Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier: Future of Higher Ed

Daniel Diermeier is the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University. He’s a world-renowned scholar of business management and political science. Before joining Vanderbilt, he was Provost of the University of Chicago. 

In this episode of World of DaaS, Auren and Daniel engage in a thought-provoking discussion on free speech, academic freedom and the state of higher education at large. They explore the sources behind requests to curtail free speech, the principles guiding free expression at Vanderbilt, and how Daniel has developed programs to teach students about civil discourse. 

Daniel and Auren also discuss the influence of universities on broader culture to the evolving challenges faced by liberal arts colleges. Daniel shares insightful perspectives on the changing landscape of higher education and insights into the impact of rising student loan costs, the balance between teaching and research, and the rise in mental health challenges among students. 

World of DaaS is brought to you by SafeGraph & Flex Capital. For more episodes, visit worldofdaas.buzzsprout.com, and follow us @WorldOfDaaS. 

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Daniel Diermeier on X at @VU_Chancellor.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)

Transcript

Auren Hoffman: 0:02

Welcome to the World of DaaS. A show for data enthusiasts. I'm your host, Auren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph and GPFlex Capital. For more conversations, videos and transcripts, visit Safegraph. com slash podcast. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Daniel Diermeier. Daniel is the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University and was previously Provost of the University of Chicago. Daniel, welcome to World of DaaS.

Daniel Diermeier: 0:28

Well, it's great to be on the podcast, looking forward to it.

Auren Hoffman: 0:32

I'm really excited. Now, where do most requests to curtail free speech come from? At universities.

Daniel Diermeier: 0:38

I would say it really varies now and has changed. So up to very recently, I would say, most of them really came from students, sometimes from parents. This is different from the 60s, where there was a lot of drama between faculty and administration. The biggest challenges right now are really student to student, as we see, I think in full force right now with the whole Israel and Hamas drama. But now you also see a lot of pressure that's coming from the outside donors, board members, politicians so that has changed, I think, really since the hearings and since really October 7th, we are really in a different phase.

Auren Hoffman: 1:14

Even pre-October 7th there was a lot of stuff, and then you're just saying it's like another level post or post October 7th. How does the student to student free speech stuff materialize?

Daniel Diermeier: 1:24

Let me give an example of that so that you see it Advantage. We have these three principles that guide our point of view on free speech. So the first one is open forums, which is that we should have discussions on really broad range of topics, unfedered and with as little restrictions as possible. That's classic Chicago principles. The second one is principal neutrality, or institutional neutrality, which means that we are not taking position on policy issues other than those that directly affect the operations of the university. So you wouldn't comment on foreign policy or Supreme Court decisions or anything like that. Most universities don't do that. So we are only part of a handful of universities that have committed to institutional neutrality against Chicago Since the 60s. We have famous Calvin reports really set the stage for that. It's us, it's University of North Carolina, Stanford is moving in a direction Now, Williams College moving direction, but it's a handful.

Auren Hoffman: 2:18

Oh, really, okay, I didn't know that Stanford and Williams you went to expect them to do that.

Daniel Diermeier: 2:23

They did not have it explicitly but they're moving in that direction now. But most universities Harvard, princeton for example don't have it. And then the third one is what I call civil discourse. Civil discourse is really a sense that the commitment to listen, a commitment that we talk to each other respectfully, that we use arguments, that we don't just yell at each other. So those are our three principles and just to make it a little bit concrete, we had about two years ago a case where we had a women's basketball team stayed in the locker room during the national anthem to protest racial injustice that created, as you may imagine, there was some pushback on that from alums and the general public. How can you do that? And you're disrespecting the flag, and if you just reflect the spec, you disrespect the country. And how can you allow them to do that? And if you use the principles, you get great guidance on how we handle that. So the first thing is our student athletes are first and foremost students, so we want them to express their opinion, especially in such an important topic. It's their opinion, not mine. That's principle neutrality. So we're not commenting on that. But then on the third thing, what we did is we brought them together with a group of veterans on campus to discuss their best structure discussion of what does it mean to be a patriot, so that there was discussion between the groups. That has worked very well.

Daniel Diermeier: 3:35

The problem that we're seeing often and we see it certainly now in the whole Israel Gaza drama is that students are trying to go after each other. That's where most of the difficulties come from right now. It's been for a while now and now, of course, it's really front and center for everybody. Now you may wonder why that is, but I think it has to do with this third principle, with the sense of civil discourse, is that that's something that we've lost in the high schools already and is part of many university cultures, and we have been really leaning into that. But it's a culture, but something that you cannot just legislate from the top. Just to be concrete, the worry that the students have is that they're saying something controversial and then they're ostracized by their peers, either on social media or in the social life, and that's very costly for them. So the concern is that they hold back. So for them to really lean in, you need to create this environment of trust, and that's where the civil discourse is really critical. That's how these things hang together.

Auren Hoffman: 4:30

Well, the problem is, if you think, let's say, someone who's pro-choice or pro-life is just an evil, bad person, it makes it hard for people to explore. For me personally, I've changed my mind on that issue multiple times in my life. So you could see someone who wants to explore, who wants to learn about things, and if it gets shut down or goes underground, I imagine Exactly.

