Ron Liebowitz:
Good afternoon. My name is Ron Liebowitz, president of Brandeis. Thank you for joining this session of Alumni College, an annual gathering where Brandeis faculty and alumni speakers engage the community in conversation, usually in person, on thought-provoking topics. I guarantee that today's conversation will be just that. We welcome today alumni, parents, friends, members of the Brandeis national committee and BOLLI, Brandeis's Osher Lifelong Living Institute. And we welcome back our two conversationalists, Michael Sandel and Tom Friedman, two alumni, leaders in their respective fields, and both members of the class of 1975. They will be joined today by classmate and Brandeis trustee, Mindy Schneider, who will moderate the Q&A session of the program when we open things up to the zoom audience.
Ron Liebowitz:
Michael Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is a world-renowned philosopher, author and superstar teacher, among the most sought after professors at Harvard University. If you have not watched Michael's lectures on justice and moral reasoning, which are available on YouTube, I encourage you to do so. His writings on justice, ethics, democracy and markets have been translated into 27 languages. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor Sandel received his BA and MA summa cum laude from Brandeis, and the Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He received an honorary degree from Brandeis and is a former Brandeis trustee.
Ron Liebowitz:
Tom Friedman is an internationally-renowned author and journalist. His foreign affairs columns in The New York Times covers US domestic politics and foreign policy, Middle East affairs, international economics, the environment, biodiversity and energy. At Brandeis, Tom has been a guest lecturer and participant in many events, including the Milton Gralla Lecture Series in Journalism and Founder's Day Weekend. He, like classmate Michael Sandel, is a former Brandeis trustee. Tom received his BA summa cum laude at Brandeis and studied in England on a Marshall Scholarship, receiving his MA at St. Anthony's College of Oxford University. He is also the recipient of a Brandeis honorary degree in humane letters.
Ron Liebowitz:
I should note that in addition to both being from the class of 1975, both graduating summa cum laude, both winning prestigious fellowships to do graduate study in England, and both having been honored with honorary degrees from Brandeis, they're also both from the Minneapolis Metro region and I understand they attended Hebrew school together. Pity their poor Hebrew school teacher.
Ron Liebowitz:
Moderating our Q&A portion of the program today is Mindy Schneider, a Brandeis alumna and trustee, and former classmate of Michael and Tom. Mindy earned her bachelor's degree from Brandeis, and later, she went on to receive an MBA in hospital administration from New York University. Mindy and her family are long-time members of the Brandeis community. They are deeply engaged with the life of the university and have been remarkable philanthropic partners of the institution's teaching and research mission, supporting a number of academic programs and causes on campus. We are grateful to have Mindy as a trustee and partner in the university's present and future.
Ron Liebowitz:
Our program today, entitled The Tyranny of Merit, is the title of Michael Sandel's latest book. It is, to say the least, a timely exploration of the role of merit and credentialism in current American society. Without giving too much away for the upcoming conversation, Professor Sandel argues that the premium society has placed on merit has had a corrosive impact on the American democratic project, as the demands of our increasingly technocratic and globalized economy have shaped everyday life into a brutal competition for status, recognition and material resources as inequality has widened.
Ron Liebowitz:
Moralistic attitudes and judgements around success and failure in this competition have left those who felt left behind angry and frustrated, which in turn has fueled populous protest, political polarization and the erosion of a shared sense of the common good. Despite this rather bleak portrait, Michael offers an alternative way of thinking about success and envisions a society where all members are respected for the innate dignity and worth of both their unique contributions to society and their humanity.
Ron Liebowitz:
I want to thank Michael, Tom and Mindy for joining us today. I know all of us are eager to listen, learn and question, as good Brandeisians do, and so I'll now turn it over to Tom, Michael and Mindy. Take it away.
Michael Sandel:
Well, thank you, Ron and Mindy, for convening us, and Ron, for those generous words of introduction. And what a pleasure it is, as always, to be together with my friend and classmate, classmates since Hebrew school days, as well as Brandeis days, as Ron pointed out, Tom.
Michael Sandel:
So the tyranny of merit, it's a paradox because normally we think of merit as a good thing. If the alternative to meritocracy is nepotism and prejudice, or aristocratic hierarchy, merit is a breath of fresh air. It's a taste of freedom and justice. And if I need surgery, I want a well-qualified surgeon to perform it. So how can it be that merit is a kind of tyranny. I'll try to explain, and in order to do so, I'd like to begin with the state of our public life.
Michael Sandel:
I think most of us would agree that our civic life isn't going very well. And I think this has to do paradoxically with the seemingly attractive ideal of meritocracy and the way it's come to inform our politics, political argument across the political spectrum, and in particular, the way it has shaped the response of mainstream political parties, including the Democratic party and including liberals, the response of liberals and Democrats to the widening inequality of recent decades. Let me explain.
Michael Sandel:
In recent decades, the divide between winners and losers has been deepening, poisoning our politics, setting us apart. This has partly to do with the widening inequalities of income and wealth of recent decades, but it's not only that. It has also to do with the changing attitudes towards success that have accompanied the rising inequality. Those who've landed on top have come to believe that their success is their own doing, and that they therefore deserve the full measure of the bounty, of the material rewards that the market bestows upon them. And by implication, that those who struggle, those who fall behind must deserve their fate as well.
Michael Sandel:
Now, this way of thinking about success arises paradoxically from a seemingly attractive idea, the idea of meritocracy, the idea that if everyone starts out with an equal chance, the winners deserve their winnings. Now, in practice, of course, we don't live up to the meritocratic principles we profess. We see if we glance at higher education. At Ivy League colleges and universities, there are more students from the top 1% then from the bottom half of the country put together. Generally, children born to poor parents in America tend to stay poor when they grow up.
Michael Sandel:
But the problem isn't only that we've failed to live up to the meritocratic ideal. There's a deeper problem. The ideal has a dark side. And the dark side is that meritocracy is corrosive of the common good. It leads to hubris among the winners and to demoralization, even humiliation, to those who lose out. It encourages the successful to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. And it leads them to look down on those less fortunate than themselves.
Michael Sandel:
One of the most potent sources of the populous backlash against elites is the sense among many working people that elites look down on them. And it's a legitimate complaint. It's a complaint that arises from the way that mainstream parties, including liberals, have dealt with the widening inequality brought about by four decades of finance-driven globalization. Because even as globalization brought deepening inequality and stagnant wages, its proponents offered workers some bracing advice. If you want to compete and win in the global economy, go to college. What you earn will depend on what you learn. You can make it if you try.
