Ep. 1462 The Moral Mess of Higher Education
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 3 August 2019
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Phil Magness discusses his new book (with Jason Brennan) about the problems with higher education. They aren't talking about ideological conformity, bad as that is. They are discussing other problems, just as deep and pervasive.
For example, most academic marketing and advertising is semi-fraudulent. To justify their own pay raises and higher budgets, administrators hire expensive and unnecessary staff. Faculty exploit students for tuition dollars through gen-ed requirements. Students hardly learn anything, and cheating is pervasive. At every level, academics disguise their pursuit of self-interest with high-faluting moral language.
Show notes for Ep. 1462
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The Tom Woods Show, episode 1462. |
| 0:03.3 | Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. |
| 0:07.9 | Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show. |
| 0:14.1 | Come on now, folks. If you ain't going to start that side hustle now, then when? |
| 0:17.9 | Check out my free e-book, Five Paths to an Online Income, where I take you step by step |
| 0:22.9 | through five things that I do that keep food on the Woods household table and how you can do them |
| 0:28.9 | too. Check it out at paths to income.com. Hey, everybody, Tom Woods here. Very glad to have Phil |
| 0:35.4 | Magnus back with us. Just such a great scholar, PhD from |
| 0:38.9 | George Mason University School of Public Policy. We're going to be talking about his brand new book, |
| 0:43.2 | co-authored with Jason Brennan, Cracks in the Ivory Tower, the Moral Mess of Higher Education. |
| 0:49.7 | Phil, welcome back. |
| 0:51.0 | Hey, Tom, thanks for having me. |
| 0:52.1 | I love your book, and in a way, I kind of love it because it's not the book I thought it was going to be. |
| 0:57.3 | Okay. |
| 0:57.7 | And I bet it's not the book that some folks think it will be. |
| 1:00.7 | With that title, I thought, okay, it'll be about, you know, ideological conformity and political correctness and stuff like that. |
| 1:08.5 | But it's so much deeper and more interesting than that. |
| 1:11.1 | It really is in a way, at least in some of the analysis, like a public choice analysis of the |
| 1:16.4 | university system. So it goes into areas and includes levels of analysis that would not have occurred to me. |
| 1:24.2 | So that makes it a lot more fun, frankly, than the book I thought it would be, |
| 1:28.2 | which I thought we'd have fun with, too. But this one is much, much more interesting. So is it, |
| 1:33.1 | did it start off as a series of academic papers that you made into a book? Right. So Jason Brennan, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Tom Woods, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Tom Woods and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.