It is no secret that the higher education system in the United States is, to put it mildly, left of center. Ilya Shapiro learned this firsthand back in 2022 when he was chased out of a job at Georgetown Law School for voicing opposition to Joe Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.
He survived the effects of cancel culture that sought to ruin his life and career and is now sounding the alarm about the dangers of ‘wokeism’ at the elite institutions that are largely responsible for educating future leaders in his new book Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites.
On Monday’s show, Shapiro joined Megyn to discuss the “cascade of failures in higher education” that centers around “placating the illiberal mob” at the expense of preparing students for the real world and how to push back against it.
The State of Higher Ed
Shapiro did not mince words when discussing the state of college campuses. “We have broken systems of education that are really more activism on the teaching and the faculty front, but also on the bureaucratic front,” he said. “We have now, in most places – including law schools – more non-teaching staff than faculty.”
Those bureaucrats are changing the fabric of higher education. “They are orientating and training and viewing a culture where there is no such thing as objective truth and one’s rights and freedoms depend on where you are in some sort of privilege hierarchy or intersectional matrix,” Shapiro explained. “All this mumbo jumbo is directly contrary to the structure of the law… and is a huge disservice to our nation.”
The silver lining, in Shapiro’s view, is that sunlight is proving to be a disinfectant. As the “moral rot” within the education system has been exposed (most recently in the wake of the October 7 terror attack in Israel), Shapiro said more and more people are waking up to the fact that something needs to change.
Megyn’s Advice
Part of that change will likely need to be led by the students themselves, and Megyn offered this advice to those currently in the higher education system:
“My advice to any law school student or college student who is under threat of being downgraded unless they say the left-wing things they are being asked to say is: Don’t do it. Write what is true, what is real, what you really feel – even if it is non-woke – and then save the bad grade like a merit badge.
When the time comes for you to go out to interview for a real job, you will have done your research on who is far left and who is normal and you will show them that paper. You will show them why you got a D in Con Law – the first D of your college career because you were a straight-A student in everything else up until that point – because you wrote that wokeism is ruining America and is pernicious, in particular, in advanced degrees like law and medicine.
Write that and then work for the employer who celebrates your D with you, like me or like Ilya. We are out there. We are half the country. Look at the numbers that put Donald Trump in office. People have rejected this wholesale.
You are not alone. You just have to get through these far-left institutions that try to ruin you and make you say what they want you to say or feel what they want you to feel before you can have access to the employers who feel very differently.”
To that point, Shapiro said he is always looking for young lawyers at the Manhattan Institute, where he is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies.
Conservative Training Grounds
While Shapiro sees some bright spots – especially at the law school level – of institutions recognizing the need to present and accept a diverse viewpoint, there is still a long way to go. In the meantime, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity for right-of-center students on predominantly leftist campuses.
Megyn noted that Peter Thiel recently told Bari Weiss on her Honestly podcast that these far-left colleges and universities might be undermining themselves:
THIEL: …They are no longer good places to learn how to defend liberalism. Maybe they are good places for training conservatives. You know, if you go to Yale Law School and if you’re one of, you know, five people in the class of 170 who is still conservative at the end, you’ll be pretty good at understanding what is wrong with liberalism. You’ll have thought about it a lot and you’ll be a more thoughtful person, so it will actually train you well to be a conservative. And we’re right to value the small number of conservatives who come out of that gauntlet as quite talented people…
Shapiro agreed. “Conservatives and libertarians get great training. They are exposed to lots of ideas. They know how to see every different argument,” he explained. “This is one of the ironies: These law schools are doing a disservice to their progressive students by not teaching them what the argument is from the other side, and then they go into federal court and don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to argue.”
“They are graduating students who aren’t qualified to do much of anything other than to be HR officials or DEI deans,” he added. “I hope that some institutions seize on the market opportunity that is created, and I think some are.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Shapiro by tuning in to episode 981 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.