Michael Sandel:
This is familiar rhetoric heard across the political spectrum, but including among recent Democratic presidents. What these elites missed was the insult implicit in this advice. The insult is this. If you didn't go to college and if you're struggling in the new economy, your failure must be your fault. So it's no wonder that working people have turned against meritocratic elites.
Michael Sandel:
So what should we do? Well, one, we should begin by rethinking the role of education, and higher education in particular, and credentialism as a response to inequality. We should even rethink the role of higher education of universities as arbiters of opportunity. Those of us who spend our days in the company of the credentialed can easily forget a simple fact. Most Americans don't have a four-year college degree. Nearly two thirds of them don't. So it's folly to create an economy that sets as a necessary condition for dignified work and decent life, a four year degree that most people don't have.
Michael Sandel:
Now, let me be clear. Encouraging people to go to college is a good thing. Broadening access for those who can't afford it is even better, but it is not an adequate political project as a response to inequality. Mobility, individual upward mobility through higher education is no answer to the inequality brought about in recent decades. In fact, higher education is not the engine of upward mobility we assume it to be.
Michael Sandel:
Now, Brandeis, strikingly, does a much better job of enrolling low income and middle income students than most elite colleges. Some economists did a comprehensive study of enrollment rates by class, university by university, college by college. And of 6,500 elite colleges, Brandeis was ninth in enrolling the highest percentage of low and middle income students. That's an impressive achievement. These same economists looked across the spectrum of American higher education, private and public universities, selective and non-selective. They looked at 1800 colleges and universities. And what percentage of students arrive poor and leave affluent? And by affluent, I mean the top fifth of the income scale. What percent? At all of these colleges and universities, two percent. Two percent arrived poor and grow up to be affluent as adults.
Michael Sandel:
So it's inspiring when we hear the stories of upward mobility and we should seek more of it, but we should also recognize that looking across our society, we can no longer comfort ourselves by saying, "We don't need to worry so much about inequality, because in America it's possible to rise." It's actually easier to rise in Canada and in Denmark and in Germany and in France, in most Northern European countries, than it is in the US. So mobility has stalled. Higher education is not the engine of mobility we assume it to be. And so, the insult implicit in valorizing college education as the solution to inequality is made all the sharper.
Michael Sandel:
So what should we do? What alternative political project does the suggest. I think this. We should focus less on arming people for the meritocratic race and focus more on making life better for those who lack a diploma, but who make a central contributions to our society through the work they do and the families they raise and the communities they serve. And this means renewing the dignity of work and putting it at the center of our politics.
Michael Sandel:
Robert F. Kennedy was one of the last political figures, he's a hero of mine, who really understood the kind of public philosophy and governing ethic that would be required to bring the country together. He put it like this. "Fellowship, community, shared patriotism. These essential values do not come from just buying and consuming goods together. They come instead from dignified employment and decent pay, the kind of employment that enables us to say, I helped build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures."
Michael Sandel:
We've seen during this pandemic, we've seen the deep divide between those who've landed on top and those who struggle. We've seen the divide perhaps most vividly in those of us who have been able to work remotely and those who, during the pandemic, had either lost their jobs, or to perform their jobs had to expose themselves to risk. But there's a beginning of an opening, I think, for a new kind of politics in this recognition.
Michael Sandel:
Those of us who had the luxury of working from home came to recognize, couldn't avoid recognizing how deeply we depend on workers we often overlook. Not only those in the hospitals caring for COVID patients, but delivery workers, warehouse workers, grocery store clerks, home healthcare providers, childcare workers. These are not the best paid or most honored workers in our society, but now we are calling them essential workers. So this could be a moment for a broader public debate about how to bring their pay and recognition into better alignment with the importance of the work they do.
Michael Sandel:
But really, to change our politics requires also a kind of moral and spiritual turning, reconsidering, and here I'm thinking of those of us who have enjoyed success and perhaps inhaled of its vapors, reconsidering the meaning of our success, reconsidering our meritocratic hubris. Insisting that my success is my do makes it hard to see myself in other people's shoes.
Michael Sandel:
But appreciating the role of luck in life, appreciating my indebtedness to those who make my achievements possible, this can prompt a certain humility. There, but for the accident of birth, or the grace of God, or the mystery of fate, go I. This spirit of humility is the civic virtue we need now. It's the beginning of the way back from the harsh ethic of success that drives us apart. It points us, or it could point us, Tom, beyond the tyranny of merit toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.
Tom Friedman:
Well, Michael, thank you. That was really compelling. For starters, how would you rate President Biden's first year here? It seems, in many ways, he's surprised people. I'm curious if he surprised you in both the policies he's used and I notice the times he's actually spoken very much about the dignity, the dignity of work, evoking his own father. Give us your assessment of his first year.
Michael Sandel:
He has surprised me, Tom. And I think he's gotten off to a surprisingly strong start in ways that respond to the failure of meritocratic, credentialist politics. One of the interesting things about Biden is that he was the first Democratic nominee for president in 36 years without an Ivy League degree, and he was a little bit sensitive about that. But this, I think, was a secret strength. Not only did it enable him to connect a little bit more readily with blue collar workers, whom the Democratic party have struggled to attract in recent decades, I think it also made him a little less enamored of the meritocratic, credentialist prejudices that had come to be almost taken as an article of faith by previous Democratic predecessors. And I'm thinking in particular of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and as a candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Michael Sandel:
And I think in governing and the policies enacted, he's spoken about going big. The COVID relief and stimulus package actually did direct most of the help toward middle-class and low-income families. And he could be, and you're also right to notice that he spoke quite a bit about the dignity of work during the campaign. And occasionally, he would lapse into this language of meritocratic mobility, rising as far as your talents will take you, but it's not his natural mode of rhetoric or expression. The dignity of work comes more instinctively to him.
Michael Sandel:
So not by design, perhaps, but by intuition and experience, I think he could be the first post-Reagan, post-meritocratic president, in the sense that he doesn't put his faith in markets. He doesn't put his faith in conventional economists, who loomed very large in the previous administrations. And I think that his policies reflect that. I think it's encouraging,
Tom Friedman:
Let's look at this for a second, Michael, in a historical perspective, because we've been through these leaps forward of technology with, we began in the agricultural age and we said some people didn't need to go to school at all. They could work on the farm. Others, get a sixth grade education. Then with the Industrial Revolution, we had the high school movement. We said, you should have a high school education. Then with the knowledge age, we said, you should have some kind of post-secondary education. And really with the acceleration of the knowledge age, we've really begun to speak about lifelong learning.
