The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - December 14, 2023


The Problem with Elite Universities (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_630)


Episode Stats


Length

38 minutes

Words per minute

154.6338

Word count

5,940

Sentence count

7

Harmful content

Misogyny

13

sentences flagged

Toxicity

21

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss what's been going on with the presidents of Harvard, Harvard M, M and P, and the other prestigious school, Penn, and why women should be given more opportunities to flourish in academia.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 all right okay guys forgive me i remain quite sick with a a cough and a cold that just doesn't
00:00:10.980 want to go away it's been over four weeks that i've been sick but i thought i would do a quick
00:00:17.840 public x spaces and then for those of you who wish to ask questions or you know have a discussion
00:00:26.060 then you can subscribe to my exclusive feed where i will then set up another x spaces only for
00:00:33.320 subscribers so this will be about i don't know maybe 20 30 minutes i'll just be sharing some
00:00:39.580 ideas uh some thoughts and then we can uh if you want to chat we can do so after so i first wanted
00:00:48.320 to discuss what's been going on with the presidents of harvard mit and uh what's the other one i can't
00:00:59.780 remember the other one the third prestigious school oh pen uh which by the way it's it's unbelievable
00:01:05.280 that women are so held back it's basically waziristan at north american universities because 1.00
00:01:11.800 it turns out that all of the three presidents of three of the most prestigious universities
00:01:16.200 are women and so we really need to work harder to give women an opportunity to flourish in academia 0.93
00:01:23.160 because they're not getting their fair shake
00:01:25.500 incidentally as you probably might have seen me mention this there was a study conducted a few years
00:01:33.340 ago where they uh the the u.s government looked at across four levels of educational attainment
00:01:42.920 associate's degree which is half a bachelor's bachelor's degree master's and doctorate across
00:01:49.280 five racial groups so they were so the the matrix was basically a five by four matrix so there were 20
00:01:56.120 cells and in each of the cells they had the ratio of male to female that had graduated and so of course
00:02:05.820 if you know uh american universities are a hotbed of misogyny then you would expect all 20 cells to have 0.75
00:02:15.100 men uh outnumbering women and of course the data showed that for every single one of the 20 cells 0.73
00:02:23.260 20 out of 20 so for every racial breakdown across every level of educational attainment women outnumbered men
00:02:32.780 and so of course the conclusion is we need to redouble our efforts
00:02:37.280 to offer women more opportunities now i say this not uh of course somebody might think oh but you know
00:02:45.200 are you rejecting the fact that in the past there was misogyny yes there was in the past but there isn't
00:02:51.120 anymore and therefore honest interlocutors will adjust their narrative and function as a function of
00:02:59.680 incoming new evidence right you you don't hold on to the same narrative irrespective of how things have
00:03:06.220 changed in the field and yet i receive endless you know celebrating women women in business school
00:03:13.940 celebrate right it's as if you know women are absolutely being trash are given no opportunities to flourish 0.57
00:03:20.500 and that's if anything today we need to be looking at making uh universities more hospitable to young men 0.73
00:03:28.660 many of whom are deciding that uh getting an education is no longer something that they're interested
00:03:34.880 in which is never a good thing okay so let's uh first begin by talking about uh claudine gay whom i had
00:03:45.060 never heard of until her uh testimony uh recently in front of uh congress so yesterday some of you may
00:03:55.620 have seen i'm going to read it uh verbatim for you so this is derrick johnson who is uh the 19th president
00:04:03.760 and ceo of the na naacp and so uh my man derrick johnson put out the following tweet yesterday enough is enough
00:04:16.720 harvard president claudine gay is a distinguished scholar and professor with decades of service in
00:04:24.900 higher education the recent attacks on her leadership are nothing more than political theatrics advancing a
00:04:33.600 white supremacist agenda and so late at night when i should be just resting and allowing my cortisol levels 0.97
00:04:44.580 to go down i said okay i can't put up with this kind of bullshit so i wrote back to him very politely 0.96
00:04:51.900 i think now let me just check the it's almost at two million views the tweet that i put out so let me 0.90
00:04:58.100 read it for you dear mr derrick uh you know whatever his name at n a n double a c p let me offer some
00:05:06.400 rebuttals to the points that you raised in the spirit of the free exchange of ideas which by the way harvard
00:05:12.600 scored last on out of 248 universities surveyed by the fire organization the foundation and individual
