 This is Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. We're in a world right now where people are terrified about what you might call the resilience or the evolution of democracy, our ability to meet collective challenges like climate change, our concerns about overcoming the hideousness of racism and gender discrimination. And in that context, in all the tension, people are very, very concerned about expertise, education, and the credibility. Are these people who are well educated, doing marketing for power, or are they there to represent a deeper understanding of the public good? Obviously, we all look for the latter. And today I have with me a gentleman who's very experienced in this realm and very devoted. Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, has written a new book called What Universities Ode Democracy. I think this is how would I say it, that what the doctor ordered is someone with his level of experience and insight sharing with us, which you might call Turn the Supertanker of Education, so that we miss the coral reef and have a successful voyage. Ron, thanks for joining me. So great to be here, Rob. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you today. Well, this book, which I believe you have two co-authors, Grant Shreve and Philip Spector, who are involved with you, and you can describe the chemistry that you put together. But this book, as you could tell from my introduction, just feels like what you might call what the doctor, what the spirit doctor ordered. And I'm curious, where did the inspiration come from? Where did, what inspired you to do this book and now? So I think it starts first and foremost with the sense that I and so many of us have around the state of our democracy and the concerns about the fragility of our democracy in the face of growing polarization, distrust in core institutions, the rise of fake facts, the tendency for people to not merely think that those with different views are wrong, but they're immoral or evil. And in all of these ways, I think this creates a very perilous moment for democracy. And it's in that context that, given my many decades as a student, as a faculty member, as a dean and now president of a university, I've been thinking lots about the role that universities play in supporting democracy. And the more I thought about this, the more it seemed to me that universities are not just an institution and society, but perhaps are an indispensable institution for the flourishing of democracy. And in a way that these institutions have a role to play that is comparable to the role that we see an independent judiciary, responsible elected legislatures, a free press playing in our democracy. And if that is true, then it's important to understand the precise ways in which universities foster democracy. And then, of course, to ask the question, as much as we think and know that we are doing to support democracy, to ask the question, are we doing enough? And if we're not, what should the reform agenda look like? And so it's really that fundamental sense of the marriage of the seriousness of this moment coupled with the prospective power of this institution to do more to respond to it. Well, from our preliminary discussion preparing for this, I came to understand that you grew up in Canada. And the great author Jane Jacobs, her last book in 2004, was called Dark Age Ahead. The third chapter was called Credentializing Versus Educating. And I guess where I would break it down, if I were trying to be simple for the audience, is are you being taught to be an input to production, or are you being taught to be a citizen, or both? And both matter. And it seems to me that the, what you might call the withering of the democratic, the citizenship flank has taken place. I know in the United States, when I was a boy in Detroit metropolitan area, we took civics. And it was about the role and the favorable role of what government institutions did to create the contours and enforce the contours of a just society. But that seems to have evaporated. And along with it, some of the trust and faith and confidence in government institutions. And I don't know that that cynicism is always unwarranted. But if there's a better way, we've got to be able to teach that. And it seems to me that's what you're invigorating, is that possibility at this critical time. Absolutely. And so, you know, I think it starts first and foremost with, you know, a sense of what is the responsibility, not just for universities, but for K-12 education, in terms of educating our children for the responsibilities of democracy. And as our founders well understood, democracy is not easy. It's challenging. It's challenging when there is not an essential dogma or essential truth. It is challenging to have to deal with competing viewpoints, competing claims around what the public good requires. And so, it's in that hurly-burly world that we know that we have to equip our children with the capacity as they mature into adulthood and to take on the responsibilities of citizenship, that they understand the nature of the enterprise that we're involved in, why we have the institutions we do in the United States, where those institutions have worked well, where they have not, how they have evolved to respond to challenges and failures, and, you know, more than that to equip students with the capacity to be able to take that knowledge and to be able to develop the skills and habits of working with others across difference to be able to foster change in our society. And I think it's really a foundational responsibility. It's, you know, this sense of understanding of democracy and its requirements doesn't get acquired through