Latest / NO FILTER / Trump vs. Harvard_ Why admin_s crackdown will have _trickle-down_ effect on higher education(MP3_160K)
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Here with me. Princeton University professor Eddie claud and Columbia
- 0:04Speaker 1: University Professor of Practice Vassal Smichel, both are MSNBC political analysts. Eddie,
- 0:11Speaker 1: how do you begin to quantify what you see and
- 0:13Speaker 1: experience on campus as the benefits of international students in
- 0:17Speaker 1: and out of the classroom?
- 0:19Speaker 2: Well, I don't know how to quantify, Chris, but I
- 0:21Speaker 2: do know this that the objective of a liberal arts
- 0:24Speaker 2: education at its best is to create a cosmopolitan subject.
- 0:28Speaker 2: Not someone who's content in their own prejudices, not someone's
- 0:34Speaker 2: who refuses to examine their own blind spots, their own assumptions,
- 0:40Speaker 2: but to actually open themselves up to the possibilities that
- 0:43Speaker 2: the world presents. And so when you have an environment
- 0:46Speaker 2: that is narrow, it actually reproduces provincialism. But if your
- 0:52Speaker 2: education aspires to produce a particular kind of person, a
- 0:56Speaker 2: particular kind of citizen, not only in the United States
- 0:59Speaker 2: but of the world, then you want them to be
- 1:00Speaker 2: expansive in their view. And in order to be expansive,
- 1:04Speaker 2: you have to have experiences right with folk in the
- 1:07Speaker 2: dorm rooms, in the classroom, on in the books and
- 1:10Speaker 2: the material that will open your eyes in some ways
- 1:13Speaker 2: to the vast diversity of the world.
- 1:16Speaker 1: People say, who go there, Basil, You walk onto Harvard,
- 1:19Speaker 1: you hear fifteen different languages in a minute. I'm guessing
- 1:22Speaker 1: it's very much the same at Columbia. Your school is
- 1:27Speaker 1: the most popular of the IVY leagues for the f
- 1:29Speaker 1: one visa. That's right, and so you've got students from
- 1:31Speaker 1: all over the world. How would it change the fabric
- 1:35Speaker 1: of your university and your classrooms quite that one away.
- 1:39Speaker 3: Quite significantly. First, can we celebrate this moment because we
- 1:41Speaker 3: are on together in the flesh for the first time
- 1:44Speaker 3: in years.
- 1:45Speaker 4: So it's on this show, and it's.
- 1:47Speaker 3: A great conversation to be with my brother talking about
- 1:50Speaker 3: this because I think he's right that it breaks apart
- 1:54Speaker 3: the provincialism, you know, the privilege reproduces itself like Noah thing.
- 2:00Speaker 3: And when you have diverse groups of people on a
- 2:03Speaker 3: college campus, diverse perspectives from diverse countries, ethnicities, races, it
- 2:07Speaker 3: really does make you feel that you are not alone
- 2:10Speaker 3: in this world, that there is a global audience waiting
- 2:12Speaker 3: and available for you. So at Columbia, one of the
- 2:15Speaker 3: things that I've had to do is have that extra
- 2:17Speaker 3: conversation with the student, because they do have concerns about
- 2:21Speaker 3: what it's going to be like, not so much on campus,
- 2:23Speaker 3: but what's the atmosphere like in the city and in
- 2:26Speaker 3: the country. A lot of the you say that Columbia
- 2:29Speaker 3: has a very high percentage of international stuits because they
- 2:32Speaker 3: want to be in New York. And I go back
- 2:33Speaker 3: to that old Yellow Pages ad. If it's out there,
- 2:37Speaker 3: it's in here. That's how I describe New York City.
- 2:40Speaker 3: So eating is I know, I am, and I do
- 2:42Speaker 3: it every day. But this is this is why folks
- 2:45Speaker 3: want to come to college campuses to experience this. And
- 2:48Speaker 3: the forty four billion dollars that are spent by students.
- 2:52Speaker 3: Imagine what happens when forty percent of those one point
- 2:55Speaker 3: one billion decide to stay in the country and then
- 2:58Speaker 3: the and the economic generation that they've become for their cities, states,
- 3:02Speaker 3: and the nation.
- 3:03Speaker 1: That's not the way the President sees it, Eddie. He
- 3:06Speaker 1: sees this as an effort to keep out the troublemakers.
- 3:10Speaker 1: Let me play that.
- 3:12Speaker 4: They're taking people from areas of the world that are
- 3:15Speaker 4: very radicalized and we don't want them making trouble in
- 3:18Speaker 4: our country. So I saw yesterday that in the middle
- 3:22Speaker 4: in the middle of the UK, there was a nice
- 3:26Speaker 4: young man. He wants to go back to school at Harvard,
- 3:30Speaker 4: and he looked good to me. But I want to
- 3:31Speaker 4: check his past. I want to make sure that the
- 3:33Speaker 4: foreign students are people that can love our country. We
- 3:37Speaker 4: don't want to see shopping centers exploding.
- 3:40Speaker 1: He looked good to me. But is the president saying
- 3:43Speaker 1: the quiet part out loud?
- 3:45Speaker 2: Yes, obviously.
- 3:46Speaker 3: I mean we know this were troublemakers for him.