00:05:22.360 rights and expression uh which i'll come back to in a second because i want to talk about that study
00:05:27.940 so harvard out of 248 universities ranked dead last out of 248 248 out of 248 schools
00:05:37.340 so let me start number one president gay is not a distinguished scholar using objective bibliometrics
00:05:46.220 she has an h index that is well below what is typically required for someone to be promoted to
00:05:51.500 full professor and so i thought what i would do right now is uh spend a minute or two just explaining
00:05:58.200 what uh the h index is for those of you who may not know what it is so typically in academia the way
00:06:06.420 that you would measure someone's uh productivity is twofold right how many you know original works
00:06:15.660 have they produced in some fields it's largely peer-reviewed um you know papers and academic journals
00:06:21.460 excuse me in other disciplines uh books also are very important so you can take all of the totality of
00:06:31.360 papers and books that you've published so that would be one metric that's a measure of productivity
00:06:37.100 but of course two people can have the exact same number of papers published but one of one of them has
00:06:43.320 ten thousand citations meaning that their work has been cited ten thousand times by others
00:06:49.440 whereas the other person has one thousand citations so even though they've produced the same number
00:06:54.740 of publications uh you know one has had a lot more influence in terms of shaping other people's work
00:07:01.580 so that was historically sort of the the main way by which you would judge uh someone's academic cv in
00:07:08.440 terms of you know productivity and influence of course you also can measure uh the prestige of where
00:07:14.920 they publish right so if they're publishing in journals that are highly prestigious you know i you know you
00:07:20.520 may publish five papers in really a plus journal someone else may publish 10 papers in c journals and
00:07:26.860 the former might might be more impressive than the latter okay and then uh about i think 16 or 17 years ago
00:07:33.900 i think it was in 2006 uh hirsch who's a physicist i think out of ucsd introduced the h index which really
00:07:44.560 tries to offer a more uh adequate measure of someone's influence as an academic so take for
00:07:53.500 example someone who has uh 10 000 citations okay uh but one paper has 9 990 citations so it's a home run
00:08:07.700 and then the totality of all their other papers have 10 citations so this so basically this one
00:08:14.360 person has a singular hit and so if you only looked at number of citations you would think wow this is
00:08:22.200 impressive but really it's just one just one paper that that generated much of their citations so what
00:08:28.940 the h index does is it lists all of your publications in decreasing order of number of citations so let's say
00:08:37.320 if your most cited paper has 100 citations your second most cited has 80 citations your third most cited
00:08:47.380 has two citations so now notice that the number of citations is less than the rank right two citations
00:08:55.440 is less than that the rank three that means your h index is only two you follow so h index has become
00:09:05.620 the the standard measure and there are all sorts of other bibliometric measure that you could use
00:09:10.240 there there are all sorts of variants of that that you know tries to create a you know a fairer measure
00:09:17.560 and so on but this has become kind of the standard measure what is your h index so you can go on google
00:09:23.120 scholar look up someone's profile by the way claudine gay doesn't have a profile most serious academics
00:09:31.380 will create a profile because people want to know what what your bibliometric scores are she doesn't
00:09:37.540 have one so she's hardly a distinguished scholar but in any case it was hard for me to calculate to
00:09:43.820 look at hers but you know i've heard someone say that her h index is eight i came up with an h index of 0.83
00:09:51.400 10 what does that mean basically that means her first 10 citations or 10 her first 10 publications
00:09:58.080 have 10 or more citations but then by the time she gets to the 11th publication it has less than 11
00:10:06.060 citations therefore she basically has an h index of 10 now how does that look in terms of distinguished
00:10:14.860 scholar well different disciplines have different uh standards in terms of what constitutes an impressive
00:10:22.840 uh you know bibliometric cv but on average you can say that you know most fields you know you better
00:10:34.400 have an h index of 20 just to get promoted to full professor and actually i'm being here very
00:10:40.880 conservative in many cases it would have to be you know much much higher than that so not not to
00:10:47.220 introduce myself into the mix because i i don't really want to compare myself to president gay 0.68
00:10:53.920 that might be impressive for her cv not mine but my h index is 35 now this is not a linear measure so
