Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned.

I’m Preet Bharara.

Niall Ferguson:

In the last 10 years, or so, there was a sustained and deliberate effort to inject fear into campus life, and to create penalties for any intellectual risk-taking, any deviation from orthodoxy.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Niall Ferguson. He’s a professor, historian, and author of 16 books about, as he puts it, money and power. His work spans everything from the British Empire to the World Wars to biographies of influential figures like Henry Kissinger.

Ferguson is a fellow at The Hoover Institute, a frequent columnist on world politics, and he’s also the founder of a new university. More on that later.

We talked this week about two issues he’s especially passionate about, academia and liberalism, and we get into where, in his view, the two have diverged in recent years. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

THE INTERVIEW

Niall Ferguson joins me to talk about academia, liberalism, and the so-called vibe shift.

Niall Ferguson, welcome to the show for the first time ever.

Niall Ferguson:

It’s a pleasure to be with you for the first time ever. Well, with you on the show.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know what’s taken us so long.

Niall Ferguson:

Well, you got to the bottom of the barrel eventually. You were bound to.

Preet Bharara:

You’re the top of the barrel I think. So, not everybody may know your arc. Tell us about yourself, Niall.

Niall Ferguson:

I wish I had an arc. That would imply, at least, going up for some of the time, half the time. I’m just an-

Preet Bharara:

I can put you a more direct question. How’d you become a professor? Why?

Niall Ferguson:

I grew up in Scotland, in Glasgow, and Glasgow in the 1970s was a rough, tough place and Oxford seemed like paradise, if I could get there.

So, I worked hard at school, that was the way I was brought up, and couldn’t quite decide I was … I came from a family of scientists. My mother is a physicist, and physics and math and all of that were attractive.

But history seemed more challenging, because it was particles with consciousness. And so, at some point, when I was a teenager, I read Tolstoy. I was a great reader. I was reflecting on what a compulsive reader I was, and reading lead to history, Tolstoy, and then immersing myself in the Thirty Years’ War.

And I suddenly realized that it was history that I wanted to study, and I wanted to do it at Oxford.

So, that’s what I did and then I could have led a blameless life, Preet, writing obscure scholarly monographs and teaching undergraduates wearing tweed jackets like this one, and leaving the rest of the world undisturbed.

But a series of unfortunate events forced me to make a bit more money than could be made as an Oxford don, and that led me to the United States where the money and the power are.

Preet Bharara:

Still?

Niall Ferguson:

Yeah. They still are there. Big time.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. They are. They sure are.

Niall Ferguson:

And so, I guess my arc, I don’t think humans generally have arcs, but my long and winding road led from Oxford eventually to Harvard, and then to Stanford.

And so, I’m just one of those many Scotsmen in history, who have gone west to seek their fortune.

Preet Bharara:

And how has that worked out for you?

Niall Ferguson:

Well, I think better than if I had stayed in England, because the United States is the most exciting place in the world, and I’m glad I had the courage to move.

I moved relatively late, in the sense that I was, certainly, in my thirties, but I had done all I could within the Oxford and Cambridge system. And if I’m honest, it got a bit bored.

And was conscious that the kind of work I was doing, which was on financial history, initially, I was doing a lot of work on questions of inflation and public finance, and I’d written a history of the Rothschild bank, or banks.

And Americans were more interested in the work I was doing. The English think that historians should study kinds and queens.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Niall Ferguson:

And that’s it.

Preet Bharara:

I thought they left that to the tabloids.

Niall Ferguson:

Well, their stories are supposed to follow the same agenda as The Sun newspaper.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Niall Ferguson:

And I was working on bankers. There was polite interest, but in New York, and at Harvard and at Yale, there was much more interest. And so, I thought, “Well, at least, go where people are paying some attention to what you’re doing.”

So, I can tell you a story about how I moved from Oxford to NYU. Two things happened, one was a conversation with a gentleman named Henry Kaufman, who for many years had been chief economist at Lehman Brothers, and had then become a benefactor of NYU, and he once asked me, he said, “Niall, you write a lot of books about money and power.” I had never really thought of it that way. But, in truth, I had done that. And so, I said, “Yes.”

And he asked, “So, why don’t you come to where the money and the power are?” And I couldn’t think of a good answer to that.

And then the other thing that happened was 9/11. I was supposed to give a lecture at NYU the following day, I never flew, and I felt a Scottish rage at what they had done to New York and the U.S.

And I resolved very soon after 9/11 to resign my fellowship, my professorship at Oxford, and accept a job at NYU. And that was when I moved to the … I moved to the U.S. in 2002, and began teaching there partly out of a bloody-minded defiance of the terrorists.

Preet Bharara:

So, I want to come back to that, if we have time. You listed a number of elite institutions, some of the most elite in the world, Oxford, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, NYU. Fair to say you’re a bit of a critic of elite academic institutions?

Niall Ferguson:

I think these institutions, great institutions have been betrayed by a generation of their leaders, of some professors, some students, of many administrators, and I spent many years trying to fight back against what I saw were betrayals of the tradition.

Preet Bharara:

Betrayal is a very personal criticism that is not mistake, or drift. As a legal person, betrayal has a lot of ill-feeling in it. Why do you use the word betrayal?

Niall Ferguson:

Because I do have ill-feeling about what happened at these great universities. The university, at its best, is a place where one is free to think, to study, to publish, to push the frontier of human knowledge without fear. That’s part of the reason that you create these artificial places where scholars are not at the mercy of the market.

And in the last 10 years, or so, there was a sustained and deliberate effort to inject fear into campus life, and to create penalties for any intellectual risk-taking, any deviation from orthodoxy.

And so, what happened to the universities, which had become great beacons of intellectual ambition in the 20th Century, had freed themselves from all kinds of orthodoxies that had accumulated in previous centuries, a new orthodoxy was imposed on them, and I felt extremely angry about that, and I also thought it was self-harming for the society that allowed it to happen.

Preet Bharara:

But you date that to only 10 years ago? Before that everything was hunky-dory?

Niall Ferguson:

Hunky-dory would be going too far, because I think that the grandfather of the problem was the kind of knee-jerk liberalism of the 1960s, that the father, or the parents of the problem, that was political correctness in the ’80s and ’90s, but wokeism as a truly rigid orthodoxy penalizing those who deviated from it with career end and reputational destruction, that really only set in in about 10 years ago.

