The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:10.840 apply. Offer ends August 31st, 2025. TD, ready for you. Hello, everybody. So in recent weeks,

00:00:19.100 there's been a well-publicized war between, in principle, Harvard University

00:00:27.020 and the Trump administration. Or at least that's how it's been framed by the remnants,

00:00:36.260 the pathetic and sad remnants of the legacy media, most particularly the utterly despicable New York

00:00:43.620 Times. Now, you see, this isn't really a war between Harvard, that august institution, and

00:00:50.900 the mega Trump administration. This is a much deeper problem. And the reason that it seems to

00:00:57.740 me that you should all know about it is because whatever the universities are doing that's corrupt

00:01:03.540 and appalling spills over into the broader culture in a way that's cataclysmic.

00:01:11.880 The people who end up running everything come from the universities, particularly the Ivy Leagues.

00:01:17.220 And so what that means is that if those institutions become corrupt, and they have become corrupt,

00:01:24.740 make no bones about it, then everything they feed into becomes corrupt in exactly the same manner.

00:01:32.480 And so now we could be thinking that it's Harvard, that august institution, against the strange

00:01:40.100 mega Trump conservatives. Or we could be thinking that this is a way deeper problem,

00:01:46.260 that concerns everyone. And so we're going to investigate that today. I'm going to give you

00:01:50.900 some facts and some opinions, and I'm going to read to you from the New York Times covering this

00:01:59.220 debacle, and also from the Montreal Gazette concerning McGill University in Canada, which Canadians like to

00:02:07.260 regard as the Harvard of the North. And now, you see, I also taught at most of those.

00:02:11.680 I was a student at McGill, and I taught there as a teaching assistant and running my own seminars for

00:02:19.460 my graduate student friends. And then I worked at Harvard for six years in the 90s, when it was

00:02:26.500 truly an outstanding place. And then, as many of you know, I worked as a professor for about two

00:02:32.820 decades at the University of Toronto, which has become equally corrupt. And so I know what I'm talking

00:02:38.000 about, or you might make that case, although I suppose there are people who would disagree.

00:02:42.320 So, I can't tell you how important this topic is for you to understand, and in some detail.

00:02:50.080 I should also point out that I haven't exactly been sitting around in consequence of believing that this

00:02:56.500 is a vital issue. My family and I, and most, my son helped me in the beginning with a broader project

00:03:04.000 in this regard. And then my daughter and her husband, Michaela Fuller and Jordan Fuller have

00:03:09.480 taken over over the last four years, I suppose, to produce Peterson Academy. And we're trying to bring

00:03:16.240 the best professors in the world to the public stage and to bring what they know to everyone at the

00:03:23.320 highest possible quality and at the lowest possible price, which we estimate, by the way, at the moment,

00:03:28.360 at 1% of an Ivy League education. So, I'm putting my money and my time where my mouth is, and

00:03:37.120 you can make of that where you will. Okay, so let's delve into this topic. I'm going to do some reading,

00:03:43.840 and I'm going to do some opining, and well, bear with me. Let's see how this goes.

00:03:58.360 Harvard University is locked in a high-stakes conflict with the Trump administration and conservative critics

00:04:04.100 centered on accusations of anti-Semitism, ideological bias, and the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion,

00:04:12.300 DEI programs. Let's talk about those for a minute. DEI programs, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

00:04:19.100 It sounds pretty good, you know, diversity, who would be against that? Equity, man, that sounds like a lot like

00:04:24.720 equality of opportunity, although it actually means equality of outcome, and that means that

00:04:30.020 everyone ends up in the same place, no matter how hard they work, for example, or how competent they

00:04:35.300 are, which is a hell of a good deal for people who don't work at all, and they're so incompetent that

00:04:40.020 it's a kind of miracle. And then inclusion, well, you know, some people should be included, and some

00:04:46.440 people shouldn't be included, and if you're doing something difficult and demanding and goal-oriented,

00:04:51.840 then inclusion shouldn't exactly be the principle. The principle should be, if you can bloody well do

00:04:57.640 the job, then you should be hired. And anything other than that is absolute nonsense, and that's

00:05:02.140 particularly the case if the way that you define whether something has been inclusive enough,

00:05:08.200 diverse enough, equitable enough, is that it segregates people by race and ethnic identity, and then makes

00:05:14.860 the case that if there are any, oh, and sex as well, and gender as well, and then makes the, and sexual

00:05:21.080 preference for that matter, any idiot group identification category that you can possibly

00:05:26.760 imagine, you make the case that if all those people and the intersection of all those groups

00:05:32.400 aren't statistically represented, statistically represented at precisely the level that a census would

00:05:40.260 indicate that the system is systemically prejudiced. Yeah, well, so what? What are we supposed to believe

00:05:49.680 as a consequence of that? The reason that 90% of people are nurses, and 90% of women are nurses,

00:05:57.480 and 90% of engineers are men, is because of systemic prejudice? It couldn't possibly be that women

00:06:06.640 and men are actually interested in other things, like psychologists have actually been claiming for

00:06:11.360 about five decades, difference in interest between men and women are the biggest differences between

00:06:17.680 men and women. And so the idea that, oh, well, and I've talked about the bricklayer problem in many

00:06:24.700 other places, but 99% of bricklayers are men. I don't see the feminists clamoring to ensure that just

00:06:32.640 exactly the same number of women become bricklayers and just the same number of women, for example,

00:06:37.940 are incarcerated in prison. So it's complete bloody nonsense, and it's worse than that,

00:06:42.640 because it's radical leftist nonsense that's one step removed from Marxism itself. And so it's not,

00:06:49.680 this is not a trivial problem. This is a major problem. It's dependent on how you characterize

00:06:57.320 human beings at the most fundamental level of analysis. They're either individuals who you rank

00:07:03.800 order on the basis of competence, or they're classified according to their group identity.

00:07:08.680 And those are very different worlds. And in my opinion, you don't want to live in a world where

00:07:13.700 people are classified by their racial identity. That's called a racist world, by the way. So when we

00:07:20.540 talk about DEI programs, we're not talking about some goddamn sweetness and light that's doled out by

00:07:26.400 people who have nothing but love in their hearts. It's a complete bloody scam. And it's destroyed

00:07:32.980 many institutions. And Harvard is definitely one of them. Okay, the clash. Escalating since Trump's

00:07:41.320 second term began in January 2025 pits Harvard's academic autonomy against federal demands for

00:07:48.120 sweeping reforms with billions in research funding at stake. Yeah, well, Harvard likes to think that what

00:07:53.960 it's pitting is Harvard's academic autonomy against federal demands for sweeping reforms. But that's

00:07:59.980 quite, that's complete rubbish as well. Hillsdale College, which is one of the few remaining truly

00:08:06.620 reliable educational institutions, takes zero federal money. Now, does Harvard have to take federal

00:08:14.740 money? Well, you know, they have a, they have the biggest endowment of any university in the world.

00:08:20.880 I think at the moment, Harvard's endowment, valued at $53.2 billion as of fiscal year 2024,

00:08:28.340 is the largest among U.S. universities. It's managed by the Harvard Management Company since 1974,

00:08:34.760 and it comprises over 14,000 individual funds. So it distributes $2.4 billion a year, which is 1 25th

00:08:42.660 of the endowment. It only covers one third of Harvard's $6.4 billion operating budget. So it's tax

00:08:51.460 exempt. That's kind of relevant when you're talking about ideological issues that might be pertinent to

00:08:58.480 political leanings. For example, we'll get into that. The, it has tax incentives for donations,

00:09:05.980 and it issues low interest tax exempt bonds. So Harvard benefits massively from its favorable tax

00:09:16.360 relationship with governmental institutions, most particularly the federal government. And so

00:09:22.740 if Harvard has become remiss in its duty to be neutral and truth seeking, then there's no reason

00:09:32.820 whatsoever to assume that it deserves its favorable relationship with the American government.

00:09:38.900 And you could also make the case, as Hillsdale has under, particularly under Larry Arnn, that any

00:09:45.340 reliance by higher education institutions on federal funding compromises their essential mission,

00:09:51.800 which is actually what Harvard is arguing right now, because Harvard has told Trump, this is the legal

00:09:56.400 argument that will start in July, that it's a First Amendment issue, and that Trump doesn't get to

00:10:02.480 tell Harvard that it has to sort itself out, because that's a First Amendment violation. Larry Arnn's

00:10:07.740 reaction to that, and Hillsdale's refusal to take any federal money, was in some sense a variant of that

00:10:14.560 argument, except in the other direction. Their position, Hillsdale's position, was there's no possible

00:10:21.780 way that a university can be reliant on government funding without eventually becoming utterly corrupt.

