(music playing) - Welcome to the Aaron Harber Show.

My special guest, Tamar Gendler, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University.

Dean Gendler.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you for having me.

- It's an honor having you on the show.

OK, as Dean what is your role?

- So I'm the Dean of something called the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

And what the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is the place at Yale where all of our undergraduates and most of our PhD students get their degrees.

It's got every department from English to physics and all the social sciences in between about 40 different departments in the humanities, social sciences, Biological Sciences, Physical sciences.

- Having been involved in accademics and I know what an extraordinary responsibility that is, especially at an institution like Yale.

So Speaking of impressive, I was very impressed with the fact that you were the first woman to chair the Department of Philosophy in the history of Yale University, You also were the first Yale graduate, first woman to chair a department at all in the entire history of the university.

What inspired you to those achievements?

- So I was a faculty member who adored the experience of being in the classroom.

The best thing about being a faculty member is the opportunity to take something that you think is the most interesting set of questions in the world and help other people understand why those things matter.

Becoming a department chair is sort of like becoming the school principal.

You don't get to have your own classroom anymore.

But at a certain point in my career, I realized that I had been able to thrive as an undergraduate, as a graduate student, as a young faculty member, because other people had put in the time to set up structures that made things work.

And I realized that I could do the same thing.

So I became chair of the department in order to make it possible for other people to thrive.

- So speaking of inspiration, you gave a keynote address once titled keeping inconsistency in your pocket.

Tell me what that meant?

- So, two Parts, 1 is inconsistency and 1 is about keeping things in your pocket.

What is inconsistency?

There was a particular inconsistent message that I wanted students to have with them as they went through college, and that is sometimes told in the form of a parable.

That there is a coin and on one side it says for me alone was the world created.

And on the other it says I am but dust and ashes.

That is, I am special and distinct and I matter and I am one of many beings in the world.

So that was the contradiction that I wanted students to be able to keep in their pocket.

The idea of having something in your pocket is that you have learned it so well.

That you have it not when you're doing hindsight.

Not when you're imagining yourself, but you have it at the moment where you're taking actin.

- Alright, I'm going to ask you a number of fire up questions.

Higher education.

What do you think the public's greatest misconception is about higher education.

- Public's greatest misconception is that campuses are in turm oil, most of what goes on on campuses day in day out, is students learning academic subjects, playing the sports in which they compete, participating in extracurricular activities like theater.

And engaging in the life of the mind.

- So one of the things when you look at the public's perception of the liberal arts and you look at what a lot of educational institutions are doing, institutions of higher education seem to be de emphasizing the liberal arts and focusing more on both activities and academic programs that are very much employment related.

What's happening in higher education and is this affecting Yale at all?

- Demographically, there has been an effort on the part of universities around the country to introduce to higher education a group of students who previously didn't have the opportunity to participate in tertiary education.

There are re first generation college students.

Whose parents did not go to College in many of those cases, these are students who want to be able to provide something back for their family immediately upon graduation.

And there is a sense in which very practical training has an early payoff of a kind whose value I completely recognize.

That said, ideally when you engage in education, you want education for the long game and the deeper you understand something, the more able you are to get through various perturbations.

So training in the liberal arts, if you understand physics, you will be able to be a better engineer.

- Why do you think higher education is in such disfavor with the public today?

- It's a really interesting question and I think here there are multiple factors, but one of the real factors is that higher education right now steals students from their communities and doesn't send them back.

There was a long tradition of students going off to the college or university that was close to their house that was associated with their state and then coming back and participating in their community.

It is now the case for a whole set of demographic reasons which we can discuss, that sending your child to college from many communities is a way of losing your child.

So that's one thing that I think is an issue.

The second is that there are a set of really deep divisions about what a good life looks like in any of the communities that have a picture of what the good life looks like.

To recognize that there are alternative views that are also valuable.

- So I mean when I look at this issue, a number of factors you know come to mind.

One is, I think the real question today about the cost versus the benefits of higher education where a lot of students of various ages are leaving undergraduate programs, graduate degree programs with an extraordinary amount of debt.

And are entering a workforce which for them don't necessarily offer opportunities to realistically pay off that debt.

