A Look Back at Governor Jeb Bush’s Florida Higher Ed Policies

Transcript

Michael Horn:

Jeff, in higher ed, it seems that Florida is in the news, well, frankly, all the time right now. Not a day goes by when it seems that there isn't some move by the DeSantis administration to regulate the state's public colleges or on the other side, expressions of disgruntlement from faculty and students.

Jeff Selingo:

Michael, to help us put this in perspective, we thought it might help by going back to the future, if you will. Specifically a couple of decades back when there was another governor with a national profile, Jeb Bush, who created a wave of changes to higher education in Florida, and that's going to be ahead on this episode of Future U.

Sponsor:

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org. This episode is brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity, and income as predictors of student success, through innovation data and information, policy and institutional transformation. Earn continuing education units this spring with Teaching Practice, an online faculty development program from Course Hero. Over a series of asynchronous courses, you'll uncover new ways to leverage tech in the classroom and build inclusive curriculum, all while supporting your own wellbeing. Plus, you'll get weekly office hours support from leading instructors. Enroll for free today at education.coursehero.com.

Michael Horn:

I'm Michael Horn.

Jeff Selingo:

And I'm Jeff Selingo. As we mentioned up top, there have been a lot of things taking place in Florida. Among other things, Governor Ron DeSantis has proposed mandating courses in Western civ, banning initiatives on diversity, equity, and inclusion on campuses, allowing for post-tenure faculty review, eliminating certain majors focused on race and gender, remaking the New College of Florida into an ultra conservative institution in the model of Hillsdale College and Michigan, empowering trustees in new ways and so much more. Geez, it's like we should put a reporter down there in Florida, Michael, given that list. Anyway, so when we thought about who could perhaps provide a kind of different perspective on this, perhaps rising above kind of the shorter term view we're seeing in the media, we thought it would be interesting to get Governor Jeb Bush's take on this.

Michael Horn:

That's right, Jeff. Now, when we scoped out the interview, we were hoping to get Governor Bush's thoughts and all those moves and more that you just listed that Governor DeSantis is making in Florida with its higher education system, but we should be transparent with our audience. Governor Bush's teams made it clear that he just wasn't following every single detail there, and so he didn't feel comfortable or expert enough to opine about it. So instead, we chose to focus on the moves that he made with Florida's higher education system, some of which were also quite controversial in their day, and to think more broadly with him about what this history might portend for the future of higher ed, not just in Florida but also nationwide. And for those who don't know, Bush served as Florida's governor from 1999 to 2007. So with that as backdrop, Governor Bush, it's good to see you again. Thanks so much for being here.

Jeb Bush:

Happy to be with you, Michael and Jeff, it is great to be with you. Appreciate your focus on really important things. We listen to politics, most of us try to avoid it, but when we do, it's all about stuff that doesn't seem relevant to people, but you're talking about things that are really important about the future of people's chance to rise up.

Jeff Selingo:

Governor, there's a lot happening in Florida right now around higher education, and it seems that the public system and Governor DeSantis are both constantly in the news. But we wanted to use the time together to reflect back on what the Florida higher ed system was like when you were governor and the changes you made. Michael was at the annual policy conference you do on education reform as part of the nonprofit you founded, Excel in Ed, this year. And in your keynote conversation you were asked that as you look back on your time as governor, what's something that you learned that you would do differently? And it seemed like your answer might hold some lessons for basically everyone also in this present moment.

Michael Horn:

And governor, you in essence said, if I have it correct, that you wish you had gone about the move to stop using affirmative action in admissions in higher ed, differently. It wasn't what you did, but how you did it, you said. And I think your point was that removing the consideration of race had actually done the opposite of what critics had said it would. The Florida higher ed system is more racially diverse than ever before. Your quote was that at the end of the day, more women owned and minority owned businesses are selling to the state of Florida and more Black and Hispanic students are going to our universities. But you also said that you wish you had listened to your critics a little bit more to take a pause and persuade and to listen and give a sense that your motivations aren't political, but that you're acting on your heart and your true beliefs. And the result from not doing that was your quote, a mess, and that you had a really diverse group of people working for you that were hurt.

