Higher Education Renaissance
Peter Lake is a Professor of Law who has never shied away from addressing the controversial topics that impact higher education with his trademark candid, unique, and often humorous approach. Eric Seaborg has created this podcast series to capture the insight of Peter Lake on the status of higher education. Eric will have Peter analyzing the key issues challenging the industry of post-secondary education and the future direction of our institutions across the nation.
Higher Education Renaissance
Supreme Impact
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Wondering how the Supreme Court's latest rulings could ripple through the realm of higher education? Together with expert Peter Lake, we take a deep dive into the sea of legal complexities and contentious decisions impacting our colleges and universities. From the landmark cases of Students for Fair Admissions against the University of North Carolina and Harvard College to the reexamination of Justice O'Connor's controversial 25-year shot clock, we break down how these rulings could dramatically reshape the face of education in America. We also ponder the potential for Congress to shift the landscape even further by amending the Civil Rights Acts, and possibly Title IV.
The conversation doesn't end there. We challenge the notion of academic freedom, scrutinize the legacy issue in admissions, and confront the fear of exclusion - a sentiment amplified by the ongoing pandemic. Also, we make sense of Amy Comey-Barrie's dissent in the Counterman ruling and her stance on digital speech. We shed light on the potential repercussions this could have on the freedom of religious and corporate speech, and how it could influence the spirit of the law. Prepare to have your understanding of the education system flipped on its head. This episode is a must-listen for anyone with a stake in the future of education.
Thanks for stopping by today as we delve into the recent Supreme Court decisions and the impact they may have on higher education. Although the ruling regarding affirmative action in education has caught everyone's attention, I'll be asking Peter to provide his perspective on two other rulings that carry just as much weight for the higher education community. As always, the intent of our discussion is to provide you, the listener, with a unique understanding of the topic, enabling you to have a broader perspective on the issue at hand. So thanks again for taking time out of your day to be a part of the Higher Education Renaissance with Peter Lake. Peter, how are you?
Speaker 1:Okay, you know, I've been worse 2023 keeps getting crazier and crazier, doesn't it, oh?
Speaker 3:boy, is it ever?
Speaker 1:So what are you up to this summer? What's been going on with you?
Speaker 3:I'm teaching summer school. I'm teaching insurance to nine brilliant women and I just told that class. I said, I guess is the dream come true. When I entered insurance 40 years ago, it was a voice club. There were no women at all. Now we're seeing, you know, really bright, talented women entering the field.
Speaker 1:And it's really great. You are always up to something and something it's been for the last couple of weeks.
Speaker 3:Something you think Something's happening that's just shaken the tree and we're all kind of trying to figure out what's next. And where do I fit?
Speaker 1:So let's jump right in and start with the Supreme Court ruling which has grabbed all the headlines, and that is the cases brought about by the organization called the Students for Fair Admissions. So they actually argued in front of the court in two different cases, one against the University of North Carolina and one against Harvard College, but my understanding is that the court ruled on them both together. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:There were different stages in the oral arguments and proceedings and one of the big differences, of course North Carolina is public, harvard's private, and the North Carolina system itself is pivoted away from using the kinds of criteria that were at issue in the case. So this is why Harvard was so focused. Plus, public institution is subject to the Equal Protection Clause directly, but private school compliance has always been an issue and they have now taken that and very clearly lumped private and public schools into the same basic legal categories through a very complex gain of reasoning For people who aren't legally trained. It's basically this Years ago, mostly after World War II, federal government got very generous to higher education, offering grants and indirect lending and direct lending and all sorts of things, and everybody took the money and we now all live on it. We couldn't live without it and it turns out it was a trojan horse. The federal government marched its army and the horse at night and has now taken over admissions in private schools.
Speaker 3:And it's interesting that Justice Gorsuch recognizes this in his concurrence. And you might remember I had predicted a 422 split and that's what we got. Basically, we concurrence is in exactly from the justices. I thought we would, gorsuch and Thomas. They voted with the majority, so it doesn't look like a 422 split, but in fact there's a significant set of fishers in this opinion no pun intended from the Fisher case of your and what were those?
Speaker 3:Justice Gorsuch pointed out that perhaps it's not as obvious as people think that the Civil Rights Acts of 63, 64, which become applicable through Title IV to private schools, really do run parallel exactly with the Equal Protection Clause. And one thing that is a possibility in fact I just raised this with a reporter at the ABA Journal just today is Congress could change the result for Harvard if they wanted to. And how would that occur? They'd have to amend the Civil Rights Acts and possibly Title IV. I mean, I don't have draft legislation, but it is conceivable that they could do that.
