Title: The Future of Academia

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. If you've been listening to On the Media the last few weeks, Season 2 of the miniseries The Harvard Plan, by way of background in Season 1, they explored the history of how the political right has been at odds, and at times, trying to dismantle the credibility of institutions of higher education. Made in partnership with The Boston Globe, the series focused on the tenure of Harvard's first Black president, Claudine Gay, and how she was pushed out of her position in the wake of the protests against the war in Gaza.

This new season explores how the Trump administration is attempting to force Harvard and many other universities to change their policies by freezing billions of dollars in federal research funding, launching several investigations into DEI initiatives that the administration thinks are discriminatory toward white students, and threatening international student enrollment. Ilya Marritz is back as reporter on part two of this story, that is, Season 2, and he joins us now.

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 OTM, On the Media. Hey, Ilya, welcome back to WNYC.

Ilya: Hey, Brian, great to be here.

Brian: Remind people of the very basics here. What gave you the idea for The Harvard Plan? What were you first setting out to explore in season one?

Ilya: I just happened to be a visiting fellow at Harvard in the fall of 2023, which is when Harvard got its first Black president, as you said, Claudine Gay. Listeners may remember pretty quickly, she stumbled into just a multi-dimensional miasma of crises that kicked off with the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel, and Harvard student groups, I think, ill-advised and very intemperate and insensitive response to that attack. It just spiraled from there to include questions around race and affirmative action and antisemitism, of course, and eventually Claudine Gay's own scholarship.

I went to the Globe after finishing that fellowship and made a podcast miniseries about this because I was interested in the idea that anybody really cared who was the president of a college or university. It's very rare that a university president is somebody whose name is known, much less becomes a focal point for so much attention as Claudine Gay did. That was the first season of The Harvard Plan about a year ago.

The second season, the one that I've just brought out, really answers some of the questions that we posed in the first season. What is this all about? Why the sudden focus on higher education? It's not like it's never been a focus before, but it hadn't been a particularly politically salient issue for a long time, and all of a sudden, all this heat on universities. We see now with Donald Trump being reelected, coming in, fulfilling a lot of his campaign promises. He campaigned on the idea that he was going to teach universities a lesson, and very quickly on coming to office, he attempted to do so through a variety of means, including withholding scientific research grants.

Brian: We have a couple of clips from your Season 2 as conversation starters here. I'm going to set up the first one now. On this one, we're going to hear how on the right, there's been a growing chorus of voices that says Harvard and other universities are promoting liberal views while silencing conservative views. In episode one of the second season, you spoke with Kit Parker, a Harvard bioengineering professor who voted for Trump twice. As you note, when he voted for Trump in 2024, Parker, as a Harvard professor, was hoping Trump would take a look at universities. Listen.

Kit Parker: We're unable to complete our mission by hosting debate and thoughtful discussion about the issues of the day represented by both sides. We continue to lower standards for admissions and scholarship and the integrity of scholarship.

Ilya: Between the ever-expanding bureaucracy and the leftward drift of campus conventional thinking, Kit felt stifled.

Kit Parker: We had spent 10 years talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, while we were aggressively excluding or silencing conservative voices on campus. Harvard should be like an intellectual cage match.

Brian: Intellectual cage match, that critique coming from a Harvard professor, and Parker isn't talking in abstract. You report, Ilya, about how his course on policing was canceled in 2021 and how he was investigated by the university. Tell us more about Professor Parker's experience and why you included him in your reporting.

Ilya: First off, I want to say Kit Parker is a fascinating guy. I went to visit him in his lab on a Saturday morning at 8:00 AM, and he'd already been up for several hours, done a workout, and taken a meeting. He is in the army reserves, and you can hear that, I think, in some of his word choices and his cadence. He's a professor of bioengineering. Don't ask me exactly what that entails, but it's very complicated. Kit Parker is one of these profs who, I think, in a lot of ways, is what you want in a scholar. He has a very restless, engaged mind. He taught a course on fashion when he got interested in the failings of a type of camo that he observed when he was on deployment in Afghanistan. He has a patent for a barbecue smoker.

