Why Geopolitics Will Make US Colleges More Nationalist

0:00Band-Dool is now available everywhere in the U.S. So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are, including these places. May this year most rewarding season ever with Band-Dool. Agent location restrictions apply. Product availability varies by market. C-FanDool.com for eligibility, gambling problem called 1-800-Gemma. Welcome back everybody to What Really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. And here is always with Walter Russell Meade of Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute, and the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. For a story of the week, Opposition to Flock Safety's license plate cameras is uniting Americans across political divides. In Liberal Asheville, North Carolina, activist fear, surveillance of immigrants,

1:01transgender residents, and political dissidents. In conservative Okenee County, South Carolina, opponents emphasize constitutional privacy rights and restraints on government. Both communities recently voted to stop using flock cameras. The technology photographs passing vehicles and uploads their information to searchable databases that can be shared with law enforcement nationwide. Critics object to installations without public approval and worry that routine travel can become an extensive record of people's private lives. Police counter that the cameras help locate stolen vehicles and missing people while arguing that responsible use in stronger oversight can preserve their investigative value despite mounting public demands for restrictions or outright bans. The backlash has prompted bipartisan congressional legislation and state-level restrictions exposing a persistent tension between crime prevention and civil liberties. Walter News or Fonus? I would say Fonus in the sense of like, oh my goodness, are you telling me that there is some sort of tension between preventing crime and preserving civil liberties?

2:04When was this first discovered that, you know, boy, a government that is powerful enough to prevent all evil might become more evil than any of the evils that it's seen? Oh my, and so gosh, we're going to have to strike a balance somewhere. Where? Where? So we strike the balance. Certainly in American history, we've never had this debate before. This is, you know, what's happening is that a new technology is hitting American character and American political reality and we're struggling to digest it. So in itself, there's absolutely, you know, zero real news there. It, you know, of course it's happening. It happened with speed radar, you know, when that was being done. But I have to wonder some of these people so worried about the surveillance. Have any idea of what that little device that carry around with the multi-long is doing?

3:05I remember once, you know, after 9-1-1, when they started making you show ID and so on to get into buildings all over New York, you know, I was, I was just full of righteous wrath as I had to show my driver's license to get into a building where I had an appointment. And I was just fuming and enjoying my, the righteousness of my wrath and my profound dedication to civil liberties and rights of privacy until like, occurred to me, I mean, you idiot. The reason that you're going in here is to film a television recording. You're doing a TV broadcast and you're objecting. So, you know, even, even mighty podcasters are occasionally irrational on this subject. But the deeper issue and it's real, we do have to figure out a way to think about the line between individual privacy, state power

4:08and for that matter, corporate and public awareness, knowledge with this technology. And the problem is only going to get worse because they're going to be more and more ways that you can be tracked, are being tracked, who's doing it, what's it for? And we've got it, we know we're going to have to come up with some principles here that we then try to apply. A lot of these things are going to end up in the courts and the courts are going to be sort of forced to take an 18th century document and figure out, you know, okay, like which amendment of the Constitution most applies to AI and why? I don't envy them that task. But on the other hand, our society's ability to engage consistently with this is one of the things that makes us who we are and is actually an important and beneficial thing. So, fight on, I guess is what I'd say, fight on.

5:08There was a line in the Wall Street Journal article that that news item came from about how I think it was in Ashville. The city council voted five to two to ban the flock cameras and the two city council members who voted in favor of keeping them were the city council's only two black members who saw themselves representing the side of the flock debate representing people who live in public housing in Ashville who were the people, according to them, who are most concerned about crime prevention. Do you think with a lot of these kind of surveillance issues, AI, a lot of these new technologies that they're going to kind of scramble political coalitions as we've known them for a little while where you find, you know, maybe parts of the democratic coalition, parts of the Republican coalition, lining up with each other and vice versa? Well, I guess what I say there, Jeremy, is we see so much, that's almost the defining feature of American politics right now. In 2024, it would minority voters shifting toward Trump in ways that surprised people.

