 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds one reason. Today, Liz and I are talking with Aaron Sabarium, a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, whose work has been widely and correctly credited with exposing the apparent plagiarism of former Harvard president Claudine Gay. Gay announced her resignation on January 2nd, a day after Sabarium published six new plagiarism charges, some of which will detail soon as we explore this story. Thank you so much for having me. Let's start by looking at some of the specific examples of Claudine Gay's apparent plagiarism. This is from that January 1st article I mentioned, where you put side by side some of her writing next to a scholar named David Cannon. We can see by the highlighted material here. I'll just, for our audio listeners, I'll just read that first highlighted paragraph. David's Cannon version is, the VRA is often cited as one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation passed in our nation's history. Claudine Gay writes, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is often cited as one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation passed in our nation's history. Then it goes on to describe the central parts of this of the Voting Rights Act and its almost identical language. One other example I'll pull up here, Claudine Gay and Gary King side by side. Gary King writes, the posterior distribution of each of the precinct parameters within the bounds indicated by its tomography line is derived by the slice it cuts out of the bivariate distribution. Claudine Gay writes, the posterior distribution of each of the precinct parameters for precinct is derived by the slice its tomography line cuts out of this bivariate distribution. These are fairly technical descriptions of kind of political, political districting and so forth and legislation. And my understanding is that she did not even, you know, often people will put in parentheses I'm citing this person or footnote or end note she didn't put any of that but she did cite these people in their bibliography. So what, you know, what should we take away from these, these are just a few select examples but of the many examples that you have compiled of plagiarism in her work. Well, it's a continuum of severity right and even your own examples I think show that the more technical example that you mentioned with the bivariate distribution. That's not ideal but I think she could plausibly say that that was at worst mildly sloppy and at best kosher because her argument and the argument some other social scientists have made is that when you're describing very technical methods or even describing the terms in an equation which is not quite what she's doing there but it's close. There's only so many ways to describe an equation or describe a very technical model in social science. So it's hard to avoid redundancy. It would be unrealistic to cite every single time there's some redundant technical verbiage. That is a common argument people have made. It's not an argument that is incorporated into Harvard's plagiarism policies for students. Those policies don't make any kind of exception for technical language. But if you're looking at this relative to the norms of social science scholarship, I think you could defend some of those examples. The one that you put on the screen with David Cannon I think is harder to defend because it's not technical language. It's also much more extensive, right? Several sentences which if you actually look on the page of her book that that's from, comprise almost half a page of material. It's stuff that yes there maybe aren't that many ways to word the technical ins and outs of the Voting Rights Act but still there's so many of those sentences are just copy pasted. It's pretty hard to argue that she couldn't have changed at least a few more words or moved some things around. That I think is more you know again taken in isolation is at the end of the world know but it's a more severe case relatively. And then the most severe case that I don't think you put on the board but it's worth mentioning it's from a previous article I wrote is when she copied pretty much an entire paragraph verbatim from two of her colleagues in the Harvard government department Bradley Palmquist and Steven Voss without not only without quotation marks or without citing them in parentheses but without listing them in her bibliography anywhere. So that was a pretty clear cut case that one of just straight up plagiarism that I don't think anyone could really defend or argue with anything other than plagiarism. And in fact that was that is one of the passages that she corrected she added quotation marks in the citation after being called on it. So there's really a spectrum here but there's a lot of examples that fall on various parts of the spectrum. So even if you think that maybe 25 even 30 40 of the examples are minor. There's still 40 of those examples plus maybe six to 10 more severe ones and you're looking at a pattern. How egregious do you think this would be in academia. If gay hadn't been in her role as president of Harvard if she were just an academic and the scandal came out and it wasn't colored with all of these sort of political under and overtones. How do you think academics would treat her. We have some clues based on how Harvard has treated former cases like this from just regular professors. And what they've typically done is either not punish them or has said yes they plagiarized but it wasn't that big a deal so we're not going to punish them at all. Right. To the extent there was a punishment it's nearly the sort of official determination that plagiarism took place but there was no actual you know material sanction. Until like being censured in Congress right like that doesn't actually yeah much it's a symbolic slap on the right. So that happened to Larry tribe and I think a couple other professors over the past two decades. It's Alan Dershowitz Larry tribe there's one other law professor and then Jill Abramson same thing happened and in all of these cases the professors basically apologized. And in a couple cases the university said yeah they did technically plagiarize you know that's unfortunate they didn't really do anything about it. So if she were just a tenured faculty member the normal response would be for her to forthrightly say yep may I call up screwed up sorry and then the university did not really do anything. Of course a as you say she's not a normal tenured faculty member she's the president of the entire university. And B she did not do what those other professors did which was to own up to their mistakes and for everyone to just acknowledge yeah it was plagiarism but you know not the end of the world. Instead she and the Harvard corporation retained a really high powered law firm Clair Lock to try to suppress the story with a defamation threat to the New York Post. You know employing these really cloak and dagger tactics to just prevent it from ever coming to light. And then after we published a story you know and it became hard for them to ignore they say well it wasn't plagiarism it was just inadequate citation or duplicative language. Blah blah blah blah blah. Euphemisms galore and in the course of investigating the allegations the university did launch its own probe they did not go through the normal processes outlined by the research misconduct office. Just basically appointed these unnamed political scientists do this very not opaque non-transparent investigation totally outside of the norms and processes Harvard has laid out do this kind of probe. So when you look at the response in some ways the cover up is worse than the crime. They really I there's never been another professor in Harvard's history where they've employed anything like these tactics to try to suppress the story or then to downplay it when it can no longer be suppressed. And I think that you know that that is a real difference. Right. My understanding is correct me if I'm wrong. She is still employed at Harvard and drawing a significant salary even though. $900,000 a year or something and seem like that. And that's not even counting the speaking fees that one can draw later on. Right. Like that's