Tom Friedman:
As you look at the history of these leaps forward, do we see the same kind of sense of humiliation? Was there a point where high school grads looked down on those with only sixth grade education, those early college grads looked down in the Industrial Revolution with those with only high school? How much of this is endemic as we keep leaping forward, and how much is a product of this particular moment?
Michael Sandel:
Well, it's a great question. And I think, Tom, you're right to suggest or to imply that elites of all kinds have found ways to look down upon those who struggle. And this is because it leads to... It's interesting, it leads not only to succeed and to gather wealth and income and power. They also want to believe that they deserve it, that they deserve their place. And by implication, that those less successful, that they have a story to explain why they're less so. So I think this is a persisting temptation.
Tom Friedman:
Yeah.
Michael Sandel:
But I think what that means is not that we should succumb to the temptation or excuse it, but rather that we should recognize the need constantly to lean against it. And I think we have a special need to do that today. In fact, it's interesting, Tom. The term 'meritocracy' is a relatively new term. It was coined in 1958 by a British sociologist affiliated with the Labor Party, Michael Young. And when he coined the term, he didn't coin it as an ideal to aim at. He coined it as a dystopia to worry about.
Tom Friedman:
Interesting.
Michael Sandel:
So he saw this tendency toward hubris, but you're right to point to the fact with... However we reshuffled the terms that leads some to land on top, those on top tend to invent ideological accounts and justifications to explain why they actually deserve to be there.
Tom Friedman:
So surely, your argument explains impart the appeal of Donald Trump to working class Americans and why some of them abandon the Democratic party in the last election and crossed to him. Where, though, Michael, does the issue of race and the issue of the dignity of work begin?
Michael Sandel:
Right, it's a tangled... It's a very tangled matter, as you know. They are intwined, the question of race and the question of the dignity of work. And here's where, politically, it's very tricky because there is a temptation to look at the outrages of Donald Trump, and the racism of Donald Trump, and the white supremacists who answered his call and say, "This is really all about race." It's too quick. It certainly is about race, but not only that, because if we don't look further, for example, Donald Trump won in 2016, he won two thirds of white men without a college degree. And in 2020, he won two thirds of that group.
Michael Sandel:
Now you could say they respond to the racism. Some of them do, but it lets liberals and progressives off the hook too easily to say, "it's only about race." Because it doesn't. Then, what liberals and progressives need, I think to look themselves in the mirror and ask, "What is it about what we are offering, in terms of the economy and the response to inequality and wage stagnation, that led 74 million people who saw what went on over the past four years to vote for this man, anyhow?"
Michael Sandel:
It's not only race. It's also about what I think is the emptiness and the hollowness and the inadequacy of what the Democratic party has been offering with regard to the dignity of work.
Tom Friedman:
So let's pick up there for a second, Michael. You get invited by the Democratic party to rewrite their platform for the next election, with all of this in mind. And we have Biden, God willing, he's still healthy and he gets to run again. How would you recast the Democratic party, both in terms of language and substantive policies-
Michael Sandel:
Right.
Tom Friedman:
...to really attack this problem? What would it actually look like?
Michael Sandel:
I would say a few things. Really, to make good on the dignity of work requires changing the way rewards are allocated. Material rewards, to be sure, but also the way we allocate recognition, esteem, and respect. Because at the heart of the valorization of the college education is the answer to inequality, is a disvaluing of people who perform important jobs that don't require a four year college degree. So here would be some policies, for example. Legislation to strengthen trade unions, a shifting in the tax burden from work to financial speculation. Because part of what has gone on during this era of meritocratic credentialism, when the democratic party has become more attuned to the professional classes than to the working classes that were its constituency, traditionally, is finances assumed a greater and greater share of the economy, of GDP, and especially of corporate profits. And with relatively little connection to the common good. Only about 15% of financial activity actually involves investing in new assets, new businesses, new factories, new homes, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges. 15%. 85% consists of various rent-seeking speculative activity, trading in synthetic derivatives and things like that.
Michael Sandel:
So I would ban stock buybacks, which inflates CEO pay. I would get rid of tax deductability for a CEO pay above a certain that threshold, which motivates the stock buybacks. I would shift the tax system. I would propose swapping out a chunk of the payroll tax and substitute with a Tobin tax, a tax on speculative financial transactions, not only as a way of making up the revenue, but also as conveying a message about the importance of work in relation to speculation and how they're rewarded. I would add also a carbon tax, which I know is dear to your heart. I would shift generally from taxing labor to taxing financial speculation and carbon, and perhaps wealth, as ways of giving tangible expression to the idea that the work that ordinary people do, whether without a fancy credential, matters, and that a lot that's been rewarded financially, but also in terms of esteem, should be devalued and de-emphasized.
Tom Friedman:
Interesting. Michael, put this in a global context for a second. Who's doing it right? You alluded to a couple of countries in your introduction.
Michael Sandel:
Yeah.
Tom Friedman:
Who's doing it wrong, and where would you locate a country like China, the fastest growing economy in the world?
Michael Sandel:
Right. Well, I think that in looking for models of right and wrong, or examples we could emulate, we need to take different aspects of different countries' policies. If we look at a serious investment and social recognition in trades that don't require a four year degree, Germany does it much better than we do. If you add up... and Economists at Brookings added up all that we spend in sending kids to college from the federal budget. This was several years ago, it came to $162 billion a year. And the amount we were spending on vocational and technical training was about 1.1 billion, 162 to 1. So Germany does that much better than we do, so-called 'Active Labor Market Policies', as well as support for technical and vocational training. So that's one area. I think that in terms of mobility, we're we're way behind when it comes to the chance to rise, despite the American dream being built around the idea of rising.
Michael Sandel:
And so most of the Northern European countries do better than we do. And the reason they do is that they have a greater income security, and health and education equally distributed, more equally distributed. Because meaningfully, to have a chance to rise, you need not the spur of poverty. You need decent healthcare, decent education, and then there is a greater opportunity to rise. So I think we would learn that from them. As for China, well, that's a long story. China, by some measures, by one World Bank measure, China now has greater intergenerational income mobility than the United States does. So we're not only lagging in Northern Europe and Canada now, but also by some measures, China. I wouldn't emulate most of China's policies, though i do admire their ability to build infrastructure in a way that we seem in capable of doing.
Tom Friedman:
So, when you're talking about the dignity of work, I was remembering a moment. I was in Berlin five years ago researching my last book, and I had to go to the ministry of interior. And they had one of those metal detectors, and you had to take off your jacket and computer and put it in there before you went through. And so I threw my laptop down there. I had a jacket, I just laid it on there. And there was a woman who was actually in charge of putting it through and she actually took my jacket up and she folded it into a perfect square and then placed it on top of my computer. And only then did she put it through the metal detector. And it struck me. I actually wrote about it in the book that this was a woman who took pride in her work. So I was struck by that.