Daniel Diermeier: 4:51

This is the worry. The worry is is that in today's culture, we're very, very quick to put labels on people and we say you're this or you're that. Either you don't know what you're talking about, or you're evil or you're moral. That's really toxic for university culture. So hence our commitment within our university to make sure that we treat each other with respect, listen to each other and that, by the way, goes all the way that when our students come on campus, they assign a pledge we call it a community covenant just like they do like an honor code. They do that as well, so that they treat each other with respect and they don't jump to this vilification of the other side right away, which is really undermining, I think, the ability to explore the complexity of these ideas thoroughly, and that's what universities should do.

Auren Hoffman: 5:33

These three principles that you have seem not only reasonable, but seem like if I was a student I would much more want to go to a place like that. It just seems like it would foster much more learning. That's why you're going to university in the first place. You can imagine other students like, hey, I only want to be with people who think like me, the people who only want to watch certain type of TV news or something. So do you think students will start voting with their feet? And just the fact that you have that brain at Vanderbilt, just for Chicago, more students will end up there.

Daniel Diermeier: 6:01

We see that for sure. We first had to clarify our principles. They're not new, they go back to the 60s. One of my predecessors, the fifth chancellor Alexander Heard, was really clear about that, but they had to be reaffirmed in the current environment. They had to be reaffirmed, clarified and then operationalized in the way we operate. And then we had to talk about it, and we had to talk about it with confidence.

Daniel Diermeier: 6:22

I have been a vocal proponent of institutional reality already a year and a half ago, and that's not always easy because people, on any given issue abortion, gun control, immigration, ukraine they want people feel so strongly and they want you to take an issue because they want their university to be in alignment with their values. So we had to build a record on that. And then we talk about it very clearly and you have come to campus, or student guides will tell you about it, or admission materials have it, or questions have it. So there's no doubt about it and the demand for it to go to Vanderbilt has just gone through the roof in the last few years. There are many factors that play into that, but for sure this is something that our students seek out and value. Okay, interesting.

Auren Hoffman: 7:06

Now, is the free speech debate at universities downstream of culture or is the free speech climate on campus tickling down into the broader culture which is affecting which, I guess?

Daniel Diermeier: 7:17

That's a very hard question. I think there's probably some interactions that are subtle and complicated, but if you look back, this started I want to say 2014, 2015 already and the first really big event I think that brought us home to everybody was the Halloween costume debate and all the drama that followed from that. Now, of course, you go back further in history. You have the political correctness stuff. This has come up at least since the 60s.

Auren Hoffman: 7:44

I went to UC Berkeley at Morio Savio in the early 60s, so all of that, of course.

Daniel Diermeier: 7:49

What's interesting is that this has flipped is that in the 60s it was the political left that was particularly in favor of free speech, the whole Berkeley free speech movement, and that has flipped in recent years where people that are very progressives have been most concerned about free speech and have been asking for restrictions on that.

Daniel Diermeier: 8:07

Now, of course, with the anti-Semitism stuff, that flipped again. So it's a little bit of a punching ball depending on where you are and what the issue is. I think that universities are in some sense, places where these things are most clearly discussed. They're observed most clearly because of the whole issue of debate and discussion is so central to our mission, and then I think that they do have consequences for the rest of culture. For sure, many of the ideas, of course, are developed there first, but I'm not sure that I would say that everything emanates from the university and that the rest is downstream from that. I think that's where these interactions come in and, for example, many of these issues now in schools as well K to 12 high schools, for sure, and you see similar issues in companies. Now, that's later. But speech codes or restrictions on that, or how do we deal with these types of political issues is front and center for many companies now as well.

Auren Hoffman: 8:56

This idea of this norm of civil discourse just sounds like super appealing. And you mentioned that when students come in they have to sign this code and stuff. But I guess, how do you reinforce? Once you have a culture, it's easy for everyone to get in there. But how do you reinforce that, especially in today's environment?

Daniel Diermeier: 9:15

The word culture is really critical here. So if you think about the Chicago principal, as we would call it, open forum and institutional trolley, these are really principles. They are about what type of speech is permitted, and then it binds the administration and sometimes it's like if the administration doesn't have to speak, it should be silent. They're really principles, but civil discourse is a culture and it needs to be lived and it needs to be reinforced. It cannot be legislated from the top, and so for us it was really critical that we reinforce this all the time that the pledge that the students signed, the students wrote, so that was already important. It didn't come from the top.

Daniel Diermeier: 9:51

When they come on campus the orientation we have a whole variety of ways for them to engage in these discussions, that get used to it from the beginning. We have a very active debate culture debate teams. We have speaker series. A lot of that happens in the residential colleges. So when we bring speakers on campus, they meet with the students. They have an opportunity to have conversations like that. So we have the future of the free speech project now with Jakob and Chagama, one of the leading NGOs on free speech globally, on campus.

