00:00:00.000Hey everybody, Tan the Charlie Kirk Show and our discussion about higher education, Arizona State University with Austin Smith and Ann Atkinson.
00:00:06.000This is a test case of how awful higher education has become.
00:00:10.000You got to listen to the details, especially if you live in Arizona.
00:00:14.000Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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00:00:40.000We also have Avek Ramaswamy and Steve Bannon, amfest.com.
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00:01:10.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:50.000TPSA alum, do some stuff with Turning Point Action, state rep. And you've kind of made a pet project of yours is our fun little, let's say, focus on Arizona State University.
00:02:07.000And when you spent several years working in the nonprofit section of higher education, the higher ed cartel is what we like to call it.
00:02:14.000And then you get to the legislature and you find out how bad the higher ed cartel actually is, like a greedy piglet that just keeps coming back for more money without any accountability.
00:02:25.000So it's time we put a stop to that and we're going to talk more about it.
00:02:28.000So by background, and by the way, we have Ann with us.
00:02:46.000Because it was bubbling up well before this event.
00:02:52.000February was really the crescendo, and there's been subsequent, let's just say, chapters of this story.
00:02:59.000Ann, remind our audience of this story.
00:03:03.000Well, in February of this year, I, as the executive director of what was the Lewis Center, invited you and Dennis Prager and Robert Kiyosaki to speak to students at Arizona State.
00:03:15.000And the faculty of the Honors College threw a fit.
00:03:18.000They launched a national condemnation campaign.
00:03:21.000They went into their classrooms and they told freshman students, do not attend Charlie and Dennis's event.
00:03:28.000This is an event for white supremacists.
00:03:31.000And then these professors stood outside the entrance to our program on health, wealth, and happiness with signs that said no hate at Barrett, 10 feet from all of the students entering to see exactly which of their students were entering the event.
00:03:46.000The deans ordered, the deans at the Honors College ordered for your marketing to be removed because it offended the faculty.
00:03:54.000The deans then told me what you and Dennis and Robert were and were not allowed to say.
00:04:00.000And Charlie, I have to tell you, they said higher education for you was off limits.
00:04:05.000You couldn't talk about anything that could be politically divisive or that may alienate the audience.
00:04:10.000And this, of course, blew up into a viral national story.
00:04:14.000A lot has happened since, but you did come and you spoke, and you were wonderfully brilliant.
00:04:40.000Yes, you know, most people in higher education are there for their careers, and even the good ones, and there are a lot of good people in higher ed, they won't speak up.
00:04:50.000They won't speak out because if they speak against the orthodoxy and against the will of a college leadership, they get reprimanded or fired like me.
00:05:00.000And like the events director at ASU Gammage, who was the other person that put on our event, she also got fired.
00:05:06.000Oh, and the dean at Barrett dismantled the entire Lewis Center that was serving all the Barrett students.
00:05:13.000So I think this story at ASU is really a microcosm of what's happening across the country.
00:05:19.000But the public expected better of Arizona State.
00:05:22.000ASU has been saying for too long how great they are for free speech, how they welcome all viewpoints.
00:05:28.000But we've seen through many examples, a big one is your event.
00:05:34.000And so then the summer comes, and then we do another event this fall where I call for the defunding of Arizona State University.
00:05:41.000You spoke at that, Austin, and we kept the drumbeat going.
00:05:45.000And then the atrocities occurred in Israel and there was a pro-Hamas rally.
00:05:51.000How did Michael Crowe respond to the terrorist sympathizers at ASU?
00:05:55.000Well, if you've been paying attention to this story and it's been developing months over months, ASU is like their own worst enemy in this situation because one, they attack conservative organizations, conservative students for presence on campus, but actual terrorists, a pat on the back, turn the other cheek, just look the other way.
00:06:15.000And so you got individuals like Michael Crowe and the Board of Regents who are supposed to be equal and respect all students on these college campuses.
00:06:25.000They come back to the legislature every single year asking for one-time monies and spending for millions of dollars for some project with no accountability and no oversight.
00:06:34.000But I'm supposed to believe that they're using it effectively and they're actually having a level playing field for college students when they are going to condemn Turning Point USA, but not the Students for Justice in Palestine for actually trying to disrupt a student government meeting, an anti-Semitic movement at Arizona State University.
00:07:51.000Classes and organizations within the university are being used to teach students not just to hate America, but to distinguish between oppressors and the oppressed and to try to be a victim.
00:08:03.000So, ASU is not preparing these students for the real world.
00:08:07.000They're spending our taxpayer dollars in an incredible number of examples to teach these students to really be miserable.
00:08:15.000And what happened to teaching them to pursue the American dream, to pursue knowledge and truth, and to love our flawed, but love our greatest country in the history of the world.
