Links:
Professor Samuel Goldman academic profile
After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division
Theodore Roosevelt on hyphenated Americans
Samuel Goldman on the Know Your Enemy podcast
Samuel Goldman article on Leo Strauss and Zionism
Lecture course overview by Leo Strauss on modern social science
Samuel Goldman on The Netanyahus
Transcript
Elan Kluger: Thank you very much, Professor Goldman, for joining me. My first question is, if you were in charge of K-12 curricula in the United States, how would you educate students about hyphenated Americans?
Samuel Goldman: That's a really interesting question. You do enough of these things, and you get a sense of what people are going to ask, but that's a new one to me, which is a credit to you.
I think that I would begin in probably unsurprising fashion, with some of the major founding documents, including the Declaration and Constitution, but also some of the speeches or statements by Washington or other founders that address these issues, and I would then ask students what they make of that. I don't think we should take for granted the existence of a sort of hyphenate, or composite identity. I think it's a possible answer to a question and in any form of education, whether younger or older students I think it's important to ask questions and see how they answer rather than to impose the one true and correct answer that I, of course, have in my mind.
Elan Kluger: For the forming of citizens, do you think there should be a certain way students should view hyphenated Americans because there are some leaders - Theodore Roosevelt has a speech about it. And it's implicit in the statements of many people that there's something wrong with the idea of emphasizing hyphenated Americans, do you think there should be sort of redirection? Some people already do redirect it. They just don't put it in this language.
Samuel Goldman: Right. Well, I think there is a question of emphasis, and I'll tell you what I don't like, which maybe will shed light on this. I don't like it when you have sort of separate categories of all the different possible hyphenations. And you know Italian-Americans go in this box, and Mexican-Americans go in the next box, and Jewish-Americans go in the next box. That seems to me, if not intentionally, then practically divisive. But I don't think it's inappropriate, because, of course, it's true to mention some of these circumstances when discussing the particular accomplishments of particular people.
So the other night I was watching the old movie “From Here to Eternity.” It was based on a bestselling novel. It takes place in the months right before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and one of the characters is depicted quite explicitly as an Italian-American, and he is portrayed in the movie by Frank Sinatra, who was the iconic Italian-American of the World War 2 and mid century generation. That's clearly relevant. And if you are talking about American popular culture, it probably makes sense to talk about Frank Sinatra as an Italian-American, and what that meant genuinely both to people who understood themselves in the same way and for others. But that doesn't mean that every discussion of every accomplishment has to include an identity marker.
What I'm making a case for is editorial judgment. And that means not assuming that hyphenated or multicultural identity is necessarily essential, but being open to the possibility that it is. And I wonder if this problem like many of our problems today comes from a demand for abstract rules that can be applied mechanically in every case, and our flight from judgment, which means weighing factors in a manner influenced by the knowledge and experience of the judger and the purpose of the information and presentation and making decisions. We are very, very uncomfortable with that. And because we're uncomfortable with that we want rules that inevitably work badly when they're applied to particular cases.
Elan Kluger: That makes sense. Thank you. Next question about Chapter 4 of After Nationalism, there's talk of sort of the attempt to write a narrative of American history. And I guess the book that it reminded me of, and you cite a bit of is That Noble Dream by Peter Novick. And you come to the end of that [Novick’s] book, and you think it seems so impossible to even conceive of objective history that there's no truth claim that will ever be satisfying. And yet it seems that certain historians today - I don't think much has changed since the end of that book in many ways - and yet certain historians, left-wing historians I would say, claim the mantle of objectivity, but only strategically. So what is going on there?
Samuel Goldman: Well, I think you're exactly right to mention Novick, whom I think I cite in the footnotes, although I don't discuss him explicitly. And what Novick describes is this great dilemma in history, and figuring out what especially academic history is. So until the end of the 19th century roughly, history was really a branch of literature. It was understood as having an edifying or educational purpose. It was prized for the beauty of its presentation and language, and it was not always based, and not expected to be based on systematic examination of primary sources.
In the late 19th century, responding to intellectual developments in Germany, a new understanding of history as a science emerged, and the idea was that history would proceed in a manner comparable to natural sciences, where you would lay out your sources. You would analyze them neutrally or without bias, and you would reach conclusions that could be demonstrated and replicated to the satisfaction of critics. And that ideal of history as a science is the basis for academic history as we know it.
