On July 31, I appeared on Chicago’s Morning Answer with Dan Proft. I’ve been on the show many times, and it’s one of my favorites because the segments are usually about 15 minutes, which in live radio world is YUGE, giving me enough time to speak in more than soundbites.
The two main topics were the Russiagate document releases, and the Trump administration’s deal-making with Ivy League schools.
Here is the description of the segment from the Morning Answer website:
Dan Proft welcomed Cornell Law professor William Jacobson to discuss two headline-grabbing stories: new developments in the Russiagate saga and the Trump administration’s high-stakes standoff with elite universities.The segment opened with Proft detailing fresh disclosures tied to the 2016 Russia investigation. Newly released notes, first reported by The Federalist, suggest a senior intelligence official was pressured by a James Clapper associate to endorse the Obama-era intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference, even without seeing the underlying evidence. The notes also describe the official being told that signing off on conclusions he didn’t support would be key to securing a promotion.Adding to the intrigue, former Trump administration official Kash Patel told Fox News that a trove of sensitive documents—including the classified annex to the John Durham report—was discovered in FBI “burn bags” in a secure room. That annex, which contains the underlying intelligence Durham reviewed, is expected to be declassified and transmitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee for eventual public release.Jacobson, who founded LegalInsurrection.com, said the unfolding revelations reinforce just how deeply the public was misled during the Russia-collusion frenzy. “It was a psychological campaign against the electorate,” he said, noting that even skeptics of the narrative were left with lingering doubts during years of leaks and media amplification. He argued that if investigators can build provable cases that officials like James Comey, John Brennan, or Clapper lied under oath or to federal investigators, the Justice Department must pursue charges—even if they fall short of the more grandiose conspiracy theories circulating in political media.“Think of Martha Stewart,” Jacobson said. “She went to jail for lying to the government. These people misled the nation. If there’s evidence of perjury or false statements, they should be held accountable.”The conversation then pivoted to the Trump administration’s ongoing battles with the Ivy League over campus discrimination and research funding. Columbia and Brown recently agreed to multimillion-dollar settlements to resolve federal complaints and restore access to lucrative research grants. Northwestern and Harvard, by contrast, have resisted settlements, with some faculty arguing that capitulating to the administration would harm their reputations.Jacobson acknowledged that the agreements mark a significant win for federal oversight, but he warned that they stop short of addressing academia’s deeper structural issues. He argued that faculty hiring practices at elite universities have produced ideological monocultures—especially in the humanities and social sciences—where conservatives are virtually absent.“Harvard’s own survey says only 3% of its faculty identify as conservative,” Jacobson noted. “That’s one-tenth the share of conservatives in the general public. These schools have destroyed their own academic freedom by hiring only people who share the same left-wing worldview.”He criticized arguments from faculty who claim that hiring openly conservative scholars is equivalent to racial quotas or political litmus tests. Fostering viewpoint diversity, he said, is essential to restoring genuine academic freedom and is not comparable to race-based preferences that courts have found unconstitutional.Proft closed the segment by observing that elite universities are happy to rely on federal money but resist the strings that come with it. Jacobson agreed, saying that real change on campus will require both policy enforcement and a cultural reckoning in higher education.
