 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and thank you again. We're going to try to make up a little lost time, but I do think one preliminary is in order. And that is for the roughly 400 or 500 who we're not able to accommodate initially in the other hall. I think you ought to give a round of applause to the gracious 400 or 500 who said, sure, let's move down and let them enter. If anyone here is unaware of the credentials of our guest, the internet is available to you later. I'm not going to go through them. I'll just make this simple observation. I suppose, depending on one's viewpoint, someone could dispute that our guest is among the very finest of our nation's thinkers. I just don't know how anyone could dispute that he's among our finest writers. The Washington Journalism Review once deemed him finest writer any category. Now what they meant was of the various categories they were honoring, he was first among the equals. In the book of some, some of us would prefer he would be the best writer on any subject he chooses. And we've got a lot to choose from tonight and the questions that I'll ask and those that very shortly we'll invite you to ask. Let me just, the obvious comments, please mute your cell phones and also yourselves so that all can hear. And secondly, those who want to ask a question, my suggestion is if your first sentence doesn't end in a question mark, strive to see that your second does. You've got time to compose your thoughts and remember the value of conciseness, thank you. So Dr. Will, George, this being higher ed we'll give precedence to process over substance. So I would like to ask a first question really about your craft, you met today very kindly with hundreds of our students, many of whom want to become writers or journalists or other similar, pursue other such professions. What's your M.O., you've generated by now somewhere in the mid four digits of columns, two a week for four and a half decades in the post syndicate and what in the magazine formerly known as Newsweek. How do you work? First, let me begin by saying how good it is to be on a mid Western campus. I'm a faculty brat from the University of Illinois where my father taught philosophy. I went from Trinity College to Oxford and I decided when I was leaving Oxford I applied to Harvard Law School and Princeton and philosophy. I chose philosophy because Princeton was midway between two national league cities which gives you some measure of my academic seriousness. I did teach at Michigan State University, I'm making a tour of the Big Ten and at the University of Toronto before I turned to journalism or as my father, the professor said, before I sank to journalism. It is about that that you ask. My method is the most frequently asked question of a columnist is the one I asked my friend and colleague, Bill Buckley, when I started this, I said, Bill, how do you come up with things to write about? And he said, the world irritates me three times a week. I would modify this, it irritates me, piques my curiosity, amuses me, something. I've never had a day in which I didn't have five topics I wanted to write about. In fact, I have in my wallet, I can actually show it to you. I always carry a card with the coming topics I want to write about and there they are. It's my next column that'll go out tomorrow and it'll be on Sunday. Thursday's paper is on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Frank Sinatra, the great American song book and all that. I think if I'm right a third of my columns, not only on subjects that are not above the fold in the New York Times, but on subjects that are not on the front page of the New York Times or even in the New York Times, I'm not doing my job right because you're neglecting among other things culture and those of us who have sat at the feet of my former best friend Pat Moynihan know that culture drives politics and that politics can improve culture but culture is primary and politics is in some sense an epiphenomenon. So my method of operating is to be open to the stimuli of this endlessly stimulating country and to understand that there's an awful lot more going on in the world than the Iowa Caucuses. I copied down a line from E.B. White who'd likened what you do to, Hunting said sometimes writing, sometimes he sat in his blind waiting for something to come along and sometimes he roamed the countryside hoping to scare something up. Maybe that's what you're doing tonight, I don't know. I would like to ask you one other question about journalism, in particular political journalism in our time, the erosion, maybe collapse of print journalism is something that some of us worry about, worry that it will not be adequately replaced by 140 whatever it is characters and so forth. But maybe that's just old phogism. I mean, George, in terms of the public discourse of the country and then in terms of self-governance the necessary information of the public are the new forms and you're involved in some of them, electronic but also digital and so forth going as suffice to inform a public that is supposed to make its own wise decisions. Well, first I do think American newspapers are going to figure out how to monetize what they do digitally. I think the reason Jeff Bezos who's worth what, $50 million or something, the reason he bought the Washington Post for $250 million, which was pocket change for him is he wants to solve the problem. He thinks it's an interesting challenge and people like Bezos will solve that. I get up every morning at about 5 a.m. So I'm up when I hear this swap on the concrete outside my house that means some trees have been cut down in Canada, turned into paper, covered with ink, given to an undocumented immigrant to deliver to my house. And I keep saying, how long can this keep going on? Particularly when I ask young people as I did today in a class here at Purdue, how many of you read a hard copy of a newspaper and in a room of 100 students, maybe five hands went up? But that doesn't mean they're not reading. There's an enormous amount of writing going on, but it's going on online. And I get up in the morning and I go fire up my tablet and I go to what are called the aggregators. Real clear politics, real clear policy, real clear markets. And there's an enormous amount of tremendous talent out there