Tom Friedman:
Do you worry, Michael, that you are trying to save and preserve and valorize the dignity of work at a time when work may be disappearing for so many people? I was exploring buying an electric car, want to buy an electric car. And so I said to Ann, my wife, I want to go down to the Tesla dealer. And this is how ignorant I was. And I was told, there is no Tesla dealer. You, you actually just go online and I actually called it up. And then you designed the car yourself. And then when... There's no repair, they just come to your home. And where... To what extent is your thesis forward-looking? What happens when we go into a world where more and more low-skill labor is devoured by software and hardware?
Michael Sandel:
Well, there are tremendous changes going on. And you've written about this in the labor force, the labor market, and technology plays a big part in this. I would say two things. I think we should consider that it's up to us, and it should be a political project, or a question at least, how to bend the direction of technological innovation in the direction of making work more productive for people of medium skills, not just high skills, rather than making work obsolete. And so whether a technology supplements and augments and makes more productive jobs that humans perform, or tries to replace them and make them redundant. That is in large part up to us, that's a policy choice, how to bend the direction of technological innovation. Beyond that, or maybe connected to that, is the explosion of employment and jobs in the care sector, broadly speaking, healthcare and education. Also elder care.
Michael Sandel:
And these are roles that do not need to be fixed in the way we define them now. They're low-paid, and in many cases, are accorded very little social honor and esteem. I think we might ask and have a public debate about how we could use technology, not to replace care workers. There are these robotic pets that the handout to some residents of nursing homes as a way of cutting back on the need for human attendance, not that kind of thing. But how actually to enrich and augment those roles so that they will be more productive, can make a greater contribution, can therefore be better paid and more respected. I think we need to think creatively about how to bend the direction of technology to support work rather than to eviscerate it.
Tom Friedman:
Michael, who's been your biggest critic, besides me? And which, in the reactions to the book, which arguments... Because always, anytime you write a book, there are arguments, you say, "You know, that one I want to think about." Which ones have gotten your attention?
Michael Sandel:
I would say the most significant one and the most challenging one touches on the topic we've been just now discussing, Tom, which is "What does the dignity of work look like?" At a time when there is so much need for the service sector and for care work, which is traditionally undervalued. And how can I avoid a conception of the dignity of work that is backward-looking and nostalgic for the kind of industrial economy where there was a male breadwinner who went and worked in a factory on an assembly line. Maybe an auto worker got paid well, and then was able to get a home and a middle-class life for his family. And it was almost always his family.
Michael Sandel:
The dignity of work that could begin to address our present condition can't look like that. And shouldn't look like that. The trade unions were often instruments of racial discrimination and prejudice. So we should ask how we can strengthen and renew trade unions that have been essentially destroyed by corporate power, essentially, connected to politics. But not in a way that simply would seek to replicate the traditional pattern of unions. So I think the biggest challenge, and it's an interesting question that you've forced me to think about, Tom, is how articulate the dignity of work in a way that doesn't presuppose the background of an industrial labor force, but can speak to the needs and aspirations of the contemporary economy and labor market.
Tom Friedman:
Yeah. So glad to hear you, Michael, give a shout out to Brandeis for the kind of students it's attracting and matriculating.
Michael Sandel:
Yeah.
Tom Friedman:
Fantastic. But there's a lot of criticism in your book really, of Harvard and Ivy league colleges in general. And what's been the response of administrations and what... Just drill a little deeper on that. What is the core critique? Because some of it's in the book too, but-
Michael Sandel:
Yeah.
Tom Friedman:
What has been the response and do you see it triggering some real reflection? That's going to be my last question, and then we'll turn it over to Mindy for some audience questions.
Michael Sandel:
Yeah. I think that higher education has allowed itself, and especially elite institutions, and I count Brandeis within that category-
Tom Friedman:
Yeah.
Michael Sandel:
...has allowed itself to be cast as the arbiter of opportunity in a market-driven meritocratic society, because it is colleges and universities that confer the credentials and define the merit that a market-driven meritocracy rewards. Now this has accorded higher education an enormously important role, but it comes at a severe price, both for those who are excluded, and we've talked about the two thirds nearly who don't go to any... Don't have any four year college degree. But it also comes at a cost to those young people whose adolescent years--and I'm thinking of those in the top 30% who are competing for places at Brandeis and other elite institutions--it's converted the adolescent years into a stress-strewn, high-pressure meritocratic gauntlet of AP exams and SAT prep courses and ballet and music practice, and water polo, and fencing, and internships abroad, and good works in distant places.
Michael Sandel:
We are subjecting young people to a kind... The tyranny of merit bears down on the winners, as well as on those who are left behind. And we see very high rates in colleges and universities, young people, of mental health problems, depression, anxiety, perfectionism, which is a less clinical, but nonetheless pervasive disorder. And so I think... And the danger is that credentializing function, and the networking aspect, and the hoop-jumping activities in higher education are beginning to crowd out the learning and intrinsic love of learning. And I worry about this for our sake. And by our sake, I mean, for the sake of higher education and our students. So I think this could be a further source of political impetus to change the policies, to change the centrality of higher education in defining who lands on top and who lands at the bottom.
Tom Friedman:
Michael, this has been fun and compelling, and I hope that all 487 participants go out and buy your book now. And I want to turn it over to Mindy and forget to get some of the audience questions. Really good.
Michael Sandel:
Thanks.
Mindy Schneider:
Thanks guys. That was awesome. First of all, Michael, I would love you to send your book to our political leaders all across the country.
Tom Friedman:
Yeah.
Mindy Schneider:
We could somehow arrange that. I think that would be a great start. I get to ask a couple of questions. We have quite a few from the audience. So I'm going to ask one question here now. A key element in the mission and our education at Brandeis is social justice. How would you define social justice in 2021?
Michael Sandel:
I think attending to two fundamental sources of injustice that have become all the more evident recently, Mindy. One is racial injustice, and we speak on the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter movement, I think that developed in the last summer, that gained momentum last summer, is one of the most encouraging signs on the political horizon. A multi-racial, multi-generational social movement to try to address racial injustice. And it reminds, us that thinking about this discussion of meritocracy and higher education, that the racial injustice in our society will not be solved by perfecting the meritocracy. Removing barriers to achievement, that's important. That's a necessary condition for a just society. But it's far from a sufficient condition. What about mass incarceration and its racial composition? And what about violence, police violence against unarmed black men, especially? So this would be one area, the racial reckoning in which we're currently engaged. And the other neglected dimension is class injustice, the inequalities of income and wealth and power and voice.
