transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gabfest. April 23rd, 2026, Trump and the Iranians Deserve Each Other edition. I'm David Plotz of CityCast here in Washington, DC about to go on vacation. Can't wait.

Speaker 2:
[00:26] I didn't know that. Oh yeah, I guess I did know that. Right, that's why you're not gonna be here.

Speaker 1:
[00:31] That's why I won't be here next week. That is Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine and Yale University Law School from New Haven, Connecticut. Howdy, Emily.

Speaker 2:
[00:39] Hey, good morning.

Speaker 1:
[00:41] And from maybe New York City. Yeah, it looks like New York City.

Speaker 3:
[00:45] Yeah, finally back.

Speaker 1:
[00:46] John Dickerson. John, I saw on Publishers Weekly that you signed a new book deal. The trilogy Adult Fantasy Romance set in 19th century Washington. I saw it described as, think A Court of Thorn and Roses meets Henry Adams' Democracy. Love the titles. Love the titles. The Cabinet of Secrets, A Parliament of Whispers and The Velvet Republic will be the final work in the trilogy. I think that's gonna be great, John. I read the opening chapters of the Cabinet of Secrets, and I personally will never think of Francis Folsom Cleveland in the same way, or of you, because I did not know you knew so much about corsets. But I guess you do. I imagine you and Ann have a rich life that I don't really know about based on your adult fantasy.

Speaker 3:
[01:35] Corsets and hoop skirts. Yes. These are so inspired, David. I'm not sure I want to do anything more than whatever it is I'm doing now, because I don't want to rob you of coming up with more things for me to do. Because if I actually get an actual real job, then we will end this.

Speaker 1:
[01:56] I'm reaching the end myself.

Speaker 2:
[01:58] Even Justice Breyer eventually retired, so that David would sit there and be like Breyer.

Speaker 1:
[02:03] Which will happen first? John will linger longer without a job, or Justice Breyer will linger on without retiring.

Speaker 2:
[02:09] No, we should go back and see how long that took.

Speaker 1:
[02:12] Oh my God. Somebody has to stop me at some point.

Speaker 3:
[02:17] No, no, it's good for everyone. People now raise this to me, who have been regular listeners of the show, are delighted to hear what you come up with every week.

Speaker 1:
[02:28] This week on The Gabfest, for reals. The Iran war that's not quite a war continues to exist in a strange limbo. Then what is going on with Kash Patel? Why is the FBI chief suing The Atlantic? And then we'll talk to Beverly Gage of Yale about the controversial new report that she authored or co-authored on the state of higher education. Plus, we will have cocktail chatter. So it's Groundhog Day in the Strait of Hormuz. JD Vance may or may not be going to negotiations in Pakistan. Those negotiations may or may not happen. The ceasefire seems to continue in the Iran-U.S. war. But Trump also has occasionally vowed to obliterate Iran if they don't get to a negotiated peace again. Iran again has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz after it appeared to be open. So we have this kind of on again, off again, on again, off. They're a couple locked in a very toxic, unproductive and repetitive relationship to parties that don't trust each other. And yet, they have managed to stall out the world economy because they have no idea either side seems to have no idea how to get what they want. Or at least maybe they know how to get what they want, but they're certainly not getting it. So, John, what is going on in that region right now? Just sort of is there a war? Is there not a war? Is the Strait of Hormuz open? Is it not open? Are there negotiations? Is there not negotiation?

Speaker 3:
[03:57] It's Schrodinger's Strait. It's both open and closed at the same time. Well, I guess there are a series of challenges here. One, you've got the administration says, and there's some reporting, great reporting in The Economist about this, that the Iranian side, on the one hand, the fact that they were able to send a group of people to negotiate with JD Vance and the other members of the administration, the president's son-in-law and Steve Whitcock was a good sign because previous week, before that, it was not clear who was running the show exactly in Iran. But it's still not clear. The Economist has this great scene about the fact that there were 80 Iranians and the Pakistani interlocutors spent a lot of their time adjudicating disputes within the Iranian delegation before the disputes could then get hashed out with the Americans. So the president has succeeded in regime change to the extent that he may have created a more chaotic and hardline mess on the other side, which obviously was not his intent. But that's a problem. So the president keeps trying to shape the table by saying, we're going to get a deal, they really want a deal, we're dealing with reasonable people. And then suddenly saying, well, they don't really know, you know, they've got a bifurcated leadership and we're not going to obliterate them and the bombs aren't going to start falling. There's reporting from Axios and others that he's basically bored with this war. It is clear from the Wall Street Journal reporting and the New York Times reporting about this that the president thought that this was going to be a fast war along the lines of Venezuela. He was told it wouldn't be because all wars are not fast. All attempts to make warfare easy will end in a tragedy, Sherman said, and so now he's he's stuck. And the problem is that this asymmetric warfare you can knock out the Iranian Navy, but as long as they still can drop mines and the Pentagon reported on Wednesday, it'll take six months to clear the mines. Or as long as they can throw up a drone and hit a ship, or they've now even tried to board some ships, that will keep traffic through the street. Only one ship made it through on Tuesday. That'll keep traffic down to nothing and keep the world economy clotted up. And no matter how many bombs you have, that's hard to break through. And so that's the reason we're at this stalemate.

Speaker 1:
[06:23] So Emily, Trump keeps insisting and the administration keeps insisting that any deal that is done with the Iranians must be better than the Obama nuclear deal of 2015. What does that mean? And what elements would need to be part of it for that to be true?

Speaker 2:
[06:38] John, would you like to speak? Because you seem like you might have a thing to say.