writing for these. And I don't know, but my column's in 450-some papers and I'll bet I have more readers online than I do in my papers. I'm guessing, but I think that's an educated guess. So I don't despair about the reading public continuing to read, whether they read words on former trees I don't know and I don't particularly care as long as they read. Just an ancillary but related note, Black Friday weekend after Thanksgiving for the first time in history, more Americans shopped online than shopped in stores. Now, the economy's gonna have to adjust to that and the journalistic economy is gonna make a similar and I think a similarly successful adjustment. A common lament these days has to do with the dysfunction of particularly the federal government. People come at that from different directions. There's what I think of as the Friedman temptation. Gee, if we could just beat China for a little while. Not Milton Friedman, Tom Friedman. Yeah, yes. Yes. I mean, yeah. Important clarification, thank you. And we were discussing earlier scholar named Francis Fukuyama just 25 years ago was writing about the end of history. Free institutions are triumphing everywhere. It's all inevitable. And the latest book has to do with what he sees as the near fatal decay of our institutions. The vetocracy is his phrase for the way Congress operates right now. You remind your readers every so often that our constitution wasn't really written for smooth, well-oiled efficiency. Mr. Madison had something different in mind. Is this, maybe this is the system he contemplated or the sorts of outcomes or have we really fallen to a state that we should worry about? This is what he had in mind with an important asterisk. When those 55 extraordinary people gathered in Philadelphia in the sweltering summer of 1787, they did not go there to devise an efficient government. The idea would have horrified them. They went to devise a government strong enough to secure our rights, but not too strong to threaten them. To which end, by the way, I said the most important word in the Declaration of Independence is secure. We all distributed to be self-evident. All men are created equal and doubted by their creator with certain unalienable rights and governments are instituted to secure those rights. Pre-existing rights, rights are not given to us by government, they're given to us by our nature, they're called natural rights, and the government exists to secure them. So it is in the language of the first two paragraphs of the Declaration, limited government is written in. It has the limited function of securing our rights, including facilitating our pursuit of happiness. So in Philadelphia, they designed a government full of blocking mechanisms, three branches of government, two branches of the legislative branch, the Senate with its own constituencies and electoral rhythms, the House, different constituencies, different electoral rhythms, supermajorities, veto, veto, overrides, judicial review, all kinds of ways of slowing the beast down and making things go slowly so people can have temperate judgments. George Washington famously defined the Senate as the saucer into which we pour our tea so that it will cool. And yet I can think, I've been in Washington for 46 years, not inconsiderable portion of the life of this republic, and I can think of nothing the American people have wanted intensely and protractedly that they didn't get. Sooner or later, the government delivers. Now, the asterisk over this, so far I've said it's working the way Madison designed it. It's supposed to be slow, it's supposed to be difficult, get over it. The asterisk is this. Madison said in Federalist 45, the proposed constitution, the Federalist papers, of course, were newspaper columns designed to get New York to ratify the constitution. He said, the proposed constitution delegates powers to the federal government that are few and specific. They envisioned a federal government that did not tell us what kind of light bulbs we were going to have, how much water could just come through our shower heads, both of these are recent government policies. The government was to do a few things and try to do them well. When you have a government that is into every form of national life, every nook and cranny, it begins to coagulate and you begin to get these veto groups and then what you get is the government grows by the very negotiation of government. Someone says, well, there are no limits on what government does, I want it to do A, B, and C. And someone says, well, I want it to do D, E, and F. So I'll support year three if you'll support my three and the very process of bickering and brokering and negotiating inexorably makes the government bigger, which makes it all the more hard to move. And all the easier to bring to a halt. So in that sense, it's medicine's basic framework, but without medicine's sense of limitation on government. If I could add one more thing, that we've just reauthorized No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind was the sixth, I believe, iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. I mentioned this bit of ancient history because until about 1965, there was what was called a legitimacy barrier to Congress. Before Congress did something, it asked the question, where in the Constitution is the enumerated power that gives us the right to do this? James Q. Wilson, the smartest social scientist of his generation, said that that really ended in 1965 after the Goldwater landslide, anti-Goldwater landslide in 1964. That was one of the 27 million Goldwater voters, but never mind. The Democrats had this enormous majority in Congress. They could do whatever they wanted. And they passed, among other things, the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act. And James Q. Wilson said that was the end of the legitimacy barrier. If the government could casually intrude itself into the quintessentially state and local responsibility, there were no more limits on the purview of the federal government. And I think it was probably right. Well, pursuing that question of limits then, you and many others have written in the last few years with concern about, out of concern, that extra-legal executive actions were being taken. That things were being done by the executive branch of government