What Novick describes was the breakdown in that consensus really beginning in the 1960s, when it was argued, partly for political reasons and partly for methodological ones, that this just wasn't possible. History was not a science in quite that way. And that created a dilemma, because if history is not a science, what then separates it from literature or propaganda, what is it that historians are doing that distinguishes them from other people who are using words to tell stories about the past. And that's why Novick uses as the title of his book "That Noble Dream". On the one hand, what he's suggesting is that historians can no longer take seriously the kind of objectivity that was seen as necessary in the late 19th and early 20th century, but they can't get rid of it either. And I think that's a dilemma that history has not escaped. It's now been about 50 years since Novick published that book—I don't know how far beyond it academic historians have gotten.
For me, based on my understanding of that book, and some of the other methodological arguments that arose at the same time, it doesn't really make sense to speak of history as scientific or objective. It's not a math problem. There are interpretive decisions that are unavoidable in choosing the evidence you will discuss, comparing it to other evidence that you will weigh more or less heavily, and in making the case about what that evidence means.
What you can do first of all, is be honest about what you're doing. And that element of objectivity, I think, remains with us. There's a call for transparency in your sources or other evidence, and in the reasons you're making the interpretive decisions that you do. And also you can resist the temptation or challenge it when you see it, to associate your efforts with a specific political or ideological project. And a lot of the debates in and around history and civic education in the last few years, I think are really about that. You know, they're not about the loss of this sort of Olympian kind of objectivity. Everyone has beliefs, opinions, biases, that influence what they say and what they teach about the past. That's inescapable. But there's a difference between recognizing that and conceding to it a kind of unfortunate necessity that can be challenged and struggled against, and the direct embrace of political agendas. You know the purpose of writing this book or article is to promote equity or democracy, or whatever the goal is. And what I try to do in that chapter is to suggest that some of the people who attempted to write big national histories—this, now about 10 years ago, I think this was sort of a second term Obama phenomenon—were doing the same thing even in ways that they didn't realize.
Elan Kluger: There's an unnamed famous historian of human rights who has implied as much that his historical project starts with political aims, and then he goes out into the archives and tries to give a sort of historical background. And I mean, he's one of the best historians working today in real ways. And so I guess that that's why I find it interesting.
Samuel Goldman: Well, you should - you should name him.
Elan Kluger: No, I won't.
Samuel Goldman: Okay.
Elan Kluger: He may be on the podcast in the future. We'll see.
Samuel Goldman: Okay, fair enough. You know part of the difficulty here which I talk a little bit about in that chapter is that a lot of the pioneers of American history really were doing that. You know, people like George Bancroft, who wrote this enormous history of the United States. As I point out in the book, I think it takes him - he doesn't get to the Declaration of Independence until I think volume 7 or 8. That's how big this book was. But he was not claiming objectivity. He was not an academic historian, as we know them. He was a political man of letters, basically, who was making the case for a certain kind of nationalism. And I think that is okay if you're honest about what you're doing, and Bancroft is pretty honest about that. My criticism of people like Jill Lepore, sort of the target in that chapter, is that they want to have it both ways.
Elan Kluger: Yeah, that makes sense. You've mentioned in a podcast interview, this Alasdair MacIntyre quote that "to die for the modern state is like to die for the phone company." Something of that sort. You didn't cite that to say you totally agree, but that there's some element of truth of it. So my question is, in your studying of American nationalism and the meaning people draw from America, why die for America? Or why serve in the United States Army?
Samuel Goldman: Right. Well, so it sounds in a way, as if you're asking a version of the question that J.D. Vance posed or raised in his speech to the Republican Convention last week, when he said, people won't die for an idea, they'll die for their homes. And I was struck by that, because, just as a matter of historical record, people will die for ideas, rightly or wrongly, for good ideas or bad ideas. But the suggestion - I don't want to say it's a claim that people will only fight in defense of their piece of ground - is just false. People do fight for ideas, and that is a part of the reason that Americans have been willing to die for their country.
Why should one do this? Well, in part, I think people have done it out of a sense of outraged honor. The attack on Pearl Harbor, for example - I was talking about From Here to Eternity a few minutes ago - was not really a danger to the American homeland. Of course Hawaii was US territory, but there was really no danger at any time of a Japanese invasion of the Continental United States. But there was a military threat. The fleet, or part of the Pacific fleet had been destroyed. I think even more, there was a sense of outraged honor. How dare you do this to us? And we shouldn't dismiss that as a motive. Honor is important in politics, even though we don't really have a language of honor anymore. Maybe if we did, we wouldn't understand some of these things better.
