In this episode of The Sad Truth, Scott sits down with Dr. Eric Kaufman to talk about his move to the University of Buckingham, his new position at the Center for Heterodox Social Science, and his new book, The Third Awakening: Woke in the 21st Century.
00:00:00.000Hi, everybody. This is Scott Satt for The Sad Truth. Today, I have one of the rare repeat guests, one of the rare people to put on their CV that they were good enough to be invited for a second time to The Sad Truth, Professor Eric Kaufman. How are you doing, sir?
00:00:17.560God, great. It's good to be here, and I'm glad that I'm one of the Hall of Fame that has managed to get in more than once.
00:00:24.400You are indeed. I just checked before we came on, the first, the inaugural time we came on was April 3rd, 2023. Much has happened since, which I want to get into, but just for the people who don't know who you are, you're Professor Eric Kaufman, Professor of Politics at University of Buckingham, which I was fortunate enough to visit last month.
00:00:46.920We'll talk about that. And you are also the founder and director of the Center for Heterodox Social Science, which comes with a new MA and a new PhD. We'll talk about that. Anything else you want to add to the bio before we get going?
00:01:04.040Well, I have my book, which you probably can see just over my shoulder, and that's The Third Awakening, 2024, which is really all about woke and how it got here.
00:01:14.500Right, which, in a sense, is going to lead up to the Buckingham Manifesto, which we're going to talk about, yes?
00:01:23.020Right, yeah. I like to think of it as the companion volume to The Parasitic Mind and to the new book on suicidal empathy, actually, which is really, I'm looking forward to.
00:01:33.780Oh, thank you so much. You know, it's funny because I wake up every morning filled with so much impatience because I am seeing the reaction that people are getting to suicidal empathy, which, dare I say, is even more, you know, orgiastic in its firm than The Parasitic Mind.
00:01:52.820So if this is any good indication, I may be able to retire in Newport Beach, California soon.
00:02:00.480Anyways, let's get, so let's first begin with, last time you were on, two plus years ago, you were at University of London.
00:02:08.960You've now moved to the University of Buckingham, where you founded all sorts of new cool things.
00:02:14.240Tell us about this move and what are some, you know, things you want to add to that, John?
00:02:18.340Yeah. Well, I think, Gad, like you, I'm one of a small band of, you know, non-progressive scholars in the social sciences, broadly conceived, so we're on the move now, aren't we?
00:02:29.600I was at Birkbeck University of London for 20 years, and I was four years at the University of Southampton, so 24 years in the mainstream system.
00:02:40.760And then University of Buckingham, which, of course, Britain's first, one of the very few private universities founded by Thatcher, you know, has a free market tradition, very different from the mainstream in that.
00:02:55.000And I just thought it was about time I put my money where my mouth was and go to a different institution.
00:03:00.440And I'd also had, you know, some run-ins, you know, the internal investigations, the Twitter mobbings, the open letters, all these sorts of things you're familiar with.
00:03:09.040And so between that and the opportunity at Buckingham, I thought it was time to make a move.
00:03:15.100And so I set out this new Center for Heterodox Social Science, which we'll talk about, because that's kind of the context for the conference and manifesto, which came later, and which you were kind enough to attend, really.
00:03:32.280So actually, so let's talk about that, and then we can get into the actual official manifesto that came out recently.
00:03:39.500I think it was published in the Chronicles of Higher Education, is that what I'm talking about?
00:03:43.480And I think someone has rebutted it, and then that person is soliciting some replies to it, which I've so far ignored.
00:03:53.080But in any case, so June 4th, I think, there was a Is Walk Dead conference at the Emanuel Center in London, which you were kind enough to invite me to.
00:04:04.160And then the following day, we all drove, headed up to University of Buckingham for, I think, the inaugural, the original first fully anti-woke academic conference ever.
00:04:20.400I think that is a true statement, absolutely.
00:04:23.660And I think it's important to, now that we're starting to get some new initiatives happening on the non-progressive side.
