♪ >> from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." >> good evening. i am filling in for charlie rose. on saturday, president trump took to twitter to accuse former president barack obama of wiretapping trump tower during the 2016 presidential election. fbi director james comey reportedly asked the justice department to reject the presidents unsubstantiated claims, arguing that the allegations are false. a spokesman for the white house said monday morning, president trump does not accept james comey'snot accept james

denial of the charge. my guest his book is now out in , paperback. i am pleased to have him at the table. this is a fantastic book. i read it in hardcover. i will revisit in softcover. before we get to the book, let's talk about the news happening. first, let's talk about the allegations of wiretapping, allegations of president obama engaged in wiretapping. you were in the business of wiretapping, loosely defined at the nsa and cia. can you explain to the viewers the process by which an administration can initiate the wiretapping process? michael: yeah, the first thing i would say is probably the word administration is the wrong word. in the 1970's, we took the

reform of the intelligence community we took , the authority to do that out of the hands of the executive and put it into article three courts. the only way you can target -- and that is the technical word we use here -- the only way you can target a u.s. person, american citizen anywhere, or anyone in the u.s., the only way to target that person is through an article three fisa warrant. foreign intelligence surveillance act court warrants. and you have to prove to the judge that the targeted surveillance is either a, the agent of a foreign power, or b, involved in some criminal activity to a standard of probable cause. so when president trump tweets out that barack obama bugged my home, trump tower, my first reaction is, that is not true. even if barack obama could pull a lever to make that happen, there's nothing on the other side of it. he can't make it happen.

it happens through article three. number one, the president can't order it. let's put that claim aside. number two, did it happen at all? so broadly speaking, there are two purposes for a fisa warrant. one is foreign intelligence purpose. the other is a counterintelligence or law enforcement purpose. you have already quoted director comey. that is indirect. i would really like to see the director speak publicly. ,ccording to the reporting director comey said he did not do it. so it did not happen in the counterintelligence or law enforcement lane. yesterday on "meet the press," jim clapper the former director , of national intelligence, was on. and jake todd said, i'm sure you cannot confirm or deny, but clapper said he could deny it.

dan: he said he did not happen, not that he was not involved, but that it did not happen. michael: right, it did not happen. you have the two universes that fisa has come out of, one led by jim comey, the other one by jim clapper. and both men say it didn't happen. could it have technically happened? sure. but in order for it to have happened, someone had to go to a court and prove to the judge that the target, which i'm assuming is somebody in the trump campaign or organization, the target was the agent of a foreign power involved in criminal activity to a level of probable cause. that cannot be good news for the administration either. dan: right. i want to come back to the russia piece of this. a public policy matter. one other issue, today the administration, secretary kelly, announced a new order relating to the travel ban. i'm somewhat sympathetic.

we can debate the rollout of the initial travel ban, but the argument the administration made initially is that in those countries where individuals could be traveling from you have , basically failed states, collapsed vetting processes -- shouldn't there be a case for at least tightening up the process by which we make decisions about who comes in and out of the country? michael: i understand. it took the not so failed state, iraq, out of the list because they have a working government there. i would say we have a far better implementation plan, but i disagree with the premise. i think it is a flawed policy. it is not because they are not bad places, they are. but i do think the campaign rhetoric has gotten ahead of our

skis here, in how much a threat this really represents. the second thing is the campaign continually says, and we have no idea who these people are -- that is not true. we do have vetting. in fact let me go out on a limb , here and say we have extreme vetting. dan: the u.s. government? michael: yes, the u.s. government vetting this -- these people. should we try to make it better? absolutely. but what you have here is this almost apocalyptic threat with a totally dysfunctional vetting system, therefore we have to stop people coming in and have a do over. that is flawed. in one way that is just unfortunate and we are leaning on the world unfortunate people to put up with this. in another way, it is not just that. it is bad. particularly the way the first order was rolled out. at the court, even the improved order is the premise that feeds the jihadist narrative that there is undying enmity between