00:11:01.640 if her h index is 10 and mine is 35 and by the way it's mine would have been much higher for example if i
00:11:09.500 didn't work in a discipline that has very few people because remember i work at the intersection of
00:11:14.600 evolutionary psychology and consumer behavior and psychology decision making and there actually
00:11:20.000 aren't too many people who apply evolutionary theory within those fields i i pioneered that field
00:11:24.800 and so if anything it's an underestimate of what my bibliometric influence would be so
00:11:30.180 if president gay you know is this distinguished scholar who got tenure at stanford and harvard with that
00:11:39.000 bibliometric score then i need to be quickly made emperor of the world okay now i know postdocs right so
00:11:48.340 postdocs would be people who uh you know just finished a phd and now they're doing a postdoctorate to try to
00:11:55.240 you know have a better cv so that they could then apply for assistant professorships there are postdocs in
00:12:01.960 many disciplines that have a much more impressive academic cv than president gay so so regarding the 0.97
00:12:11.480 first point no she is not a distinguished scholar she's an astoundingly mediocre scholar and there is 0.93
00:12:19.780 no way using the standard bibliometric measures someone like president gay should be getting tenure at 0.99
00:12:28.060 stanford stanford and harvard now let's talk about someone who did get tenure at harvard uh roland fry
00:12:36.200 was an economist who was at harvard who i think was the youngest tenured professor ever at harvard or i
00:12:43.980 don't know if he was the youngest black tenured professor uh he happens to be black he's done a lot of
00:12:50.360 uh research he's an economist he's done a lot of data-driven research where he has demonstrated that many of the
00:12:57.580 victimology narrative you know there is a genocide of black people by the police in the united states
00:13:04.160 are simply not true and you know there's nothing better than data to dispel a particular narrative
00:13:10.440 his narrative was not one that certainly president gay when she was the dean uh of his faculty at harvard
00:13:19.320 would have supported uh and eventually as you know you know he got into trouble for apparently making some
00:13:25.660 sexual innuendo jokes or something that created a hostile environment and i don't know if he's been
00:13:31.800 fired of from harvard or if he took a leave but his h index i i checked it earlier today is i think
00:13:39.780 something in the in the 50s so again by if we're using objective bibliometrics then this gentleman who is
00:13:48.560 no longer at harvard you know is exponentially more accomplished than president gay okay so let's 1.00
00:13:56.300 dispel the first statement made by uh mr derrick johnson about you know it's white supremacy that
00:14:04.020 people are attacking her because she's just she's basically she's indistinguishable from you know 0.99
00:14:09.280 da vinci newton einstein and darwin i mean you know and anyone who disagrees with that you know it's
00:14:16.200 just clearly because they're white supremacist okay so let me go on with point two of my rebuttal 0.83
00:14:20.620 president gay is not a distinguished administrators administrator as she has spent her entire career 0.94
00:14:27.520 promulgating the die cult diversity inclusion and equity which violates every fabric of the 0.95
00:14:34.760 meritocratic ethos that one would expect from harvard if you if by the way if you look at her research
00:14:39.640 you know black this black that black black black black black black black black black every single 0.92
00:14:45.820 paper is about some racial thing right now as some of you know if you've read the sad truth about
00:14:52.160 happiness in one of the chapters i talk about the importance of seeking variety for a happy life
00:14:57.760 and i get into intellectual variety seeking and i basically argue that it is truly regrettable that
00:15:04.340 in academia professors are taught to be stay in your lane professors be a hyper specialist keep publishing
00:15:10.900 in exactly the one narrow field and never expand your horizons to other intellectual landscapes whereas
00:15:18.700 you know i've published in medicine and in politics and in economics and in psychology and in marketing
00:15:24.140 and in made choice and in evolutionary psychology and in bibliometric which by the way has people have
00:15:31.540 used that against me there were universities that wanted to hire me at various points and they came back to me
00:15:37.320 and said well your cv is very impressive but it seems very frazzled you're all over the place
00:15:43.360 so from one side of the mouth universities talk about wanting to promote interdisciplinarity but from
00:15:49.980 the other side of the mouth basically no no no don't just be a narrow thinker and in the case of
00:15:56.260 president gay my goodness is she narrow every single thing revolves around skin you never out of that 0.99
00:16:03.580 black this black that black this white this and so on all right so is she a great administrator 1.00
00:16:09.620 hardly that she is a complete die bureaucrat which by the way die is an absolute cancer to the human 1.00