that did not have the delegated powers to do and that were the right and or were the rightful prerogative of the legislative branch. And you, however, unlike many folks who would agree with you most of the time, have argued that it's the judiciary, in fact, the more activist judiciary, which should be stepping up to these issues where they arise. Could you say a word or two about them? Yes, conservatives alarmed by what they took to be the activism of the Warren court in creating new rights, not enforcing traditional rights. Adopted the language that there should be less judicial activism, a more deferential judiciary to the popular elected branches, celebrating majority rule. In doing this, conservatives were doing the work of progressivism. It was the progressives who came along and said, the judiciary must proceed. We must allow the government to legislate and regulate where it will out of respect for majoritarianism. My view is that it is a dereliction of judicial duty not to enforce the boundaries of government because if it doesn't, no one will. And to that end, some of us, there's now a growing movement among conservatives to say, the United States is not about majority rule. The United States is about liberty. And liberty can be threatened by majority rule. Our founders' catechism was roughly this. What is the worst outcome of politics? Tyranny. To what form of tyranny is democracy prey? Tyranny of the majority. Now, Madison's answer to this wasn't, first of all, judicial. It was a new sociology of democracy. He said, the Madisonian revolution and democratic theory was this. Hitherto, everyone who had said democracy was possible, and it was a few people who had said it, they said it is possible if, but only if, you have democracy in a small face-to-face society, Rousseau's Geneva, Pericles Athens. Because the larger the society, the more factions you will have, and factions were thought to be the enemy of democracy. Madison turned that on its head, saying the way you will prevent majority tyranny is to don't have majorities, by which he meant don't have stable tyrannical majorities. Hence, he said, famously in Federalist 10, have an extensive republic, not a small republic, an extensive republic, the larger the republic, the more factions you will have. And he said in Federalist 51, the first job of government is to protect the different and unequal capacities of acquiring property, because those would generate different factions. And you would have this maelstrom of factions forming temporary, unstable majorities that would not be durable enough to be tyrannical. And that is roughly the interest group liberalism that we have in this country. Now it gets out of hand, particularly when the government doesn't recognize Madisonian limits on its proper scope and actual competence. But beyond that, it's, again, Madison's great contribution to world democratic theory. The expansion of government, and in particular the unilateral executive actions, and many of we've seen lately though, are generally presented as defending the defenseless or the powerless. Well, when presidents say they're going to go around the constitution to defend the powerless, they're defending a constituency of one, the presidency. All presidents do it. This president has done it with more enthusiasm and brio and gusto and lack of conscience than most. I mean, the idea that one of surely the most important international agreements of the post-war, post-Second World War era is our agreement with Iran, which should have been a treaty. He didn't like Congress, so he doesn't submit it to Congress. Woodrow Wilson, more about whom later. We'll come back to you. Yes. Yes. Also known as the root of all evil. Woodrow Wilson said a president can be as big as he wants to be, and that's true because unless you have in a president the self-restraint that is dictated by the ethics of our constitution to respect the separation of powers. Woodrow Wilson was not just the first PhD to be president. There's a warning in this. He was, I speak as a PhD from Wilson's Princeton. Woodrow Wilson was not just the first president of the American Political Science Association to be president, but he was not coincidentally the first American president to criticize the American founding, which he did not do peripherally. He did root and branch. He said the heart of the problem is the essence of the American constitution, the separation of powers. He said at one point that was fine when we had to worry about majority tyranny, but now he said in the early 20th century we are so enlightened and so united as a people that we don't need to worry about that. And what we need to do is unleash the government to do the wonderful things it can do. He said our constitution was written, and this is right at a time when there were four million free Americans, 80% of whom lived within 20 miles of Atlantic tide water. Now he said we're a continental nation united by steel rails and copper wires and all the rest. And we need a government with powers commensurate to its great responsibilities. Therefore, he said, the constitution bequeathed by the founders is fundamentally wrong because it divides, it has separation of powers and rivalrous branches of government that make it difficult to move. Well, if you believe that, then you believe that presidents should do what this president has done and Richard Nixon did also with certain gusto. And that is ignore the separation of powers, ignore the Congress. And here's where I come back to your question about an act of judiciary. Congress is so busy. There are only 535 members. There have been 535 members for about 80 years. The business of government has increased 100 fold in those years. The same number of people spread thinner and thinner and thinner. So what they do is they don't really pass laws anymore, they pass sentiments. They say, we should have an adequate education. We should have maximum participation. And then they shove it off to the bureaucracy to really write the laws. Well, there used to be something called the non-delegation doctrine, whereby the Supreme Court, before it gave up enforcing this, said, in John Locke's words in the second treatise on government, a legislatures may make laws, they may not make other legislatures. What we're doing now is turning over