osmosis. It requires deliberate education. And to the extent in this country that we know that 25%, only 25% of the students graduating from high school have had a proper grounding in civics, that means that if we're going to rectify that situation, it falls to universities to step up. And again, given that we have a situation where more than 70% of Americans will go into some level of post-secondary education, I think that we're important sites for being able to respond to this challenge. And again, I think it doesn't have to come at the cost of giving students expertise, skill, dare I say, credentials in areas where they are interested in pursuing careers, professions, graduation. So it's not either or, but we have got to understand that we're both training for the marketplace, but at the same time, educating for citizenship. You've given us a very good statement of what, in the medicine and why, but I guess it's how. How do you see the specific evolution of university education facilitating your goal? So maybe it might be helpful if I start first and unpack a little bit the idea that universities are indispensable for democracy. Because I think some people might say, well, I get courts, I get the media, universities are good in training, but why do we really think a vital role for universities is indispensable for democracy? Maybe I can talk a little bit about that and then we can talk about prospective reforms. To start, so much of the writing about universities and the extent to which they touch democracy has historically been about the importance of a liberal arts education. And when you look at whether it's Alan Bloom's classic, closing in the American mind, a totally improbable bestseller that shaped the date for a time, or at some of the recent writing of people like Tony Crom and at Yale, the focus has been very much on the importance of getting the Western canon, the liberal arts back into the first, back into the undergraduate curriculum. And that's an important debate to be had, but I think it's only part of the story about how universities affect the society of which we're part, not just about what kind of undergraduate, formal undergraduate program you have, but there's so many other ways. And so let me just talk about those briefly. One, universities are really important engines for social mobility. In fact, there's no more powerful instrument for taking people from disadvantage and casting them up the economic ladder. And it's not just that those who graduate with a university degree are going to enjoy a significant increase in lifetime earnings. It's not just that they will have much less risk of periods of unemployment. It is that they will live longer. We know that they will enjoy greater family stability. There's a greater degree of contentment. So there's so much that happens with the receipt of a university education. And it's here that one can't help but ask the question, given the overwhelming weight of students in universities, both public and private, here in the United States and indeed internationally, to students from the highest income strata, the question is, how well are we doing in ensuring that the ideals of equal opportunity and getting access to the benefit of social mobility is being realized. So I think that's an important area where we very directly touch the confidence in democracy. Another area which we play an important role is around educating for democracy and teaching the ideals of the Enlightenment and what it is that we're trying to achieve through the structure of government we have in this country and where the aspirations have been of the founders have been properly realized, where they may have been too myopic and we've over time broadened them. These are important issues for us to be teaching our students and to make sure that they are well prepped for citizenship upon graduation. And it's not just about stock of knowledge. I think there's skills and habits that we can inculcate in our students during this time that will make them better citizens and better equipped to deal with the challenges that we see in democracy today, including of course the ability to be able to discern fact from fiction where there's so much exposure to claims and sometimes people overwhelmed in terms of being able to know what is true and what is not, which is so foundational to democracy. We want to operate on truth rather than falsity. The other area which I think institutions of higher education are absolutely critical is that we're really important places where we are dedicated to the pursuit of truth, of creation of knowledge, of stewardship of knowledge, and as places that take the commitment to fact and truth so seriously, we play an important role in helping media and indeed political representatives be able to check, confirm, verify what claims are being made out in the marketplace of ideas are true and what are manifestly false. And so we play an important role of checking claims and here it seems to me that we have to worry a lot about ensuring that our ideas are shared, are accessible, and the public can have a high degree of trust in our reliability and I think we face some challenges in that front. And then finally, and as important as the other three areas that I've talked about, you know, in a world where increasingly we just don't hold different views and are unwilling to really engage with others across the divide, we actually create lies for ourselves where we live, socialize, and work with people who are just like ourselves so we sensuously avoid the opportunities for contact and engagement. We know this in terms of the great sword in American society of liberals living with liberals and conservatives