6:10Many are now shifting back. We'll see where all this goes. But, you know, splits between sort of upper middle class progressive self describe progressive white people. And then lower class middle class working class people of color is like a huge split in the democratic party. And, you know, the split between the sort of country club Republicans and the Maga Republicans is long. So in America, class ideology ethnicity and other forms of identity are constantly scrambling in our politics. They always have I suspect they always will. All right, our second story. The European Union's top officials said she would work to make Canada the block's first associate member. European Commission President Ursula Von der Lein said Europe needed to tighten its cooperation with like-minded democracies in particular Canada to retain the continent's sovereignty and tackle threats from what she called an openly hostile world.

7:12The speech of the European Parliament in Strasbourg signaled that the notoriously bureaucratic 27-member block threatened by Russia to its east and an increasingly adversarial relationship with Washington is rethinking its own limits. Officials are beginning to contemplate new more flexible terms of inclusion in Canada, whose prime minister has been urging Europe to create a space for a country heavily reliant on the US will be the prototype. Walter, is this news or phone news? I would say this is fairly typical Brussels phone news of not really being able to do much of anything, not actually having the will to do much of anything, but not wanting to look like you are without options and largely paralyzed. It's, you know, as China, sorry, Canada, one of its responses is to open up its markets to EVs and other things from China as a way to reduce its dependence on the United States, while maybe the central question in European economic policy right now is how to protect what remains of its automobile industry from the Chinese EV invasion.

8:22I mean, I'm gathering too that I saw some interesting little notes that Germany is having raising questions about fast tracking Canada's application to become an associate member. So, you know, this is a, so does this mean that for the next five years there will be intricate parliamentary debates and bureaucratic papers passing back and forth about the merits of Canada's accession, the definition. It also raises fascinating questions and I think these will will will become more salient. There are a lot of countries that that are kind of peripheral to the EU, including maybe most famously Britain. Britain tried to negotiate something sort of like Canada is doing now after Brexit and was met with a pretty cold harsh response from the EU, but of course that didn't offer an opportunity to stick it to Donald Trump.

9:26So, this is I think more both in Canada and in Europe. This is more theatrical sticking it to Donald Trump than representing some profound shift in the international order. I think Americans shouldn't sit around and say, well, ha ha ha, it doesn't really matter. I mean, the fact that so many countries are interested in sticking it to Donald Trump does not necessarily cover the Trump administration in glory, certainly not in diplomacy. But we need to, I think we do need to kind of keep a lot of this in balance. So, the reality is neither Canada nor Europe have many alter any real acceptable alternatives to the United States. Canada, which has perhaps the most laughable defense budget of the major NATO countries, is not going to help Europe fill its security problem hole with vis-a-vis Russia without the US.

10:31It doesn't change much. It vents. It's not a great sign that everybody needs to vent, but this is, let's just say that history was not made by that speech. All right, final story of the week. The United States has stationed weapons in Earth orbit. Air Force Secretary Troy Banks said this week, the first such public acknowledgement by Pentagon official after years of preparations to counter potential deployments by Russia and China. The Pentagon has long feared that China and Russia are making advances in space operations that could threaten US ground forces as well as American satellites. In 2024, American intelligence agencies had raised concerns that Russia could be planning to put a nuclear weapon in space, a threat that could disrupt satellite networks that are vital to everything from communications to military operations. In response to Banks announcement, it spokespeople from the Kremlin and the Chinese Foreign Ministry made statements opposing what they called America's weaponization of space. Walter News or Fonus?

11:32Well, certainly Fonus that Russia and China oppose America's weaponization of space, the one thing it gets in the way of their own weaponization of space. I think it is one more straw in the wind pointing to the deterioration of the global political climate. You know, as I think I've said before on this podcast, sometime around 2014, 2015, the world left the post-war era, where your international life is defined by dealing with the pro... Left over problems of the previous conflict of the post-Cole War era and started to enter a pre-war or interwar era, which is really I think where we are now, where your problems, international life is shaped by problems that if you fail to resolve them effectively or correctly, can lead you lead into a major global conflict.