not even once that. Yeah. Once the examples piled up. You know she resigned the presidency but not exactly taking a huge hit financially there. There's one more example that was the most kind of amusing and alarming one to me which was documented in the New York Times where she copied the acknowledgement. From a of her 1997 Harvard dissertation. She copied the acknowledgement from another one of her Harvard colleagues of political science Jennifer Haas Child wrote Sally Jenks showed me the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor adding later that Mr. Mr. Jenks drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven. Sorry that was Sandy Jenks. And then Dr. Gay thanked her thesis advisor who reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear of favor and then thank her family who drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven. I mean, what do you do you have like a theory of mind for what is going on here is this just like she's producing so much content that it's just like she's grabbing from wherever she can to put these. manuscripts together like what do you have any insight as to what's going on here. Yeah, I mean maybe she just felt like she needed to have an acknowledgement section but was crunched for time before filing her dissertation. And was cribbing in the way you suggest. I have to say, you know, that example on one level is more minor because it doesn't involve plagiarizing any kind of substantive scholarly language certainly doesn't involve plagiarizing an idea. But on the other hand, it does seem to be the example that has. Disturbed the largest number of people including I think members of the Harvard faculty, you know, I can't name names but I. I've been told by multiple professors at Harvard that that particular example really bothered them because it just seemed so gratuitous so hard to rationalize right. You know, the acknowledgments are supposed to be these deep personalized heartfelt expressions of gratitude and here you are cribbing a stock phrase from somebody else. It just really rub people the wrong way. So even folks I think who were inclined to dismiss some of the allegations as either politically motivated or simply not that big a deal just seemed to think that this one indicated something negative about her character. I think the best you can say is that she was rather lazy. And the worst you can say is that maybe there was a kind of pathological inability to come up with original language even to thank your own mentors. And yeah, you know, I don't I don't think that that single example would have made all the difference. But I it is interesting to run the counterfactuals right in which you subtract this or that given example. And that does seem to be one of the examples that really moved the needle for quite a few people. So it's possible that without that simple copying that one instance of copying maybe she survives this probably not. But that one really seemed to upset people in in my conversations in a way that a lot of the other ones did not. I want to take us back to a key point in this drama that maybe will help us expand the lens a little bit which is December 5 when Claudine gay appeared in front of Congress alongside you pens president Elizabeth McGill who also resigned her post shortly after this appearance and MIT's president Sally Cornbluth they were being grilled by Congress member Elise Stefanik a Republican from New York about what unfolded on their campuses after the Hamas attack on Israel. Let's watch that and then comment. Miss McGill at Penn does calling for the genocide of Jews violate pens rules or code of conduct. Yes or no. If the speech turns into conduct it can be harassment. Yes. I am asking specifically calling for the genocide of Jews. Does that constitute bullying or harassment. If it is directed and severe or pervasive it is harassment. So the answer is yes. It's a context dependent decision Congresswoman. It's a context dependent decision. That's your testimony today calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context. That is not bullying or harassment. This is the easiest question to answer. Yes. Miss McGill. So is your testimony that you will not answer. Yes. If it is yes or no. If the speech becomes conduct it can be harassment. Yes. Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide. The speech is not harassment. This is unacceptable Miss McGill. I'm going to give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment. Yes or no. It can be harassment. The answer is yes. And Dr. Gay at Harvard does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment. Yes or no. It can be depending on the context. What's the context. Targeted as an individual. Targeted as an individual. It's targeted at Jewish students Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them. Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism. I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment. Yes or no. Anti-Semitic rhetoric. And is it anti-Semitic rhetoric. Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation. That is actionable conduct and we do take action. So the answer is yes that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct. Correct. Again it depends on the context. It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes and this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board. I think it's fair to say that this is what got the snowball rolling downhill on the plagiarism investigation. Right. Yeah, I think it's safe to say that she was under extraordinary scrutiny in the wake of that testimony. Although if you look at the timeline in the New York Post actually contacted Harvard about some of the initial allegations all the way back in late October. So the impetus for that presumably, I mean it couldn't have been her testimony because it hadn't yet. It was probably just her kind of flailing around trying to respond to the initial October 7th attacks and making a number of statements that alums and students felt were insufficient, making them too late, making them with insufficient moral clarity one might say. So I think it is safe to say that the broader controversy over antisemitism that ignited in the wake of October 7th did greatly increase scrutiny on gay, including her acting parents. When actually examining the statements that the college presidents gave to Elise Stefanik, like are they wrong? I think all of us react in a prickly manner to the double standards of speech on these hyper elite college campuses. But when I actually sort of remove it from the context of the situation in which they clearly really failed to respond with any sort of moral clarity and emotional resonance. But when I actually examine the things that they are saying, like I think I agree by a large with what these presidents are saying that, you know, we should basically have an incredibly high standard must be reached and specific conditions must be met before, you know, speech is cracked down on on a college campus. How did you feel when reacting to the testimonies initially, Aaron? Basically the same way you did. I thought that their answers on the merits were correct. And in fact, I don't even I can't say I love this game of saying, well, but they should have been more empathetic. You know, I don't I've spent a lot of my admittedly short professional career implicitly fighting against the people who invoke empathy as a justification for shutting down speech. I think the whole idea that feelings are relevant here is kind of wrong. Like, like, they're not relevant to the question of whether speech should be protected. And frankly, I think college campuses would be a better place. It all organized kind of identity groups, Jews, African Americans, gays, etc. If all of them just if there wasn't this sense that their grievances like carried as much weight and were allowed to sort of dictate university policy. It's not to say that there, you know, any groups feelings don't matter in a moral sense, of course not. But the idea that bureaucrats should be trying to kind of micromanage ethnic or religious or cultural tensions on campus. I just think is a fundamental rest on a fundamentally mistaken conception of what the university is or