 Our guest this weekend is Tom Di Lorenzo, a professor of economics and history at Loyola Maryland University and also a friend and senior fellow here at the Mises Institute. And our topic is the PC cancer that is spreading across campuses and universities in America, not only Yale and Mizzou. Tom is particularly well equipped to handle this topic, having fought the PC monster really throughout his academic career. He took on the Lincoln myth which is of course one of his great achievements and he also took on and exposed the evil of the Hamiltonian Federalists as the great centralizers in American history. Now I have to apologize in advance, we caught Dr. Di Lorenzo traveling so he's on a cell phone and the sound quality at points is not optimal but I guarantee you'll enjoy a very interesting and informative interview on what's happening with PC on campus from an insider and an academic, Tom Di Lorenzo. Tom I'm sure you've been following the recent events at Mizzou and what strikes me about the situation is this, you know Mizzou is not Yale, it's not Berkeley, it's not Wellesley. Do you think students and their parents really understand how left wing most universities are, even big state schools, SEC football schools like Mizzou? No I don't think so, I see parents at Loyola University, Maryland, they keep paying $40,000 to $50,000 a year for room board and tuition and I think they have no idea the place is really like most American universities now by these cultural Marxist ideologues who really are enemies of free speech. Their basic mantra is that free speech is okay as long as you agree with me when my sort of extreme left wing Marxist views, they believe and they teach, they teach students that it's an honorable thing to destroy the right of free speech to the oppressors, who they call the oppressors, which is basically white heterosexual males, everyone else to be oppressed and it sounds crazy but that's pretty much the way it's been for quite a long time. You might remember Jeff, in the 90s there were a whole bunch of books written by Dinesh de Souza and one of the other neo-conservatives on political correctness and made a big stink for a while and then it kind of faded away but this has been simmering and getting worse and worse every year since then and so that's why we see these absurdities such as we see at Yale University or the University of Missouri. In your experience, have the kids changed over the last 20 years? Are they getting worse? Are they special snowflake syndrome exaggerated by right-wingers or is it true? Well, my own experience, a lot of my students, their parents work in business, they work on Wall Street, they're from New York, Connecticut, the mid-Atlantic and so I get, most of them seem to just get a chuckle out of all this. They understand this farce but then there's maybe, I don't know, a percent that fall for it and for example, when the maliciously libeled our friend Walter Block for getting a very mainstream speech on the economics of discrimination, you know, a whole bunch of the students piled on and sort of collaborated the administration in this awful smear of Walter but at the same time, every single letter to the editor who's in the school newspaper supported Walter Block and condemned the University administration and the economics department so the vast majority of students in that incident were disgusted with the whole thing but there still is this minority that is manipulated by faculty, by the way, you know, I don't think that those teenage football players in the University of Missouri thought of this on their own, they're always manipulated by these sort of conniving, scheming, cultural Marx faculty members who grow all of these kids during freshman orientation and they begin brainwashing them in their ideology and so I think that's how things like this happen. So Tom, you've certainly been accused of being on PC, especially with regards to your books about Lincoln. Tell us what sort of fallout did you experience with faculty and in terms of your own career development as a result of having crossed the line of political correctness? Well, they pretty much left me alone. It's kind of funny. I had the time the book in real late came out. I had a teaching schedule that I was really sick of at the time. I was teaching MBA classes all day Saturday at 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. and the dean at the time thought, well, this guy's too politically incorrect. We've got to get him out of the MBA programs. So that's what I've been trying to get out of that schedule for years. And so he actually did me a favor, but they pretty much left me alone. So what I expect from University administrators when they pay attention to you, you know, that's bad thing. And so I didn't have any any reprisals over that, but I did over the Walter Block scenario when Walter Block gave this speech. He basically wrote mainstream talk on economics and discrimination. For example, if I pay a woman half of what I pay an equally qualified man, the theory goes, well, I create a profit opportunity for my competitors. She can offer her a 20% pay raise and she will certainly take it. And I still make money on the deal because she's still underpaid. That's pretty much it. And oh, my goodness, you know, the president of the university sent an email to the whole world of denouncing the instant comments of Walter Block. Walter and I, of course, did that in moving on the local radio station in Baltimore. We wrote probably a couple of dozen articles on loomuckwell.com about it. They took revenge on me for that. But I have tenure. They can't do much. So they did freeze my salary for eight years. That's the price I paid for sticking up free speech when one of my friends was a lawful university president, Brian Lanane, is the name. But there's an interesting point here, right? Is that you and Professor Block didn't grovel. You didn't resign. You actually fought back. And we see so many of these kind of simpering academics just immediately try to issue some mea culpa and it never works. I mean, there's no amount of apologizing that can ever satisfy the progressive appetite. No, and that's the you use the word apologizing. That's part of their pain plan. They always demand an apology no matter what the issue is, because it's not enough for them to libel and smear and sender you. And they want you to that you're an evil person and apologize. And in the Walter Block case, of course, Walter would never have apologized for for giving a great speech on free market economics. But the university administration and Loyola University of Maryland have several members of the economics department to apologize for him. So they were the letter in the school newspaper apologizing for Walter's presence on campus. And then I, of course, wrote a letter back saying because they find it in the economics department and the chairman of the economics department at the time was violently opposed to what they did to Walter and so was I, of course. And so we wrote, you know, a letter of our own saying, hold on a minute here. The chairman of the department was not behind this later with I. So this is basically a lie. And so, yeah, they were just basically pandering to the university administration in hopes of getting maybe a 3 percent pay raise next year instead of the usual two and a half percent, almost academics behave in my experience. Well, you've been teaching for a few decades. Can you talk about this rise of the administrative state? In other words, have you seen the emphasis shift from teaching and classroom expertise