The Campus as Culture War Battlefield

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. On The Media has a three-part series beginning this weekend on college campuses in the United States at the center of the nation's culture wars. The series is called The Harvard Plan. We'll hear some clips now from episode 1 and talk to two guests. Ilya Marritz is the reporter on the story. Some of you will remember that Ilya was co-host of the Trump, Inc. podcast during Donald Trump's first term and the Will Be Wild podcast about the events leading up to January 6th. Now he's with The Boston Globe and doing this series for The Globe and On The Media.

Also with us, Hilary Burns, who covers higher ed for The Globe and is a key voice in the series. Her Boston Globe bio page says Hilary is closely following how the culture wars are playing out on elite campuses. Ilya, always good to talk, and Hilary, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Ilya Marritz: Great to be here, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Ilya, would you start with a little personal context as you do in episode 1. You took a year off from daily journalism to be a, what they call a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard. Did your experience there inspire this series?

Ilya Marritz: Yes, although in kind of a roundabout way. Yes, I went to do this fellowship called the Nieman Fellowship. It's almost kind of too good to be true, really. You get to be a college student again. I've been out of college for two plus decades, but you get to go to campus, and take classes, and take some time out, and build some perspective, and get to know some area experts, and stuff like that. For myself, having covered Trump and kind of the fraying of democracy for a long time, I really wasn't particularly interested in learning more about those things, so I was taking ancient Greek history, and the Ukrainian language, and random stuff.

One day, towards the end of September, I heard that the new president of Harvard was going to be inaugurated. I didn't know anything about her, but I went with my new friends from the program and it was a historic first. It was Claudine Gay. She was the first Black president, the first non-white president, I should say, of Harvard, is only the second woman president, and there was a real celebratory history-making vibe at that inauguration.

So it came as just an absolute shock barely a week later when her presidency fell into a crisis connected to the war in the Middle East and student activism around that. We can talk about that more, but basically, she only had about a week as a sworn in president that functions normally, and from that point on, her presidency was under siege. After initially wanting to stay away from it, I became fascinated. Nothing quite like this had ever happened before that I had gotten to witness up close.

Brian Lehrer: Here's an excerpt from episode 1. This is an alumnus of Harvard named Sam Lessin who had originally dismissed chatter about political correctness at the school, but had started to become alienated. You'll hear two clips, listeners, of Sam Lessin with a short line from Ilya in between, and when he says 10/7, that's obviously a reference to October 7th. Here it is.

Sam Lesin: I started hearing, like everyone else, the trigger warnings, and then I'm like, "Wow, there are trigger warnings?" We talked about some crazy stuff. You get a sense that things are changing here or there. People worry about antisemitism, they worry about what can and can't be said, what does and doesn't happen on campus, you have disinvited speakers, you see this drumbeat. But again, I pre-10/7 last fall really was the one who defended the university pretty consistently in my friend group being like, "Yep, look, this stuff is complicated."

Ilya Marritz: Lessin had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Harvard in the past, but now he was questioning that.

Sam Lessin: And I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm the one who's wrong here," and that sucks.

Brian Lehrer: Harvard alum Sam Lessin and Ilya Marritz in the new On The Media series about colleges and culture wars. Hilary, we'll get to you in just a second. But Ilya, want to tell us a little bit more about Sam Lessin and what he represents in the story you're reporting?

Ilya Marritz: Yes., Sam Lessin is a good friend of Mark Zuckerberg. He was a Facebook executive for many years. They were in the same residential college at Harvard. Sam Lessin graduated Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg famously did not. But I see him as a representative of this whole faction of people who at one time were big Harvard supporters, Harvard cheerleaders, and as a result of this crisis really got peeled off into another camp that said, "Harvard has to change, universities have to change. This culture of oppressor/oppressed, this framework and way of looking at things is a problem. It's not a small problem, it's a big problem and we need to do something about it."

So I see him as a representative of a constituency that one private university lost. Obviously, this is about Harvard specifically, but these kind of things played out on a lot of college campuses last year, and that's a big reason why it's interesting.