I wasn’t really aware of it until about 2014. And so, in that sense, I think the real crisis is of quite recent origin.

Preet Bharara:

And neither agreeing, or disagreeing with you yet, I wanted to understand your diagnosis. How does something that you describe … I don’t know if you think about it as a movement, or a trend, or some other such thing. How does that happen in multiple universities, multiple places by your reckoning? Notwithstanding the fact that you say there’s a father and a grandfather, I will note, not a mother, or a grandmother-

Niall Ferguson:

I did say a mother and father-

Preet Bharara:

So, you’re subscribing to the patriarchy yourself, Niall, in that assessment.

Niall Ferguson:

I actually thought as I was saying it that I should quickly introduce a maternal parent. But there was three generations-

Preet Bharara:

So, what happened 10 years ago? Was there a manifesto? Was there a bill passed? What happened?

Niall Ferguson:

Well, as you know, Preet, I’m a scholar of networks in history, and many of the great historical changes don’t have an org chart with a general secretariat, and wokeism, if you want to use that shorthand, was really a network phenomena.

Now the thing about networks is that they have structure. It’s just not like an org chart. In academic life, and I actually know a really good paper that shows this, a relatively small number of departments in a relatively small number of universities can have an enormous impact, because of the way that the academic profession works.

The jobs go to the people with PhDs from a relatively small number of departments in any given field. And so, it’s amazing how few people create each generation of professors.

So, you didn’t need a central command. It was enough that, let’s say, the English literature departments of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all embraced critical race theory, or all embraced gender studies at roughly the same time for the next generation of PhDs, and, therefore, of professors at every other university to have some version of that ideological formation.

Intellectual fashions are a fascinating subject to study. The Scottish enlightenment wasn’t devised by Adam Smith and David Hume. They didn’t have a master plan, but the zeitgeist, the intellectual zeitgeist in late 18th Century Scotland was incredibly conducive to creativity.

Our intellectual zeitgeist, unfortunately, was conducive to the opposite, to intellectual stultification, and the advent of a series of ideas that were, in fact, deeply hostile to free thought, whether it was critical race theory, or the various branches of grievance studies, we created a monster, and that monster was highly illiberal.

And this is the great paradox of our time, that liberals in the ’60s and ’70s hired progressives, and then the progressives hired, or trained people who were deeply illiberal, and wanted to shut down intellectual diversity.

Preet Bharara:

Just to make sure we understand what we’re talking about, by illiberal, do you mean liberal is used to be, or in your mind was a bastion of tolerance and illiberal is intolerant?

Niall Ferguson:

That’s a reasonable definition. Let me put it in a slightly more vivid way. A liberal is somebody who says, “I believe in free speech and I will defend to the death your right to say something, even if I disagree with it.” And an illiberal is somebody who says, “I believe in free speech, but,” and then they say what you’re not allowed to say.

And American universities are now absolutely full of people who say that they believe in free speech, but, and that’s the problem, because there shouldn’t be a but. There really shouldn’t.

Preet Bharara:

I’m jumping ahead, because I want to talk about the right, not just the left. Are there illiberals on the right-

Niall Ferguson:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

… who say, “I believe in your free speech, but”? What do you call those people?

Niall Ferguson:

They’re also illiberals. Liberalism is this center ground where you believe in free inquiry, in free publication, and free speech, and all of those freedoms, and you have enemies to the left of you who say, whether it’s for the working class, or the downtrodden, in other terms, “You have to shut up.”

And then there are the people on the right, who have equally compelling reasons why you should shut up.

But if you’re a classical liberal, you’re bound to fight on two fronts.

Preet Bharara:

So, if you had your druthers, there would be multiple ideologies, or a range of ideologies, ranging from narrowly from conservatism to liberalism, but there should be an overlapping consensus on both the right and the left to tolerate free speech. Is that a fair characterization?

Niall Ferguson:

Yeah. Think of the operating system of a free society-

Preet Bharara:

Everything else can be … You can disagree about all the other things, but there should be a core of overlapping belief in free speech without a but.

Niall Ferguson:

The United States, you’re the lawyer, has its rules about what can be said, and the body of law that’s evolved from the First Amendment is an admirable body of law, and we should respect it.

Universities don’t need to, because it doesn’t necessarily apply to them, if they’re private corporations, but they should act as if something like the First Amendment prevails. And I was told at Harvard many years ago by Joseph Nye that that was how Harvard ran. It just stopped being true, if it ever had been.

But the point is it’s an operating system. If you’re interested in pursuing truth and trying to understand the world better, whether it’s the physical world, or the psychological world, or the world of literature, or history, you should want an operating system that allows experimental thinking, experimental work to happen, and it shouldn’t be prevented, or constrained by some orthodoxy that says, “Now we can’t ask that question. That question’s not allowed to be asked.”

If you have those constraints then you’re under … You just won’t be very good at being a university quite quickly.

Preet Bharara:

I’m confused about something. So, when we talk about free speech and we talk about liberalism, when we talk about that in this country, it is very, very bound up with both legally, rhetorically, historically, substantively with the First Amendment.

Other countries don’t have the First Amendment. Other countries, including liberal democracies like Canada, the UK, France, et cetera, say, “We believe in free speech, but” and they have laws on the books that are all about the but.

In your estimation then, are those other countries that are not the United States, by definition, illiberal?

Niall Ferguson:

They’re less liberal, and it’s very obvious that England is a less liberal place than the United States right now.

Preet Bharara:

By design, structure, and law.

Niall Ferguson:

By history, but, certainly, the legal position today is that in this country, the police can come and arrest you, if you are guilty of hate speech. And there are people in jail, because of things that they have said on social media, that were deemed to be hate speech.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I’m not endorsing any of that, and I’m an American, I’m an American-trained lawyer, and I believe in the First Amendment. I think it’s one of our great strengths.

Niall Ferguson:

Yes. I agree with that. I was born in Scotland, but I’m an American citizen. And one of the reasons-

Preet Bharara:

You and I both, my brother, my Scottish brother.

Niall Ferguson:

… I really appreciate the First Amendment. And it’s startling how much free speech has been rolled back in the United Kingdom in recent years.