00:04:32.280You know, so we have the June 4th event that yourself, Matt Goodwin, and Baccia Ungar Sargon spoke at, which was before the conference the next day, which was on Heterodox Social Science.
00:04:43.760As it's worth saying for the audience, we have got a free speech infrastructure now of organizations like FIRE and the Free Speech Union and others who are defending academics.
00:04:55.120We had the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference.
00:04:58.800We've got the Heterodox Academy Conference.
00:05:01.340We have a number of conferences where, and we have that conference out at University of Southern California, I believe, where people are talking about the problem of free speech and ideological conformity in academia.
00:05:16.360But what I wanted to do with this is to say, okay, we've now outlined the problem.
00:05:21.400What is the positive thing we need to do?
00:05:24.560And that is a new research agenda and a new intellectual movement.
00:05:28.920So this is really the whole point of my post-progressivism article and this conference is to sketch out what I call post-progressive intellectual movement and agenda.
00:05:40.980It's a bit like, think of it as a non-progressive post-modernism.
00:05:43.760But instead of post-modernism, we're saying we're not post-modern, but we are beyond the last 60 years, which is really the progressive period in which the cultural left has come to completely dominate high culture, intellectual life, universities.
00:06:01.660We need to have an agenda, which is post-progressive, which says, actually, that progressive movement has restricted the pursuit of truth by setting out taboos and red lines beyond which you're not allowed to go.
00:06:17.520So you can't say people's minds are parasitized.
00:06:24.340So essentially doing more or less off-piste or politically incorrect social science that is rebalancing.
00:06:32.560So what we're doing is we're trying to rebalance social sciences towards truth because they've gone away from truth and in favor of ideology.
00:06:40.860Ideology tells you what you're allowed to research and which perspective.
00:06:44.580So any disparity between, you know, black and white or between men and women can only be explained by systemic racism and sexism.
00:06:53.980You can't say, well, actually, can we at least look at family structure?
00:06:59.020Can we look at, you know, you say evolutionary psychology choices men and women make, you know, these sorts of things.
00:07:05.720If we really want to understand the phenomenon, we're going to need to actually bring these other explanations in.
00:07:11.900So that's really part of the mission is heterodox social science or countercultural social science.
00:07:17.460And the other part of it is we need to be studying woke as an ideology like any other.
00:07:23.060The way, you know, if you, I'm a co-editor of a journal of nationalism studies where after the Berlin Wall came down,
00:07:31.320this scholarly association and journal was set up and you had a boom in studies of nationalism,
00:07:38.280thousands of articles, books, conferences, courses.
00:07:43.160You know, if academia was functioning properly, the explosion of woke would have led to the same thing.
00:07:49.880But you're not going to find courses on woke, except my course, open online course on woke.
00:07:54.740You're not going to find that at universities.
00:08:16.480I mean, and there are several reasons for why we are in the, I mean, in French, you say,
00:08:21.880like in the trouble pit that we're in right now.
00:08:27.880One of it, I mean, there are many reasons.
00:08:30.260One is, of course, if you conflate activism versus the pursuit of truth, right?
00:08:37.520I mean, there's nothing inherently non-scientific about sociology, epistemologically speaking.
00:08:43.840I mean, Auguste Comte argued in the hierarchy of sciences that sociology should be at the apex because it is a lot more difficult to study human beings than it is to study, you know, chemical compounds.
00:08:59.240The problem arises because sociologists don't view their fundamental objective as one to pursue truth, but rather I have to be an activist.
00:09:10.580And so it's in that sense that sociology is tainted, not because psychology or sociology are any less, so there's that problem.
00:09:19.780Another problem, which is an infrastructural one, is that if 95, 98, 99% of the professors are leftists, even if you and I are, you know, proud signatories of the Buckingham Manifesto, are you ever able to flip it?