12:36We are deep in that right now. And the world is visibly getting more dangerous, you know, by the year. You can look back and see a steady ratcheting up of tension. Part of this is manifested in the accelerating arms race that we see just on every hand. Sort of the Ukrainian Russian war is driving a lot of this because each side is, finds it necessary to innovate, you know, at breakneck speed. But in the rise of computer technology and AI in particular is also leading to the acceleration of a global arms race. We should really be seen as one aspect of this accelerating strategic competition that we see under the sea, on the surface of the sea, on the ground, in the air and in space.

13:40That's just where we are. And the idea that you could sort of try to stop this by piously, oh, no weapons in space. I think the problem is a lot harder to solve than that. And you know, how do we restore some kind of order to a world that is drifting closer to a new great power conflict every day. Van Duel is now available everywhere in the US. So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are, including these places. May this year, most rewarding season ever with Van Duel, age and location restrictions apply, product availability varies by market. See Van Duel.com for eligibility, gambling problem called 1-800-Gembers. Visible puts unlimited 5G data in hotspot in the palm of your hand, powered by Verizon's 5G network.

14:45With no contract holding you back, and for a limited time, you can get visible for just $19 a month for 12 months when you use promo code Save6. All the features of Big Wireless Service, for half the cost. Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply, standard rate applies at month 13. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. All right, that is it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. Walter, you wrote this week that the return of great power competition is upending global institutions and reshaping the world economy as we know, but that it's also accelerating changes in American higher education, putting wind in the sales of people wanting reform and undercutting the efforts of those trying to keep college woke. So tell us what you mean there about the impact that great power geopolitics is having on higher education here at home in America.

15:48Yeah, as as our regular listeners know, I do spend a certain amount of time on on the campus at the University of Florida and have been teaching college for many years and think about education from time to time. Though my say my own education. Let me just admit that I majored in English because instead of history because if you majored in English, you could take a senior seminar while if you majored in history, you had to write a senior paper. And that sounded to my young self like a very owner of tasks indeed. So, in any case, after the end of the Cold War, it really seemed to a huge cliche people thought history was over, but what they really part of what they thought was that the era of great power competition was gone forever. You know, we would never get into that kind of ugly international politics and we were going to live in a borderless world, a seamless world, trade, commerce of every kind, finance, migration, travel.

17:02We would just all be citizens of the world rather than citizens of any particular country. And this was, you know, this actually sentiment was strongest actually in kind of cutting edge aspects of American capitalism. So that, you know, a global financial company didn't want to think of itself as an American company and your management, your employees, they'd be from all over the world so you'd have a Kuwaiti next to an Indian, next to a Chinese, next to a German, next to an American. And you don't want the American driving everyone crazy, you know, wearing a cowboy hat and, you know, singing God bless America, you know, all of that kind of stuff. So, elite education came to be part of a socialization of really two generations of American elites into a post nationalist cultural framework.

18:06And if you wanted to work at McKenzie, if you wanted to work in at Goldman Sachs or whatever, that was actually the way to go and con and I mean colleges responded to these market signals. Nowhere was this stronger, more strongly felt than in the tech world. It is very hard for people to remember that today or to think about it today, especially younger folks. But in 1995, 2003, whatever, the internet zone, the tech zone was the most cosmopolitan, most post national, you know, we are companies of the world of the cosmos. And we don't want to be connected to or seen as supportive of any particular government, especially the United States. And what we're seeing now because of these geopolitical changes is that what Thomas Friedman wrote about us, the flat world where there would be no boundaries.

19:10Every country was like every other country in terms of economics and so on. And people thought that political systems would be converging to the same type pretty much everywhere. Democracy everywhere, capitalism everywhere, liberal, liberal ideology everywhere. You know, it's not happening. And in fact, things have moved the other way to a large extent. And now in the tech universe, China looms over everything. It's, you know, your biggest threat to your business in the case of many, many companies is theft of IP. And the single most active, you know, IP burglar is China in all kinds of various different ways, reverse engineering, what have you? And you've got, you now need to be, well, and China is not simply trying to kind of attack a particular company through corporate espionage or what have you.