00:08:28.000Yeah, and the first place I would cut is the 39 professors that came out that said that Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk shouldn't be allowed on campus.
00:08:38.000And I want to make sure we talk about these two.
00:08:40.000The free speech is a major issue at ASU.
00:08:43.000But Austin, there's an ideological toxin that they are replicating that should not be subsidized.
00:08:54.000Why should they receive even a dollar of taxpayer funding?
00:08:57.000Well, it brings up this whole purpose of like, why does the Board of Regents even exist?
00:09:01.000When the legislature and the state of Arizona make laws, the Regents are responsible for enforcing those laws.
00:09:07.000And one of the laws in the state of Arizona is that all ideas are treated frequently.
00:09:11.000We actually have a more robust First Amendment in the Arizona Constitution than the United States Constitution.
00:09:17.000But when you start having these professors spew this ideological hate against white people, the West, Christianity, we got to ban Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager from being on campus.
00:09:28.000And then you have the university president sign a letter essentially condemning Turning Point USA, which is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that is allowed to be on that campus.
00:09:39.000When that president, when Michael Crowe sends the lobbyists down to the legislature saying they need more money for a certain project or a certain cool, yeah, they send their team of lobbyists down there to ask for more money.
00:09:50.000When I was like, why would we give you a dime when you continually punish other people that are not ideologically brainwashed, like you that are Marxist social justice warriors, for last, and what I said was that they offer classes for lesbian underwater basket weaving, being facetious, but that's true.
00:12:35.000I mean, you walk into the dean's office at Barrett, the Honors College, they have an entire glass display case dedicated to witchcraft, fairies, demons, the intersection of witchcraft and Christendom.
00:12:47.000I mean, this is, it's not like this is a course that's uncommon.
00:12:53.000I mean, even the professor that lunged at your cameraman, I mean, he has a disclaimer in his syllabus, Dr. David Broyles, that they will be having vivid discussions and depictions of teenage sexuality and sexual violence.
00:13:08.000This has become the culture, and ASU leadership has allowed it to turn into a cancer within the university.
00:13:32.000It has infected every single part of daily American life.
00:13:35.000And for taxpayers like Ann Charlie and I, who are conservatives, who really disagree with that type of messaging on public taxpayer-funded universities, there has to be an answer to that, and it's cutting off the funding.
00:14:01.000Dagmar Van Engen, a non-binary person whose current project argues that transness is central to queer and feminist science, an author of How to F a Kraken.
00:14:15.000This is what your taxpayer dollars are underwriting.
00:14:17.000This next one: Lisa Barca, whose area, this is our professor's area of expertise includes feminism and gender studies, and recent research uses an eco-feminist approach to the intersections of speciesism.
00:14:29.000Or Alex Young, a scholar of the transnational settler colonialism, or David Agris, who has done research in gender and sexuality studies and recently filed a lawsuit against Montana State University because he said they fired him because he's gay.
00:14:44.000I'm sure they fired you for other reasons.
00:14:46.000Joseph O'Neill, who recently led a seminar on whitewashing of ancient Greece and Rome.
00:14:52.000Rachel, these are all professors, Fedbach, whose research interests include feminist ethics, black feminism, abortion, gender, and race.
00:14:59.000And my favorite, the Rebecca Sorris, an editor of the female fantastic gendering the supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s.
00:15:08.000This is what Arizona taxpayers are underwriting.
00:15:12.000And so there was an article that came out, a column earlier this week about this committee that we had regarding the classes that ASU offers.
00:15:21.000And it was a lynching of our higher education.
00:15:24.000I'm like, if this is what higher education at Arizona State, supposed to be the Harvard of the West, is offering our students, yeah, we need to reevaluate what kind of classes that taxpayers are offering students to turn out these next generation of radical leftists.
00:15:39.000So Anne, you were going to say something.
00:15:55.000That is the first step as a Barrett Honor student.
00:15:57.000I had to do it over 20 years ago when I showed up as a Barrett student.
00:16:01.000You have to take the human event with the Barrett professors.
00:16:04.000And then beyond this, there are ways that the radical activists have infiltrated even great classes.
00:16:11.000So when I ran the Lewis Center, I reviewed all the syllabi.
00:16:15.000And in one class called Personal Finance and Life Skills, somebody who has now been promoted to an assistant dean with the entire university included homework assignments for how to defund the police and the case for slavery reparations.
00:16:30.000So if a student wanted to take a class on personal finance, they are still getting this radical ideology shoved down their throats, whether they want it or not.
00:19:14.000What I want to know, Anne, because it's really for you as the executive director, that their conversation is about health, wealth, and happiness, as you've suggested it will be, and not about higher education or anything that could be deemed as political or turned into a political platform.