00:09:37.020And then, of course, there are other reasons that the parasitic stuff that I talk about, you know, social scientists are afraid to argue that human beings are driven by biological imperatives and so on.
00:09:47.540Do you see any of these three that I just mentioned, and there are a few other reasons, as one is more, you know, we better solve the lopsidedness and biased professoriate before we get, or are they all equally problematic and it has to be a multi-pronged approach?
00:10:04.220Well, okay, yeah. I think that our aim shouldn't, in the short term, be 50-50 in academia between right and left. I think that's unrealistic. But I think what's more realistic is to say we can approach a more balanced picture in terms of the influence on the dominant ideas of society.
00:10:28.440And actually, the way to attain that is we have to create a parallel ecosystem of new universities, new centers, new networks, and then we need to amplify the cultural production of those networks.
00:10:44.300Because most academic papers are never cited. So we don't actually need to reproduce all of the stuff sitting on the dusty shelves. We need to, however, anything that is produced by the dissidents needs to be amplified to the point where it really influences debates that policymakers and journalists are having.
00:11:06.740And I kind of see an alliance between the dissident academics and some of the kind of new media that's out there, new podcast media that can amplify this research. And so actually, it should be possible to have the same influence with one, you know, with one-twentieth the number or one-tenth the number of academics.
00:11:28.760I still think it should be possible. I still think it should be possible. But we need to be much smarter and more nimble about it. So one of the things I'm trying to do is create a repository of non-progressive social science that can be searched with an AI by journalists and by policymakers. I'm trying to get some funding for that.
00:11:47.880So what that will allow people to do is say, well, we want to bypass, say, chat GPT or some other AI that will just direct us to the usual stuff. We can go to this portal and we can find the argument against systemic racism as the explanation for the racial wealth gap.
00:12:05.600Something like that. Can we come to a system where we've created a separate ecosystem, linking dissenting academics like you with people in think tanks, people in new media, new universities that can have an amplification and change the culture?
00:12:25.260So I think that's probably our best bet. I don't think we're going to suddenly have academia be 50-50.
00:12:31.480Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. I mean, that's the exact reason why very early I saw the value and power of setting up my own show. This was way before it was cool to have podcasts, right? I mean, you know, everybody and their mother has a podcast.
00:12:51.080But when I first came out, I was, dare I say, probably maybe the first professor to actually have these long format chats and so on, because I thought, well, wait a minute, exactly to your point, the modal number of times that a paper is cited in academia is, drum roll, zero.
00:13:10.080Zero, right? I mean, yes, there are these stellar papers that end up getting cited after 10 years, you know, 8,000 times, but the average paper, and by the way, this is not an indictment on the value of producing knowledge.
00:13:26.360Both you and I are academics in our core. But life also involves trade-offs, as the great Thomas Sowell explained to us. So I can write a trade book that will be read by hundreds of thousands of people, or I could publish my 97th academic paper, which if I'm lucky, it'll be read by 30 people.
00:13:51.500Well, life is short, I've got to make a decision. So I exactly agree with you. And that's why I love having these conversations, because I'll post this up. And within, you know, an hour or two on X, there'll be 65,000 people who viewed it. So do you think that a lot of academics, whether they are parasitized or not, are starting to realize the importance of these new media? Or are they still stuck in their stay in your lane sort of vision?
00:14:19.000I think most are still stuck in your lane, because they're used to it's comfortable. I think there's also another interesting dynamic, though, which speaks to what you're doing. And that is, I heard somewhere that, you know, for example, the statistic that if you go to law school in the Ivy League, and you're a Republican, your chances of clerking in the Supreme Court are something like 14 times higher.
00:14:44.180Because the demand is kind of roughly 50 50. But the supply is so heavily on the left out of those law schools, that if you happen to be in the minority, you're doing very well. And similarly, with nonfiction books, you know, I think a similar pattern where the pattern of books that are actually consumed is more balanced than the producers of the book. So and so it's true, then that, you know, for podcasting, most of the political podcasts in the US that are popular are actually on the right.