islam and the west, islam and modernity, islam and the united states. there is a civil war in islam. there is a fraction, not a trivial fraction, that believes that narrative. that when we do these kinds of things, we seem to be living the role they say we have. we hate them, we don't want them here. i fear -- and the damage may already have been done. i fear we have kind of reinforced their story that this is a clash between civilizations rather than what i really think it is, that the center of gravity is a fight within a civilization within islam. and by doing what we just did, to my mind, without, real purpose, has actually somewhat hurt us within that civil war. dan: staying within that region, another issue that is top of the

perplexing problem list, a lot to choose from. iran. during the campaign, then-candidate trump talked about the u.s. extricating itself from the multilateral deal that the obama administration struck with iran. do you think that is viable? should it be a priority? michael: here's the way i look at the iranian deal. think of it as three packages. one is the deal. that is what is going to happen with the iranian program in 10 years? frankly of the three, it is the best. they are further away from a weapon than they would otherwise be. then you have the problem of what happens after 10 years. when the limits age off. then finally you've got all the things that are ongoing in the region now. i think the correct approach,

and i think the trump administration is going there, which is leave the current deal alone. we don't have international consensus to rip it up. start turning up the heat a bit though, on our friends, about what happens in 10 years. when these things begin to age off. and then, something the obama administration refused to do then you have to start punching , the iranians in the nose for all the other things they are doing in the region. dan: proxy wars. michael: proxy wars, what they are doing in iraq, syria, yemen, all the chest thumping. this can't be cost free. i fear we held our policy toward all those transgressions hostage to the nuclear deal on the false premise that if we push back against this, the iranians would walk away from the deal. my thought on that is if they walk, they walk. it is not an easy decision for them and we shouldn't hold our policy hostage to that.

dan: let's move around to some of these other easily addressable problems. you live in a world of easily addressable problems. north korea. it has been reported that during the transition, the obama administration basically warned the incoming trump administration to keep their eye on north korea, that this could become the sleeper problem that could consume this administration. is that how you see it? michael: yes, that's exactly what i would have told them. i have a formula, our move, their move, no move. our mood is syria. we have to go do something. no move, russia and china. i think they're going to ground to see where they are going. their move -- north korea. you know as well as i do, we have experienced this. foreign policy looks like it was written on the bottom of a shampoo bottle. provoke, accept concessions, repeat. they will provoke. they will create a crisis.

dan: and the u.s. response should be? michael: that is a really tough question. that is a genuinely wicked problem. the obama administration, i must admit i thought it was the right hand -- they used what they called strategic patience, which means paying no attention to the three-year-old throwing his porridge on the floor. he wants attention. don't pay attention. they tried that for eight years. now they are a few years away from an icbm reaching seattle. that is not working out as well as we would have liked. there are no easy choices. we could break right, which would mean a more aggressive policy toward the north koreans and try to stop them from developing. we could break left, which means we will decide to live with nuclear north korea and make peace with that fact, or we could try one more time to have the approach i call actions have consequences.

i think we need to go to the chinese and say, that's the kind of stuff that happens when you let this guy do this. .a.d. inwe will put t.h japan, as well. those nuclear capable ships that used to come here will come back again. but you know what? we still have the bunkers for nuclear weapons. i don't mean to be bellicose, but to say he does this, we have to go do stuff, it's not intended for you, but we have to do what we have to do. maybe that incentivizes the chinese to increase the torque. dan: let's move to russia. we talked about russia before. as analysts try to understand -- public analysts, not in the agencies, analysts try to understand what seems to be the trump administration's

understanding of relations between vladimir putin and his government. to give him the benefit of the doubt, there is a world view out there that says america is no longer in an ideological struggle in the world. america is in a civilizational struggle, and the other side, the adversary in our civilizational struggle for survival, western civilization as we know it, is radical islam. russia, while we may not like what they do in their own backyard, and in their neighborhood, we shouldn't let what they may or may not do in ukraine or in the future in lithuania or estonia bother us or get in the way of working with russia to combat the threat of radical islam. that is the school of thought out there. i don't necessarily agree, but that is a school of thought. how do you respond? michael: i think the premise is wrong. remember this is not yet a war , between civilizations.