The fact that there is such a category as a non-crime hate incident, that the police investigate in England, that thousands of people have the police harass them, because of things that they’ve said, it’s like something out of Orwell’s 1984.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve got a series of questions relating to this. Given that we have lots of western democracies, in fact, most of them that say, “We believe in free speech but,” there’s nothing hardwired in western culture, generally speaking, towards unfettered free speech, because unless … You can correct me, you’re the historian, have there been movements to undo hate speech legislation in other countries? Have there been movements towards more unfettered free speech in other countries? And if not, why not?

Niall Ferguson:

There were. It’s interesting. If you take the case of the United Kingdom, there had been up until the 1960s quite serious restrictions, blasphemy laws were still in place, for example, and all kinds of things were subject to censorship, including theater, and there was a period of liberalization when those laws that were perceived to be anachronistic were done away with.

And I didn’t realize it, but at the time in the ’80s when I was an undergraduate, Britain was going through a golden age of free speech. Didn’t have the First Amendment, but it might as well have had. One could say, and do pretty much what an American could say and do.

And it’s only with the disappearance of that period of freedom that we realize that the norm in England is, in fact, for the state to have powers of censorship, and for there to be blasphemy laws of some sort, or another.

So, I do think that the United States stands out as an anomaly. It’s remarkable that there is this distinctive form of freedom in America, but that’s the whole point. That’s one of the American exceptions.

When I wrote a book called Civilization, I was trying to define why the west broadly had outperformed the rest of the world from about 1500, or 1600, and one of the six killer apps that I cited was the rule of law based on private property rights.

I did not name free speech as a killer app, because that’s a very American peculiarity. It’s not general in the west.

Preet Bharara:

I want to clarify something, as the lawyer in this duo, what we’re talking about when we discuss free speech on campus, it has nothing to do with the First Amendment.

Niall Ferguson:

Correct. As I said-

Preet Bharara:

We invoke the First Amendment, and the culture of the First Amendment, but it has nothing to do with the First Amendment, because the First Amendment is about governmental abridgment of free speech.

Niall Ferguson:

And I’m glad you clarified that. I thought I had already made that point, but I did it somewhat elliptically.

Preet Bharara:

So, the question is if you believe in free speech, and there is the possibility and allowance for free speech, and there was, in your mind, and in your assessment also in these universities until about 10 years ago, if you believe in the marketplace of ideas, why isn’t the contrary view, or maybe it is, why isn’t whatever you think the contrary view is to enforcing speech orthodoxy gaining traction? And what, if anything, should anybody do about it? Given that you have very, very smart, intelligent, educated, decently paid and housed people at these elite universities.

Niall Ferguson:

My observation at Harvard, but I go to multiple universities to give lectures. So, I had a sense of what was going on elsewhere. In addition to which, we have a lot of survey data now, Heterodox Academy gathers it, for example.

So, my impression backed up by data is that over a 10 year period, there was an increase in cancellations, disinvitations, disciplinary actions taken against professors as well as students, and a shift in censorment amongst not only students, but also professors, administrators, and university presidents.

And these things cumulatively changed the climate so that in 2014, I felt that I could speak quite freely in my classes at Harvard, make jokes even, risque jokes, I could teach controversial topics without fear of being disciplined, threatened, or publicly castigated.

But that ceased to be true. So, that by the time I left, I was familiar with a process that could be applied to undergraduates, to graduates, but also to tenured professors.

And the process went like this, you say something, somebody takes exception to it, and they say that it’s racist, or it’s homophobic, or it’s transphobic, or it’s Islamophobic, or it’s something phobic. That one person emails an administrator, and the administrator who is perhaps a Title IX officer, or a diversity, equity and inclusion officer, suddenly sees an opportunity to do something for a living.

And they then send the offender an email saying that they have reason to believe that they engaged in offensive, triggering speech, and that, for that reason, there may need to be disciplinary investigation.

At that point, there’s a moment of supreme danger for the individual concerned, because if they agree to the investigation, they’re done. The investigation is a committee of public safety type affair. There’s no due process. And then usually the student newspaper reports that the professor has, in fact, clearly, committed some heinous offense, hence, the investigation, because, obviously, guilty as charged.

And that story then appears in the New York Times. Now by this time, your reputation is in tatters, and you begin to get the emails canceling your appearance at the other universities, or kicking you off the committee of the journal that you’ve been an editor of, and so on.

So, the process of cancel culture involved the, kind of, pattern that I’m familiar with from studying the Soviet Union, a letter of denunciation followed by the bureaucratic investigation followed by the reputational destruction, the show trial, and then, at least, morally, the disappearance of the offender.

I saw that happen to multiple colleagues, I saw it happen to students. I saw students have their careers destroyed on the basis of a casual accusation. And you, as a lawyer, would agree that that is the very antithesis of due process.

Preet Bharara:

Well, no, because … I’m not agreeing, or disagreeing with any of this at the moment. At the end of the day, in a courtroom, there’s a jury. There’s a non-expert jury who decides the guilt, or innocence of the party. Right?

Niall Ferguson:

There are no jurors on campus.

Preet Bharara:

No, but here, and this may be an infection of the minds of the people who are making the judgements, and that may be your view, and that may very well be the right view, but if someone stands in the front of the class, and says … And there’s a range of things that might be said that are called into question, on the one hand …

And I’m just making this up off the top of my head, on the one hand, if someone says, “You have to stand up for your rights,” and by, one, manual of proper language usage, that’s offensive to people who are disabled, and you’re called up on charges of violating the orthodoxy, I would hope and expect that that innocent phrase doesn’t cause the verdict that you’re talking about. And if it does, then we have a different kind of problem.

On the other hand, if the person at the front of the classroom lays into a Black student and intentionally calls that Black student lesser, or inferior, and let’s just throw in for the hypothetical for good measure, uses the N-word, then I think a negative verdict on that person would not be out of line.

And then you have a range of things in-between. But I guess what I’m trying to understand is if the transgressions are silly and stupid, and fall more in line with that first example I gave, what is the mechanism by which a falsely accused person suffers a bad consequence? Is it because everyone has become a mush brain? Or is it something else?

Your explanation does not explain to me why the right result doesn’t arise, if you believe that there are people of good faith. And maybe your argument is that people have become not of good faith any longer.

Niall Ferguson:

Well, there’s an immense amount about faith in the academic world today. Otherwise, Joshua Katz would still be a professor at Princeton, and Roland Fryer would not have been suspended for two years without pay at Harvard, and do you want me to go on?