00:15:14.160Right. And I think there is some truth in that, in that there's a big demand with very few people to fill it. And so it's quite a good opportunity for people like you to who are filling that particular niche, to get your ideas out there. So I think all we need to do is in fact, connect the small number of producers with this quite large demand to have the same influence.
00:15:39.240Now, of course, someone can always say, if you're just a podcaster, and you have no credentials, someone might say, oh, well, you're just a podcaster. I think that's a dishonest way to argue, but they can say that. I do think we need to have some academic heft behind this alternative media think tank sphere. So it is useful to have the alternative academia.
00:16:02.300I do think we need to, you know, people who know the methods can produce the deep research. I think that's going to be necessary. We can't just have somebody's take on today's events.
00:16:14.700But I think we don't need to reproduce all of academia. As you say, most of academia is either salami slicing off the same very tired old ideas, or just never getting cited. So we just need to have better amplification and maybe better coordination.
00:16:35.580Yeah, beautiful. I mean, we've already touched upon many of the ideas behind the Buckingham Manifesto. But give us the specific definition of what this manifesto is. And then in the eventually in the description section, I'll put a link. Now is the link to the actual manifesto behind the paywall? Or is it publicly available?
00:16:57.440No, there? Well, there's really the the the the chronicle is paywalled. But I've also got it on a Google Doc that anybody who's an academic or graduate student can sign. So we are taking signatures. Okay, perfect. I'll put I'll send that over to you. So it's perfectly public. But yeah, there's really, the manifesto is really just following from the conference. It's two things.
00:17:19.780It's it's that we need to do what you might call politically incorrect or countercultural social science, to rebalance the production of knowledge, which has become heavily warped. And the second thing is we need to do critical woke studies. In other words, study woke, as an ideology, the way we would study fascism or communism or any other ideology. That's a research agenda. And we've already got, as I mentioned in the well, in the manifesto, we already have competing schools of thought.
00:17:48.220We have, you know, we have, you know, the people who say it is all about status and dividing the working class. That's why we have woke, you know, Viva Gramaswamy, or Rob Henderson, or, you know, and then we have the people who say, no, it's a religion. It's a true belief. And that's perhaps a bit closer to also your, I think, to your position.
00:18:09.420And then, or then we also have arguments over, you know, did this arise in the 2010s, or did it arise in the 1960s, which is my view and Chris Ruffo's view. So you have these competing schools of thought already, this is a discipline. And so it needs to be recognized as such. And so it's a research agenda. So that's really the two prongs. I'm kind of using this term post progressivism to kind of scaffold this enterprise.
00:18:36.760Because I do think there's a sense in which cultural leftism has come to the end of the road. You know, trans is its Waterloo in a way. I'm not saying everybody recognizes that. But I think even the proponents, they're just defending turf now. I don't think they're actually taking it to the next level. And I think a lot of even the center leftists now are starting to back away from elements of it.
00:19:02.820So I think it's kind of reached its apogee. And so I think we should put a bookmark down and say that was the era of the cultural left, it dominated intellectual life, what's the next era going to look like the post progressive era, and two parts of that are going to be this new social science and the critical woke studies.
00:19:21.320So two questions. First, one, you already alluded to when you referenced Christopher Ruffo, he recently came out with the Manhattan statement, which I was also a proud signatory of that statement. What are some do they does the Buckingham manifesto and the Manhattan statement feed off each other? Do they complement each other? I mean, of course, they complement each other. But what are the similarities? What are the differences? Maybe you could talk a bit about that.
00:19:50.580Yeah, and then I'm also also a signatory of both. The Manhattan statement is, is more of a political and legislative, or let's just say it's a policy manifesto. This is what government should do, or the Trump administration should do. Whereas the Buckingham manifesto is an intellectual manifesto. This is what intellectuals should do. And one of the reasons you can see one way you can see the differences, you can see intellectual
00:20:20.440opponents. Chris Ruffo and Steven Pinker are both signatories of the Buckingham manifesto. Now, those two don't agree on much.