20:16But the Chinese government and state system is using every resource at its command, favorable credit terms, favorable regulation. You need a factory. You're not going to have any problems. We're not going to let anybody interfere. We're shooting anybody who tries to stop a data center that you might need or the power plant that would feed the data center. All of this power is being focused on an effort to reduce the Americans to also ran into global technology race. And not simply so the Chinese can say that it was, haha, we're number one, but to, but so that instead of a kind of American based information, info structure around the world, you're going to have a Chinese based one that favors Chinese products. Chinese companies and so on and so forth. And in that kind of situation, suddenly, it matters to have employees who are patriotic again.

21:20You don't, I mean, actually, I hear from a lot of people in the corporate world who, you know, really are looking, you know, how do I screen out? You know, bright kids from good schools who, you know, wanted to destroy capitalism, globalize the intifada, whatever you know, say, I don't need that. And or somebody who thinks it's totally immoral to work on a Pentagon project, but not a problem at all to work with China on some kind of thing. So this, this, and I think you're going to see and we're already seeing the beginning. I think we're going to see more of colleges beginning in various kinds of ways to reorient themselves for this. And we're driven in part, you know, by corporate demand, by donor demand, by the fact that American public opinion and maybe American elite corporate opinion is going to start valuing patriotism more because we're in this competition.

22:28And we, we do need to think about how do we hang together and win it together. But then you're going to see also students responding in part because they are shaped by the times. But also they look at the potential career paths. And, you know, it may turn out that being students, you know, being president of your local students for free scientific exchange with Beijing might not be the best pathway into a frontier lab job. So how does that, you know, how does that play out? I think we're seeing colleges actually many elite colleges are doing things like tweaking questions on the application form, you know, questions like, you know, can you give me an example of a time that you changed your mind. We're seeing, you know, I hear that Harvard is trying to raise money for some endowed chairs that promote intellectual diversity.

23:31At Dartmouth, you hear that there are quite a few changes going on. You have obviously the in some of the red state universities, you have these civic study centers being formed. So lots of different initiatives from different kinds of perspectives. And there's another factor, demographic factor that to me is worth looking at, which is that you have, if we look at the demographic trends, the number of high school graduates will be applying to colleges is going down by like, you know, over the next 10, 15 years, 20 by 30% or more in states like California, New York, Illinois, but rising in places like Texas, Florida, and some others, the south overall will show slight gains, even as nationally, the number of 18 year olds declines.

24:33So a liberal arts college, a small liberal arts college in New England is going to face a lot of trouble. We're going to, we want to, we want you to pay us $100,000 a year to become unemployable in tech. Okay, that's not the greatest marketing message that you could possibly deliver to the younger generation. And colleges follow, you know, we like to think of colleges is maybe these, you know, refuges of platonic philosopher kings who don't pay attention to such vulgar topics as politics in the outside world. That is not Western universities have almost 800 years of history. They have never worked in that way. University, Chancellor's even university faculties have kept their eyes open to the developments in the world around them.

25:35And this is, this is likely, I think, to, I don't think the contemporary American academic scene is going to be an exception to that rule. Final question. How do you think the dynamics that you just described are going to affect the willingness or the eagerness of American universities to accept law and enroll large numbers of four in the students? I think, you know, everyone who went to college of my generation was very used to the idea that, you know, in every class you'd have classmates from China, India, Nigeria, and, you know, their plan was to go back home after we all graduated. Maybe they didn't want to, but the US would force them to go home. How do you think that's going to change giving everything you, you just described? Well, I think this sort of, I think we're likely to see less public support for tax supported or colleges that get a lot of financial benefit from being tax exempt.

26:41To use scarce college places on foreign students when they're American kids that aren't going to the colleges that they want to. You know, so you have these elite colleges. I don't actually think that, say, my own alma mater of Yale college couldn't entirely fill up its enrollment with, with American citizens born in the United States and have actually, you know, very, very talented students in, you know, in every class. You know, I don't actually think there may be certain types of talents where you need to recruit globally, but generally speaking as much at the corporate level that would be or, or scientific lab level as student level. So it is, as a professor, I've always found it is actually great to have kids from other parts of the other countries in the world in an American classroom because the American students learn so much from having them there.