what it's for. So look in my ideal world, you know, none of these questions would have been asked at the hearing because we wouldn't even have this regime. We wouldn't have this regime of kind of not just DEI but anti harassment law that basically, you know, in effect allows people to argue. Well, you know, if there have been a lot of microaggressions, then the conduct is severe pervasive enough that the university has to start policing the microaggressions. No, no, no, I think that whole way of thinking about it is wrong and antithetical to the mission of the university. However, as you also know, it's hard for me to come to their defense here when the same people invoking free speech against Stefanik have spent the past decade shrampling on all sorts of speech that this or that other group besides Jews doesn't like, right? That Harvard Gay was personally involved in removing Ronald Sullivan from an administrative post because he served on Harvey Weinstein's defense team. She was involved in sanctioning the star black economist Roland Fryer ostensibly for sexual harassment. A lot of people think it was pretty clearly a pretext over his scholarship, which had found some sort of politically incorrect results about police and used a force against black people. You know, and and there was something there were controversies over Carol Hoeven who said there are only two sexes, which started a firestorm. There have been all sorts of cases like this at Harvard where the administration has consistently at best sort of just, you know, allowed departments and students and faculty members to effectively engage in cancel culture with no, no even minor rebuke from the administration saying, hey, we don't really think that you guys should cancel the talk. That's at best. And at worst, the administration has actively sought to suppress dissenting viewpoints. So, you know, as much as I would love to issue this kind of stentorian defense of free speech and to say, oh, actually, Claudine Gay was right. I mean, I just she doesn't deserve people coming to her aid like that, considering all of the times that she suppressed conservative speech as the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. So there's no world in which the over 10 windows should be so narrow that Carol Hoeven or Roland Fryer are sort of seen as far outside of it, right? Like there's no world in which an elite college campus ostensibly for the purpose of learning and, you know, intellectual debate should be considering Carol Hoeven too far outside of the realm of reasonable, right? Like that's just to me shows that something is horribly wrong. And of course, I think it's worth adding that although I think students should be free to endorse Hamas without sanction from the university is maybe from their future employers is a different story. But from the university itself, sure, they should be allowed to do that. That is a much, much more extreme crazy out there view than there are only two sexes. And this is something that sometimes gets lost. But remember that the substance of the views here, even if they should all be protected is not the same. And I think most reasonable people would agree that the things Carol Hoeven got canceled for saying are much more rationally defensible than, oh, yeah, October 7 was just an act of Palestinian resistance. That was great, right? Like the second thing is a lot crazier than the first. We're talking about like the scientific fact of like, you know, fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers versus like the terrorists who kind of did burn a bunch of bodies in a big mass across civilians like these two things are kind of not on the same level at all. I really take your point very well and I think that that is something that so frequently gets lost. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that it's extremely hard to swallow the selective defense of free speech. However, I still am concerned when there is a def no matter how hypocritical if there is a defense of free speech for their if part of the campaign to take down these presidents is because they are. Not embracing the regime of microaggressions in this particular instance that that is a little disturbing to me and I mean a lot of. And I'm not putting any of this on you your reporting is completely legitimate but I know that the way that a lot of this was kicked off you know you you posted the document that was submitted to the free beacon from an anonymous professor. From a different university that had a bunch of the initial plagiarism allegations in it and obviously not going to ask you to reveal who that source is. But do you have any insight about the motivations in that specific instance or can speak to kind of the motivations to beyond just concerned for plagiarism and academic integrity and sure bringing down Claudine gay. Sure, well, I think it obviously is the case that people people probably would not have started digging as intensely as they did had it not been for her statements now. Now what it was about her statements that upset people I can't really speculate about particular individuals motivations but I would just say that I do know a lot of people who agree with you that free speech is important and the answers they gave were legally correct. But also think that the answers betrayed such absurd institutional hypocrisy that that itself should have been disqualifying that the hypocrisy really was just, you know, astonishing and upsetting. So, to the extent people searching for plagiarism were motivated by her testimony, you know, I do think it's important to recognize that they could well have been motivated, not by a sense that oh my God, she won't embrace DEI protections for Jews. She has to go. It could well have been they thought, look, you know, she's just a kind of a terrible career administrator who's been complicit in the silencing of all sorts of conservative views. And now she has the hot spot to get up there and say, oh, now that it comes to calling for the genocide of Jews free speech, you know, screw this lady. I mean, I think that actually was a pretty common reaction. It's unfortunately not quite the sentiment that Elise Stefanik articulated at the hearing. But among the kind of broader masses of, you know, disgruntled academics, I actually do think that that sentiment was pretty prevalent. I would say this, though, too, about just my own motivations and reporting. I do think that the plagiarism, you know, serial plagiarism from the present at Harvard University is obviously a story, regardless of whether any of this anti-Semitism had happened. And I actually think it speaks to a kind of failure of liberals to pass the ideological churning tests that they think that we only went after, you know, like, oh, you only wanted to go after Claudine Gay because she's black or because of the anti-Semitism thing. No, no, no, no, no. Conservatives have long thought that these institutions are terrible for all sorts of reasons, totally aside from anti-Semitism. And the idea that conservatives, I'm not even speaking about my own motivations here per se, but like the idea that conservatives wouldn't jump to, you know, kind of hurt any Ivy League president for just about any reason, given how they see the Ivy League and its role in American society. It's like, you clearly, the critics of the sort of so-called, you know, conservative cancel culture, whatever, they just don't understand the depth of the critique of the universities on the right. They have no concept of how deeply compromised and corrupt conservatives take the university to be, and as such have no conception really of why it is conservatives would welcome plagiarism allocations against basically any elite college president, except maybe for the president of UChicago. But other than him, like, you know, like, I mean, if someone, I've joked about this on a few things where people ask me, like, oh, did you do this because you went to Yale and she's at Harvard? I'm like, guys, that's cute. But no, like, if believe me, if you have, if you know about plagiarism in the president of Yale's work or the president of Princeton, it's like, please send it to me. Like, of course I would publish that, you know. Are