00:20:29.440But they do agree on this. I was quite pleased. It was an aim to try and get both of them. And there's a few, you know, there's a number of liberals, you know, Yasha Monk and Claire Lehman. And then you have conservatives both signing up to this manifesto.
00:20:49.180Because I think both your liberals who don't want to see government interference and who believe in university autonomy, they are very opposed to the social justice agenda and conformity, as well as the people like myself and like yourself who think that without government pressure, these institutions will never change.
00:21:11.780Which is really, which is really, I think, I should say that in regard to the Manhattan statement, I have a debate out now and inside higher education with an opponent of the Manhattan statement, this guy, John Wilson. So that came out today. I wasn't that convinced by the reply.
00:21:30.360But that's, forgive me for interrupting. That's the guy that I was thinking about when I said, I've been ignoring it. I mistook it as that guy being for the Buckingham. It's for the, you're right. Thank you. Go on.
00:21:44.200Yeah, I think the Buckingham one is, who knows, it may become debated. I have a reply to one journalist, but I think it's more likely that this will be, what I'm hoping is that this gets debated in academic journals.
00:21:59.780Because I'm kind of trying to, we're trying to reach into academia. And so what I'm anticipating is we'll send this, we're going to do an edited book as well, and you'll undoubtedly be contacted on that. But the aim is to try and get something in the academic world, get it attacked, as it no doubt will be. But once something is attacked, it's inside the system, and they're having to deal with it.
00:22:25.300Well, I said that I had two questions. One was the Christopher Rue from Manhattan statement. The second one, which in a sense, you're sort of alluding to, because I was going to ask you, what are some of the next steps? One, you said it, edited book, but then the most obvious next one would be, are you thinking of founding a new journal of post-progressive social science?
00:22:49.120Well, that's a good question. So I'm not, it's not something I'm personally thinking of doing. I will say that we have now just recently, and you saw at the conference, there are some journals, which I think are essentially doing post-progressive social science.
00:23:05.740And so Theory and Society, which is a venerable journal. One of the founders was Alvin Gouldner, who is one of the originators of the term new class, which also is a euphemism for the professional managerial class.
00:23:20.300So yeah, but he, that journal now under the editorship of Kevin McCaffrey, I think is a great home for post-progressive social science.
00:23:28.980Lee Jossam's, Soyb's journal, Journal of Open Inquiry and the Behavioral Sciences. So we've got a few journals. I don't think I, I don't think I can, can or want to replicate that.
00:23:40.700One thing I am doing is I managed to get some money for a grants program in countercultural social science. So that we will be advertising, you know, try and get projects that are going to be working towards the two aims of the manifesto.
00:23:59.940And then we got the edited book and then the special issue of Theory and Society. So I'm trying to make that impact in the academic world to try and just say, no, in fact, you can't just go on assuming that you are the world.
00:24:15.400There is a challenger, which you will have to deal with in some way. I think that's the beginning.
00:24:20.920Yeah, I, I, if you mentioned theory and society, one of the many wonderful interactions that I had at your conference in Buckingham was with Kevin who approached me and we had a very long conversation.
00:24:36.840And, and, and yes, you know, there's this special issue that's coming out, but he also invited me to, to submit my evolutionary psychology stuff with the hope of Darwinizing the field of sociology.
00:24:49.500And, you know, if Kevin hears this, I hope he appreciates how much I felt invigorated by his, you know, I mean, he's a bit, he's a bit younger.
00:25:01.840He's probably in his forties, but he's very, very driven, very much wishing to make big changes as you are.
00:25:10.380And so there is something that is so soothing. I'm not saying anything that's not obvious, but to meet fellow like-minded people, not because you're trying to create an echo chamber,
00:25:19.520but because when you've spent, in my case, 31 years fighting against nearly everybody in sight, and suddenly I go to a conference where people come up to you for all sorts of different reasons saying, hey, thank you for your work.