Preet Bharara:

But do you understand what I’m getting at?

Niall Ferguson:

The cases you gave are frivolous.

Preet Bharara:

I’m trying to deconstruct-

Niall Ferguson:

No. The examples you gave are frivolous. What happened in each of those cases was that … Well, let’s take Joshua Katz’s case. Joshua Katz’s crime was to express a critical view of Black Lives Matter. He was then not only accused of racism for casting aspersions on the bonafides of Black Lives Matter, but he was then subjected to a very dubious disciplinary procedure relating to an offense for which he had previously been disciplined, what? 10 years before.

The bad faith is there, trust me, in abundance, or, at least, it was, because I think the tide has turned, and-

Preet Bharara:

But who is it bad faith on the part of?

Niall Ferguson:

… numerous cases, numerous … On the part, I’ll tell you-

Preet Bharara:

Is the bad faith on the part of the administrators? Yeah.

Niall Ferguson:

I think the administrators who have accumulated in bizarre, hypertrophic numbers in recent years in universities are key here, because what makes the modern university different from its ancestors is there is this enormous bureaucracy of people whose job seems to be to meddle in what goes on in the classroom, or for that matter in halls of residence.

But I think there was an unholy alliance formed between administrators, radical students, radical professors, and weak leaders, weak presidents. And this combination meant that a mob tactic could be deployed against anyone who deviated from the orthodoxy, and then the bureaucracy would do the rest.

I think if one takes the cases of Roland Fryer, or Joshua Katz, and there are many others I could mention, the thing that’s most insidious is that the initial harm, the initial provocation was on an ideological transgression.

Joshua criticized Black Lives Matter, and Roland had the temerity to suggest that the police did not, in fact, commit more lethal violence against African American suspects than against white ones.

And what [inaudible 00:28:29] ultimately did for them were I think highly dubious disciplinary procedures, and it was the lack of due process in those procedures that I think was most offensive.

But these things wouldn’t have happened if, as you put it, people of good faith had been involved. There were people of bad faith involved, people who, I believe, bore false witness, and people who connived at the destruction of reputations of great scholars and teachers.

And I think that that is a travesty for what a university should be like. That is something that those responsible should be shamed for, because they’ve taken great universities and they’ve destroyed the operating system. You cannot have a great university in which professors and students are afraid to say what they think.

Did you know, Preet? That 59% of American undergraduates are afraid to speak their mind in class. 59%. How can a university function if in class people are self-censoring? But that’s the culture that these people have managed to create, a culture of fear, which I remember thinking at Stanford six years ago was reminiscent of a kind of totalitarianism lite.

It was a little glimmer of the fear that you would have felt in a properly totalitarian regime, fear of being denounced, fear then, the bureaucracy grounding into motion, and a sense that when it did, your rights were more, or less gone.

Preet Bharara:

Is this an issue in your view that exists in all universities in America, or concentrated at the elite great universities in your words?

Niall Ferguson:

I think it varies. I think the elite universities seem to be notably bad. Harvard comes bottom of the fire rankings for free speech. If you look at the rankings, it’s pretty clear that there’s variance.

But it’s notable that the elite universities are all at, or near the bottom, which I think is telling. Just as the elite universities were where the most violent pro-Hamas protests took place after October the 7th. Funny, that.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask a question? Because I’m really confused about … I’m confused a lot in my life generally.

So, all the surveys say, and you’ve I think referred to these, that, particularly, in the humanities, the overwhelming number of tenured professors, particularly, at the elite universities characterize themselves as liberal. Correct?

Niall Ferguson:

I think it’s 95% at Harvard last I checked.

Preet Bharara:

So, is that because conservatives don’t want to become professors? Is that because there are equal numbers of conservatives and liberals who pursue academia and the conservatives are rooted out and not allowed admission and not given PhD slots? Is it because the nature of academic inquiry somehow is more likely to be pursued by people who are liberal?

I’ve not understood why in a free society, what the explanation is for that complete and total ideological imbalance at our universities? Do you know the reason?

Niall Ferguson:

There are a number of ways of explaining this that I don’t think are too confusing.

Partly, there’s a network theory of homophily that explains it. So, birds of a feather flock together, and the more liberal institutions become, the more liberal they become. That is to say, over time, it becomes increasingly clear that Harvard is a place for liberals more and more over time. And so, finally, conservatives just stop even considering it.

So, if you go back to the 1960s, there were conservative professors at Harvard, but they were a minority, and the liberals were Kennedy liberals.

Fast-forward to the Harvard of today, and the transition is almost complete. You’ve got 95%, and a big proportion of those liberals say that they’re actually progressive, or democratic socialists.

Two things happened at once. One, conservatives were overtly discriminated against at every stage from PhD programs onwards, and I saw it happen, and, two, conservatives gave up. So, generation one would be conservative academics are discriminated against. Generation two, why would we even bother?

And so, now you have what you have. It’s not hard to understand. I can assure you, when you see committees who simply say, “Well, we can’t have him, because he’s a conservative,” you get the message fairly quickly.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think that’s all it is?

Niall Ferguson:

I think that’s most of what it is, but I think it’s a protracted multi-generational process where it just got harder and harder-

Preet Bharara:

But at every elite university?

Niall Ferguson:

Pretty much.

Preet Bharara:

Something doesn’t-

Niall Ferguson:

I can’t think of any exceptions to that.

Preet Bharara:

I’m not smart enough to understand.

Niall Ferguson:

I’m at The Hoover Institution, which is-

Preet Bharara:

How’s the University of Chicago?

Niall Ferguson:

The University of Chicago has an interesting track record here, because its operating system is very explicitly committed to academic freedom, and it has the Chicago principles. It probably has the best, at least, until recent times, the best written commitments to a culture of academic freedom, but in practice, it’s not that different to be an undergraduate there than to be an undergraduate at Princeton.

I drilled down into the survey data, and found, to my surprise, that Chicago students didn’t feel any more able to speak freely in class than their counterparts at Princeton.

So, there has been a cultural shift that one can see in opinion polling amongst Generation Z, but I think the universities have moved to a surprising extent, in lockstep away from commitments to academic freedom, and meritocracy towards an orthodoxy that restricts areas of inquiry, and in which, by the way, and this is just as important, considerations other than merit determine everything from admissions to tenure.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Niall Ferguson after this.