00:16:19.200 spirit all right number three this is in my rebuttal to to the n a double n double a cp guy number three
00:16:28.080 some very serious repeat allegations about plagiarism about plagiarism have been levied
00:16:33.520 against her across many of her works including her dissertation unless you think that plagiarism is
00:16:39.560 an inherent part of white supremacy then it is difficult to see your point plagiarism cannot be
00:16:45.260 contextualized because now harvard's coming out well you know it depends plagiarism who are we to say
00:16:50.580 right like put on your post-modernist hat you know it's all relative well it turns out christopher
00:16:56.640 rufo broke the story i think yesterday or day before that you know there's tons of passages in
00:17:02.800 many of several of her papers in her dissertations full complete passages fully lifted so let's suppose
00:17:09.840 it were an accidental thing sometimes you you take a passage but then you you forget you know there
00:17:17.260 should be a very very clear procedure by which you make sure that you never get it wrong for example if
00:17:22.660 i take a quote i put it in a different color and i right away put it in quotes that way there could
00:17:29.920 never be a mistake where inadvertently i somehow forgot to cite it or quote it but let's suppose she
00:17:35.960 had done that because she didn't have the proper discipline well you can't do it across you know half of 0.85
00:17:41.420 your papers across your dissertation but apparently it is white supremacy to argue that she plagiarized
00:17:48.860 so how could you now ever punish someone at harvard a student of from plagiarism if the president
00:17:56.220 supposedly engaged in it and there are no repercussions to her by the way i caught a doctoral
00:18:02.740 student several years ago engaging in just the most outlandish plagiarism after i filed the case
00:18:10.000 you know wasted several weeks documenting everything they got back to me and said okay well here's the
00:18:16.360 here's what we're going to do she has to redo the exam and i said no i mean if if she doesn't get
00:18:23.060 expelled for that then there's no point in having a code of conduct an academic code of conduct and all
00:18:29.620 you're doing by asking me to give her another exam is you've just added several weeks of additional work 0.68
00:18:35.580 for me so i get punished for her having cheated from a to z so it is truly uh grotesque when universities
00:18:44.060 say that they're all about academic integrity and then they look the other way when someone does
00:18:50.380 violate it number four she was unwilling to deontologically condemn the open hatred of jews
00:18:56.760 on campus instead she had to quote contextualize it do you think that the repudiation of jew hatred
00:19:03.260 is a form of white supremacy this again is part of my rebuttal to to this gentleman uh now here i want
00:19:10.680 to bring in something that some of you may have heard me mention before others haven't and so it's
00:19:14.760 worth repeating the difference between deontological and consequentialist ethics some of you who've read
00:19:22.400 the parasitic mind know about that distinction because i talk about it there uh in the book
00:19:28.240 deontological ethics are absolute statements so if i say it is never okay to cheat never then that
00:19:35.920 would be a deontological statement if i say well it's okay to lie if i'm trying to spare someone's
00:19:40.940 feelings if if my if your wife says do i look fat in those jeans and you say no you've never looked
00:19:46.200 more beautiful and you're lying well then from a consequentialist perspective it might make sense for
00:19:51.640 you to lie if you want to have a happy marriage if you want to spare the feelings of your spouse
00:19:57.040 but when it comes to the truth when it comes to freedom when it comes to foundational principles
00:20:03.800 they have to be by definition deontological so there is no contextualizing scamming you know all of your
00:20:11.560 work and cheating and plagiarizing right that's the currency of academia is is the unique and distinct
00:20:17.920 ideas that you contribute in the pantheon of knowledge if someone else just takes it and steals it
00:20:24.680 well that's a very serious uh offense so that's that's that and so i wrote then i wrote i'm almost
00:20:33.160 done with this uh tweet you do a disservice by invoking the boogeyman of white supremacy here 0.83
00:20:39.380 president gay is being criticized for her behaviors and positions the only ones who have ever cared about 1.00
00:20:45.460 her skin color are those who repeatedly promoted her to positions that she is unfit to hold god damn 1.00
00:20:53.520 that's a mic drop but then get ready are you ready fasten your seat belts then of course i turn it around 1.00
00:20:59.960 and i use the victimology currency of all these idiots and i said be careful to accuse me of white 1.00
00:21:06.480 supremacy as i am a lebanese jewish war refugee of color so i outrank you and president gay in 1.00
00:21:14.180 victimology poker so if he were going to come and say yeah yeah but you're a white supremacist now he's 0.96