00:25:35.180It can't help but feel good. And so again, I can't stress enough how, how wonderful it was to, to be at that conference. So thank you for organizing it.
00:25:44.300Thank you. It was wonderful. You know, it was just great to have you there. And the energy I thought was just tremendous.
00:25:51.100And you have a vice chancellor that's rather applicable in his offbeatenness, if I can put it that way.
00:25:58.080I know. Yeah, it's great to have a, have a, you know, leader of the university be that enthusiastic.
00:26:03.680And, and, and, and, you know, because normally I think presidents and vice chancellors would be sort of peddling away as quickly as they can.
00:26:11.260So it's trying to, you know, very much behind it.
00:26:15.800But the other thing too, is, you know, it's also important to have these kinds of events.
00:26:19.940Like if you look at self, self-censorship amongst staff and students, it's driven mainly by peers, actually, or perceptions of peers.
00:26:30.120And so even if you have the best University of Chicago trifecta principles, you're still going to have massive self-censorship.
00:26:38.540And so when you have a forum like this, where people can speak freely, can be creative, and not have to worry about looking over their shoulder, I think that's a great environment.
00:26:50.160Now, that doesn't mean you don't also have, we might have a, in the future, it may be that, you know, you have a, an environment where the kind of woke mainstream and the countercultural may have a forum where they get together.
00:27:04.240And I've been in some of these forums and they have their own dynamics.
00:27:06.980So it's, you know, it's useful to have, like, I know Johns Hopkins is doing something like that.
00:27:11.280So you can have the, the neutral ground where the two sides meet and disagree.
00:27:23.940On a personal level, may I say that I had, I guess you call them chips, but they're these very, very big potatoes in downtown.
00:27:35.340If we could call it a downtown, because it's a small sort of quaint village, in downtown Buckingham, that I might return to Buckingham, not to see you, but only to have those fries.
00:27:48.720Do you know, by the way, which place I'm talking about?
00:28:09.620And we ordered a large, but the large was enough to feed an entire Russian battalion.
00:28:15.840So what ended up happening, actually, a gentleman from the conference, whom I didn't know who he was, but, you know, he knew me, came up to us to introduce himself.
00:28:26.380And he ended up sharing in this orgiastically large chips.
00:28:33.340So I'll have to try to find the place for you, because if you ever return there, I know you're a very slim, healthy guy, but you really need to partake in that Epicurean delight.
00:28:43.660Well, I think if you use the term orgiastic about chips, then something is right.
00:28:57.780What are some projects that you're currently working on, whether it be with some of your MA or PhD students in these two new programs that you founded at University of Buckingham or anything else beyond what we've talked about that you'd like to share?
00:29:12.640Well, I have, yeah, some more academic projects.
00:29:16.000So one thing I'm looking at is the very strong correlation between, among young people, between being very left-wing ideologically, being non-heterosexual, particularly bisexual or queer, and mental illness.
00:29:36.000Now, so if we're talking about, you know, let's step away from value judgments and just say, you know, I can tell you that ideology, sexual orientation, and mental health are essentially so heavily correlated in the student data, the FIRE, 60,000 samples, student data, that one underlying factor explains half the variation in those three variables.
00:30:04.300So, you know, so, you know, look, now, I mean, there's just this ridiculously high correlation.
00:30:10.820And so that's one area where I'm kind of working on that, you know, not a hot potato or anything.
00:30:20.660Also, this question of trust in universities, which has declined among Republicans, especially in the U.S.
00:30:28.820And, you know, one of the things you see is, I'm trying to understand the connection between what people think academics, you know, the makeup of academia politically, and their trust in academia.
00:30:42.220And what you kind of see is that Republicans who think academia is heavily Democrat are very untrusting, unsurprisingly, of professors.
00:30:52.940And it kind of turns out that a lot of people don't realize just how left-wing academia is.
