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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. One obvious feature of American politics right now is the high levels of polarization, right? That word has certainly got a lot of meanings, though, that go beyond having differences on key issues. Even in this election year when people are rightly working for victory in their party races, polarization is a topic unto itself. Biden and Trump have both been known to call for unity, though they tend to use the word differently.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York has begun stepping into this fray. Their current president, Dame Louise Richardson, former president of Oxford University, has committed to making a fight against polarization, their top priority for the foreseeable future. We'll talk to her now about that. Dame Louise, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Dame Louise: Brian, it's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: First, I believe I addressed you in the proper way, Dame Louise but for our listeners, thinking, "What does that mean?" Could you explain that title to our listeners who might be unfamiliar?

Dame Louise: Well, a dame is the female equivalent of a knight. A man would be awarded a knighthood and called Sir by the British Monarch and a woman is named a Dame which is the equivalent. It is an award given by the British monarchy in recognition of particular achievements usually. In my case, it was because of the work my colleagues and I did getting more children into elite universities like Oxford and St. Andrews, the two I led as well as for my work in helping to develop the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID.

Brian Lehrer: Wow, fabulous. For those unfamiliar with the Carnegie Corporation of New York, what kind of not-for-profit organization is it? What has it done in the past? Who funds it? Give us the basics.

Dame Louise: The basics are that we were founded by Andrew Carnegie more than 100 years ago. He was an immigrant to the US from Scotland, started life as a child laborer, a bobbin boy in a cotton factory who went on to become the richest man in the world. He didn't believe in inherited wealth, and he didn't believe he had any right to this money so he resolved to give all of it away before he died. He tried to give it all away.

He built 2,700 libraries, Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, and a raft of other institutions but discovered that he wasn't quite going to succeed in giving it all away. Towards the end of his life, he created us the Carnegie Corporation, and then when he died, any remaining wealth went to the Carnegie Corporation, which is in fact a foundation. We support peace education and strengthening democracy, which were his priorities. We have been doing that for over 100 years.

Brian Lehrer: You're now the president of the organization after being president of Oxford University, and I guess St. Andrews, as you said. Can you talk about the through line there for you professionally, what have your main interests been in running a major university? I guess you just mentioned one before in terms of working to get students of more modest means into elite universities, but what else? How does it relate to your new job here?

Dame Louise: Education is the theme that runs through all of them. I believe passionately in education as a means of transforming lives. I started life as one of seven children in rural Ireland and where nobody before me in my family had been to university, and it was university, or it was education rather, that propelled this absolutely wonderful career I've had on both sides of the Atlantic. I have studied and taught at wonderful institutions, Trinity College Dublin, Harvard, and St. Andrews and Oxford.

In all of them, you see the evidence of the power of education to transform lives. One of my commitments in all of these institutions has been to ensure that every smart young person has an equal opportunity to study in these elite institutions because once you get one of these extraordinary educations, they open up all kinds of opportunities for you.

Brian Lehrer: To polarization, your current concern. The word means different things to different people sometimes. What do you mean by polarization and how are you orienting the Carnegie Corporation's mission to deal with it?

Dame Louise: Polarization quite simply means the collapse of the center ground. Yates talked about this in Ireland at the time of the rising when he worried about the center not holding the good lacking all commitment and the worst being filled with passionate intensity. It's about people not just disagreeing but also actively disliking the people with whom they disagree.

We're seeing that people have fewer and fewer social connections with the people with whom they disagree politically and we think that's really deeply unhealthy. We're seeing this played out in our politics. Instead of assuming that we all essentially share the same goals but just have different views on how to achieve them, we're assuming that somebody we disagree with is nefarious or bad in some way. That's deeply unhealthy to our democracy, and have long been committed to trying to strengthen our democracy.

We're doing a raft of different things in short, medium, and long term. On the longer term, we're funding academic research by academics all across the country, helping us to understand polarization, how it came about and how we might mitigate it. We're also funding long-term things that we think might help mitigate it by, for example, teaching civics in schools and also community service initiatives because I think there are far too few opportunities for people to interact across race, region, and class than there used to be.