00:21:20.240 got to think twice about it because surely you don't want to be attacking a child refugee of color i'm a jew
00:21:26.160 of color uh let me and then i wrote let me tag bill ackman the hedge fund billionaire who's been
00:21:32.080 really active in going after his alma mater harvard i'm sure he'll enjoy this exchange and as i said
00:21:39.680 this uh rebuttal very polite rebuttal i think very measured based on facts uh has gotten over two million
00:21:47.380 views now let me just mention one thing about uh bill ackman i love that he's getting so involved i love
00:21:54.060 the fact that uh you know he's someone of great influence he's obviously somebody very wealthy and
00:21:59.660 so you know the more people that decide that they want to contribute to addressing the the cancer
00:22:05.580 within our universities hey the better it is he's activating his inner honey badger but here is one
00:22:11.120 lesson that i think and again i'm not trying to uh uh you know uh i you know focus on bill ackman but
00:22:18.400 it represents a a regrettable part of human nature bill ackman did not get involved for the past 30
00:22:25.640 years when i was standing on top of the mountain screaming like the one lone wolf about all of the
00:22:31.400 problems that now we're seeing at harvard and every other university because it didn't affect him
00:22:36.540 personally but when all of the anti-semitism started making its way you know across canadian and 0.86
00:22:43.720 american universities he's jewish when it it hit harvard his alma mater when president gay is acting 0.78
00:22:53.220 the way that she is at his alma mater then he felt compelled to to speak out and i think while i
00:22:59.840 commend him for you know it's better better late than never i think that what we need to do is
00:23:05.780 you know lend our voice precisely when it doesn't specifically affect us right it's jew hatred should 1.00
00:23:15.660 not matter to you only when your son mordechai is picked on in in in the high school yard that's not
00:23:24.340 the only time that you decide you should care about this right so if you follow deontological principles
00:23:28.700 then you should be weighing in on these issues uh you know in many many contexts where it doesn't
00:23:35.600 personally affect you that's what makes you courageous and heroic right when someone is crying
00:23:40.280 in a in an alley because they're being attacked and raped you don't say oh wait a minute is that
00:23:45.940 my daughter is that my my my sister is that my mother is that my wife no then who cares let's keep
00:23:51.880 walking you don't only go into the the alley to protect someone you know if they're your wife or sister
00:23:59.960 or daughter so i'm i'm delighted that bill ottman has joined the fight as have many others but i wish
00:24:06.580 many of these folks would have joined earlier and i hope that now that they have joined the fight
00:24:10.740 they won't suddenly uh uh recuse themselves you know once they think the issue has been addressed
00:24:17.620 there is an endemic persistent endless cancer that has made its way through our universities hence
00:24:25.260 my book the parasitic mind and uh and it is incredibly important for the wealthy alumni to to
00:24:32.980 really come in because you know i i fight through the tools that are at my disposal which is in the
00:24:39.140 battle of ideas i can write books i can go on shows i can contribute uh in offering superior ideas
00:24:47.480 to all of the parasitic you know bullshit but ultimately administrators listen to one thing only 0.86
00:24:54.000 it's the green money so when a donor says you know what you keep this up say goodbye to my hundred 0.99
00:25:02.960 one hundred million dollar donation suddenly they're the administrator's ears perk up and they
00:25:09.680 suddenly pay attention because administrators are actually not part of homo sapiens they're a unique 0.99
00:25:16.320 species they're they're invertebrate castrati they have no spine and they have no testicles
00:25:23.700 that they're that that's literally their default phenotype and therefore the only way they can find a
00:25:32.360 spine the only way that they can have some testicular fortitude is if it hits them where the only place
00:25:39.360 that it matters to them which is money money money and so more power to bill ottman i hope more people
00:25:45.760 join in that very quick story about um harvard uh personal story that's the that's the good juicy stuff
00:25:54.500 you get when you join these x spaces and remember folks i'm not opening up right now for uh for people
00:26:01.260 to speak it's a sort of one-way hosting but if you do want to contribute uh to the conversation then
00:26:08.420 please after this talk i will set up a x spaces for my uh subscribers in any case uh in 1993
00:26:20.480 i was invited uh for a campus visit to harvard so the way the way it works is when you're about one
00:26:29.260 year away from finishing your phd you go through several rounds academic rounds where universities
00:26:36.580 interview you for assistant professorships excuse me in the first round universities interview you
