SEASON 3: Ep. 3 Leading a College for Half a Century with Leon Botstein from Bard College

In this episode, Bard College President Leon Botstein reflects on a remarkable five decades in higher education leadership. He shares how he unexpectedly became a college president in his twenties, the lessons learned from leading through financial and cultural change, and how higher education has evolved over time. 

The conversation explores the tension between excellence and access, the growing challenges facing college leaders, and the enduring value of a rigorous liberal arts education. Leon offers a candid, long-view perspective on the role colleges and universities play in shaping thoughtful citizens and strengthening society. 

This podcast is sponsored by Viv Higher Education 

About Viv Higher Education

Viv Higher Education is a Boston-based, female-owned comprehensive marketing agency specializing in higher education. With expertise in strategic planning, creative asset development, and media campaigns, we focus on enrollment-centric initiatives. Our approach is grounded in industry best practices, ensuring precision in reaching target audiences. We have extensive experience in marketing to diverse groups, including high school students, Hispanic, military, LGBTQ+, international students, and online learners. Navigating the complex landscapes of university environments is second nature to us, and we prioritize fostering collaborations that yield mutually beneficial outcomes. With a personable, nimble, and highly responsive approach, we deliver tailored solutions to empower organizations to achieve their objectives.

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Transcript

  Hi Leon. It is so wonderful to have you on the show.

Thank you so much for being here. Susan, it's a pleasure to be on the show. I was thinking you are likely the president with the longest standing tenure that I have ever spoken to and maybe will speak to in the near future. You have led Bard College for five decades, and during that time you've also remained active as a scholar, as a conductor, as a public intellectual, and would just love to start out by having you tell us how your path into academic leadership unfolded.

What drew you to the kind of presidency that you've practiced at Bard since the 1970s? Well, the fact that I became a president in the 1970s when I was in my twenties, was an accident. it was, a strange moment in American history. It was a moment right after the, um, upheavals of the sixties, where there was a lot of talk about generational conflict and That created enough chaos that, opportunities were created that, you couldn't repeat today. Now it's terrific that, uh, Ani as mayor of the city of New York is 33, so it's a moment where we're returning to bring younger people into leadership, but that was something that seemed very, Timely. So that's how I got into it. To me, education and, to my parents and to my grandparents and to the entire family education was the, center enterprise, of what it meant to become an adult. My parents were both professors of medicine.

my great uncle finished his PhD in Germany. my grandfather also went to graduate school in Germany and in Russia where he was from. And, one generation before that, there were also academics in the family. So The act of learning was, a center part of growing up and a joyful part of growing up.

It wasn't tedious. it was the habit in a way of the family. So in a strange way, my brother and sister and I, we all went into the family business, which is the business of scholarship and teaching and research Early on in my life, I made the determination that I wanted to be a musician and, I had a transformative experience going to college.

So I went to the University of Chicago at a time where the total enrollment of the college was 2000. It was a small college within a large university, and I had very, very influential teachers.  Music and also outside of music. And, I, developed the ambition to create a career where I would combine scholarship with performance.

, That was true when I was in college  The world of 18th century music and Renaissance music and medial music. There were scholars who were also performers, and some of 'em were my teachers. And I thought, well, I could do this for the 19th and the 20th centuries. Why only for, the Renaissance and baroque and classical eras?

So I had this idea of being. a scholar performer, but then when I went to graduate school, I spent the summer of 1967 in Tanglewood. and then when I was a graduate student and I was the assistant conductor of the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra, as a graduate student, I realized that, know, this is, not an obvious career path.

And during the Vietnam War, there was a sense of civic obligation. If you were not going to go into the army and serve your country, as a soldier, a person in the military, I thought, I have an obligation, especially as an immigrant. We came stateless to the United States, my entire family, so our gratitude to the country, our patriotism.

To the Constitution, to America as a pluralist place, people from all over the world and the opportunity for citizenship. I still remember my naturalization ceremony when I was 10 years old. in those days, the children had to go through the same process. They weren't lumped in with their families, right.