the institutions terrible? Right? Like, you brought that up. It's like something in the conservative imagination, but like, is it true? Do you believe it? What do you think? Yeah, more or less. Now, I mean, we can in a minute get to the whole question of whether sort of we want there to be systematic hunts for plagiarism in the work of every academic. I think there are interesting debates about whether that would really be good or whether that might, you know, create some bad, bad norms, what have you. But as to my own views on the university, look, I think that the thread connecting the plagiarism scandal to the anti-Semitism scandal is this notion of double standards, right? There was one standard for clotting gay plagiarism, which the university said, oh, that wasn't misconduct. It's fine. And a much stricter standard for students who were upset when they heard about the story because they said, wait a minute, we would get kicked out if we did but clotting gay did. And by the same token, right? The thing about anti-Semitism that I think really did go a lot of people was the double standard. Oh, you know, saying there's only two sexes, that's a microaggression that should get you kicked out of your job. But, you know, genocide of Jews, well, you know, free speech both sides, right? The hypocrisy really was what was so galling in both cases. And I think those double standards are those kinds of double standards is really endemic to academia, especially the ideological ones. And they're pretty, they're pretty pervasive. You know, you can find lots and lots and lots and lots of cases of really a very moderate, not even right-wing speech, just like centrist or even center-left speech getting shut down, while really radical far left speech, including even endorsement of terrorism that's just, oh, well, that's fine, that's whatever. You know, I think that that does speak to a kind of ideological rot in the universities. It's not just that the policies and standards are inconsistent. It's also that the fact that people just, there's a consensus that treats these different speech acts as they are treated, and in such great disproportion to the actual content of the speech. I think that suggests a kind of cultural rot at these institutions. Institutions that we should remember are received hundreds of millions a year from taxpayers, including many taxpayers who have views that the people running these universities think are deplorable and should be illegal or something. So, you know, when you look at it that way, I think, yeah, I like the conservative, which he has a lot of merit. Well, so speaking of taxpayers with strong opinions, what role did Bill Ackman play in all of this? Well, I mean, I obviously don't know the behind the scenes calculations of the Harvard Corporation. We know not to underestimate you. Liz, for people who haven't been following this, you know, day to day, could you explain who Bill Ackman is? Unfortunately, yes. Bill Ackman is, you know, a hedge fund manager. I think his net worth is four billion. He's married to the MIT, former MIT professor, MIT scholar, and very interesting sort of like design scientist, Neri Oxman. Ackman was basically, I'm not totally sure what his relationship with the Harvard Corporation, which sort of oversees the hiring and firing of Claudine Gay, is. But it seems like, I mean, he's a massive Harvard donor. He got very outspoken, very riled up after the congressional testimonies, very dissatisfied with Gay's answers, and seems to have, you know, basically even before that, been exerting an awful lot of pressure on the Harvard, the Harvard Corporation and the administrators of Harvard to basically be treating the sort of Hamas sympathetic speech that was rife on campus in a way that was, I'm not totally sure what he exactly wanted to happen, but it seems like he felt dissatisfied and angry and riled up with the fact that students were, you know, acting as if the apartheid regime of Israel is, and I say that with air quotes, is responsible for the events of October 7th. So Bill Ackman was sort of like very involved over the course of October and November, but it's still, I think at this point, and then he became very outspoken about wanting specifically, you know, Claudine Gay's head on a pike, so to speak. But it's sort of unclear what relationship exactly he had behind the scenes with the powers that be. What do you think of that, Aaron? Yeah, so again, I can't really, I genuinely don't know, you know, what kind of conversations may have gone on between him and the Harvard Board, although by his own accounts and everything I've seen reported, I don't think that the Harvard Board was happy that he was going on this kind of Twitter crusade, and I actually suspect that it may have, he may have inadvertently prolonged Gay's life as president of Harvard University, because they think they felt, they felt like if they got rid of her, you know, at the height of Ackman's anti-Gay tweet storms, it would have... Anti-Gay tweets storms? Sorry, yeah, anti-Claudine Gay to be clear. Anti-Claudine Gay, yes. I'm sure Bill Ackman loves people with all sexual orientations. Anyway, I think that they probably felt like if they ousted her when, you know, at the moment when he was demanding they do it, it would look really horrible if they were capitulating to outside pressure and donors. And he himself tweeted that he heard that that was one of the reasons why they initially, on December 12th, I believe, affirmed her support for Gay and did not fire her. You know, in terms of the role he played throughout the rest of the controversy, he certainly amplified the plagiarism allegations on Twitter. More people saw them. So maybe that played a role, but to be honest, I think that they would have gone pretty viral even without him. And I think it sounds like, it sounds as if what really happened was that once these plagiarism allegations hit a critical mass, support for her really cratered among the faculty and students too, and it just became untenable for her to leave the university. And I really don't think Ackman has very much to do with that. I'm not to pat myself on the back, but I think it was largely the strength of just the allegations and of my reporting on them that made it hard for people to ignore just the facts spoke for themselves. And yeah, yeah, and if anything, again, I think that probably the collapse in support would have happened even more quickly had Ackman not been tweeting. So aggressively, because I think that those aggressive tweets made faculty feel dug in and like they had to defend gay against this outside pressure. But once the facts really changed and became so sufficiently unflattering, they kind of said, even if we're even if when some ways we're giving into Ackman, you know, come on, can this person really be the president of Harvard with this many strikes against her. So the day after gay was fired, aka resigned, you know, depending on sort of which narrative you want to go with, she technically resigned, but I think it's pretty clear that it's one of those. You need to, you know, pack up your things and get out of here type conversations. But after that, Ackman started tweeting about DI. This is a little bit kind of out of left field. I mean, this ties into a lot of the longstanding critiques that many of us have lodged against some of these elite institutions. But the thing that's kind of interesting is that I think Ackman somewhat single handedly turned this into a DI conversation. Maybe Chris Rufo was somewhat involved in that as well. What exactly, how did that pivot happen, Aaron? Can we read, can we just read a little bit of his very long Twitter post? Yeah, please don't read the whole thing. He says, you know, in light of today's news, I thought today's news being Claudine Dick gay's resignation, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about. And scrolling down best a lot of this, I ultimately concluded that anti semitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign. That was the quote canary in the coal mine. I came to learn that the root cause of anti semitism at Harvard was an ideology that has been promulgated on campus and oppressor oppressed framework that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests. Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI. This whole thing kind of annoyed me because A, DEI, like we can talk about the oppressor oppressed sort of social justice framework, but DEI is almost sort of the more recent incarnation of that, right? Like DEI sort of more frequently applies to admissions practices and hiring practices. It's okay, I guess if we want to expand that term to sort of be the umbrella by which we talk about these other ideologies that have been rampant on campus, but it's a little bit weird. And the other thing that annoys me about this is it's just like, were you born yesterday, Bill Ackman, right? Like this has been going on for, I mean, I entered college in 2014 and I left in 2016. I think in 2013, 2014, that was sort of the beginning of this most recent round of campus speech craziness and absurd double standards. But I'm a little bit like, well, Bill Ackman, you've been donating to Harvard for an awful long time and you sort of weren't like who was minding the store? Who was keeping watch? Clearly not you. What do you think, Aaron? Yeah, I had largely the same reaction, especially not so much to Ackman but to Mark Rowan and some of these other donors who fomented the revolt against Penn. I was like, oh, now you realize that they're all terrorists and they're crazy? Okay, great. Well, we've been telling you that for decades and now you figure it out. All right, like a little belated. I will say in Ackman's particular defense that he has gone beyond just saying, we anti-Semitism is a problem on campus and some of the activists are a little crazy to seeming to really embrace a pretty thoroughgoing critique of the entire DEI regime. And yes, DEI is a recent incarnation of it. But I think when you look at his posts, he seems to understand, oh wait, there's kind of systemic race discrimination at universities. And basically anyone who's not a straight white male can claim victim status and use that status to gain special privileges and suppress any kind of speech that they deem offensive or harmful. Yeah, that seems bad. You know, he's actually, he seems to understand now the nature of the problem. And I think that's a good thing. And he seems to have understood it better than some of the other. Yeah. Yeah, well, I want to ask you about the nature of the problem that he's outlining there, which what he's saying, and this is something I've heard, this is an argument I've heard a lot lately that the anti-Semitism that has been expressed in these anti-Israel or Palestine movements is a natural outgrowth of DEI. This is where DEI leads to anti-Semitism. Is there anything to that in your estimation? Is that a sound argument? Yeah, I think it's a very sound argument. I mean, let me try to try to put it in the clearest way possible. Think about what a lot of DEI rhetoric focuses on. It focuses on disparities between groups. And the premise is always that any disparities are caused by oppression of some sort. Any kind of innocuous explanation for the disparity, certainly any explanation that just says, well, one group just happens to be better at rising to the top of this field. That's certainly not allowed, right? Well, look, that creates a bit of a problem because in case you haven't noticed, Jews are overrepresented in a lot of fields. They're overrepresented, they are overrepresented in finance. They are in fact overrepresented in Hollywood. And although they're less overrepresented on Ivy League campuses than they used to be for various reasons we can maybe get into, they are still overrepresented on Ivy League campuses. They're not overrepresented on sports teams. Correct, they're not. And yet no one thinks that that is a reflection of systemic anti-Jewish prejudice on the part of the NBA. For some reason, no one's made that argument. But look, if you think that all disparities, especially disparities that favor white-coded individuals like Jews are if so facto illegitimate and racist, well, then it looks like that then we have a problem because Jews are in fact overrepresented in a lot of fields and by the logic of DEI that should suggest that they have kind of unearned privilege. That's the most innocuous formulation. And the least innocuous formulation is they have their privileges as a result of a kind of illegitimate, almost conspiracy or system of power that keeps others down. And it's not hard to see how that's going to just turn into sort of bold fashion, Jews control everything, they're evil anti-Semitism. That really is the causal pathway from DEI to anti-Semitism. Now, there's another dimension here too, which I think is related but separate, which is just that in practice, this DEI proponents wouldn't say this out loud, but I think this is implicit in a lot of stuff, the rhetoric. It's just kind of a knee-jerk assumption, ooh, kind of white people have unearned privilege and tend to be the bad guys. And white people can't be victims. And most Jews in America are whites. Now, some Jews would say, oh, I'm not really white, blah, blah, blah. But in practice, most of them are classified as white by the census. And in the social construction of race that is currently operative in the United States, Jews are white. But when you've said that all white people are part of this system of power that makes them oppressors, then the very idea that Jews who are a subset of whites could be victims just becomes much more harder to cognize. And I think that's the other big part of the story, right? This is as much, a lot of the anti-Semitism I think here is made, it's not necessarily caused by, but it's made possible by a kind of anti, phrase might get me in trouble, but a kind of anti-white cultural default where whites are just assumed to be in power and kind of bad in some way, right? When that is the cultural default at these institutions, it becomes harder to talk about subsets of white people who may be victimized in various ways, or at least for whom that assumption of power and privilege may be a little more complicated. So I do think DEI and kind of broader notions of progressive identitarianism do have a lot to do with anti-Semitism. I would just say that having made that argument is important to distinguish between harsh criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism, right? Those are not necessarily the same thing. And just because progressiveism makes people focus more on the settlements or whatever, like that's not intrinsically anti-Semitic. With the anti-whiteness argument that you laid out, which I think is broadly true, you know, that is how a lot of these progressive activists see it. How did it get bastardized and get away from, like, Coleman Hughes has made this argument. I've made this argument many times. I think many people of our ilk sort of believe this type of thing where it's like, well, if progressives actually care about uplifting the marginalized, right? Like trying to apply the ideological turing test and really believe, you know, fully approaching their argument in totally good faith. If they're interested in uplifting the marginalized, why aren't they doing a class-based critique, right? Under which, you know, poor Rust Belt whites would be seen as extremely marginalized, right? And a wealthy Jew who's had every advantage in life who grew up in the Northeast and was sent to the best schools, you know, really has an awful lot of privilege afforded to them, right? Like, why is it that it became this whiteness as the demonized thing and, you know, anybody who's white passing sort of gets mapped on to that as opposed to the much richer understanding of this, I think, which would be a class-based one, which I'm sure would still end up in places where I, as a libertarian, disagree, but would at least feel intellectually rigorous and sound? Well, there's lots of reasons, and obviously we can't do a deep dive into the intellectual genealogy of wokeness, right, that that's beyond the scope of this conversation. But I think there is also a very kind of obvious material reason to be a little Marxist about it, which is just who provides the donations to these schools. It's rich people. And so if you did the class-based thing, right, you