the real writing of laws to executive agencies. And it's up to the government. Clarence Thomas is extremely good on this, saying it's now time for the Supreme Court to say to the Congress, if you can't write laws on your own, if you're too busy, then just leave the subject alone because you cannot delegate an essentially legislative function. That's an example of what some of us on the right say we need a much more engaged judiciary to do. It's time for those with the temerity to do so to come forward and approach one of the mics. I've got another question or two which will give you time to do that, but if we can get at least a couple in each one. I do want to ask you about a foreign policy question. You have parted company, at least as I read you, on more than one occasion with people, again, who would otherwise most often agree with you, in cautioning against hubris or overreach on the part of the United States in foreign policy. You were very cautionary about Libya. You were cautionary about Syria. I can go back further for other examples, but do you feel, just take those two examples. Do you still feel, as you did, would you write those columns any different in view of events since you did? No, I wouldn't, and I'd be in with the third example. The worst mistake I've made in 40 some years as a columnist was not opposing the Iraq War, which I think one of the reasons why I think that is far and away the worst blunder in American foreign policy history is that I think we've paid about 20% of the price we're gonna pay for that. Pandemic destabilization of a region. I got off that fairly quickly, I'll tell you a little story. I was at a dinner party with Don Rumsfeld, who's a good friend, in June of 2003, three months into the invasion, and I said, I'll bet you'll be awfully glad when you find those weapons of mass destruction. And he turned to me and he said, what's the difference? And I said, oh my goodness. Good men, Colin Powell and others, read the intelligence, the French read the intelligence, the British, the Chinese, they all believed those weapons were there. They were wrong, and that was a lesson to me about how hard it is to know things in this world, how hard it is to be sure. Along came Libya. Libya appealed, I'm convinced, to the Obama administration because it was untainted by national interest. It was completely pure humanitarian intervention. The British felt the same way. This was, we were going to save the people of Benghazi and others from Qaddafi. Well, my goodness. Not only was it illegal, because the president didn't even, I mean, completely ignored the war powers resolution. But we, for eight months, it was probably the longest most protracted assassination in history as we tried to chase down Qaddafi with fighter bombers. Again, for no discernible American interest. And they never asked Admiral Yamamoto's question. Admiral Yamamoto was the genius who, what day is today? It's today. Okay, this is Pearl Harbor Day. This is really apposite. He was the man who conducted the brilliant attack on Pearl Harbor. About eight months before which the Japanese government summoned him and said, could you take a fleet across the North Pacific stealthily and deliver a devastating blow against the American fleet in Hawaii? Yamamoto said, I can do that if you'll design some shallow running torpedoes for them. Pearl Harbor, I can do that. He said, and then I will run wild in the Pacific for six months, maybe a year. But then what? Admiral Yamamoto had studied at Harvard. He loved our country amazingly. He loved our country even after studying at Harvard. He'd been military at the Japanese Embassy in Washington. He knew our country. He knew that what they would achieve at Pearl Harbor was that they would arouse a continental industrial superpower and that Japan's defeat would be implicit in its initial great victory. We never asked the question when we went into Iraq, but then what? I once said, Iraq needs only four things to succeed. I said this in a talk I gave that was not well received. Five months after the invasion, I said, they need a James Madison. That is someone who can devise the constitutional architecture for a society with factions. They need an Alexander Hamilton who can conjure out of dust a economic strength. They need a George Washington, a unifying figure above politics to unite the country. And they need a John Marshall who can construe the works of these other men. And I said they need a fourth thing. They need the extraordinary social soil from which those four geniuses emerged in the young America. Well, there's no such social soil in the Middle East, least of all in Iraq. So what I was saying is all they need are five things, but those are enormous five things and they don't have any of the five. But just remember, always ask Yamamoto's question, but then what? I think we have a question here. Welcome to Indiana. Thank you. Briefly, you touched on the founding fathers and their construction of the constitution and the checks and balances. And one of the things that they put in there in order to get the states to pass it was another check and balance against what you mentioned, the tyranny of the government, and that was the Article V constitution of the states. Can you briefly touch on, there is a fledgling movement for that now? There is a movement now. Under Article V, you can call a constitutional convention. There are two problems with this. One, who's gonna play Madison? In those four million people in the end of the 18th century, we produced Madison, George Mason, Hamilton, Franklin, my goodness. We got 320 million Americans. I don't think we could find one of them at this point. But beyond that, you may remember we got the constitution we got because the Annapolis Convention said, let's go to Philadelphia and revise the Articles of Confederation. That's all they said. Well, they got to Philadelphia, tore up the Articles of Confederation. I'm glad they did. But the cautionary tale is, you can start your Article V convention, but how do you keep it from being a runaway convention? Now, there are some very clever lawyers involved in this who said you can word the call of the convention, so that, for example, and this is what they're trying to do, they would be allowed to meet for one day, they'd be allowed to vote on