00:10:27.400 And so, and by the way, Hillsdale is flourishing, and if any of you out there listening are donating

00:10:32.520 money to Harvard or any of the other Ivy League institutions, well, first of all, and thinking

00:10:38.980 about sending your children there, first of all, you could give Hillsdale like a real consideration,

00:10:44.340 both in terms of donations and enrollment. Yeah, and you could also think about educating your

00:10:51.460 children at the Peterson Academy. It's a hell of a lot cheaper, and the professors are a lot better,

00:10:56.880 and they're not ideologically warped, so that's something. Okay, so Harvard also doesn't really

00:11:04.420 use its endowment to a great degree to fund its researchers or its student costs, so it relies on

00:11:10.740 $2.2 billion in federal grants and contracts annually. Only 5% of the endowment is unrestricted,

00:11:19.200 which limits Harvard's ability to replace federal funds, for example. Now, let's also point out that

00:11:24.660 the costs to students are extremely high at places like Harvard, so tuition, 2024-2025 tuition room and

00:11:31.980 board is essentially $83,000, with 55% of undergraduates receiving financial aid. The endowment

00:11:39.460 funds $749 million in financial aid, but critics argue this is insufficient given the endowment's size.

00:11:45.280 Taxing just 1% of the endowment could make community college free for all Massachusetts

00:11:50.680 students. Yes, so that's an interesting little fact. Okay, I've, I've, what? Cynics believe that

00:11:59.240 Harvard has actually become an endowment with a university as a, like, somewhat ineffective

00:12:03.740 appendage, and I think there's some real truth in that. Now, we also have to understand that Harvard is

00:12:08.760 being used as a test case, right? There's much, there are much broader issues at stake here than

00:12:16.460 Harvard against Trump. Do we think that, if you're someone, if you're someone who leans classically

00:12:27.720 liberal or classically conservative, then it's actually Harvard against you. And it's not just Harvard,

00:12:34.360 it's the Ivy Leagues, and it's not just the Ivy Leagues, it's higher education as such. And so this

00:12:40.500 battle between Harvard and Trump is a battle between the elite educational institutions that essentially

00:12:48.200 dominated the selection of people in leadership positions for the last 50 years, and you. And so

00:12:57.640 that's partly why you need to pay attention. The administration has frozen $2.2 billion in

00:13:03.900 multi-year research grants and $60 million in contracts, threatening, threatening up to $9 billion

00:13:10.060 in total funding, Harvard's tax-exempt status, and its ability to enroll foreign students. So these are

00:13:16.020 pretty severe sanctions that the Trump administration has at least threatened to levy against Harvard.

00:13:22.880 These measures aim to force compliance with demands to eliminate DEI, which we already discussed,

00:13:29.240 audit viewpoint diversity. I don't like that word much, viewpoint diversity, because it allows the

00:13:36.360 progressives to maintain their claim that diversity should be one of the selection criteria for hiring

00:13:43.320 instead of just merit. And also, the Trump administration is trying to force the universities

00:13:51.160 to reform hiring and admissions. Harvard, under President Ellen Garber, we'll get back to him

00:13:56.820 later, has resisted suing the administration in April 2025—I think that's lawfare, by the way—for

00:14:03.540 violating its First Amendment rights and bypassing legal procedures. Yeah, well, perhaps. Perhaps

00:14:09.860 Harvard could just stop taking federal funding and they could do whatever the hell they wanted to.

00:14:14.320 Garber argues that no government should dictate what universities teach higher research. That's pretty

00:14:18.940 goddamn funny, I must say, after the Biden administration and its insistence that DEI,

00:14:26.540 for example, be prioritized pretty much above all else, not only in teaching, hiring, and research. So

00:14:32.160 that's a complete bloody crock. And it's also the case that Harvard cravenly submitted to all the

00:14:39.600 radical progressive demands that emanated, let's say, from the Biden administration. So that's just a

00:14:45.020 non-starter, as far as I'm concerned, at least on the moral ground, on moral grounds. Who knows what'll happen

00:14:50.040 legally? The lawsuit backed by faculty, yeah, we'll see why that is, and other universities, marks Harvard as the

00:14:58.420 first major institution to openly defy Trump's crackdown. Yeah, it's not exactly Trump's crackdown, which has also

00:15:05.620 targeted. Columbia, oh, there's another institution that deserves to be.

00:15:11.780 Well, let's start with defunded. Yeah, that would be enough, that everybody could attend to it and

00:15:16.720 understand exactly what it's up to and just how bloody dangerous it is, and then defunded. Cornell,

00:15:22.140 a billion dollars, and Northwestern, 790 million dollars. Harvard's defiance is rooted in its massive

00:15:28.500 endowment and prestige. Yes, prestige, which it earned, by the way, first of all, by being like,

00:15:35.540 what would you say? It was the prime edifice for the transmission of somewhat hereditary

00:15:41.800 autocratic rights down the generations till about 1960 or so, right? It was an upper-class institution

00:15:49.540 with relatively well socially positioned people enrolled who weren't necessarily drawn from the

00:15:58.060 upper echelons of the cognitive elite. The average IQ at Harvard has gone up substantially, or at least

00:16:03.320 had, between 1960 and 1995, let's say. I don't really know what's happened since then.

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00:17:06.940 In any case, Harvard drew on its reputation as the place where the elite went to meet and rule,

00:17:14.820 and then transformed that into a meritocratic selection process, primarily based on general

00:17:22.780 cognitive ability, which is essentially IQ. IQ is age-corrected general cognitive ability. So Harvard

00:17:30.460 selected on the basis, for example, of the SAT, which is essentially an IQ test, even though people

00:17:35.440 also lie about that all the time. So, and for their graduate programs, they use the graduate record

00:17:41.400 exam, and for their legal programs, the LSAT, and for their medical school, the MCAT, and so forth.

00:17:47.620 These are IQ tests. Make no mistake about it. Harvard was pulling the top percentage or so of

00:17:53.440 high IQ people into their institution, and then advertising to companies who can't use IQ tests

00:18:01.540 because that's against the law, that they were ensuring that their graduates had the kind of

00:18:09.880 extremely high intelligence that's necessary to thrive at the most competitive levels in extremely

00:18:15.160 complex jobs, as well as the conscientiousness that enabled them and social ability that enabled

00:18:21.520 them to participate effectively in at least a four-year degree program. Well, they've mucked all

00:18:26.720 that up since the 1990s. And so this is also partly why so many companies don't really give a damn if you

00:18:32.600 have an Ivy League degree anymore. And Harvard has also noted that because applications to Harvard have

00:18:39.080 plummeted in a precipitous manner. And that's well deserved as far as I'm concerned. Harvard's defiance is

00:18:46.540 rooted in its massive endowment and prestige, positioning it to challenge Trump's demands, where others like

00:18:52.120 Columbia have partially complied. Key points. Harvard's lawsuit, this is legal, argues the funding freeze

00:18:59.180 violates the First Amendment and Civil Rights Act's procedures seeking to halt the $2.2 billion freeze. Oral arguments

00:19:05.200 are set for July 1st, 2025. So keep your eyes on that, because that's important. DEI adjustments.

00:19:13.580 Well, this is another stack of lies that's so thick you can hardly even imagine it. So because Trump won,

00:19:20.720 and there's a bit of a conservative uprise, let's say, or a classic liberal uprise, because it's not

00:19:26.340 exactly as if Trump and the people around him, many of the people around him are conservatives.

00:19:33.780 20 years ago, well, Trump was a Democrat, and so was Musk, and so was Tulsi Gabbard. And so it's not

00:19:41.620 exactly even conservative. It's just sane people, fundamentally. So now they've had some success.