Of course, wanting to defend home and hearth is part of the justification. And Vance himself served - I actually I confess I don't remember whether he served in Afghanistan or Iraq, but many young Americans joined the military after 9/11, out of a sense that they were protecting their families. They were protecting the places that they lived from attack, and I think a lot of the disillusionment that followed those wars rightly is associated with the discovery that the threat was much less than many people believed.
But also some people, some of the time, do fight for ideas or principles. They think there is some component of justice that has to be vindicated. And on the one hand, you know, we don't want to pretend - I think it would be a mistake to pretend that's the only or even the primary motive. And I'm sorry to keep talking about this movie and book but it's actually quite interesting, but if you look at the popular culture created by the so-called greatest generation, you know, people who fought in World War 2, or were of that age, it's very different to what people think. It is much more disillusioned and even cynical than the Steven Spielberg version. And it's clear if you watch these movies, read these books or read letters that people wrote, they did not sign up because they thought the Nazis were evil and wrong or they wanted to make the world safe for democracy. These other motives were much more important. So was the motive of peer pressure. You don't want to be the only one who's not doing it when everyone else is.
But I would not rule the ideological or principled element out completely, because, again, there are many examples of many people, not all, but many who have fought in part for principles and ideals. So why serve in the military? I'm not in a position to answer, because that's not something that I've done. But I think my answer is gratitude. If you are grateful for what your country and in this case the United States is, if you are grateful for what it does, then you might be willing to consider what risks or sacrifices you are willing to make to express that gratitude.
And speaking of the Republican Convention, Vance made this statement about what people are willing to die for, but it seemed to me in tension with a speech earlier in the Convention delivered by Hung Cao, who's running for the Senate in Virginia and completed a career as a naval officer. He is himself a Vietnamese immigrant, who was brought to this country as a child. And Cao seems to me to reflect or to express that mix of motives better than this dichotomy between home and idea, the principle and family is able to do.
Elan Kluger: That makes sense, and that connects more with what you said earlier about the search for clear cut principles, where it is a matter of judgment and far more contextual.
Samuel Goldman: And I think also it sheds some light on the first question about so-called hyphenated Americans. Cao is running for Senate in Virginia. So I live in Washington. It's very close, and I see some of the ads and read some of the reports. And he seems to me to reflect this balance or ambiguity better than broad theoretical arguments are able to do. So on the one hand, if you ask him - and he said in his speech at the RNC - you know I'm an American. I'm 100% American. I devoted 25 years to serving this country, and I was willing to die to do that. But he doesn't deny that he and his family are immigrants, and that he has some connection to their ancestral culture that in some contexts is important. And that's okay. Those things can go together in practice much more easily than they do in theory, and one of the things that we've talked about privately, but is maybe relevant to this conversation is that I think hyphenated Americanism, or diversity, or multiculturalism - pluralism, people have different words that they like to use - works much better in practice than it does in theory. And for that reason, I think the question we should ask is, why is that? How is it that we can bring together these ideas or principles that seem to be in tension? But again, for the most part, and in most settings, I think really just aren't.
Elan Kluger: You're not a soldier, but you are a scholar, scholar of political theory. And I have a question just related to that and political scholars in the nation. So the idea of scholarship - there's international conferences, there's an international community. But in some ways I think this may be more true of historians than political theorists, I'm not sure, but there is a certain role that political - that historians play within the nation. Maybe traditionally, maybe it was by popular historians. So George Bancroft or Henry Adams, or whoever it is. But the idea of an international community of scholars - do you think that that is a good thing? Do you think there should be a role that political theorists should play in perhaps providing a bulwark to the nation, or some relationship to the community?
Samuel Goldman: Well, I would, I think, draw the comparison slightly differently. Less between political theory and history than between political philosophy and history. I think political philosophy, insofar as it is understood as the search for universal principles, has elements that cut against the emphasis on the national or other political community. Political philosophy in that sense isn't simply international, because I think political philosophy precedes the adoption of the nation as the basic division between people. But it transcends any specific political community in pursuit of something that is human. How successfully it does that is a different question, but it tries. And that gives it an international or universal quality.