00:26:46.600 at in in a hotel at a conference and so different universities will be in different rooms and then
00:26:53.220 you know okay northwestern is in room 307 and they'd like to see you at 11 o'clock okay and usually what
00:27:00.040 you do is you go into these different interviews uh and you talk about your doctoral dissertation you know
00:27:05.720 what's the topic about you know how far along are you when do you plan on finishing and so on you're
00:27:10.320 pitching basically your your research stream stemming from your doctoral dissertation and anything else
00:27:16.260 you've done in your phd and so you go through the first round uh and then you know some of the
00:27:22.480 universities may decide you know you're one of their finalists and so they invite you to second round
00:27:28.500 interviews which are typically a campus visit where you'll go to the university you'll give a talk in front of
00:27:34.620 the faculty uh which you know can be quite uh harrowing uh if you're not confident in your abilities
00:27:41.460 because you're you know you're you're you're this young doctoral student and you have to speak in front
00:27:46.240 of all these big famous professors and then usually the professors will host you one-on-one
00:27:52.460 in their offices you know you you know you'll visit the school and so i i had been fortunate in that i was uh
00:27:59.740 you know i was doing well in the market i had been invited to many of the top first round uh
00:28:05.660 universities you know many of the prestigious universities and then in the second round i've
00:28:10.380 been invited also to several you know many universities uh of which one of them was harvard
00:28:15.320 business school which was really you know the mecca in terms of you know glamour right like glitz glory 0.99
00:28:22.960 right it's it's it's harvard business school i mean i remember in 1993 their you know their endowment
00:28:28.400 just the business school was probably more than the gdp of some countries i i'm not i'm being literal
00:28:34.060 incredible opulence incredible uh well as i said glitz uh now i do recall that there was something that
00:28:43.620 had struck me as problematic when i was on my visit to harvard at one point i was asked to sit in
00:28:52.020 on uh a meeting that is held by all of the professors who teach the capstone courses in the first year
00:29:02.100 mba so for example at harvard business school there might be in year one eight sections of you know the
00:29:10.100 the introductory marketing course a marketing course right so there are eight different sections taught by
00:29:16.200 eight eight different professors and so each week the eight professors would get together
00:29:21.800 in a kind of uh coordination meeting where they agree on every single syllable that's going to be said
00:29:30.360 in the next lecture every single thing that's going to go on the board you know what is going to be the
00:29:36.100 key lesson for whatever case you're analyzing what and so there was very very little room for you know
00:29:43.560 individual contribution and so right away i was thinking to myself oh as someone who is rather
00:29:49.900 irreverent to authority as someone who is very much an out-of-the-box thinker i thought boy if i get
00:29:56.720 this job and i already knew that i very much wanted to you know to work you know in you know applying
00:30:02.720 evolutionary psychology to economic decision making to consumer behavior how would this fly but yet i was
00:30:09.240 still enamored by the idea of going to harvard now as it turns out i didn't get the harvard job i had
00:30:16.360 heard from inside sources so this is 1993 30 years ago that i did not get the job uh because it turns
00:30:24.840 out that i don't ovulate although of course we know today that men too can ovulate but at the time in 1993
00:30:30.880 uh i couldn't ovulate and so wokeness had already seeped into harvard back then so that's my harvard
00:30:38.860 story uh now i want to spend a minute or two uh i'm almost done but i just want to talk about two
00:30:45.820 more things so remember i mentioned earlier that i wanted to uh discuss the fire survey the foundation
00:30:53.580 uh of individual rights uh an expressionable i can't remember the acronym uh that they just
00:31:00.820 released you can go and check it on their site fire f-i-r-e uh the the guy who who heads it greg
00:31:08.060 lukyanioff is someone who has been on my show he was someone who came on my show many years ago when i
00:31:15.120 first began my show he of course wrote the book uh the coddling of uh i think the american mind with
00:31:21.620 jonathan height and so i looked at the ranking so what they did is they they sent out a survey to
00:31:27.700 55 000 plus students so this is a very exhaustive exhaustive survey uh across 248 universities
00:31:37.340 spanning the whole spectrum of prestige and i think i can't remember the exact methodology but i think they
00:31:43.620 they quantified 13 variables that capture you know how open the university is to alternative ideas
00:31:51.600 you know heterodox ideas you know that they don't de-platform people and so on and so forth