You have spoken about, and others have as well, with the advent of the second term of President Trump, what people have called a vibe shift. Is there a vibe shift? What’s the vibe shift? And is that vibe shift occurring in your mind on campuses as well?

Niall Ferguson:

The idea of a vibe shift comes from popular culture about which I know next to nothing, but it made sense to me when it was applied to Silicon Valley, and the point was made early last year in a clever blog post that there had been a real change in the valley from the culture in which you had, essentially, the Stanford campus replicated on the Google campus to one in which there was increasing skepticism about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and there was an increasingly open skepticism about other progressive norms.

I hypothesize that Trump’s election was a political vibe shift, that what had been detectable in Silicon Valley turned out to be nationwide in every blue state, because the swings to Trump were bigger in the blue states than in the red states. And that the vibe shift were global piece I wrote for Bari Weiss’ Free Press was on the global vibe shift.

I think it’s not yet clear that the vibe shift is going to happen on campus, because I think there are many progressives, or woke types on campus who think that they’re the last bastion of resistance to Trump, and they will dig in, and try to defend the DEI bureaucracy, and they will try to defend the speech codes, and they will keep their pronouns. They will hang onto their preferred pronouns in their emails to the bitter end.

So, I think the vibe shift will be resisted on many campuses as far as possible until finally they find that the federal funds have been cut off, and the donors are walking out the door, and then the vibe shift will finally happen.

Preet Bharara:

I think this is the post that you were talking about with respect to the vibe shift. And I wonder if it’s the case … Because I consider myself to be a liberal, progressive, but close to the center, I was a prosecutor for most of my life, not a bastion of extreme liberal ideology, and I wonder how much of a caricature there is in public understanding. And maybe people would say the same thing about the right.

But I feel it certainly about the left, and the vibe shift that’s described in this post, I look at it, and I’ve always been on the other side of most of these, and I consider myself to be a progressive.

So, I’m quoting from the post, “The vibe shift looks like ditching childless civilizational nihilism, and saying, “Yeah. Having kids is good actually.” I’ve always believed having kids is good actually.

“The vibe shift is the repudiation of homogenizing hyper-globalism, and instead intentionally pursuing the communal, the local, the national.” I’ve always felt that too.

“The vibe shift is the rejection of reality denial, and instead embracing that men and women are unique and different.” That’s always been my view.

“It’s about relearning to trust your eyes and ears.” I’ve always believed that’s true.

“It’s about being able to cheerfully proclaim dudes rock.”

I go down the list of things, and I’ve been on that side of the vibe shift as long as I can remember. So, am I actually not a liberal, or is there a caricaturing of the liberal, or is there something else going on?

Niall Ferguson:

Well, I think … Preet, I’m just refreshing my memory, but it’s a Santiago Pliego’s definition-

Preet Bharara:

Yes.

Niall Ferguson:

… of the vibe shift.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. That’s what I was reading from.

Niall Ferguson:

Which I was impressed by. He goes on, “The vibe shift is a healthy suspicion of credentialism, and a return to human judgment”-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Niall Ferguson:

“The vibe shift is”-

Preet Bharara:

I’m onboard with that. I’ve always been onboard with that, Niall.

Niall Ferguson:

“The vibe shift is living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth at whatever the cost. The vibe shift is directly facing our tumultuous times.”

The reason that post validated, resonated, rather, with so many people in Silicon Valley was that there really had been a countervailing tendency … Here’s some more, “The vibe shift is the rejection of reality denial, and instead embracing that men and women are unique and different.”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I quoted that a minute ago.

Niall Ferguson:

There was an entire movement committed-

Preet Bharara:

But how large is that movement, sir?

Niall Ferguson:

It turns out to be very large, indeed, at tech companies and universities, and quite small in the wider country. And that’s why, if you look at what went wrong for the Democrats at the election, the more the Democratic Party identified itself with woke positions, particularly, on gender, the worse it did, because ordinary Americans are in the center on that kind of issue, and not out on the progressive wing.

Now you’ve called yourself a centrist progressive. That’s a contradiction in terms, Preet. You can’t have that. That’s like saying, “I’m a centrist Leninist.”

Preet Bharara:

Why not?

Niall Ferguson:

“I’m a centrist Stalinist.” You can’t … You’ve got to choose.

Preet Bharara:

I’m a little bit left of center. How about that?

Niall Ferguson:

You’re a liberal, and like many liberals, I’m going to tell you the hard truth, my friend, you made common cause with a bunch of people who call themselves progressives, but were, in fact, deeply illiberal people who wanted-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I don’t know what common cause means.

Niall Ferguson:

to [inaudible 00:40:12] of the world.

Preet Bharara:

I voted for the same person that they voted for.

Niall Ferguson:

True, but they voted for different policies than the ones you believed in, or did you look at Kamala Harris’ record in the Senate? Did you look at her voting record in the Senate?

Preet Bharara:

Have you seen the coalition of crazy disparate people who support Donald Trump? Do you think they all are of a piece with each other? Do you think they’re all on the same page on H-1B visas? They’re all on the same page on immigration? They’re all on the same page on education? They’re all on the same page on-

Niall Ferguson:

You’re changing the subject, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

… taxes?

Niall Ferguson:

[inaudible 00:40:41].

Preet Bharara:

No. I’m just saying-

Niall Ferguson:

That I’m not making a fair observation that-

Preet Bharara:

Political coalitions are different from ideologies.

Niall Ferguson:

We’re not talking about political coalition. We’re talking about the tension between your liberalism and the progressive left. It’s a very big tension, and it’s fundamental, because you believe in free speech, and they don’t. They don’t.

Preet Bharara:

I have a lot of issues on my side, fair to say, fair to say-

Niall Ferguson:

And the cancel culture, it’s very clear, is much more a phenomenon on the left in practice than on the right.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but have you heard this term the woke right?

Niall Ferguson:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

You don’t like that? Why don’t you like that? Why’d you make a face, Niall?

Niall Ferguson:

I can’t get excited-

Preet Bharara:

There’s a cancel culture on the right too. Isn’t there?

Niall Ferguson:

Yeah, but-

Preet Bharara:

Look, and it’s only beginning maybe.