00:19:48.600 Harvard and many other universities have started to reconstruct their DEI offices. But basically what

00:19:55.360 that means, and all of you conservative types listening should know this, is that they keep

00:20:00.460 the same people, and they give them different names. So, for example, Harvard renamed its DEI office

00:20:06.840 the Office of Community and Campus Life. Welcome to Community and Campus Life at Harvard in April 2025,

00:20:14.680 and ended race-based affinity group celebrations. Well, thank God for that, unless you want to keep all

00:20:20.820 those black people in their own graduation ceremonies, where what? Are those at the back of the bus,

00:20:28.880 just out of curiosity? Now, I should get in plenty of trouble for asking that. But I think it's pathetic

00:20:34.200 and appalling that these bloody universities have race-based affinity group celebrations for

00:20:40.840 graduation, for example. It's absolutely appalling. It's appalling. So they renamed it, but that doesn't

00:20:49.200 make any bloody difference, because you can do the same nefarious activity under all sorts of

00:20:56.120 different names. And this is part of the problem with the universities. You'd have to fire all the

00:21:00.220 people who are progressive, essentially. And that's not going to happen. And then, of course,

00:21:05.040 that's going to make you ask how many of them are progressive. We'll get to that. Faculty like Harvard

00:21:11.400 Medical School's George Daly emphasized that funding cuts threaten breakthroughs in biomedicine,

00:21:16.720 AI, and public health. Yeah, I don't think so. I think most of the breakthroughs in AI are going

00:21:22.200 to come out of Silicon Valley, and probably some out of China, too. And in terms of breakthroughs,

00:21:26.660 well, breakthroughs only occur when you have researchers who aren't corrupt, and only when

00:21:32.600 they're publishing in journals that aren't corrupt. But the researchers are corrupt. They're all

00:21:36.940 progressive, or at least they follow the progressive dictums, as we'll see. And the journals

00:21:42.160 increasingly publish in accordance with DEI mandics. So I think it's time for everybody

00:21:47.660 who's watching and listening to understand very clearly that whatever you might think about

00:21:52.060 the research breakthroughs that the great universities of the United States have historically

00:21:56.900 been making, that those days are probably done. And the reason for that is because the researchers

00:22:02.480 themselves, in a fit of absolutely craven, pathetic cowardice, decided that they would promote,

00:22:10.520 hire, and publish on the basis of these race, ethnicity, and sexual identity-based categories

00:22:17.100 instead of sticking to merit. And that was true for the small-l liberal faculty members,

00:22:22.420 for the progressives, and for the tiny proportion of people that were conservatives.

00:22:26.940 How many faculty members stood up and refused to write DEI statements? None. Like, so few that you

00:22:34.420 might as well just say none. Me. There's some other people too. And that's it. And it cost me my,

00:22:41.440 essentially, that cost me my career as a professor. There's no goddamn way I was going to write a DEI

00:22:47.640 statement for a grant. That was never going to happen. So now the researchers whine, well, you know,

00:22:54.120 it was the government that said we had to write these DEI statements, and all we were doing was

00:22:58.040 following the rules. It's like, you know, you guys are supposed to be leaders, and you're supposed to be

00:23:02.280 ethical. And that's why the public supported you. And you weren't leaders. You were craven followers,

00:23:07.180 and you violated the public's trust. And that's why Harvard admissions are plummeting, and why no one

00:23:12.960 gives a damn that your research funding is being cut. And it does suck, because Harvard, for example,

00:23:18.380 and many other universities, particularly in the States, were stellar places. But here we are.

00:23:23.540 Harvard's stances have emboldened other universities, with Columbia's acting president adopting a more

00:23:28.840 defiant tone after initial concessions. How brave can you get now that they have $53 billion behind

00:23:34.980 them? Okay, so on to the New York Times. There's a terrible thing to say. So this is an article by

00:23:41.580 Gina Colata and Jeremy Peters that was written in May 3rd, 2025, about Dr. Ellen Garber. So Dr. Garber,

00:23:48.740 and I don't know him, and he might be a perfectly fine guy, for all I know. And he probably is. I'd

00:23:53.540 probably like him if I met him, though I don't know if he'd like me. But that's beside the point.

00:23:59.520 Because we're talking about the institution. And he's required as the head of the institution to act

00:24:05.100 as a representative of the institution. So we'll adopt that analytic standpoint as we go through

00:24:14.960 this. He is fighting Mr. Trump. I'm reading from the New York Times now. He is fighting Mr. Trump as

00:24:19.940 the federal government tries to strip Harvard of billions of dollars in research funding and its

00:24:24.180 non-profit tax status. Yeah, well, the federal government gave Harvard that, those billions of

00:24:30.600 dollars in research funding and its non-profit tax status. And they are not morally obliged to

00:24:35.200 continue, especially, as I said, when that institution has acted in the manner that it has acted,

00:24:41.600 which is so appalling that it's almost incomprehensible, which is why people don't believe it.

00:24:46.360 Dr. Garber has said, I'll paraphrase the article as we go through it, that Harvard has a campus

00:24:53.640 culture problem that needs urgent fixing. Harvard has shutout voices that many liberals disagree with,

00:24:59.880 he said. It's not liberals, by the way, it's progressives. Okay, so Dr. Garber's admitted that

00:25:05.260 there's some problems at Harvard, but he said this in Washington. The issue for me was not principally

00:25:10.560 whether we had problems that we needed to address. Yeah, that's the problem, Dr. Garber. That's

00:25:14.560 definitely the problem. The problem is the Trump's administration methods, which are growing more

00:25:19.880 aggressive, according to the New York Times, by the day, and no bloody wonder. Last month, Trump

00:25:24.660 officials said they would cut more than $2 billion in federal funding, etc. On Friday, a couple of

00:25:31.660 weeks ago, Mr. Trump escalated the attack. So that's the threat to take away Harvard's tax-exempt

00:25:37.800 status. Yeah, do it, as far as I'm concerned. Now, to Dr. Garber, defending and reforming Harvard is not

00:25:45.080 a local matter. Americans are questioning a higher education system that many see as disconnected from

00:25:51.120 their values. Yeah, like at least 50% of the population. But it's worse than that, because

00:25:58.020 the Harvard faculty, the Ivy League faculty, and the administration aren't just liberal in the

00:26:03.660 classic liberal sense. That's complete nonsense. They've moved well over into the progressive

00:26:08.740 lane. And even if they don't really believe the progressive shibboleths, let's say, the DEI

00:26:14.580 nonsense, for example, they're not doing that thing to oppose it. So it's not that Americans are

00:26:20.840 questioning a higher education system that many see as disconnected from their values. That's how the

00:26:26.240 New York Times lies non-stop. It's that, we'll see, there are no conservatives at the universities.

00:26:33.900 Right. And so I can tell you some of the stats here. We might as well do a little bit of that now.

00:26:40.340 Okay, are we ready? Based on available data from surveys conducted by the Harvard Crimson

00:26:45.660 student newspaper, the political leanings of Harvard's faculty, particularly within the Faculty of Arts and

00:26:51.140 Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. So that's, you know, that's a pretty

00:26:55.720 central part of the university. Show a strong skew. Let's find out what a strong skew means.

00:27:02.200 2023, 2.5% of surveyed faculty identified as conservative and 0.4% as very conservative,

00:27:12.100 totaling about 2.9% conservative-leaning faculty. Over 77% identified as liberal or very liberal.

00:27:21.140 With 20% as moderate. Let's think about that again. 20% are moderate. Okay. 80% of Americans are

00:27:31.140 moderate. That's a good way of thinking about it. 80% of Americans pretty much agree on everything.

00:27:36.180 Okay. That means 20% of the Harvard faculty are kind of like 80% of Americans. Whereas 77% of them,

00:27:45.200 the ones who identified as liberal or very liberal, are like 10% of the American population.

00:27:50.340 And then with regards to the conservatives, there's none of them. There's none. So that means if you're

00:27:56.420 a centrist at Harvard or the other Ivy Leagues or most universities, then you're a Nazi. So 2022 survey,

00:28:06.000 1% of respondents identified as conservative. With no respondents identified as very conservative.

00:28:12.360 80% were liberal or very liberal. 21, pretty much the same thing. These surveys consistently show that

00:28:19.420 conservative faculty members make up a small minority ranging from 1% to 3%. Okay. So let's see if,

00:28:27.120 let's think about that for a minute and then decide whether this is Trump against Harvard or whether

00:28:33.840 it's the universities against everyone. Right? 1% to 3% are conservative. 50% of Americans voted

00:28:41.580 conservative in the last election. Okay. So that's, you can do the math yourself, right?

00:28:46.700 It's 25% to 1% or 50% to 1%. Something like that. So this isn't some opinion that the universities have

00:28:54.140 become radically left in a way that is really quite novel now. There were conservative people,

00:29:00.440 or at least classically liberal people, everywhere at Harvard when I was there in the 1990s. It wasn't

00:29:06.120 a politically radical place. There were departments like English that were infected, so to speak,

00:29:13.760 with the postmodern bug and that were radically liberal, but they were fringe and now they're not.

00:29:21.720 And then let's talk about the administration. There's no direct survey data on the political

00:29:26.180 leadings of Harvard's administration. There's more administration than faculty, by the way.