living with conservatives and never the twain shall meet. Universities have become very intentionally sites of enormous diversity, of enormous pluralism. Our classes are much more diversified, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, geography than they've ever been. And it seems to me that we've got four years when the students are undergraduates to do something really extraordinary and allowing students to be able to learn how you navigate those differences and find friendship, civic friendship with those whom you might vociferously intensely disagree with but nevertheless can still see yourself as being part of a collaborative enterprise. And if we do that right, if we're better able to equip students with the ability to negotiate those differences, then I think we've got a shot, particularly given the high numbers of young Americans who are in post-secondary of education, to be able to change the arc of the country's culture and in particular to increase the likelihood that we become less polarized and less distrustful of each other and the institutions that govern us. Well I think these are very, how I say, very powerful elements of the healing and the repair and the evolution of our society. What are their specific structures that are in your mind obstacles to this achievement that you would like to underscore? You know, it's a great question, Robin. I think for me, you know, when you think about what would change if we would take these ideas seriously, you know, I think we would, for instance, end legacy admissions. I mean, this is a practice where, as you know, about 70 to 100 top private universities in the country put the thumb on the scale for students who are family members of graduates of the institution. If we're really committed to the ideals of American democracy, Jeffersonian ideals of equal opportunity, it seems to me that it's very difficult to justify such an overt preference for people who come from privilege. And particularly when there's so many other benefits that students of or children rather of graduates of a university will already have by virtue of their parents being educated and subject to all of the benefits that I talked about before in terms of higher earning power and so forth. So, you know, that's something that's clearly available to us just to stop tomorrow. It doesn't require government edict. One could think about, for instance, how we deal about our challenges around educating for democracy. And here I think a number of institutions are moving in the direction of introducing courses or clusters of courses where students are given the opportunity in some cases required to take an exposure to some kind of educational training in democracy before graduation. Again, that's easily available to us. And then, you know, if you think about other practices within the university that I think have undermined our effectiveness in promoting some of the things I'm talking about, one of the obvious places is around, and it's quite simple, it's around housing. When students come into universities, and again, as I said before, these enormously diverse and interesting communities were creating, but to the extent they are given, for instance, the ability to choose their own roommate before they come to university for the first time. And when they do that, that they're choosing, you know, roommates in university housing that look a lot like them, you know, whether it's by race or by socioeconomic status, that seems to me to be something that is a lot, you know, that represents a lost opportunity. And here, again, something as simple as what some universities have done recently, which is to end the ability of students to self-select their own college roommates before coming to university, again, is a simple way in which we foster this idea. So there's lots of things, and there's others that I talk about in the book that I think can make this broad ambition very practicable. And I don't think that much stands in the way of doing this other than our willingness in some sense to take this responsibility seriously. Yeah. Well, I do think, you know, I want to talk about two dimensions of learning. One, the learning is the experience of who you learn with, like you said, the diversity, whether geographic, gender, race, income, you know, tears that the children come from. And so that, which you might call fostering of mutual respect across all those different categories is contributing to the democratic sensibility. The other question I'm curious about is in the curriculum, a lot of people have written about what I'll call the rise of the vocational, you know, accounting business majors and the things of that nature, and the decline of the humanities, poetry, music, Shakespearean literature, and all of that. What role, that latter chapter, what evolution of the curriculum do you think is, we might call a necessary ingredient in achieving this success? So in the book, I discuss this briefly and other writing that I've done, I talk about it very explicitly, the importance of the humanities and undergirding a good undergraduate education. And I've talked about, you know, the extent to which in a place like Hopkins, we have a lot of students who are deeply interested in the sciences. And that's why they come to Hopkins. But I'd like to remind them that, you know, one, just in terms of the kind of technical skill that you're looking to acquire while you're here, it's going to come at a very early point in your professional lives when you are going to be confronted with issues as to how you think about that technology, how you use it, is it does it, it does it comport with the public interest, you know, doctors face this