Daniel Diermeier: 10:21

It's not one thing, but it needs to be reinforced all the time. And then, of course, my job is to talk about it and to live that that the decisions that we made at the university level are consistent with each principle, so that it's modeled, it's practiced, it's reinforced, it's working well, now, they get it now. That doesn't mean that boundary cases are always going to be contested and you always have to reinforce it, because these things are not obvious. It sounds obvious when you say it, but then, in a particular event, when people feel very strongly, they say well, not now, not in this case, and that's what makes it challenging.

Auren Hoffman: 10:53

If you think of like an individual professor, they're going to have their own biases, and I was an engineer in some ways. Less came in, but I remember taking sociology classes in college and I knew that if I weaved in some sort of thing about institutional racism or something like that into my papers, I was going to get a higher grade and so it was just one of those things. You knew that, based on what the professor wanted and stuff, how do you help guide the professors who have tenure and who have their own academic freedom in a way to encourage free speech?

Daniel Diermeier: 11:23

Their job is, of course, is to educate the students, not to indoctrinate the students, and that's really important.

Auren Hoffman: 11:29

Probably a lot of professors at other universities believe maybe their job is to indoctrinate.

Daniel Diermeier: 11:34

This is a real problem the moment we're tipping into a sense where we're utilizing the university to advance the political, genital, real issues. That happens from time to time, no doubt. I think there's a significant difference across universities on that and how universities think about that we're pretty clear about that is that we don't want that in the classroom and that sometimes difficult to separate and of course the lines are blurry and so forth. That's all clear. That's the goal. Those are the values. And then it's also important that you have some intellectual diversity on campus, some conservative voices. You have some voices that are challenging orthodoxy in a variety of different ways. But a classroom is a sanctuary. That's an important place. If you're not allowing space for students to explore their own ideas, we have a real problem.

Auren Hoffman: 12:18

How do you think when people graduate, they go to companies and stuff like that. How should companies be thinking about this? Certainly not as charged as universities at a company, but they have their own things and they have sometimes their own pressures to take stands on things, and how should they be thinking about it?

Daniel Diermeier: 12:33

I think there's a real reckoning right now with companies. So I think that there was always a big debate on what's the social responsibility of companies and I would say, over the last 10 years or so probably culminating right around the murder of George Floyd, that and the climate crisis there's a whole variety of things like that it's more and more felt that they have a responsibility to take on social issues and take a position on that. And whether those are election laws in Georgia or whether those are the Floyd so-called don't say Gable or issues on the Joseph Justice, companies did a lot more than they've ever seen before and they did it on issues that were contested. It wasn't like in the olden days. The debate, if you go back to Milton Friedman and so forth, was always about what's the scope of responsibility of companies, but the issues were not contested or controversial. It was like safety in manufacturing or like a killing dolphins or stuff like that Broad consensus that there is issues here, and then the question is do you have companies have a responsibility to address those, yes or no? And we can have long debates on that.

Daniel Diermeier: 13:35

But what happened now is different.

Daniel Diermeier: 13:37

What happened now is that companies were willing to take a stand on an issue that is polarized right down within the United States and, more broadly, globally speaking, and I think what they underestimated is that once you do that now you're playing politics, and what happened, of course, is that they took position on one side and then the other position Ron DeSantis was probably the first to did that on the Republican side were pushing back, and you had that on ESG, you had that on DEI issues, you had that on a whole variety of different things.

Daniel Diermeier: 14:07

If you remember the boycott of Bud Light, which knocked out 20, 25% of their sales, they're no longer the most popular beer brand in the US Target, another example like that. So what happened is basically, I think they went into a domain where there was contested politics. Then the other side pushed back and all the companies are pulling back, and they're pulling back because this is nothing to be gained from that. Some will not. Some will stay there. Had a go in your vending areas where it's part of their brand, but Bud Light or Pepsi or companies like that, they're all going to pull back.

Auren Hoffman: 14:38

Or do you think we go the other way? Could you see a scenario where we have blue companies and red companies and based on that, you buy your sneaker? Based on your political affiliation?

Daniel Diermeier: 14:47

Goaia brands had that the CEO of Goaia was very pro-Trump. I don't quite see that. I think that, just from a business point of view, segmenting on political beliefs is not the greatest idea because it limits your growth potential. They are going to pull back and they're going to have basically a version of institutional reality for their business where they're going to be much, much more careful with these type of things. Certainly, I think what you're seeing from the big investment banks to many of the companies they all got burned and now they're pulling back.

Auren Hoffman: 15:14

Okay, interesting, let's talk about higher education. There's just a lot of debate about the burden of student loans versus the value of a traditional college degree. Maybe, if you go to elite school like Vanderbilt or Chicago or something like that, maybe it's still good ROI, but for many, many schools it's a negative ROI. How should we be rethinking some of these college degrees and the cost of them?

Daniel Diermeier: 15:38

There's tremendous heterogeneity. Of course, just like you point out, there's still a college premium, but that's for people to finish. One of the biggest failures of higher education is people that do not finish. You have various a little bit from time to time, but half the students that go to college do not graduate with a degree.

Auren Hoffman: 15:55

Some of these could go not just one semester in, but they could go five, six semesters in and not finish.