Brian Lehrer: Hilary, I gather that as The Boston Globe higher ed reporter, you added a lot of context for the series about Harvard in particular. The clip of Sam Lessin suggests a longer arch of rising culture wars conflict than the specific things that happened just after October 7th. As someone who has covered campuses and culture wars for a while now, how would you describe what the state of things at Harvard might have been on October 6th?

Hilary Burns: That's a great question. I think a lot of people at Harvard felt like they were stepping into a new era where Harvard was going to reach out to communities that had long felt ostracized or unwelcome on the campus. Claudine Gay was going to open the gates and create a more inclusive environment, reach out to historically Black colleges and strengthen those relationships, and with members of the community around the Boston area who felt like Harvard was this place that they were not welcome at.

That was exciting for a lot of people. There was a lot of hope and energy around her presidency. I think we just had a moment of whiplash where the trajectory of the school really changed, and all of a sudden, those issues went to the backburner and those efforts, I should say, went to the backburner and there were more pressing crises to address at Harvard.

Brian Lehrer: Now, listeners, you can weigh in here, too. Campus Report Card, 212-433-WNYC. And to be very clear, this is not just about Harvard, even though that's what we've been talking about so far. If you're a student, faculty member, parent of a student, donor who pays attention to your alma mater or with any relationship to any college, what's the state of the culture wars on your campus? What's the state of comfort or hostility that you or your student from any demographic background are experiencing now? 212-433-WNYC.

If you're at a non-elite college or a community college of any kind, is it less politicized there in your view than maybe at a Columbia or a Harvard? 212-433-9692, call or text. Whether you know it's over the Israeli Palestinian situation or a larger frame of oppressor versus oppressed in campus culture and coursework, and we'll get to that, or over diversity, equity and inclusion or anything related. Is anyone listening who applied to college, or your kids did just in the last year, were the choices about where to apply or even whether to go to college right now affected by current politics and the kinds of campus conflicts that Ilya is reporting on here? Any of those things with Ilya Marritz and Hilary Burns from The Boston Globe and Ilya's three-part On The Media series, which debuts this weekend. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Ilya in the episode, you replay part of the very well-known clip of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik grilling the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT about whether calling for the genocide of the Jews violates the university's code of conduct. They all said it depends on the context, like if it's persistent or targeted at an individual. We don't need to air that again here, but two of the presidents wound up having to resign, President McGill from Penn and President Gay from Harvard. The president of MIT still has that job. Here's a clip from the episode of the president of Mount Holyoke College, Danielle Holley on the extra burden that she feels Claudine Gay had to bear as a Black woman in charge of that school.

Danielle Holley: The jury is always out, right? There's a sense that even though you hold that position, that it's really not yours. You are temporarily holding the reins, but you're still an outsider.

Brian Lehrer: Danielle Holley. We'll hear more from President Holley in a minute on a different aspect of how to manage campus culture wars. But first, with another perspective from the piece, here's Rabbi David Wolpe, who was a Harvard Divinity School visiting fellow at the school last year and a member of the Post October 7th Antisemitism Task Force that the university put together. He wound up resigning from that group after seeing President Gay's responses in the congressional hearing.

Rabbi David Wolpe: The system at Harvard, along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil.

Brian Lehrer: So Hilary, let me come to you first on this and kind of a similar question to before, I guess. For you as a higher ed reporter covering campus culture wars, do the conflicting views of President Holley and Rabbi Wolpe there speak more to particular divides at Harvard or to something broader you're reporting on in university life today?

Hilary Burns: This is certainly hitting on something broader across higher education today where there's much heated debate about the role of diversity, equity and inclusion and how that plays out in the classroom. Area studies such as ethnic studies, Black and African American studies, women and gender studies, LGBTQ studies are really under a lot of pressure, under a microscope in a lot of ways, where a lot of critics say that these classes are teaching an ideology that indoctrinates students and focuses too much on identity politics.

Of course, professors and higher education leaders push back against that narrative and say these are important areas of study that we need on our campuses to better understand our history and what different groups of people have been through in the past. It's very interesting, and we're seeing this play out in Texas, in Florida and North Carolina, where it's starting to creep into the curriculum and lawmakers are saying, "No, you can't teach these types of classes or this type of ideology." Of course, that has people across the country nervous with the incoming administration.