And so I think a lot of people look at especially the price tag, the official price tag of going to a college or university and say it's I could buy a house for what I'm going to spend, so I think cost benefit is an issue I think just as you mentioned in terms of what's really going on campuses, I think the public sees, you know has a different impression that you have a lot of activists spoiled kids who are not studying, who are not learning and instead are involved in political issues and so that you know, that creates a question of do we want to dedicate public resources to that playground and then there's the issue of speech where I think a lot of Americans see different universities that are restricting speech, that in essence have speech codes for either de facto or actual for students, for faculty members and staff, I think those are the primary reasons driving down the image of higher education today.

- So America has an incredibly idiosyncratic model of funding higher education.

So roughly speaking, there's three streams of income that fund an institution of higher education.

One is direct beneficiaries.

Roughly, students who pay tuition so that they come out with a degree or with knowledge that is there is two different things you get.

One is a certification and the other is a set of things that sit in your head and help you live a good life.

Also in that first category are cases where industry or some other sponsoring party directly pays because they believe it will be to their benefit.

America puts a larger proportion of the burden for higher education in the hands of that group than any other country in the world.

Most other countries fund their institutions through a second category, which is the category of government subsidy.

That's basically spreading an investment across the society on the expectation that the benefit that ensues for society as a whole from having students who have gone through tertiary education is worth charging the community for.

So most higher education in England, in Europe, in all of the Asian countries, runs through a model whereby the funding comes from the government.

The third source of funding in American higher education, again idiosyncratic is Philanthropy.

And there are a small number of institutions, roughly 20, who have endowments, which have been given to them and as a consequence of those endowments, those 20 institutions can enable students to intend debt free.

Let's cut that out of the equation right now, because that's 20 institutions, you are right.

No student leaves Yale with debt at the undergraduate level.

No student leaves Stanford with debt, etcetera Those are schools that offer full scholarships to their kids.

The other institutions have to rely on A and B.

That is either the money that comes in comes from the consumer or the money that comes in, comes from the government.

There's been a reduction in government investment even at the public institutions and as a consequence, because universities can't economize on scale, teaching happens in a one to one setting.

It's incredibly difficult to keep costs in alignment with the benefits for the individual.

- So what do you think?

You know, I mentioned the issue of radical politics and you didn't have to convince me.

I mean, I know what actually goes on campus and what 99% or 95% of students are doing.

I'm just saying, I don't think that's what the public sees.

- That is right.

So the public gets shown whatever is different from the ordinary.

It's not an interesting news story to watch a student with a pipette.

Filling a bunch of test tubes.

It's not an interesting news story to watch students studying Latin.

That said, that is most of what goes on on campus.

In addition, there is political activity that goes on on campus.

And over the past decade a large amount of really publicly fascinating political activity first around issues of race inequality, then around a set of issues related to gender and now around a set of issues related to Americans international politics have occupied, I think you're right a percentage of our students.

And to the extent that there has been coverage of those stories, the focus has been on a particular group of students, which is students from the left.

- And then the third Point about free speech.

- Yes.

- Where, when a conservative speaker is rejected or an offer is rescinded, obviously get, you know, can get significant publicity where there are speech codes on campus where there's focuses on things like microaggressions, etc.

I think the public really questions, what's going on on campus?

And has a sense that the higher education has just moved in a very significant way to the left.

So what's your take on that?

- Let me give you conservatives analogues of trigger warnings and a conservative analog of what a microaggression is.

A triggered warning is like a movie rating, a trigger warning says you're coming into a space.

You don't know what kind of thing is going to be shown.

This is actually rated X if you're not comfortable with watching something sexual or violent.

Brace yourself, sexual and violent is coming.

So a conservative who feels like movie ratings are an appropriate way to let people know what's coming your way.

May thereby gain some understanding of what trigger warnings are supposed to do.

They aren't supposed to tell you.

Don't engage with this material.

They are supposed to tell you put yourself in a position to be best able to be receptive to this by knowing that there will be referenced to something disturbing.

Second, microaggressions are Miss Manners and Emily Post, telling you that when you engage with another human being, you should take into consideration, how what you are doing makes them feel, take into consideration how what you are doing makes them feel.

I know few people who don't agree that that's a good way to go around in the world.

The notion of microaggression is a particularly specific way of saying, there are a set of things that make people feel a particular way that you may not know about.

If you don't have their lived experience.

And I'm going to let you know that just as it hurts somebody's feelings to tell them that their clothes are ugly, it hurts somebody's feelings to say X or Y in a particular way.