Military service used to provide this opportunity in the past doesn't anymore. We're funding initiatives to launch a community service program. Students after high school [unintelligible 00:06:48] and before going to college could spend a year contributing to their community. We're funding or helping to fund one initiative in Utah, another in Maryland, and we're hoping to fund others. Again, these are our long-term approaches. This polarization didn't come about overnight, it's gradually evolved over the years.

We're taking a long-term approach as well as a more immediate approach by funding many wonderful organizations, which are bringing people together, which are encouraging conversations, which are giving young people experiences with people very unlike themselves, and so on. It's a complicated business. It's a really difficult problem. As I say, it's a long-term problem, and the solution is likely to be fairly long-term too.

Brian Lehrer: In the short term, you're out talking about polarization in an election year, but an election is by definition, a binary choice. It's polarizing by definition. Is this the right time for this kind of initiative?

Dame Louise: Oh, I think it's always the right time for this kind of initiative, and there will always be binary choices. In Scotland, I lived through the referendum on Scottish independence. I also lived through the referendum on Brexit. They were deeply polarizing. One of the things that has really struck me is living in Britain prior to the pandemic, I think Britain was just about as polarized as the US and you saw that in the vote on Brexit. Post the pandemic, Britain is much less polarized than it used to be.

Coming back to the US, I've been stunned by the accelerated pace of polarization in the course of the pandemic. I'm not sure what the explanation for that is. One of the hunches I have is that it might be the absence of a single source of reliable information in this country. In Britain, we have the BBC, and even though left and right often criticize the BBC, which is supported by the public paying their license fees, at the same time, at six o'clock every day, everybody in the country turned on the BBC to find out what was happening with the pandemic.

Nobody thought to doubt what they were being told. I think we don't have any single reliable source of entrusted source of information in this country. That feeds this polarization, I think.

Brian Lehrer: You don't think social media competes in as meaningful a way with the BBC to use your example as it does with the media in this country?

Dame Louise: Well, social media is a huge part of the problem, of course, because we all retreat into our echo chambers and social media. Social media is a source of some wonderful information as well as very dubious information. I think we haven't yet educated our young people to appreciate the difference between the two. I don't think any of us really appreciate fully versed in how to ensure that the information we're getting on social media is as reliable as possible, but we know how the algorithms work. Many of our fellows that we are funding are studying this, how the algorithms play to the extremes in the same way that many of our political structures do too. Yet, I'm the perennial optimist. It comes from spending my life around brilliant young people at universities. I'm convinced that the population is actually less polarized than our political leaders are. I hope to be able to provide just more and more opportunities for the public to interact with one another across differences.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, what do you want to say or ask about polarization and the Carnegie Corporation of New York prioritizing a fight against polarization short-term and long-term as its core mission right now? Who has a story about polarization perhaps in your own family or other circles? How concerned are you about the issue? Is it the right or wrong moment to be talking about this? What might be done about it? You've heard a few suggestions already.

What might be done about it without giving up your values? 212-433-WNYC for Dame Louise Richardson, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. 212-433-9692, call or text. I'm curious if you think our two-party system in this country is structurally polarizing to some degree. If we have a divided government, like a president of one party and a Congress of the other, Congress has motivation not to get things done, for example.

The president from the other party doesn't look like a success and get reelected if they're in their first term. Was it any different in your experience in Ireland or the UK with more parliamentary type, more multi-party systems that they have over there? Is that a factor or is that off point?

Dame Louise: Oh, I definitely think it's a factor. Britain also has broadly a two-party system, although the most recent election was the least dominated by the two major parties than in a very long time. Ireland historically had a two-party system, but again, that too has broadened out to more active parties. I think in addition to the two-party system, the primary system also plays to extremes. One could imagine other structures, and certainly, the academics we're funding will be exploring other structures like having a single transferable vote system where you rank candidates in order of priority.