Brian Lehrer: Mark in Madison, New Jersey, I think has something to say about whether this is mostly an elite colleges issue. Mark, you're on WNYC, hello.

Mark: Hello, Brian, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, thank you.

Mark: Great. I work at Drew University as an adjunct and it's interesting, we've got a good school and great people. We're really working on our economic issues and trying to manage our relationship with the community, so it is interesting. I attended elite colleges for my undergrad and graduates, but I feel like at this medium-sized level, it's really a struggle to keep the students educated and keep the economics going. I thought I'd pass that along.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Ilya, do you have anything on that?

Ilya Marritz: Well, a lot of colleges are-- Hilary knows a lot more about this than I do, but a lot of colleges are struggling financially right now. Harvard is not one of those. They have an enormous endowment, but they did see a lot less giving from major donors in the last year, and so I think all colleges have their version of watching the money right now. There's also a little bit of a demographic issue where there's fewer college-age people in the population right now, so that's one piece of it.

I think the thing that was so interesting and jarring to me as basically a student on campus last fall was there were all these headlines being generated in a lot of social media around Harvard. But actually, on the campus, I thought in terms of activism, I thought it was actually a little bit pathetic. I went to college in the late '90s. In my particular college, there were demos all the time and signs and chalking. I was never an activist myself, but I just thought that was part of college. My sense of Harvard was very much of a place where students just wanted to get good grades, get ahead for the most part. There were, of course, were students with family ties to the Middle East or some other reason why they might be very activated by this, but that was a minority.

So I felt a real gulf between the discourse around college presidents and college speech and what it was actually like in the classroom, like on a campus. Eventually in the springtime, we started seeing the Palestine encampments, but that was a separate issue. I think in a lot of ways, what happened at these elite universities was a proxy fight that people had wanted to have for a long time anyway, about what kind of speech is acceptable, about who really belongs and who should be a member of these elite institutions.

Brian Lehrer: Ryan in Brooklyn wants to report on her recent alma mater. Ryan, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Ryan: Hi, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can.

Ryan: I just wanted to mention, I went to Tufts University up in Boston. I graduated a couple years ago, but have been following the SJP and the response to October 7th on that campus. The Tufts University administration actually disbanded, defunded and suspended the Students for Justice in Palestine group from campus for simply protesting and demonstrating against the occupation in Palestine and against the university's financial profiting from that.

I just wanted to make that note because I think it really goes to show when we're talking about the question of safety on campuses and making sure students feel safe, it really goes to show who the university cares about making feel safe and who they frankly couldn't care less about making feel safe. If they're willing to ban and suspend Students for Justice in Palestine, which is an affinity group based on an ethnicity and a country shared country of origin, they're willing to ban that group and defund them. It shows that they couldn't really care less about making Palestinian and Middle Eastern students feel safe. I just think that's an important part of this question when we're talking about this issue.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Messi in Montclair, who just graduated from college this spring, I think, from Oberlin. Is that right, Messi? Hi, you're on WNYC.

Messi: Yes, that's true. Hi, how are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Good.

Messi: Yes. It was just really interesting because I ended up graduating last December, actually, a semester early. So when I had come back on campus for commencement, it's like everybody had to catch me up. People had tried to make an encampment. It had failed. There was A lot of infighting between the activists on campus. It was very sad. We had tried to organize some actions during the commencement ceremony. Some people wanted to do a walkout. Most people didn't. The action that we tried to do ended up failing and our college president said something along the lines of like, "I appreciate your expression." I don't know, it was pretty weird, the whole thing, but yes.

Brian Lehrer: What do you think from your experience as somebody who just that recently finished college, about the critique in the clip from Rabbi Wolpe that we played, that's part of the public discourse generally today, that college kids are being taught to see the world through a framework of the oppressors and the oppressed? Also, that there's so much competition around who the victims are of the campus environment. We just heard the previous caller say she feels at her alma mater, the Palestinian students aren't being protected or the pro-Palestinian students aren't being protected. Does your experience indicate that, I don't know what your major was at Oberlin, but that you were taught that there's a framework in the world of the oppressors and the oppressed through which you should see the world?