Speaker 3:
[06:41] Well, it's really complicated and interesting. Because what does better mean? OK, so on the one hand, better can mean, you know, the JCPOA said that enrichment levels would be at like 3.67 percent. OK, that's for this uranium. Now, a better deal would be maybe no enrichment at all, zero enrichment. Iran must get all of its existing stockpiles. They got to go away. Well, first of all, is that realistic? Are they going to do that? And there were some previous things being discussed before this war about taking the enriched uranium to like a third island, giving it to another country. But the question is then once if you got that, how do you enforce that? OK, in the JCPOA, you had a massive coalition that was agreed on enforcing these rules with the Iranians. But the US has gone alone here. And so, you get down to zero enrichment, who's going to be the enforcer if they break those rules? So, it might be better on paper. Zero enforcement sounds good. But strategically, it might be more unstable. That's just one thing. There's also the question of it to be better would be to address the support for proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas or getting rid of the bristling missile systems that they have and having a much more limited thing. But then, when you think about the calculation, OK, there's better on paper. But then think of a cost, right? So maybe it's a little bit better than the JCPOA, and that's not a guarantee. But at what cost? In lives, in the global economy, in all of the wasted effort to deal with this, and also in the mindset change that has now resulted from the fact that the US has done this. In terms of the, and particularly the United States, the mindset change in Iran, which now thinks, even though it always did, in existential terms because a US president has said he's going to break out their civilization. Those are all costs that make this new deal more expensive when you're trying to do this calculation about is it better or worse than the baseline, which was the JCPOA that Trump got out of back in his first term.

Speaker 2:
[08:47] I mean, that is such a great outline of the challenges, John. I feel like there's another very cynical way to look at it, and it's my way of looking at it, which is that it's not about what the actual provisions are. It's just about whether President Trump can say it's better. That's what we're going for. This is just 100 percent performance in theatrics, and it doesn't really matter as long as he can make that claim. It doesn't even really matter if it's an implausible claim, right? Because he has made so many implausible claims, leadership change, the war is over. He just needs some face-saving way to get out of this, and the Iranians also need some way to get out of this. But I feel like their goals are different because they are willing to inflict long-term pain on their own people, as long as they feel like they can endure and get to the other side. And so that just is always the problem here. It's this short-term, quick-win calculus of the superpower versus the attrition strategy of the actual affected country here. And we could have a stalemate for a long time because those things are at odds.

Speaker 3:
[09:56] Well said. I would recommend everyone to Peace and Foreign Affairs by Dominic Tierney. And he makes the case basically that the other person who gets a vote in whether this is a win or not are the American people. And the American people have a concept of what a win looks like. Donald Trump has been claiming since March 7th that America has won, that this is over, that victory is at hand. Well, it's now, we're recording on the 23rd. So he's been claiming, when you claim victory and then people don't feel it, there's a gap. And it reminds me very much like his larger political problem, which is he says, you know, there is no affordability crisis. Inflation has gone down. You're all fine. People don't believe it. His numbers on the economy are now as low as they ever have been. I think his approval on the economy is 30%. And this war is much the same way. And I'm just now grafting from Dominic Tierney's piece, which is much more, goes through the whole argument about where and why and how Americans have certain expectations of what a victory looks like, particularly in a war that they had no interest in being a part of. So Donald Trump can claim, as you just rightly say, you can claim victory this, victory that, we've won. People aren't buying it. And so not only is that bad on its own terms, not only does that give the Iranians a propaganda win, but it also, as a political matter, multiplies the president's existing problem, is that he goes out and says a bunch of things that people in their bones don't feel.

Speaker 1:
[11:19] Well, actually, I think there's a, so you've named three parties, Iran, the president, the American people. I would say there's now a fourth party that has largely been absent from this entire process, which is the rest of the world. And so the rest of the world is now feeling this economic squeeze in a very profound way. I think there was a sense like, well, there'll be a temporary spike in energy costs, and then ancillary things like fertilizer will go along with that. But now, truly, across Asia and Africa, even in Europe, there's a massive pressure on the economy and on prices because the inputs, the necessary inputs are now vastly more expensive because 20% of transit, 20% of the energy economy is shut down. And the rest of the world, I think, wanted nothing to do with Trump's war, but now they're all bearing the cost. And I do think one thing we might see, although it's unclear how much effect this would have on Trump, we might see the rest of the world, either Europe, ganging together or the Gulf States or China playing a more active role, trying to craft a solution, even though Trump and the Iranians don't, because it's actually a much more urgent problem for everybody else in the world than it is for Americans.

Speaker 3:
[12:38] Lufthansa said they're cutting 20,000 flights to save fuel. Ryan Airlines says that they may run out of fuel by May, and American Airlines just lowered its earnings target by $4 billion to adjust for these fuel costs. So that is exactly what you say, David. Also, one other thing I found very interesting was the former head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger was on the Economist Podcast, and he basically says, I regret coming to this conclusion, but the US underestimated this job. And about two weeks ago, the Iranians gained the initiative. That for me represents the global, basically global view of where the US is here. And so again, to back to Emily's point, the US, the president can say we're winning, but not if the experts in the other countries are like, no, they've shut down the Strait of Hormuz and you're not able to do anything about it, you're not winning.

Speaker 2:
[13:30] Well, that's one way to think about this is that before the war, the Iranians had their nuclear stockpile as their leverage. Now, they have another piece of leverage, which is control over the Strait of Hormuz and they have shown how powerful and important that is to the world economy and until the very long-term project of other countries building pipelines to go around it, which is like a huge will take forever endeavor, they have gained power in a sense, because they've shown what it means to shut down the Strait. What do you guys think about these upcoming questions for Congress? The War Powers Act 60-day deadline, we're going to hit that on May 1st. Whether Congress acts or not, there's going to be a sense that they didn't, if they don't impose that deadline in some way. Then there's this massive budget increase for military spending that the Trump administration is asking for. It seems like Congress, while the Republican majority has preferred to just defer to Trump, is going to be facing these moments where they have to say something.