Niall Ferguson:

I feel as if that’s … I don’t feel as if that’s a very large and important hill for anybody to be dying on whereas-

Preet Bharara:

Yet. Yet.

Niall Ferguson:

… academic freedom is an important … Civilizationally, very important thing.

If there are people on the right who seriously intend to challenge academic freedom, they will have to reckon with me and my friends. But they haven’t been our problem for the last 10 years.

Preet Bharara:

Well, can I ask an iconoclastic question? How important is academic freedom insofar as how important is academia? How important is expertise? We’ve been taught it’s not that important.

Niall Ferguson:

Do you think it would have been good if the Germans had won World War II?

Preet Bharara:

No.

Niall Ferguson:

Right. Do you think that we won World War II because we had better science than the Germans in the end?

Preet Bharara:

Well, how’s our science doing now? I’ve seen a movement-

Niall Ferguson:

It’s still pretty good.

Preet Bharara:

… on the right to denigrate science. You see it in the appointments that Donald Trump is making to HHS. You see it all over the place. This vibe shift from learning to look at things with your own eyes and ears, and forsake credentialism sounds nice. It’s a nice bumper sticker, but the logical extreme of that on the part of some people in our country would mean the opposite result of what you wanted to have happen in World War II. Scientists are least respected now than they have been in a long time. Are they not?

Niall Ferguson:

Does academic freedom matter was your question? And my response was-

Preet Bharara:

I think it does, but I’m asking you a pointed question for the sake of this discussion.

Niall Ferguson:

You can’t have sustained scientific and technological leadership without academic freedom. And in the end, Hitler destroyed the German universities and he destroyed them by imposing his orthodoxy on them, and driving out much of the talent, and, fortunately, much of it ended up in the United States. And it helped the west win World War II.

So, whichever threat … As I said, whoever threatens academic freedom, whether they’re from the left, or the right is my enemy, because if we don’t have it, then we will, ultimately, be overhauled by whichever rival empire, or civilization does have it.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Is the following fair? We’re talking about academia as if it’s monolithic. There are a history professors, and I respect them. There are also biology professors and physics professors, and from the polling that I’ve seen that 95% figure that we talked about earlier, in the history departments of elite universities is not quite the same once you go down the spectrum from soft science to harder science.

So, I don’t know that we have the same problem in our physics departments, in our astrophysics departments, and even in our economics departments. And my question to rephrase is how important is academia?

Because I was talking about humanities academia, and you smartly went back to science and talking about World War II and our scientific accomplishments. How important and influential is academia on the humanities side?

Niall Ferguson:

Well, universities are called universities, because they cover all the bases, and under one jurisdiction. We engage in the human, social, and physical sciences. That is the nature of the universities since medieval times. And that means that everybody is subject to the same constraints, whether they’re an astrophysicist, or a specialist on Dante.

And so, in a way, the fact that in the engineering department, there are more conservatives than in the English literature department doesn’t really matter, because all these departments are subject to the same central authority, and the president’s-

Preet Bharara:

Relating to speech you mean?

Niall Ferguson:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

You mean relating to speech.

Niall Ferguson:

Exactly. And scientists have been as susceptible to these sorts of pressure as people working in the humanities.

There’s quite good data on the politics of different disciplines. You can calculate that the ratios of registered Democrats to Republicans in all the different fields, it’s been done in a relatively systematic way.

And you find that it ranges from engineering where the ratio is not especially high, they’re all positive ratios, down to anthropology where you can’t calculate a ratio, because there are literally no conservative anthropologists.

But I don’t think it alters the general points, that it’s a problem if American universities go from being places where you can be truly intellectually adventurous, and take the intellectual risks that will get you across the frontier to being places of conformism.

Thomas Kuhn wrote a great book on the structure of scientific revolutions, making the point that any major breakthrough is resisted. It’s always resisted by the incumbent, the thinkers. There is rarely a kind of enthusiastic embrace of a radical new idea at first.

And so, it’s important that our institutions are set up, so, that the outlier, the person who is the contrarian doesn’t just shut down when they put forward their radical new idea.

And that’s why it matters. It matters in every field. In history, it matters as much as physics. After all-

Preet Bharara:

It does?

Niall Ferguson:

… Winston Churchill didn’t go to university, but he was a great historian, and we couldn’t have won World War II without him either.

Preet Bharara:

It seems like the one bias that we both may have is in favor of universities to begin with. Your former colleague at Harvard, my former professor, Michael Sandel talks about how we in America may over-valorize college. Is he onto something there?

Niall Ferguson:

I’ve had this argument over many years with Peter Thiel, who at certain points believed they should all just be shut down, abandoned. And my response has always been, “And where would we be now, Peter? If there’d been no Stanford for you to rebel against, and no Oxford for me to rebel against?”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Niall Ferguson:

Ultimately, universities have been playing a remarkably important role in western societies since around the 11th Century. And that role has been to create a peculiar space, not of the political world, not of the market, and not entirely of the religious world, in which intellectual innovation can happen, and knowledge transfer between the generations can happen when students are at their I suppose most creative and most capable of learning.

And the reason that this form has survived for so long is that it’s so powerful. And when it really works, you get the great paradigm shifts that Thomas Kuhn writes about.

Now it doesn’t always work. Gibbons said that his time at Oxford was the least profitable of his entire life, and really denied Oxford any responsibility for the quality of his subsequent writing.

So, you can be a genius without a university, but you’re more likely to produce fulfilled and productive geniuses with universities than without them.

So, I’ve spent my life in universities, because I think they’re as indispensable as laws, as courts to a free society. And if I thought what was happening to our courts was what just happened to our universities, I’d be very concerned. I’d be as concerned.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’m surprised it’s taken us this long to get to it since we’ve been talking about universities. Could you please explain to us, and tell us what the University of Austin is all about, sir?

Niall Ferguson:

Well, realizing that the existing institutions were unlikely to respond to my attempt at reform, despairing indeed, that the established institutions could ever, at least, in my lifetime reform themselves, I, in common with a few others, Joe Lonsdale, Bari Weiss, Pano Kanelos, decided three and a half years ago that we would start a new university in Austin.

And we tried to address some of the problems that we had identified, and reinvent the university for the 21st Century.

This seemed like a very American solution to the problem, because in previous periods when people have been dissatisfied with the Ivy League, they’ve started new universities. That happened at Chicago and at Stanford in the late 19th Century.