00:31:01.580So the average Republican thinks that social science and humanities professors are almost 40%, or somewhere between a third and 40% Republican.
00:31:10.360So actually, if they actually knew the correct proportion, would that even lead to a more, a greater suspicion of university?
00:31:23.380I mean, this is just from an empirical standpoint, right?
00:31:26.840And so I'm kind of looking into this data through surveys.
00:31:30.680So I'll present that in the American Political Science Association in Vancouver this summer, or in September.
00:31:38.200So that's something else that I'm looking at.
00:31:41.580I have a project that I started, I would say, maybe four or five years ago, just shortly after Parasitic Mind came out.
00:31:51.820I wanted to test some empirical ideas I had.
00:31:56.300And so I had a master's student who asked that I supervise him.
00:32:03.900And so what I pitched to him was the idea of studying, I mean, several things, but one of which, I don't know if you remember the male feminist as sneaky effers section in my book.
00:32:17.780So for our viewers and listeners who don't know what this is, so the concept of sneaky effers, fuckers, is a zoological term from the 1970s.
00:32:28.500The formal term is kleptogamy, which is the stealing of mating opportunities, where you typically have different phenotypes of males in a species.
00:32:40.440There's the dominant phenotype, like the dominant male phenotype.
00:32:44.120But then there is another male that mimics the morphology and behavior of a female, hoping to cause the dominant male to let this guy through, and then he can surreptitiously engage in some sneaky effing.
00:33:00.460And so I took that idea and the parasitic mind and I said, aha, I believe that the male feminists and the supra empathetic, you know, social justice warriors are applying that zoological strategy in the human context, hence male feminists and sneaky effers.
00:33:20.480And so then I decided with this graduate student, I said, well, why don't we actually test some of these ideas?
00:33:27.580There is some research that's already published, not by me, by others, that shows that, for example, your physical formidability correlates to your political and economic orientation, which itself is a fascinating finding, which I cite in the parasitic mind.
00:33:48.040So, for example, men who are physically more formidable are less likely to be for social or economic egalitarianism, because they obviously realize that humans are a hierarchical species.
00:35:03.540As regrettably often happens with graduate students, they get sucked into a black hole of which they never return.
00:35:12.340So this project, which as far as I know, he had reported to me that he had ran the data, I mean, collected the data and ran it.
00:35:20.900I haven't heard from the student from nearly two years.
00:35:24.060And I'm assuming at this point he's dropped out.
00:35:26.700I have two other PhD students with whom I spent probably hundreds, if not thousands of hours supervising them who've also disappeared.
00:35:34.680So one of the biggest frustrations I have had in my career is to, you know, nurture these students for really hundreds, if not thousands of hours, and then regrettably they disappear.
00:35:46.780But if he resurfaces, I think I've got a whole bunch of studies that very much fit within your post-progressive social science framework.
00:36:42.920Because it's the first time where you're being asked not to retain and master other people's knowledge.
00:36:50.940But now you have an empty paper where it's incumbent on you to fill in that knowledge, right?
00:36:58.640And for some people, they could be very, very bright, you know, very talented, but they can't make that switch.
00:37:05.840And so I, maybe I'm speculating, but my sense is that for a lot of the students who've been sucked into a black hole, at least in my case, what happens is they flounder.
00:37:17.020And I've always struggled with whether there is any part of that that's due to me in my supervisory strategy.
00:37:26.480I'm infinitely nurturing in that if you ask, as a matter of fact, I will often be the one who is driving the research, right?
00:37:35.100They come to me, professor, give me a research topic, right?
00:37:38.320So it's not as though I'm not willing to mentor you fully, but I'm not someone who will call you every 48 hours and say, what have you done?
00:37:49.320So if you happen to then get sucked into a black hole, I might send one email, two emails, three emails, but then I will back away.
00:37:58.960But I don't know, maybe I should be sending an email every Tuesday.