Speaker 3:
[14:32] Yeah. I have no idea how that's going to play out on the War Powers Act. I really just have no idea. One thing that intrigued me about the request, and that has to get through Congress, and there are also really interesting ways that they're splitting it between what's mandatory and therefore goes through a less rigorous annual appropriations process and what isn't. But the uptick in spending on drones, when you see another sort of implicit way to see the argument the Iranians are doing much better than expected, or in fact are winning in a sense, is the amount of money that is now being asked for in this budget request for drones. They are asking for $75 billion in drone technology, and that includes one particular area, this thing called the Defense Autonomous Working Group. In the last appropriation got 225 million. In this one, the request is for 54 billion. I mean, one thing we are watching here is the total, we already seen it a little bit in Ukraine, we are seeing a total rewiring of the way war is fought.

Speaker 1:
[15:39] Right. There was a great, I think it was in the Times, Emily, a great sort of analysis of the asymmetry of the drone war, and where you look at the cost of an Iranian offensive drone versus the defensive weaponry that the United States has to deter that drone, and you just get the sense, like, oh my god, this is an incredibly bad set of transactions for us. There's a $35,000 drone, and it's going to cost us minimum $100,000 to shoot it down. Like, that's the cheap version, and then it could be up to millions or tens of millions of dollars to shoot that drone down. It just makes you think there has to be a complete change in what the military is, and it's very hard for the United States to do that.

Speaker 3:
[16:24] I can't let this week pass without this exciting thing that Donald Trump said on CNBC, which is sort of, you know, he's been saying that America has won in Iran since early March, and that isn't working. So he decided to say that he could win other wars in the past easily. So he on CNBC, he said, I would have won Vietnam very quickly. If I were president, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time. This, this, I mean, I know he says crazy things, but this is particularly for somebody who, you know, took measures to get out of the Vietnam draft, which is a little bit of a side thing. But like to say that he wanted would have won Vietnam easily in the face of what's happening in Iran and in face of what he said about the war in Ukraine. This is unhooked. This is farther out there than Artemis flew. It is unhooked from reality and the entire, and yet this entire shooting match is in his hands.

Speaker 1:
[17:22] The Atlantic's Sarah Fitzpatrick published a damning article, the FBI Director's MIA, alleging that Kash Patel has been frequently intoxicated in working situations, has been unavailable for early morning meetings because he's hung over, parties hard, has been unreachable, travels for pleasure but pretends it's work, erratically available at the office, and is also potentially on the verge of being fired. That article prompted a $250 million defamation suit against the Atlantic by Kash Patel. And it also came news that the next day that the FBI had investigated a New York Times reporter and thought about pursuing criminal stalking charges against that reporter just because she had written an article about how Patel was using government resources in unseemly ways to help his country singer girlfriend, a profile of the country singer girlfriend. And they were seeing, like, oh, is it stalking to report on Kash Patel's girlfriend? So, Emily, you've done a ton of reporting on similar lines. Not exactly. You weren't looking at Patel's particular behavior. But did the Atlantic story correspond with what you learned about Patel's behavior as the FBI chief that he's checked out and perhaps having too much fun?

Speaker 2:
[18:41] Yeah. I mean, without confirming all the details that I think Sarah Fitzpatrick had, yes, it does broadly match our reporting. We had a story about how when he was going to the Five Eyes Conference with our close allies in the UK, he wanted to reschedule all the meetings to have them at soccer matches and speedboat rides and just not interested in the more traditional settings and was basically, in the view of our sources, treating it as a vacation. A paid vacation, of course. So, you know, look, I think there is this big question about why Kash Patel is still in office. Trump fired a third member of the cabinet this week, the Labor Secretary. All three of the people who have lost their jobs are women. Kash Patel somehow continues on despite all of these reports, despite the fact that he was on video, you know, like popping beers in this like very overheated way when the United States won the Olympic, won, was it the soccer team? No, it couldn't have been the soccer team. Thank you, Hockey.

Speaker 1:
[19:45] Honestly, that one doesn't bother me at all.

Speaker 3:
[19:48] What, Emily mistaking soccer for hockey?

Speaker 1:
[19:50] No, Emily mistaking hockey for soccer is bad.

Speaker 2:
[19:52] No, Kash Patel with his like beer everywhere.

Speaker 1:
[19:55] No, that doesn't, as the defined sins of Kash Patel or the delineated sins that Sarah Pitt Bechert identified, that one felt pretty penny ante to me.

Speaker 2:
[20:05] I guess so, but then there was a whole thing of like, obviously, he had gone to Italy for this because he wanted to go to the Olympics and he claimed that he had all these like official meetings. Anyway, it's all part of the whole. Fine, that one is petty.

Speaker 3:
[20:18] Well, but there is a connection between the Labor Secretary and these allegations about Kash Patel. And also, Kristi Noem was, there were some allegations along these lines too, which is that they are using government money. At the very least, they are not good stewards of government money. At the worst, they are engaging in their own personal travels around the world at taxpayer expense and sort of shoehorning in business so that the public pays for it. You'll remember what Donald, when he came to office in his first inaugural address, he was like, now ends the period where the elites and those in power get ahead and use the levers of power to...

Speaker 1:
[20:57] But why is it that those people, those three people, Kristi Noem, the labor secretary, and not Bondi is a different one, why are they pilloried, but Donald Trump, who has made $4 billion in essentially corrupt self-dealing as the president, so certain people are not allowed to indulge and abuse government office, and take public funds, but some of them are?

Speaker 3:
[21:23] Two, yeah. One is the Fifth Avenue effect. He can do what he wants, and he has voters behind him who he still has some sway over, who can affect the political lives of other Republicans. So the mechanism for complaining about any of this would be in his own party, and they are captured by him. And the second thing is, at least at the Labor Department, it was nominally nudged along by the Inspector General at the Labor Department, which by the way, shock, there's an Inspector General at the Labor Department, because I thought all these...