Michael Sandel:
Here, Mindy, is one further measure of that injustice. Tom and I were talking mainly about stalled mobility, the difficulty of rising, the erosion of the dignity of work, about political representation. Nearly two-thirds don't have a four-year college degree. Almost none of them are members of the Senate or the House of Representatives or of state legislatures. And the effect of this is that working people, and according to the census, about half of the Americans are in working-class jobs, almost none of them find their way into Congress or into the Senate or into state legislatures. Only 2% of members of Congress have any working-class background and only 3% in state legislatures. So I think we've neglected class inequality and class injustice and that would be the second.
Mindy Schneider:
Tom, did you have anything you wanted to add?
Tom Friedman:
No, no, no. Let Michael respond to the questions-
Mindy Schneider:
Okay. Another question that's not exactly on the topic, but I thought might be interesting to our audience. And each of you can answer, as you wish. Was there a particular course or professor or event during your time at Brandeis that influenced your career path?
Michael Sandel:
Well, in my case there were two and I loved my time at Brandeis. I thoroughly loved it. There were two courses that I remember most powerfully and they were radically different. One of them was the Introduction to Economics course that I took with the sainted Barney Schwalberg, who was a brilliant teacher and was able to provide a kind of clarity and analytic rigor that made me believe for a time that economics was the way to think about social life. He was a brilliant teacher.
Michael Sandel:
Now, in retrospect, I rethought a lot of that, but I wouldn't have been able to rethink it had it not been for learning it in the first place from Barney Schwalberg, in so compelling a way. In fact, quick anecdote, I wrote against trade some years ago, in the late 90s, during debates about the Kyoto Climate Accord. I wrote against the idea of tradable emissions permits as a way of reducing global warming. And it appeared in... It was an op-ed in New York Times and there was a deluge of response, critical response from economists who said, I didn't understand the first thing about economics. And then it's this torrent of criticism. I received a note from Barney who said, "I see the point you are trying to make, but will you do me one favor? Don't mention to anyone who taught you, economics."
Michael Sandel:
I kept that pledge for a while, but I violate it now with appreciation. The other class I would mention was Alan Grossman's Humanities One, which went from the epic of Gilgamesh up through the Bible including Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and Sophocles and Aeschylus along the way. This oracular, unrigorous associative thematically rich humanist thinker Alan Grossman. And the juxtaposition of those two experiences in the Brandeis classroom are ones that I think have marked me for life.
Mindy Schneider:
What about you, Tom?
Tom Friedman:
W`ell, my favorite teacher was Elaine Loeffler who taught me the art of the ancient world and particularly of the civilization in Crete and after taking her course, I actually got to go to Crete because I was a semester abroad studying in Cairo and I adored Elaine and her course. And to this day, every time I see a Doric, Ionic or Corinthian column, I can identify it and I think of her, the other for me was because I was a transfer student to Brandeis, so I was just there for my junior and senior year, unlike Michael, who was there for all four years, so I made some just terrific lifelong friends there. I reconnected with Michael and that was a hugely important experience for me. My closest friend who I met at Brandeis was a guy named Victor Friedman. And Victor was also, we were the only two students in them Mediterranean studies, studying the Middle East and Victor and I have been lifelong friends, he went on to move to Israel, to Zichron Jacob and was a professor of education there. And in my column on Monday, I quoted him.
Tom Friedman:
And whenever you can learn from your friends, that's always terrific. I've had the pleasure and opportunity to quote Michael many times, but I'll tell you the story. I actually had a different column written Saturday night, and it was going to go up Sunday evening. And I'm of that age where I wake up multiple times at night and sometimes I check my cell phone, is a terrible thing to do. And at four in the morning, I got an email from Victor making a point about, kissingerian moment in the Middle East. And I thought it was so compelling that it started racing through my head and sometimes as a columnist, you're just taking dictation from the muse. And I got up at four in the morning and I wrote a completely different column between four and six in the morning and credited to Victor. So your friends that stay with you for a lifetime and continue to inspire you are truly a blessing.
Mindy Schneider:
Terrific. Well, we have lots of questions from the audience I'm going to start and I'll read it to you. This comes from an alumn: "Has merit become reinterpreted by populous left and right to mean authenticity and identity confirmation rather than rigorous achievement?"
Michael Sandel:
Well, merit at its best, I think, is relative to the value of people's contribution to the common good. And the distorted notion of merit that is most familiar in public discourse, I think is market defined merit. We easily assume that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good and therefore the measure of their merit. And it's this assumption that I think we need to criticize and question and challenge because really to embrace the political project based on the dignity of work requires that we deliberate as democratic citizens about what counts as a valuable contribution to the common good. We have outsourced our moral judgment on that question to markets in recent decades. And we've outsourced partly because we shrink from disagreement. We know that once it comes to debating, what is the common good and what counts as a valuable contribution, apart from market criteria, we're going to have disagreement, because this involves competing values, contested notions of contribution.
Michael Sandel:
But I think that's a healthy debate. It's a morally more contentious debate, but I think that's the only way and it does gesture toward a richer, truer notion of merit, than the shallow ones and largely market defined notions of merit that are predominant today. So part of what makes my political proposal challenging, I admit, is that it requires us to engage with moral disagreements, including about what does it really mean to contribute to the common good: does a hedge fund manager really make a contribution that's 900 times more valuable than that of a school teacher? Well, if not, what is the relative importance of their contribution? These are contentious debates. These are morally challenging debates, but I think that would make for a richer kind of public discourse. And I think these questions are unavoidable. I think we've outsourced them to markets for too long.
Tom Friedman:
Michael, are there any rising politicians, young politicians, Democrats, or Republicans and Conservatives, Liberals, who you see as being onto this message in a healthy way? I think there are some that are onto it in an unhealthy way, but in a healthy way, and talk about those who are onto it in an unhealthy way.
Michael Sandel:
Well, it's easier to name those in the second category, Tom, those who are onto it in an unhealthy way in a despotic way include Donald Trump and those who are trying to follow in his footsteps. Essentially, I think politically, we should keep an eye on those Republican figures who are trying to claim Trump's mantle by working out a working class argument for the Republican party to make, that is more compelling. Trump made one at a purely rhetorical level in 2016, his policies, did little, if anything, to help that working people whom he attracted. So it was utterly spurious and it was a kind of full populism, a plutocratic populism, in the end. But he was on to something important, which is that the democratic party has largely alienated working people. And those without a college education, it used to be that people who were better educated, voted Republican, they tended to be more affluent.