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00:30:29.720 Conservative faculty members at Harvard. Yeah, all two of them, such as Harvey C. Mansfield, have suggested

00:30:36.680 that the administration is even less ideologically diverse than the faculty. A 2015 Harvard Crimson

00:30:46.200 analysis, and so you can be sure it's much worse than this now, found that 96%, only 96% of campaign

00:30:53.340 contributions from faculty of arts and sciences, faculty and staff, which may include some administrative

00:30:58.640 roles, went to democratic campaigns between 2011 and 2014. So, well, so there you go. Now we could

00:31:08.200 talk about researchers, right? Because those are the scientists, the people who are in the labs busily

00:31:14.060 pumping out these world-shaking novel discoveries that are then published in the entirely reliable

00:31:21.800 scientific journals and distributed to interested scientists all around the world. Well, that's the

00:31:28.540 theory, isn't it? And that was actually true. You know, for most of my academic career, I could be

00:31:34.540 pretty much certain that everything that was published in an academic journal, 90% of everything that was

00:31:43.940 published in an academic journal, maybe even more than that, was at least good faith. It wasn't true,

00:31:49.580 because you can't expect all scientific publications to be true. If 20% of them were true, that would be

00:31:56.100 like something stellar and remarkable. People are going to make mistakes. But you could assume

00:32:01.980 reflexively that if a paper was published, particularly in a decent journal, that you had

00:32:10.180 reason to trust the integrity of the researchers, even if not the truth of the report. And then you had to

00:32:15.920 be a scientist and try to figure out for yourself what was credible and what wasn't credible. And you

00:32:20.540 can't do better than that. And from, like, I started my graduate training in 1985, and I finished my

00:32:26.560 academic career in 2016. That's 30 years. And for most of that, I was pretty solid in my delight to be

00:32:37.540 not only a professor, but also a researcher. It was trustworthy. And then that stopped. And we'll

00:32:44.580 see. So now we have the researchers, and they're winding up quite the storm because Trump is

00:32:50.220 threatening their research funding. And I can understand why, because it's hard to get research

00:32:54.020 funding. Academics probably spend a third of their time writing grants, which is also appalling,

00:33:00.060 but and also an indication of the corrupting influence of government funding. But it's hard to get

00:33:06.320 research funding. And you need it to run your lab to hire graduate students to buy equipment. Although

00:33:11.780 at places like Harvard, you know, the endowment could in principle be used for such difficult things.

00:33:16.960 So being hit where the money is distributed is, you know, that's a tough blow. And it does

00:33:25.560 threaten the continuation of the research enterprise as it currently exists. But this is the point.

00:33:35.120 Since at least the early 2010s, DEI statements have become ubiquitous in academic hiring, promotion,

00:33:43.680 and grant applications, particularly at elite universities like Harvard. Researchers dependent

00:33:49.720 on federal funding, for example, $37 billion from the National Institutes of Health in 2024,

00:33:55.860 have dutifully complied, often prioritizing ideological conformity and, let's say, cowardice over

00:34:02.400 merit and bravery, for sure. And so, like, I started to see this about 2010, where I would write a grant

00:34:10.380 application for National Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Medical Research

00:34:15.920 Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. This was in Canada, but similar entities

00:34:21.760 exist in the U.S. And I'd have to write out an ideological belief statement. And I thought,

00:34:28.000 no bloody way am I doing that? There's no excuse for that. It's completely irrelevant to my stated,

00:34:35.040 to my commitment to seek truth as a scientist and a researcher, and to teach truth to my students.

00:34:42.220 And so I thought, to hell with you. You need me more than I need you. Now, did that spread? No.

00:34:48.940 The researchers, pretty much to a man and woman, rolled over and let the progressives have their way

00:34:55.600 with them. And there's no excuse for this. And there's no whining about this now. You made your

00:35:00.540 goddamn bed. It's time to lie in it. So, let's document some of that. Early 2010s, DEI statements

00:35:09.200 emerged as optional components in faculty hiring at universities like UC Berkeley, surprise, surprise,

00:35:15.520 spreading to Ivy League schools by 2015. By 2018, remember, they started out as optional,

00:35:21.500 right? Well, maybe we should have some more people of color as our research assistants or our

00:35:27.600 professors. Well, let me tell you, I sat on a lot of hiring committees as a professor, and any person

00:35:33.840 of color who is vaguely qualified, and I mean vaguely, is going to be snapped up by universities so fast you

00:35:40.700 can't bloody well believe it. And that's been the case at least since the 1980s. And so, if universities

00:35:48.460 have been unable to flesh out their quota of racial, sexual identity, and gender proportions,

00:36:01.140 it's because qualified people in those categories simply do not exist. Now, no one will say that, but

00:36:06.720 we'll get back to that when we discuss McGill in Canada. And that, I'm telling you, this is the

00:36:13.560 straight truth. I sat on lots of hiring committees. If there was anyone who vaguely smacked of minority

00:36:19.720 status in any possible manner, and they were even remotely qualified, they were prioritized over every

00:36:27.420 other candidate. And that goes back all the way to the 1990s, at least, probably before that. There's

00:36:34.200 probably no institutions in the world that have tried to be more inclusive without sacrificing merit

00:36:41.460 until recently than the universities. And if they're not able to do it, and you think that's a

00:36:45.940 consequence of systemic racism, well, then you're one of those neo-Marxist types that really we

00:36:51.220 shouldn't be contending with anymore, especially not in the universities. Okay, so back to, and we

00:36:56.800 notice as well, DEI statements are optional in 2010, but by 2018, they're mandatory. And then it gets worse

00:37:04.600 than that. They're not only mandatory, but they're the criteria by which faculty are now hired. And so,

00:37:09.820 we'll get to that, especially in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and medical schools. Do you remember

00:37:13.740 that? By the way, all you people, when you go see a newly graduated doctor, you have no bloody idea

00:37:19.500 if they were selected for merit or on some other basis. And you have no idea if the program that

00:37:26.420 they were trained in, even at an august institution, evaluated them without prejudice for their merit.

00:37:33.100 So you remember that when you put your sick kid in their hands. I would be very careful about that

00:37:37.920 if I was you. In fact, I am. Post-2020, following George Floyd's death, DEI requirements

00:37:44.040 intensified. It isn't exactly obvious to me that the events surrounding George Floyd were of sufficient

00:37:53.400 historical importance, all things considered, so that the world's greatest universities should

00:37:58.140 have reconstituted their promotion, hiring, selection, and publishing criteria. But that is what

00:38:03.540 they did, instead of having, like, an iota of courage. Harvard FAS, Faculty of Arts and Sciences,

00:38:10.400 mandated DEI statements for all tenure-track hires, evaluating candidates' commitment to diversity

00:38:16.540 alongside scholarship. Well, alongside or prior? We'll get to that, too. Grant applications to NIH and NSF

00:38:24.940 increasingly required DEI plans, with 80% of major research universities adopting similar mandates by 2023.

00:38:32.540 Okay, so understand that. So now, you have to hire on the basis of race and sex and gender and sexual

00:38:38.920 identity, and you have to promote and you have to publish on those bases. Okay, and so, well, what does

00:38:46.880 that mean? It means that you've stopped using truth, quality, and merit as criteria. So why the hell should

00:38:56.120 you be getting any money? Now, let me make another case here, and I know this to be true as well.

00:39:01.340 So, I talked to a lot of professors at Stanford, especially at the Hoover Institute, eh? And there

00:39:07.720 were some people in Stanford, like Jay Bhattacharya, who's doing quite well now in the new Trump

00:39:12.200 administration, just as case in point, who stood up against the woke mob in the mid-2010s. And Jay

00:39:23.820 suffered pretty tremendously because of that, but he had a few colleagues around him who stuck by him.

00:39:29.120 And, you know, it's possible for the woke mob cancellation psychopaths to go after people one

00:39:38.800 by one really successfully. But if there's like five of you, and you're major researchers and stellar

00:39:45.540 professors, and you band together, they haven't got a hope. And so, how many places did that happen at?

00:39:51.620 Well, it happened at Stanford. That's one place. And that was also a place, by the way, because it had the

00:39:56.980 Hoover Institute that had a place where there were actually some classic liberals and conservatives.

00:40:03.380 It's not like Jay Bhattacharya is some kind of Nazi. You know, first of all, he's a person of color.

00:40:08.720 And so, you know, obviously should be credited with that for what it's worth. But what am I making a

00:40:18.400 case for here? If five of my colleagues, with my kind of research background or better, had stood

00:40:30.360 together at three universities and told the DEI mob to go to hell, none of this would have happened.