That really encourages a move away from the extremes and towards the center because you want, if your first choice candidate doesn't win, who's your next choice candidate? One could imagine open primaries, again, facilitating the greater diversity and less binary operations. There are a number of ways in which we could adjust some of the mechanisms of our democracy which would facilitate more incentives for politicians to lead from the center rather from the extremes.

Brian Lehrer: Joe in Red Bank, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joe.

Joe: Hello. I was wondering if you see any evidence of the increase of gerrymandering causing an increase in polarization where one party in power could collect a huge percentage of one party to isolate their votes into one district congressionally. You end up with so many uncontested congressional races and the people that do get elected could be elected without any votes from the other side.

Dame Louise: Yes, thank you for that question. Yes, indeed. I think gerrymandering is both a cause and an effect of polarization. Again, one of our fellows is doing some research on this. One of the suggestions is that we should have maybe citizens, a group of citizens draw constituency boundaries. At a minimum, a completely non-partisan external commission draw regional constituency boundaries rather than have politicians themselves precisely for the reasons you suggest.

Brian Lehrer: Lisa in Maplewood, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi. Nice to speak with you, both. I teach adolescent girls and the effect polarization has had on a lot of them is they are afraid to talk about politics with each other, either in the classroom or when they're alone because of how much their personal ideas about each other, their friendships have become connected with political views. It's hard because politics can be very personal, but we also want to encourage them to develop their own views, their own voice. Of course, we don't want girls especially to be so silent, but they're very afraid.

Dame Louise: Thank you, Lisa. I don't doubt what you say is absolutely true and really unfortunate. I do hope that teachers and leaders of educational institutions generally can take this seriously and can model to their students how we should behave. Certainly, when I was leading Oxford, every incoming student, whether they were a freshman or an incoming graduate student, had to come into a hall and listen to a lecture from me before they could start at the university.

In this lecture, I said, their responsibility was to engage with others, engage with the ideas that they found uncomfortable, and that they should try to persuade the other person to reason with the person with the opposite points of view, to try to change their mind by reason, and above all, to be open to having their own minds change. I was trying to create a norm where it is completely acceptable and indeed part of your responsibility to talk openly about difficult issues.

My colleague Timothy Garton Ash called it an atmosphere of robust ability. I do think we should try and inculcate this amongst our students, starting as young as the students that Lisa is teaching.

Brian Lehrer: Lisa, thank you for your call. She said she's teaching adolescent girls. Here are a couple of more thoughts on gender and polarization. A listener texts, "I am a 32-year-old woman. I'm feeling more polarized by public language for many men and some women that women are better off staying home, procreating, going to church, and obeying their male partners. How am I supposed to find community with someone who fundamentally disagrees with my freedoms?"

In addition to that, I will add, I saw in your press materials that one of the pieces of research that, I guess, you're working on at the Carnegie Corporation right now, is to measure the current divide between white women in the US, especially in the South, which maybe goes to that texter's concerns. What would you say to either of those things?

Dame Louise: I think it was ever thus that misogyny has existed in our society. I think it's imperative that we don't let it hold us back. I've been enormously privileged to be the first woman in just about all the roles I've had, the first woman head of St. Andrews and of Oxford and of Carnegie. Certainly, one of my goals has always been to ensure that I'm succeeded by a woman as I have been until now. I think what really matters, we've always had people saying objectionable things, and the key is that we not let those derail us.

It doesn't mean we have to be friends with people who have misogynist views, but it does mean we cannot be derailed by them. The particular case that you mentioned is that one of our fellows doing work, trying to understand different political views amongst women and by focusing on the South, finding that many of the things we think we know about women's views may not be accurate. It's too soon to say because we're funding the study.

We don't know the results yet. I think in this election, we are going to see a lot of misogyny, but I think we're probably in a better place than we were eight years ago. I would encourage the woman who texted to just keep forging ahead. The best revenge for women is success. That has been my mantra.