He's a very, very interesting guy. One of the things that he got interested in was how some battlefield techniques used by the US military in Afghanistan were being applied in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is a pretty poor, pretty troubled city in the western part of the state. For some time, that course aroused not a lot of interest. There was a favorable profile in 60 Minutes, I think in 2013. Then he was going to be offering the course again, I believe it was in 2020, and the course listing came to the attention of some activists.

What they believed they saw, I think, was a class that really vouched for the idea of militarized policing, using military counterinsurgency techniques against Americans in an American city. They found it very offensive, and they started a petition. You can remember this was the summer of George Floyd protests. It was that sense of a social media-fueled campaign, where perhaps the campaigners had a good point, but perhaps they also didn't take the time to learn more about what Kit Parker was teaching.

In any case, the class was effectively canceled for a variety of reasons. It did quietly come back a few semesters later. What really upset Kit Parker, the professor behind the course, is he felt the university didn't speak up for him, didn't speak up for the idea of academic freedom, didn't speak up for the idea of open inquiry, and the idea that, yes, Harvard can offer a class that you may find some of the premises disturbing or offensive, but it's worth examining. Let's have a look. Let's not just blanket cancel things that we think that we don't like.

Kit Parker is, as you mentioned, a Trump voter. There are plenty of professors on the more centrist or liberal end of the spectrum, or who just don't have a political leaning particularly, who also feel that there was a censoriousness that seeped into university life. That's definitely a big element that I discovered underpinning, I think, the Trump campaign on universities is also an understanding that many people inside those universities are also unhappy with the way that discourse has gone lately.

Brian: I guess this gets to where is the line now as it pertains to the Trump administration between promoting genuine viewpoint diversity, which is what they say they're for, and actually really trying to go all the way in the other direction and make sure people in academia, people in news organizations, et cetera, only parrot or emphasize what they believe in, otherwise they're going to be punished. For example, I think you have former Harvard president, Gay, saying that attacks on institutions of higher education are because universities are centers of independent thoughts.

Yet you also have this clip, which we're going to play now, of May Mailman, who spent most of the year as a senior policy strategist in the White House. She worked closely with Stephen Miller, I think, just under Stephen Miller. Here's a clip of her responding directly to claims of authoritarianism in the way the Trump administration is pushing universities toward compliance with their demands.

May Mailman: What type of authoritarian regime would be like, "I want more debate? I want views explored, debated, and challenged." Fundamentally, what is being sought here is freedom and the lack of an orthodoxy rather than an implementation of one.

Brian: I love how she travels around with those chimes wherever she-- I'm kidding. Part of the original soundtrack, by the way, we might say, written for The Harvard Plan, wasn't it?

Ilya: Yes, that was from our amazing engineer and sound designer, Jared Paul, the music. I felt very fortunate to get to talk with May Mailman. She is really the person, I think, pretty much more than anyone, who stood behind this sort of pressure campaign on universities, whether it was drafting executive orders or leading negotiations with universities. She just left the White House to have a baby, and she made time for me right around the time that she was due. We talked for over an hour, and it was really, really fascinating.

I think the clip you played gets to this very interesting question, which is, 'Is it plausible that the heavy hand of the government could bring about a healthy level of viewpoint diversity that has been lacking and maybe needs to be there on college campuses and at universities?" Her view would be, yes, and not only can it be done, but the government should do it. There is a proposal circulating. They call it, basically, the Trump compact, which would require universities to assess the political leanings of faculty, staff, and students and report on that. Chew on that for a moment.

Really, on the other end of that discussion would be somebody like Princeton president, Christopher Eisgruber, who finds that totally macabre, thinks it's a gross, gross overstepping of bounds, and would really say, actually, believe it or not, and contra what's being said about universities, colleges and universities are some of the last places where reasonably good, reasonably high level debate does sometimes happen.

I feel like the hidden imagined villain hovering over my whole inquiry was the way that social media has changed discourse in this country, and particularly the way in which it has gotten into the discourse around higher education, where social media moves fast, it rewards virality, it rewards emotion, and the academy is supposed to be the exact opposite. It's supposed to be the place where everything moves slow, it's deliberate, there's peer review, that we don't do mobs. It's just been an absolutely fascinating subject to delve into.