we have a disagreement on the premise. let's put that aside, and agree for exercise purposes. let's go implemented. how do you explain putting their arms around the iranians and other arms around hezbollah? you can't picture two more violent actors in the middle east with regard to radical islam than these shia expressions of radical islam. i don't know that they signed up to, "let's go find the radical islam fight." the president said during the campaign that russia's fighting isis. that's not true. they have hardly dropped a bomb on isis. they are fighting the more or less moderate opposition that we thought might have offered an alternative to the assad regime. all they want to do is keep the alawites, their own form of shia

radicalism, in power. not because it suits the narrative, but because it suits their naked russian geopolitical ambitions to have a foothold in the middle east. dan: to your point, russia is helping syria bomb aleppo, not raqqa, where isis is headquartered. they are contributing to the catastrophe, the human suffering. michael: if you think syria is a problem to solve, if you are going to solve the broader question of radical islam, the presence of that alawite regime is the engine that continually fuels sunni opposition, which the longer it goes, more and more captured by the sunnis were not just willing to kill, but willing to die. dan: let's talk about this book, "playing to the edge," which is a fantastic, if not at times unnerving read. not bedtime reading, shall we say. read it during the day while the sunlight is out so you don't get totally freaked out and depressed. what has been the reaction to

the book? you had said there were some gray areas. i would say morally ambiguous decisions that you had to make almost every day. what is the reaction? michael: playing to the edge. it is designed to be and is unapologetic. this is what we did i don't have , any regrets. let me explain to you why we did it. i understand you may disagree, that's ok. we share values and we are just disagreeing. not an argument between the forces of light and darkness, but you may disagree. i began the book tour on the hardcover almost a year ago today. i took it on the road. i've got my personal fingerprints on every controversial program we have engaged in since 9/11. i have done the surveillance program. i created it. i inherited and then implemented renditions, detentions, interrogation programs at cia. i played a very strong role in

convincing the bush administration in 2007 and 2008 to amp up the targeted killing program. check, check, check, i have got them all. non-apologetic. i took it on the road. frankly, i was prepared to be heckled from time to time, but that turned out not to be the case. there is actually a fair amount of understanding of the american people that these are tough choices. even those who disagreed appreciated the candor and honesty with which i said this is why we did what we did. i get your objection. there's another dynamic that you might find interesting. i was out there a year ago, just as the campaign is getting underway. i'm thinking, i will spend a lot of time explaining why we are playing to the edge. because of the rhetoric from the campaign from certain candidates, i spent as much time talking about why there are edges and why we shouldn't go

beyond them because some people , in the campaign were talking about carpet bombing, killing terrorists' families, waterboarding is too good for people, and so on. it was a fascinating exercise for me, the playing to the edge guy, actually telling american audiences, no, no, no. there are things we shouldn't do. there are limits beyond which we should not go. dan: i just want to zero in on the kind of decisions you have to make at a very microlevel day-to-day. you talk in the book about making the decision about a targeted killing of an al qaeda leader. but in this case if you struck the al qaeda leader, you would kill his grandson in the collateral damage? michael: what i talked about was the first targeted killing the united states government took after president bush in the

middle of 2008 began to ramp up the program. the individual involved was the for al qaeda, and somebody we were spending a lot of treasure and putting a lot of people at risk to find. we had the intelligence that we knew where he was, and we knew it was him. it is a region of pakistan, it really hot in the summer, people sleep outdoors. families go out there and put out cots. and he unfortunately was there with his entourage, and unfortunately members of his family, including his grandson. we had to make the decision. we had to contribute to the government's decision, should we take the shot or not? again, wmd. the united states decided to take a shot. the shot was taken. he was killed. that is the good news. his grandson was killed as well. that is the bad news. dan: the terror attacks we have seen in europe, nice, brussels,

germany -- in so many of those attacks they are not so much , like we have seen here in the united states like san bernardino. those the more like a lone wolf situation. but these were planned. michael: launched by the mothership to come into europe. dan: right. and they incubate in europe, and they have plenty of time and space and infrastructure to organize. why don't we see that kind of thing here? is it just a matter of time? michael: probably, but there are important differences. one is geography. they can't walk here. another is demographics. far higher proportion. you have one million refugees in germany. you have a significant number in france. we don't have that, which brings me back to the previous debate. we are probably hyperventilating about the refugee thread here. we had 10,000 syrians here, not one million.