I have a naturalization paper with a childish 10-year-old signature on it and my 10-year-old photograph. so I, in graduate school, I got a fellowship to work in the city of New York, as an intern, in the city administration of the city under John Lindsay. He had the idea of bringing young people in and, I didn't know anything about anything, uh, except, you know, music and history and philosophy, the things I studied at the University of Chicago, which were inspiring.

And, so the mayor's office decided to put me into the board of education. And I became an intern and a kind of mayor's representative, if you will, in what then was an independent board of education. Now the school system is run by the mayor, but in those years it was run by an independent civic board called the Board of Education, and I became the assistant to the president of the Board of Education and.

By happenstance I got involved in, educational policy and, I had a firsthand look at how important urban education is and how important public education is. I took the internship with the idea that, I would have a day job and then my real job, which was to perfect my. Musical skills.

but, realities being what they were, after this year of internship, I had to earn a living and, I got an offer, from the then Vice Chancellor of the City University Timothy Healy, who later became. Head of the New York Public Library and President of Georgetown in the reverse order, to work for him.

He met me through the various things I did, and at the same time, out of the blue, I was, recruited by the chaplain of Dartmouth College under the leadership of the then president of Dartmouth, John Kennedy. to become the president of a experimental college that had been founded in the 1960s, which was brought into bankruptcy through a open quarrel with the very conservative newspaper of New Hampshire, the union leader, and they sued one another, for, libel or slander.

I don't know exactly why it was before my time. It was a college founded in 1964, and it went into bankruptcy in 1968 and Dartmouth, which was an hour away, John Kennedy, was wise enough to realize that you can't let, sort of a PR campaign of a political nature close and destroy a  place of learning.

That wasn't right. And although Darmouth had no self-interest, he thought if they can bring this fledgling new college founded in 1964 without any money to its knees, we could be next. So he persuaded the bankers who held the debt on this college Frankia called it. that he put a bunch of Dartmouth senior administrators, including the chaplain on the board, and the chaplain became the president of the board, and the president left and they were looking for a president in 1970.

And they had a choice either to close or to give it another try. And in the process of. looking for a president. he, crossed paths with me because I was the administrative supervisor of a search for a new chancellor for the school system. So we ran into one another and, and John Kennedy came up with a preposterous idea of offering me the job.

I was 23 and I hadn't finished my PhD. And I thought he was crazy, but he was a Lutheran pastor, so how crazy can a Lutheran pastor be? and a very, wonderful amateur singer, fine musician, and a great softball player as well. And long story short, he talked me into it and I was 23 and it was an adventure gall up in Northern New Hampshire.

I'd never lived outside of a city in my life. I grew up in the city of New York and the Bronx. And, I, went to university, you know, at Chicago and went to graduate school in Cambridge. So I took the job and I was there for five years and it was an incredible experience. I never met, any Christian religious leader and the board had an episcopal priest, a congregational priest, a Presbyterian.

Pastor, you know, I, met a world in Northern New Hampshire. I was so provincial coming from New York and Chicago. And, so it was a rapid growing up experience. And I was 23 and president of this place, which had started out with 90 students and then grew to 250 students. And most of them were, from the city and from suburban America.

And there were. disaffected youth, they were a part of this sort of counterculture, if you will, and I was, had nothing to do with the counterculture. so they didn't much trust me because I seemed very strange to them. so I ran the college and we took it out of bankruptcy and we got it accredited.

and as a result of that particularly, I was able to refinance the college. With the support of the federal government and the Department of Agriculture, Bard College, which was looking for a president, they had offered the job in 1975, to two very fine people who turned it down. ' cause Bard, had no endowment.

And although it had a very high academic reputation, it was, financially very shaky. it had 600 students. And it was, struggling. And the previous president, had developed Parkinson's disease. So he retired earlier than they expected. A wonderful man, an Episcopal priest, and a wonderful person and very helpful to me.