So I'm just curious if you can elaborate on both how you went about putting in the One Florida executive action, as well as the substance of what's occurred since that has gone different from what so many critics at the time expected.

Jeb Bush:

I was younger, I think I'm wiser now. I was impatient, I wanted to get stuff done. I had a big agenda and I wanted to do it at warp speed. And some of that stuff, it's okay to like steamroll people when it may be less controversial. But this opened up a wound that had nothing to do with affirmative action, had to do with race relations in our country, which are hard still. I mean, even to this day you see people struggling with this issue and there's a historical context that I didn't think through. So we unveiled a really thoughtful plan that was thoroughly vetted and it was ... when we unveiled it, we had buy-in to go forward and we started doing it. So I kind of checked the box and moved on to the next initiative really. And three months into this, there was a pushback, put aside whatever motivations they had, that's not relevant in this conversation, and it opened up a whole new struggle for us to be able to advance a cause while being accused of being racially motivated in a bad way.

So the lesson was you never stop advocating, you never stop communicating, you never stop listening. You can't move on to the next thing. Whatever the next thing is, you still got to do it, but you also have to be fully engaged. And so it was painful. The largest march in Tallahassee's history occurred because of this. That wasn't fun. It became political in the sense that my reelection was taking place, I guess the next year. And so this issue was used to try to motivate my defeat nationally, not just in the state because my brother was president, and so we had to contend with the politics of this. But more importantly, the fact that good policy requires and provocative policy really requires hanging in there. Politics today is a lot more about grievance, about anger, about victimization on both sides and bigger things aren't being done because that would require a little bit more time and a little more thoughtfulness, I think.

Michael Horn:

Stay on the substance just for one moment. Why do you think it didn't do what the critics thought it would do and has resulted in this way more diverse higher ed system? What about it confounded sort of the predictions, if you will?

Jeb Bush:

Well, I was pretty confident it would work because I had confidence in our K-12 reforms. So the argument for affirmative action, say at the University of Florida back at the time was, well, we're competing with the Ivy League schools for Black students and they were getting middle class Black kids to get into the University of Florida with lower admissions criteria than their white counterparts. And somehow they excused that away and it was wrong. So I had these long conversations with the leadership of the university, and my point was, well, why don't you develop relationships with the urban core high schools in Jacksonville, Orlando and build partnerships with them to find the aspiring students, give them the tools to first believe they could go to college and then nurture them so that they could be admitted. That would be a race conscious policy, but not at the expense of lowering standards for one group against the other.

Jeff Selingo:

So governor, I was at that march in Tallahassee that you mentioned, and I covered your-

Jeb Bush:

What the hell were you doing there, Jeff?

Jeff Selingo:

Well, I was there covering it as a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jeb Bush:

I'm joking. I'm joking.

Jeff Selingo:

So I covered your One Florida plan as a reporter for the Chronicle back then and back then, I think no matter the debate and what you think of it now, Florida was really seen as a serious place for higher ed governance. It had this statewide board, which had a lot of responsibility and teeth to it, Charlie Reed was your chancellor, and then he went off to lead Cal State, and then Adam Herbert replaced him. So do you agree with that assessment that Florida had, for the most part, good higher ed governance at the time, and what do you think were the ingredients that made it so?

Jeb Bush:

I don't, I think it was too top-down driven. It played favorites. The anchor universities got a little more attention than the metropolitan universities, to the frustration of every one of the talented presidents that were, like UCF, USF and FIU, along with the others. I think it was appropriate to have a statewide entity that was focused on policy, and we created the Board of Governors to replace the Board of Regents and empowered the universities to basically create their own strategic plans. And I think that was the better approach. Look, there could be room for disagreement on that, but we replaced the Board of Regents, and I think today, I would say Florida's one of the leaders in performance-based funding.