Daniel Diermeier: 16:01

That is a catastrophe because that's also turns that many of these students have the highest student loans. There's a whole bunch there that's broken.

Auren Hoffman: 16:09

So there can be 100 grand in debt and have no premium.

Daniel Diermeier: 16:12

That's a catastrophe. That is really. There's a catastrophically bad outcomes. We saw a lot of that in the for-profit colleges, but we see a lot of that also in broad segments of public education as well, and across the board. That's, to me, is the biggest problem.

Daniel Diermeier: 16:27

When you look at the elite sector let's say top 25 universities, particular private research universities most of them are committed to need blind admissions. She means that you pay as much as you can afford. That's a tremendous thing. If you think about it. You're basically eliminating financial barriers to entry for students. Huge amount of the resources are committed to that. We're spending on $245 million in financial aid every year, so enormous amount. The returns to go to an elite university, even compared to a flagship public, are still significant. Especially, there's very interesting recent research. It's not some of the average, but if you look at the probability of going to the top 1% of the earnings, that's where it kicks in. The high end is working, I think, particularly from a financial support side, very well, but a handful of those are no loan as well. So our students can graduate with no loan and makes a huge difference for the type of risks they can take, what type of careers they can do.

Auren Hoffman: 17:21

I imagine there's only a very small number of universities that could do that, because you need a sizable endowment, a sizable financial structure, maybe some other money making things like a hospital next to it or something like that Absolutely true.

Daniel Diermeier: 17:33

There are just around 10 universities that can do all of that. What's interesting to me is that those are the very universities that get the brunt of public criticism. So there's the irony Even though there is this dramatic commitment to access and affordability, you get this criticism that this is from the left. We're like in the middle right now. The right is where woke machine, the left things were inequality factories. I think that is really off. This whole debate that elite universities are rations of privilege I think it's really not supported. That's just a fun example.

Auren Hoffman: 18:03

What do you think of universities that are experimenting with everything, like Purdue has been experimenting with these income share agreements and obviously Purdue has always been an amazing school and great engineering school but they're trying to align themself with the students. Hey, you don't graduate, you don't pay, you don't get a good job, you don't pay, kind of thing. How do you think about these things?

Daniel Diermeier: 18:23

I think experimentation is great. It's clear that there is a real problem there, and experimenting with that it's very important. We don't know whether it's going to work, but I think it's wonderful that Purdue and others Arizona State is doing a lot of that in their space as well. I think that's so important that we break out of the usual thing, because there are a lot of challenges there.

Auren Hoffman: 18:42

Right now, only about a third of America has confidence in higher education and that number has dropped pretty significantly over the last decade. Is there some sort of path to rebuild trust At some point? If only a small amount of Americans really support higher college education and stuff like that, then it's going to be hard to get funding. There's going to be people politically against it and all these other types of things.

Daniel Diermeier: 19:04

I've been very concerned about this for a while. You're absolutely right. It's that the public trust in higher education has plummeted over the last years. It has plummeted more among Republicans than among Democrats, but it has done both. I think. If you look at it, it has these components One thing we just talked about from the right, wokeism from the left, bastions of privilege, no-transcript.

Daniel Diermeier: 19:25

Then there's the whole issue about affordability. And then the third thing, I think, is there's very little appreciation for the great value that research universities particularly provide for the country and for the world. People have a little bit of a sense that in medicine that's helpful, but we are totally innovation machines and enormously important for the American economy. It's how they understood. I think that's on us. I really do. I think that we have not been able to articulate why we exist, what makes research universities great, why they're the envy of the world. And sometimes I think academics have a tendency we love complexities and subtleties and so forth. That's what we do, but there has been a total void really being able to clearly articulate why is it so important that these universities for the country and for the world? And we need to get on with that, because we're just sliding there, it gets worse every day and, of course, what's going on right now, in the past, october 7th, is just another disaster which is not helping.

Auren Hoffman: 20:20

Over the last, let's say, 40 years or so, the price of university education has gone up two to three X the rate of inflation. The university budgets have gone up very fast as well. The spending per student, if you just think of dollars per student being spent has gone up two to three X the rate of inflation. What is going on there? It's not clear. Maybe you would argue with me that the university education today is so much better two to three X better than it was 40 years ago. So what has happened?

Daniel Diermeier: 20:48

A whole bunch of things to say on that. And again you have to segment a little bit. So in the elite segment, when you look at the actual tuition paid by people, in our case, for example, basically you look and real dollars has hardly moved at all, has been flat for the last 15 years, but that's because the increase in financial aid. So this is what you see in terms of the tuition, but what people really pay.

Auren Hoffman: 21:10

The dollars per student is still so much higher. However, you're getting them, the investment per student is high.

Daniel Diermeier: 21:15

So if you look at what students pay, it's basically flat if you're just for inflation, but we do spend more per student. That is true, and a big part of that is the increase in not everything, but it's the increase in regulatory compliance issues.

Auren Hoffman: 21:30

So you need way more staff to comply with title 29 or a lot more.

