How to Rebuild American Universities: Jacob Howland

When we are dispersed and we interact with other human beings only online, and the algorithms feed back our own preferences and desires to us, what it effectively does is kind of isolate us in these multiple sub caves. Jacob Howland is the provost of the University of Austin, a new private liberal arts university that is pushing back against censorship and politically popular narratives in higher education. Once Trump was elected, people felt free to say what they actually believe, and to say things like, I'm a patriot, I care about the United States of America, we need borders, men aren't women. As dean of the Intellectual Foundations program, Howland gives students a comprehensive education in the Western tradition, emphasizing both Athens and Jerusalem, as he says. There are inexhaustible resources in the tradition, and if we're going to find our way forward, we've got to understand the past. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Jacob Howland, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's great to be here, Jan. Thank you. A lot of people are wondering, what's happening in America right now? Many Americans, frankly, but also Canadians, I am having people call me saying, hey, what is Trump doing? What are they doing over there? Europeans, I mean, everywhere. What's your take? Well, I have a lot to say about this. Before the election, I felt there was a kind of doom coming at us. I've been trying to think about the way to represent this, and why I felt that. I think it started in 2020 with COVID. Everybody was told to get behind their locked doors. You can't go to church. You can't congregate in certain numbers. You're going to be reported. There was this atmosphere of kind of intimidation. I knew a number of older people, especially, who thought that anyone who hadn't had the vaccine was actually killing other people. Of course, we learned later that that was false. There was this kind of isolation and atomization. The sort of image I came up with there is that the cave in the Republic, where everyone is sort of watching these images. I realized that when we are dispersed and we interact with other human beings only online, and the algorithms feed back our own preferences and desires to us, what it effectively does is kind of isolate us in these multiple sub-caves. I mean, the good thing about it, at least in ancient Athens, if ancient Athens was like a cave, everybody was in the same cave and looking at the same images and so forth. But then I had another idea about this, and it really is informed by Dante. I was reading the Inferno. And you know, in the Inferno, you have these nine circles of hell. And the problem is that everybody's in their own circle. So all the damned souls are in their own circle, and they just walk around. In some cases, they're actually rooted to the ground, like the suicides. But no one's getting out of that circle, and they're only relating to other people who are like them or maybe they're antagonists, like the hoarders and the spenders are in one circle, and they're sort of pushing against each other. So Dante and Virgil come down, and they're able to travel through these levels and sort of... But this sense of isolation, it felt like everything, everyone was frozen. People weren't going anywhere. They weren't developing. And at the same time, Americans were becoming passive. First of all, we were sort of addicted to our social media feeds. And second, we were sort of physically restricted during COVID. And then there's also the ideological component, right, which is you can't say these things. So there was a sense in which motion was restricted. And then as we approach the 2024 election, I realized, look, you've got Dianne Feinstein in a wheelchair. You've got Mitch McConnell having the episodes of being frozen. You've got John Fetterman, who's actually changed a lot. But at the time, you know, he was having very big psychological problems. And so I wrote an article for UnHerd called Something Like America Has Become a Zombie State. And of course, zombies are these beings that don't think. They are in crowds. They act in crowds in zombie films. But there's no community. They don't connect with each other. So just to go back to Dante, it's as if we've gone all the way down to the ninth circle, where everyone is frozen in the ice. It's an amazing image. Dante has this brilliant idea that at the center of hell, the very bottom of hell, it's not fire, which is motion and change. It's ice. They're frozen. And Dante sees these figures under the ice just kind of like, you know, whatever posture they're in for eternity. No one's talking. And then you have the massive figure of Satan. And if you calculate it, he's towering up from the waist, something like a thousand feet. And he's not speaking either, because he's chewing on these traitors, Brutus and Judas and Cassius. And he's represented like this windmill, like a big machine. And I thought, you know, that's an image of the state. And he has three faces and six eyes, and he can surveil everywhere. And what he's looking at is this frozen valley of the damned, and no one's moving. But then Dante and Virgil break through the ice, and they go through it, and they realize that their entire perspective has been inverted, because Satan is actually upside down. The story is that he came from the other side of the