00:38:20.440But there's not a whole lot you can do.
00:38:22.680It has to come from the student, I think, especially PhD.
00:38:27.560Now, you have these processes where you have to fill out reports every year and things, so they have to kind of show what they've done each year.
00:38:34.960But if a student wants to spend money and spend years and years, I mean, there are processes now they're trying to crack down on it a little bit.
00:38:43.620But some people just enjoy the process of being a student.
00:38:51.580So how have you so far, since we're talking about graduate students, given these two new programs, the master's and PhD that you've instituted at University of Buckingham, have you had any students that have completed the programs?
00:39:05.700Or is it so new that no one is out of the pipeline yet?
00:39:28.000So, yeah, we're just at the beginning.
00:39:29.220But, you know, teaching is a part of it.
00:39:33.360But I'd say the research agenda is, in many ways, a major part of this, too, is having a program that you want more researchers to work in these areas and to know about each other, connect with each other, you know, hopefully with conferences, certainly through networks.
00:39:55.380So one of the things that's occurring in the U.S. with these new schools of civic thought and the new centers, new universities, University of Austin, for example, Ralston College, is we have an emergence of a lot of teaching.
00:40:10.000When that's great, we have to have that.
00:40:11.840I mean, one of the questions is, are we producing new research?
00:40:15.480And there, I think it's much weaker and there's a lot of work to be done.
00:40:19.700And so hopefully as this enterprise, as these new centers pop up, this will be a way of, in fact, trying to advance a research agenda, not just a teaching agenda.
00:41:01.200But Northwood University, which, by the way, I thought would have been great for you.
00:41:05.800I tried to connect you with the president of Northwood, which I'm still hopeful that you guys will connect.
00:41:10.780They're very much founded on the principles of free enterprise, small, limited government and so on.
00:41:16.580Now, that ethos, one can argue, is a different project from the one that we've been talking about, but you can also reconcile the two together.
00:41:26.280And so, you know, there's now, I think, one at, of course, University of Austin is trying to do this.
00:41:33.240There's, you know, Florida International University has the Adam Smith Center.
00:41:38.720University of Florida has a kind of a freedom center and so on.
00:41:41.540Do you see these two projects, the proliferation of centers?
00:41:48.400For example, I visited Ole Miss, University of Mississippi.
00:41:52.640They have a new Declaration of Independence Center.
00:41:56.360Do you see these types of projects jiving well with the post-progressive social science project?
00:42:06.180I mean, I think that in terms of higher education reform, the only way to bring viewpoint diversity in is through these centers.
00:42:14.260I just think having a bunch of scattered academics who are having to keep their mouth shut is just not going to, that's not going to be enough.
00:42:21.680We have to have that as well, but we have to support them.
00:42:24.000But we need to have kind of ring-fenced zones where people can be free to research what they want without fear.
00:42:34.080And so I think this is really extremely important.
00:42:37.400Now, the one criticism I have is that these schools of civic thought and the new universities are heavily focused on great books in the American Constitution and tradition,
00:42:48.940which is extremely important to pass on, I support that for the teaching enterprise in particular.
00:42:55.680But I think we also need to push back, not just in the humanities, but in the social sciences.
00:43:01.340We have to do research that starts to change the narrative about systemic racism and sexism being the reason for race and sex inequality.
00:43:11.900Essentially, as Moussa Al-Gharbi shows, 85% of papers in sociology are talking about inequality.
00:43:20.120I mean, that is just a ridiculous level of focus on an important problem, but only one problem.
00:43:27.100I mean, we should also be talking about social cohesion and integration and how to reduce polarization and crime and other elements of social disorder,
00:43:36.800which are not really part of the mainstream agenda in the social sciences.
00:43:41.440So, yeah, I would say that what's missing in the new centers is the social research part of it.
00:43:48.440I know that there are some social scientists in some of these centers, and they are trying, and I think it will develop, but it's at an early stage right now.