to this sort of bureaucratic administrative state in university settings? Well, you know, every university has ever grown in bureaucracy. So I've seen it in my entire career as a teacher in 1979. And, you know, the higher dean and the dean wants an assistant dean and then the assistant needs an assistant on and on it goes. For example, when I first got to George Mason University in 1981, it was still a small state school, but I was there for eight years. And the bureaucracy probably quadrupled or quintupled in size during that whole period that I was there. Not exactly, but the Congress. And so now, you know, with cultural listening charge, the universities all have some sort of vice president for multicultural affairs, and they have a huge staff and a huge budget. That's, by the way, is what these people in numerous in Missouri are demanding. If you read on the web, their list of demands, the university president, he was too slow in turning the whole university into a politically correct and sane asylum under the guise of multiculturalism, as they say. Because he didn't do anything bad. I've searched the web, but I can't even find any kind of racial incident that might have instigated these students. I read on the web that one person claimed that someone wrote a swastika in the bathroom, but I've never known what. He needs to get too upset over that sort of thing. And the other thing I read about in Missouri is that one student, the president of the Student Union, claims that some guy in a pickup truck yelled a racial slur at him as walking across campus. And that still is not verified, just his word. And it's hard to believe that that is what caused the university president to resign from his job. You know, how could he have prevented some idiots from screaming out the door of a pickup truck? So the real reason for all this is they're upset that they heard a white guy in the university president putting in their own words. He was not really one of them. He was a businessman who got a job and he was not really a cultural Marxist ideologue, apparently, and that was very made them very unhappy. So he's gone. Yeah, well, it's interesting. You know, maybe the unsung victim and all this is just the average kid at college who wants to keep his head down and get a degree and get a job. Right. It seems like we're forgetting about about what I hope is still the majority of students. Yeah, well, the media, of course, they didn't go to engineering school or business school, you know, they're, they're, they're part of the cultural left to the multicultural left. So they, they play out these things. But, but even at my university, like I said, these business students that I have, they want a job on Wall Street. They're not, they're not there to become a multicultural crusader or anything like that. They just talk the best they can. But they're all about learning business economics and getting a job. And I think the same is true of the engineering students and, you know, all the sciences, biology and chemistry, they all want to go to medical school or something like that. And so, but you can do the humanities and some of the social sciences. And that's where the rot is in American academia these days. And, you know, in the kids in computer science and things like that, they're, they're relatively safe from this, which is a good thing. And they're probably, probably are the majority. But what you have, though, is you have faculty who are manipulators, you know, they're connivers and manipulators. And they do get a hold of these kids of freshman orientation. And they start beating into their heads the idea that, you know, white oppression is, is so, is the reason the cause of all the world's, world's problems. And so they learn that language and they get a minority of students to be loudmouth activists like themselves. Tom, do you think there's a point where parents and student borrowers are going to say enough is enough? Maybe there's always going to be demand for fancy or elite degrees from Ivy League schools like Yale. But when you're talking about a more generic state university like Auburn, is there some point where parents say it costs too much. There's too much debt involved. The degrees aren't worth enough in terms of the job market. And we find out that these left-wing faculty members hate our guts, hate our values. Could we potentially reach a point of peak university or peak academia? Well, I certainly hope so. I do read more and more of these days about people saying things like that, like go to a trade school or learn a trade or become an apprentice. Or maybe dad will say, instead of like spending a hundred grand in the next years while I stake you in a business and you learn the business about, you know, and do something like that. And I don't know how widespread that is. At the same time, I still see these parents who spend so much money. An old friend of mine has sent his daughter to Dartmouth, said it, writing that check every year felt like pushing the Mercedes off a cliff every year. We have to write that tuition check. I still see the parents, you know, they want their kids to have that teddy green and not be left out. And that's the culture that's been green in our minds for decades. It is changing. You're right. It is changing. I do see a lot of parents becoming increasingly upset. Even during the Wolter Block, you ask that I mentioned earlier, I had an alumni right the one guy in particular. He said, I was just to write a $50,000 check to Loyola. But after reading about what they did with Wolter Block, I'm going to send it to my church instead. And I had several like that from big years to the university. And that will change things if you can get some of the board of trustees to get their heads out of the stands and not looking at being on board of trustees. That's just something that can improve your social life or make a few business connections and be responsible. That will change. That can change things, at least in some of the institutions. It's interesting that you bring up alums. You know, I'd like to ask you about this. On the one hand, I'd like to think that alumni could do a lot about this PC nonsense by withholding their donations, not attending football games, that sort of thing. But when you look at some of these schools, their endowments are so huge, they've got hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe that alum who says, well, I'm not going to write you a $50,000 check, maybe they just don't care. Maybe they're the amount of money in universities as such that alums actually have very little power. Yeah, you've got problems like what did I just read? Yale has, what, a $25 billion endowment. So, you know, you put yourself in the shoes of the current administrators of Yale University who think that they're probably going to retire in the next five, six, seven years themselves and they're sitting on a $25 billion endowment to be. And so I'm not sure they would really care that much about some donor that said, hey, I want my $100 million back because their time horizon is not that long themselves in their job here. You don't get to be a university president very often at age 35. And so I'm not sure that that strategy became a work. I have seen examples of it, but it's a matter of dollars. I suppose how many dollars? Professor Tom Di Lorenzo, thank you so much for your time this weekend. I know that you have a lot of fans among Mises.org readers and listeners of this show. And I suspect that this is a topic that is only going to intensify. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.