on a daily basis, research scientists face this in terms of the new technologies in CRISPR and artificial intelligence so and so forth. And you need an understanding that goes beyond the technical aspect of these scientific disciplines to contextualize it. So I think that's really important just for being good at what you do on graduation. At another level, I think just in terms of as you know, we know as we age, we become more and more attentive to the meaning of our lives and whether we're having the impact that we want to have and, you know, thinking more carefully about whether we're living up to the things that we hold most dearly. And again, I think that's what an educated imagination that is steeped in the humanities allows you to do. And I feel very strongly that, you know, as much as we're trying to prepare students for the first job, and I think the humanities are helpful, even if they're a minor to the major in engineering sciences, we also got to think about, you know, the midlife crisis that is, you know, that comes the way of so many of us and how we actually equip students with the ability to have avoided that by ensuring they're living lives that are meaningful to them. But even when that moment, and if that moment still happens, that they have some foundations is to be able to work through it and to understand how they fit in in a broader universe. So I think we can do all this. It's not either or it's and with. There is a sense, I think, in which we've been talking about enlarging the community within the United States, but enlarging that dialogue and difference and compassion and curiosity across borders may also contribute mightily to the quality of our future children's lives. And so I'm curious how you see those, which am I called the cross cultural challenges to be integrated in this process? You know, Rob, it's a really interesting point that you're raising. And, you know, in fact, it was the challenge that you're raising about how we negotiate an increasingly interconnected global society is one that, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, when I first became the Dean of the Law School of the University of Toronto, I was very focused, we were very focused on this sense of how do we open up to the world and what this what what the opening implies for our educational mission and the law school indeed across the university. And there was a sense, you know, that globalization is going to infect every nook and cranny of life. So just precisely things you're talking about is, you know, how how we work to understand different cultures and societies and, you know, how how we should assess them, work across them and so forth. That was all that was a paramount concern. And it's still, of course, important today. But I think in some sense, the spotlight has shifted, you know, very much domestically that, you know, given how deeply ribbon we are domestically, if we don't get over the level of polarization, acrimony and trust, distrust that I think threatens the core stability of our common enterprise here is hard for me to imagine we're going to be worth much on an international stage. So I think in some sense, the issue that you're raising around global society and how we reflect that in our mission are really important. But we've got a more important issue given what's going on at home right now that we have to solve and solve quickly if we're going to be able to maintain our end of the conversation at the global level. So I think it's just a question now of shifting priorities, not that we dismiss this other poll, it's just that we understand the perilous state of our domestic political culture. Yeah, you're how to say your awareness of society, of institutional elements, and of the emotional psychological elements in a person learning is I'm just I delight at listening to you today and the way in which you can integrate all of these things. It feels to me more like a credible healing than almost anything I've read or heard in recent times. And what I really I really admire is that you are embracing this challenge. When everybody's scared, it'd be easy to hunker down, but you're becoming an even greater leader by rising to the challenge. And I want to I want to celebrate that for a moment with you with a song that I heard in my mind as I was listening to you comes from Harold Melvin in the blue notes, but Teddy Penegras sang it. And the first portion of the name of the song is Wake Up Everybody. Wake up everybody no more sleeping in bed, no more backward thinking, time for thinking ahead. The world has changed so very much from what it used to be. So there's so much hatred, war and poverty. Wake up all the teachers time to teach a new way. Maybe then they'll listen to what you have to say. Because they're the ones who're coming up and the world is in their hands. When you teach the children, teach them the very best you can. In the chorus, the world won't get no better. If you just let it be, the world won't get no better. We got to change it. Yeah, you and me. Well, I got to do my part because you're rising to the challenge. But it's really, I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend this time share it with my audience, my young scholars. We have a over 15,000 in our young scholars initiative. And how would I say, I look forward to them reading your book, engaging in discourse, talking about the reform of economics or affirming parts of economics, but engaging in that critical discourse. But you're one heck of a catalyst and you're very insightful. And I'm grateful that you joined me today. Thanks so much, Rob, for our truly wonderful and really interesting conversation. I've really enjoyed it.