world and smashed down to the center, and half of his body is on the other side of the ice. So they broke it through the ice, and now they're properly oriented, because they're going to go out and they're going to climb purgatory, and then they're going to ascend to heaven. So putting all this stuff together, it's as if we've replaced frozenness and submission and a kind of passivity for a kind of chaos. We don't really know what's happening, but a new vista has been opened up to us. And at the same time, things have turned. There's been like an orthogonal transformation of 180 degrees, and then we're moving in another direction. And I take heart from that, because it seems to me that so many elements of our lives have been opened up since Trump's election. Maybe there's a possibility in Dante for a kind of ascent, as opposed to a sort of continuing descent. Maybe there's a possibility for transcendence. With this election, I feel like a kind of hopefulness, but also a sense that, I mean, nobody really knows where we're going. But to me, it feels like an epical transformation. Now, I haven't answered your question as to what's going on in America, but I have told you what I feel about these recent events and what they might portend. Well, the COVID years made me think a lot about Hannah Arendt's work, and specifically how atomization of a society is required to kind of institute a totalitarian-type governance, or how those things go hand in hand, or perhaps even unintentionally atomized society will trend in that direction. And that atomization seems to be shifting somehow. I mean, it really does, actually. It's palpable, isn't it? Well, I think part of it is that we've all been sort of faking it. In particular, the imposition of a new vocabulary. Men can't be called men if they want to be called women. The appropriation of words like justice turns into social justice. The kind of general sense that, you know, if you're not speaking this language, you're not on the right side. And certainly in universities and elsewhere, the data suggests that many, many people have bitten their tongues. They're not talking to each other, and they're not going to be honest. And it's as if there's a kind of preference cascade. It's as if, you know, once Trump was elected, people felt free to say what they actually believe, and to say things like, I'm a patriot. I care about the United States of America. We need borders. Men aren't women. It's as if all this ice has broken up, and now everything's flowing. The lying to oneself and to others is a characteristic of totalitarian societies. I think that's a very serious problem. So when people get used to that, they just fall into it, because the opportunity cost is too high in a lot of contexts to say, this is what I really believe. But now that's gone. The opportunity cost has been greatly diminished. You're making me think about something that I speak with. I've spoken with people about often, and just how really foundationally different it is to live in a totalitarian society. And I was thinking about the society that my parents came out of, communist Poland. There were much more grave manifestations, even than that. But basically, you and I, it's very difficult for us to have, because we don't know each other that well yet, to have a normal conversation. Because I know in the back of my mind that you're incentivized to report on me. It's very quite possible that you will, even if you say niceties. So there's this kind of veneer, always. And you have to be incredibly careful. With any, close relationships are the hardest thing to create. It's the family, and that's it. Almost. And that's very just difficult to fathom in a free society, where just none of that really is an issue. Yeah, for sure. There's a great book by Wassily Grossman called Life and Fate. I consider it the best novel of the 20th century. It's the 20th century war and peace, because the subject of the novel is the Nazi invasion of the USSR. And it focuses on the Battle of Stalingrad. And in this book, there are several scenes where friends will begin to feel comfortable with each other. And then they will open up. And they will speak the truth. Or at least they will articulate their own actual views. So they might say something about Stalin. And they're elated. And then they walk away, and they think, what have I done? I mean, I just said these things to this guy. And if he betrays me, I'm doomed. So there's this kind of weird oscillation. And in that book, by the way, it's very interesting. The freest human beings in the Soviet Union in this book are a group of Soviet soldiers in Stalingrad who have now been surrounded by the Nazi forces. And they realize that they're doomed. And so a commissar goes to this location. And they make it clear that they despise this guy. And he's just unbelievably upset. You know, like nobody talks badly to a commissar. And the very next scene, he wakes up. And he wakes up at a hospital. And he says, I want to report this guy, this guy, this guy. And they say, oh, well, that's not necessary. They're all dead. So the interesting thing is that the only people who are truly, truly free are those who are liberated by the knowledge that they're going to die. So why is this relevant to what I was just talking about, about the pre-Trump days? We have to come up with some kind of way to refer to this epical transition. Like one way to look