Speaker 3:I don't think it's going to happen. We'll see what's coming, but I will be interested to watch as lobbying entities of various persuasions red, blue, purple and neutral. If there is such a thing, I have a feeling a lot of Americans are going to have a stake in what just happened in a way that they may not realize the moment that's happening and I suspect it's going to create all sorts of interesting political pressure throughout the spectrum and on Congress. So it's a little hard to say right now whether what seems unlikely is as unlikely as it might be. I could see a restoration act here of some kind in the next 10 years.
Speaker 1:So I'm a little confused. The San Giordano-Connor opinion in Gutter versus Bollinger talks about a time, some type of time limit in affirmative action, like there's a certain type of clock that would resolve race discrimination in this country. Am I reading that right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're going back about 20 years called Michigan cases there were actually three, but the two there were companion cases at Gutter and Gratz that the Supreme Court took and they looked at two different admission systems one that gave a plus score based on race and another one that did holistic individual review, looking at race as a potential factor in that. And the Supreme Court validated the holistic individual review process but invalidated the plus score. And in one of the opinions O'Connor drops a line that caught everyone's attention that apparently the 14th Amendment has a shot clock 25 years. This would all go away. And almost immediately it was greeted with derision from a wide range of people Like first of all, where is the shot clock in the 14th Amendment? There's nothing really to suggest that there's a constitutional time limit. This is just a pure judicial creation, and in fact O'Connor backed off it as well.
Speaker 3:And so what it mutated into is this idea that the aspiration of diversity admission is that someday America will be race neutral and we will no longer need this anymore. The melting pot, the blending idea, whatever it is, however, you see it, and most people thought that Loretta Rick was dead, but Roberts resurrected it and basically said well, it's been about 25 years, pretty close, and there's no end in sight. And so several times in the opinion he makes reference to this no end in sight concept that we're getting tired of. They're getting tired of race conscious admissions in any way. Diversity is a goal and that's where it comes from. Is this sense that when does it ever end? And will be a perpetual state of remediation?
Speaker 3:But then there's schools of thought about the 14th Amendment, and I have a particular perspective on it, and I think that the framers of the Civil War Amendments were probably keenly aware of the fact that race discrimination in America would go on for a very, very long time, potentially, that this wouldn't be something you could just fix overnight or in a couple of decades or even a century, and therefore they did not write a shot clock into it.
Speaker 3:Equal protection is equal protection as long as you need it, however long it takes. And I think the resurrection of really strong racist rhetoric in American politics makes it clear that whatever we thought happened in the 1960s and 70s didn't go as far and deep as we thought and in fact may have triggered something of a backlash that may have been unintended by some of the activity that occurred in that period. So I think reconstruction as people might have seen it in some people's minds is still going on. But for folks, like the majority of the Supreme Court, they're anxious for that to be over. And it's not the first Supreme Court that has anxiously embraced the end of reconstruction. That's actually been kind of a theme really since the beginning of Supreme Court. Interpretation of the 14th Amendment is, shall we say, sort of an active role in imagining how reconstruction would play. And perhaps now in retrospect, brown and Bord was a bit of an aberration constitutionally and although that, you'll notice, roberts won't touch it or overrule it, they're clearly cutting into it left and right.
Speaker 1:So is that why people see this court is so unique? This?
Speaker 3:is not that a normative for the Supreme Court? I mean, you can go to several iterations of the court following the Civil War and you'll see themes that are not entirely dissimilar. They may be the rhetoric may be different but sort of a frustration with rebuilding around an equal protection cause with some teleological goal for the United States.
Speaker 1:So is Roberts's opinion about not wanting to hear these types of cases again.
Speaker 3:Roberts is standing on it as if there has been race discrimination, you can move right to it. So anything that's race negative, you can punish it, and I imagine that this court will come back with a ruling at some point. In a crucifying racist behavior that causes harm to people, I think you're going to see a companion case at some point, because it's very much part of this opinion that that you can punish people who harm others based on illegal and unlawful motivations. However, the larger theme which you raised is the 14th Amendment have a shot clock. As of now, we're either at halftime or it has a shot clock, so I'm going to page ahead. Eric, past probably both of our lifetimes and I don't mean to suggest that we're mortal, but we are but probably someplace in the future this will be revisited again. It's just a matter of time before we get another lineup of nine or whatever the court composition will be. When you are willing to play with Starry DeCise, the way the court is, it just invites another court to do the same thing.