00:40:38.520 And that didn't happen. And that's a illustration of a depth of cowardice that's so profound that it still

00:40:47.160 shocks me. And those of you listening and watching should have no sympathy whatsoever for what your, the people that you

00:40:57.160 support involuntarily, essentially, with your tax dollars did with the responsibility that had been

00:41:04.440 vouchsafed to them, for example, with their tax-exempt status. And they bloody well know it too. Harvard,

00:41:10.720 Columbia, the major league universities, they're running scared because they know they put their foot

00:41:15.800 into it, their foot in it. And they did. They deserve whatever's coming to them. And, you know, in terms of

00:41:24.120 reforming them, how are you going to reform them? Hmm? 75% of them are progressive. If the problem is

00:41:33.480 the disproportion of progressive ideology and the pathology of that ideology, especially with regards

00:41:39.880 to racial, sexual, sexual preference, classification, and the proclivity to do that, what are you going to

00:41:45.880 do? Are you going to keep those people? And what, give them new positions? Give them new name,

00:41:51.680 their institution, something different? The radical left is very slippery with language. Yeah, to say the least.

00:41:59.040 Property is theft. There's a classic example. You have the same players with different names, they're going to play the

00:42:05.280 same games. I see no way that the universities currently are salvageable. Hence, for example, Peterson Academy. So, major

00:42:14.680 research institutions require DEI mandates, 80% of them by 2023. 90% of faculty at elite institutions,

00:42:22.920 90%, include DEI statements and applications. So that means, so that means if you're a junior,

00:42:31.000 if you're an applicant to be a junior faculty member, and Lord forgive you, Lord preserve you if you're not

00:42:38.520 in one of the protected categories. Ha! That's for sure. You can just forget it, right? And so, and that's

00:42:45.800 dead serious. The probability that you can be hired at a university, if you're a young, white, male graduate,

00:42:54.120 is, it's vanishingly small. And I know this from personal experience, because I had stellar students

00:43:00.360 who were in those categories who couldn't get jobs. So, it's absolutely the case. At Harvard, DEI

00:43:06.920 criteria influenced hiring in 70% of faculty of arts and sciences searches by 2022, per internal reports.

00:43:14.840 Promotion and tenure decisions also weighed DEI contributions. So that's not only a DEI contribution,

00:43:21.960 a statement is not only your willingness to proclaim allegiance to an ideological doctrine.

00:43:29.320 So a belief statement, it's also an indication of your willingness to sell your soul to the devil

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00:44:11.720 Right. So make no mistake about this. This isn't merely political corruption, you know,

00:44:18.600 analyzed from a conservative perspective. I don't like those progressives. I don't like the

00:44:23.160 progressives, the Marxists. I think they're appalling to the core and that their doctrine is

00:44:27.480 genocidally murderous and unforgivable in the same category, by the way, as the Nazi doctrines in the

00:44:34.040 extreme. But even independent of that, I think the willingness of faculty members and researchers

00:44:40.200 to pen these bloody statements, to say that those were their words, to sign themselves to those

00:44:46.740 beliefs indicates that they don't deserve public support at all. And I don't think you should send

00:44:52.440 your children to those institutions. They're gone. Just like CNN, just like MSNBC, and just like the New

00:45:00.200 York Times, who we happen to be assessing today. He believes, Dr. Garber, he's the new president of

00:45:06.760 Harvard University. We'll get to that, too. Why he's the new president. This is genuinely unprecedented,

00:45:12.800 Dr. Garber said. We have so many challenges ahead, and we also have so many opportunities.

00:45:17.520 Yeah, blah, blah, blah. This is a time when we should be doubling down on our investments in research,

00:45:22.940 particularly in science. Yeah, Dr. Garber, that assumes that what's happening in those labs is

00:45:27.940 research and science. And by and large, it's not. We haven't even talked about what's happening to

00:45:32.960 publishing. He believes deep funding cuts would impair the kind of innovative work that has made

00:45:37.840 American research universities the global engine for scientific discovery since World War II. No,

00:45:43.140 not since World War II. From World War II till probably about the year 2000, right? And that's now

00:45:49.920 25 years ago. So no, Dr. Garber, wrong. So the White House has said Harvard should not receive federal

00:45:58.000 money if Jewish students are targeted and harassed on its campus. Well, I think we could dispense with

00:46:02.920 the if personally, because that's obviously the case. In the eyes of Mr. Trump, this is classic New

00:46:10.580 York Times, right? What would you say? This lie should annoy you and demoralize you right to the bottom of

00:46:20.080 your soul. In the eyes of Mr. Trump and many Republicans, Harvard and other elite American

00:46:26.680 universities have become echo chambers, places where students develop intolerance for political

00:46:31.940 perspectives different from their own. Yeah, as if they have their own when they're 18 and shield

00:46:37.860 themselves from ideas they find objectionable. University leaders often say that criticism

00:46:43.560 exaggerates the issue, claiming that critics want to perpetuate woke caricatures of university culture

00:46:49.800 in order to win elections. Yeah, fine. There's a four stellar sentences from the lying scoundrels

00:46:56.060 at the New York Times. Let's just delve into this a little bit using some facts. In the eyes of Mr.

00:47:02.900 Trump, that mega maniac. Well, we already talked about the fact that 3% at best of faculty are conservative

00:47:12.940 conservative, and either 0% or 1% very conservative, and that the administration, and there's a lot more

00:47:21.040 people in the administration than there are faculty members, they're even more skewed, so there's that.

00:47:26.980 But let's look at the researchers here. 90% of faculty at elite institutions include DEI statements

00:47:34.980 in applications. Many of them have tailored their research to align with DEI priorities.

00:47:40.660 That means developing studies, for example, on racial disparities.

00:47:44.940 So that's... And then let's talk a little bit more about how the researchers have responded to these DEI statements.

00:47:51.480 Candidates with stronger DEI statements, which means

00:47:54.320 more radically progressive and left, and also bigger lies,

00:47:59.200 assuming that they weren't radically progressive left people and just filled these things out because they had to,

00:48:04.000 as seen in Harvard's 2021 hiring of Sherry Charleston as its first chief diversity officer,

00:48:09.980 despite plagiarism allegations. A high-profile example from UC Berkeley, that hellish joint.

00:48:19.740 A high-profile example from UC Berkeley's life science initiatives, 2018 to 2019,

00:48:25.520 faculty search demonstrates the impact of DEI statements. In this initiative, 600 out of 900 applicants

00:48:33.520 about 70% were eliminated. Hear that? Eliminated. That means their lives were altered severely.

00:48:43.200 That means that despite having worked like mad as high school students and undergraduates and graduate

00:48:48.980 students, having put in 20 years of work into being educated, they were eradicated from consideration

00:48:56.500 for a top-tier job. Regardless of their bloody research prowess, that's their publication record, which is...

00:49:04.500 was the only true record of their capability. 70% of them were eliminated from consideration. Stamp. Gone.

00:49:14.260 Because their DEI statements didn't what? Didn't please who? Exactly. How about the radical progressives

00:49:21.300 who swarmed, because they weren't doing their research, to the bloody hiring committees? How about that?

00:49:28.080 70% were eliminated in the first round based solely on their DEI statements.

00:49:34.280 So let's say you have some poor character who's got 20 publications when he emerges from graduate

00:49:40.680 school. That's a stellar record. In fact, that's a record that's much better than Claudine Gay,

00:49:45.800 who was made president of Harvard University, for example. So we're talking about people whose research

00:49:51.560 records exceed that of the woman who was promoted to president at Harvard. Those people aren't going

00:49:59.480 to be considered for a position at Berkeley and other high-level institutions because their allegiance

00:50:05.800 to political belief was deemed improper or insufficiently craven. So don't tell me this is

00:50:13.400 a bloody Trump problem. That's such a lie. The search committee used a rubric that prioritized candidates'

00:50:19.320 knowledge of DEI, track record, and plans for advancing it. Right, oh yes, what? The last time I looked at

00:50:26.760 the Engineering and Research Council grant application in Canada, it's frequently asked questions. It said this,

00:50:34.680 if you have a lab that's notable for its diversity, so which means if you've been as craven as you

00:50:41.640 possibly could have in following every single bloody dictate that we imposed on you in the last 10 years,

00:50:48.520 don't just rest on your laurels because no matter how good a job you've done in the past,

00:50:54.040 you could do better in the future. And so we don't want to see that you're already running a lab where

00:51:00.520 minorities of the multiplicitous form that we insist upon existing are overrepresented. No matter how

00:51:08.600 well you've done, that's not good enough. And your bloody DEI statement better indicate that

00:51:13.720 no matter how craven you've been in the past, you should be a little more craven in the present.