But we stopped having new universities. There hadn’t really been any for ages.

Preet Bharara:

There aren’t many at all that are new, and is that because there are huge barriers to entry, or people-

Niall Ferguson:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

… just don’t have the-

Niall Ferguson:

It’s really hard. We’ve created a huge barrier to entry called accreditation, which I’m sure was created with good intentions, but does make it very difficult.

Catch-22 is you can’t be accredited until you’ve graduated your first class. So, for four years, you have to persuade students to study with you before you’re accredited. That’s a barrier to entry right there.

Preet Bharara:

So, how many years has it been in Austin?

Niall Ferguson:

Our first class is in its second term.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, and what’s the student population?

Niall Ferguson:

92. We, basically, have 100 places for the first four years, because I don’t think one could easily go above that. We offer full tuition, because we have to incentivize people to risk an undergraduate degree on a new institution.

And our goal is once we’ve got over the vital hurdle four years from now to scale rapidly up in the way that University of Chicago was able to, and it quintupled its student numbers in the first 10 years. And very quickly became competitive with the established universities.

It’s harder than it was in the 1890s, but I think the same approach is viable, and I think it will be good for all the existing universities to have a new kid on the block, because they’ve all become somewhat alike, and our university won’t be like them.

Our university will mean what it says about academic freedom and admission and promotion according to merit, and you’ll like this, Preet, unlike them, we have a constitution with a full set of guarantees of freedom, and an independent judiciary that will determine if somebody’s rights-

Preet Bharara:

And a robust First Amendment?

Niall Ferguson:

It has a First Amendment, though, it’s not identical to the First Amendment, obviously, because we’re a university, not a federal government.

More importantly, we have a Bill of Rights, and we’ve clearly defined the rights and responsibilities of members of the university, and the bases on which they can be subject to discipline. So, that there is due process. That’s very clearly modeled on the Constitution of the United States.

I’m proud of that innovation. I consulted a lot of eminent lawyers to make sure that the constitution was a strong document, and I hope that it will become a model the way that the Chicago principles became a model, because university governance is very broken in America, and in the English-speaking world generally.

And the best way to fix it is to have some real constitutional order, and the process that holds the executive, the president, et cetera, and the legislature, the trustees to account, which no other universities currently have.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you what the reaction has been generally? And, in particular, like, how does Stanford feel about your foray here?

Niall Ferguson:

Well, Stanford I don’t have to answer to. The university’s relationship to The Hoover Institution is-

Preet Bharara:

Separate?

Niall Ferguson:

… somewhat like that of the Peoples Republic of China to Taiwan. But Condi Rice, the director of The Hoover Institution, gave me her blessing when I embarked on this venture. In some ways, it’s entirely compatible with Hoover’s role, Hoover as a research institution that doesn’t have students whereas the University of Austin is an undergraduates-only operation at this point. We can’t have graduate degrees, and we can’t really establish research departments until we can have PhDs.

So, it’s not that they’re at odds with one another. I think they’re complimentary. The reaction at first was scathing, negative, downright hostile-

Preet Bharara:

Why?

Niall Ferguson:

… from the academic establishment.

Preet Bharara:

Why is that? What’s the skin off their back?

Niall Ferguson:

I thought it was very revealing that people who cover academia in journals like The Chronicle of Higher Education were so dismissive, or that journalists for The New York Times were so dismissive, because that told me that we must be of above the target. The flak was sufficiently intense.

I think a lot of journalists feel weirdly invested in the established order, because the thing that they cherish above all other things is their Ivy League degree. That’s one possible explanation.

Another is that in this particular sector, there is immense resistance to innovation, which is another sign of its ill health, but things have changed. We’ve now proved the skeptics wrong, who said we’d never be able to launch a university in three years.

And, increasingly, I think now that people realize just how serious the problems have become in higher education, there are people who see us as part of the solution, which is very encouraging.

Preet Bharara:

Are you attracting necessarily, and understandably, conservative-minded students and conservative-minded faculty, or a broad selection?

Niall Ferguson:

We did not set out to be a conservative institution. There is already Hillsdale, if that’s what you’re interested in.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Niall Ferguson:

Our goal is to have real intellectual diversity, and I think we’ve achieved that.

I think they have in common a certain rebellious attitude. The undergraduates are there, because they did not feel enticed by the status quo, by the established institutions, and I think that’s also true of the professors.

But I see them as rebels, not conservatives, and that’s the strong impression I get when I talk to them. I’ll be teaching next term. I’ll be able to report back with more precision, but, no, it’s-

Preet Bharara:

I’ll expect a detailed report, sir.

Niall Ferguson:

It’s not a conservative scene.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Niall Ferguson:

It’s a rebel scene, as it should be.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you’re in Austin.

Niall Ferguson:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a liberal oasis in Texas I’m told.

Niall Ferguson:

That’s partly what makes it good, that Austin is the liberal town in the red state, and that’s the vibe that I think we’re looking for.

Preet Bharara:

Niall, you’ve been very generous with your time. Thank you so much. Good luck with everything, and we’ll hear your reports forthcoming soon. Thank you so much.

Niall Ferguson:

It’s been a pleasure to be cross-examined by a professional-

Preet Bharara:

That was not a cross-examination. [inaudible 00:56:27].

Niall Ferguson:

When will sentencing be?

Preet Bharara:

Four months. Usually, it’s delayed four months. Thank you, Niall.

Niall Ferguson:

It’s been a pleasure chatting.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Niall Ferguson continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. To become a member, head to www.cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s www.cafe.com/insider.

Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions.

Q&A

Now let’s get to your questions.

Preet Bharara:

So, last week, I did something for the first time. I did an AMA, or Ask Me Anything on Reddit, and I wanted to share with you one of the many great questions I got, and what my answer was, which I stand behind.

The question came from Moonspindrift, who wrote, “Preet, I enjoy your show very much. Question, do you think Trump even knows what is going on? An op-ed by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post lists a range of responses to reporter questions that suggest he has no idea what his administration is doing, has no idea he pardoned January 6-ers, who boasted on social media about beating Capitol police officers. He seems clueless about his plan to send 10,000 troops to the southern border, and intends revealing his recent pardons on a case-by-case basis. Even though, they cannot be reversed. Your thoughts would be most welcome.”