one thing, a balanced budget amendment, for example, and then by that act, they would be dispersed. It sounds too clever by half to me, but let's assume you could do it. That is what the gentleman's talking about. There's a movement of what to do it, and it terrifies me. Thank you. Over here. Thanks for coming. As money has moved more and more into politics, I mean, it's disheartening. It seems that gerrymandering and then, like Citizens United, have quashed this maelstrom of differential ideas that were supposed to be awash in, and as these factional groups have gained more and more money, what's, how is the average or common citizen to, you know, with their single vote supposed to stand up to this? Well, that's a good question, and I'm sure you speak for many here, and I'm gonna make you annoy you seriously with my answer. I think, A, there's far too little money in politics, and B, I'm amazed at how little money there is in politics. People say, gosh, there's too much money in politics. 85 to 90% of the money in politics is used to disseminate political advocacy, political speech. So people who are saying, there's too much money in politics are saying two things. They know the right amount of money in politics, and therefore they know the right amount of political speech that ought to be disseminated. I don't believe either. People say, gosh, this year, last year, each presidential candidacy in the two-year cycle spent a billion dollars. It's two billion dollars in 2012. Every year, Americans spend two billion dollars on Easter candy. This is a rich country. We just spent, in October, $6.7 billion on Halloween candy costumes and decorations. Spent two billion dollars to elect presidents who oversee a $3.8 trillion budget. It's amazing how little we spend electing the lawmakers who make these decisions. In fact, I mean, any economist looking at this would say there's a disproportion here. What the economist would note is we spend far more on lobbying because it's much more efficient. In politics, and there's abundant social science demonstrating this, money does not draw the convictions of politicians to it. Money flows toward politicians of particular convictions. The NRA supports Republicans because Republicans support the Second Amendment. It's not the other way around. The NRA isn't bribing people to support the Second Amendment. They're out there. The teachers unions support Democrats because they're not bribing Democrats. Democrats believe what the teachers unions are doing. And that's politics. And I'm not ready to charge bad faith on either part of that transaction. You cannot regulate the quantity, content, and timing of political speech which McCain Feingold did all three without limiting free speech, without violating the First Amendment. And I would point out to you, with regard to Citizens United, all Citizens United did was it said, when Americans band together in corporate form, they do not forfeit their First Amendment rights. The corporations and unions, the corporations and unions that are protected by the Citizens United decision are not Microsoft and Pepsi Cola. They don't get involved in politics. They don't know when to offend anybody. The corporations that are freed up now to spend money are the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, the National Right to Life Committee, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the advocacy groups that are all corporations, every one of them. Those are the ones that benefited from this. And I think we benefited from it by increasing the number of people which you're rightly concerned about whose voices will be involved in and heard in our politics. So I think the most alarming development in the last two years in Washington is that 54 Democratic senators voted to amend the First Amendment. They voted to change the Bill of Rights to make it less protective. It never happened in American history before. They voted to amend the First Amendment to empower Congress to regulate the quantity, content, and timing of political speech about Congress. Now that just strikes me as dangerous. Thank you for a really important question. And if someone hadn't asked it, I would have. Thank you very, very much. Over here. All right, Dr. Will, about 50 or so years ago we had these great, I guess, side-by-side debates, Gore-Vidal, William F. Buckley. If I had to ask you right now, I guess off the top of your head, what left-leaning political thinkers or commentators do you most like to read and admire, and why? That's a good question. I just, the other night, saw the movie Best of Enemies, that I don't know how many of you've seen it, it's about the Buckley-Vidal debate. And I have to tell you, Bill was, for the rest of his life, get participating in that. He thought it got out of hand, and it was the harbinger of the kind of rage culture that we now have been too much of in my judgment on radio and on television. Who would I like to, when I was with ABC, I appeared periodically with Paul Krugman, which is an affliction sent to make us more spiritual. Paul is smart, and he's informed and all that. The problem is he doesn't think you can disagree with him honestly, that you're either a fool or a naïve or a navish fool. So it's hard to debate. That's a good question. There's a guy named Michael Kinsley who's been around for many years. A man of the left, he's dead at the New Republic. Very smart and witty. He's the one who gave us Kinsley's definition of a political gaffe is an untimely expression of the truth. But I'd say Michael Kinsley. That'd be a good match, I'd buy a ticket. Good evening, Dr. Will. My name is Mitch McCord. My question for you is regarding the front page cover stories. Do you find yourself writing differently when writing for the front page of a paper compared to when on the inside? I never write for the front page. And I've always been a columnist. So I don't have to worry about that. I was amused the other day that the New York Times so excited was it about the problem of gun control they said for the second time we're gonna have an editorial on the front page. And I thought, New York Times editorializes on the front page every day. Thank you. The first time they did, by the way, it was June 1920 when they were so appalled by the Republicans nominating Governor Harding