It'd be easier just to take the money and do whatever you want, but now there's accountability around receiving the money and it's been proportionally higher and higher percentage of the overall money. And it seems to work, and the universities have gotten better. And unfortunately, US News and World Reports been held in low regard recently, but if you measure, whatever the measurements I've read, Florida's public university systems have done quite well in the last five or six years.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. So as you sit back, I know frankly you had a mix of reforms that you referenced earlier around K-12 and what you're most proud of there. I mean, and Florida's students have zoomed to the top of the nation's report card, whereas before you became governor, they were in the bottom half of states. But I'm curious, outside of some of these actions that you've mentioned, or even with them, with the benefit of hindsight, what are you most proud of doing as governor with regards to higher education? What's the policy or set of things that you think really moved the needle?

Jeb Bush:

So I'm proud of how we differentiated the higher education system. Florida is a premier land grant public university in the country, and it's emerged, its reputation I think has now kind of caught up with its success. The smaller thing that I think should be replicated across the country is providing greater access. Low tuition is really a smart thing to do. If you think it's important to get a four-year degree, then make it easy to go, and then make it easy to stay, and then make it easy to get a four-year degree in four years. I don't want to oversimplify it, but when you measure a four-year degree completion rate in six years and you brag that you got 60% or 70% of the kids graduating, that's shameful. Students ought to be able to graduate in four years with a four-year degree, which means full-time student equivalency is 15 credit hours, not 12.

Michael Horn:

So that's where I want to go next, which is as you look at the landscape of states and their focus as they regulate and finance higher education, I'm curious, what do you think more states ought to focus on that they're not, and what do you see as the most important questions higher ed is facing right now?

Jeb Bush:

Well, as just a observer watching it unfold, I think figuring out a way to allow for pushing back against illiberalism would be a nice healthy step. I mean, the elite universities we hear about all the time, all the challenges they face with this stuff, but it's percolated to a lot of different places. So going back to kind of a place where there's inquiry, discovery, challenge, where your views are challenged, where there's an openness, a little L liberal place where divergent views are encouraged, where people don't feel like they're threatened by someone who comes with a different view. My gosh, if that was the case, I'd be getting therapy all the time because a lot of people disagree with my thinking. It doesn't offend me.

Someone taught me long ago to put on my big boy pants and get back in the game. Now it's like, oh my God, you allow a conservative on campus and it's violence. You need to have safe spaces and all that. So pushing back on that would be, I think, an important thing. And then the throughput issue I think is another really important issue, to make higher education viable, it's got to be affordable, and one of the ways to make it affordable is to allow people to finish in a proper amount of time. And then, look, Michael, all this stuff you guys are working on to open up the system to allow for more customized learning would be the next thing. I mean, that's the next big thing. If universities and community colleges can compete for relevant nationally recognized certificates that give people a chance to rise up without necessarily getting a four-year degree, that would be pretty good.

Jeff Selingo:

So I just want to follow up there, because there are kind of, governor, they're tricky boundaries of regulating and governing higher ed. And as a conservative, are there places where you think states should leave governance and academic freedom to the system? And where should states, as some of the biggest funders of public higher education, perhaps lean in more than they typically do?

Jeb Bush:

I, for one, don't like people using the powers of government to advance their agenda? I'm a traditional-

Jeff Selingo:

And I'm assuming that's obviously on the right or the left.

Jeb Bush:

Yeah, right. Yeah, totally. So I'm a little L liberal. I believe that universities, their historic role to allow for free thought, free thinking, the inquiry, the pursuit of knowledge. From that comes innovation, creativity, well-rounded people that can take care of themselves. When you pander to students and on top of that, you have an overlay of a weird ideology that is imposed on them and then forces from the right come in and try to push back against that, you've got my view on that, I think that's important. But to use the powers of government to do the opposite, I'm not for. So finding that balance, I think, is important. And there should be a degree of autonomy. I mean, I'd like to see the boards of trustees, boards of whatever the governing entity is of a university, step up. You don't have to be cheerleaders all the time.

One of the things I found a little frustrating was when we created this board of trustee system, my thought was, well, in return for freedom from the Board of Regents and all the top down mandates that were given, and basically you were a subsidiary of the Board of Regents, there needs to be some degree of accountability. You can't just have the freedom to take all the money without any accountability. And the Boards of Trustees, the idea was to put people that had practical experience that could do that. And a lot of times they just put on their cheerleading outfits and did the rah, rah my school, and didn't assume the responsibility of governance that I expected. I think that's far different now, that took some time, but it now does exist.