Speaker 2:
[21:53] With a beating heart.

Speaker 3:
[21:55] Yeah, yeah, had been ejected. And also the behavior as alleged with Kash Patel is so over the guardrails. And also it's, I don't know, I think it's a personal sloppiness. I think if, here's a question to put to the group. If Kash Patel were accused of the equivalent overstepping of the boundaries in terms of lining his own pockets versus public drunkenness, what would he be in trouble?

Speaker 2:
[22:28] Maybe. I mean, one way to think about it is that because Trump is making $4 billion, everyone else has to be pure, or at least it's embarrassing when other, right? Like it's reserved for him, the corruption. I think that's like a real thing.

Speaker 1:
[22:42] Did you tell that to Steve Wicoff?

Speaker 2:
[22:44] Right. That's a problem for him perhaps eventually. What I was going to say about Patel though also is that what Patel keeps doing is trying really hard to save his job by jumping up and down for his audience of one. His response to this Atlantic piece in addition to this defamation suit, which presumably he will lose because he would have to prove actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth and the Atlantic, I'm sure, lawyered up this piece and has its sources in line. He went on TV and said, Oh, guess what? We're about to arrest people for the 2020 election being rigged. This is like the way to Donald Trump's heart, even if it makes no sense. And then there also right now are these Justice Department charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center in which they're making what seem like pretty implausible claims of fraud that the Southern Poverty Law Center used paid informants and therefore like helped the right wing groups. They were trying to police in a way that their donors would find to be a betrayal of the purpose of the organization. It doesn't sound like any of that really stacks up. Like yes, SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center used to have paid informants, but it was like part of their strategy of infiltrating these groups and understanding what they were doing. So but that's like very much of course like the politics of MAGA to go after this organization which puts out a hate watch list every year that conservatives particularly don't like. And then there's this idea, you know, that they're going to investigate my colleague Elizabeth Williamson at the New York Times because she was just like being a normal reporter making lots of phone calls the way one does and that's going to be like criminal stalking. So there's just all these real abuses of power at the FBI because the FBI though it is in hands of this clownish figure remains this very powerful mechanism for retribution and weaponization against one's enemies. And as long as Patel is using it in ways that Trump sees as useful or appealing, he seems like he can kind of get away with this. And it just seems like it's going on so much longer than I thought when I was writing about him.

Speaker 3:
[24:55] Meanwhile, there are duties the FBI has that it should be tending to. But let me ask you a question, Emily. Would it be better for Kash Patel if a judge throws this out, this lawsuit against The Atlantic right away? Because if it doesn't, doesn't The Atlantic get to then go to what's it called, the Poodle Lounge and other places and say, do you have evidence of one Kash Patel cashing out at this place?

Speaker 2:
[25:20] Yeah, it's hard to imagine that discovery would be a good thing for Kash Patel in this regard. And also, I mean, yeah, it seems like there is, I mean, from our reporting too, there will be substantial evidence to support these kinds of allegations. And the defamation suit is also a performance, but it's a costly one because The Atlantic has to spend time and money defending it. And, you know, this is a relatively recent phenomenon that famous people, including Trump, obviously over and over again, sue for defamation when they're mad about news coverage. It used to be that you didn't do that because that just sort of amplified the message of whatever defamatory article you were complaining about. But now it's like becoming part of the playbook that it's your way of damning the media as being corrupt and telling your base that you've done nothing wrong. Right.

Speaker 1:
[26:07] I mean, just this week, Patel had another defamation suit thrown out against an FBI official, Frank Feluzzi, who had gone on TV and had said, yeah, he'd said that Patel had been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the FBI. And the judge was like, obviously, this is rhetorical hyperbole. It's obviously rhetorical hyperbole, but they had to get a judicial ruling, had to go through a bunch of hoops. And the defendant, Feluzzi, did not get the slap remedy that he asked for, the protection, so where if you file a meritless defamation suit just to harass somebody, the person who is the defendant in that can counter sue or can make a counterclaim and can get damages from you. And Feluzzi was not allowed to do that.

Speaker 2:
[26:58] In some states.

Speaker 1:
[26:59] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[27:00] Just if you are, for those of listeners out there who are seeking to file frivolous lawsuits in a political context, there is a distinction between the one that President Trump filed and Kash Patel. So when President Trump baselessly went after CBS for editing Kamala Harris, every cycle of that story allowed the following things. Him to talk about how Kamala Harris gave word salad answers. Him to talk about how the long standing normal editing process that not only the 60 minutes went through, but any organization goes through is somehow deceptive, which puts the press on its heels. And it allowed him to switch topics to something that was safe for him. There was nothing in that lawsuit that would reaffirm an existing problem that he had. Kash Patel, on the other hand, your point notwithstanding about the Olympics, David, you have these allegations, and every time we talk about this is the image in people's minds of Kash Patel having to be assisted out the door by his security detail because he no longer has the proper control of his legs. And now you have, and then you have that video from the Olympics. So the video matches the preexisting condition.

Speaker 1:
[28:06] Well, it's also that Patel has a lot of leverage as the head of the FBI, but he doesn't have the same leverage that Trump does. And Trump's leverage over CBS and the fact that CBS was then at that point seeking a deal that required the Trump's administration to approve it, just gave Trump all the leverage. And I'm not saying, like I am sure that Kash Patel, if he wanted to, could find ways to make the life of the Atlantic more miserable than it is. But fundamentally, the Atlantic has a billionaire owner. It doesn't have a lot of government business. And Patel doesn't have the leverage, either political leverage, psychological leverage, or even literal leverage within the government to put that much pressure on the Atlantic the way that Trump did on CBS and other places.

Speaker 3:
[28:48] You identified a really smart extra benefit of the CBS story for Trump, which was that it was always a flex. It was a power flex. Because every time the story came up, it reasserted his power over that institution. One other thing is anybody, as I have, who's written for the Atlantic, knows the fact checking process. I mean, if you say the sun came up in the morning, they're like, do you have a source for that? So as Emily said, they didn't go into this blindly.