beyond that, we are actually pretty good at this. our intelligence services are world-class. we are a tough target. our services are actually pretty tough. back to the book, we do a lot of things that make the europeans get a little fidgety in their seats when it comes to making people safe. one more thing. this is important for the intel guy to tell you. we are a welcoming society. we know how to assimilate people. our european friends don't. we do have radicalized individuals in america, we don't have radicalized communities. we don't because of who we are. brings us back to the first conversation about the travel ban. we need to be careful about the second and third order affects of things even if they are , legitimate self-defense steps. dan: in the region, where a lot of these individuals come from at first in the middle east,

parts of sunni middle east, growing cooperation now really a surprise to many of us between the government of israel and the sunni -- someone had a good line that sure enough, president obama did bring the arabs and israelis together. they do a lot of intelligence sharing and strategic cooperation. how important is it? michael: it is real and it is important. the normal rhythm for a cia chief is to name one sequence of another, the emirates, the saudi's, the jordanians, the egyptians. in essence, you are sweeping up the sunnis and israelis. why do you do it that way? because you have the same thing in all the capitals. they all have the same worldview and they all want to talk about one thing. it's not each other, it is iran. they are focused on iran. i had to visit saudi arabia and i talked about this. i would visit with his majesty,

the king. the king of saudi arabia has ties to the director of the cia. that describes what kind of relationship we have with the kingdom. and his majesty and the foreign ambassador would come back. he would always be the translator. his majesty would give us three to five minutes on the plight of the palestinians. you would almost see him go -- and then he would immediately launch into what he wanted to talk about. which he would begin by describing the iranian threat. when he got really warmed up, it was the persians. then when he got really going, it was shia. you've got this convergence of self-interest between the sunni states and the israelis with regard to the dominant threat in the region, which is the iranians. dan: and also, i would agree iran is number one on the common threat list, also the rise of the muslim brotherhood.

sunni extremism is a threat. it is a threat inside gaza and the west bank. egypt, and threat in jordan. michael: less complicated. we just talked about a whole lot of monarchies, not republics , other than israel. i guess the question i would ask you is what is the future of political islam? where does islam go in a world in which not every country is a monarchy? you have a republics. i hold up my hand and say, this arm is the sunni root. you have a variety of expressions of sunni political islam. you have isis over here. you've got al qaeda over here. you've got hamas here.

you've got the brotherhood here. and then you have the turkish version here. you drive down part of the arm and you have common roots. where does that go? this one over here, the turkish one, i discuss in the book. condoleezza rice thought that was political islam we could bet on. erdogan in turkey. i think she was right for a while, but unfortunately around 2011 and 2012, erdogan got off the democracy bus. dan: and president obama thought, too. michael: yes. besides the other second and third order effects in the region, the fact that this kind of stopped the engine going forward on the development of political islam is another great sadness. it's a really complicated puzzle.

i know what they are doing in egypt. on almost my last international trip was egypt. about president bush and secretary rice and the freedom agenda. i know what is going on he said , he had the situation under control. it turns out he didn't. it's a cul-de-sac, not a highway. we can't live with that forever. how do we end up with a political islam that they and we can live with? dan: general hayden, thank you for a not upbeat, but certainly illuminating discussion. "playing to the edges," a highly interesting read, as relevant today as when it first came out. thank you for joining us. ♪ ♪

>> good evening. i'm dan senor, filling in for charlie rose. last thursday, middlebury college experienced a scene that is becoming increasingly familiar. scholarlys murray, a -- scholar from the american institute was invited to speak. a massive protests greeted him. the intent was not simply to express peaceful dissent, but to shut down his speech. dr. murray and the middlebury

professor who interviewed him assaulted her and center to the hospital. a growing tendency on american campuses, an intolerance for freedom of speech and the challenge to intellectual diversity. joining me now to discuss this trend is frank bruni. an op-ed columnist for "the new york times." he writes frequently about higher education and is the author of a recent bestseller about the college admissions mania "where you go is who , you'll be" is the title. jonathan hite, a professor at nyu's stern school of business "the righteous mind." he is also the founder of an organization countering what he calls liberalism on campus. thank you both.