Messi: I don't necessarily think so. I can't really speak for all colleges. I appreciate-- I did a lot of Africana studies at Oberlin. I was a dance major with a concentration in African American music, so having gone through so much Africana studies, that department, they're really amazing and I think they present the information, I don't think necessarily in a neutral way, but they present a lot of readings and we do the readings and we talk about the readings. We're encouraged to connect our lived experiences to how those readings are sitting with us. I do think that sometimes identity politics can get a little bit tricky. I don't know if you're familiar with the YouTube video essayist ContraPoints.

Brian Lehrer: No, actually.

Messi: She's really awesome. You check her out. Her name is Natalie Wynn, and she has this expression, she says, "The competition for America's next top victim." I think that sums it up a little bit, but, yes. I can't really speak for other campuses, but I do think that the professors, a lot of the professors, at least the ones who are still there at Oberlin, at least in the Africana Studies Department did a really awesome job. In terms of other departments, I don't know. I was in a queer poetry class and that got a little bit weird at times.

Brian Lehrer: In what way?

Messi: Yes, I think it really-- I think in terms of intersectionality. In terms of the pedagogy and the curriculum, there was a little bit more of a focus on white queer poets and their experiences and less so on other marginalized identities within the LGBTQ spectrum. Yes, I think it comes down to the professor and what the professor's goals are.

Brian Lehrer: Messi, thank you. Thank you very, very much. Jeff in the Bronx. We'll do one more in this thread. Jeff, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jeff: Hi, Brian. Although I'm in the Bronx now, I live in Jerusalem and I got to tell you, I love your show. I actually live listen to it in Jerusalem on live stream, so just keep doing what you're doing. I wanted to offer you something of a long-term perspective here. I have an undergraduate degree and two graduate degrees from Columbia University. My son and my daughter both went to Columbia. My son was there during the second intifada and I had been back recently. When I was there in the early 1970s through the early 1980s, it was a very, very comfortable atmosphere. I could wear my Jewishness, I could wear my pro-Israeliness on my sleeve, there was no problem whatsoever. The conversation was open. The conversation was nuanced.

When my son was there during the second intifada, unfortunately, he appeared in a film called Columbia Unbecoming because of the way the Jewish students were being harassed and actually persecuted on campus. I was back recently with a Professor Shai Davidai. He's the professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Business, and the situation now is completely 180 degrees the reverse about what it was during the 1970s and early 1980s on campus.

Brian Lehrer: Jeff, I appreciate you calling in and telling your and your kids' stories from your point of view. Hilary Burns, higher ed reporter for The Boston Globe, we hear from that array of calls that there are different people from different backgrounds who feel that other people are getting more advantage treatment on different campuses. It's a representation of, if not culture war, if that's too strong a word, such divergent perceptions of what reality is.

Hilary Burns: Yes, absolutely. The calls that just came in remind me of the emails I've been getting all year since October 7th with just very different points of view. I think that campuses are really trying this fall semester in particular to reach across those differences and educate on how to have really difficult conversations with people you disagree with. I've heard from a lot of professors and higher education watchers who say that COVID and social media, everyone retreated to their bubbles and lived in their echo chambers, and that only made it more difficult to have these already difficult conversations, so it's been really interesting to see different strategies there.

Brian Lehrer: I wonder if you've reported on any impacts on the number or demographics of applications at Harvard or other schools you cover at The Globe in the last year with the environment as hot as it's been, or demographics or acceptance rates after the other recent epic Ohio Ed event, the Supreme Court striking down Harvard's and by extension all schools affirmative action program.

Hilary Burns: Right, that's right. That's what we thought was going to be the biggest story last year post-affirmative action. Yes. So it's been very interesting. Harvard did see a decline in early decision applications last year, but overall, its applications were down just a hair. They still receive more applications than most places on the planet. It's still very competitive. We did see the first class coming in this fall post-affirmative action. It was the first time that colleges could not consider race in the admissions process, which colleges opposed. They were really against that decision. They said that was the best tool they had to achieve diversity on their campuses.

This fall we're seeing fewer Black students on a lot of these elite campuses. There were a couple of prominent exceptions, but across the board, we're seeing fewer Black students on these campuses, which is a big concern for educational equity advocates who have been pushing for progress and making progress for so many years.