Brian: Listeners, anybody have a question for Ilya Marritz, after listening to all or part of The Harvard Plan, Season 2, which just ended on On the Media, or Season 1, or Season 1 and Season 2, 212-433-WNYC. You can call or you can text 212-433-9692. Anybody related to academia right now as a professor or a student, or recently for that matter, want to weigh in on this question of the politics on campus, censorship on campus, official or unofficial in any direction, the vibe on campus during the Trump administration so far, and with respect to this compact that Ilya was just referring to, which we're going to get a little more into. Diversity of viewpoint, welcome here, 212-433-WNYC, and any questions for Ilya, 212-433-9692.

Here's a question that really goes back to Season 1 about Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard. I don't remember if you drilled down on it this deeply, but when she was testifying with the other Ivy League university presidents, and Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked her about the killing of African Americans, and the president answered the same way that she went on to answer the Intifada questions. This is how the listener is writing the text, and concludes, "It was a setup." Did you drill down to that degree?

Ilya: No, I didn't, but I do find that moment, that congressional testimony, was really a huge turning point because that was the moment where a critical mass of Americans came to the belief that something is very wrong with universities and needs to be done. There have always been people who are unhappy with how things are at universities.

I think there's particularly been a long-running conservative critique of university life, going back to William F Buckley, God and Man at Yale in the 1950s. I think what October 7th and the aftermath, and that congressional testimony in 2023, that was December 2023, with Elise Stefanik, what that did was really gel in people's minds the idea that something is seriously wrong here, and is maybe worth the government getting involved to the degree that it now is.

I also want to say, part of how I view my job as a journalist is to mark changes. We live in a fast-changing world, sometimes a world where things change so fast that it's kind of dizzying, and it's worth remembering that not only did we not pay very close attention to who was leading our colleges and universities until very recently, it was also unthinkable that an individual college or university could be singled out by the government in the way that Columbia was, and later Harvard and UVA and several other schools.

It was inconceivable that cancer research or Alzheimer's research could be turned into an improvised weapon, basically, to try to bring about changes at these universities. Part of what I'm trying to do with this series is just show how much the standards have changed, how much what is acceptable or imaginable has changed in a very, very short period of time.

Brian: One of the most interesting things to me in Season 2 was your focus on Jay Bhattacharya last week, who is the head of NIH now, the National Institutes-

Ilya: That's right.

Brian: -of Health, and you spoke to Ashish Jha, who some listeners may know that name. He's been a guest on this show more than once, really, during the pandemic as a public health expert. He's the dean of the Public Health School at Brown. He was in the Biden administration as a public health official, and he knows Jay Bhattacharya and considers him to be an earnest person who really cares about public health, but he took this job with the Trump administration and has been involved with eliminating so much funding for medical research, which was his field, medical research.

Ashish Jha, to my ear, Ilya, sounded tortured about this. He really wanted to still believe that Jay Bhattacharya is a person of goodwill, but here he is out there, not contradicting some of the, let's say, wackiest things that RFK Jr might say, and cutting funding to his own field, which we could say is crucial to humanity, medical research. Can you talk about that?

Ilya: Jay Bhattacharya is an absolutely fascinating figure. He's a double degree halfer. He has a medical degree, and he also has an economics PhD and his specialty has been health care economics for many, many years. He's highly credentialed. Nevertheless, it's pretty much inconceivable or would have been inconceivable that he would have become the director of the National Institutes of Health until very recently. His qualifications, I would say, he's highly credentialed, and he has the correct politics, and he really came to public attention.

He really emerged as a public figure during COVID. He was one of the three original signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, which basically called for herd immunity, following herd immunity to get most people back to work, back at school, back in everyday life, except for the elderly and the immunocompromised.

Brian: Meaning, largely, let the COVID-19 virus spread. It will take the lives that it takes, but it'll get society back to normal more quickly?

Ilya: Yes. Their view was that for people who are not immunocompromised or not elderly, we could just basically let the virus spread, and that more harm was being done, particularly with schools being closed or being online.

Brian: More selectively shut things down or vaccinate. Go ahead.

Ilya: Interestingly, people like Ashish Jha would now concede that there was probably some truth to that, and that he probably got shut down too hard. Jay Bhattacharya's radicalization story is that when he started speaking out, he started getting a lot of blowback inside his own university, which was Stanford, from the then-leaders of the public health establishment, saying that we need a swift and devastating takedown of this way of thinking.