know, the kid from the Rust Belt would frankly offer is, I think, more pressed that the poor Rust Belt evangelical is much less privileged than a wealthy Jew from Manhattan and would add far more meaningful diversity to Harvard or Yale than that Jewish student would. But the Jewish student's parents, frankly, are more likely to donate a wing of, you know, to the library or a new cancer center, right? I mean, it's just true. So I think that is a big part of it. That's also one reason why a lot of the, you know, minorities who are admitted, especially a lot of African-Americans who get into these schools who, in some cases, they're not African-American, they're just African, right? And their parents are wealthy immigrants from African countries, or, you know, they maybe are, yes, they're black kids, but they went to Andover, Exeter, right? They didn't grow up in Anacostia. And that's, I think, in part because, look, it's just expensive. If your affirmative action program is class-based, the university would have less money than if it's race-based. So I don't think that's the only reason, but I do think that that is a big part of it. Yeah. Well, when did you, I want to shift to what got you so initially frustrated by wokeness, which I think has sort of, to some degree, like, powered a lot of your career, right? You do this really interesting sort of shoe weather reporting. And you have a lot of people, you get a lot of scoops. You have a lot of people leaking stuff to you, and you've done a really, really solid job of uncovering a lot of the deep ideological rot in these institutions. Did you, what year did you enter Yale, 2014? 2014. So actually, I think was, we're the same age, shoulder you graduated before I did. Yeah. So I was there 2014 to 2018. And while I was there, the famous Halloween costume controversy took place. Can we make a clip of that really fast? Yeah. I've pulled that clip, actually, because I want you to reflect on how this informed your worldview. And you can talk about what was going on with you at the time. Hold on. Let me set this up a little bit more, Adam. The Halloween costume controversy was that a letter had gone out suggesting, you know, us suggesting culturally sensitive Halloween costumes and some of the faculty had objected to the idea that administrators would tell college students who were adults, what is appropriate to wear for Halloween. And one of those people was Erica Christakis, whose husband, Nicholas Christakis, was sort of a dean of housing, and he was confronted by a bunch of angry students who thought that administrators should dictate or, you know, set some parameters for what is and isn't a Halloween costume. And this is a clip from that confrontation provided by fire, the free campus free speech group. So let's play that clip. So you were, you were on campus when all that drama unfolded. Not only not only was I on campus, but a I actually saw a part of that interaction unfold from across the street because I lived in the residential college across the street from Silliman. And B, I was the opinion editor of the Yale Daily News, which meant that I not only had to solicit and edit op-eds from angry students upset about all the systemic racism, allegedly permeating Yale, but I also had to write the paper's official editorial about the protests. And the way the editorial process worked was that it was basically just a democratic vote by the editorial board. And then the opinion editor had to kind of execute the will of the editorial board and write the op-ed, even if the opinion editor didn't agree with the will of the editorial board. And that has happened in this case, right? You know, I'm not actually sure it was meaningfully a democratic vote because we got into the meeting to discuss things, and it, it became clear within seconds that anyone who dissented was going to get called racist and shout it down. So nobody did, even though I think a lot of people privately thought this was going too far. It was, it was very clear that like, if I had, I sort of, I tried to gently push back on some things, but it was quite clear that had I pushed it too far, it would have just devolved and the outcome would have been the same, but even worse. And so I kind of made a tactical decision, all right, like, you know, I'm not going to win this fight. So the best I can do is sort of try to moderate whatever we end up writing. So I had to actually write a boning editorial saying, oh my God, these protesters are so brave and, you know, why does the university, you know, should listen to their pain, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then when I tried to even sneak in a line about free speech, what happened was it was being, there was like a Google Doc that was, that was effectively being stealth, not stealth edited, but like, everyone was looking at the Google Doc. So then I throw in the line and people come over to me and say, I think this sounds, you know, like you're blaming the protesters, how could you, and then that line gets taken out. So it was, it was a shit show. It was terrible. Just sitting at a keyboard, just sweating, right, you know, carefully writing these sentences as if people are watching the Google Doc, that's pretty. I'm not joking. That is what happened. And look, it was, it was, it was a preview of what happened to the New York Times and other. Big media outlets in 2020 media outlets that of course employ a lot of alums of the daily news and the Harvard Crimson and other such. Did this, did this radicalize you? This is the origin story. I, I, you know, radicalize is a bit of a strong word because I it's not like it's not like I was a normal. I mean, I was kind of a moderate Democrat who was just pro free speech. But, but, you know, it's not like I went from moderate Democrat to, you know, fight or breathing MAGA or anything like that. But yeah, it made me much more concerned about who the future leaders of the country would be. I, it definitely pushed me right and subsequent developments after college further pushed me right. But yeah, this was sort of an inflection point, maybe, maybe radicalization is too strong, but certainly an inflection point in my political structure. Well, so I came to college in 2014, same time as you. And I think for me, the environment there was extraordinarily radicalizing to the point that it even inspired me. One could say to graduate early, which was not my plan to do so because I just had a miserable time on campus. I went to the College of William & Mary and to set the stage for old geezers like Zach and our viewers and listeners who might not know, you know, 2014 was a weird time. It was right after, I guess, the officer who had stood accused of killing Michael Brown had been acquitted. There were all of these riots related to Ferguson. Ferguson was basically on fire, sort of a precursor to the George Floyd summer 2020 protests. Obviously, we've seen these bubbling ups of the protest movement surrounding cop killings and police brutality in the United States. This was not the first incarnation of it. And it was also not the last one. But 2013-2014 was a very hot time for that type of thing. And so I recall that fall being really intense on campus for that reason, for all of the racial and police brutality reasons. And then Rolling Stone published, they now widely discredited a rape on campus rape hoax story that basically describes. And I think this was talked about at many college campuses. You know, I went to William & Mary and obviously this had occurred on UVA's campus very, very close by, you know, lots of friends there. And so I think it made a huge splash, not just in that sort of college microcosm, but on other campuses too. Because there was essentially, I think, a little bit of this precursor to Me Too happening where, you know, suddenly these sort of twin issues of race relations, police brutality, and campus sexual assault and sexual harassment were sort of not exactly entering the public consciousness, but certainly having this huge moment. And to be 18 years old and to have these two issues where so many people were saying, hey, you're either with us or you're against us. You're either fired up about this or you're, you know, an evil, you