at totalitarian societies is you're on a train. And the train starts out. And you get to a station. You get the next station. And when you get all the way to the end of the line, you have the death camps. Or you have the gulag. The Soviets have a word for people in the camps who have died before they've already physically died. And there's an equivalent word in the Nazi camps. In the Nazi camps, they called them musulmen, which means Muslims, right? Which I think because of submission. But nobody really knows why. In Russia, in Russian, it's dohodyaga. And a dohodyaga is literally someone who has come to the end of the line. And the understanding was they have come to the end of the line of communism. Jacob, one quick sec. We're going to take a break. And we'll be right back. And we're back with Provost of the University of Austin, Jacob Howland. Briefly tell me about what you're doing now at the University of Austin, but also how you got here to be having all these very compelling thoughts about the world. Well, so I'll tell you about the University of Austin. Look, I designed the intellectual foundations program at the University of Austin. And what is that? It's one of three elements of our curriculum. In the freshman and sophomore years, students take roughly two thirds of their courses are in intellectual foundations. And the idea is that these will provide foundations for any future work you do. So when I was asked to design this, it was very interesting. It's like put together 15 courses. And at the time, it was very clear to me that our institutions were broken. The news media is supposed to report news not to serve as an arm of government propaganda. The CIA and the FBI are supposed to protect Americans, not spy on them. Universities are supposed to educate and not indoctrinate, et cetera, et cetera. And I decided that what's wrong is a lack of sound judgment. A lack of being able to see things whole. Institutions had forgotten what their purpose is. And what we needed to do is educate students who were capable of repairing these institutions. So how do we do that? And the only way I could think of was, look, get students to connect multiple disciplines in a coherent way. Give students, what I was talking about earlier, a sense of where we've come from and where we're going in the West. So the intellectual foundations has a kind of historical arc. We organize these courses around fundamental questions like first term freshman ticket course, chaos and civilization. What is civilization? Where did it come from? And it turns out that the Greek poets and the Hebrew scripture both begin with chaos. They have very different accounts of how the chaos is ordered, right? Or, of course, on the meaning of politics. What is politics? What is law? Why do we need it? And so equipping them with these capabilities and then we have courses in quantitative reasoning and statistics and probability and physical science and biological science. But we follow through every time we're looking at these fundamental issues in the first year. We've got a biblical text that we have. So we have Exodus in the beginning of politics and we have Herodotus and Thucydides. Of course, on Christianity and Islam. And finally, we get to modernity. But the idea here is, I'm reminded of a saying by John Henry Newman in his, the idea of the university. He says that the point of a university is to form individuals who can make an instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us. That's the idea. And to do that, and that's a goal that obviously is unattainable by any human being, but you can move closer toward it. You really have to have a sense of where we've been and where we're going. So when we get to the second year, we have a course on modernity and its discontents. We have a course on ideological experiments of the 20th century. We have a course on the uses and abuses of technology. And I should say, by the way, technology, that's sort of the outgrowth of what I was saying, Athens, right? In other words, this is a rational project. How to understand the abuses of technology? Well, that would require a philosophical anthropology, by which I mean a basic understanding of what it means to be a human being, of what human flourishing is, and what the human good might be. And we're gonna need that understanding, which has got to be informed by the biblical sources, as well as Greek philosophical sources like Socrates. When we face things like AI, how do we avoid the abuse of AI? Well, we gotta understand what a human being is. That was my conception of how to put together this intellectual foundations program. How did I get to it? Well, I was lucky I had good teachers and I studied ancient philosophy. And I was at University of Tulsa, and they decided that right after I got tenure to put together the philosophy department or the religion department. So I wanted to get to know my colleagues and we started reading Kierkegaard. And I said, I'm gonna write a book on Kierkegaard. So I wrote a book on Plato and Kierkegaard, sorry, Kierkegaard and Socrates. And then I got into studying the Talmud. And I wrote a book on Plato and the Talmud. The Talmud was like the Platonic dialogues. And I spoke to a couple of very well-known Jewish scholars. One was Jacob Neusner, who actually published 1,000 books. I'm not making this up. They had an article in the New York Times about him. And he said, oh, you