how did we get here? this incident with dr. murray at middlebury is not the first time it happened. this did not exist when you and i were going to college. what has happened? >> luckily we are not seeing the kind of violence at middlebury or uc berkeley everywhere. we are seeing a desire to shut down speakers who are unwanted. three things come to mind. one is we are living in a era , when you step away from campus, increasingly partisan, polarized, vitriolic debate. why wouldn't we see a heightened version of that on campuses among kids who are at the most passionate phase of life? it's important to note this is the generation, everybody gets a trophy generation. nobody modulates themselves, or thinks i should retire in the public space and let others have their say because it's very individualist sentiment like that. lastly, there's not a lot of ideological diversity on a lot of the campuses where this is happening. the notion that somebody with a

perspective totally contrary to your own deserves the stage, deserves to be heard, that a -- that is sort of going away because there is so little diversity and appreciation for the really important ethos of education and civil debate. dan: how widespread is this, give us some perspective here -- how big a problem is this? >> we need to put parentheses around this. it is not happening at most campuses, most campuses are not four years. this new moral worldview only develops when you have a group of young people living together for four years. people going home to a family or job, you don't get this. secondly, it is not most students at any school. it is in the humanities especially. in the sciences you don't see much sign of it. even the humanities, it may not be most -- what you have to understand is in any campus, there is an interesting social

environment. there are multiple morales and multiple communities competing with each other and drawing recruits. what we are seeing in the last few years is the rise of a particular subgroup that is extremely passionate morally about equality, fighting racism, and that's all great. but they have adopted a way that is kind of vindictive, about calling people out. and people are afraid of them. it's not just the students, it's the professors too. even if it is only 5% or 10% on any campus, the fact that they can file charges against a professor. at nyu we have a new bias response team. anything i show in class that offend the student, there are numbers posted everywhere to call and report me. if students are not exposed to diverse ideas, if someone like dr. charles murray comes, he spoke at middlebury 10 years ago. dan: but there is more controversy.

-- [inaudible] quoting anthony collins in "the new york times." >> it is the biggest problem of our age. why did trump win? it's a coming apart by class. yes, this should be the century of social scientists. we need a social science establishment that can address these problems. students are increasingly reacting, it's almost an allergic reaction. because they are exposed to diversity enough. dan: if you were to give those organizing these protests the benefit of the doubt -- it is a minority of students and it is a minority of schools. but they do set the tone. and at those schools where this is prevalent, it is really, really pronounced. we are producing graduates with little sense of the true ideological political diversity of american life. i went within the last couple of years to a very esteemed liberal arts college in the northeast. when i was there, the president -- they had a dinner for me at the president's house. all these faculty members went around the table and sang the praises of the school.

i heard about the affinity group they haven't for this group xyz. , there were like 20 faculty members. at the end they said, do you have any questions? they were all boasting about what a diverse environment they had. i had one question. i said, is there a group for republican students? they looked at me like it had never occurred to them. there was one student there and she says, i think there is that they maybe have 1 member. schools trip over themselves to get racial diversity. they give a lot of lip service to socioeconomic for and some do better than others. but what about this whole other kind of diversity? how can we move forward as a country if many of our top schools are graduating kids who can't even begin to process how a human being could vote for ? donald trump they need to understand who voted for donald trump and why they are not monsters. >> if you are to give them the benefit of the doubt, the students that were organizing,

how would they rationalize this and explain it? >> they would say this is hate speech. they would say charles murray is a racist and they would say would you let somebody from the klan speak? and they would say that about milo yiannopoulos. it isare being honest, hard to figure out where the line is. what is constructive and acceptable dissent and what is . provocation? i think milo is to provocation. i have questions about but i do not think he is merely a provocateur. if you look at the book "coming apart," he is discussing essential things that in many ways augur the 2016 political cycle. that is a precursor to "hillbilly elegy," which people