Speaker 1:So, again, approaching all this as a person who did not study law, nor is reading all this easy to do I'm finding that when notable rulings by the Supreme Court although I suppose they're all notable but when cases such as the one we're currently discussing are ruled upon and you read both the opinions in the majority and the minority, seems like past cases or situations will open your eyes to things you may not be aware of. That you find interesting, so for me, this ruling. There was reference made to the numbers of minority enrollees in California institutions that dropped off after California got rid of affirmative action. A little embarrassing to admit that I wasn't even aware of that fact about California.
Speaker 3:Yeah, florida was even before that. In some ways it started in California, baki, and it was out of California. It split the court all over the place with different opinions about what higher ed should do. I think the message that came out for a lot of people from Baki years and years ago was that you had a pretty wide latitude of solutions that you could attempt and still be potentially constitutionally compliant. But it did cause people to think should we even be doing this at all? Now there really a sector of higher ed uses race or has used race within constitutional perimeters.
Speaker 3:When they asked me in Florida on local news what happens in Florida, it says business as usual. It's the governor's had an edict for a long time race neutral. Many of the private schools are doing that. It's not really that big a change for most Everybody here it's just another day in Florida. Now they've taken California, today in Michigan, and I think that is politically something that's really important to calculate is that for certain activities and certain entities it has enormous impact and for others it's just another day.
Speaker 3:I think where we're headed, eric is, I think where this is going to line up is that public schools will have to operate on an exceptionally race neutral basis. I don't think any public school it thinks that they can set race diversity as a goal, directly or indirectly is really going to be on path with this court. Public higher education is going to become very opaque, very objective, metric based and probably sanitize A lot of and I say sanitize in the sense that you will eliminate references to race preference and religious schools. I think religious schools will be able to do what they want. I think some of them will assert this and I think their religious missions will say that it's our religious belief that there was an inhumane evil, whatever act of human subjugation, and we believe we need to remediate it. And I do not see this court telling religious schools that they can't do that. I have colleagues that are debating this. They think, oh, the court will never do that and I'm like, oh, heck, yeah, they will. They are absolutely going to tell private schools they can do what they want to do on this if they're religious.
Speaker 3:Now, the non-sectarian schools are the ones that are in the trickiest position. They're going to be looking for solutions with this and what you're going to see there? With a lot of consternation over scholarships, affinity groups, club sports building, naming and identity, whether you can even have a DEI office, the way it's been, which is already under fire for a lot of places. And the elite private institutions are struggling in the face of what is, for them, a true constitutional crisis Because, as of the Harvard opinion, any semblance of 20th century academic freedom just crumbled. You are now in receivership, local federal court. They run your school.
Speaker 3:You'll notice that Robert slammed Harvard for claiming academic freedom and said well, we're a court and we have to do our job. So you do yours, but ours comes first. So is it a lost cause? Only solution to this is to push back at Robert's own rhetoric and Citizens United. Private colleges are going to have to stand on their identity as persons. Harvard really didn't argue the case. That way, I think, historically they'll be reflecting on the path forward, which the only way is to start trying to push the Citizens United idea that, hey, we're people too. You and I have talked about this before, eric, that higher ed right now is the most disliked perspective across political perspectives. It's one thing that unites everybody, as we all think higher ed's a big mess. The Robert's opinion really resonates with people who want to stick it to the man.
Speaker 1:With the affirmative action issue being basically ruled upon by the court, is the next batter up to the plate in regards to higher education enrollment, the legacy issue.
Speaker 3:I think when you open the crypt that is admissions, anything that's in there that is politically or legally incendiary is going to come to the surface. The pressure now is the law doesn't permit race conscious admissions. So what are we turning our institutions into Country clubs for the great grandkids of the people who've got in and their friends and their rich buddies? I mean, are elite colleges, the box at Wimbledon now, so the access to the most privileged parts of American economy and society, or it's basically Edwardian England? Are we going to turn everything into Eaton and who you're related to, and Bonnie, prince Charles the 56th or whatever, and you just have no chance? Here's the thing. I think a lot of Americans are feeling the squeeze about entry. You want to go to Fenway Park. You used to be able to walk in, unless it was the Yankees late in the season you could get a seat for a reasonable price and a hot dog and a beer and make an afternoon Now cost of fortune.