Speaker 1:
[29:15] Last question on this, Emily, which is, or John, I suppose. The article presupposes that Patel is on the verge of being fired, that he's always trying to keep his job, he's about to be fired. And that the Trump powers that be, the people who make the decisions in the White House, Trump and his closest don't like his too overt use of government resources, the way he's embarrassing them, his impulsive statements that have been wrong. But do you think that this article helps him? Does the fact that he is now a target of the lame stream media make him more likely to hold on to his job, because Trump hates to be seen as capitulating to any form of pressure?

Speaker 2:
[29:52] Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I don't think it hurts him in the obvious ways that it would if it was ricocheting around in the normal political cycle. And I also think that his willingness to pander to these schemes of retribution is really important for him. Like, the whole thing of, you know, this was the US attorney in Washington, Janine Perot, but asking Wayne County in Michigan, which is Detroit, to turn over all their paper ballots from the last election. Like, there are just ways in which the FBI participates in these Justice Department moves to scratch all the Donald Trump itches that he seems to really like. And so far, that has been good enough to keep Patel in office.

Speaker 1:
[30:38] We are joined by Yale historian and Gabfest regular, Beverly Gage. Bev co-chaired the Yale Committee that just issued the report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which is the hottest committee report of this year's spicy academic season. Bev, what is the Committee on Trust in Higher Education at Yale and what just broadly, just so everyone's oriented, what broadly did you find and recommend?

Speaker 4:
[31:03] We were a committee of 10 faculty members at Yale who were appointed last spring to think about this very broad problem of trust in higher education. And so we spent the year talking with hundreds of people and staging events on campus and doing deep dives into the literature and consulting with experts. And a couple of weeks ago, on April 15th, I guess just a week ago, we issued a report that makes the argument that the problem of trust in higher education is a real thing. It's a real concern and it's something that colleges and universities need to think about and to embrace and chart a path forward for improving it.

Speaker 2:
[31:48] So to start at 30,000 feet, one of the committee's recommendations is to narrow the university's mission statement. And the idea is that the committee is saying that Yale has been departing from its traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge by expanding its mission statement to include improving the world today, educating aspiring leaders, and fostering a diverse community. So, I mean, those are three worthy goals. Why narrow? Why concentrate on this idea of producing knowledge?

Speaker 4:
[32:21] The report has four opening recommendations that are, in some sense, these 30,000 feet recommendations. So, what does a university need to do that is absolutely fundamental to what a university is? The first one is take responsibility. So, it's a call to be the self-governing institutions that we are supposed to be, and to think critically about ourselves in this moment. The second one, as you say, is to focus on really the core academic mission of the university, and to think about what it is that universities are here for and what they do best. So, to say that we want to put out a mission that is about re-centering the academic core of the university does not mean that universities can't do all sorts of other wonderful things, too. It just means that unless you are engaged in the business of preserving and creating and sharing knowledge, then a university is not a university. It could be lots of things. It could be a hospital or a job placement organization or all sorts of things, but that this is really the core of a university. And in a moment where trust is the question, we ended up defining trust as being... Trust means doing what you say you're going to do and doing it well. And so in order to build trust, people have to know what it is that you're really there for, and then you can have a different relationship on that basis. The other two of those four core opening principles are about free speech and the importance of free speech on campus and about academic freedom. And so between them, responsibility, the core mission, free speech, academic freedom, those are really the kind of foundational principles that undergird a lot of the rest of the report.

Speaker 3:
[34:22] The audience can be more than one person, but can you give us a sense of the kind of percentages of who the audiences are? And then if I could tack on one tiny thing, to the extent that parents of school-aged children are the audience, how much does the what the school teaches in sort of very meat-and-potatoes way? I know you talk about the Civic Education Initiative and a shared core. How important is that to parents who have a set of expectations of what their kids are going to actually learn?

Speaker 4:
[34:52] Well, there are a lot of different audiences for a report that has as broad a mandate as this one. There is both an external audience, a kind of public audience, and an internal audience, the campus itself. There's the world of higher education. There's the president of the university who actually charged the committee. And so we were very aware in doing this of the multiple audiences and wanted to come up with something that would in fact speak on different levels maybe or on different issues to all of the constituencies who are really interested in this question. And when you ask, what do parents think? I mean, I think parents think a lot of things and some parents probably care really deeply about the content of the curriculum. Others might not care as much. But I do think that what people want from universities is a deep assurance that the classroom is a place of high standards, of open exchange, of really thoughtful engagement with the best of human knowledge in whatever capacity that might be engaged. And that's what universities should want too, and in many ways do want. But there's been, I think, something of a disconnect in communicating those things over time.

Speaker 1:
[36:13] So we're having you on because this report has created a storm of interest and to some extent controversy. And usually we don't talk to people about academic committees. Even you, even you, Bev. But I'm curious how you react to the various criticisms that have now come through around it. So just to cite a few, one criticism, theme of criticism I saw was this is just about elite universities. What does this say to all the community colleges and state universities and smaller colleges which are not the Ivy League, which represents an infinitesimally small fraction of the actual higher education in the United States? That's one line of criticism. Another line of criticism, which I think Emily, you were sort of talking about Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan or ex-president of Wesleyan was sort of saying.

Speaker 2:
[37:00] Current.

Speaker 1:
[37:01] You can't, current president or president, you can't abandon these broader engagements in the world. And the third line of criticism is this does not deal with the actual existential question looming over universities, which is AI and how AI is going to change information work and how we, what even people who now go to college do and what their purpose is in the world. So I'm interested in you just sort of batting each of those back one by one.