Michael Sandel:
And those without a college education voted Democratic, back to the days of FDR, because the democratic party stood for the people against the powerful and the privileged. That has changed. That has fundamentally changed. And now it's those better educated voters who vote Democratic and less well educated voters who vote Republican, as Trump proclaimed after one primary victory in 2016 "I love the poorly educated." Well, he was a kind of malevolent clown and buffoon, but he was onto something important. And there are Republicans who are trying to find a working class agenda, but more serious kind, that can consolidate the Republican party's claim to working people. As for Democrats or Progressives, that's more challenging. In fact, the success of right wing authoritarian populism is usually a symptom of the failure of progressive politics. And I think that's been true over the last four or five years.
Michael Sandel:
I think that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in policy terms were on the right track, though they didn't frame their arguments so much in the moral terms that I've suggested about the dignity of work. And they didn't have a language of patriotism and national identity and pride. If a progressive politician can do that, can connect a critique of finance and of crony capitalism and of inequality with the language of national community and patriotism. Then I think that has the makings of a potent progressive political agenda. So far, none of the major national figures have actually worked that out. But we shall see, I think that's what would be required.
Mindy Schneider:
Sure. Here's another question. What is your perspective on the exploding costs of college over $50,000 for tuition alone per year? When for many, it's just a stepping stone to more education, higher level MD, JD, PhD, and for others, it's a true waste when they could have learned to code via online courses.
Michael Sandel:
It's a problem. The exploding cost of higher education. I think it's partly connected to an enormous increase in administrative layers in higher education. Many administrators will say we have no choice because we're subject to so many federal regulations that we need to hire more and more people for compliance for everything from Title IX compliance to various kinds of health and safety compliance. I don't know exactly to what extent that could be pared back, but also the competition for student services, we perhaps had less lavish amenities. Mindy and Tom, when we were in college that most college students do today and I don't know that we were the worst for it, but it's part of the competition and the clamor among colleges and universities for the kind of prestige that enables them to climb the US news rankings, which I think are damaging and pernicious.
Michael Sandel:
I think that whole focus is damaging and pernicious. It's created, really, it's turned higher education into a sorting machine. And I think the sorting machine does damage, not only to those who are sorted out, it does damage to those who are sorted in, and it disfigures the whole high school experience for grant many students. So this goes beyond cost, but I think that cost is a factor because so much is at stake in where you get in. It didn't used to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way. Going back to Tom's question about what are some examples of places that were better. In Canada, there is not this frenzied competitive drive to get into this or that university, nor in Germany. So, I think that both in terms of public policy, but also in terms of the way we conduct higher education, there's a lot we could do.
Mindy Schneider:
Oh, here's another question: "How can you address class or racial injustice in Congress or state legislatures without addressing campaign finance reform?"
Michael Sandel:
Very difficult. The campaign finance system is actually a license for politics to be dominated by corporate interests and wealthy people. And it's very difficult to reverse the tendencies that we've been discussing without coming up with a better system of campaign finance. Unfortunately, the Supreme court has ruled that money is speech and therefore can't be regulated when it comes to political campaigns. But I think we should experiment with forms of public funding of national, and for that matter, state level political campaigns, where there's an offer made that in exchange for receiving public funds, there'd be no use of private fundraising, but I think we do have to solve that problem to make these other problems more tractable.
Mindy Schneider:
Okay. "How can one succeed in having a productive conversation with another who rejects facts as mere opinions and believes their opinions are valid as any supposed facts?"
Michael Sandel:
Well, I take this on in the book in ways that make some people uneasy. The conventional wisdom is that the reason we're so divided and the reason we can't really persuade one another is that some of us believe in facts and others don't. But I think truth in politics and political persuasion is a more complicated matter. When it comes to political persuasion, much of the work of persuasion consists in cultivating the trust among our interlocutors that can make a political dialogue and reason to argument possible. It isn't just about teaching people facts. In fact, it's interesting.
Michael Sandel:
Take the issue of climate change. You would think, if it were all about facts and believing in science, you would think that the partisan divide on climate change would be wider among those with less education and narrower among those with more, but it's actually just the opposite. Democrats and Republicans disagree about whether climate change is a problem and whether it's caused by humans, but the disagreements increase with levels of education and they even increased with levels of science, education and background. So the reason we can't come to agreement on climate change is not that some people do believe in facts and others don't. It's a political problem, so unless we address the underlying sources of political polarization and mistrust and anger, facts alone will not get us very far.
Mindy Schneider:
Okay. I have another question. "How did the Republicans address the dignity of work and more importantly, what on their policy platform has attracted all those people? I think racism and one's own bank account have more to do with their support than the problems with the Dems platform. But that's just my thought from talking with those supporters."
Michael Sandel:
Well, the question highlights an important fact about support for Trump. A lot of his support came from affluent traditional Republican voters who liked the tax cuts and perhaps the promise to get rid of Obamacare and to reduce regulations more than they were bothered by the racism. So I think we have to recognize that a lot of Trump's support came from traditional affluent and well-educated voters, but that alone would not have been enough to elect Trump. The fact that he got two thirds of white working class voters was a big part of his appeal.
Michael Sandel:
Now he didn't get it because he had a well worked out proposal to renew the dignity of work. He didn't. He did in 2016, said he would protect social security and Medicare, and that he would stick up for workers. Mainly he was able to tap into the grievances and the anger and the resentment that many working people felt looking at a Democratic party that was more attuned to the well-educated credentialed classes than to the blue collar constituency that was its traditional base. It was about sticking it to elites, not about actually serving the interests of working people that drew a great many voters to Trump and that matters because it identifies, I think, a weakness in what the Democrats were offering, including the meritocratic hubris, including the credentialism and the emphasis on kind of technocratic expertise that I think a truly progressive politics has to transform and call into question.
Mindy Schneider:
Okay. How about one more question here? And then I think we're going to turn this back over to Tom. So the last question. "How do we find common basic solutions as a mediator for the Oakland county courts? I think mediation of solutions would be a viable pathway to finding agreement. Professional non-partisan co-mediators may provide a model for working through the process of agreement on solutions. Has anyone considered mediation?
Michael Sandel:
Well, it's an intriguing suggestion and it might help. At least, the spirit and orientation of a seasoned mediator might help, but I don't think it's sufficient. I think what we need, fundamentally, is a different kind of politics, a different kind of political project. What passes for political discourse these days consists either of narrow managerial, technocratic talk, which inspires no one, or when passion does enter, we have shouting matches where partisans shout past one another on cable television and talk radio, and certainly on social media without really listening. Listening, as much as reasoning, listening is a great civic art that we need to cultivate. We need to cultivate it through civic education. We need to teach young people the art of democratic discourse, including listening and arguing and reasoning together.