So both microaggressions and trigger warnings can be viewed as versions of a kind of etiquette which is a norm in the world which many of the critics of higher education occupy.

So when it comes to trigger warnings, shouldn't we be prepared for anything?

- I would love to create an environment where everybody feels comfortable enough that the most provocative things in the world could be said and they wouldn't be unsettled by them.

My ideal world is a world with no trigger warnings.

And with students reading everything from Mein Kampf to Marx, that's the kind of campus I want.

The reason we don't have that kind of campus is because of a certain deep cultural disagreement that I'm happy to keep talking about.

- I would argue that you are actually negatively preparing them because you have now trained them to be accustomed to having trigger warnings and they are going into a world, Dean, that they are not going to get trigger warning.

-So I have actually never seen a trigger warning on a syllabus, so I don't know what one would look like.

So it is a bit of a myth that there are trigger warnings.

That said, here's an argument for why it is valuable to do something different in an educational setting.

Than you do in the world.

When we're training you to be a pilot, we do it on a simulator.

And we want to make sure you learn how to deal with difficult situations and if I'm training you to be able to fly through a thunderstorm the first time you use that simulator, I'm going to say there's a thunderstorm coming up.

I want you to focus especially on holding on to the wheel and then when you go out and be a pilot, you will absorb that skill.

If the way a warning is used.

Let's just say we're going to discuss something that's going to feel personally really painful for you.

And I want you to practice distance yourself from it.

Here are some things you can use to absorb this information.

We're doing exactly the sort of training we do for a pilot when we warn them in advance, there's going to be a thunderstorm in training and then in real life they are better able to deal with it.

- Well, if you were training pilots, they'd all have very good jobs upon graduation.

- That is correct.

- And having been in a simulator, I actually could discuss your point mor but, I won't for now.

- What's a good definition of equity in the context of higher education?

- So there's a tradition of distinguishing between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.

And I would say very few people subscribe to a view, according to which what we're seeking is equality of income.

That is that we're seeking to have everything end up in the same place because their differences in skill, their differences in effort, their differences in luck.

What equality of opportunity looks like is the vexed space within a university and part of our problem as a country is that we've under invested in K12 education and so many of our students who have had the advantage of going to schools that focused on them as learners, come with a set of skills and a degree of comfort that our students who have been in underfunded schools don't have.

And so how we create equality of opportunity?

How we create equity at the level of allowing every student who comes to us to benefit from what we have to offer is the main place in which we're focusing our attention.

- So a huge controversy.

And the country is DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion.

How is DEI really promoted at Yale?

- So, framed properly, DEI shouldn't be controversial.

So let me just give an analog.

If you are a company and you do not hire individuals to work for you who have hearing impairments or who use wheelchairs.

There's a whole bunch of talent you're going to be missing out on.

And if you're looking to fill your company with the most talented workers.

You should make sure that you are able to accommodate workers who are hearing impaired or workers who make use of a wheelchair because those are people who are going to be just as good at doing the job that you want them to do.

But who otherwise wouldn't find your workplace to be accessible?

The notion of diversity is the notion that an analog of a wheelchair is an underfunded public school system.

And that consequently we should in looking to bring the most talented minds into higher education, look across the economic spectrum.

And when we do so, we may be taking students in the indicators for whom don't look exactly like the indicators for the students who've been in a privileged setting.

So that's diversity.

Equity is, as I said, a question of making sure that we help the students who get to our school get going.

We offer summer pre calculus courses.

We offer summer courses in writing.

Inclusion is about making people feel comfortable.

That said, whenever a term is used to express something with which society feels uncomfortable it becomes politically vexed.

Note that the words idiot and moron were introduced in the 1920s as polite terms for individuals with cognitive impairment and a very nice thing to say about somebody was that they were an idiot or a moron because those are vexed social categories.

Those became terms of derogation.

DEI is a vexed set of issues because it's about the ways in which we fail to stand up to our ideals as a society, which is, we want to be a great nation in which everybody has a chance to thrive and succeed.

And there's all sorts of reasons that that isn't going right.

And so DEI became sort of like idiot and moron.

A term that got a negative connotation, though it wasn't meant to have one.

- All right, as a mathematician, as a cognitive scientist, do you think that compulsory DEI training works?

- It depends how you introduce people to the topic.

In general, anything that you force on people, anything that is done mechanically, anything that is done without attention to the specificity is going to at best, be neutral and at worst have the opposite consequence that you want.