know, Trump tar didn't exist yet, but like an evil right winger, it very much made it. So I think many people were, I don't want to say forced into submission, but very much given all of the social incentives to believe what the herd believes, to go with the herd and not their dissent. And I was one of the people I was writing for my college newspaper and dissenting from this. And a lot of activists really made my life hell as a result. It ended up becoming very quickly apparent. It was made apparent quite quickly to me that this would not actually be a healthy, thriving place of intellectual discourse. And I should just cut my losses and get the hell out because being part of the working world is so much better, you know, being an actual journalist and being able to engage more thoughtfully with these things. Oh, I agree. But did you have a similar experience? Like were you doing the exact same thing that I was just a little bit north? Yeah, it was, it was similar. One time when I was the opinion editor of the paper, I published a op-ed criticizing migration to Europe, which was admittedly, I think a defensible but also pretty fire and brimstone restrictionist tape on the issue. But, you know, we published crazy far left things all the time that were just completely, completely batshit. So I thought, all right, you know, this is a little over the top in the other direction, but that's fine. You know, he's not calling for genocide or anything. Like it's he's just saying that Europe should stop accepting migrants because they're destroying like the culture of Europe and creating safety issues. Okay, it's a little much. But, you know, he can say that I published it. And then a girl came up to me in the coffee shop like in public and started verrating me for publishing the op-ed. And to be honest, I didn't care that much because like, what was this girl going to do to me? But that that I think gives you a sense of what the climate was like. I was lucky that I Yale had a good network of conservatives, unit groups, especially this thing called the Yale political union, which contains a lot of conservative political parties. And so I was in one of those and I kind of had a friend group that I knew was not going to cancel me or so me. And in fact, within that friend group, I was like the token lib. So if anything, they were like, they'd be like, Aaron, you know, okay, yeah, it's nice that you believe in free speech. But really what you should believe is that we need a Catholic monarch who will suppress free speech in the interest of creating, you know, our Lady of Guadalupe Empire from North America to South America or whatever. Like, it sounds like a joke, but there were actually people who believed that. So, you know, they all, for me, they were like, oh, yeah, you know, you think that maybe Title IX is going a little too far, right? Like, oh, you know, you think you're controversial? Well, wait till you hear what we believe. So. How were they treated on campus though? Like, you're saying there were people. They, well, because they had the social group, like they were fine. They also weren't as outspoken though, but they weren't writing their takes, committing them to paper. I think people probably knew that they were Catholic and conservative, but they, they typically. I think we're pretty good about just knowing when and where to share that. So, yeah, look, I had a similar experience, although I would say that I didn't feel as socially isolated as I think some people felt. And I actually, especially at Yale, where there is this kind of conservative infrastructure, you know, I would probably advise students to be a little less afraid of getting canceled because as long as you have the friends who won't cancel you. It doesn't really matter if someone calls you a mean name on Facebook. It just should learn to get over that. But yeah, look, these, these, these universities often do have a very cycle and climate for free speech. And I do know people at other elite schools where there was not, I think, as healthy a network of dissident students and at those schools, people who spoke out really. You know, based of a steep social price. Yeah, no, it's, it's a problem. And so, and then you asked earlier, do I think there's anything to the conservative critique? Well, having seen it up close, I mean, yeah, you know, you really will see kids get piled on for saying things that are, if anything, way to the left of Fox News, but just not quite the left of Bernie Sanders. And, you know, you don't see anything like that pile on triggered by students saying that rationality is a tool of white male oppression, which someone literally wrote almost exactly that in an op-ed for me that I had to edit, right? I was sitting next to the girl and editing it with her line by line. And the thesis of the op-ed was that demands for rational discourse are a way of policing the emotionality of women of color, right? Like, it's pretty crazy. And, you know, that was what you were expected to say. Oh, that's an important perspective. Thank you so much for writing this op-ed. Like, no, I mean, come on. And I think that kind of stifling environment, it's so a lot of seeds of discontent that perhaps are coming to fruition now in the form of a significant backlash. And it's something that Claudine Gay alluded to in her response to all this. She published an op-ed in the New York Times and, you know, saying that what happened at Harvard is bigger than me. And she identified two themes here. One is she said that the campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Trusted institutions of all types from public health agencies to news organizations will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders' credibility. And then she goes on to say that this was largely an attack on her because she was a black woman selected to lead a storied institution. I think we can kind of put aside that second one. We've kind of gone through a lot of the evidence as to why Claudine Gay was forced to resign. But to that first critique, where it's a very much like I am the Fauci, I am the science kind of moment, I am academia. This is an attack on our hallowed institutions themselves. Part of that line of argumentation comes from the actions of people like Chris Rufo who was also involved in this story and who characteristically just like diabolically announced this in a tweet. He says we launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus from the of the left legitimizing the narrative to center left actors who have the power to topple her then squeeze. He also announced that he'd gotten a scalp when Claudine Gay was fired which like okay fair but also according according to the Associated Press that that was very racist with him. That was a practice that was a practice of white colonizers who scalped Native Americans and also sometimes Native Americans scalped other people but that's just an aside. Native Americans were never barbaric. They always did everything according to the moral standards of 2024, you know like come on. Correct. They never did anything or pillaging. Look, I don't begrudge Chris Rufo publishing this material whatever his motivations are I'm always happy to get true material about, you know, important public figures. And it's more important to evaluate the source material rather than the conduit who published it. But I do have to say I find his all out warfare mindset to be pretty cynical and unsettling because you're kind of eroding the norms of discourse and justifying it with like, well, the other side is use these sleazy tactics to take down their enemies so it's fair game to do the same and like doesn't doesn't the Rufo mentality kind of create a ratchet effect and just leave us with these two horrible unprincipled warring sides crowding out any rational discourse. Yeah, I mean I think that is a possibility to defend Rufo I'm not necessarily saying I agree with this but but I think the defense would be look if we want there to be healthy norms of discourse. There has to be incentive to adopt the healthier norms of discourse and for a long time I think it is true there really was an asymmetry in terms of the blowback that would be faced by people on different