The other thing that's really fascinating about Jay Bhattacharya, which I delve into in the episode, is he was mentored by Alan Garber, who's the current president of Harvard. Arguably, two of the biggest adversaries in this fight are two men who have known each other for decades. They have co-authored papers together. They really look at the world in a very similar way. They're both healthcare economists, they're both double MD, econ PhDs, and yet, one had this radicalization moment where he felt that he was shut down. He wasn't able to express his view, and that's Jay Bhattacharya. That put him on the path where he is, where he's now very much in the Trumposphere.

The other is Alan Garber, who followed much more of the expected path of climbing an organizational ladder. He's now the president of Harvard and is in the really unenviable position of trying to deal with having billions of dollars in funds withheld from laboratories and research institutions that Harvard runs.

Brian: We're going to take a break. Ilya, you can stay with us till the end of the hour, right?

Ilya: I can.

Brian: Okay. That's about another 13, 14 minutes with Ilya Marritz, who reported the On the Media series, The Harvard Plan, Season 2, with three episodes, just ended in this weekend's edition. We're talking about huge issues from what constitutes viewpoint diversity versus authoritarianism from any direction on college campuses, and also the NIH funding cuts for medical research and what that has to do with politics, not just budgeting.

We have a full board of callers, and I want to point out that as soon as we come back from the break, Lainie in Hoboken, you're going to be first, because I guess, with respect to this Trump compact that they're trying to get universities to sign, it looks like this caller is involved with trying to draft a statement on what academic freedom means. We will continue on that profound question right after this.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we continue with Ilya Marritz, who reported and produced Season 2 of The Harvard Plan about the Trump administration and higher education. Lainie in Hoboken, you're on WNYC with Ilya. Hi, Lainie. Thank you for calling in.

Lainie: Hi. Thanks for talking about this. I'm so grateful for this conversation. Just real quick, I'm with a bunch of other professors at my university, Stevens Institute of Technology, and there's a huge diversity of political leanings, more so, I'd say, than on most campuses. There's from super lefties to super conservatives and Trumpers.

There's such a big diversity in students and faculty that we decided, in the wake of all this, we want to actually be very concrete and draft our own definition of academic freedom to put in our faculty handbook, and to show our students. We're having a lot of trouble, and I wonder if you can help us out with any recommendations for how to very liberally define academic freedom for a really diverse bunch of learners and thinkers.

Brian: Wow. Ilya, you want to engage on that?

Ilya: [chuckles] Gosh, I'm not sure if I can quite take that on. What are the stumbling blocks, though? I'm curious.

Lainie: It is tricky because there are people who are really psyched, I would say, for the reforms going on in the government, and there are people who are really terrified of the pressures on academia. I come from a big academic family, and I revere the concept of academic freedom. I've realized when I try to define it, it's really tough for me not to let my progressive lefty values seep into the definition, and we're trying really hard to have as inclusive and broad a definition that can get people who support the present administration in Washington and people who are terrified of it, because they can both look at this definition and go, "Yes, this is what academia is for."

This debate that you're talking about, this is-- We look to Eisgruber, and we're like, |Yes, Eisgruber is, in a sense, talking about cherishing academia as a place for genuine debate." I'm a music professor. I don't know how to write this in an inclusive, really positive way for this broad community.

Ilya: I'm just curious, have you heard from any of the Rutgers people? The reason I ask is in our third episode, I talked with Paul Boxer, who's a professor of psychology at Rutgers, Newark. He was one of the drafters of something that was called the Big Ten Compact. It didn't really happen, but it was the idea of a mutual aid compact that Big Ten schools would do. That didn't take off for a variety of reasons.

He told me, he's now refocusing his efforts on cross university solidarity in New Jersey, and trying to build support for academic freedom, as you say, and political support, in the New Jersey legislature to just make it ironclad that, at least in New Jersey, universities, particularly public institutions, are not going to be subject to a certain kind of political pressure. I think what you're describing is something that's happening everywhere, where institutions and the professors who work there are like, "How can I inoculate this place against the problems that we're seeing cropping up at Harvard?"