00:19:43.000That we're not leveraging any of those conversations to make political statements that are going to alienate our audiences.
00:19:54.000And that's some pretty powerful stuff.
00:19:58.000This aired on the Seth Liebson show just on Monday, but to a local audience, this has never been aired to a national audience.
00:20:07.000So, you know, I've released the transcript of this to ASU publicly.
00:20:12.000And, you know, I guess people just have to hear it in the voice of an ASU dean that, look, you did try to limit what Charlie and Dennis and Robert could or could not say.
00:20:22.000I'm wondering, do they give these parameters to Ibram Kendi when he comes to campus when the Clinton Foundation got paid, as we learned in the hearing on Monday, half a million dollars for Hillary Clinton to speak at ASU?
00:20:35.000Did ASU give her parameters for what speech was and was not acceptable?
00:21:05.000The clip that was just played earlier in the year when we had our free speech committee, Anne was there testifying.
00:21:11.000And she said those words verbatim, what the dean told her.
00:21:14.000Do not let Charlie or Prager or Kiyosaki bring up anything political.
00:21:19.000And I said, does the dean think that you're a mind reader, Anne, that you're going to prevent somebody from speaking about health, wealth, and happiness?
00:21:28.000And I'm like, the reason why they say that, don't let them talk about anything political because health, wealth, and happiness are inherently good human conservative values that they despise.
00:21:39.000And so second thing here, ASU is in full retreat.
00:21:43.000You got people like Michael Crowe who wrote a book this year about, you know, any politician that doesn't support all these climate change policies or idiots and morons.
00:21:51.000I'm like, that's the culture at Arizona State University.
00:21:54.000That's what they truly believe in people who are not brainwashed, moronic Marxists like them.
00:22:00.000And so now you've got them sending out their, because the media does a great job in Arizona playing cover for the Democrats and the higher universities, and we're done with it.
00:22:09.000And next legislative session, ASU should be very weary during the budget process.
00:22:19.000That's the most important job as legislators.
00:22:21.000And there is an appetite, Charlie, what you're talking about for this, that we can't just keep saying, because conservatives for the longest time have run into situations or been approached by people like Ann that we've got to do a better job of protecting free speech on college campuses.
00:22:33.000Well, the rubber has met the road now.
00:23:06.000Hence, ASU's push to have more international students.
00:23:09.000They're trying to appeal to be a university of the world to attract more high-paying international students.
00:23:16.000That's why ASU has partnerships with the Chinese Communist Party, with different countries all over the world.
00:23:22.000That's why they're trying to have learners that are not degree seeking, but that they're trying to have that top dollar tuition come into the university.
00:23:33.000Yeah, so it is, and I'm going to ask some things off the top of your head.
00:23:37.000Can you just kind of help me understand the finances?
00:23:54.000Well, I mean, part of it too, though, Charlie, is that every single year, up until about COVID, tuition consistently rose at Arizona State University.
00:24:02.000And in the Arizona Constitution, it says that public universities' tuition should be low to as free as possible.
00:24:12.000It continually rises, rises, and rises.
00:24:14.000The regents raise tuition because they just become a rubber stamp for places like Arizona State University that Ann was talking about that attract international students to raise tuition.
00:24:44.000I even offered new diversified donor funding, and the Barrett dean wouldn't have the conversation.
00:24:49.000The provost of the university knows this.
00:24:51.000We had the conversation, and she didn't even say, let's find a place for the Lewis Center to continue.
00:24:57.000The Lewis Center and its values, which were about traditional American values, hard work, personal responsibility, those are not welcome at ASU today.
00:25:08.000So it was not true that I was let go just because Tom Lewis pulled his funding for this grant agreement.
00:25:15.000Part of it, well, one of the pieces of proof.
00:25:17.000Tom Lewis was funding multiple positions, and everybody else, all the faculty members of the Lewis Center that were also 50% grant funded, kept their jobs.
00:25:28.000But I was the, you know, the one to go for the reason of the, you know, Tom's polling of grant funding.
00:25:35.000It's not the case, but ASU stands behind that because it's easy to say.
00:25:40.000So the Honors College, which they say feels and functions like a small college within a large research university, is supposed to be the standard of excellence, right?
00:25:51.000They brag that it's the best of both worlds, that you get this kind of intimate environment, but you still get all of the benefits of Arizona State University.
00:26:04.000Can you just reinforce for our audience that is this the place of the pursuit of academic excellence or more and more ideological workshopping of a radical agenda?
00:26:18.000Is this a place where students are reading the great books and being immersed in Western values and getting their money's worth, quite honestly?