And so he retired early and they had an interregnum and instability in leadership. And a very wise leadership of the Board of Bard, one of whom is still alive today, David Schwab. They looked around after two people, turned them down, and they had interviewed me because, one of the students at Bard who was on the search committee had parents who lived near Franconia College of New Hampshire.

And he had heard about me, so they invited me. they passed me over and offered it to other people, but when they turned it down, they said, what the hell, what can go wrong? So they hired me, when I was 27 to become the president of Bard, and that's when I came to Bard. In 1975 you were a president in your twenties and already a second time president in your twenties a second time, that's just incredible.

But the first, what I learned is how to run an institution where you have no money. I ran a bankrupt institution and then institution that barely got outta bankruptcy, but really had no endowment. No real physical plant. and it finally closed in 1978 or 1979. It had no real long-term future. After the baby boom began to decline, enrollments began to decline.

and I had two children. And, the thought of living the rest of my career in Northern New Hampshire, It didn't seem totally to fit. So, I accepted the job and, it turned out to be a stroke of great luck. I had a very famous teacher when I was an undergraduate Hannah, or the political philosopher, and her husband had been a faculty member at Bard and she played a behind the scenes role in helping me get the job, which was very nice of her.

so I arrived at Bard. I didn't have any long range plan, but it was a perfect fit because it was a fine, intellectual, academic place with a very strong investment in the arts, a strong history in music theater, in the visual arts, and in writing. Mary McCarthy had taught their soul, bellow taught their, Ralph Ellison had taught there.

it had a very strong literary tradition. So it was a terrific, place for me to realize both performance, scholarship and the values that surround them. And, it was, in that sense, an ideal fit. In addition, I was able to repeat the refinancing i'd done in Northern New Hampshire.

' cause Bard was then in a rural area that qualified for the special federal funding, which they finally closed off, but it allowed the college to avoid. Running off the rails financially and to have a new start. so it turned out, to be, a terrific fit.

 

  📍    I mean, this is an incredible story in and of itself. and to just think about then the five decades that have passed since then, and you said it was an incredible fit from the start. Maybe to start just with H, how has higher education evolved from your perspective in those five decades? How has Bard evolved?

'cause I know Bard is considered more of an unconventional model in higher education, and are there tensions that you think have been there all along that a college president has to navigate? Or are there tensions more recently in higher education that are genuinely new that maybe in the eighties or nineties were not at play yet?

It's a very good question. so let's start with the, detail, the small detail. My primary purpose when I arrived was to build the college. So it was about 600 students. Now we have on this campus, over 2000 students. And we have all together a over 6,000 degree candidates because we have.

10 public high school, early colleges that we run in six cities. We have a large prison education program. Mm-hmm. We have small graduate programs. we have dual degree programs abroad. In bk, we have a campus in Berlin. we have the only major academic collaboration with the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank.

and we have collaborative arrangements with a global network. We even have a program out of Nairobi for refugees and displaced persons. So, we were able to expand the mission and, the graduate programs we have mostly in the arts. We build a conservatory. We have a fantastic Frank Gary performing Arts center.

 we're finishing a mile in, dance and theater building. we have a fantastic museum and graduate program in curatorial studies. We have an MFA, we have a graduate center in New York in design. decorative arts and material culture. So we've expanded dramatically. So in that period of time, my charge given by the trustees was, make this an important place in the public interest and make it different, but always excellent, reconcile excellence with equity.

so over the five years, it took much longer than I thought. I had no idea how difficult all this was. the most difficult of all was raising money because we just finished a billion dollar endowment campaign, 500 of which came from the Open Society Foundation as a challenge.

And, most of our support, is from philanthropy from around the nation. not alumni support. You take the best of the liberal arts colleges in America that have large endowments. they're 90% from graduates and families of graduates. In our case, we had to compete for philanthropy in the open market of philanthropy through ideas, and that was my primary, primary preoccupation.

 Fascinating framing. Well, you just mentioned equity and excellence. That's a tension that we still have today, right? I think people talk all the time about how do we balance prestige and access , from a social justice perspective, don't wanna just educate the kids whose parents bought them an excellent education and excellent test scores and whatever it is.