Michael Horn:

And now it exists in Congress where I guess they cheer their own schools from their home states during testimony and stuff like that. But just to switch gears for a moment and perhaps not in jest, is there any part of you that would want to oversee a higher education system as a chancellor or president? Because there've been some good examples, former governor Mitch Daniels did it to great acclaim, and of course Ben Sasse, now a former senator, is stepping into the leadership role at the University of Florida. So does that ever interest you, or what are the things that would have to be at play to interest you?

Jeb Bush:

I'm busy with my own life and I can't undo it, but I do like the idea of in public university to have people that have public experience, public leadership experience. I think that's more than appropriate, or proper leadership experience in business or in the military. I think that there are some great examples of success, there's probably some examples where it didn't work out either. At the beginning in Florida, university presidents had to have a PhD to be appointed. Really? I mean, what does that mean? Does that mean they're a good leader because they have a PhD? No, it just means they took a long time to get something that says they have a PhD and they had some arcane, perhaps arcane thesis that doesn't add value to people's lives. Now, it may also turn out that they have leadership skills that were honed inside the academy or out, but the fact that you would require that is part of the problem.

It's like our accreditation system for higher ed, not sure that input driven system is a great measurement of a success of a university. So I know, Michael, you're particularly ... you have been consistently advocating innovation and changes in governance to model the move to the 21st century. We're in 2023 and most of our institutions are mired in the 1950s. So whether it's higher ed, K-12, early childhood literacy, how we manage our healthcare system, how we do workforce, I mean, almost everything is still designed like Vance Hartke could show up and say, "Yeah, I know exactly how this ... this was what I was trying to implement when I was a senator from Indiana." It's crazy, but we're still living in government, with a governance model that was created in the 1960s and '70s.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, and there's a lot of unhappiness, governor, with all of those systems, whether it's healthcare, whether it's airlines, whether it's government and education, both at K through 12 and higher ed. And that's kind of probably where we wanted to end today because there is this unhappiness and there's unhappiness, if you look at the polling, on both the right and the left with higher education. Might be slightly different issues, but there's clear unhappiness with higher ed and there's considerably less faith in higher ed than there was generations ago, where there was a lot of trust in higher education.

And so I wanted to get your view on, you mentioned boards, for example, but I'm more interested in the presidents of universities that you've worked with over the years and what's their role in helping govern themselves? What's perhaps missing that was present generations ago with leaders with whom you worked? What was it about the presidents that you worked with that you said, "We may disagree, but at the end of the day, I know that they have the right mind of the state in their mind and so forth." So what think's needed, I guess, today in today's college and university leaders?

Jeb Bush:

That's a good question. I don't know if it's any different than it was before. I just think people in general don't believe the institutions that we've relied on for rising up to being successful in many ways, work as well as they once did. And I think they're right. So I worked with presidents that really were embedded in their community, that were great advocates for their universities, great lobbyists to get resources for their universities, expanded the universities, they built their universities, but a four-year degree getting a psych major, basically means you're going to get a job outside your field or you're going to graduate school. And you're likely to, even in Florida, probably get a student loan that's a recourse loan on your back if you can't generate the income to justify it.

So systemically, we need to change things. I think the leaders, I think there will be leaders, the same leaders that are stuck in a system right now that I think is dysfunctional, in a new system, I think many of them will thrive quite well and others probably won't. But maybe part of that is that you change the mindset of who should be a university president. Do you have to be a provost before, do you have to have a PhD? There's models now, the University of Miami has a interesting model. You've got a well regarded university president that's got a incredible traditional resume. He was head of the School of Public Health at Harvard. He was Secretary of Health in the government of Mexico. He's got pretty good resume for bilingual, bicultural, pretty good resume for the University of Miami. But they have a COO who was the head of one of the big eight accounting firms, US operation. Works really well.

Now that's an innovation that not a lot of universities are doing. That might be a good one, is to empower more people that actually have practical operational experience, to bring much more efficiency, shrinking the administrative side of universities and expanding the access to classroom education so you can get a four-year degree in four years.