Daniel Diermeier: 21:37

There's the tremendous demand for mental health services that we're getting, for example, and you just cannot not do that. There's the reporting requirements and we're a little bit of a punching ball now. Do that? Administration comes in. In many cases, such as title nine issues, which is about sexual misconduct and so forth, the rules are thrown out typically. So you have to redo everything at that level and remember we not only have student things, we have research aspect and the federal government decides. We got real security issues with China. Now we have to look at the compliance of our entire research function on that. That's just okay. Do that? So? Animal safety, patient safety, if we have a hospital, because we do so many different things, if the regulatory burden goes up, that's a big thing.

Daniel Diermeier: 22:19

I don't want to claim that everything's efficient. That would be an overstatement. But you have to remember also, when people think we are in a super competitive industry, we're competing for every student. We're competing for every faculty member. If I want to track the top faculty member, that's expensive and I need to get the resources. I don't have a lot of patience with dollars not being spent effectively along those lines.

Daniel Diermeier: 22:38

I think the public typically thinks about us being slow moving, ponderous and so forth, but when you actually in it is type of competitive. It's a little bit like market for athletes, with free agency all the time, and so it's all the time you're trying to get talent and invest and that's the other thing. The amount of spending and investment that we do in research is incredible. We have north of a billion dollar research portfolio every year. That's what we're spending on research, in large part through grants, but has to be subsidized from internal funds. We didn't have quantum engineering a few years ago. There was no neuroscience major 15 years ago. There's AI now, so the demands to invest in research infrastructure are just increasing.

Auren Hoffman: 23:15

It does seem like the aid, especially the aid that comes from government, does distort the price somewhat. If I want to go on vacation, maybe I want to stay at a four seasons, maybe I want to stay at a Radisson. It's going to be very different cost structure. Maybe sometimes I'm going to make one decision versus another, but it seems like every university today is like a four seasons. The dorms are beautiful, they've got this, they're doing that and they're competing on some of these perks. The reason why they compete on them in some ways is because the student doesn't actually have to pay for it, because they get these other subsidies that come in. If the student had to pay for it, you could imagine a scenario where some would be competing on perks but some would be competing on price.

Daniel Diermeier: 23:54

This is true. I think that one way to think about this is that among the elite universities, because we all have comparable financial aid packages and comparable pricing models, we really compete. It is very similar because of this commitment to financial aid is we're competing on brand, we're competing on reputation, we're competing on experience, we're competing on what type of education do we provide and, again, there's some segmentalities. But if you get in into a place like that, you just go. Now, you go to a worse place and you pay more. That's the irony, right. You go to a worse place and you pay more. So how is that going to work?

Daniel Diermeier: 24:31

Nobody go to these great places, and if you can get in the incentive is now to go to a place that has less of that. It just isn't there, and then you can say at some point is it too much and are we investing too much? I think that's these are fair questions. That's, of course, the decisions we have to make every day. We want to invest in student life, we want to invest in research facilities. That's the question mark. I think there are things that are frivolous, that we wouldn't do. Interestingly, you see quite a bit of that at public universities too the lazy river and stuff like that. That's not anything that we would do. This is a hard question. Exactly how do you invest here and there and so forth, but the competition is fierce. There's not a lot of extra cash, even at well endowed universities, not a lot of extra cash flowing around, because everything you do, you invest in the students on the faculty.

Auren Hoffman: 25:15

In some ways. How do you know you're doing well? We gave this person an offer and then you find out they got three other offers from three other competing universities and you try to figure out the win rate. What percentage of them came to Vanderbilt? And then you're tracking against your peers.

Daniel Diermeier: 25:30

We pay very little attention to the rankings, which are very poor quality, but what we do look at is we want to be a destination for the most promising students, those students that fit. We're not a good place for everybody, but for the students where we're good fit. We want to be the destination of choice, and so we pay a lot of attention to if they don't go here, where do they go? What's their?

Auren Hoffman: 25:49

choice at Right. So they get in a Vanderbilt and they get in a Duke. What's my win rate versus Duke? What's my win rate versus whoever?

Daniel Diermeier: 25:56

Exactly, and the same is true with faculty or with graduate students. You want to know where do they go. It's always a question of where, destination of choice, that's the question. And then we want to know when they're here they succeed. So for us that means for students, what's their career later on? What's the impact they're making, our placement, all that type of thing. We pay a lot of attention to that. For faculty, of course, we want to know their publication, whether they win big awards and so forth. That's what we look at. It's pretty straightforward, but the exact measurement is intricate. Your intuition is exactly right Now.

Auren Hoffman: 26:26

We've seen a lot of prominent academics being cues of plagiarism recently. Is this a problem or is it just a big news story? And I guess you have the replication with it at the same time, all this replication crisis as well?

Daniel Diermeier: 26:39

So two different questions, but interrelated. The replication crisis, I think, is very much that is in particular fields. Psychology was really the first one where this really happened and that's an important thing about scientific methodology that needs to be addressed and it's a very important thing about the validity of particular research findings. So I would say that's one thing, and there's this whole self-correcting mechanism that academia is so good at is really at work there. The second part is really plagiarism and plagiarism, and then there's also data falsification, which is yet another thing.