sides of the political spectrum. And in one theory is that if you ratchet up the pressure on the left right and due to the left what's been done to the right. Maybe that will cause the left to evolve, re evolve kind of better free speech norms much like the ACLU did in the 50s and 60s right the ACLU used to be a communist front group and then discovered that free speech was actually very beneficial to protecting communist speech and then and I think genuinely came to believe in free speech for many decades but there was a kind of self interested partisan incentive for them to believe in it. When the incentive structure was different so it's not crazy to think that going after the left in this way can in fact serve. The interests of better discursive free speech norms. But I also think that that argument rests on a lot of assumptions about how incentives will be understood and processed and internalized by the various actors that that are not self evident. And I think there is a real chance that it does evolve into what you're saying where it's just, you know, total tribalism and everything just gets worse and worse. You know, the other thing I would say though about this, could I just say one more thing is please do someone. So I was on another podcast and my friend Demir Marsuch made the point that you know, when when when Bork was held up in that confirmation battle. The Supreme Court, it kind of marked a real shift in norms around Supreme Court confirmation fights that we've arguably never recovered from and now there's a lot more partisanship on both sides. You have Mitch McConnell saying we're not going to, you know, we're not going to just consider anyone tough luck until the next election and then you have the attempts to destroy Brett Kavanaugh and things like that. It just that is a case where it just seems like it was a ratchet effect. Everything got worse and worse and worse over time. And so one way you could look at that is to say, either you could start it with Garland and say, you know, refusal to confirm Merritt Garland was really where it started. You could go back to Bork and say, well, that's really where it started the evil Democrats. But another way you could look at it is to say, listen, why was there a fight over the Supreme Court in the first place? Why were the stakes such that people felt these tactics even needed to be deployed on either side? Well, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court abrogated to itself the right to determine when life and human rights begin and just said, by the way, yeah, until the end of the second trimester, no rights whatsoever women can do what they want. And we're not going to vote on this. We're not even going to try to really rigorously justify it with the Constitution. We're just going to come up with this BS argument that even RBJ would later say was crazy. And that, I think, really changed things as the Supreme Court just aggregated more power to itself. It became more and more important to control the Supreme Court and both sides had an incentive to pull out all the stops to control it. And I think you can argue that something similar is happening with universities. And so I think it's a bit of a mistake to lay all the blame at Rufo's feet or really anyone's feet. It's like what happened over the past few years, universities became more important, college degrees became more important to employment prospects. Universities developed, got larger endowments. They wormed their ways into more and more aspects of elite policymaking, the distinction. I mean, universities were involved in all the, you know, they set up these misinformation centers that were involved in attempts to regulate Facebook and Google and Twitter. The distinction between the officially private universities and the government really has eroded. So these institutions, part of why there's such a culture war battle is that they're just more important and powerful than they've ever been. And if you don't want this kind of, this war on expertise that Claudine Gay is talking about, well, maybe those institutions need to be a little more humble and stop irrigating crazy dictatorial powers to themselves. You know, she says public health agencies, huh, I wonder why there's a culture war over the public health agencies. You know, was there anything recently where maybe they kind of said, by the way, you should shut down the entire economy and you can't go outside of your homes? Oh, except to protest Black Lives Matter. That's fine. Might that have had something to do with the attacks on them? I don't know. But like, maybe there's a deeper problem here with the hubris of elite institutions that has set this in motion. And you can deploy Chris Rufo's tactics all you want. But they are, I think kind of like people say, oh, you know, terrorism is just kind of an inevitable response. Like some of this stuff is just an inevitable response to material to material conditions on the ground changing. And it doesn't make it good or excusable. I'm not saying you should support or not what Chris Rufo's doing. But someone like him was going to come along and do this, no matter what, eventually. I think universities, frankly, do bear a lot of the blame for that. I hear you. And I think we're on the same page in terms of the course correction that needs to happen in terms of, you know, checking the hubris a little bit and, you know, decentralizing power, certainly in the case of public health agencies. As we bring this home, Aaron, I got to ask, though, like, are you optimistic that this is a course correction in effect? Or is this kind of just a temporary blip? Do you have any thoughts overall? I vacillate a little on this. I think. I do think that now that you see people like Ackman tweeting at DEI and Musk and some of these billionaires, that does suggest to me that there could be a real. Not that it not that we're going to see at the pendulum swing super far in the other direction and the country is going to suddenly be super right wing. But I think that you will see more organized opposition to it. More organized opposition to it, which may want some of its excesses and and allow kind of a phase of operations for further attempts to systematically dismantle the DEI regime. And I think that is frankly a good thing that people are sort of been an awakening of political consciousness among people who matter that. Oh, wait, there is this DEI thing and it's bad and it permeates every aspect of our lives. And I'm sitting on four billion dollars. Maybe I should do something about that. That's not a bad development. I would say that I think a lot of the kind of deep kind of conceptual underpinnings of DEI, especially the assumptions about disparities and what is and is not a legitimate explanation for them. I think that stuff, frankly, long predates DEI and is now very, very deeply ingrained in much of elite and even not so elite culture. And so, you know, I don't I don't think people should prematurely declare victory. A lot of a lot of the fights that we're currently having were already had in the 1970s would say busing or other things and just slightly different form. So I suspect a lot of these culture war battles will continue to be fixtures of our politics and won't have a clear resolution. But I do think that whereas before it was kind of like this, you know, army of well funded leftists who just were dictating priorities to institutions in 2020 and the immediate years after. Now they're going to face a lot more pushback and, you know, it'll be a bit more of a fair fight. And hopefully that results in a negotiated settlement that we can all live with as America. A two state solution, if you will. Yeah, a two state. Yeah, exactly. That's an optimistic peaceful piece, optimistically peaceful way to leave it. Aaron Sibarium, thank you for your your work on the topic and for joining us to talk through it today. Thank you so much for having me. This is great. Thanks for listening to Just Asking Questions. These conversations appear on Reason's YouTube channel and Facebook page every Thursday and the Just Asking Questions podcast feed every Friday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please rate and review the show.