Jeff Selingo:

Well, Governor Jeb Bush, we really appreciate you being with us on Future U today. Thank you for kind of coming back to talk a little bit about what happened in Florida 20 plus years ago and reliving some of that stuff and talking about what worked and what might not have worked now coming out of that. So again, thank you very much and we'll be right back on Future U.

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system level change and a student-centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post-secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners, and rural community members. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Michael Horn:

This episode is being brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Today's college students are more than just students. They're workers, parents, and caregivers, and neighbors, and colleges and universities need to change to meet their changing needs. Learn more about the foundation's efforts to transform institutions to be more student-centered at usprogram.gatesfoundation.org.

Well, welcome back to Future U and Jeff, I want to dive in right away to where there was disagreement and pushback. I thought it was interesting when Governor Bush said he disagreed with your assessment that Florida was a well governed system. I do not have the historical perspective here, so I would love your take.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, Michael, I kind of totally disagree with the governor on this one. I covered Florida back in the early 2000s for the Chronicle, so my memory is a bit different from the governors. So let's do a little bit of a history lesson here. The reason the Board of Regents was dissolved was because lawmakers, frankly, from both parties couldn't really control it, even though it was a board that was appointed by the governor at the time. And what really annoyed the legislature and the governor was when legislators, for example, wanted to be presidents of universities after their political days ended, and even that doesn't end these days., So people still want to be presidents of campuses. Or when they wanted a new college in their backyard or they wanted a medical school built in their district. And I think in Governor Bush's case, that he didn't like it because the board was against his One Florida plan to end affirmative action.

And I remember in the closing days of the Board of Regents at the time, when it was clear that they were on their way out, the legislature decided to do an end run around them, agreeing to establish a medical school at Florida State Law Schools at Florida International and Florida A&M, which is the state's historically Black college. And the Regents had rejected all three projects. So basically the legislature and the governor decided to do an end run around them. So tell me how that's less political, for example, than a board because then the legislature basically did whatever they wanted. Now of course, all of this was undone again, so now even a longer history lesson here, when Florida's US senator at the time, Bob Graham, who's a Democrat, and now, by the way, in Washington, but still getting involved for some reason in Florida politics, because he had been previously governor, and he objected to the demise of the board and he succeeded in getting a ballot measured to restore it.

So today in Florida, they have this thing called the Board of Governors, which essentially brings back the Board of Regents. So let's zoom out here though for a moment because I think there's probably a lot of our listeners who may not care that much about Florida. But what I think this brings up is university governance in general at public universities. First of all, there's clearly no one model. We have very strong boards, like we may now have again in Florida or in North Carolina or in California, we have others where there's no coordination at all, like in Pennsylvania where we have the PASSHE system and the state related systems and the community colleges. But what's very clear about any of these boards, with the exception, for example, in Michigan, where they're elected at places like Michigan State and the University of Michigan, is that these are political plums for the governor usually because the governor usually gets to appoint most of these boards.

And I just think that this is ... a higher education board is very different than most other boards that governors might get to appoint for. This is not the water coordination board or some other arts board, and no offense against people who sit on those boards, but there's real work that's done in these boards that are appointed by governors. And the question is they're always going to have some sort of interference as a result when you have somebody appointed by the governor. And so I'm not quite sure how to fix this to be honest with you, Michael. I'm wondering, for example, does there need to be a lot more of a confirmation process? In some states they are confirmed, but in other states they just basically are appointed to these boards by the governor. I'm wondering if they need to have longer terms so that they overlap different governors and perhaps different governors of different parties. So maybe that's the answer.

But at the end of the day, these boards are incredibly powerful and I think that the fact that they're going to have political interference because they're appointed by the governor, again, I don't want to take that political appointment power away from the governor, but how do we make them better? Because right now, I don't think in most states, and it's not just in Florida, I don't think in most states they're working.

Michael Horn:

So basically what I hear you saying is you don't want appointments to the board of universities to continue like the ambassadorships for US presidents. This analogy is not a good one that I just made. You want to end that?

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, I mean, I just think that at some point, again, I don't think we're going to end political appointments to boards. The question is how do we make them better?