Speaker 4:
[37:27] Well, you are right that having served on many faculty committees, this faculty committee is getting a lot more attention and engagement than I think the standard genre would. I think that was the whole point in some sense, was to get these conversations started, to get people engaged, to shift the conversation a little bit, to encourage a kind of self-scrutiny within higher education about what it is that people want, what it is that they value. We were a committee of 10 faculty and we managed to come together around these pretty big ideas that are in the report. As anyone who's been on faculty committees may know, that in itself is I think a great triumph that we managed to do that and pull it off. But we always understood that this was the beginning of a conversation. We put these ideas out there in order to provoke exactly the kind of debate that's coming. So I think it's great actually. I think that that's what we want. Some of these criticisms are totally fair. Others are just in the nature of what we were doing. This is a report coming out of an institution like Yale that was asked to do some self-examination. As we acknowledge in the report, higher education is this incredibly diverse in many ways, really complicated set of institutions. And to call it a system of higher education is a little bit of an exaggeration because you've got so many different kinds of institutions that are involved. So it's absolutely true that our report focused in a lot of ways on Yale. It might be most useful to institutions that are like Yale, but we did also, I think, genuinely identify a set of questions around cost, around speech, around purpose, around admissions that are things that everyone can engage, certainly within the higher education sector.

Speaker 2:
[39:33] One of the things you point out is that at Yale, the faculty percentages of registered Democrats and registered Republicans are way out of whack in terms of the country. So you have, I think, 36 Democrats for every one Republican in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Law School and the School of Management. Then there's this idea that individual departments should take a look at themselves and try to figure out how to do things that could begin to change that ideological balance. But how does that ever really happen? There's so many reasons why that ideological imbalance has become so prominent. I mean, obviously, the statistics are particular to Yale, but I think the phenomenon is wider spread in higher ed. One of them has to do with who wants to go to grad school now, who sees themselves in the examples of the faculty. There's the faculty self-replicating. There are all the other more lucrative lines of work that people can go into. Do you feel like pointing this out then calls on universities to figure out different strategies? What do you think about Harvard, which is now raising money for conservative professorships? Obviously, some schools like Stanford, and I'm sure others have a particular place on campus that collects conservative faculty and thinkers. And then that corrects the imbalance, but it also risks the siloing of ideas too.

Speaker 4:
[41:06] Well, I think you've put all the dilemmas very well in that description, and that's a lot of what the report wrestles with. Our own view was that we needed to think about this set of questions, starting with really the core values of the university and of the academic world. So that's not going to be hiring people according to political litmus tests. In fact, those statistics, I think, in some very broad sense are obviously true, but it's surprisingly hard to actually get numbers about this because it's not something that universities track or that they should track party affiliation or exactly where you fit on the ideological spectrum. And a lot of the discussion of that question is incredibly reductionist in terms of thinking about the relationship between how someone votes and what they teach and how they approach their work. And so I think it's a very, very complicated question. And as we say in the report, it is probably the most contested question that we encountered. A huge array of opinions from people who don't think there's anything that needs to be taken on with this to those who think it's the most urgent thing and should be just done from the top down. So our committee started from the premise that intellectual life and academic life flourishes when there is the widest range of kind of a legitimate and thoughtful opinion on campus that we can have. And that it behooves us all on a regular basis to take on the question of whether that is in fact the case. So that's what those self studies really are about, knowing that different disciplines have different ideas of what they value and how they think about this question. In some cases, political questions are out front. In other cases, they're quite muted and quite far off from the actual content of academic work. So this was sort of a statement of, here is a challenge. It is a challenge that lots of people recognize. And our recommendation is not only that self study, but to do a set of experiments in how you might deal with this not as a kind of heavy handed or hackneyed response to political pressures, but actually in ways that would enrich the life of the university, the intellectual life, the academic life, and the community life of the university.

Speaker 3:
[43:52] So, Bev, this raises a lot of questions, which, you know, as you say, will be debated and will be ongoing. But when a lot of smart people get involved in complicated questions, they sometimes need a forcing mechanism to actually get to actionable results. What's the forcing mechanism for any of this?

Speaker 4:
[44:11] Well, it's an interesting question because the report has 20 recommendations, some of which are quite broad, some of which are quite narrow. But I think one of the things that you can see in those recommendations is that there are a certain number of things that can be done very quickly, things that are additive, creating a civic education program. You can snap your fingers, do that. Others are a matter of a very, very long time scale and probably pretty slow change, to the degree that change happens at all. Then there's lots of stuff that's in between. I think the forcing mechanism is not only the leadership of the university, but the energy that people have around these kinds of questions. One of the things that was the most heartening and fun and really exciting about doing this work was all of the energy that was out there. All of the people who have been sitting there just waiting to have the chance to think about these questions, to answer them, to come up with their own ideas. Several of our recommendations are just that, like just provide some resources and unleash the energy from the ground up, particularly in terms of trying to open up universities so they're not just these kind of gated communities in terms of their knowledge. So I think it depends on what issue you're taking on, what the mechanism will be, but that energy is definitely out there.

Speaker 1:
[45:42] Beb, just to close us out, to linger on that, give us two other things that Yale could do right now that are practical that would increase trust.

Speaker 4:
[45:51] Well, we have recommendations about grade inflation and about ways to just provide a better set of signaling mechanisms about what grades actually mean. So that is both from faculty to students and then from the university to the outside world, right? If everyone's getting A's and A minuses, it's really hard to tell what those grades mean. So that would take, you know, require some action on the part of faculty and deans, but it's something that could be could be taken on right now. We have another recommendation, the opening phrase of which is open the gates. And that recommendation says that universities should think about ways to make their educational resources much more accessible to the public. And we recommend that, you know, Yale just establish a fund for people who want to do experiments in that way. One of my personal favorites is to get laptops, tablets, phones out of the classroom as the default. There are lots of people who use those well in terms of pedagogy and what happens. There are, of course, lots of problems with having those devices in the classroom. And having taught a device free class this semester, I mean, it was transformative. It's really wonderful. It's an easy thing to do. You're just changing the default. You're just encouraging people to find different ways of relating in the classroom. So that was more than two. So there are a lot of them.