Brian Lehrer: I want to play one more clip from the episode. Again, this is a conversation pegged to the new On The Media three-part series on culture wars on college campuses, reported by Ilya Marritz. Ilya, this brings us back to President Holley from Mount Holyoke. In the episode, she refers to something she calls the statement on statements. Her policy apparently is to not issue statements about events in the news on one side or another. In this clip, she says she had the policy before she came to Mount Holyoke too, when she was dean of the law school at Howard University.

Danielle Holley: I came to Howard July 1st of 2014, which was only a few weeks before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. Immediately people said, "Well, are you going to issue a statement on behalf of the law school about the killing of Michael Brown?" I said, "No, I'm not going to do that because my duty is to educate lawyers who will then turn around and make real transformation in the criminal law system. I don't have time to write or do what I considered at the time to be performative statements.

Brian Lehrer: Ilya, do you have an impression briefly from your reporting, if this kind of abstention from being a commentator on public affairs succeeds at all for her as a university president or has an impact on bridging gaps and creating productive dialogue on campus among people with divergent points of view at Mount Holyoke, or shielding the school from alienating donors, if that's another motivation? You mentioned some dissenters who accused her of silence equals condoning genocide from their point of view.

Ilya Marritz: Yes, I think in the immediate short term, no. A lot of people were very annoyed because we have come to expect every kind of organization to have a statement on every kind of issue, but that's relatively recent. If we look at Harvard, the critics blamed the critics faulted Harvard for not speaking out about the war in the Middle East after having condemned Russia's war in Ukraine, after having condemned the killing of George Floyd and so--

Brian Lehrer: From both sides, by the way, right? First, they got pressure for not condemning October 7th, the attack quick enough, and then they got pressure for not condemning the Israeli response.

Ilya Marritz: That's right, and so what we're seeing now is more institutions are moving in the direction of Holley's statement on statements, basically saying, "We're setting a new expectation, which is that we only speak about things directly relevant either to this institution or to higher ed more broadly." Interestingly, with Danielle Holley at Mount Holyoke, who ended up being a really fantastic and helpful source for this because she is like Claudine Gay, a Black woman and a new college president, she feels a lot more free to talk about the stuff that matters to the university.

You'll hear as the series unfolds, particularly in the third episode coming in two weeks, she's very concerned about the rhetoric coming from the incoming Trump-Vance administration, where they have talked about attacking the universities, about firing accreditors unless universities change their curricula. They've talked about using research money, using financial aid dollars as a lever to try to force universities to change their curricula or to back off DEI policies. She told me that she is making plans to figure out how to do student loans in an environment potentially where her college, where other colleges perhaps lose access to federally backed student loans.

I know we're getting kind of tight on time here, Brian, what I want to leave listeners with and is the thing that I really learned, which is this is about a lot more than Harvard. It's really going to be about what-- The real question that I think we're going to see a lot in the next year, and Hilary, please chime in on this, because you cover this stuff day in, day out, is what is an acceptable level of government intervention in higher ed? I'm not talking just state universities, but private universities that are also intertwined with the student loan system, intertwined with the research dollar system, because the incoming Trump-Vance administration has pretty big plans. I suspect that even people who are critical of some of the rhetoric coming out of colleges over woke or whatever else may be uncomfortable with the sense that the government is going to take a very active role in this.

Brian Lehrer: Hilary, we just have 30 seconds, but I see your recent article on The Boston Globe site called Trump World Wants to Reclaim Universities. What does that mean?

Hilary Burns: Yes, jumping off what Ilya said, they really want to take back the universities from what they say are the Marxists who control them now. They want universities to lose DEI priorities and step away from women's studies, gender studies and focus on a more classical education and there are a lot of concerns about equity and what that will mean for low income and students and faculty of color.

Brian Lehrer: Hilary Burns covers higher education for The Boston Globe. She's one of the frequent sources in the three-part series that On The Media is airing beginning this week on campus culture wars reported by Ilya Marritz. Ilya and Hilary, thank you so much.

Ilya Marritz: Thank you so much, Brian. I just want to say, if you want to listen, you can get it through the On The Media feed or through The Globe Podcast feed. You can search them both. It's going to be in both places.

 

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