Daniel Diermeier: 27:09

So where people are falsifying data or doctoring images or stuff like that, p-hacking those types of things, all these types of things, but even more blatant, where there's literally data is made up or massaged or all of that stuff. These are serious issues because they are undermined, of course, the confidence into academic research. And then the plagiarism side is they're really in the original case for researchers, we did a study idea from somebody else. Now what you see now and of course the Claudine Gay case was exhibit number one is this is more about taking language and moving it over, and it's my reading of it is they're not ideas are necessarily stolen, but they're text carried over, so to speak. The way this happens in practice often is many writer research papers like a boilerplate section where you summarize the literature, or something like that, or you do an overview paper. We summarize things in a particular way. You don't have to be careful to do it the right way. But what worries me right now is that this is going to be weaponized.

Auren Hoffman: 28:09

Go back 30 years and find anything similar, and it's 80% similar to some other thing. Use AI to do it.

Daniel Diermeier: 28:16

I didn't look closely at Claudine Gay's I'm not an expert on plagiarism, but the concern I have right now is that this is just like I said it's going to be weaponized and it wasn't intended like that and we'll have to think about how do we handle this, because that would be really bad. That would be a really bad outcome for everybody.

Auren Hoffman: 28:33

To me, all the academic problems. Plagiarism to me is almost at the bottom. If you're cheating, that's high. If you're falsifying data, that's high. If you're doing outright fraud, all these things are fireable. And maybe the Stanford University case is a little different, where there could have been at least there's some sort of allegations of fraud there, or something that seems faster to go after John McRoth.

Daniel Diermeier: 28:54

I had a great piece in the New York Times on that where he said we need a new word, Because when you think about plagiarism it's really about stealing ideas. But there's this other thing which is sloppy and not so careful, and we're taking something over. That's what I call what happens in these boilerplate cases.

Auren Hoffman: 29:10

And even stealing ideas. That is what you're supposed to do, right? You're supposed to borrow ideas and combine them and bring them together. The concern is that you're taking something without attribution. Yeah, that's true, but sometimes you don't always remember. You could have told me something 10 years ago and I'm not going to remember. It's coming from you, exactly.

Daniel Diermeier: 29:27

And, as people said now today, the software is not good enough yet, but when it's good enough, you can just run a plagiarism check to just make sure that when you're doing things that you're not inadvertently, there's something like that and then it's fine. But that's not what's happening right now. Of course, this was a way to put up the pressure on the Harvard president, and that's what we had.

Auren Hoffman: 29:46

If you think of this tension between teaching and research. When I was in college, literally my worst professors were the Nobel laureates. They were terrible and they really couldn't teach physics at all, at least to a mere mortal like me. How do you think we should be thinking about this relationship? Very good question.

Daniel Diermeier: 30:06

And it's changing. By the way, I come from a different angle, but then I come back to your point. We have this crisis of the liberal arts colleges right now, where there is a really dropping demand, not at the very top, but across the board, and you would think that liberal arts colleges are exactly the places that focus on teaching.

Auren Hoffman: 30:22

Some don't even have graduate schools or a very big graduate program.

Daniel Diermeier: 30:25

And then I've got it. They're totally focused on teaching and the professors are really dedicated to that. So what's going on and I think what's happening is the real advantage of being in a research university for a student is that the university can take you as far as you can go. So we have literally freshmen sophomore that operate $50 million equipment in the lab. You can't do that if you're not a research university. So liberal arts colleges can do that. So the cutting edge, you have to have research faculty on that. To do that I'm going to research faculty Classical mechanics 101, I don't need to have that thought necessarily about Nobel laureate, right, but the stuff that is at the edge, if you don't have research professors there, you're just not going to get the students to that level. And the problem right now is or the development right now is that so many fields, the knowledge in places like computer science is turning over so quickly. If you're not a research faculty member you can't teach the students. It's outdated to put it differently at a time when knowledge was changing slowly.

Auren Hoffman: 31:25

I'll push back on that. I feel like on computer science that is, having just someone who codes a bit is probably going to be great at teaching the students how to code. I don't think they need to be a world-class PhD. They probably don't even need a graduate degree to be a great teacher of basic computer science. If you want to teach someone the ins and outs of large language models again once you get to a super high level, I think that's going to be hard. But let's say the first four courses, even though that's relatively new. There's probably thousands of great teachers who can teach that.

Daniel Diermeier: 31:55

I think the problem is that knowledge changes so quickly that it turns over more quickly than you have in teaching Aristotle or something like that. Third need to learn biomedical.

Auren Hoffman: 32:04

But the difference is you don't practice Aristotle, so most of the people who really know Aristotle probably are probably PhDs and stuff like that, whereas in a thing some of you are actually practicing computer science. There's thousands of people who are actually using the tools every day and they probably could teach it quite well.

Daniel Diermeier: 32:24

That's a question. I mean, can practitioners teach this well or not? We have some people in some areas where we feel that practitioners are really essential, Like, for example, in entrepreneurship classes or things like that. That's really valuable in the business schools to have that. We have some of that in engineering too, but I still believe that that still has to be centered on the faculty member, particularly in engineering in most of the areas. My point is that in areas where technology advances fast, where you need significant infrastructure, it's very difficult to do this, to separate the teaching from the research. Other universities system have done that. Where basically there is the high end research takes place in government labs or quasi-governmental labs and the teaching takes place in large public universities and they're not doing so well.