That said, there is serious interesting academic work around issues of diversity and inclusion from which people greatly benefit, and those include things like a historical understanding of how it is that universities have various kinds of structures and a recognition of the distribution of income across this nation.

Couple of remarks at my own institution, the main way in which we've tried to bring diversity to our faculty, is actually looking at people with pH D's from a wider range of institutions than we used to.

We used to roughly speaking, only consider for our faculty people who came from the 15 or 20 most elite institutions in the country, which is basically a measure of how able you were at the age of 17 to put yourself on to a track.

We have now opened things up.

We hire people with PhDs from HPCUs.

We hire people with PhDs from state institutions that are less selective.

And we have simply by considering people who weren't where they needed to be when they were 17 produced an extraordinary faculty, so that's comment number 1.

Comment number 2.

There are some places that believe that part of what the skill required to teach effectively in their institution includes is the ability to connect to a certain sort of student.

That's not something that we hold as a policy at Yale, but there are a number of UC schools, particularly UC schools, University of California schools, that serve predominantly Hispanic communities and predominantly first generation, non-native speakers of English.

In those institutions, as with, I will note, every police force in the country, there is a recognition that in an age of identitarian significance, some students, not all students, learn more effectively when they feel empowered by the presence of someone who shares some feature of their identity at the front of the classroom.

So when a university is saying we want to hire somebody who's made a statement, that explains, I know how to teach a classroom full of first generation students.

I know what it's like to teach students who are working 50 hours a week outside of this.

That's their DEI statement.

Or we are looking for faculty who can be role models for us students, it is ecause they think it is relevant to that work in the same way a police force might try to hire someone from a particular neighborhood.

- That to me makes sense, but it seems different than saying we're only for this position.

We're only going to hire a person of color.

- So I do not know of cases where the latter has happened.

- I will provide you with some and we will have it so viewers will be able to find out.

- If that is happening, that's an exceptional outlier case.

I certainly have never encountered something like that.

- I think it is the exception and as we both know, it's actually illegal.

But I think it's emblematic of this, the move on the part of higher education, not as a whole, but in terms of the public image of the this appearance, that higher education has really moved to the radical left and I think it's one of the reasons why the public has lost so much faith in higher education.

I think it's one of the reasons that a lot of parents say, you know, it really doesn't make sense for my kid to go to a university where I think they're going to be indoctrinated.

- I think what's helpful in political conversations is to think what deep, wonderful thing are you seeking to provide to the world.

In insisting on something that others find radically controversial.

And so let's take individuals who oppose treatment for children who identify as transgender prior to adulthood, and individuals who want to engage in hiring that takes race into consideration.

In both cases, there's a deep and sincerely held belief in the race case it is, I want to make college a place where students of all races feel comfortable.

I wish we lived in a race blind society.

We don't live in a race blind society and in this imperfect condition, the best thing that I can do is to bring somebody into the university who's going to serve as a role model.

I wish this weren't how I have to do it, but this is how I have to do it.

Now, let's move over here.

- Well, hold on with that.

I'll say two things.

I don't think the public objects to the concept of a university saying we need to make an aggressive effort to hire more talented people who are people of color, or who have, you know, whatever the variation in society that we're seeking in terms of diversity.

I think the public in general is very supportive of diversity.

What I think they're not supportive of is when it goes to the extreme and suddenly you are now excluding certain groups and maybe it's the groups that have been privileged and maybe it's the groups that dominate the faculty.

And the other challenge the public is not aware of is that to change the composition of a university faculty is an extraordinarily difficult process.

You know you don't turn over the faculty the way you turn over students.

It is a 20- 30-40 year challenge and the public is totally unaware of that.

- With regard to faculty turnover, you exactly correct.

Students come for four years, faculty come for 40.

I oversee a faculty of roughly 1000.

And roughly 50 come in and 50 leave every year.

Suppose that I bring in 20% faculty of color each year, so that of the 50 I bring in 10 faculty who were from a previous generation leave and are replaced by 10 faculty of color.

That is 110th of 1% of my faculty.

So you're absolutely correct.

All right, fair enough.

Well, Dean Gendler, thank you so much for joining me today.

You've been wonderful.

All right, that was Tamar Gandler, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University.

That was part 1 of our special two-part series with the Dean, so make sure you watch Part 2.

I am Aaron Harber.

Thanks for watching.

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