Michael Sandel:
And we need to find ways of designing new media platforms and opportunities that don't trade simply in sensation or ensuring people's prejudices and pre-convictions, but that bring people together across social and economic and racial and ethnic divides to talk to one another in a kind of sober setting, cultivating the art of listening and including debating big questions about values. What counts as a just society? What should be the role of markets in a good society? What do we owe one another as citizens, and how can we apply these ideals to our everyday lives? This is hard work. It's the work of democracy. And it's work that hasn't been done, that we haven't done very well in recent decades. So I think that the hard work of cultivating the civic art of listening and reasoning and arguing about big moral questions is what would be required to lift up the terms of public discourse and to reach for something better, Mindy.
Mindy Schneider:
Terrific. Tom, did you have any comments or additional answers for some of the questions that have been laid out in the last few minutes?
Tom Friedman:
No. I would just pick up with what Michael, though, said at the end, because I'm working on a book right now, the title of which is What You Say When You Listen. And it comes from the biggest lesson I learned as a journalist. I'm a little Jewish guy from Minneapolis, but I'm pretty widely read in the Arab Muslim world. That's actually not a natural thing, especially if you read my stuff. I'm not out there saying, "You're all great. You're all wonderful. It's all the Israeli's fault." And the reason I've survived for 40 years from Beirut to Jerusalem and been able to operate in that part of the world, for me, the secret of success, actually being a good listener. Because, listening is first and foremost, a sign of respect. It's amazing what people will let you say to them or ask them if they think you respect them. And if they don't think you respect them, you can't tell them the sun is shining. And so for me, that's always been the uber lesson that I've learned from journalism.
Tom Friedman:
Let me segue from that to say a few words about the Middle East and what's going on there. Ron and Alyson suggested, because I've been writing about this a lot. I will simply tell you, and this is the theme of my column that will go up in the next couple of hours. I think we're at a really pivotal moment because, if the two-state solution, two states for two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, if that project is basically trashed and over, it is going to blow up every synagogue, every Jewish institution and the Democratic Party, not to mention the Middle East. That's the big lesson I took away from the last 11 days. Because, if the forces in that part of the world that have been really pushing Israel toward a one-state solution, and a one-state solution can only mean that, for Israel to remain a Jewish state, it would have to systematically deprive Palestinians in the West Bank, 2.5 million of them, of basic democratic rights, thus giving the ammunition to those who would describe Israel as an apartheid state.
Tom Friedman:
If that happens, every Jewish institution, every synagogue, the Democratic Party, every Brandeis student, and students on every campus around the country are going to have to ask themselves or are going to be asked, "How do you feel about that kind of Israel? Are you good with that kind of Israel that is really no longer a democracy, whose most recent ambassador to Washington boasted and encourage that Israel should seek to ground its political support in America with evangelical Christians and not Jews, because evangelical Christians will unquestioningly embrace a one-state Israel in the way that liberal Jews and non-liberal Jews, in many cases, will not." So what I'm say in my column for tomorrow is that president Biden has a huge, huge task ahead of him right now. And it is not to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, as long, in my view, as Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas are the leaders, respectively, of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. I don't believe the foundation is there for a solution right now.
Tom Friedman:
But, it is vital, it is essential that the United States preserve the possibility for separation, the possibility for a two-state solution. Because, if that is taken off the table, it will blow up the Middle East. It will blow up every synagogue. It will blow up every Jewish institution. It will blow up every college campus, and it will blow up the Democratic Party. And we saw the glimpse of what that could look like, and it will also give great license to antisemites to pursue their antisemitism under the cover of Zionism. I hate to be such a downer after Michael's really brilliant presentation, but if you want to know what is on my mind, that's on my mind. I learned something. We all should have learned something in these last 11 days. We got a flash of what the future could look like.
Tom Friedman:
So, in my last column on Sunday and my one tomorrow, I am urging the president, who doesn't want to get embroiled in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I don't blame him. And my view is, you don't have to get embroiled, but we do have to take some very concrete steps to ensure that no one is able to say, "Well, the two-state solution is over." We have to keep this alive. We have to keep it viable for a time and a different leadership that can pursue it. So, that's basically what's on my mind. And if anybody wants to ask a question about that, we have a few minutes left. Are you speaking Mindy? Because, I can't hear you.
Mindy Schneider:
I am speaking. I'm off mute. You can't hear me?
Tom Friedman:
Yeah, now we can hear you.
Mindy Schneider:
You can hear me. Okay. Then, I believe, Ron is doing the closing words.
Tom Friedman:
Great.
Ron Liebowitz:
I am doing the closing words, but before then, who would have thought that there would be a connection between Michael's tour de force comments and also Tom's? Because, the question that I would raise, and perhaps I can raise to Tom before we break is, how do we get there when we have heard from Michael, and the points were made so clearly that we have this polarized groups, two groups who don't see and agree to anything? How do we get there? In other words, the steps that Michael suggested seem to be necessary in order to get where you are in agreement on how we look at Israel and how we approach Israel and how do we accomplish, even within the American polity, a common sense as opposed to even between the groups in Israel and in the West Bank or Palestine.
Ron Liebowitz:
So, how do we get there, is the question to you. In other words, Joe Biden has a big task ahead of him, but even public opinion that you mentioned, as someone, of course, who engages this on a university campus all the time, fears this issue almost every day about how this can blow up. How do we get there? How do we have the conversations here about this issue?
Tom Friedman:
Well, it's a very important question, Ron. I'd say a couple things. That column that I was working on on Sunday that I substituted with a different one from Victor was kind of getting into this. It was kind of addressing the question of, how do we get to this sort of moment? It actually began with the description of Hamas, which is hardly a progressive organization, and was really asking the question, how could Israel lose a PR war to this kind of organization? And my answer is, first of all, exhaustion. Americans are really exhausted with the Middle East. That's actually the dominant mood of the country. We, as Jews, often involved in these issues, tend to exaggerate how people are thinking about this.
Tom Friedman:
If you really wanted to see the mood of America on the Middle East, look at the reaction to Joe Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. It was basically about a 72-hour story. Quite remarkable, after 20 years. The usual neocons wrote, "This will be terrible. It's a disaster." And a lot of people, myself included, actually nodded our head, "Yeah, it probably will be, but it's time to leave anyway." So, I think that's really where the mood of the country is.