Auren Hoffman: 33:10

There's an idea that's popular with the tech community that we're in a period of scientific stagnation and we're not getting the amount of breakthroughs that we had, at least at the same rate that we have in the past. What are some of your thoughts on that?

Daniel Diermeier: 33:24

I'm not convinced that the evidence is really that strong on that. I know people talk about that, there's some data on that, but I'm not really that convinced of that. I think that it's very hard to do this systematically If you look at it as examples the MRNA vaccine, for example. Come on, how awesome was that when no time at all. Totally new technology, great collaboration between universities and the private sector, beautiful example of the model at work, the American model of innovation. Phenomenal and with government support. Just a great story. That doesn't keep me awake at night.

Auren Hoffman: 33:57

Like universities. You've talked a few times about some of these mental health challenges for incoming students and that they're on the rise. What is the underlying reason of why there's a higher spike in these mental health challenges today with students?

Daniel Diermeier: 34:13

We do know that starts already in high school. We have a lot of the students, many of them have therapy or medicated, and they're just coming with that already to the university. So it's not anything that starts in the university. It's really something that we know from the schools.

Auren Hoffman: 34:29

Why is that? On the rise of the last 10 years?

Daniel Diermeier: 34:31

People have all sorts of hypothesis. People point to social media and isolation that comes with that, or people like Jonathan Hyde point to that there is a safetyism that we're protecting kids from praying freely and we're not letting them fail and the pressure is too high. I don't think there's a clear understanding of that at this point. I think all these are plausible hypothesis. I don't have a strong point of view on which one is right or wrong on that. It makes sense to me from my experience, from being a dad myself and see what's happening in high schools but it's super worrisome. Covid has triggered this into an epidemic. It's super worrisome and COVID accelerated it. Absolutely no doubt about it. The isolation was horrible.

Auren Hoffman: 35:09

The students. You see, just right after COVID that came in.

Daniel Diermeier: 35:13

Absolutely everybody sees that and we made a decision to bring all students back on campus in the fall of 2020. 85% of students on campus, in contrast to many of our peers. It wasn't really driven by that. To a large extent, we just believe that students, especially when they're 18 to 23 year old, learn best in the community and this isolation. We were just really worried about that. Was it hurt? You lay an effort but we got it done. But that was driven by exactly the concern that you point out.

Auren Hoffman: 35:40

At some point in a big university you're going to have terrible, extreme outcomes, things like suicide or other self hurt type of things that happen, and obviously that doesn't just affect that one student. That affects all the students that knew that person and interacted with that person. How do you deal with that? Is it just? Everyone comes together? Because I can imagine these things spiral to get worse or they could spiral to get better.

Daniel Diermeier: 36:04

These are horrible days they do happen. It can be that it can be an accident, it can be a medical thing. These are horrible days. Part of the job of a university president is there's almost sometimes a pastoral role where you have to bring the community together in these moments and that's very hard. We had a school shooting three miles away from campus. The head of school was a Vanderbilt grad. She was shot and two teacher with Vanderbilt grads and deeply affected the community. And those are moments when you have to come together and you have to give as much emotional support to the members of your community as you can.

Auren Hoffman: 36:38

Thinking about the university itself. There's all these different stakeholders students, faculty alumni, broader academic, etc. Do you rank order them in some ways? Okay, students are number one and faculty number two. How do you think about it? Because I'm sure a lot of times you're making decisions where it's in conflict in some ways between the stakeholders you always go back to mission.

Daniel Diermeier: 36:59

What's your?

Auren Hoffman: 36:59

mission.

Daniel Diermeier: 37:00

And for us it's providing transformative education and pathbreaking research. And you have to be clear about where you want to go and what the decision is, and then you try to get as much alignment as you can. Not only can there be tension between these different stakeholder groups, but there are tension within that. It's not that the parents are the alumni always see things the same way. I always think about when you are a cottage president or, as we call it, a chancellor. I mentioned the pastoral role, but there are these main roles.

Daniel Diermeier: 37:26

You have to be an academic leader, which is really about making decisions about what values and where you want to invest in the curriculum and the faculty and research and teaching. But then you're also a CEO. You're like a mid-sized enterprise with $1.6 billion top line with a complicated business model. And then at the university, we have this investment thing called the endowment. We have the corporate real estate portfolio. Then there's many universities. We don't run our hospital anymore we spun that off but they run their own hospital.

Daniel Diermeier: 37:54

There's cottage athletics and then there's a small town with 8 to 20 two-year-olds that not always make the best decisions. That needs to be managed carefully. And then the third piece is what you were talking about. You're like a mayor, like a public official in some sense, and so there's a political side to this which is internal, and then you also have to connect, of course, with your community, with the state. So all these roles come into play. They're all important, you go back and forth between them, but everything starts with the mission, everything starts with the values, everything starts with what you want to accomplish on the academic side, and then the other things that have in support to that, the financial side, the resources. How do you support that and how do you get alignment in order to advance that agenda?

Auren Hoffman: 38:34

Now a couple of personal questions. You and I have been friends for quite a long time, and one of the things I admire about you is that you're a remarkably candid person, which I think is actually pretty rare for leaders to climb their way up either the university or corporate ladder. You see it sometimes with founders. How do you think, first of all, do you agree, and then how do you think that trade has ultimately helped your success? Because I can see a lot of ways where that trade would hurt some buddies as well.

Daniel Diermeier: 39:00

I'm glad you say that, because I think that's important to me and I want to be authentic. That's very important to me is when I think about my own leadership journey I was a professor first. I ran some research institutes, then I was a dean, then I was a provost, now I'm a chancellor is I want to be authentic, I want to be straight with people and in my experience, when you're straightforward and when you're authentic, then you can have a conversation. You can have a real discussion with people. They don't always have to agree with you, that's okay. But just evasive or hoping you get to the weekend, to Monday, that's just not me.

Daniel Diermeier: 39:32

I think that in the long run that pays off. Sometimes there's pushback and that's okay. But I just think that being authentic is really valued by your own people, by your community, that they feel that you're straightforward and then they know where we stand and then let's see whether they want to be with us or not and then argue your case. And I love a good discussion, I love a good argument. If they're right, I'm happy to change my mind. That's fine too. But the business we're in would be a place where the better argument wins. I want to be truthful to that ethos in the way I lead as well.

Auren Hoffman: 40:03

It seems so many people I know in your position are ruled by lawyers and we saw the extreme with that congressional hearing on anti-Semitism on campus and stuff like that, where people just try to give this very legalistic response. How do you push back on that? Because I imagine there is a lot of pressure to control all your speech through 30 lawyers.

Daniel Diermeier: 40:24

So I have a great general counsel. If you are a great general counsel, you always understand that the legal risk is one of the risks that you need to think about. It's germane, it's important, it needs to be taken very seriously. But there are other risks. There's a reputation risk. There's a way you lose trust.

Daniel Diermeier: 40:41

There are all sorts of other things that come into play and I think sometimes leaders whether that's in the private sector or in universities they defer to their lawyers. It's scary when they come back and they're saying, oh, this can happen and this can happen and that can happen. But I think you have to just look at this and say, okay, that's the input, that's one risk, we'll take this into consideration and that may guide our decision-making or it may not, and if it doesn't, then we're not going to do it that way. So I think the same is true with communications too. Communications people they have a point of view as well. Sometimes they may be particularly cautious or not, or they want to say it in a particular way. But if you feel that this is not the way you want to say it, then do it. Say it differently. The job of ever is at the head of the organization. The chance that the CEO is to take these inputs and then make the call, and if you're just automatically deferring to the lawyers, you're not doing your job.

Auren Hoffman: 41:30

Yep, that makes sense. Our last question we ask all of our guests what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Daniel Diermeier: 41:37

Oh great, Focus okay, I think too much focus. I think that's bad advice. There is a tendency, particularly to people that are early in their careers, is to focus on one thing. I think you have a similar issue, but I have broad interest and fostering these interests is a good idea. Now, not as the main thing. 80, 90% you have to focus on your main thing. That's not wrong, but don't kill these things. And what I found in life is that having these other things alive and fully developed actually helped me to be more effective in my work later on, because who would have thought that was a philosophy undergraduate? And I thought this would be never going to be useful again.

Auren Hoffman: 42:13

But now it's great because I have this particular connection to the humanities.

Daniel Diermeier: 42:16

Now that is really wonderful. I've always had that interest. Don't think about them as hobby, think about them as pursuit and develop them seriously, Nobody focuses in life Everyone.

Auren Hoffman: 42:27

They maybe do their work, they care about their family, they care about their friends, they care about some of their hobbies. It's not like you spent 100% of your time on this one dimension in life.

Daniel Diermeier: 42:37

You hear that advice all the time that you got to focus. Now you got to do that. I want to push back a little bit against that.

Auren Hoffman: 42:43

To do even more. Certainly, in academia, to get tenure, you have to get more and more niche, and so you see, these people are maybe a little bit less broad than they were in the past. That's exactly what I mean. This has been awesome. Thank you, daniel Deermeyer, for joining us at World of DAS. This has been a ton of fun.

Daniel Diermeier: 43:00

I'm honored to be on the podcast. I love it and thanks for inviting me. Thanks, all right.

Auren Hoffman: 43:05

Amazing. If you're a super data nerd, go to worldofdasscom that's D-A-A-S. Worldofdasscom and sign up for our weekly data as a service roundup newsletter. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, consider reading this podcast and leaving a review. For more World of DAS and DAS is D-A-A-S. You can subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts, and also check out YouTube for videos. You can find me at Twitter at atoran that's A-U-R-E-N. Oran, and we'd love to hear from you. World of DAS is brought to you by SafeGraph. Safegraph is geospatial data for physical places. Check it out at safegraphcom. And by Flex Capital. Flex Capital invests in data companies like those we talk about at World of DAS. Check it out at flexcapitalcom.