Michael Horn:

Yeah, and more serious. So I'm also interested in this back and forth over the One Florida plan that Governor Bush put in place and what's resulted, and I'd love your take on it, Jeff. And I also want to connect something as we're doing that Governor Bush said to a recent episode on the podcast, where we interviewed, of course, John Alger, James Madison University, the president there, about affirmative action. Now, because Governor Bush, it sounded, he just came out in favor of race conscious actions, that is actively recruiting minority students to attend college in Florida and the like, but not race conscious admissions, if you will, where there's a different bar depending on someone's race for the college itself. But if I heard President Alger correctly in our interview, there's an open question, depending on what the court does, if even the sorts of race conscious actions that Governor Bush was describing will even be legal in the future depending on what the court chooses to do in this case. And we're still waiting to see.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah. And Michael, of course we're still waiting to see. I can't wait till we actually actually see this decision so we could actually answer all these questions that we have. I think it's clear where everybody thinks the court is going for an overall decision, but I think the nuances of that decision is the question. And really it's around race neutral versus race conscious emissions, and we have the latter now, where they're able to use race as a factor. But if you have to come up with race neutral ways of both recruiting students and admitting students, that obviously becomes a lot more difficult. And this bar that the governor mentioned, of course, is based on test scores and GPAs. And I think we really need to, and we talked about this in a previous episode, I think we really need to come to terms about what equals success in college.

And I think for a lot of these selective colleges, especially these selective colleges that are under the microscope and are getting sued in these programs, the feeling is is that if you don't have a high GPA and a high SAT score, you don't deserve to be there. Now, MIT, as we know, said the test score does matter because of what students do at MIT, but I think that there's a lot of questions right now in elite college admissions about does a high SAT score and a high GPA necessarily equal success in college? Now, we know from the national research that they are two very good, in fact, in many ways the best predictors of success in college, based on the predictors that we use. But are there other factors that we could come up with post this decision in affirmative action, that we could get a sense of this student who didn't grow up in a household where they were talking about higher ed from day one, didn't go to a well-resourced high school, are there other ways that we could determine whether they're going to be successful in college?

Because at the end of the day, I think that's what everybody wants. We don't want to be admitting and enrolling students who are not going to persist and graduate at the end of the day. The second issue, I think here, and this is what the governor mentioned, is around how do you build these robust pools? Now, if you talk to admissions deans, what they'll say is our pools are pretty good. They have pretty good pools of underrepresented students. The problem then is that they are being admitted to a bunch of different selective colleges. And so then the question is how do we yield them? And many of the selective colleges are just not yielding students. And so what ends up happening is their enrollment of underrepresented students is either going down or it's flat, because even if their pools are robust, they're not getting enough students kind of into the enrollment funnel or they're not actually getting them to enroll.

And so I think the question then becomes how do we create recruiting programs that give us even bigger pools of underrepresented students, and in a kind of race neutral way? And that, I think, is going to be the question that comes up after the Supreme Court decide whether we can use recruitment mechanisms to get them into the pool and then use race neutral ways of getting them into the institution as enrollees.

Michael Horn:

Super interesting. And I will say the ultimate fix is also making K-12 education just better in the first place, but [inaudible 00:35:55].

Jeff Selingo:

I think we all agree on that, but that seems like it's a 50 year to a 100 year problem.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, that may be right. So another thing that I heard, and perhaps this is my third way sensibility again kicking in and being wistful, but I think I thought I heard the governor towing this middle line between conservatives and liberals and the culture wars on college campuses. Which is to say he wants ideological diversity, something he thinks is in short supply right now, and frankly, I do as well. I mean, it resonates to me from the things I've seen and some of the experiences I've had on college campuses, not just some of the headline stories about shouting down a judge at Stanford Law School, although, Jeff, there actually have been a rash of those types of incidents in the last few weeks alone.