are not raising questions about. >> it is a book about social class and what happens when you start doing college admissions on the basis of iq scores and sat's, rather than who your father was. we have three giant divide in this country. there's a racial divide, a class divide, and a political divide, left-right divide. of these three if you go back to say since then, one of them has 1980, gotten better and two of them have gotten worse. if this country ever blows apart it will because of the combination we are seeing of the class divide and political divide. in universities we are mostly focused on the race problem. that is still an important problem, we need to work on it. what i think universities have a crucial role to play. they should be the premier place when you bring people from all over the country who are different in politics and class and they learn to get along with each other. they learn to tolerate people that have different views. dan: how do your colleagues at nyu view you? do they view you as an outcast, or are they quietly supportive?

there is a silent majority on campus that is saying to you, thank you for being what they would say is the voice of reason on this issue? >> you have to look at it field by field. the academy is vast. it is like different countries. i suspect that if i were to give a talk in the department or gender studies department i , think it might not go so well. by and large, the vast majority of professors are what you would call liberal left. they are not at all liberal, they really believe in freedom of speech. since i've been on this mission to call attention to this problem, we have lost our political diversity in the social sciences, nothing bad has happened to me. my colleagues in social psychology have been very positive. they recognize, good research requires we challenge each other. nothing bad has happened to me. i have not been kicked out. on the internet people say that -- bad things about me. [laughter] but there's been a lot of support. i'm very encouraged. we now have 400 members at

heterodox academy. dan: explain what heterodox is. >> you take an obscure academic name because our goal is to appeal to professors. everyone can agree that an orthodox academy would be a bad thing. if we had a sacrament and pledged allegiance -- we can pledge allegiance to truth. if the academy focuses on antiracism, even if it is a good goal, if we all are like this is our mission, that's going to blind us. heterodox academy was started when i wrote a paper with a few other social psychologists showing that we have lost almost all our political diversity in psychology. and i heard from other people the same thing. they would get -- people who would even dare question the favored position get shut down or humiliated. our research is only in politicized areas. in certain areas, our research is not as reliable as it would be. the answer professors got , together. let's buy a web domain, let's call attention to this. we are the most balanced

organization in the entire academy, about even between left and right. we had a lot of centrist libertarians. go to heterodoxacademy.org. if you are a professor, joined. -- join. we are advocating that we need to have a give-and-take we need , freedom of inquiry. ♪

dan: i want to come back to what frank said about students not being exposed to people who may view the world differently, ideologically.

>> is the point of education. dan so, talk about when the are : leaving their senior year of college and they are actually pursuing jobs professionally, not just the lack of ideological diversity. what this means for them in terms of their ability to compete in an increasingly cutthroat, competitive employment environment. >> they are very rigid in their notions of how things should be and that translates well beyond politics to everything else. i hear employers complaining all the time about this generation of students because they hate to be challenged, they hate to be countermanded. they have been told you are right, you're right. and that extends to their ideological beliefs and these homogenous enclaves we have constructed for them in the ivy league, outside the ivy league. the minority of schools, as john said, but a significant number of schools feed some of the employers. >> do you see the same thing with business school? >> business school is much more

pragmatic. if you are in the school of liberal arts things are much more ideological, about projecting an image of yourself. businesses are much more pragmatic. business schools, engineering schools, natural sciences, there's very little of this. what i'm hearing from students because a lot of them right to me, i hear that education and social work schools are the worst. the ones i hear about are really repressive. that should be very concerning. dan: you are concerned in terms of how we are preparing students. >> to build on what frank said, the best analogy is to understand what's happening with peanut allergies. wire peanut allergies rising? they have been raising alarming rates since the 1990's. so what do we do? i take my kids to school, we get these long lectures on how we can't have any peanut butter in schools. >> if you bring them you are basically expelled. >> a report came out last year. do you know why peanut allergies are rising? because we haven't exposed kids to peanuts.