00:26:29.000Or is it something that is closer towards trying to create more angry activists to deploy into the world?
00:26:35.000Well, it has the framework to be great.
00:26:37.000When I was a Barrett student, we read Plato and Socrates and Dante's Inferno.
00:26:42.000I mean, we read the classics and it was a small, like a small liberal arts college within a big university.
00:26:50.000But what happened is the same issue throughout ASU.
00:26:54.000They've hired radical members into their faculty.
00:26:57.000Faculty have academic freedom to teach whatever they want in their classrooms.
00:27:02.000And they've, if you hire people that really want to teach witchcraft, guess what's going to come into the classroom?
00:27:07.000So, you know, Barrett had a great dean for the last 20 years, Dean Mark Jacobs, who believed in the balance of all of these things.
00:27:15.000And maybe he had, you know, some radical faculty, but he kept the overall big picture balance.
00:27:20.000But Barrett has a new dean who's not demonstrated any leadership.
00:27:24.000She's an administrator, Dean Tara Williams, and the radical faculty have run rampant.
00:27:29.000You know, Michael Crowe was offered a $50,000 bonus a year ago to make Barrett and W.P. Carey and Ira Fulton global brands, individually global brands.
00:27:38.000And I would say he's failing miserably with Barrett.
00:27:41.000It's very sad as an alumna to see what it has become, knowing what it could have been.
00:27:47.000I want to zero in on this for a second because ASU, to an untrained eye, has become a model.
00:27:54.000People think it's this wonderful place.
00:27:56.000You know, Starbucks employees get like, I don't know, a free ASU course or something, right?
00:28:02.000It's something like that, online course at ASU.
00:28:05.000But in the pursuit of expansion, Crow has obviously grown the university, but has also introduced radical ideological elements, some of the worst left-wing impulses imaginable.
00:28:18.000And it doesn't function Austin as a university as much as it does as almost an increasingly woke tech company with tens of thousands of customers that live on campus.
00:28:32.000Well, Michael Crowe believes that he's like Elon Musk of Arizona when he's more closely to like Elizabeth Warren with what he believes in and what he tries to bring to Arizona State University.
00:28:41.000And something that I just recently found out, that ASU was ranked number one above like Michigan State, Penn State, and MIT for global impact in advancing the United Nations sustainable development goals.
00:28:54.000What does that have to do with producing the next generation of great Arizona leaders?
00:28:59.000And they're getting exposed to classes about witchcraft and having intercourse with the Kraken.
00:29:04.000None of that prepares us to take on countries like China.
00:29:08.000And Michael Crowe is leading the charge in the downfall of a great state like Arizona.
00:30:47.000We need to support our legislators like Representative Smith here, like our committee chairman, Senator Anthony Kern, Representative Kwan Wen, people that have been leading this effort.
00:30:58.000We need to support those in office that can do something from the outside.
00:31:56.000Walk us through what can be done to fix this, at least partially.
00:31:59.000Well, higher ed administrators are something I like to call the pork lobby or the pork caucus, and they only understand money.
00:32:07.000And you've got to hit them where it hurts.
00:32:08.000And we talk, Tarli talks about it all the time, and I kind of stole it from him at this committee this week, is that mom and dad, you're playing Russian roulette with your kids' future when you send them to public universities.
00:32:17.000Donors, your values are not being representative maybe at that college that you love or that formed you into the great person that you are today.
00:32:26.000Redirect your funds to an institution, to a place, to an organization, to a university that values what you believe in.
00:32:33.000Legislators in Arizona and across America, stop pork caucus rolling these universities that are giving us the next generation of little communists.
00:32:45.000And until we course correct here, it'll take at least a generation to two generations and a half for these universities to finally fall back to be a place that's actually inclusive to all thoughts and ideas.
00:32:57.000But until then, don't go to public university.
00:33:00.000And it's just, I'm going through the Baird Honor College now, and it's trash.
00:33:05.000There's no redeemable value to learn how to F a Kraken.
00:33:09.000Okay, that's not worth going into debt for.
00:33:22.000Has Michael Crowe ever had to answer for what these professors are teaching?
00:33:27.000And he's like, oh, it's just academic freedom.
00:33:29.000No, no, no, you're responsible for, as the president of university, whether or not these students are leaving better prepared, wiser, better understanding of the world ahead of them.
00:33:58.000We have all sorts of different professors.
00:34:00.000He won't touch the faculty, and the faculty have taken over.
00:34:03.000So I think, you know, parents locally, look at places like Grand Canyon University.
00:34:08.000Look at other places because public universities are in a pickle right now.
00:34:12.000And Representative Smith, you have the power to work with your colleagues to maybe all syllabi should be available publicly so that students and parents can see what they're buying before they buy it.