of Ohio for president. And the country took the times so seriously they gave Harding 60% of the popular vote, which was to that point the biggest landslide in American history. It seems that the media, whether it's in politics or entertainment or sports, are enamored by the people they're covering. You've written in all areas. You have friends, I'm sure, in all those areas. What do you consider an appropriate distance between those people in those three areas that you write about? That's an excellent question. I'm not one who thinks the media ought to have a dogmatic adversarial position to the political class. The vast majority of men and women in politics are trying to do difficult things under difficult circumstances and they're trying to do their best. It's important to know them and to understand them. My wife, who has worked for Bob Dole over and over again, she holds world's record for most concession statements ever written. And she was Ronald Reagan's last White House Director of Communication, so she's been around this business. She and I regularly have dinner parties, small 12 people, Barack Obama came to one of them when it was a week before he was elected and inaugurated. We've had all the Republican candidates, almost all of them this year, because we think it's important to do this, to see people in the social setting and understand their human beings. So I don't advocate sort of hostility. Now you can go too far, I did so once in 1980 when Reagan was preparing for his one debate with Jimmy Carter, I helped prepare him for the debate. It was not at that point a state secret that I was for Reagan, but I still shouldn't have done that. But say you have to draw a line and there is one and I stepped over it, I haven't done that since. But I think it's important to see people. Tomorrow night in Washington I'm gonna, my house is being used for a book party for Virginia Coates, who's written a book called David Sling. It's on understanding democracy through 10 works of art. She's an art historian. She also is the Chief Foreign Policy Advisor to Ted Cruz, who will be at my house tomorrow night. Nothing wrong with that, there'll be a lot of folks there and we just treat these people as not as constant adversaries. They're not enemies. That was a great question too, thank you very much. Hello, I read a book recently that was called The Shallows and in The Shallows, the author argued that people are reading more than they ever have, but they comprehend less of it due to the tendency to skim online articles. And your point earlier about the switch to online reading really interests me. And just asking about your writing, have you noticed like people respond differently to your articles or tend to misinterpret what you say? And do you feel like new journalists today have to kind of like adapt their writing style in order to appeal to the new audience? That's a question that really gets close to the bone to me because I have to treat every subject in the universe in 750 words, which means I have to be concise and compress things, which means I have to use a kind of more complicated syntax than you're used to in the normal wire service story that begins explaining who, what, when, where, why. Also, there's nothing in the world more optional than reading a syndicated column. So if Americans are applied and belabored by tens of thousands, I'm not exact, tens of thousands of messages a day. You drive down the street, the signage is bombarding you. You turn on the television or the radio, the commercials are bombarding you. You turn on the internet, the spam is bombarding you. People who get this, so Americans develop these filters. It's a survival device in which we turn it all into sort of audible wallpaper there, but not noticed. But in order for me to get people to read my column, I think it has to be written with a kind of flair and energy and elegance, if you will. I don't always achieve it, but I try. And I do find, getting to the point of your question, that some people will say I couldn't follow that sentence. And I'm sorry, it had a subject, object, a predicate. It was a perfectly serviceable sentence, but it didn't read like green eggs in hand. And I do think people are having more and more trouble following. I mean, they would have trouble reading Dickens. They would have trouble reading PG Woodhouse, from which I got my style. They would have trouble reading Middlemarch, because the Victorian, there was a kind of Victorian fullness in their syntax, and it worries me. There's a lot of research already, and I've been egging some of our people here to look more deeply at what might be happening to the cognitive power and the attention spans and things like this. I think of particularly young people who have only known one environment, the bombardment you just talked about, and sooner or later we'll know, but preferably sooner. One over here. I did wear my Purdue gear for you today. I like to talk about politics and sports. Bob Costas comes to mind and highly irritates me, so I turned on the TV. But what do you think about the injection of so much political talk into sports, or veering to the left in sports journalism? It's real. Someone has said that ESPN has become MSNBC with athletes. Sports writers like the occasion to get, to sort of, you know, get out of the dugout and out of the clubhouse and into the larger arena. So when something comes up, like domestic abuse, which is a serious problem, particularly in the NFL, they sometimes go overboard on it. First openly gay football player, Mr. Sam, I guess he was, from the University of Missouri. I think they do tend to go overboard. And it's MSNBC, or ESPN does seem to dwell on race more than is absolutely necessary. But it's understandable, and at the end of the day, that's not why we watch ESPN, and ESPN has lost a whole bunch of subscribers recently, and I think that's one of the reasons why. I mean, sports is an escape from reality in some ways. It doesn't mean a damn thing. That's why we like it. That's why I wrote a book on baseball called Men at Work. Now it's, they're not boys of summer and they're not playing, it's a dangerous, demanding business they're doing. And it's enough. I wrote, it was consciously anti-romantic sports writing. I didn't, I'm tired of people saying baseball reminds