Brian: Lainie, I hope that's somewhat helpful. I heard you perk up there when he mentioned that it's a New Jersey-wide effort since you're at Stevens, so I hope that's helpful. We're going to go to another New Jersey caller, a community college student in Newton. Joanne, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Joanne: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. As stated, I am a student at Sussex County Community College. We're a pretty small community college, in the woods, essentially. I just wanted to mention that it's definitely felt even in the smaller institutions. I know a lot of the talk is about the top tens and all these much bigger institutions, but it's definitely felt all the way down to the beginnings, where a lot of people are starting their education journey, including myself.

There's currently a history professor I have who I admire greatly. He essentially views history in the form of bottom-to-top rather than a left-to-right, so being very critical of systems and institutions and giving a lot of people patience and grace, which is something I appreciate a lot when you view the complexity of US history in general. There was complaints even from students, I'll say definitely more conservative-leaning students, that felt upset by the fact that he would criticize the systems and-- Not even necessarily criticize it, but there was a lot of complaints, and he was actually brought into an administration meeting in regards to academic freedoms.

It basically came down to the fact that he is allowed to teach how he wants to teach, but they cannot protect him at the end of the day if the board decides to let him go at the end of the school year. That's something I definitely take issue with because I personally would not complain about a conservative teacher. I appreciate broad viewpoints, but you can definitely see that there is a trickle-down effect when it comes to institutions, even as small as Sussex County Community College.

Brian: Really interesting. Ilya, any thought?

Ilya: May Mailman, the quarterback of Trump's pressure campaign on universities, herself conceded that Harvard is not the most liberal university. You ask yourself, why are Harvard and Columbia and some of these schools a target? I think it's because they're the most prominent. Because if you can get them to submit, then, as the caller says, there is a trickle-down effect. I want to say one more thing. I know we're getting close to time. There's a reason that the United States government has this particular kind of partnership with universities.

It's pretty unusual in the world that our government funds quite so much basic science research. It's really a reason that we have so many Nobel Prizes in our country, much more than many of our peer countries in the industrialized world. It's really that at the end of World War II, a man named Vannevar Bush proposed a system, a compact, where the United States would fund the National Science Foundation, NIH, all these other organs, and put that money out into research laboratories and really do it in this very kind of arm's length, non-politicized way where peer reviewed proposals that appear to be good are the ones that get greenlit.

In his view, universities should be independent. They should be independent, equal partners of the government. What I really learned, if I had one takeaway from doing this series, it's that the Trump approach, which they're trying to pull off, but it's not completed yet, is a very significant revision of that compact. It says, no, universities are a junior partner to the government, whether they're public institutions, private institutions. If they get this kind of government money, they are subservient partners. It is a contract relationship, and the dominant partner in the contract is the government. Whether you think this is actually authoritarian or not, that looks a lot more like what happens in authoritarian countries.

Brian: I'll note that Ilya mentioned that he sees the clock and how much time we have, because in his previous life, Ilya Marritz started at WNYC as a Brian Lehrer Show producer behind the scenes, I will say with extreme pride, before he went on to be one of America's leading on-air journalists in the medium of audio. Congratulations on everything you've accomplished, Ilya.

Ilya: Thanks for getting me started, Brian.

Brian: To finish on the thought you were just making, we have two texts that counterpose each other. One on the right says, "Sounds like a bunch of snowflake fascists are mad because they can't repress the population anymore with their propaganda." The other one says, 'How is it punishment to deny medical research to Harvard? Don't they argue back that Republicans get cancer, too?" You asked that question explicitly yesterday. Even if antisemitism was generally the target, repressing antisemitism, how does denying medical research relate to that? Don't Republicans get cancer, too? We have literally 15 seconds.

Ilya: The administration would say, if you're not laser-focused on fighting antisemitism, how can you also be a great research institution? I didn't quite follow the connection, and I think a lot of damage will be done along the way to critical research if this goes on for very much longer.

Brian: Ilya Marritz, host of the On the Media miniseries called The Harvard Plan. All three episodes of Season 2 are out now.

Ilya: With The Boston Globe.

Brian: And The Boston Globe, wherever you get your podcast. Ilya, thank you so much.

Ilya: Thank you so much, Brian. It's been such a pleasure.

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