00:51:17.880 Sickening. Sickening. This case, highlighted in City Journal and National Association of Scholars

00:51:25.560 reports, suggests DEI statements can be a significant gatekeeper. Yeah, well, there's

00:51:32.920 something damned by faint praise. Faculty promotions increasingly hinge on DEI activities, sidelining

00:51:39.000 traditional metrics like publication impact, which is really the metric that scientists have decided on

00:51:45.240 over a hundred years best indexes their research productivity and ability. That's merit, merit.

00:51:51.720 That's the merit Garber's talking about when he said that American universities led the world, which

00:51:56.200 they did in scientific research. Right. That's publication impact. Make no mistake about it.

00:52:02.360 You prioritize anything over that, assuming the journals aren't corrupt, and they are corrupt now,

00:52:06.440 so that's also a problem. Then you're making everything worse. And maybe not just worse, maybe like

00:52:11.560 failure worse. Because you don't go from great to mediocre. You go from great to useless. There's no

00:52:21.080 intermediary slide. And so if you're not great as a scientist, you're basically useless. A 2023 nature

00:52:29.640 study found 40% of sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty, so that's the hardcore

00:52:36.280 scientists felt DEI overshadowed research quality. Right. So racial identity, sexual identity, sexual

00:52:45.240 preference, et cetera, et cetera, gender choice, all these idiot group categories now overshadows research

00:52:55.080 quality. Just think about that. And then think about whether that's something you want to devote your

00:53:00.200 tax money to. Now, publishing. So when you do a scientific paper, and maybe that takes you five

00:53:07.240 years, it depends on the complexity of the problem, and you're working on multiple issues at the same

00:53:15.000 time, so you have a steady publication stream. If you're a great scientist, several a year. If you're

00:53:19.960 a good scientist, at least one a year. You publish them. Journals are ranked by quality. And then

00:53:27.480 scientists evaluate their own papers to see when other scientists bother to pay attention to the

00:53:33.720 publication and cite the paper. So one of the ways you determine whether a paper is impactful is by how

00:53:41.400 many people refer to it, right? Logically. Okay, so that's the publication impact. So journals, including

00:53:51.640 those tied to Harvard, prioritized DEI themed papers. Okay, so now think about that. You won't get hired

00:53:59.160 unless you're part of the right group, and the groups multiply endlessly. You won't get promoted if

00:54:05.480 you're not part of the right group. You can't submit a grant unless you're willing to abide by the dictates

00:54:13.320 and publicly state it that would prejudice the selection against you, even if you're not in one of

00:54:19.960 those favored groups. And then now you can't publish, you can't do research on any topic that isn't

00:54:28.280 racially, sexually, or otherwise group indicated. And if you did do that research, you couldn't get

00:54:35.160 published. So now you tell me, oh, journalists from the New York Times, how that's not 100% rotten

00:54:43.000 from the bottom right to the top, and how you could possibly fix that. The journals are skewed,

00:54:48.840 the promotion is skewed, the research agenda is skewed, the grant application process is skewed,

00:54:55.000 the hiring process is skewed, right? And then the administration is even more skewed.

00:55:00.440 So, how do you fix that? How do you fix that, folks? There's no fixing that.

00:55:08.680 Not as far as I can tell, there's replacing it. That's why we made Peterson Academy. Now,

00:55:15.640 I have no idea if that's going to work, by the way, right? Because it's not easy to replace

00:55:20.200 august institutions. I don't know if there's a market for lectures. We're doing quite well with our

00:55:26.120 new initiative, but its long-term success is as unlikely as the long-term successes of anything

00:55:33.160 new. Researchers have widely complied with DEI requirements due to funding pressures. Yeah,

00:55:39.000 right, due to funding pressures. Researchers have widely complied with DEI requirements. Why?

00:55:45.320 Because they're cowards, that's why. It's as simple as that. And maybe you think that's too harsh,

00:55:50.600 you know. These scientists, protected in their ivy towers, had to contend with political pressures

00:55:57.640 they'd never faced before. Fair enough, you know. I have some sympathy for that, but listen to me.

00:56:04.040 There's one thing you're obligated to do, two things you're obligated to do if you're an actual

00:56:08.760 academic and a researcher. You're required not to lie when you speak, especially not to students,

00:56:14.520 and you're required not to lie when you write, and you're particularly required not to lie when you

00:56:19.800 write. And when you fill out a DEI statement, especially one that passes muster, and you're not

00:56:27.320 a radical progressive who believes that everyone in the world should be categorized by their

00:56:31.800 intrinsic group identity, which is how we used to define racist, by the way, if you fill out a

00:56:37.560 statement that indicates that you're one of those people, and you're not, you are signaling your

00:56:41.880 willingness to lie with your written words at the deepest possible level of commitment,

00:56:47.400 at the level of your career. Think about that now. How can you trust anything that anyone like that does?

00:56:54.120 Written. How do you know that they won't sacrifice everything for their career, for example? The pursuit

00:56:58.920 of scientific truth. They just bloody well demonstrated that that's what they would do,

00:57:02.840 and right at the initiation of their career, or when they're being promoted, or when they're being

00:57:06.840 published. And what do they teach students? Exactly the same thing. They're lying.

00:57:15.480 They're betraying the trust that's been placed in them. They're violating the spirit of the

00:57:20.120 institutions, and they shouldn't get any money. And it's not Trump. So let's leave that kind of idiocy

00:57:26.520 behind.

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00:58:26.600 Faculty report pressure. Pressure. What the hell does pressure mean to tailor research to DEI themes?

00:58:33.320 No one had a gun to their head, folks. And there are worse things than losing a job

00:58:39.240 that you only have to keep by lying. Faculty report pressure to tailor research to DEI themes,

00:58:47.000 with 40% of STEM faculty feeling DEI overshadows research quality. I mentioned that before,

00:58:53.080 per a Nature, 2023 Nature study. Nature at one point was the world's best scientific journal,

00:58:59.640 by the way. Okay, back to the New York Times with that little side venture into the facts that they

00:59:07.080 lied about. At the same time, many university leaders also worry that Americans have lost trust

00:59:14.760 in academia and no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. So let's be

00:59:20.120 a professor here for a minute and assess that sentence for quality. At the same time,

00:59:25.960 many university leaders also worry. Okay, well, what do you worry about? Well, often you use worry when

00:59:34.760 you're describing like your neurotic grandmother being concerned about things that really aren't

00:59:39.560 factually true. Okay, but university leaders aren't worried. They know that Americans have lost trust in

00:59:48.840 academia and they know that there are reasons for it. So they're not worried. So that's the first lie,

00:59:54.040 that Americans have lost trust in academia. No, Americans haven't lost trust in academia. That's

01:00:00.040 the second lie. Academics have violated the trust that Americans had placed in them. And that was trust

01:00:09.560 that was hard won because ordinary people don't necessarily trust intellectuals and no bloody wonder.

01:00:17.240 And so it isn't that Americans have lost trust in academia. It's that academics have lied and

01:00:25.640 become corrupt. And the New York Times, when they're reporting on this, well, let's count the lies in the sentence.

01:00:32.120 So far, that's two. And no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. That's the third lie.

01:00:39.240 There were only three factual statements in the sentence. So three lies is actually pretty remarkable.

01:00:46.680 Americans no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. Okay. Well, there isn't

01:00:53.000 as much value in a college education as there once was. First of all, they're not as rare. Second of all,

01:00:59.160 as we've already pointed out, the colleges are no longer evaluating teaching or research or student

01:01:05.160 application on the basis of merit. Then we have the additional problem that the corporations,

01:01:11.880 by and large, and the general public have noted the radical decline in trustworthiness and quality

01:01:18.520 and no longer regard degrees as a marker of integrity and ability. And that isn't because

01:01:24.440 Americans no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. It's because there is no,

01:01:29.640 there is no longer as much value in a college education as there once was. So let's rewrite the

01:01:38.440 sentence. At the same time, many university leaders have come to the uncomfortable conclusion

01:01:45.960 that their institutions violated the trust of the Americans and the rest of the world that they were

01:01:51.320 sworn to serve, that bestowed on them certain advantages that were granted to them by public trust.

01:01:57.240 Americans as well have realized that there is no longer as much value in a college education

01:02:06.040 as there once was and are acting in accordance with that. And college leaders have no idea what

01:02:12.040 to do about that. Yeah, that's a much more truthful statement. About a third of Americans have little or

01:02:19.000 no confidence in higher education. Right. 33 percent. Little or no confidence. According to a Gallup poll

01:02:26.920 published last year, up from 10 percent a decade earlier. Yeah. Those Americans, eh? They're a sad bunch.