that is the reason they are rising. the new recommendation is you have to give kids peanuts early. there is this wonderful book called "anti-fragile." kids are anti-fragile. they say if it is fragile, do not knock it and let it break. but like your bones your brain, , your personality, unique challenges and setbacks. the biggest problem is the loss of unsupervised play. she has been brilliant on this with her book called "free range kids." in our childhoods after school we spent time where there were no adults around. dan: imagine that, you have to come home and figure out how to keep yourself busy. >> that's right. in the 1980's there was a real crime wave, there were anti-bullying measures, there was fear of abduction. for a variety of reasons kids , were never out of adult oversight. now in many towns can get if your kid goes to the park to play. we cannot be too tough on these

kids. we have deprived them in the name of keeping them safe and happy and comfortable, we have deprived them of uncomfortable experiences with their peers. there's always an adult around, so they come to campus, this is the last chance we could give young americans to learn to work out their differences. and we don't do it. we have more and more deans and processes and bias response teams so there is always an adult to call in to settle the++ >> to use the jargon of the day this is the helicopter parent , producing the bubble wrapped kid. when i did my college book about admissions to elite schools, the complaint i heard most often

from deans of admission college , presidents at the very tip top schools in terms of selective this was that these kids arrive , on campus and they are overachievers by every metric the colleges are using. in the phrase that sticks, i'm always amazed by the stunning fragility of these kids, which is what jonathan was saying. so what do we do? andive them safe spaces debate that is so shut down. i wrote a column asking the question, are these colleges that put so much effort into bringing in a diverse class, one -- once those kids are on campus what do they do to promote haveeraction so you diverse interactions? don't affinity groups and safe spaces work in the opposite directions? he was a racist you because asked how do jonathan's colleagues react to him? when i talk to people in higher education, he's a hero. he is bringing up stuff like free speech and ideological diversity. they won't say that in the public square, they won't say the same things he is saying because they are so worried about a kind of shaming that the left seems to specialize in. >> i think this is crucial. there was a piece in "the new york times" after the election on the problem of identity politics and how this may have alienated a lot of people and contributed to trump's victory. the response from many academics was ferocious. one of his colleagues at

columbia had an essay basically linking him to the ku klux klan. here is the point. he comes back with this brilliant point. he says, that's a slur, not an argument. once he said that, i realized, that is exactly what has been happening to me. i've been saying some pretty provocative things, beginning with an atlantic article. i keep looking on the internet for people who respond to it, and nobody is arguing against me for anything i say. but i get a lot of people saying, i'm a white male, i somehow i'm winking at racism. young people who go through these colleges, they are exposed to rhetorical training that prevents them from learning how to engage. they are trained carefully and -- carefully in how to discredit your opponent, slur. they learn to slur. they do not learn to argue. >> look at the tape from middlebury, and that's what you see. you see students with their backs turned, chanting slurs.

they are not having intellectual arguments. >> they decide to move the doctor and professor to another room. >> credible middlebury. middlebury is not the villain here. >> the professor, allison stanger, said she wanted to challenge them. the reason she wanted to interview him was because she strongly disagreed with his ideas and she was looking to a robust, spirited debate. and she's the one who wound up in the hospital. >> i want to retract a little bit of what i just said. middlebury is not the villain in the way they handled his visit. they did all the right things. but the culture being created at schools like middlebury are producing students who behave that way. it's fine, and more free speech and more free speech is better for students to protest the speaker coming, stand outside the venue. in some way make clear i don't , believe in what is being said in there and i want to offer a contrary perspective. what you had happened in

middlebury when milo yiannopoulos at uc berkeley went, you saw form of registering disagreement that was completely out of bounds and has nothing to do with enlightened discourse. >> i think this called attention to a gigantic generation gap is not just the millennial's. it started two years to four years ago, this new moral order. if you look at terms like safe space, trigger warning, they only begin to emerge around 2012, 2013. there is a new moral order and i think social media is absolutely central to this. facebook lowered its age, you could join in at in 2006, 2007. 13 the first wave of kids growing up on social media, just graduated a year or two ago. it is the younger millennials. they've grown up totally linked to each other, always with her -- their finger on the button. always knowing anything i say, i