So, this is how I responded, “Yes. Trump knows what is going on. He may not be versed deeply in every bit of policy detail that is being put forward, but the MAGA agenda is his, the MAGA messaging is his, the deliberate divisions being sown spring from his brain and his heart, and he knows exactly the results that he wants.

I think we need to be careful after this long to underestimate Donald Trump’s wherewithal and political competence. We underestimate him and his tactics and his abilities at our very great peril.

Maybe some people take comfort in telling themselves he’s a moron, but that moron kept the House, won the Senate, packed the Supreme Court, and returned to the White House. He is a grave political adversary, and should be treated as such.”

This email comes in a question from Cathy who says, “Hello, Preet. Several of the executive orders have been blocked due to lawsuits regarding their unconstitutionality. For executive orders that do not relate to constitutional provisions, what actions other than lawsuits can be taken to oppose them? Sincerely, Cathy.”

Well, I think all the executive orders, whether they relate to a constitutional issue, or not, are subject to lawsuits by people who have standing, whether that’s people who are going to be affected by the statute directly, or by attorney’s general on behalf of constituents who might be affected directly.

And that’s, as you might imagine, a principle way that people will fight back against these executive orders.

Now the other way that the fight could go, although, in a divided Congress, it doesn’t seem super likely, is Congress on a bipartisan basis could pass statutes that block one, or more provisions of one, or more executive orders promulgated by Donald Trump.

An executive order does not trump, so to speak, a federal statute. So, whether it’s on immigration, or the executive order relating to gender-affirming care, presumably, hypothetically, Congress could pass a law. Then, of course, you’d have a battle with the administration once again. Where would that battle go? To the courts upon the filing of a lawsuit.

So, at the end of the day, with respect to many of these, if not all of these executive orders, the fights are going to be in the courts.

This question comes in an email from Michelle. Michelle writes, as a lot of other people have written and asked this question on prior occasions, it’s one of the questions I get, or a version of it, that I get the most.

“Dear Preet, first of all, thank you for your work. I was a religious listener since the start of your podcasts, but I will admit, I, like many others, stopped listening to the news, reading the various papers I subscribe to, and stopped listening even to your podcasts after the election. It was too depressing, and I hated the blame game.

As a former elected official and mayor of my small town, I was a political junkie, but I am adrift, and as a first-generation American, I am horrified and pissed.

So, I ask you how do you continue to do your work without feeling hopeless, or rage? I don’t want to be uninformed of what’s going on, but as I’ve begun to plug in again, I feel like the dream of America is gone, and I’m angry and spiteful about those who put us in this position.

While I still understand this didn’t happen overnight, what words of wisdom do you have to be thoughtful, engaged, and unemotional about helping our country move forward? Thank you, Michelle.”

As I said at the outset, I get a version of this question all the time. It’s a question a lot of thoughtful people who wanted a different outcome in the election are asking themselves.

I think it’s okay not to be unemotional. If you care about your country, if you care about the policies that you wanted to be enacted, and you care about the policies that you don’t want to be enacted, it’s okay to care about those things.

You asked me how I do my work without feeling hopelessness, or rage, I often feel rage. I try not to express it too often, because it’s not that productive, but I seldom, if ever, feel hopeless.

Defeats happen, they happen in all aspects of our lives, and they happen on a regular basis, and there can be grace and hope and resolve in defeat. Defeat, whether it’s political, or personal, or professional, can bring you down, make you want to give up.

And at the risk of sounding like a coach at half-time, that’s not what we should do. We never say after someone’s defeat, whether it’s a friend, or a colleague, or a loved one, we never say, “Yeah. You lost this job,” or this game, or this relationship, “Time to give up. Pack up your bags. Just surrender.” We don’t say that, because it’s idiotic.

Defeat is a time for reflection, and rebuilding, and then you fight another day.

And one more point I would make since we’re talking about politics, and political outcomes, Donald Trump lost badly, resoundingly, and he didn’t give up. Why the hell should we?

BUTTON

Well, it’s been a tumultuous week and a half to say the least. Trump and his team have wrought a lot of senseless stuff, some petty, some punitive, some unlawful, some just awful. They have frozen funds, fired IGs, yanked security details, pardoned cop beaters, distorted the constitution, terminated civil servants, halted medical research, and much more.

But I want to mention one particular senseless executive action. It’s flown under the radar a bit. It’s not the most important thing in the world, but it’s deeply important and upsetting to the young people affected, and to the institution involved.

While the Trump team takes a hammer to DOJ lawyers involved in his prosecution and attempts to thin DOJ ranks overall, there is one special program that Trump has also seen fit to slash. It’s called the DOJ Honors Program, and it’s been around for decades.

It’s an entry-level job for young and idealistic lawyers who are committed to public service. It is highly competitive, and highly selective. It’s for fresh law school grads willing to forego the riches of Wall Street firms to serve the people as lawyers in antitrust, or consumer protection, or public integrity, or environmental law, and other areas.

I have known many stars who cut their teeth in the honors program. Hiring into that program is nonpartisan and apolitical. By rule, ideology and party affiliation are not considered.

But the incoming class of 2025 has been told their spots are canceled. They’ve all lost their jobs. Even though, they have not yet practiced law, have not yet prosecuted anyone, have not yet crossed Trump in any way, not that that would be an excuse.

Now these bright graduating students are scrambling for work, outside the usual hiring cycle. What a shame, and what a waste.

Here’s what one student wrote a few days ago on LinkedIn, “Like many others impacted by this decision, I had built my entire three years of law school around this program. I turned down paid private sector internships for unpaid public sector internships. I wrote essays, collected references, and spent hours wrangling with an online platform.

My peers in the DOJ Honors Program, along with others across the various federal agencies, did all of this work to compete for positions that pay less than half the starting salary in the private sector.

It was just last month that most of us spent hours over our winter breaks compiling virtually our entire life histories for background investigation screening.

This week, we learned that, even though, we made these sacrifices to begin our careers in public service, to literally help the people of the United States at personal cost, that this country does not want our help.”

Well, I can say to this student, and others, this country absolutely wants your help, needs your help. It is just that some idiots don’t care.

So, to my lawyer and law firm listeners out there, if you’re in a position to hire one of these legal eagles, I hope you’ll consider doing so.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest Niall Ferguson.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet.

You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost.

I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, Stay Tuned.