01:02:36.680 You violate their trust and they notice. We can put that in the New York Times article too.

01:02:41.720 Okay. Steven Pinker weighed in on this. Steven Pinker is a classic liberal, by the way. He's also a Canadian.

01:02:50.360 And he's been adamant in his stance against the woke mob at Harvard.

01:02:59.560 The last few years have been a wake-up call, said Dr. Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, who's

01:03:04.840 warned that his university and other elite institutions have devalued intellectual and

01:03:08.680 ideological diversity at considerable cost to their reputations. See, that's also a lie. It isn't that

01:03:15.240 the university and other elite institutions devalued intellectual and ideological diversity.

01:03:19.560 It's that they stopped doing their job properly. That's another law. Another lie. He praised Dr.

01:03:28.440 Garber for recognizing what many other leaders have not, at least in public. The Trump administration

01:03:33.160 had not made an unreasonable request when it said Harvard must consistently enforce its rules against

01:03:38.440 disruptive demonstrations and swiftly punish anti-Semitic harassment. That's a whole other issue,

01:03:43.960 right? The absolute craven cowardice and complicity of the universities, especially the big ones,

01:03:50.520 with regard to these unfathomably corrupt demonstrations that emerged all across the West

01:04:01.560 after October 7th. Demonstrations that were so corrupt that they were praised and the university's

01:04:07.560 role in promoting them. They were praised by the Ayatollah Kamani himself directly on X.

01:04:16.520 There's the only real, I hate comparing anything to Hitler, but can you imagine in the 1930s when

01:04:23.720 the anti-Semitism rose in Germany that there were protests on American campuses in favor of it and that

01:04:31.080 Hitler praised them? That's pretty much the situation. And so Harvard's making a big case that it's the

01:04:36.280 anti-Semitic allegations that are behind the reaction of the Trump administration, and that's only

01:04:42.760 partially true. It's part of the problem, but it's by no means all. So, the New York Times also points

01:04:50.280 out that the Harvard Crimson had published an essay, suggested the change to diversity programs might be

01:04:56.120 politically expedient for now, but it will not solve Harvard's public relations crisis. The way to win

01:05:01.320 against authoritarian attacks isn't by prioritizing optics, it's by standing up for our values. Yeah,

01:05:06.440 well, we know what Harvard values are. So, okay, let me turn to something else here. Well, I should tell

01:05:13.000 you why I want to talk about Canada. It's because the same idiocy that permeates the American higher

01:05:20.760 education academies also permeates Canada. And I found an indication at McGill that makes this case quite

01:05:30.920 profoundly. So, if you're a medical school or any other professional school, training engineers,

01:05:38.040 training teachers, training massage therapists, training nurses, training psychologists, the programs

01:05:44.280 that teach you at a university have to be accredited before you can be granted a degree that can then be

01:05:52.040 turned into a profession. Okay? So, you take the courses, you get your degree, then your turn, and

01:05:58.920 whether the program can give you your degree is judged by accreditation authorities. The colleges,

01:06:09.400 the professional colleges, for example, or the professional organizations, there's various ways

01:06:14.760 this can be done. Now, for a long time, those accreditation agencies focused on merit, but they

01:06:20.120 don't focus on merit anymore because they've been captured. They focus on DEI. Now, McGill University,

01:06:27.480 which is Canada's Harvard, let's say, and it was a very good university, despite the attempt by the

01:06:34.520 Quebec Separatists to destroy it, essentially, for like 40 years, because it was English language,

01:06:39.880 even though the rest of their universities basically suck, to put it bluntly. Harvard, or McGill, has a

01:06:46.920 great medical school. Now, it has to be accredited. So, here's some fun. In 2017,

01:06:56.680 McGill's medical school ran into trouble with the accreditors. Well, why? Well, this is from

01:07:02.680 CBC News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is Canada's state-run media, right? An appalling

01:07:11.480 organization, which was once also a reasonably reliable institution. So, McGill's medical school

01:07:18.840 was put on probation by its accrediting body. Well, why? Progress is minimal and below average for

01:07:25.640 Canadian medical schools when it comes to the recruitment of Indigenous students. It also notes

01:07:30.280 that Black and Filipino people are underrepresented in relationship to Montreal census data. Low

01:07:36.280 parental income and education levels are underrepresented as well. And, McGill was cited for lack

01:07:41.480 of progress recruiting students from rural backgrounds. McGill's dean of medicine promised to improve his

01:07:47.880 faculty's diversity. Well, that was his mistake. Another coward. Craven, sad,

01:07:55.560 ideologically captured, weak, spineless, lack of leadership. Okay, and the letter from the

01:08:05.240 accrediting agency continues, it is unclear what actions have been taken to improve diversity in

01:08:09.560 leadership, and little progress is reported in improving levels of participation by women and

01:08:14.200 aboriginals in leadership positions. Okay, so this is what you have to understand, although perhaps you don't

01:08:21.400 want to. The competition for qualified so-called minorities is insanely intense. Now, are the

01:08:31.240 universities supposed to hire people who can't do the job? Well, obviously, as long as they fit the

01:08:36.120 right bloody racial category, sex category, sex proclivity category, get those LGBT two types in there,

01:08:45.720 whatever the hell that has to do with scholarship and teaching. The people don't exist. The people don't

01:08:53.960 exist. Do you understand that? You have to radically lower your criteria in order to meet the mandates,

01:09:02.120 in which case your quality will radically and permanently dip. And if you're training physicians,

01:09:09.320 or maybe air traffic controllers, there's another group to think about. Maybe you don't do that,

01:09:15.000 eh? Maybe you would select people for how well they do on the MCAT, right, or on the SAT. And if you

01:09:21.240 can't find people who do, what, in the top five percent, if you're a great university, then you don't take

01:09:26.680 them. Because if you do, they hire people who are even worse, and then you're screwed, really. Then your

01:09:33.320 institution collapses. And that happens very quickly. How many places are there in the world

01:09:39.480 with great university and professional institutions, eh? How many do you think? There are 24

01:09:46.680 free Western democracies in the world out of 200 countries. So that's how rare it is. And it took

01:09:57.640 hundreds of years to build those institutions, and they can be destroyed at a moment's notice.

01:10:03.880 And that's what's happened. So McGill, in an interview with CBC, remember this is from 2017,

01:10:09.320 Dean of Medicine said, David Eidelman said, a number of measures have been put in place to try to recruit

01:10:14.280 more minorities. The university has hired a director specifically charged with improving diversity.

01:10:20.120 There's a new indigenous health program targeting students from indigenous communities. McGill,

01:10:25.320 moreover, is trying to improve rural recruitment with its Gatineau campus.

01:10:31.000 Eidelman said all medical programs struggle with recruiting minorities. It's hard. Why? Because in order

01:10:38.040 to get into medical school, you need to have very high marks. And then he does this. Then he does this.

01:10:43.400 In general, it's easier to get really high marks when you come from a privileged background.

01:10:47.400 Yeah, well, you know what? It's not that goddamn easy, you know? And the marks either mean something

01:10:55.320 or they don't. And if marks don't mean anything, then why the hell do we have universities?

01:11:00.840 So this statement from Eidelman, it sums up the pathology of the universities and their craven

01:11:06.600 administrators in a nutshell. It's hard because in order to get into medical school, you need to have

01:11:11.560 very high marks. Well, maybe that's because we want smart doctors, eh? You know, it's a possibility.

01:11:16.760 And in general, it's easier to get really high marks when you come from a privileged background.

01:11:21.400 Yeah, you know, I don't think it's that easy. You son of a bitch. The university medical school,

01:11:26.520 the oldest in Canada, was put on probation in 2015, a major blow to McGill's reputation.

01:11:31.720 It risked losing its accreditation after an inspection found the undergraduate medical

01:11:35.560 education failed to meet 24 of 132 required standards. Well, there you go. So that was 2015.

01:11:44.040 So let's go to 2025, shall we? April 25th. For the second time in a row, McGill University's

01:11:50.760 flagship program in medicine, the best medical school in Canada, has been put on probation

01:11:55.880 by Canadian accreditation authorities for another two dozen clearing deficiencies. Same as in 2015.

01:12:01.960 You can bet McGill bent itself backwards, hiring all the right lefties to run their bloody diversity

01:12:08.520 programs and didn't make a bit of progress. Why? How about because it's impossible? How about that?