cannot just be shamed in front of seven people but the entire , planet. it could be an international sensation. >> this generation also reflects the fact that when you curate your information the way you can with the internet, when you choose only certain twitter feeds to follow, when you like and share only certain things on facebook that then the n algorithm kick in we are living , in a time when not just this generation but newcomers to it but everybody is able to construct their information flow and thus of their reality and to live apart in these , siloed ways online. and you see that reflected. >> why can't i block charles murray? why can't i press a button to keep him off campus? >> if you can do it on the internet, why can't you do it in the flesh? >> when i was on college campus, i was active in the israel debate, the peace process. when i speak to students today on campus, they say the boycott divestment and sanctions debate about boycotting israel, it's no longer just between those who support one policy on israel and those who oppose another policy

on israel, like when i was going to college. now those who are hostile to israel or u.s. policy towards israel are joined by almost a coalition of all these different factions who know nothing about the issue but they all lock arms. >> the key to the new morality is a method of looking at society and looking in terms of power and privilege. the old idea of education is, come to campus. we will teach you lots of perspectives that you can use. let's look at poverty. what would an economist say? what would a marxist say? a lot of perspectives to look at a single problem. what's happening now is some students in a few departments, they are learning one perspective to look at everything. you start -- there's a good kind of identity politics, if black people are being denied rights, let's fight for their rights. that is the good kind. but there is a bad kind which is , to train students, train young people to say, let's divide everybody up by gender, race,

and assign them by moral merit. victimhood is good. israel, the palestinians are the victims. therefore they are the good, and the jews or israelis are bad. then you get one totalizing perspective. all social problems get reduced to the simple framework. i think we are doing them a disservice. i think we are making students less wise. >> how many campuses do you touch in this report? >> so far, we just took the u.s. news and world report top 150. we said, what if you actually care about exposure to diversity? we have that up. in the next couple weeks we will get the top 50 liberal arts colleges. it appears that liberal arts colleges, especially in new england, are particularly intense on this. we are going to get those ranked in the next couple weeks. >> in the middlebury case, they dr. charles murray and professor allison stanger are

driven from the stage and taken to a satellite room where they are going to conduct their interview and livestream it to the audience. someone pulls the fire alarm. then, a mob, there is a good report in "the washington post." and another from a former student, this mob of students our listening on the live stream for whether or not the fire alarms are breaking through in the live stream so they can determine if they are getting closer to the room and they can storm the room. when this happens, there is campus security, campus law enforcement. based on what i have seen they , seem to have been almost absent from the situation. >> if you go to the aei website that charles murray writes about this. on twitter he thinks campus security. i think they were doing what they could. luckily no one was hurt. >> the middlebury professor, interviewing murray, ended up in the hospital.

-- with a neck injury. >> one thing we have not said loudly and clearly enough is, when people on the left, when they try to shut down this debate, do they not realize that donald trump's election is partly the fruit of those actions? i know so many people who flirted with voting for trump who were responding to his destruction of a political correctness that they find oppressive. there's a real relevance to what we are talking about on campus, and who is governing our country right now. i don't think the people on the left have wrestled adequately with that. >> the reason is, you have to see this not as a practical method of addressing problems. it's a dawn of a new religion. i study moral psychology, religion, politics, sports tribalism are all manifestations of a tribalism. i think we see this in the charles murray case very clearly. i just watch the video again today before coming here. at the end when the administrators say we're going

, to move the talk. they start screaming off campus, , off campus. he says to another venue, on campus. and then they scream. what you have to see, you cannot have blasphemy on campus. the best way to understand what happened is a auto-da-fe, a religious right coming together to punish the sinner, to punish the devil, and reaffirm our community. it's a crazy time, but it's also an incredibly fascinating time to be a social scientist. >> you really want to salute the passion of those students. i liked that they are engaged, but i don't think they understand or the people who have constructed these campus environments understand the potential damage. >> if only they had learned that any virtue carried to excess becomes a vice. dan: in 10 years, the college campus could become unrecognizable to us if this trend continues. hopefully we had a discussion

today that will lead us in the direction to not let that happen. i want to thank you both for being here. thanks for an illuminating discussion. ♪ >> the united front.

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