should write a book about this. And then I spoke to another post-Holocaust theologian named Rabbi Irving Greenberg. And he said, you should write a book about this. My problem was, I didn't know any Hebrew. I hadn't had any study. So I managed to hire someone to teach Hebrew at the University of Tulsa and audited the classes and finally wrote this book. And I realized that Jerusalem is folded into Athens and Athens is folded into Jerusalem the following way. So you know the story about Socrates, the Delphic Oracle, right? And the apology. His friend goes to the Delphic Oracle and says, anyone wiser than Socrates? And the answer is no. And Socrates says, well, that's, I started thinking like, well, surely I'm not wise. And he goes around and he realizes he's wiser than others. The question he's confronting after he hears that is, what is wisdom and who is Socrates? And in the apology, he says, without any argument, he says, it's impossible for the God to utter a falsehood. That's faith. It's faith in the revelation of Delphi, the shortest revelation in history. No, right? And then the rabbis, there's a wonderful book called Rational Rabbis by a guy named Menachem Fish. And the introduction is 40 pages on Karl Popper's theory of falsification. Because rabbinical debate is in the horizon of biblical revelation, but they're trying to arrive at their best understanding of the world. And it's essentially a philosophical endeavor in the sense that you've got to give arguments and you've got to construct a way, by the way, to connect your point of view with the Bible, because that is sort of the horizon of all understanding. That's the revelation. Yes, exactly. So these things are all there. They're all there already. And then if we sort of fast forward to today, I would say we see it in, for example, Henry Adams. So Henry Adams writes The Education of Henry Adams. Amazing book. And he describes our society as having transitioned from what he calls the virgin to what he calls the dynamo. So the virgin prevails for centuries and centuries and millennia. And the virgin is accessed by your heart and love and promises salvation in the afterlife. But the dynamo, and he went to Harvard College in 1858, that last 50 years of his life, roughly, I mean, you've got telegraph, telephone, airplanes were invented before he dies. You've got steamships. You've got the discovery of radioactivity. You've got amazing scientific advances. You have the Civil War. You have 1848, blah, blah, blah. He says the dynamo is mechanical, complex, material, and promises salvation in this life. So right there is the separation. Because, I mean, there's a sense in which, can we put the dynamo together with the virgin, so to speak? Because if we just go the dynamo side, then we're in trouble. And the last thing I'll say is Adams was famous for calculating that our human capacity to control nature doubles every 10 years. He did that by calculating coal production, okay? So the claim is that there's this acceleration. Now, the rate of acceleration is constant. But if you think about it, at some point, the curve becomes really steep. So if you look at today, AI is changing things so rapidly. And Adams' concern was that once things begin to change too rapidly, human beings can't catch up. They're too dislocated. He even thought that the telegraph might destroy society, you know? But, I mean, now we're at a point where it's just astronomically fast. And so what could sort of ground us in a society that is so technologically moving so quickly, and also ideologically? Well, something like the virgin, so to speak. In other words, if you could find your North, South, East, West, you're not gonna do it by just looking into your own soul and saying, what do I desire? You're not gonna look at it. You're not gonna do it by looking at technological advancement and saying, well, what should I use? How can I use these things? You're going to need some kind of true North. And one of the characteristics of the COVID years, and I've had this discussion with many people, there was a tendency for people who had very strong faith or religious grounding to kind of persevere the whole situation better. So that, again, not an absolute statement, but kind of a rule of thumb. Well, you know, I'm definitely going to have to have you back to talk about technology. Well, it's an exciting time. I'm really glad we're having this conversation. I think that we need to draw on our intellectual capital to understand what is happening today. And I think that's the way forward. I think we need to do that. And that means we can sort of put that forgetfulness aside. What is old is not bad. What is old is our resource. Any great growth of the future must spring from the soil of the past. A thesis that I could prove by pointing to great musicians, artists, you know, authors. When I teach the Bible, I ask kids, you know, how many of you wanna be authors? Oh, their hands go up. Okay, all the big stories are in the Bible, all the great stories. So you're gonna wanna study this. I mean, there are inexhaustible resources in the tradition. And if we're gonna find our way forward, we've gotta understand the past. Well, Jacob Howland, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much, Jan. It's a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you all for joining Jacob Howland and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.