me of the universe or the Federal Reserve Board or something. It's enough, it's nice, it's baseball. My dad read your book. Thank you, thank you. I've published 14 books, and that one's probably sold more than the other 13 from mine. A few weeks ago, American academe was scarred by the shameful capitulation of the University of Missouri and Princeton University to the petulant extortion of group identity politics advocates. Don't you think it's time for American universities to reject group identity diversity politics and focus more on promoting academic freedom by empowering individual students to reach their God-given potential? In a word, yes. It, universities have talked so long now about identity politics, that we are our race, we are our gender, we are our sexual preference, that we are our identities tied up with group identities. And they're beginning to reap a kind of whirlwind from this that we've developed all kinds of grievance groups and exquisite sensitivity to slight thrill and imagined. That's why they're called microaggressions. I should have preceded this answer with a trigger warning. But it's dangerous because universities are the, probably the finest flower of Western civilization and it took us a long time to get here. And these are fragile institutions that depend on vast tolerance for surprise and defense and shock and unsettling. That's what we're here for. All of those things, all those things that are now being called bad things are what we pay good money to accomplish here. I mean, the idea that a university should be a safe space, safe from what? I recently saw my son as a Northwestern graduate and a former Marine. It's a Robert Kappa picture taken on D-Day from inside a LST. It's the American soldiers jumping into the water off Omaha Beach and over it, it said, college age men leaving their safe space. When I was at Oxford, a friend of mine named Vernon Bagnonore, this was at a time when the University of Oxford had gone out of its way to offend Margaret Thatcher, which was really not smart. They always gave an honorary degree to the prime minister. They decided not to give one to her and she knew what to do about that. And he walked out on the balcony of Brazenow's College, which faces the Radcliffe camera, the circular library there. And he said, as though musing aloud, he said, the most beautiful view in the South of England, therefore the most beautiful view in Europe, therefore the most beautiful view in the world. And yet he said, there was a time when everyone wanted to attend the University of Padua. No one wants to go to the University of Padua today. And he said, there could be a time when people will not want to attend the University of Oxford. All these institutions are fragile because they are based on intangible things, certain attitudes of tolerance and acceptance and the thrill of verbal combat and the willingness to give offense and to overturn subtle assumptions. You get rid of that, the institution dies. This dies. Who wants to go to the University of Padua? Yes, sir. The Bill of Rights, most of them, they start with Congress shall not. But I believe it was in 1925, the Supreme Court, when they used the 14th Amendment to apply the Bill of Rights to states and localities. I was wondering what your opinion is of that decision and its ramifications of today. I'm for what's called the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to apply to the states. I think it was really done by the 14th Amendment, which says in there that no American shall be denied their privileges or immunities of Americans. Now, what does that mean? Unfortunately, in the Slaughterhouse cases of 1873, I won't go into the details, but the Supreme Court gave a very narrow reading to privileges or immunities. I think privileges or immunity means all the rights of Americans, including the unenumerated rights of the 10th Amendment. My son is in second year law student, and I've told him his life's work is to re-litigate the Slaughterhouse cases of 1873. I've given you the answer to your very good question, which is I'm all for saying that Americans are not Virginians, we're not, you know, Robert E. Lee referred to Virginia as my country. A lot of people did then. We fought the Civil War to go from the United States R to the United States is, and these are American rights and belong to be protected by the 14th Amendment everywhere. We've somehow developed a lopsided tendency to the right side of the stage, you know? So yes, ma'am, please. Thank you. I appreciate your thoughtful commentary so far. I have a question, but I do have a statement to precede it, and I try to second one with a question mark. Well, I'm already behind because I already said a sentence saying it was period. You're good, we'll start the clock, though. Anton, how many semicolons are there? They're coming. I suppose I was motivated to stand about the question about the University of Missouri, and I feel very strongly that when black students are responding to the n-words mirrored in feces on a wall, it is not a question of tolerance or exchange. It's actually a very hostile environment that they're trying to encounter, and they request their expectation that there will be professors who look like them in color or who are female. It's also not an unreasonable expectation, and I suppose that I would like really a thoughtful engagement with that because that's not a microaggression that's really a systematic, it's path dependent, right? So that if women could not enter universities, then how could they possibly be a majority of professors or even half of them as a country, you know, by chance we would expect. So I'd like a response to that, but my actual question is about John Boehner, right? And I wondered, I think that resigning is like the new thing to do, so that's actually what I think happened at Mizzou. I think that resignation is noble now since John Boehner. And I wonder what you think about the Freedom Caucus and they're pushing him out of leadership of the Republican Party or whether there's some other explanation for kind of the, it seemed to me that he fell on his sword as a speaker at the house. He could not manage the caucus anymore and he got tired of trying. And there's a mechanism for calling for the vacating of the speakership and John Boehner didn't