- 3:49Speaker 2: It's often attached to particular bodies, to particular regions, regions
- 3:53Speaker 2: that he's okay with accepting an airplane from though, but
- 3:56Speaker 2: not necessarily their students, right, So I think it's really
- 4:00Speaker 2: important for us to understand. He also says something out
- 4:02Speaker 2: loud as well, not too long ago, a couple of
- 4:04Speaker 2: days ago, he said that with all of these foreign
- 4:07Speaker 2: students being admitted to places like Harvard, there are no
- 4:10Speaker 2: seats left for Americans. And you combine that with the
- 4:14Speaker 2: critique of race based admissions. This is about really these institutions,
- 4:20Speaker 2: Chris trying to build a student body that reflects not
- 4:23Speaker 2: only the diversity of the country, but the diversity of
- 4:25Speaker 2: the world, and Trump stoking a particular kind of grievance
- 4:29Speaker 2: because people like him, their children can't seem to get
- 4:32Speaker 2: into Harvard like they used to. They can't get into
- 4:35Speaker 2: the Columbias and the Princetons like they used to. They're
- 4:37Speaker 2: having difficulty getting into the Lee Highs and the Williams
- 4:40Speaker 2: like they used to. They believe they possess these institutions,
- 4:44Speaker 2: and so by virtue of their particular positions of power,
- 4:47Speaker 2: they are trying to in some ways capture them.
- 4:49Speaker 5: Once again.
- 4:50Speaker 3: It's a really important point because what he's saying is
- 4:53Speaker 3: that education is being commodified and you should get it
- 4:57Speaker 3: only at certain price points. And if you look at
- 4:59Speaker 3: the history fear of our country, whether you're talking about
- 5:01Speaker 3: an eighteen nineteen Dartmouth's case against with the Supreme Court
- 5:05Speaker 3: that it established the independence of universities, created the kind
- 5:09Speaker 3: of philanthropic system we see today, the Marl Act in
- 5:12Speaker 3: eighteen sixty two, which established a lot of state universities,
- 5:15Speaker 3: and some HBCUs, the GI Bill Affirmative Action Title nine,
- 5:21Speaker 3: Brown versus Board event. There's been a two hundred year
- 5:23Speaker 3: history of this country saying that we need to make
- 5:27Speaker 3: an education more accessible to Americans, and what we see
- 5:31Speaker 3: in this administration if you also include taking money away
- 5:34Speaker 3: from museums, taking money away from other cultural institutions. It's
- 5:39Speaker 3: their interest in creating education and knowledge to a very
- 5:43Speaker 3: small segment of the population.
- 5:45Speaker 1: I think there is also it's a place, right, it's
- 5:48Speaker 1: the place, and how much you develop as a human
- 5:51Speaker 1: intellectually but also socially. And how many people have you
- 5:56Speaker 1: heard say over the years, those are the best years
- 5:59Speaker 1: of my life. But if now somebody was at Columbia
- 6:04Speaker 1: and they felt like, oh, maybe now I need to
- 6:06Speaker 1: transfer to Harvard or vice versa or something like that,
- 6:09Speaker 1: or any of the other places, any of the other ivys.
- 6:12Speaker 1: The deadline for most of them was back in March,
- 6:15Speaker 1: and the stress that students are feeling will let me
- 6:18Speaker 1: play a little bit of what we've heard from them.
- 6:21Speaker 5: I haven't got the time yet to think about in
- 6:23Speaker 5: my back at Plants, But as of now, I don't
- 6:28Speaker 5: think anyone is shore if they can return for their
- 6:31Speaker 5: fall semester back into Harvard and more broadly, back into
- 6:34Speaker 5: the US. It's really unfortunate that thousands of thousands of
- 6:38Speaker 5: international students who have come again so many miles away
- 6:41Speaker 5: from their own respective countries and don't have any family
- 6:44Speaker 5: in the US happened to face. They need to face
- 6:47Speaker 5: all of these issues on their own.
- 6:50Speaker 1: The stress on students. Are you seeing it? Are you
- 6:53Speaker 1: having conversations.
- 6:54Speaker 2: I've been teaching for close to thirty years, and to
- 6:57Speaker 2: be honest with you, I've never seen the level of
- 7:00Speaker 2: anxiety among students. You can have students who are about
- 7:05Speaker 2: to graduate and the parents can't come see them, or
- 7:08Speaker 2: they worried about if they come, will they be able
- 7:10Speaker 2: to what will happen. There is a deep uncertainty, and
- 7:14Speaker 2: one could even say that that uncertainty generates a sense
- 7:18Speaker 2: of panic and terror and how they inhabit the space.
- 7:23Speaker 2: It impacts the way they complete their assignments and impacts
- 7:26Speaker 2: the way they sit in our offices. Right. I remember
- 7:29Speaker 2: a students saying to me just recently, I can't finish
- 7:33Speaker 2: my thesis, and usually I go, this becomes the hustle,
- 7:38Speaker 2: when in fact she said, because I'm worried, I don't
- 7:41Speaker 2: have anywhere I don't know what is going to happen. Right,
- 7:45Speaker 2: And so you can imagine these students trying to It's
- 7:47Speaker 2: already a pressure packed environment, trying to complete those assignments,
- 7:52Speaker 2: trying to get to the end with all of this
- 7:53Speaker 2: hovering over this.
- 7:57Speaker 3: Just to say the President might want to just say
- 8:01Speaker 3: and point his finger at elite institutions. This is coming
- 8:04Speaker 3: for everybody, and we need to be very clear about that.
- 8:08Speaker 3: It's not just the Harvard's Dales of Princes of Columbia.
- 8:11Speaker 3: This will trickle down and it will have a massive
- 8:15Speaker 3: impact on reshaping higher education specifically in education broadly in
- 8:20Speaker 3: this country. Absolutely,