two or three kind of big picture thoughts that will be somewhat controversial or contrary to popular opinion about higher education that you feel we should consider? I just, I'm bragging now, Greg. I just joined the board of the Regents of the University of California. [00:24:53] S1: Oh, great. [00:24:53] S0: And I'm thinking a lot about higher ed reform because I can think of few products that have changed less in fifty years and survived. So give me two or three great ideas the big university system should be considering.
00:25:08 · Greg Lukianoff
[00:25:08] S1: Well, my big thing, and it's tend to... The book's tentatively called the academic filibuster, which is about how like the standard for there being something wrong in higher ed keeps on, the goalposts keep shifting. And the worst it gets, the more people pretend there's nothing wrong. But as far as something that I think really matters is committing to disconfirmation. Essentially, you don't really know what's true. You know what isn't true. Like, bay... Basically, the only way we have access to truth seems to be by subtraction. And institutions need to refocus on the... Their priorities and the things that actually give them the special protections of academic freedom and and legal protections and all all of these kind of things. And to me, I think the only thing that really justifies that special societal treatment is that they help us see the world more clearly when they're doing their job right or can help us see the world less clearly if they're not. And I think that committing to search for truth, it it it is essential, and that's... Hopefully, that won't be too controversial. But the way you do that is not just people pinky swearing to be better. It's by having structured friction. It's by having things like, Daniel Deremyer was the first person. I I don't think he called him this, but having, like, counter departments to basically be like, listen. If we have the following sacred cows in this department, we're not gonna get rid of the department, but we are gonna have people test to see if the empirical assumptions that would be true, if those political assumptions are true in these departments hold up. We have to be much braver and much more ambitious in being like, let's see if we're not just standing on a a huge pile of BS. And frankly, when I look at modern scholarship, it is a weird hodgepodge of excellent, excellent research and a lot of junk. And we have to be able to sift and winnow between those two. And the way you do that is, again, not saying I promise to be better. It's by having a counter department saying, by the way, none of these empirical assumptions that would be true if your dogma was true, hold up.