Speaker 1:
[47:28] That's right. That's great inflation. Classic Yale inflation. Recommendation inflation. Bev Gage co-chaired the Committee on Trust in Higher Education at Yale. Bev, thanks for coming on the Gabfest again.

Speaker 4:
[47:41] Yep, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:
[47:43] Let's go to cocktail chatter. Emily, you've come out of a Yale staff meeting where you've discussed all the big changes that are happening. You've decided you're going to lower grades. Everyone's going to get a C from now on. And you need a real stiff drink to grapple with the fact that you're going to be giving your students C's instead of A's. What are you going to be chattering about?

Speaker 2:
[48:04] Parish the thought. I got a really moving email this week about legal immigration. It's really about this just collapse of green cards and other services for legal immigrants. There are 39 countries now where there's just no processing that's happening. Even though they're still collecting tons of money in fees from people applying for green cards and other kinds of status. This was a story about an American citizen who's married to a Venezuelan, and he had one kind of visa and his company tried to get an H1 visa for him a bunch of times, and he just can't get it. For really no apparent reason when you're thinking about what would be good for the American economy, what would be good for this particular immigrant, there's just the shutdown going on. So I was thinking about all of that, and then I went for a walk with an Afghan national in New Haven who somehow has been able to get a green card. That happened a while ago before this freeze. She's just doing incredibly well. I mean, in the nine months since I had last seen her, she had a full-time job and an apartment, and had gotten her driver's license and a car, and is speaking English really well. She's not like some elite Afghan. She's like an ordinary person who came after college, or actually during the end of her undergrad degree, and wants to stay here, and was just doing all the things you want people to do when they come here, and was such an advertisement for legal immigration. And I was just left feeling so frustrated, and just this deep sense of, in all this immigration uproar that we've been having since Trump took office, we're just losing sight of the power of immigrants to move our economy and to better our world as well as themselves.

Speaker 1:
[50:00] I had a similar experience with an Uber driver, Tajik Uber driver this week, and just same story. But did you guys see, I almost chattered about this, but I was so upset that I kind of couldn't, the story about how these 1200 Afghans who helped out the United States during the Afghan War, translators, medics, people who risked their lives to help us, to protect us, to protect our soldiers, to protect our mission who ended up in Qatar because they couldn't quite get to the US before in that hurried evacuation many Afghans made to the US, but some just couldn't quite get there. And then the Trump administration shut everything down and now they're sitting in Qatar. And so the Trump administration is cutting a deal which either they can go back to Taliban controlled Afghanistan and risk their lives, or they can go to Congo, a country which is already suffering the worst refugee crisis in the world, has 600,000 refugees that can't do anything, is unable to feed, house, close, shelter already. And those are the choices these people are being offered. It is a fucking moral abomination.

Speaker 2:
[51:02] Absolutely. I'm glad that you brought that up.

Speaker 3:
[51:05] And then imagine you're in the context of the Iranian deal making and any country involved in the United States has to say, this is the way they treated their allies who were from another country. Why are they going to keep any promise that they make to us as a part of these negotiations?

Speaker 1:
[51:21] It's fucking sickening. All right, John, what's your chatter?

Speaker 3:
[51:24] My chatter is much lighter. It is from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The paper actually came out in March, but it's called Feel as a Determinant of College Choice, Evidence from Campus Tour Weather. And it essentially finds that this is a working paper, that basically what the weather is like when you go on the college tour affects a student's likelihood of applying of enrollment.

Speaker 2:
[51:49] Totally makes sense.

Speaker 3:
[51:50] So hot weather reduces applications by 10.1 percent, a cold weather by 5.9 percent. Precipitation reduces applications by 8.3 percent. Cloudy conditions, just 4.9 percent. As might be intuitively understandable, if you're from a warmer home state, you're more likely to be bombed if it's cold during your tour. Also, males are generally more sensitive to poor tour weather than females. Precipitation, these gentle flowers, reduces male application rates by 13.2 percent.

Speaker 1:
[52:21] I just had this experience, exactly. My son and I just went up and visited Middlebury. We were coming from a beautiful Washington spring, went up to Middlebury where he was admitted. He was trying to decide between Middlebury and some other schools. The weather was crap. There are other reasons why I don't think he's going to go to Middlebury, but that was one distinct reason. I was like, why is it 50 degrees cloudy and dripping rain in the middle of April?

Speaker 3:
[52:51] I wonder if the next question is what schools have the ability when it's raining to change the tour and make it better? Like so at the University of Virginia, which I only have an understanding of, the lawn would look like pretty dismal in the rain, so would you take them into the top floor of the rotunda, which is a sort of hallowed place? Fascinating.

Speaker 1:
[53:19] My chatter is about my friend. Some people call their mother every day, but Anthony Schmidt calls me every day. Every single day Anthony Schmidt calls me. Let's hear from Anthony Schmidt.

Speaker 5:
[53:32] My name is Anthony Schmidt. I am the Senior Loan Specialist and working on your $250,000 business line of credit approval. You can reach me or our underwriting department directly at 855-357-2016, or you can press one now to speak to our business funding team.

Speaker 1:
[53:50] Every day I get this message and he gives me a voice, me he. I call him he. Every single day I have blocked that number probably a hundred times.

Speaker 2:
[54:04] And it just comes back no matter what?