want to go through that anymore. And if I were in Congress, I'd probably be a member of the Freedom Caucus. I'm a Tea Party guy in good standing. I mean, all they're saying is, read the Constitution and do what Madison said. Got two Princetonians sitting here. Madison from the great class of 1771 is our guy. So I think Boehner got tired and I think he felt someone else might manage this better. And you know, Bismarck once said, God looks after drunk babies in the United States. He must have been looking after us to have someone with Paul Ryan's caliber standing there who'll see what he can do. I don't know what I'm supposed to say about the University of Missouri other than this. Obviously, feces, what was it, a swastika or something? That's intolerable, it should be. The culprit should be found and they should be at least expelled. Yes, we want lots of women in academia. I don't know how it is in PhD programs around the country. There are more women in law school now, I believe, than men. More women, I think, in medical school than men right now. 50% of all undergraduates. Yeah, 50, so I mean, demography's gonna take care of that. What we want, however, 100 years from now is not to give a damn about who looks like home. When my dear friend Pat Moynihan was Richard Nixon's Chief Domestic Policy Advisor and he had a big staff and Nixon once said to him, Pat, what portion of your staff are women? Pat drew himself up to his full and considerable six foot five and said, Mr. President, the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids me to ask my staff if they're men or women. That's kind of America I wanna live in. So we got one more and just time for one because I'm saving one. You are? I've come to believe that the mainstream media, journalism has become so biased and so slanted, so agenda driven that it is no longer trustworthy. Am I off base? You're not off base in the way we've gone back to the past. There was a time in the 1790s when politics was at least as violently bitter as it is today. In our party system, which none of the founders anticipated was coalescing. All the newspapers were party newspapers. Jefferson had his favorite newspaper as Secretary of State. He kept it alive with government business. The Federalists did the same thing. So in a sense we're reverting to something. That the period of scrupulous, objective, independent, observing journalism may have been a little episode. I don't know. But the journalism today is, the internet is part of it and cable television which broke up the oligopoly of the three networks. 30 years ago, at the dinner hour in America, 80% of all the television sets in use were tuned to ABC, NBC, and CBS. Now it's way below 50 and that's healthy. Break it up, let the MSNBC people go there and the CNN people, both of them go there. And the Fox News people bless them, come to us. And you know, let a thousand flowers bloom. It'll sort itself out. But it's healthy that people have now said, we have to look at this differently. We have to look at this. There are party newspapers, there just are. And if people know that going in, they'll sort it out. The American people are not dopes. They know how to read newspapers and how to watch television. Makes them irritable, but they know how to do it. It was only in the last 10 years, in fact, one of them lives on in name at least, that in this state, the two institutions of the Indiana Democratic Editorial Association and the Indiana Republican Editorial Association finally gave up the ghosts and disappeared. But they were the vestiges of that era of party voice newspapers and lived right on into the, oh, 80s at least. So, I want to close, I want to elevate the debate to something even more important than those wonderful questions. And that of course is baseball. And so I've really, this is a question that I've only thought about in the hypothetical till the last year or two when the cubs began to rise. And George, my question is, I know you've waited through those hundred and whatever it is, seven consecutive rebuilding seasons that you always write about. But I'm worried now. And I was interested, you used the same word a minute ago in some sports context, but if the cubs perish the thought, actually break through and win the World Series, won't it end one of the great romances in all of American sports? Won't it spoil this great yearning for all time? I hope to find out. Look, I only write about politics to support my baseball habit, which is so severe that my wedding ring, which I designed myself as the major league baseball logo on it. It's my way of telling Mari that in my heart she ranks up there close to baseball, which is, call me romantic. Losing is good for your character, I'm told. I've got quite enough character, thank you. I'm done with that. Look, I grew up in Champaign, Illinois, midway between Chicago and St. Louis. At an age too tender to make life-shaping decisions, I had to choose between being a cub fan and a cardinal fan. All my friends became cardinal fans and grew up cheerful and liberal. I became a dispeptic conservative. You've suffered enough, huh? I have suffered enough. Dodger fan that I am, I got to spend some time with Tommy LaSorta once, and he too said, he said his wife, Joe, had once said to him, as he left on yet another scouting trip or something, Tommy, there are times I think you love baseball more than you love me. And he said, Joe, I do, but I love you more than football. I had some research commission and some of Princeton's finest minds have determined that of those 324 million Americans you mentioned, exactly 17 men look good in a bow tie. And you were one of them. Very good. So here's a Purdue bow tie for your next to the television. And as we break, I just, I want everybody who doesn't already know to know that Dr. Will gave us not just this tremendous hour, but several other hours meeting with two classes, hundreds of our kids, a reception with some of our Honors College students. We probably imposed on him too much today, but I want to thank you on behalf of the Purdue community, George, not only for today, but for a remarkable lifetime of helping all who were attentive, presidents, senators, and most importantly, citizens to think more carefully. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you very much.