Speaker 3:I mean, there's a pervasive fear of being excluded and I think some politicians have really played into rhetoric which sort of identifies the people that have to stand on the other side of the velvet rope and never get in, and it unifies people because it's a daily experience. You go to the beach now you have to pay for parking, you get your taxes they've gone up 10%. You know it's like you lose control. You might get pushed out of your own house and then meanwhile people are sitting in the royal box at Wimbledon, going to Harvard with kings and princes and they're owning all the properties.
Speaker 1:Let them eat cake, yeah.
Speaker 3:And so there's this sense of and I think it started with the recession and I think it accelerated through the COVID period and then became a political movement is what about us? I mean, pink was singing this song all along and there's a kind of a resentment towards the gatekeepers of the elite opportunities. It's pervasive. I mean, it's not just blue, it's not red, it's not purple, it's a very strongly held sentiment across the board. Now, I know, did you see New York Times? I think it was today. No, I didn't. They did a schema on why student loans will never be paid back and one segment of a student loan people after so many years, they still owe basically 100% of the principal loans. Well, it's debtor's prison, is what it is. And now, of course, that's the parallel with the other decision that came out is the Supreme Court now is yanking authority away from Congress and the president and the regulatory branch. So now we're getting government by federal court.
Speaker 1:Is this the other case we wanted to talk about Biden versus Nebraska coming to?
Speaker 3:play. Well, this recent case that came out from the Supreme Court really reinforces that idea. The government can only go so far, so Biden is told he can't cancel the loans, which might be the right result. But what does that practically result in? Is a bunch of people just moved home with their parents indefinitely? They're not. It's going to hit the housing market. It's going to hit the retail market I mean it's and maybe we would have had other economic impacts if it hadn't happened.
Speaker 3:Probably nothing worse than if you were Amelia Earhart and you're on that island stranded and you're waving at the plane and they turn towards you and then fly away. You know that sense of almost being rescued, like sorry, back to the hole you go. It's going to infuriate a lot of people and their families because they have started to develop a hope, but even perhaps an expectation, of a different result. You know, all I can say is what's happened this last couple of weeks is one of the biggest backlashes against higher ed that you're going to see, and it's part of my itch apocalypse. This is going to cause tidal waves of energy that will pressure the institutions even more.
Speaker 3:Now you know again Harvard is really a storefront in Massachusetts for a global corporation. You know a lot of the elite institutions posture themselves, because it's good marketing, as quaint little storefronts and cute little places and it's wonderful. But many of them are essentially storefronts for global corporate activity. That's right and they just happen to. They like their ancestral location. Well, my guess is that a lot of them are going to be rethinking their business plans.
Speaker 1:So in most cases, legacy equates to dollars and we're talking about business plans. And where does this all leave? Higher education and future funding.
Speaker 3:The Department of Ed which is, of course, led by whoever is the president, has played an instrumental role in creating the structure of how federal money is disseminated and has been historically given a great deal of authority in terms of how to do that, including, at one time, ending indirect lending in the face of a banking crisis. The Bank of American Higher Education has been the department of that. The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of the Bank of Higher Education has been the secretary of education or whoever is president. Okay, what the Supreme Court just did is they changed the role of the Fed. They said they don't have as much authority to manage the, shall we say, the money supply as was once thought before. Now, that's a, you know, an abstract way of thinking about it. That's exactly what's going on, which is basically, supreme Court, tell the chairman of the Fed that they don't have certain authority to do certain things.
Speaker 1:So in essence they're taking over the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 3:That's exactly right they have so in a fell swoop, the Supreme Court just took over admissions at every school in America and the Bank of Higher Education of America.
Speaker 1:This is so interesting because this reminds me of that poster used to see at the iceberg, where 20% of it was above the waterline and 80% of it was below, and that was the dangerous part. It seems like all three of these cases, or all these Supreme Court rulings that have recently been decided upon, is that iceberg Meaning. Unless you dig into reading between the lines of both the majority and minority opinion, you don't have the full picture of what these rulings mean to the future of higher education.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, the big question on the table, which is sublimated to all the rhetoric, is who controls the fate of higher education? Just a few years ago, the private, even public, institutions were masters of their own fate and, with a large input from the Department of Ed and whoever was the president, and the federal judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court now, have taken a lot of power over this in a way that many people may cheer right now but we'll see and some will piss. But this is a very interesting thing. I do worry a little bit for the federal judiciary that they're taking on a role that they won't be able to manage.
Speaker 1:Manage as in. They're not qualified.
Speaker 3:It's pretty obvious that the majority of the Supreme Court hasn't spent a lot of time reading admissions applications. You know, intriguingly, I mean, there is one person on that majority who may have spent some time. I don't really know whether she was on admissions committees or not. Who is that? Call me Barrett. The one that would have the most experience would be in dissent Kagan. You know she would have had a closer hand on that.
Speaker 1:With the exception of enrollment professionals.
Speaker 3:Who really knows admissions anyway, you know it's a job that not everybody runs to. It takes a special skill in orientation and having jumped into that world, I just I think the federal judiciary may find themselves getting deeper and deeper into a business activity that is a quagmire.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's switch now to this case that you enlightened me to, and that's the counterman case.
Speaker 3:Yeah, counterman could easily have flown under the radar. I think a lot of people missed it and the higher ed community missed it is no connection to higher ed. You've got, roughly speaking, a stalker kind of situation a person who develops a fascination with a female singer and starts trying to contact her digitally and she shows no interest in him and keeps shifting her platforms and he keeps following and along the way he issues statements to her that were found to have been objectively threatening under Colorado law and he was prosecuted for it. And this case follows on a previous case called a Launus that was strikingly similar in some ways. In that case the Supreme Court had punted the issue down the road. Of course, this was before the Supreme Court started getting a lot of personal threats against themselves because of the DAPS decision. So a lot of folks think that this case is sort of the reaction of the court to having experienced the digital world's hate machine when it can operate. And they came back and they said yes, you can prosecute threats. The only thing is you will have to have some subjective standard to prosecute somebody for a true threat, which is at least the level of recklessness, but could include purpose or knowledge that the language is threatening. So what this really means is that for a lot of people, like the counterman person, they will still be found guilty. It's just the standard has to change, and what's interesting about this is that the court is finally trying to rope in some of the wildest of the wild west on the internet.
Speaker 3:Now what really caught my attention, interestingly, was the dissent of Amy Comey-Barrie. She's very white-hot in this opinion, to the point where there's a little snarky interchange between herself and the majority. But here's the thing is that Justice Barrett is not lining up visibly with all of the free speech metrics that are pushed by conservative groups, and they'll notice it. I mean, I noticed that because her attitude is that you could punish threats without any standard of subjectivity and in fact that that historically was the case, and this would run against some of the so-called right-wing free speech groups that are out there. So she's an interesting force in the future of free speech, particularly digital speech, and I would also keep an eye out for her when the issue of pornography comes up. I suspect those cases will come up. So you know, just kind of playing that out. Very fascinating case Backing up to the wider First Amendment conversation out there.
Speaker 3:I'm starting to see this court almost line up around the idea that some speakers are more privileged than others, and they're going to have to rectify this because it appears that religious speech is getting priority from this court.
Speaker 3:Corporate speech through Citizens United got priority, but it hasn't been applied to colleges that are private, because you'll notice, there's no appearance of Citizens United in this case. I'm kind of shocked where Roberts doesn't even bring it up at all. And then you have the speech of people who are threatening or otherwise unpleasantly communicating with others, and the court has created boundaries for that. So, for example, you can flip off your teacher when you're home at night in high school talking to your parents and get away with it, but you can't go on the internet and threaten somebody if it's considered reckless behavior or worse. So we're starting to define boundaries for different kinds of speech, and the threatening boundary is going to literally intersect with political discourse in the next 10 years. What counterman sets the tone for is that the prosecutors can prosecute people who've issued threatening language. Objectively speaking, short, they don't have to simply prove that it was purposefully intended to threaten or knowingly going to threaten, but it could be recklessly uttered.
Speaker 1:So, simply put, what you're saying is, some will have the right to say certain things, while others will not.
Speaker 3:That's kind of transition. You know, I've been, in the back of my mind, have a manuscript called the Spirit of the Law and the fundamental premise is really quite simple is that law belongs to all Americans, not just a privileged elite that announces itself lawyers, judges and jurists. They certainly have control, but control of legal machinery is not equivalent to having the spirit of the law. It can be there. It might not be there. That's something I think that people have to see. I will say one thing for the Harvard opinion opinions Almost everything that's in the public discourse found it ways into that set of opinions. It's capturing the moment as a snapshot of, I think, this you think that I don't agree with you, and I mean it does an excellent job of modeling what a lot of the debate looks like and the ideas that are current at this time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we were talking earlier about our place in all of this and honestly, sometimes and this may be vanity on my part, but sometimes I imagine myself like Tom Sizemore in saving Private Ryan. What was his perspective? You know, I'm just the staff sergeant. I'm not going to make it to the post-war Europe. It's not my fate to live in the space that's on the other side of this. So we won't see the end of this in our lifetime. I find it hard to believe that a lot of the edge apocalypse issues that I see right now will resolve themselves within 10, 15, 20 years relatively easily. And I may be wrong.
Speaker 3:And I think that's what Americans are trying to figure out is how do I make it count? What does a fair, just, legally responsible American society look like? And I don't necessarily and I speak generally, don't necessarily trust the people who've taken charge of it. I don't know that they care about me. I don't know if they care about each other, I don't know if they care about the country or the environment or education.
Speaker 3:And that fear and mistrust is translating into tremendous, tremendous challenges to the rule of law, because is it my law or your law? And can we see each other? And what even is the law when you change nine people on a court and everything changes. I do see an economy that a lot of people think that there's advantage in terms of dividing people into conflicting affinity groups. To a certain extent that sells, but I think a lot of even the business world is starting to realize is that if you turn everybody on each other and create a civil war. There's nothing to sell to anybody, because the very energy that was supporting all of this turns on itself and becomes conflict.
Speaker 1:Does the conflict resolve itself into something positive?
Speaker 3:The great hope is that we can see past this, and I suppose reading Robert's opinion in its most aspirational moment is that there's this almost desperate desire to get to the other side of all of this. You never know how people evolve and at the end of the day, the Supreme Court is nine people. They're human beings. They've come from an extremely narrow range of experiences.
Speaker 3:The Supreme Court, as it was originally designed, had no requirement that lawyers be on the court, certainly not a certain type of lawyer, and I think it's a historical mistake of the first magnitude that the Supreme Court is populated entirely by people with law degrees. There should be people on that court that see things from other perspectives science or whatever and you'd get a very different type of leadership on constitutionalism if it weren't so skewed towards one often anemic skill set, and to me that was one of the things that struck me is here's Robert saying you can't do anything unless it's objective and measurable by a court, and I thought holy mackerel, do you want to? Does every American want to live under the rule of lawyers? How could you raise your kids like that? It's like dad. Prove to me that what you're doing is good, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I just think that we are also losing the understanding that this nation is made up of so many different cultures and we want to try and curtail everybody into our line of thinking. And to me that's the sad reality. We don't seem to grasp that people have different opinions, different perspectives, different understanding of things, and that's their right, Eric, I live in a bubble driving from Chicago to Notre Dame and I passed through Gary Indiana.
Speaker 3:So I stopped in a Burger King in its paper map time and I'm asking directors to Notre Dame and I said you know, is this the best road to Notre Dame and the people working there said we don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 3:I said you know University of Notre Dame and they're like, nope, nothing. A cook in the back said I think they might have a football team. You know I live in a bubble. I spend all of my time in blue and purple places and when I drive places I drive in between those places and unless I stop for any length of time, I'm in this higher ed lawyer bubble all the time.
Speaker 1:We all live in a bubble of some type, and some of us are able to move away or out of that bubble If we so desire. Others don't even are not even aware they're in a bubble.
Speaker 3:That's exceptionally difficult. I find that you know, society today is very restrictive. You're in your boundary, You're supposed to hang out with a certain group of people. It's very age and, frankly, economic, even race-specific. I fight that every time because it's not where I'm from.
Speaker 1:And I agree with that wholeheartedly, of course. So where does that leave us with the Supreme?
Speaker 3:Court. You know, I see a Supreme Court desperately trying to take the reins of an American society that's teetering unconstitutional edges, and maybe they've got the right touch, maybe they don't, but I can certainly see what they're saying, that they're concerned that things aren't working the way they ought to in their minds. So, in summary, you can never really know all of the things that a choice or a decision lead to, but what you can do is try your best to follow. The most basic law of all is to try to do the best you can for everybody around you and yourself. That has a magic tendency to create the best outcomes, even if it's not apparent in real time.
Speaker 1:And this is why I'm always hoping our audience expands beyond just folks interested in higher education, but the blend of education into our society.
Speaker 3:You never know who's listening.
Speaker 1:So true. And again, thank you, Peter, for your insights and I'll look forward to our discussion next time.
Speaker 3:Thanks.
Speaker 1:Eric, good luck. Thanks, and you too. Take care, peter, we'll be back.
Speaker 2:Higher education renaissance is produced by Eric Seaborg, Grace Mosby, Gina Profetta. Technical production by MC1R Studios. Artwork by Gingee Productions. We welcome your comments or program recommendations for future episodes at ericseaborg at gmailcom, and thank you for listening.
Speaker 3:It's been quite a ride.