Speaker 1:
[54:06] No matter what, they call me over and over again. And I don't know, like AI is killing us in all kinds of ways, but this way, this way may be the way it's killing us. Why doesn't it learn? Why doesn't it know? And there's no cost to Anthony, quote unquote, Anthony Schmidt for doing this to me and filling my voicemail every single day. They are not paying any cost. And instead it's just a hassle for me. And actually, because I get notifications, if I missed phone calls, I mean, it's blocked. Then I don't accept any phone calls from numbers I don't know, but I get a notice. Like every day I get this notice and then there's this brief moment of like, oh, who called? And it's, oh, it's Anthony. It's Anthony.

Speaker 2:
[54:46] You can't turn off like hide alerts or something.

Speaker 1:
[54:48] I mean, I could. Yes. But then I would have to hide alerts for other things that I don't want. I probably could figure it out. But he still keeps leaving the voicemail. I have to keep deleting these voicemail messages every day.

Speaker 3:
[54:58] I think you're you are looking at this too narrowly. You might even get more than $250,000.

Speaker 1:
[55:04] That's true. I could. A higher loan amount might be available for me.

Speaker 3:
[55:07] This is John Chance.

Speaker 1:
[55:09] What is my track record with my existing loan? What existing loan do I have?

Speaker 3:
[55:14] Well, all we know. Let's look, like many things in life and Chicken McNuggets, let's not delve too closely into the details. Just accept the fact that you have a good record. And this is wonderful. This is a fucking daily affirmation. I get a call from periodically, not every day, from an earnest woman who's very concerned that I have not paid my PEPCO bill. I have not been a customer for PEPCO for eight years. And what's fascinating about the AI and her voice is that they've included all of these ums and ahs. And so the verisimilitude is quite high. And yet just the gentle amount of urgency from this woman about how I really got to get on this. Anyway, it's a long way from the guy who calls in a room of obviously a hundred other guys doing the same thing, where you can hear them all, you know, with the same pitch about your Microsoft windows that he wants to help you with.

Speaker 2:
[56:10] Well, and there's no discouraging that could ever be done, right? It's just relentlessly cheery and insistent and never would go away because it's not human.

Speaker 1:
[56:20] Right. All right, listeners, you've got chatter.

Speaker 2:
[56:24] I spared everyone my Andy Rooney ran. I have a different one, but you know.

Speaker 1:
[56:28] Oh, wow.

Speaker 3:
[56:30] Now you have us on the edge of our damn seats.

Speaker 2:
[56:33] There's this, I don't know, John, if you've experienced this, but there's this, I think new scam, which is that someone will send you a note about how they want to feature your book. And then like sometimes it looks real and I'll respond once tentatively and then of course they want to charge you so that they can feature your book in some fake thing. And then I either don't reply or I write back like, are you kidding? But then they're automated too. And so then you just get this like regular up, like positive upbeat, you know, oh, but we really want to adjust. Like it's, it's like so deeply insulting to me.

Speaker 3:
[57:10] I write books, I write books that are so impervious to anyone wanting to feature them. Even the scammers don't do it.

Speaker 2:
[57:18] Oh, they're gonna find you, they're gonna find you.

Speaker 3:
[57:21] It's not entirely true. There was one Twitter account that used to say, congratulations, hardest job in the world is ranked number 10 in, but then it kept making more and more obscure categories that it was number 10 in to keep the pitch fresh. So yes, it is number 10 in the books written by right-handed blondes on a standup desk.

Speaker 1:
[57:43] It wouldn't definitely not even be number 10 there, John. Listeners, you got chatters, please keep them coming to us. Email us at gabfest.sleep.com and we hear from Matt in Milwaukee.

Speaker 6:
[58:01] Hey, Gabfesters, it's Matt in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Here in Wisconsin, we experience all of the seasons, the heat, the snow, the wind, the rain, and everything in between. Our mail carriers deliver through it all. But it seems in a suburb of Milwaukee, they finally met their match, the wild turkeys. That's right. Residents on one street near me won't get their mail because of the turkeys that have taken up on the street. After one mail carrier fell following a brief chase, residents have been asked to pick up their mail at the local post office for the time being. However, one final line of defense remains, Tater Tot the dog. She is the true protector of Church Street. Make sure to check out the video in the story to see her in action. I love the show and can't wait for you to get back to visit us soon for a live show again. Thanks.

Speaker 3:
[58:53] I wonder if that's Church Street in, there's a Church Street in Wauwatosa, which is where my mom was from and it's near Tosa East, which is where she went to school. I wonder if that's where the turkeys are hanging out. We have turkeys at our place and they're mostly harmless, but they are so, so ugly.

Speaker 2:
[59:14] Really?

Speaker 6:
[59:15] They just look like turkeys.

Speaker 3:
[59:17] It's like a bird put together by a committee. I'll send you a picture of the turkeys in our backyard.

Speaker 2:
[59:27] And we'll believe you.

Speaker 3:
[59:28] And you will believe me.

Speaker 2:
[59:30] I will be able to— Ungainly, maybe, is the word you're looking for here.

Speaker 1:
[59:33] I admire a turkey. That's all for our episode this week. We have a bonus episode in your feed. President Trump loosing restrictions on psychedelics research. That is only for Slate Plus members. So become a Slate Plus member. You'll also get discounts to our live shows. We're planning some live shows. You'll get bonus episodes. You'll never hit the paywall on the Slate site. And you'll get our eternal gratitude, which is probably priceless. So if you are a member, thank you again. If you're not a member, subscribe to Slate Plus directly from the Political Gabfest show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or go to slate.com/gabfestplus to get access wherever you listen. That is our show for today, the Political Gabfest was produced today by Kevin Bendis, because Nina is off on vacation, I guess. Our researcher is Emily Ditto, our theme music is by They Might Be Giants, Ben Richmond, the Senior Director for Podcast Ops, Neil Lobel is Executive Producer of Slate Podcasts, and Hilary Fries, Editor-in-Chief of Slate. For Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson, I'm David Plotz. Thanks for listening. They will talk to you next week. I will not. We will have a guest host, superstar guest host, Juliette Kayam, I think.