Tom Friedman:
Second, we've just gone through a period of, I don't have another word for it, but really piggishness where... One of my favorite movies is There Will Be Blood. And that closing scene where Daniel Plainview, the oil man, explains to Eli Sunday, who's come to him to try to sell his land and the oil under it. And Plainview explains to Sunday that, "Actually, Eli, I don't need to buy your land. I already drilled all the oil off it. I had a really long drill. It was like a long straw," he says, "And I drank your whole milkshake. I had a milkshake and you had a milkshake, and I had a long straw. And I drank your whole milkshake." Never drink the other guy's whole milkshake. Always leave something. If you look what kind of things that Trump and Netanyahu did together over the last few years, they were really drinking the Palestinians whole milkshake. That was unwise.
Michael Sandel:
If we have time, Ron, Mindy, could I ask Tom a question, a follow-up question about what he said about the Middle East?
Tom Friedman:
Yeah.
Michael Sandel:
You've argued that we need to preserve the possibility of a two-state solution. And that certainly has been the preferred policy of all of us and of the American foreign policy for many, many years. And yet, when I heard Biden and his secretary of state speaking about the ceasefire, I was struck that they were using a language that was the language of equal treatment, equal respect, equal security. Now, that language could be interpreted as being pointing to a two-state solution, equality taking the form of two countries, two states. But, it was a subtly different language from the language that we've heard from policy-makers in the past, because it was actually a language agnostic with regard to a two-state solution or a one-state that respected the equality of all citizens. Do you think that the equality language, was this just a rhetorical slip, an evasion, or do you think it reflects a gradual evolution in expectation?
Tom Friedman:
Michael, I don't know. I think, honestly, they were looking to say the most anodyne thing, so not to get themselves in trouble politically or exacerbate the situation, and wanting to appear to be sensitive to civilian casualties on both sides. Because, at the actual strategic level, they gave Israel 10 days to actually do what Israel felt it needed to do in response to Hamas rockets on Jerusalem. So, I wouldn't yet draw that point.
Tom Friedman:
I was going to make a third point though, in answer to your question, Ron. So, one is that, this question of, I think they went to excess in the Trump years. But, I think there's just enormous ignorance about the real history of this conflict, among some progressives, frankly. How many know that Bill Clinton proposed a two-state solution to Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak? Not perfect from a Palestinian point of view, and it was rejected by Arafat and followed by the second intifada and suicide bombs, which basically decimated the Israeli Peace Camp.
Tom Friedman:
I mean, to me, one of the most fundamental questions progressives should be asking themselves is, how is it Israel has held four elections in a little over two years and the peace process was not on the agenda? There wasn't a single party proposing a two-state solution as a means of getting elected in Israel. Now, partly, that is a product of the failure of the Palestinian response, first Arafat, then Abu Mazen to Prime Minister Olmert, then Abu Mazen to President Obama. And that all gets glossed over in the, "We must end the occupation." Well, it's not like people haven't been trying to do that, and it's not like there wasn't a failure of Palestinians to respond.
Tom Friedman:
When I read the progressive critique, I also ask, excuse me, but where were you when the most progressive Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, former World Bank executive, brought in, made prime minister, elected prime minister, and his mission was to build Palestinian institutions, root out corruption, and to create a model that Israelis would say, "Wow, that was like the Jewish Agency. Those are people who I could imagine living in a state with." And he was run out of town on a rail by Abu Mazen, because he was trying to clean up corruption, including of Abu Mazen's family, and he teaches at Princeton today. Where were progressives when the most progressive Palestinian leader got run out of town?
Tom Friedman:
So my problem is, maybe I don't mean this, I know too much. I've been doing this for 40 years, so I know where everybody was 20 years ago. And so, I feel like I'm watching people. They walked into the middle of a bar fight and the big guy was punching the little guy and they just made a huge set of moral inferences from that that are really unfair. And so, again, I think there's piggishness, I think there's ignorance, but it's really, really dangerous, because, to think about Israel productively, I think, you have to actually hold three thoughts in your head at the same time. And, if you listen to what Michael said, that's really hard for people, okay?
Tom Friedman:
One thought is, Israel's an amazing place. What Israel has created by the way of education, the absorption of people from 120 countries, refugees, even from Africa in recent years, science, education, literature, art, technology. Israel's an amazing place, number one. Number two, Israel does bad stuff sometimes. Israel does bad stuff. Sorry to tell you, folks. It does bad stuff in the West Bank sometimes and other places. And third, Israel lives in a crazy neighborhood. It lives in a crazy neighborhood. Now, I have no problem holding all three of those thoughts in my head at the same time and pivoting between the three. Unfortunately, most people say, "It's amazing. It's just amazing country. It's amazing." Or they say, "Israel does bad stuff. Bad, bad stuff. Bad Israel." Or they say, "It lives in a crazy neighborhood. Leave them alone." No, you actually have to hold all three thoughts in your head at the same time, ditto about Palestinians.
Tom Friedman:
They've been really, got the short end of the stick in a really, really... One historical wrong, they feel was cured with a historical wrong for them. And there's truth to that. And Palestinians have done bad stuff and they've done crazy stupid things and they live in a dangerous neighborhood. And so, because of my experience, I have no problem holding these thoughts together at the same time. But, it's very frustrating to me to watch a debate where people just walk into the middle of this bar fight and seize on one of those things and then make pronouncements. And in the world of social networks, that is the world we live in. And so, what I argue, what I think Biden needs to do is, we need to preserve the possibility of a Palestinian state. We need to be establishing our own independent embassy in Ramallah. We need the Palestinians to have an embassy in Washington. I lay down, basically, the framework for how you'd do that, but we've got to keep this alive. Otherwise, it will actually impact every synagogue, every campus, and ultimately the democratic party.
Ron Liebowitz:
Well, I want to thank all three of you, and particularly Tom and Michael, we have homework. We have to read Tom's column this week. We have to read Michael's book this month. And then, we all have to gather again to see where we all are. But, I just want to thank you to really have this conversation of such important issues that we're all facing, both nationally and internationally. And Mindy, thank you so much, also, for being a great member of the class of '75 and for hosting the Q&A and being our host here. And thanks to everyone else who joined us.
Ron Liebowitz:
And also, I just want to point out that our next alumni college program, I invite you all to that. It will be with our Henry Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum, Professor Gannit Ankori. She just began her tenure in January. She's remarkable. She's got great energy. She'll be speaking about her work on Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving. It's a great show that will be opening in the Rose this fall, too. So, goodbye, everyone. It was wonderful to see all of you. Thank you again, Tom, Michael and Mindy. And thanks.