History, on the other hand, is closely associated - history as we understand it - with the nation. As you mentioned, Bancroft and Henry Adams and I talked a little bit about the German origins of modern historical scholarship. All of that goes along with the emergence of modern nationalism and history was thought to be the science of nationalism. Because history would show you through objective research that there are these different peoples, and they have different qualities, and they're associated with different places. History and historical scholarship were pitted explicitly against this older sense of political philosophy, as pursuing universal or common human standards as opposed to national ones, and that conflict is in some ways the story of political thought in the 19th century.
What I like about political theory is that it can sort of migrate between those possibilities. It can consider or look toward the universal, but then return to the national or other sort of communitarian view, but it can also begin from the national and emphasize particular traditions without needing to justify them on the broadest possible scale. So that has disadvantages. One of them is that political theory, I think, according to its critics, is less scholarly than either history or political philosophy. It's sort of a hybrid discipline, you do a little of this, a little of that, but not in a way that satisfies real experts on either side. I think there's some truth to that. But also it provides a flexibility that I think is not only useful, but also captures something real about political experience, because most of us are neither purely cosmopolitan, purely universal in our experience of politics, nor purely particular. We're somewhere in between and in different settings we're closer to one pole or the other. Political theory, I think, is good at dealing with that. And that may be why, in the 20th century, it's political theory that has absorbed a lot of the bits of political philosophy and history that have been cast off by those academic disciplines.
Elan Kluger: Why does it seem that many of the few scholars that are right-leaning or conservative tend to be in political theory or political philosophy? Hayden White described history as “the conservative discipline par excellence” but he was describing it less in the political sense and more that it does not adapt to the changes that other disciplines went through. There are explanations about political philosophy that unique things happened at the University of Chicago that led to certain scholars finding certain things interesting. But the way you described it, conservative, as in your review of Yoram Hazony's book on Conservatism to sort of Burkeian, whatever growth over time in terms of skepticism about Universalism. Why does it? Why does it seem that most of the conservative figures in that sense become political philosophers. Yoram Hazony himself, identifies as a political philosopher, and very few historians, tend to identify as conservatives, providing the narrative of their particular nation, and not even reaching for universal truth.
Samuel Goldman: I think it's a pretty contingent story about what happens in the American Academy after World War II. One significant event was the wave of émigré scholars from the Germanophone world. Many of them were Jews who did not think of themselves as German, even if they lived and worked in Germany. There were also many Austrians who spoke German but were not German. So, calling them "German émigrés" isn't quite accurate; they were Central European émigré scholars educated in the German academic tradition.
These scholars came to the United States and didn't fit into the standard divisions of academic labor. They weren't quite philosophers in the Anglo-American sense, nor were they historians either. They were largely concerned with texts, intellectual history, or the history of thought. Many ended up in political science departments and, intentionally or otherwise, created what we now call political theory. This field became a primary vehicle for conservative scholarship in the humanities.
It's important to emphasize that this story is specific to the humanities. The situation is different in economics, where conservatives or libertarians have been a major presence for a long time. It's also different in law, where conservative scholarship has been influential for many decades. In the humanities, political theory became a safe space for conservatives. That had both positive and negative effects. The positive was that people who were right of center in practical politics had a place to go. However, it also distracted attention from other fields where conservatives might have made an impact. Fifty or more years ago, there were significant conservative scholars in sociology and history; that's almost all gone now, and political theory has become the last refuge.
This shift is not solely due to intellectual reasons, nor is it universal. This is an American story. In Europe, even now, conservatives are more drawn to history, and political theory is associated with the left. But this is how things evolved in the American Academy after World War II. Because America was and remains the dominant cultural power, that then trickle-down effects in other places.
Elan Kluger: I should clarify that this is an American podcast, so we're speaking to an American context, not a universal one. I first discovered your work on the "Know Your Enemy" podcast, where you were one of the so-called enemies.
Samuel Goldman: I was not really their enemy. They were very nice to me. They should have more real enemies.
Elan Kluger: Yeah, that's true. I don't think they can, for different reasons, but I do know many conservatives, along with liberals or left-wing listeners, who listen to that podcast as a way to understand their own conservative intellectual tradition or intellectual heritage. Do you think that this is a problem?
Samuel Goldman: Could you give me the question one more time as I think it over? This is how you can stall during a live interview.