But he also, I think he said on the other side that he doesn't think state government should be using its own tools to legislate its own ideological priors and to mandate courses and the like or take over of campus boards by people with a certain ideology, that, I think he was saying, should really be the purview of campuses and their academic freedom, and then he wants a small L liberal take. And in that, again, maybe I'm reading it into this, but I thought it mirrored the recent op-ed in the Boston Globe, by Stephen Pinker and Bertha Madras, about their new center at Harvard, called the Council on Academic Freedom, which its purpose is really about preserving academic freedom and strengthening freedom of speech in college campuses and getting away from the fear that many express about being honest about their views.

But on the other hand, one quote in the article that they said, I thought was quite pertinent, which is they said, quote, "One kind of resistance will surely make things worse, attempts by politicians to counter left wing muscle with right wing muscle by stipulating the content of education through legislation or by installing cronies in hostile takeovers of boards of trustees. The coin of the realm in academia ought to be persuasion and debate, and the natural protagonists ought to be the faculty. They can hold universities accountable to the commitments to academic freedom that are already enshrined in faculty policies, handbooks, and in the case of public universities, the First Amendment." That really lands for me, but I'm curious what you heard, Jeff, and maybe more broadly, if you want to opine on what's taking place in Florida right now? I think I just sort of gave my own de facto take, I can do more if you want, but I think I'd prefer to hear your thoughts at this point.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, Michael, and this is where I think we might have a little bit more agreement. I think of my own experience, I was in high school in 1988, so I couldn't vote yet, but one thing I didn't get to tell the governor is that I was actually a big fan of his father, and I would've voted for him if I was 18 in 1988, and then I got to liberal Ithaca and my political beliefs started to shift. But the head of the College Republicans was a good friend of mine, I was a political minor. We would have these great debates in class around political philosophies. And I think college is an area, is a time in your life where you go through a lot of growth about what you believe and what you think. But the only way you're going to go through that growth is if you have presented to you multiple perspectives, have debate about those multiple perspectives.

In fact, I was really struck by this 10 page letter that the Stanford Law School Dean recently sent out to the campus, where she said, "I believe that the commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion actually means that we must protect free expression of all views." And indeed, I think as we try to solve some of the toughest problems in society right now, and as we increasingly are segregated by where we live in terms of our political beliefs, this may be the last time that people with differing political beliefs come together or at least are able to express them, and that's on college campuses. So if we don't maintain that as a higher education system, I really fear for the future and for the students who will then be leaving college, not having had the chance to interrogate those views, to have those views interrogated on them.

And then they get into, quote, unquote, "the real world." I hate to sound like a Gen Xer here, but then they get into the real world and they're not able to participate in these conversations. But I also want to throw another thing out here, Michael, and it goes back to this idea around admissions and enrollment, because one of the things that I've been hearing quite frequently from both high school counselors and from college admissions offices recently, is how popular the South is right now as an admissions destination. So the public colleges, the private colleges in the South are really hot. And there's many reasons for this that people give. In fact, Town & Country, Nicole Laporte wrote a big piece on the rise of southern institutions, and a lot of it has to do with the weather. People want to be in the warmer weather. She also advocates that, in her piece, that it may be post COVID, where those colleges were open and people are having fun, and then also you also have sports and everything else.

I might also think something else is happening here, that students, they want to be part of these conversations, these political conversations, but they don't want it basically every moment of every day of their lives for four years of college. And I think that's the other difference now from when I was in college or when we were in college. And I don't know what it was like at Yale, but I would imagine Yale, like Ithaca, was a very politically active campus. But you know what, these conversations weren't in your face every day, every moment, in every class. And there's a little bit, I believe, of exhaustion here on some campuses, that now is starting to filter down to the admissions point of view. And it's not, again, I don't think it's affecting the elite colleges at all, but for other colleges that are seen as maybe they're just too politically active and students, they want to participate in those conversations, but they also want to go to college to learn about other things, and to be honest with you, have a little fun while they're at it.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, Jeff, that really resonates with my own experience. And I think, frankly, one of the things I loved about Yale was that I was no longer inside the beltway, so I didn't have to think about all the bickering all the time. But let's leave it there because the bickering is not what we had, we appreciate Governor Bush coming on and having the conversation with us, and then Jeff, your perspectives on some of these questions. And to all of you, our audience, we look forward to your perspectives as well, and we'll see you next time on Future U.