So would you agree that that is attention that has been present, That's a major tension. So just in our case, when I arrived, 10% of the student body had financial  aid. Now 70% of the student body is financial aid. But the real tension is, that I'm a real believer in.

The liberal arts and the traditional classical idea of the liberal arts, Bard has a heritage as a progressive institution. That means that we see the student as the primary engine of learning. We teach in small seminars, not lectures. The students  have to learn how to command the English language, to write, to read critically, We have a great book sequence in the first year. So there was recently a, a news article that.    University in Texas, basically censored somebody from teaching Plato. Every first year student that comes to Bard is given free a two volume cloth bound, edition in Greek and English of the Republic by Plato.

And that's the core reading of our first year, first semester Common core sequence. On the other hand, we teach film photography. We have a human rights major. We, um, have, an art and architecture design program. We have a lot of, different kinds of, programs, in the sciences, from data analytics and computer science where students, are really, the driving force in shaping the programs.

They all have to do a senior project. It's very rigorous, but it's not  rigid and, we have avoided the conflict between.  The  progressive and the so-called conservative, we're in that sense radically conservative. And, we believe in teaching at short range Teaching is at the core of what we do, and we have very, very, very distinguished faculty.

So we have a kind of university quality faculty. in a smaller, liberal arts undergraduate setting. but the problem in the country is that we have come to believe that excellence cannot be democratically distributed. And I oppose that idea. Excellence is not the province of privileged people.

It's not the province of an elite. Excellence is something every individual is capable of. They all might not attain the same level, but excellence is a goal to which every student should strive and that will. Build their self-confidence and also, make their judgment, better about things in life, both in their work life and their personal life.

So, I'm a real believer in, the utility, the practicality of a serious liberal education that ranges from science to the humanities we require of our students. Something called citizen science. So if you want to major in the humanities, you have to do citizen science. you have to do some science in order to get basic literacy.

every student, there's a three week intensive before the first year begins in close reading and writing. So it's demanding, but terribly enjoyable.

Terribly enjoyable. What you said about excellence, being democratically distributed is extremely thought provoking, I think, at this moment where everybody is sort of clustering around scarcity models in, in their minds, right. Including, in education. So thank you for, for sharing that perspective.

Yeah. And, I believe, online technology is very helpful. But it doesn't replace the person to person teaching. And the other question you asked is that, you know, is there, something that, is different over the years? Yes. Yep. I, I would never have predicted that the country would be lurching to autocracy and to the, destruction of the rule of law.

And to a kind of a quasi monarchical, evisceration of the balance of powers and the,  violation of fundamental human rights. Take the, shooting, uh, that happened, uh, in, Minneapolis. people are debating which video tells the real story. Well, I would say it has nothing to do with the video.

There should be no circumstance in which an unarmed civilian in a barely moving car is dealt with with lethal force no matter what that person. Is presumed to have done or not done. that is the safety of one's rights of freedom of movement and freedom of assembly, and the attempt to censor universities, , which is now on the rise and to weaponize, public funding, to essentially enforce some ideological conviction.

whether it be right or left. Right. It is a role. It's extremely painful to think about what you have shared earlier about the patriotism that you felt when you became a citizen, and the, the values that you associated with the country then, and what the country gave to you, and to have to reconcile that with.

We are right now in this moment of time. It's very, it's very hard to reconcile. So, the great, proponent of democracy, American style democracy, who became the president of Czechoslovakia between the two wars, Thomas Masek, was asked one,  what is democracy based on? And he said, you know, it's basically Christian.

He said it derives from the gospels, and he quoted the 22nd chapter of the gospel according to St. Matthew. And in which Jesus has asked, what's the most important law and the most important law Jesus says is, the, love of God and what's the second most important law he said. To love thy neighbor as thyself.

I think a democracy he said is premised on that idea. So I, think it is a violation of the fundamental principles of American democracy. Do deport people who've been our neighbors, whatever their legal status may be. To incarcerate and take off the street people without due process of law to put them in detention.

This is so un-Christian. It is so undemocratic. It violates the fundamental premise of the nation, and the premises that brought us to this country, which is in search of freedom and the absence of fear of the abuse of violence by the government.

I also think it's interesting the assault that is impacting a higher education directly, and, and posing a real threat to the fiscal sustainability of so many institutions, Not only because of the threats to public funding, but also because of just. Seemingly arbitrary assaults on immigration and international student visas and there's just assaults coming from all directions and it puts on top of what's already a very difficult role at this time, the college presidency, I think I'd be curious, your perspective, you know, how much more difficult do you think it has gotten on average, because the data on our show college presidents tend to stay less than five years, and that's obviously very disruptive to any strategic plan, to institutional continuity.

What was already a very hostile environment with public trust eroding in higher education, assault on the liberal arts, and obsession with sort of, short-term outcomes, you know, to earning potential and things like that, to now have this assault happening from the federal government. so anything that you share there in terms of what do you think is contributing in addition, you know, to that short tenure that we're seeing, which is in star contrast to the 50 years that you have served, admirably in your role.

Well, there's several causes. First of all, the assault on the American university by the Trump administration is completely unpatriotic. the American University has been the most competitive in the world, and if he wants to make America great, you don't tear apart one of its most competitive industries, which is higher education.

You don't undercut the conduct of science where we have been the leaders. So it's incomprehensible, in that sense. We were a destination point for international students. It was economically significant, not only for colleges, universities, but the towns and cities in which these universities reside in the Midwest and in the South, and in the Northeast and in California, and the big state universities as well.

So it is senseless, economically senseless. And culturally senseless. the fact is that America's preeminence in science in the 20th century and the 21st century is based on immigration. The second, assault is comes from how social media and the internet has worked out. It is a lightning speed opportunity for.

fanaticism, and for, the destruction of people's privacy and sense of safety. Anybody in a public role, whether you are a judge or a politician or a college president, is suddenly daily, hourly, the object of hate, right? Threats. Violence we have shown ourselves. The problem is not with Donald Trump.

The problem is with ourselves, who we are and the unfiltered hate and disinformation. The third thing is that process has eroded anybody's confidence in something called truth. The distinction between opinion and truth. Now, there are a lot of things we can't know the full truth about. But the inability to understand the distinction, for example, between certainty and probability, take the vaccines.

No vaccine was ever certainly uniformly, a hundred percent gonna be effective. Every vaccine had bad reactions to it. people died from the vaccine. That has always been the case. The real issue is what are the probabilities? Is the population more safe with vaccine or without? And there's no contest.

The facts are there, but the fact remains that people don't trust it. And we've created a situation that you cannot actually have a democracy if you don't agree about how you can determine the truth. Is it true that the earth is round or that the earth is flat? Well, there's a right answer. It's round.

It's not flat. It's not a matter of opinion. The fact that, H2O is water is a fact. That's the way we understand it. two and two equals four, not five So we have to have a, rules of the game, if you will, that we can agree. You may have all kinds of beliefs about things which you're entitled to have.

there are some things which we are not going to determine. Collectively, whether you believe in God or what kind of God you believe in, we have the freedom of religion. But we live in a time where no one is willing to give up their subjective convictions in the face of evidence. I think I'm able to be convinced by you, by evidence you have about something that I believe to be true.

Which I will now learn is wrong, and I'm willing to admit that. I haven't seen a presidential debate where one candidate said to the other, you know, you are right. I'm wrong. You have the right facts. I would vote for such a person. But instead, you have ignorance and prejudice dominating the way public policy is made, and rhetoric, which is basically.

Reduced to insults and the fact that people say, well, the liberal arts is not practical. there are no facts behind that. The liberal arts graduates have the greatest chance for good earnings and for be able to modulate their careers, you know, if they're in a world that moves from printed materials to.

Visual and digital materials, who can make that adjustment more easily? Who can learn new techniques, new methodologies, who can adapt? Having a good education broadly conceived is probably the best as opposed to a narrow vocational education. Yeah, and there is actually data that shows that after 10 years liberal arts graduates, I would earn their peers.

So that's, also proven. I am curious just at this moment, in this context that you just so articulately laid out, what role should colleges play in public life, especially as that trust in the liberal arts has eroded. As you look at other people who are in the college presidency who are likely struggling every day with the exact things that you described, how can they.

Face this moment and lead their institutions through what is hopefully not a long-term situation. so first, the universities have failed to respond collectively. The government was able to divide and conquer and that was a mistake All the elite universities should have.

The research universities banded together. And said we stand as one second. universities should not be governed by lawyers. life is not able to be reduced to a legal argument. Life is not all adversarial. one has to operate by principle and violence. Something a university cannot tolerate. and, the right of the individual, something the university has to support, the university has to be in that sense, fair and equitable.

At the same time, be able to give someone a bad grade, flung someone out, to exercise standards. So the, problem is that, currently universities are simply scared and they failed to make their case to the public. In our case, I have to say that. We run these 10 high schools in the public sector where young people can earn an AA degree by the time they finish the 12th grade in six major cities.

I just, I just yesterday presided over a commencement giving AA and BA degrees inside Fishkill Prison in the state of New York to prisoners who've earned their degrees, while being prisoners. We serve around the world and in the United States, students who don't normally have access to an education.

so that's the right thing to do. and colleges, especially the universities that have medical schools, the average citizen doesn't realize that the medical care they want and should have is derivative of these great institutions of biomedical research. The people living around Boston don't realize that the Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical School, Boston University, these places are the source of the quality of care that they get.

So universities have been very narrow-minded and arrogant in their communication with the body politic. They haven't developed a constituency in the voting public to say, these are treasured places. If you go to a small town. Let's say go to Northfield, Minnesota, where there are two colleges, Carlton and St.

Olas. The people of Northfield will be the most ardent defenders of those institutions ' cause they provide them their livelihood, their culture, their environment. And those institutions are known and are part of the community. Many of our big universities have been. Arrogantly insulated and have actually not, made the case using modern media, to the person who is the voter.

And therefore we have this nonsensical, arrogance against elites. On the one hand, we tolerate a nation where there are people who are multi-billionaires, richer than countries, and we don't complain about that. We don't complain about Elon Musk, but we complain about someone who has a PhD or is a doctor or is a scientist as being a snob and an elitist.

Well, elites are good for democracy. I want an elite doctor to treat me. I want an, elite dentist to treat me. I want people. Who know what they're doing. The same way as I want someone to win on my sports team the same way, you know, I want actually, to go to a show where the performer is really fantastic at what they do, where that performer, Taylor Swift or  Bruce Springsteen, or that performer is a great violinist or pianist.

So why is democracy hostile? Excellence. It shouldn't be. We've allowed that populist idea, to rise to power on the belief that people's anger at their own condition is the result of some kind of elite. Now, the universities have contributed unwittingly to that by failing to. Deliver services and communicate.

One of the great things,  that the, unexpected part of Trump's attack on the universities, the richer universities, has been to show that they're so dependent on federal support. Harvard may have an endowment of over $50 billion, but it can't be Harvard without government support. we're less dependent on the federal government than they are.

We have a very small endowment. So the idea that these institutions felt themselves as rich and entitled, has come home to roost. Do you think there's any truth to the, populous narrative that a higher education is promoting, far left ideology that leaves no space for conservative ideas?

Because from my perspective, that is the most. Mainstream idea that is leading to buy-in, that higher education is not living up to its mission, right? So, it's a very good question and the answer's pretty simple. First of all, most universities are involved in subject matters where left and right are irrelevant.

Whether you have a heart condition is not a left right situation. So it's just a misunderstanding of what the university is doing. 70% of its teaching and subject matter doesn't have a political bias in it. You know, how many people live in Texas? That's a demographic sociological question. It's not a left or right matter.

Now, as far as ideology in every age of history, there's been a dominant ideology. in 1950s, it was an anti-communist ideology. the fact that, some places, have, taken inappropriately the morally high ground to believe that, someone who doesn't agree with them shouldn't have a say.

I think this is wildly exaggerated. The other thing people don't realize is that very self-consciously liberal institutions. Have an uncanny habit of training the next generation of conservatives. Every generation wants to rebel against the previous generation. Look at all of the incredibly shocking conservatives that are graduates of the Yale Law School.

Supposedly a bastion of liberalism where they brought us Josh Hawley and JD Vance. I don't want to go down the whole list. and conservative Catholic, Christian, Jewish institutions that are very conservative have produced their share of radicals. So teaching and learning, we don't understand enough about it that it's not important what the faculty member says from the front of the classroom.

It's important How that faculty member teaches the student to think for themselves, A teacher who preaches will fail because young people are not stupid. as young adults. They don't wanna be indoctrinated. The public has some ridiculous idea that we have an enormous amount of influence on our students.

We actually don't. The only influence that we can have is to help them teach how to think, not what to think. So if you have some kind of Marxist professor, that might happen, right? I bet you most of the students that walk out of there are going to be financiers on Wall Street. So funny. Yeah. That's such a good, provocative perspective, and I'm glad, I got that out of you as well.

That is a fascinating reframe on what's happening right now, in the public narrative around American classrooms, right? The truth is that if you have surveyed American, which people have done American faculty members, in any decade, you'll find a consensus. because people of learning who, get PhDs and have to learn how the right arguments and look at evidence and study archives and make experiments, they're skeptical people and they're usually skeptical of a reigning orthodoxy.

So, Ronald Reagan became president in 1980 and conservatism has been on the rise since then. So it's no surprise that a skeptical community is gonna look at that with skepticism, turn it around. Who were the leading opponents of communism, let's say in Eastern Europe before the wall fell? Well, university members, in other words, so there's always going to be a tension being the universities and who's in power, and the demonization of the universities as a place in which left-wing ideology is, completely mistaken. And, it is not to say that many people have abused, the privilege of, what their task as teachers should be. One should teach, not only what one believes, but what one believes someone will learn from.

So let's go to Plato. We teach the Republic of Plato. Now, I think most of us who teach, it's a required text for our first year students don't share Plato's political views, but it's a wonderful text to learn how arguments are made. and How you can critique them and how you can interpret them and how you can have a different take the way you would, let's say in the famous film, Rashman, the same events are seen from different points of view.

That's the kind of thing you need to teach. Yes. Thees was, Such a delight to talk with you, and thank you for your generous perspective sharing and your ability to provide such organized thinking, not just on the higher ed presidency, but also this moment in time that we find ourselves in. And I think we really benefit from you being able to map what's going on over the 50 years that you've spent at Bart and beyond.

I cannot thank you enough for being here on this show and sharing with our listeners. it is my pleasure. And I thank you for your interest. You asked the question, you know, why are the college presidents of such short tenure? Yes. Because it is a job nobody should want. I never wanted the job. I fell into it at a time of my life where I didn't think long term.

I didn't say I'm gonna be here for 50 years, and so I was too ignorant. I didn't know what questions to ask. The most important thing in an education is teaching someone how to ask questions, to go further in what they know. So the reason they're such short tenure is 'cause the jobs are undoable and the people who hire them, are so frightened the boards that they hold them on a very tight leash, and the faculty are ambivalent about having leadership.

They're used to being in control. And so the person in those jobs is frequently given an impossible task. And now with the internet, especially in big places, their families, their private life Has been so breached and it no longer is a job that, feels entirely, pleasant or, safe.

So these are people who take these jobs on and they're set up for failure, not success. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think that's what's playing out in the data in terms of tenure is just shrinking so rapidly and what you're hearing from people who are leaving those positions or just opting out of them before they even get the chance to take roles like that.

 it.