Elan Kluger: The question is, is it a problem that the main or perhaps the best vehicle for learning conservative intellectual history is provided by left-wing people. Is that a problem?
Samuel Goldman: Yes, I think it's absolutely a problem. I'm writing a little book myself about conservative academics that I hope will provide an alternative, even if it doesn't solve the problem. I'm certainly more sympathetic to these people than the "Know Your Enemy" team, although not without criticism.
It's a problem when public awareness is driven almost entirely by critics. This doesn't mean the alternative should be hagiography, but it can offer a more sympathetic and balanced assessment. The absence of conservatives or right-of-center people from the academy has distorting effects. I've been in conversations where scholars struggle to understand why anyone would hold views they consider wrong and bad, and because they struggle to understand, they impute low and dishonorable motives that are not accurate. So yes, that is bad, and I wish there were more alternatives. But it's hard to achieve this as long as there are so few conservatives or people sympathetic to conservatives producing scholarship, whether in specialist literature or in a more accessible mode.
Elan Kluger: That makes sense. I think tacit in much of our discussion thus far is Leo Strauss. You wrote an academic article on Leo Strauss, discussing his Zionism and his relationship to Roman political theory. At the end, you imply this strange coda about Strauss almost seeming like a religious Zionist in the style of Zvi Yehuda Kook. This seems counter to much of his other writings and readings of other political thought, but it's so interesting. So I have to ask, do you think that Strauss ultimately was sympathetic to that view? Or was he doing something specific in that essay about Maimonides?
Samuel Goldman: I think what Strauss is doing is suggesting that Maimonides was not really a Messianist. Strauss argues famously that Maimonides was an esoteric writer, covering up his skepticism concerning a personal God whose will is revealed in the Torah. Strauss quotes Maimonides saying that the reason the temple fell was because of astrology. The classic reading is that this is divine punishment for seeking the future in the stars instead of upholding Mosaic law. Strauss reads it to say that Maimonides is suggesting that people should have been more practical and political, focusing on weapons and armies rather than astrology and then would never have been defeated.
Strauss is saying that the true character of the Messianic age is not a miraculous, redemptive event but a political one. He's suggesting that, at least for Maimonides, the restoration of a Jewish state and the restoration of kingship is the Messianic age. Strauss is draining the Messianic component from classic Jewish sources and bringing them closer to political philosophy in his understanding. I'm not expert enough in these sources to have an opinion on whether that is a plausible reading of Maimonides, but I point it out at the end to suggest that Strauss retains an admiration for Roman politics, associating it with political toughness, and he sees this toughness in Maimonides as part of the Jewish tradition.
Elan Kluger: Hmm, okay, very interesting. Another question about Strauss: do you think, on net, he has been good for the conservative intellectual tradition? He is a very interesting thinker, and his students are excellent teachers, but he appears to be just one thinker among many who has become the intellectual lodestar for everyone to gather around for contingent reasons.
Samuel Goldman: I think the concentration of energy in political philosophy or political theory—followers of Strauss, of course, like to say political philosophy, as Strauss himself did not like the term political theory or the practices associated with it but it is a point about placement in academic departments—has encouraged a lack of breadth and healthy tension between arguments. For a long time, it seemed like the political theory avenue, especially the Straussian avenue, really worked. People were getting jobs at good universities, publishing, and producing graduate students who also got jobs—not as many jobs as they wanted—but more than their rivals. But I worry that this has permitted and even justified the abandonment of other fields that also have something valuable to say.
I'm working on a book about conservative academics, on a chapter about Strauss. One thing I've been thinking about is the consequences of Strauss's deep skepticism of modern social science. He was not critical as many suggest but he was very skeptical of modern social science, especially in political science departments, but implicitly also of sociology and economics. I think it would be good if there were a few conservative sociologists around. There are genuine insights that are available from that kind of research, and that's been lost. It's not just that people read Strauss and dismissed social science; often, the fields were happy to get rid of scholars they considered conservative whether or not they were conservative or not scholars and ideas. But it's not good when conservative academia is composed exclusively of people reading Plato and Machiavelli. Those are good things to do, I am in favor of them, but I worry that there's been an over-concentration of energy and resources in Strauss-inspired history of political thought, and that that has come to some extent at the expense of other valuable scholarship in history, social sciences, and other disciplines.