Brian Lehrer: We're getting a number of calls and texts that are coming from listeners on both the left and the right, politically making a similar argument from their point of view. Somebody on the right writes, "Some people on the left don't have the same goal as the people on the right," and goes on to elaborate. Somebody on the left says, "The guest talked about polarizing sides having similar goals but with different means. I believe that one side has other goals so that even the goals aren't the same." I'm going to let Arnold in Brooklyn chime in on this track on the phone. Arnold, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Arnold: Thank you, Brian. To follow up on that, your guest said that even the polarization is characterizing the people with the other position as bad As if that's not correct, but what if in fact, the other position is in fact bad? Do we normalize extreme positions like some of the [unintelligible 00:20:09] are MAGA positions with their anti-constitutional and the authoritarian, or an extreme example, if there's any a Nazi party? Do we view them as simply on the political spectrum and subject to an equal voice and an equal part of the conversation?

Dame Louise: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Dame, go ahead.

Dame Louise: The way I approach this is that we need to appeal to the center. I'm completely convinced most people are not those extremes that you describe. The way for success is to what is called the exhausted majority of people whose views are varying but not extreme. These are the people who've been neglected, I think by our political leaders. Of course, nobody has to justify Nazism, but very few people actually support Nazism in this country. To give you one practical example, a wonderful study was done by [unintelligible 00:21:09]

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in on that because I think the caller is arguing that yes, he mentioned Nazism and that's the most extreme example but that there are plenty of MAGA Republicans who, to him, because he mentioned MAGA Republicans to a lot of liberals and progressives and even centrist democrats in America. This is like fascism at the gates. It's the wrong time to be talking about polarization. It's the right time to be talking about putting up defenses for democracy.

Dame Louise: I think the best way to defend democracy is to ensure that our institutions are as strong as possible. We ensure that the institutions reflect majority points of view and that they're not hijacked by extremes. That's the best hope, wonderful essay by Michael Ignatieff recently on this point. Yes, people have objection views that we may find anathema but the goal is to ensure that those views remain held by very small numbers of people, which I believe they currently are.

Brian Lehrer: One last thing before we run out of time, to come back to something that you mentioned earlier in the conversation, a listener texts, "The guest mentioned that military service no longer allows for the opportunity to be part of your community. Why is that?" I think that person may have misheard you a little bit. You were saying that military service used to be more universal. It put people from very different backgrounds around the country into contact with each other, and that built community across the lines of whatever your upbringing was.

You suggested something like that in not necessarily a military context, but all kinds of service context. You probably know we have something like that in this country called AmeriCorps started way back in the Clinton administration. The proposals for those kinds of things, when AmeriCorps was created, I think it's accurate to say some of them wanted to go much further. Some of them talked about a mandatory one-year of service. It wasn't going to necessarily be military service.

It might be some kind of social work or some kind of community-based work of all different kinds that people could sign up for from a list of options, but that everybody would have to do it when they turned 18. That got watered down into the voluntary AmeriCorps, which involves in real life, relatively few people. Do you think that something like that could be expanded in any way to be much more universal, whether it's in a mandatory or voluntary model?

Dame Louise: I absolutely hope so. Yes, my point was I was referring to the draft when people were compelled to join the military and then interact with people very different from themselves. We've seen the funding from AmeriCorps decline. We've been working with states with the idea that if we were to help states establish successful community service initiatives, just like the ones you described, then it might become a norm. Other states might follow.

The one way to ensure opposition to an initiative is to make it mandatory. Our goal would be I would love to see a popular mandatory year of community service. I think those two are never going to go together. Instead, I think we should create a norm, endeavor to build a norm around the fact that every young person spends one year contributing to their community in some way. Whether it's the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps or working in their local hospital or food kitchen or what have you, but doing that with other people from different backgrounds than themselves.

Brian Lehrer: Dame Louise Richardson, formerly President of Oxford University and St. Andrews, is it university or college?

Dame Louise: University.

Brian Lehrer: Over there, now president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York over here and leading it to focus short, medium, and long term on the issue of polarization. Thank you so much for sharing some of your thinking with us and taking phone calls.

Dame Louise: Thank you so much, and thank you to those who called in, too.

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