27:51And, you know, this sort of incredulity with which some foreign students meet a lot of the woke assumptions about the American kids make or whatever. You know, this sort of, you believe America is a racist hellhole that no, you know, no person of color can survive in and you've got a, you've got five Nigerian kids in your school that just want to get themselves into that racist hellhole as fast as they possibly can. Yeah, this is an educational experience and it's a healthy one. Nevertheless, I think we're probably going to see less international students. Now the colleges will fight this part of the agenda because they need the money and they can charge those foreign students fall tuition. And, you know, $100,000. You know, and they like and need the money and I think there is a reasonable, you know, there's a reasonable certainly a good case for some foreign students.

29:02But I do think American colleges and universities have a primary duty in so far as they benefit from federal, from taxpayer subsidies and loans and payments to first to make sure that they are, let's not say America first. That's a little partisan, but, but that they are educating Americans first. Now that's probably going to get me so canceled, but I think that's, we're moving in that direction. We could go too far. You know, I am not in favor of some kind of, you know, paranoid overreaction. But, but I do think we're going to see a kind of a natural, a gravitational pull back toward a more patriotic mindset on American campuses.

30:05All right, that is it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Listener Kay from Washington State writes into ask Walter, who is the best living historian? I, you know, I thought about that question. And first of all, you know, I think it was Machiavelli who said if you do someone a favor, you make 1,000 enemies and one in great. So, I'm going to, you know, I, I give a name there and I'm going to, you know, so many people who I thought were friends are going to be possessed with a burning desire to destroy me. And the person I name will just treat it with contempt. But, to be honest, as I really thought about it, I don't think there, I don't think such a category exists because there are so many types of history and different qualities are needed in each.

31:11So, you know, if you, you know, when I think about Indian history, you know, they were, uh, Ramachandra Guha or William Dalrample are just amazing. Very different people. They focus on very different eras. They do it in very different ways. Um, in American history, I would really, I would really hate to name, you know, to sort of pick somebody here. Um, and also each generation re-in has to reinvent a history that makes sense from its own perspective. That is, when his, his, the main thing historians do is forget and bury the past. I mean, by that, even someone like me, and I'm not, you know, I'm more like an amateur dabbling historian than a sort of a serious professional historian. Um, when I'm writing a book, 99.5% of what I learn writing the book does not get into the book, or it would be so unbearably long.

32:24And so full of kind of rambling digi-aggressions, even worse than my books already are in those departments. And they're pretty long and rambling. I have to confess. Um, that they would, they would be unreadable. Um, and so what a historian is, is, is doing often is less preserving the past than it's sort of taking like a polster almost taking a sample of the past. And this is that that has meaning to the generation in which the historian lived. So for example, to a, you know, to someone writing a history of America during the great recession. The great depression might be like the most important thing to, to look at our financial crashes and panics through history. And you know, that would shape the history and how do people recover? How do you get out of them? What effect do they have on the culture? Somebody writing a history around the time of the pandemic paid a lot more attention to the Spanish flu epidemic than normally, you know, normally that occupies like three lines in a history book max. And then we're, we're moving on.

33:39Um, and I think today we need to see some histories that look much more the very, very complicated history of immigration in the United States and the various impacts that it that it's had. So, um, it's, it's a, it's a good question in that it made me think it is a tough question in that I don't think I end up arriving at an answer. But they're, you know, there's certainly historians like James McPherson who I always read with pleasure and profit. Um, I don't want to get into this list. I'm going to just get in trouble. All right. There you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Eli Axelrod. Thanks to Alex Fitton, a bit Hudson and my co host Walter Russell mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show. And uh,

34:39uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Van Dool is now available everywhere in the U.S. So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are, including these places. May this your most rewarding season ever with Van Dool. Agent location restrictions apply product availability varies by market. See fan do dot com for eligibility gambling problem called 1-800-Gemmar.