Elan Kluger: That makes sense. I was just thinking, even in terms of literature, it seems like the best education for someone that is against trying to derive universally true rational principles. Literature is all about the particular experience.
Samuel Goldman: Yes, although it's interesting that the last time conservatives had a significant presence in literary scholarship was in the heyday of the so-called New Criticism in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the New Critics were quite conservative in politics, but the New Criticism was all about universalizing and finding interpretive rules, rather than distinguishing individual experiences of readers or national cultural perspectives. The New Criticism aimed to be a sort of science of literary analysis, not just subjective response. I am not an expert and do not have comments to make about the relevant fields, but it's striking to me that the last conservatives who were influential in literary studies were New Critics and were modernists in their aesthetic tastes, rather than curatorial scholars interested in old books. Someone should write a book about that.
Elan Kluger: That's certainly an important historical question. Another question about literature: you wrote an essay about the novel The Netanyahu's, and you captured ambivalence about American Judaism. To put the question simply, do you see yourself in the character of Ruben Blum?
Samuel Goldman: No, I don't, because I'm not of that generation. Blum, for those who haven't read the novel, is from the streets of New York, the Bronx I think, is a child of immigrant parents, grows up speaking Yiddish, and becomes a scholar at a fancy college where he doesn't feel entirely at home. The book is set in the late fifties.
Elan Kluger: Yes, late fifties, I think.
Samuel Goldman: Right. This has become almost a cliché. Saul Bellow wrote novels about this, people don’t read them so much but Bernard Malamud did too. It reflected the experience of a generation of Jewish intellectuals who became prominent after World War II or around the middle of the 20th century, and they drew a lot of energy from breaking into these stagnant WASPy institutions and shaking things up.
I don't belong to that milieu at all. That is not my experience at all. Like a lot of academics or para-academics the university was always a comfortable and open place to me. It seemed like my kind of place from the outset, not necessarily in politics, but in culture it was very familiar to me.
In my review, I suggest that this has made me and many of my contemporaries somewhat boring. We can't draw on the energy of opposition, of being upstarts. We are more like the old WASPs who fit in well and had relatively smooth career paths. We're not as provocative or creative, maybe not as brilliant. The point of that review is to suggest that Jews today have shifted into a position, I do not want to say Jews have degenerated, but it's only in period pieces, in books set 60 or 70 years ago, that we can recover that energy known to our parents or grandparents.
I should say, that is true in the United States, and maybe it was more true a few years ago than it seems now. Since October 7th, things might be different. It's much less true in Israel, which, for all its complications, is an extremely interesting place. It's never boring. One of the developments in the U.S.-Israel relationship among intellectually and culturally inclined Jews has been the reluctant ceding of energy. America used to be where things were happening, this was the place, but now it no longer is, or at least not to the same extent.
Elan Kluger: Yeah, you link to another review in your own review where someone suggests that American Jews' fascination with Israel, both negative and positive, stems from seeing Israel as where things are happening, while their investment banking job isn't so interesting.
Samuel Goldman: I think that's right. And you're right to say both negative and positive. You can draw very different political conclusions, but either way, there's an implicit conception that whatever is happening is happening somewhere else.
Elan Kluger: So then my final question is how to regain that energy within American Jews. One solution would be to make aliyah, but that's not realistic for everyone and not appealing for the negative side of the American Jews. What are some ways to regain the vitality that struggle has created? Maybe some of it is returning already.
Samuel Goldman: I think some of that energy is already returning. I want to be careful in what I say because I don't want to suggest that anti-Semitism or hatred of Israel are good things—they are not, they are bad things. But I do think a certain amount of tension and opposition is intellectually and culturally healthy. It may be that people of my generation, and maybe a little older, had it too easy and got too comfortable, assuming that institutions were friendly and on our side when they really weren't.
Getting a wake-up call about that could be a spur to creativity. So, I'm optimistic about the future of Jewish intellectual and cultural life, including in the U.S. But it's partly because of the wake-up call and the response by universities and other institutions. I don't know where this resurgence will happen; it may not be in universities as it was 20, 30, or 50 years ago. New practices and new institutions may need to emerge, and that's okay. Figuring out where people can think, speak, argue, write, and create is part of the creativity we need. We shouldn't just rely on existing institutions to do the work for us.
Elan Kluger: That makes sense. Well, thank you very much, Professor Goldman, for coming on the podcast.
Samuel Goldman: Thank you for having me. It was fun.
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