00:31:57.260 and as i said out of 248 universities harvard ranked last but what i wanted to do is look at
00:32:06.940 well is there a correlation between how prestigious a university is and how poorly they score on the
00:32:16.120 ranking and boy is there ever so i'm not so i'm not gonna report here the actual statistical results
00:32:23.220 i'm just going to kind of share with you so i circled here the eight ivy leagues so ivy league schools
00:32:30.680 uh and by the way i'm associated to two i did my ms and phd at cornell and then i was a visiting
00:32:38.260 professor at cornell in 2000 and then i was also a visiting professor at tuck school of business at
00:32:43.780 dartmouth so i am you know through and through an ivy leaguer but uh i'm it it gives it gives me great
00:32:51.780 pain to share the results so the highest ranked ivy league school scores number 69 so remember here
00:33:02.020 number one would be the best school in terms of free inquiry and freedom of speech and heterodox views
00:33:09.680 and number one is some very non-prestigious school i don't remember like a michigan metropolitan
00:33:16.080 university i can't remember the name okay but it's certainly not a prestigious school so brown is number
00:33:21.580 69 now just to give you a few non-ivy league schools but very prestigious mit is number 136 caltech
00:33:31.720 144 berkeley 147 ucla 169 now we come to the next ivy league school princeton number 187
00:33:45.720 now 187 out of 248 okay this gives me great pain my own alma mater cornell number 212
00:33:55.720 columbia 214 yale 234 dartmouth 240 penn 247 and harvard 248 boy is that some telling statistics so
00:34:14.260 remember we just had the presidents of mit harvard and penn uh appear to testify in front of congress
00:34:22.280 and they score some of i mean literally penn and harvard two out of the three schools
00:34:28.080 score the absolute lowest on freedom of speech so the more prestigious and elite the school is
00:34:36.000 the less tolerant it is of any ideas that uh you know don't fit the the parasitic spectrum that's
00:34:45.040 not really a good thing and then i just want to one last finding and then i'll wrap it up and i'll
00:34:50.420 thank you for your attention this is actually a study that i cite in my uh in the parasitic mind
00:34:57.820 it's from uh langbert 2018 where he did a study looking at the ratio of democrat to republican
00:35:10.260 affiliated professors across many disciplines it's absolutely astounding you have fields
00:35:16.220 where it's 130 to 0 in other words there isn't a single republican professor in that discipline
00:35:23.520 across the 51 universities excuse me but today what i want to talk about is one of the figures figure
00:35:32.380 four from that study uh by the way let me just read you what the title of the paper is homogeneous
00:35:38.900 colon the political affiliation of elite liberal arts colleges faculty by mitchell langbert
00:35:46.080 2018 published in national association of scholars okay so now what he did is he broke up the ratio
00:35:55.080 of democrat to republican as a function of the prestige of the school in question you follow so
00:36:03.380 so you've got tier one schools the most prestigious schools tier two tier three and tier four so remember
00:36:10.660 how earlier i i talked about the fire survey that showed that the more prestigious the school is
00:36:16.560 the less open and tolerant it is to alternative views and so here i'm trying to make the same point
00:36:23.000 right so here is the ratio so if the ratio were one to one that means there's as many democrat professors
00:36:30.300 as republican professors if its ratio is three to one to democrats there are three at three times as many
00:36:35.700 democrats right so you're ready tier one you're ready you're sitting down 21.5 to one meaning
00:36:44.660 there are 21.5 times more democrat professors than republican professors tier two 12.8 so it's a massive drop
00:36:57.100 tier three 12.4 so there's not much of a difference and then tier four the least prestigious group of
00:37:05.160 universities it's still incredibly lopsided but it's 6.9 to one so meaning the difference from the most
00:37:12.880 prestigious schools to the least prestigious schools is three times worse in lopsidedness if you go to
00:37:21.280 the elite schools so not only are the elite schools complete and utter echo chambers when it comes to
00:37:28.400 political orientation but they're also the most intolerant of uh alternative viewpoints uh that
00:37:37.780 should make everyone uh very very queasy and especially so when some of you here that are
00:37:44.260 listening to this chat are going to be paying 65 70 80 thousand dollars a year for your students to
00:37:54.040 learn feminist glaciology and queer architecture all right guys fantastic it took about 38 minutes i was
00:38:00.840 hoping to not go any more than 30 to 45 minutes thank you so much for your attention if you wish to be
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00:38:19.660 start a conversation thank you so much for your attention thank you for joining talk to you soon cheers