01:12:14.200 Yeah, well, it's not impossible if you're an idiot accreditor and you think you can make things happen

01:12:19.240 in complex institutions by waving your magic fairy wand. And this is the Gazette. Even as McGill moves

01:12:27.640 to address these shortcomings, it is closing its social accountability and community engagement office,

01:12:32.600 which was set up after McGill's medical program was first placed on probation in 2015 to address DEI,

01:12:39.560 diversity, equity and inclusion. The Gazette has learned. This shows you the state of newspaper

01:12:45.880 journalists as well. The three individuals who ran that DEI office in the medical faculty,

01:12:50.760 all of whom are members of racialized minorities, are being replaced by a single person who does not

01:12:57.320 come from such a minority background and who will be overseeing diversity initiatives as vice dean of

01:13:02.440 education and community engagement. If you don't think that's funny, you've got no sense of humor.

01:13:07.320 It's damn black humor though. McGill's decision to close its dedicated DEI office occurred right after

01:13:13.720 accreditors wrapped up their interviews and visits to the university in January. Just think about that.

01:13:18.440 McGill was put on notice that unless they advanced their DEI programs, they were going to lose their

01:13:24.840 bloody accreditation. That meant they wouldn't have a medical school. And the consequence of that 10

01:13:29.160 years later was that they hadn't made a bit of progress and everything they did failed so utterly

01:13:34.680 cataclysmically on the DEI front that they actually closed their office. You think about what kind of failure

01:13:42.360 that indicates, right, in the face of this absolute impossibility. Technically, McGill's marquee medical

01:13:49.160 program is still accredited despite his probationary status. But the news could potentially affect McGill's

01:13:55.240 number one ranking of all medical schools in the country by McLean's magazine in Canada. That's kind of like

01:14:00.920 time used to be in its next annual survey. So, what can I say? Well, here's something else that's happened. And

01:14:09.240 Trump actually moved to do something about this with an executive order earlier this month.

01:14:14.040 The accreditation agencies that determine whether the professionals who serve you are competent have

01:14:20.200 become more corrupted even than the universities. So, you know, with Peterson Academy, we're wrestling

01:14:27.720 with the issue of accreditation because our courses aren't transferable to universities. But increasingly,

01:14:32.600 corporations don't give a damn if you have a university degree, and no wonder. And it might even be the fact

01:14:37.560 that being accredited now is an indicator that you're ideologically corrupt. Because in order to

01:14:42.760 become accredited, you have to follow all the accreditation dictums, and they're all the same

01:14:50.520 dictums that destroyed the universities. So, what we're hoping with our initiative is to go direct to

01:14:56.840 corporations and to say, we can screen candidates for you for merit, and we won't educate them to be

01:15:04.280 narcissistic, woke troublemakers who think that the way you improve the world is by protesting,

01:15:10.120 which is essentially, definitely what they're taught in university. Leslie Fellows is Dean of Medicine,

01:15:16.680 by the way. Fellows insisted, however, that McGill has made tremendous progress with its medical

01:15:22.840 curriculum since 2015. Yeah, I bet that's progress. When you dig down below the kind of headline on the

01:15:28.200 outcome, you can understand better the progress that we have, in fact, made over the last 10 years.

01:15:32.840 Yeah, progress. All right. According to the New York Times, Trump's at war with Harvard.

01:15:40.520 But the New York Times is capable of lying three times in a single sentence that only contains three

01:15:45.160 hypothetical facts. So, it lies all the time. This is not a war between the world's best university,

01:15:53.800 Harvard, and mega-Trump. First of all, it's not the best university in the world anymore.

01:16:01.240 I don't know what might be the best university in the world anymore. It's hard to say. Oxford's

01:16:05.800 pretty shaky. Cambridge is pretty shaky. Columbia, less said about Columbia, the better.

01:16:11.400 You can tell Harvard's not the best university anymore because people aren't applying to it.

01:16:16.440 And donors have decreased the degree to which they're willing to support it. And there's going

01:16:23.560 to be more of that along the way. For a long time, one of the highlights of my life was the fact that I

01:16:32.360 had taught at Harvard, that I was selected on the basis of my merit for a position there.

01:16:38.280 And now, you know, it's not something I bring up. I never did bring it up, you know, except when

01:16:48.200 it was appropriate. But I'm much less likely to do it now, as I'm less likely to presume that my status

01:16:57.880 as a PhD is a meritorious designation. And that's a sad thing. I loved working at Harvard. I thought

01:17:09.640 McGill was great. And the University of Toronto served me pretty well for about 15 years. I'd say

01:17:16.200 none of this with any pleasure. And I'm sorry also for a fair bit of irritation, but it's so frustrating

01:17:24.040 to see this. It's so appalling. It's so sickening. It's such a betrayal of trust. I saw nothing but

01:17:31.080 cowardice from my faculty, compatriots, from the administration, from the research. I really

01:17:37.640 expected better from researchers than, say, my compatriot psychologists, professionals. We're so

01:17:43.880 cowardly. A few of us could have band together at any time and brought all this nonsense to a stop.

01:17:49.320 100 would have done it. Or the 10 that so famously would have stopped God from destroying Sodom and

01:17:55.240 Gomorrah. It would have just taken a very few people. And they didn't show up. And so whatever

01:18:04.040 Harvard gets from the Trump administration is a small fragment of what they deserve. And I would say

01:18:11.160 that is true, no matter how harsh the treatment. So the Trump administration has also, at one point,

01:18:23.560 detailed out some tentative plans to deal with the situations at the university, to replace them in

01:18:29.560 some ways, particularly given the impossibility of reforming them, given the overwhelming proportion of

01:18:38.040 progressives among administration and faculty. Back in 2023, he published as part of Agenda 47,

01:18:47.720 a plan to take billions and billions of dollars collected by taxing, fining, and suing excessively

01:18:53.240 large private university endowments to create the American Academy. Now, we haven't heard much

01:18:59.000 about the American Academy in recent months. Trump's plan was to have the American Academy gather,

01:19:04.520 quote, the highest quality educational content, covering the full spectrum of human knowledge

01:19:09.000 and skills, and make that material available to every American citizen online for free.

01:19:13.640 Okay, so look, when that happened, we at Peterson Academy thought that the Trump team had been

01:19:20.680 preusing the Peterson Academy website because he used essentially the same name and made essentially the

01:19:25.880 same claims. Now, I really have no idea if that's true. And I actually had a chance to ask Dr. or Donald

01:19:33.000 Trump at Mar-a-Lago in the few minutes I got to talk to him about his American Academy plans. And he

01:19:39.880 said at that point that he didn't remember making the promise. And so I don't know if he meant that or

01:19:48.200 if he didn't know who the hell I was and what the hell I was talking about. But in any case, it was a good

01:19:53.240 idea. And that's exactly what we tried to do with Peterson Academy. And there are other institutions that are

01:19:58.200 emerging that are trying to revitalize the university in a more traditional form, right? There's the University of

01:20:05.800 Austin at Texas, which is up and running, very expensive process, quarter of a billion dollars to

01:20:14.360 get the institution up and running in its nascent form. But stellar students, I was there a couple of

01:20:20.920 weeks ago. There's Ralston College in Georgia, in Savannah, beautiful city. It offers a master's

01:20:31.800 program that is accredited. You can learn to speak ancient and modern Greek in a year,

01:20:38.440 and to familiarize yourself with the basis of the Greek basis of Western civilization. And there's

01:20:45.400 institutions like Hillsdale that I mentioned earlier. And so there are some promising possibilities,

01:20:52.040 and we'll see how they turn out. I think what I'm going to do on the Daily Wire side is continue my

01:20:59.080 analysis of the university situation. And so if you're interested in a more in-depth analysis,

01:21:06.280 a continued analysis of the problems with higher education and the potential solutions,

01:21:11.560 then give some consideration to joining us on the Daily Wire side. The Daily Wire makes these podcasts

01:21:18.120 possible at their high production level and on this continuing basis. And they've been a very positive

01:21:25.640 advocate for free speech and the dissemination of information like this over the last few years,

01:21:31.080 and you could give some consideration to throwing some support their way if you're interested in

01:21:36.840 material like this. In the meantime, thank you all very much for your time and attention. It's much

01:21:41.800 appreciated. I hope that this relatively emotion-laden analysis of the university situation and the New

01:21:49.080 York Times craven coverage of the battle between Trump, so to speak, and Harvard has been useful

01:21:56.200 and informative. It's a very, very important issue, and it would be best if people actually understood

01:22:01.960 what was going on. Thanks for your time and attention. Bye-bye.

545. Reaction to Harvard： Scam？｜ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

545. Reaction to Harvard： Scam？ ｜ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Summary

Transcript

545. Reaction to Harvard： Scam？｜ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson