An Act of War? Brandeis President Arthur Levine on Trump’s University Policy

[00:00] Andrew Keen: Hello. My name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States.

[00:23] Andrew Keen: Hello everyone. Back in September of last year, we had a show with the president of Brandeis University, Arthur Levine, and I asked Arthur whether the $320,000 college degree is really worth it. Arthur said that colleges like Brandeis have to adapt or become irrelevant. Back then, he was talking about his book—his co-authored book—The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future. And Arthur is back, literally and metaphorically. He's back in action as a co-author. His new book, written also with Scott Van Pelt, is From Upheaval to Action: What Works in Changing Higher Ed. And Arthur, I’m thrilled you're back on the show, talking to me from Boston as always. Arthur, congratulations on the new book.

[01:13] Arthur Levine: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you again.

[01:17] Andrew Keen: So Arthur, I was questioning, as you remember, last time you were on the show, whether that $320,000 college degree—it’s probably gone up since we last talked—is really worth it. And now you're focused, not so much on the upheaval, but the action; what works in changing Higher Ed. So why don't you get into it and tell me the real value in higher education, or at least what you've learned since the last time we talked.

[01:45] Arthur Levine: The thing I’ll tell you is what I told you last time, which is: You must think it's worth it because you're sending your kids to expensive schools.

[02:00] Andrew Keen: Well, and as I told you last time, I don't have much choice. And you know this; you've talked to lots of parents, you’re a parent yourself. What’s the choice? You can't say to your kids, "Well, I’m going to ruin your life because I'm not going to pay that $320,000 fee," even if you know it's mostly a waste of money. But what’s the alternative? Tell them not to go to college?

[02:22] Arthur Levine: If you really think it’s a waste, of course you’d have told them that, because you’re a good parent and you want to give them good advice. The reality is you know, and I know, that our kids need that education. They need that degree. But the other point that I’d probably make that’s really important: very few people pay that price. The reality is that at Brandeis, 65% to 70% of students get financial aid. Some students get merit aid. And at Brandeis, we have full need; we will give you whatever scholarship you need to be able to afford our tuition. We don’t want people graduating having taken out large loans.

[03:07] Andrew Keen: One of the problems—I’m not sure if we talked about this last time—is that parents, or people who pay for education (whether it's parents, grandparents, kids sometimes), they don't really know what other people are paying. So that's one of the most annoying things about this: some people pay the full whack, others don't, but no one quite knows and no one quite understands why some people pay X and why people pay Y. Is that one of the things that you address in From Upheaval to Action—making the tuition system more, not just perhaps... I mean, obviously you want to stop the keep-on increasing in fees, but making it more transparent so everyone understands why some pay X and others pay Y?

[03:52] Arthur Levine: Yes. We’re going to make an announcement later in the month explaining that we’re going to tell students, not how much financial aid they’re going to get; we’re going to tell them what they’re actually going to pay. We’re going to guarantee the price that we give them. They will submit the information we need to make that decision, and they will know immediately the price that they pay. The reality is there isn’t that much difference between students in the same circumstances, if any. Almost all of us are using some algorithm to figure out what students need to be able to pay for college, so that if students come with similar backgrounds, they get similar financial aid packages.

[04:41] Andrew Keen: But Arthur, again, I'm speaking to you from a parent’s point of view and a community of parents. Everyone knows that it’s not just simply algorithms. Some parents have clever accountants and the algorithms that or the forms that you have to fill out to determine income are so open, shall we say, to interpretation. If you’re self-employed, it’s quite different from if you have a more corporate job. So in terms of this new scheme you have for figuring out what works and transparency, is there going to be a more... should there be a change to how parental income or parental wealth is evaluated?

[05:22] Arthur Levine: We’ve done the best we can do to try to figure that out. We haven’t assumed people are lying to us, but we’ve asked for the documentation we need to be able to figure out what the situation is for each family in terms of the wealth they have. But our real goal: when Brandeis was formed in 1948, the reason was that people were being excluded from the most elite institutions in higher education. Jews were, women were, people of color were. And they opened up a university they said they wanted to be first-rate and be a home to those populations. So those have always been the people we've gone after.

[06:09] Andrew Keen: We’ve done some shows recently, Arthur, from law professors about whether or not universities should be biased or not. What you just presented, I guess, is a kind of ideology. You seem to indicate that one of the responsibilities of universities is to socially engineer, to give more opportunities to people who have less power, less opportunity. Is that what you're arguing, and is that what "action" should be in universities—to address injustice?

[06:40] Arthur Levine: If that’s what you heard me say, I misspoke. The reality is that what Brandeis said was just the opposite, and our policy is just the opposite. What we say is that we’ll admit students based on their academic ability and performance, regardless of religion, race, or gender.

[07:06] Andrew Keen: Arthur, in the six months since we've talked, it seems as if the current administration has continued its war on the university. Recently there was a very interesting piece by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker, "The Unmaking of the American University," which suggests that American universities' survival may depend on compliance with the government; they perhaps might have to start giving up some government money. What's been your experience at Brandeis, not so much in terms of Trump, but in terms of your relationship with the government and in terms of figuring out a future, a viable future for your institution? Should you still be relying on government money?

[07:54] Arthur Levine: The reason I'm stopping is I'm just trying to think of what I think. Okay. We have to rely upon government money. And there are two kinds of money we rely upon: one is money for research, and the other is financial aid. What I suspect is that financial aid will not be materially affected, though there've been some changes in terms of support for graduate education. And in terms of grants and other kinds of research activities, one of the things that’s happened is Congress has had an inclination to restore that money. And I think that makes sense because our economic development depends upon that. And it’s not as if if we don't do it, nobody else is going to do it. What it’ll do is enable other countries to leap ahead of us if they’re doing the research and we’re not doing the research. So yes, I think universities need to diversify their sources; we can’t allow this to happen to us again. Although since World War II—80 years—nothing like this has ever happened before, and I trust nothing like this will happen again.

[09:07] Andrew Keen: You said "we can't allow something like this to happen to us again." I mean, some universities have been singled out: Harvard up the road from you, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia. Can one collectively suggest that the current administration has kind of gone to war with the American university?

[09:28] Arthur Levine: I can say "going to war" is a strict term, is a very restrictive term. What I can say with all confidence is that this administration has been negative about higher education. They put all kinds of controls and regulations on higher education, largely by executive order, and had another nation done this, we would regard this as an act of war.

[10:04] Andrew Keen: Wow. So you come back to my "war" word; I had meant it metaphorically, you might be suggesting it's literal. Over the last six months, of course, one of the other huge stories when it comes to the university is the rapid development of AI. It seems to be revolutionizing every aspect of our economy, and in particular when it comes to education. More and more debate about whether it's signaling or symbolizing the end of the university or the beginning. In your new book, From Upheaval to Action: What Works in Changing Higher Ed, what do you say, Arthur, about AI? Is it the problem or the solution, or both?

[10:48] Arthur Levine: It’s both. What happens is every time we have a new technology, it brings with us all kinds of ills. So that when we looked at the Industrial Revolution, what it did was cause an income redistribution. What it did was create all kinds of abuses in terms of working conditions and so on and so forth. What we needed were new sets of regulations in order to govern it, in order to provide guardrails on its use and its non-use. Let's go back to AI. AI will need those guardrails. But what I think about is we’ve always been afraid of new technologies. The Luddites are the most famous group; they were deeply, deeply chagrined at the creation of factories. They thought "we’re going to lose our livelihood, we’re going to lose craft, we’re going to lose artisanship," and they blew up factories. So Britain responded by hanging them, and yet the rebellion continued. Three things ended the rebellion: the first was there were too many factories to blow up; the second thing was it reduced the price of consumer goods; and the third thing was it hired artisans and crafts people to do the jobs of factories, but it paid better than being an artisan and crafts person. So what I’d say about this is nobody knows the impact that AI is going to have. However, we’ve been through these kinds of frights. AI offers us all kinds of things at universities: it offers us the chance to bring into our classroom things we’ve never had before. We can create 5th century Athens and have students walk through it. We can bring in people from the French Revolution, talk about what they were doing. All of that is possible. What we can also do is we can help instructors in terms of doing the rudimentary and the boring parts of their jobs, so they can spend more time with students, spend more time on research. There are clear, clear advantages in AI. We just need guardrails.

[13:06] Andrew Keen: And are those "guidrails" or "guardrails," Arthur?

[13:10] Arthur Levine: Oh, guardrails.

[13:12] Andrew Keen: Guardrails from who? Government, tech companies, yourselves?

[13:16] Arthur Levine: It's guardrails from the abuses that AI can cause.

[13:21] Andrew Keen: It’s interesting you brought up the Luddites and... I'm not sure I agree with you when you say that one reason why we got beyond the Luddite rebellion is because the—and I'm quoting you here—the "craftsmen and the artisans," they may have lost their jobs making textiles in their cottages, but they got better paid work in the factories. I'm not sure that was entirely true. In fact, I think most historians of the early Industrial Revolution would say that the first jobs in factories were pretty awful, both in terms of the working conditions and the pay. But that’s another issue.

[13:58] Arthur Levine: Well, wait, wait, wait. I want to go to that one, though. I don't want to let that drop. I've written about the Luddites, I've done research about the Luddites and the kinds of jobs they got. Factory jobs were abysmal; they were terrible. But artisans didn't make a lot of money, and they did better in the factories than they had been doing. There are several books that document that, several studies that document that.

[14:27] Andrew Keen: Arthur, let’s extend the metaphor then—you and I will agree to disagree on that one. Are university faculty the equivalent—pre-AI faculty—are they the equivalent of the craftsmen and artisans of the pre-industrial age? Are they going to have to adapt and understand? Maybe they’re not quite having to go to work in a factory, but the very nature of their work and their identities is going to have to dramatically change in the age of AI?

[15:00] Arthur Levine: Their work is going to change. I can’t tell you how much it’s going to change. What AI will do is take the routine parts of everybody's job and replace them, so that what we have in terms of faculty is we have the capacity to unleash their talents. Will the job be different? Yes, the job will be different. All of our lives will be different. New jobs will be created as a result of AI, but I don't know what those are yet. And anybody who tells you they do is making it up.

[15:39] Andrew Keen: When we go back to that $320,000 bill for sending our kids to college, one reason why it's so high is because we're also paying bureaucrats—high-level ones, I guess, like you—but more problematically mid-level bureaucrats, a lot of administration that, again from the outside, is hard to make sense of or sometimes justify. You've noted that AI can change everyone's jobs, not just faculty. Can AI reform the bloat, the bureaucratic bloat in the university so that these mid-level people, paper pushers, will be replaced by machines, and that might bring the price of education down, make it more efficient, more affordable?

[16:26] Arthur Levine: I’m going to disagree with your use of the word "bloat," but you probably expected me to do that. In any case, what I’d say is I can’t speak for every university, but I can tell you that we’re not bloated. We’ve gone through and we’ve looked at this position by position in terms of what’s necessary to keep us afloat and do the job we need to do. But the answer to your question is: absolutely. AI is going to replace all kinds of jobs. Those things that are routine will be replaced. Those routine parts of even lawyers' jobs, doctors' jobs, faculty jobs are going to be eliminated and done by AI. Yes, it’ll change the workforce.

[17:15] Andrew Keen: Arthur, you’ve noted that AI can free up faculty to do their good stuff, to focus on what they love doing, what they're best at, rather than boring bureaucratic stuff. But you noted earlier that AI can create, I don't know, 5th century Greek philosophers. It can do stuff that now seems like magic to us. What's the value of an academic? I mean, AI can create Robert Reich, it can create Stephen Gould, it can create Charles Darwin. So where's the value in an academic?

[17:51] Arthur Levine: And what I can tell you right now is the things that leap out—I can't tell you where it's all going to end up—we still need the minds of researchers to do the research that is essential for the future of the country. We’re still going to need faculty to engage in teaching and apprenticeships with students; all that’s going to be essential. And part of it is that yeah, we can get Robert Reich and we can get Einstein and we can get Archimedes, but they've done the work they've done. And we need people who can keep moving us forward. The other thing is I don't know how many people have ever taken an AI as their role model, but I think it's also important to have models that kids can follow. Yes, I suspect if we come back in 25 years, the job of faculty member will have evolved.

[18:54] Andrew Keen: Arthur, we live in pessimistic cultural times—again, you don't need me to tell you that—lots of complaints, there always seems to be complaints about the crisis of the university, and of intellectual standards, and of thinking, and of the arts in America. But there's a particular crisis these days with AI. Lots of complaints—I've got lots of friends who are still academics—they complain endlessly that their kids don't read, they're not capable of reading. I even had one interesting interaction with a friend of mine who teaches at UC Berkeley told me that a student came to him and said, "Look, I don't want to read books anymore. I don't need to. I can use AI," because he'd told them that they have to do the reading for his class, and the student had the cheek, or maybe the intelligence, to go to him and say, "Look, why would I need to do the reading when I have an AI able to do that?" How is the AI revolution going to change being a student? Will they still need to read? Should they embrace AI? There seems to be a kind of a love-hate relationship again within it in the university; lots of fears that kids are using it endlessly so that there's a kind of a plague of cheating. What's your sense of the role of this new technology in the university for the student?

[20:11] Arthur Levine: In terms of the student who came and said "I don't want to read, I have AI," that’s a failure of education. Reading is an essential skill, it's going to remain an essential skill. And the fact of the matter is reading's one of the ways in which we—what's the expression we'd use?—in which we keep knowledge where it needs to be. You can't ask questions if you don't know what question to ask, and that's one of the things that we get by reading. What education should have taught this student is why reading is essential. It's not an anachronistic skill, it's going to be critical now, it's going to be critical. When your AI talks to you, or is your AI going to write to you? I guess I need to tell this story. Before I came to Brandeis, I was finishing a chapter comparing the Spanish flu and COVID on college campuses. And I asked AI for a whole bunch of data and sources, and it gave it to me. And as I headed off, I handed off the manuscript to Scott and said, "Scott, check out all this data. We can't say that our source was ChatGPT." Scott reported back to me and said half the data was wrong, and the sources they gave were hallucinations. Maybe someday AI will be much better than it is now; it seems quite likely. But it’s a good thing that Scott and I could read.

[21:56] Andrew Keen: When it comes to writing, should students be allowed to—and I use this word again carefully, "allowed," I'm not sure how you not allow it—should students be allowed when they're writing their college papers, their essays, their research to use ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini?

[22:15] Arthur Levine: Yeah. I mean, we are just learning about how to use this stuff. I think writing is a muscle, and you only train... you have to train muscles, you have to lift weights. And so the only way to teach people to write is by writing. Should they be allowed to use AI? There are ways in which we can use AI to get facts, there are ways in which we can use AI to get data; those aren't bad things. But we can't allow students now to use it for writing. We have to provide assignments; maybe we'll switch to in-class assignments. But it's very, very important that we teach students to write.

[23:05] Andrew Keen: When it comes to professions, you mentioned the craftsmen and the artisans that were disrupted by the Industrial Revolution, the hand workers who went to work in factories, the end of artisanal work. A lot of people are suggesting that the equivalent of those artisans in the 2020s are lawyers and engineers and doctors—the people who traditionally went to university to acquire certain knowledge skills and then to take those knowledge skills out into the world and practice them. In terms of envisioning the future of the university in our AI age, Arthur, are there still going to be, should you be training, should you be focusing in the university on training lawyers and engineers and doctors, or do you need to think in terms of new careers, new identities in our AI age?

[23:59] Arthur Levine: That’s a wonderful question. The reality is, at least in the foreseeable future, AI will not take the entire job of a surgeon or other kind of doctor, but it'll take all the routine parts of their job. Nonetheless, we're not yet at the point at which I want an AI surgeon. We're not at the point at which I want an AI lawyer to defend me in the courtroom. We still need those creative parts, we still need the judgment, we still need the ethics that come with professions. But here's something else we're going to need. Traditionally education, colleges, universities has been prospective. So we give you four years of stuff, two years of stuff, because we think you're going to need that to succeed with your life. What's going to happen is we're going to have AI and changes that are dramatic throughout your lives. So what students are going to do is come back to university or other provider and they're going to say, "I want education immediately. I want education now." And they're going to say, "I need to reskill, I need to upskill, I need to new skill, and I want it by next Thursday." Universities are going to be increasingly in the business of keeping up with trends, in changes in the real world, and the students are going to turn to them for that. If they can't provide it, students will find other places to go. It’s a choice on the part of universities. I gave a speech in Europe—oh gee, it must have been two years ago—at one of the top technical universities.

[25:52] Andrew Keen: Europe's a big place, Arthur. Where about?

[25:55] Arthur Levine: Switzerland. Okay. And we talked about... I told them continuing education was essential. And they concluded they didn't want to do it. Well, if they choose not to do it, somebody else will. Maybe it'll be another university, maybe it'll be Coursera. But people are going to need education throughout their lives. Just-in-time education.

[26:24] Andrew Keen: Just in time. In terms of the time since we've last spoken—in the last six months, Arthur—again, don't need me to tell you this, one of the big stories in the United States is the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Jeffrey Epstein seems to have had a huge success, shall we say, infiltrating the American university. I know you didn't know him, but he was close to the president of Harvard, he's brought him down; close to other presidents at other leading universities. He was a man with a lot of money, and he threw around that money and power, as you know, in a very vulgar kind of way. We've done a number of shows on the Epstein scandal and some of my guests have suggested, and I tend to agree with them, that the scandal itself more broadly reflects a kind of ethical crisis in the American elite. It doesn't mean that everyone is a child molester, doesn't mean that everyone took Epstein's money, but it speaks to a kind of moral rottenness that seems to have affected, shall we say, the technocratic, scientific, academic, intellectual elites on the coast where you are on the East Coast, where I am on the West Coast. I’m not sure if you agree with that or not, but in terms of the future of the university, do you think that universities should be putting more of a priority, more investment, more focus on an ethical education to make sure that the American elites of the future won't be corrupted by a criminal like Jeffrey Epstein?

[27:54] Arthur Levine: The stories have been quite vivid, there’ve been a lot of them, but there are a lot of people involved in academia; they're not only on the coasts, they're in the middle of the country, they're in Florida, they're in Texas. What’s really of note is not that the enterprise is rotten; the fact of the matter is we’re talking about a very small number of people who succumbed to him. The danger, the real danger is that we have people in prominent positions who believe they're above moral standards, who believe they can do anything without criticism, without getting caught. It's wrong, it's immoral. I think that for... but I'll tell you something equally immoral in my mind. I once read an interview with a Manhattan Project scientist, and he was asked if he felt guilty for creating the bomb. And he said, "No, I feel as much guilt as a tin can maker should feel when a can is thrown through a window." And I thought to myself, whether or not he felt guilt, he had to understand the consequences of what he did. It's not the same as throwing a tin can through a window. Sleeping with underage women is not the same as having relationships with adults. Having relationships with adults if you're married is wrong. Yes, everything that we teach in universities ought to come with the equivalent of the label that's on a bottle of medicine: it ought to tell how to use it and the ways in which it can be misused, so the people who possess that knowledge don't do that.

[29:56] Andrew Keen: I'm not sure you really answered my question. It was more about: should everyone who goes to a university like Brandeis or Harvard or Bard or any, Columbia or Princeton or UC Berkeley or Stanford, should they all have to take introductory ethics classes? Should there be a core, shall we say, ethical or philosophical series of introduction classes? Some universities offer them, some are more traditional than others. But it seems as if in our increasingly technical university—maybe AI will change that—people can avoid classes on ethics, and maybe that reflects the weakness of the American elite and—and I take your point, it's not true of everyone—but this stain on the American elite, the bad smell around the American elite after the Epstein scandal.

[30:52] Arthur Levine: And again, we're talking about a very small number of people. Let's talk about universities. I think every subject that we teach, ethics ought to be part of. I don't think it ought to be one course: "Gee, take this ethics course and then spend the next four years doing whatever you want to do." I think when we teach students anything, the ethics of doing anything ought to be part of that. It's essential. Universities are built on ethical principles. And it's essential that the people who graduate from our universities are imbued with those ethical principles. And I think we've also had a scandal in Texas about a congressman who had an affair with one of his staffers and she committed suicide. That doesn't mean that most congressmen do that. And with Epstein, it doesn't mean that most academics do that. I think most institutions have procedures for people who engage in immoral behavior. And I think we teach it in the majority of our courses, the moral principles that need to underlie it. You gotta ask yourself why did Larry Summers resign? The reason he resigned is because he was under pressure at Harvard. His behavior was wrong. We're seeing people who are resigning because of this. And they're resigning because they don't want to face the music. And they would have.

[32:41] Andrew Keen: Maybe I should have revised the question, Arthur. I asked whether university undergraduates should take classes in ethics. Maybe given the demands of university presidents—again, you know this better than I do—part of your job, maybe most of your job is going out and raising money. Whether it's Larry Summers at Harvard or Leon Botstein at Bard or other university presidents in their association with Epstein, clearly they appeared at least from the outside to be morally compromised. Should university presidents have to take classes on ethics before becoming president?

[33:23] Arthur Levine: My hope would be that people who come to these kinds of positions have shown a history of ethical behavior. But what I’d say most about this is, let's talk about Leon Botstein. One of the things about Epstein is for a long time people didn't know what he was doing. Okay.

[33:43] Andrew Keen: They claim they didn't know what he was doing. Anyway, go on.

[33:46] Arthur Levine: Well, I know I didn't know what he was doing. I think most of the public didn't know what he was doing. I think people on the inside may have known what he was doing. But just because he was doing it, he didn't announce it to the world. If I were Leon Botstein and I was at Bard and I had this wealthy New York financier—you bet I'd have approached him. Until I knew that what he was doing was wrong. Until I knew the kind of behavior he was engaging in, and then I would have cut it off. There's nothing wrong. There are people whose money I haven't taken because I didn't want to be associated with them. And my job, I'm guessing about a third of it is fundraising, and that's only because we're in a capital campaign.

[34:39] Andrew Keen: Yeah, and I'm sympathetic also to Leon. He's been on the show and I find him actually personally a delightful man, and he's obviously key to Bard. I mean, most presidents are important, but he seems particularly important.

[34:52] Arthur Levine: He saved it.

[34:53] Andrew Keen: So moving on, the other of course huge story recently—over the last six months or actually year since Trump took office again—is academic freedom. What do you say in From Upheaval to Action about freedom of speech on campus, what should and shouldn't be said? It seemed to be tearing apart some campuses, Columbia in particular comes to mind, Arthur.

[35:19] Arthur Levine: What I... when I came to Brandeis, what I said was I believe in neutrality. Universities should not be taking stances on political issues. And what I think is I don't even know what it means for a university to take a stance on a political issue. Does it mean the board thinks that? The president thinks that? The faculty thinks that? The students think that? Everybody thinks that? I do not know what it means and I think it's deleterious. What I want is a forum in which any opinion can be expressed. And that for me is critical for universities. Universities have the freedom—interestingly, we call it academic freedom, but it has two components: there's Lehrfreiheit, which is teacher's freedom, and there's Lernfreiheit, which is students' freedoms. We need environments in which opinions can be expressed and debated civilly.

[36:26] Andrew Keen: One area of particular sensitivity is criticism about Israel and its association with antisemitism. Given that Brandeis—and correct me if I'm wrong—I'm not going to say it's a Jewish university, but it has strong associations with the Jewish community, it was founded by Jews, do you think that in your experience at Brandeis and in this incredibly controversial subject that criticism of Israel is a form of antisemitism, and that any student, for example, who demonstrates against American involvement with Israel, support for Israel, association with Israel currently perhaps in the war with Iran, is behaving in an antisemitic way?

[37:16] Arthur Levine: No. What I think is this: I think that Israel is a nation, it's not a religion. That nations sometimes do very, very bad things, and I can't support them under those circumstances.

[37:37] Andrew Keen: Arthur, what about DEI? Should universities be free to, shall we say, concentrate on communities that for historical reasons perhaps they've been associated with? For example, should Brandeis be free to bring in more Jews than non-Jews because you've always been associated with the Jewish community, or should you be color, religion, gender blind in your determination of who you allow into the university and who you don't allow in?

[38:11] Arthur Levine: I told you earlier that we are gender blind. We are religiously blind. We are racially blind. We are looking for students who meet the academic criteria to succeed at Brandeis. So no. And let me talk about DEI for a moment. In this new book, which I finished before I came to Brandeis, I recommended getting rid of DEI. And what I said was DEI has become a label that has little transparent meaning and it's become a target for the left and the right. Get rid of the term; it doesn't serve whatever you want. And I suggested based upon my experience working with—I worked with seven states on what people might call a DEI project—I wanted to bring underrepresented populations to universities to become teachers and teach in high-need schools, and for the universities to change their programs. In one state, in every state, I went to the Democrats and I told them, "You know something, this is a program about equity, opportunity, and fairness." I went to the Republicans and told them the same program would enable economic development and workforce development as well, that we needed it for economic reasons. Both were true. But one argument was more cogent with one group and one was more cogent with the other group. I suggested in this book: drop DEI, let's say what we want is full access to higher education by those who can benefit from it; what we want to do is support them once they come to college, and we want to do is retain them to graduation. I can't imagine a Democrat or Republican opposing that. In the state I described, my greatest champion—greatest champion—was the Republican head of the Senate Finance Committee.

[40:27] Andrew Keen: Arthur, finally, you're arguing I guess From Upheaval to Action: What Works in Changing Higher Ed, you’re arguing that DEI doesn't work. Finally, what else doesn't work? We know what does work; you've talked about innovation, you've talked about embracing technology, you've talked about perhaps allowing faculty and bureaucracy to do what they're best at. What else are you arguing in this book doesn't work that perhaps we should be aware of?

[41:00] Arthur Levine: The thing that works least well is not changing. When the country moves from a national analog industrial economy to a global digital knowledge economy, the university we need for that new world and the things it needs to teach are not the same. Henry Adams—so here's a guy whose grandfather, great-grandfather was president of the United States, his grandfather was president of the United States, he's a historian, he's a journalist—he goes to Harvard in 1850. And he says, "You know something, I received an 18th century education to prepare me for a world plunging into the 20th century." Harvard didn't intend to give him an education that was 200 years behind the times. The simple reality is that sometimes the world changes quickly and it occurs behind our backs. We can't let that happen. The worst mistake institutions can make right now is doing what they've always done in a new environment and not expecting the same results.

[42:25] Andrew Keen: Wise words from Arthur Levine, the co-author of From Upheaval to Action: What Works in Changing Higher Ed. What we need, Arthur is saying, is 21st century education at the 21st century university. Arthur, as always, a real pleasure and honor to have you on the show and I appreciate you addressing questions which you probably didn't want to hear. Thank you so much.

[42:52] Arthur Levine: I really enjoyed being with you, both times. Thank you.

[42:58] Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I'd be very curious as to your comments as to what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.