Here are some excerpts (auto-transcribed, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)
Proft (04:36):…. Where do you come down in terms of how you think about this information and what you would like to see the Department of Justice do with it?WAJ (06:17):Well, I’d certainly like to see the Department of Justice go as far and as quickly as they can on this.My big takeaway is how manipulated we were as a nation by the false Russia collusion claims. It started at the very top. I remember when we were going through this and there were leaks to the New York Times, there were all sorts of things. I consciously knew this was nonsense. It was so clear yet kind of subconsciously it planted a lot of doubts.I remember thinking at the time, I don’t believe it. There’s no evidence, and we know that some things like the so-called secret server connection turned out to be completely false. But what if they’re right? Can all these people be wrong? And it turns out, yes, they were, but it planted enormous doubts.It really was a psychological terror campaign against our electoral process where, as it’s coming out, and I think we knew this, but we’re getting more details, there was an organized operation to mislead and manipulate the American public that had a profound impact on our politics.Even today, the numbskulls protesting on the side of the street hold the signs about Trump and Putin, all that sort of stuff. It really was outrageous when you think about it.***WAJ (12:29):I think the main one who’s still digging in and waging a battle, although there are rumors they will cut a big check, is Harvard. Yeah. In terms of Columbia, in many ways it was a, a good victory for the Trump administration, for the cause of proper academic freedom on campus. But I think it fell a little short. I think they, they achieved a lot, and so it’s not a criticism for what they achieved, but the one thing that they left off the table was the faculty hiring process. And in fact, there’s this specific sentence in there that says nothing in this agreement gives the federal government the right to interfere in the hiring process.The faculty hiring process as it exists at almost every university, but certainly the so-called elite universities, the Harvards, the Columbias, the Browns has destroyed the system.I’m all in favor of academic freedom. In a better world, this notion of faculty having the freedom to hire other faculty, that’s a great concept. But what we’ve seen over the last 30 years is they’ve destroyed the system. They have spent 30 to 40 years only hiring their own. It’s close to impossible, maybe not impossible, there are exceptions to every role, but it’s close to impossible to get hired in the humanities and the social sciences, in modern higher ed, if you are openly conservative, it’s close to impossible.Harvard, according to the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard faculty, only 3% self-identify as conservative versus 38 or 39% nationally, according to, I think that’s Gallup, identify as conservative in the U.S. Eighty, almost 80% of Harvard faculty identify as liberal or very liberal versus 26, 27, 28% in the U.S. So Harvard has turned into a little bubble which created the problems that there are in campuses because the hiring was left to the faculty.And that [hiring] freedom, which is what they are fighting over more than anything, and at least at Columbia, they seem to have protected, that freedom, has destroyed academic freedom on campuses. You only have academic freedom on campuses if you are liberal, very liberal, far left, archist, anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Zionist. Those are the people who have the academic freedom.So I find it very shallow when they say, oh, the federal government is interfering with our academic freedom. No, you have destroyed your own academic freedom. And it’s not only in the humanities and the social sciences, it’s increasingly because of the DEI programming in STEM, in the sciences.So I don’t think they went far enough. I think that they made good changes. They made policy changes. They told them, Hey, here’s what the law is. You have to follow it. Of course, they should have been following it all along.They achieved a lot, but they didn’t, in my estimation, achieved the one thing that would make permanent the policy changes, which is they have to rebalance the faculties. You cannot have a situation like you do at Harvard …. That’s an absurd situation. That’s a destructive situation, and it’s what landed us here.Remember at Columbia when they had the protestors harassing people, taking over buildings, et cetera, there were lines of faculty there to protect them from the police. So unless, and if anyone in the Trump administration is listening, and I hope they are, you need to effectuate changes that are permanent, that are not just three year deals. And the only way you’re going to change the universities is if you rebalance the faculties.I’m not talking about conservative faculties, just like have some sense of normalcy in the faculty composition instead of the extremity that you have now. And that’s what you need to focus on.Proft (16:57):Well, you know, it’s, it’s interesting because I, you probably saw the op-ed from a philosophy professor at Penn in the New York Times, talking about why it’s a bad idea to compel or, or even encourage universities to hire more avowed conservative academics … So it’s better, we can’t get into this business of setting aside positions for ideology any more than conservatives would say, you should set aside positions for race or sex….WAJ (18:33):That’s such a ridiculous argument that that person is making, because we know the reality as it exists today.I completely agree that getting the federal government involved in hiring decisions at universities is a bad idea, but it’s a less bad idea than what the current situation is. And the current situation is that a large percentage of the viewpoints and ideology expressed in the country is completely removed from the campuses. So yes, getting the federal government involved in all these things is not ideal, but we’re at this situation because what the faculty of what the faculty have done to their universities.***WAJ (19:39):And, you know, the notion that actually supporting a diversity of viewpoints on campus is the equivalent of hiring people based on immutable characteristics like skin color, the two are not equivalent. Fostering an open environment on campus with viewpoint diversity is not the same thing as racial preferences in admissions and hiring. They’re just two very different things. There are laws against racism in hiring. There are no laws against diversity of viewpoint in hiring.So they’re picking some one thing that has nothing to do with the other, and they’re trying to play conservatives, oh, you’re opposed to race-based affirmative action. How dare you insist on viewpoint based affirmative action. Well, they’re two very different things. One has nothing to do with the other. One is unconstitutional. One violates equal protection of the laws, the other doesn’t. So they’re not equivalent things, but this is, you say it was a philosophy professor who, who wrote that? Now it makes sense that it’s a philosophy professor. But nobody in the real world thinks that fostering viewpoint diversity in a left extreme left bubble is a bad thing.
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