David Barnheiser is Emeritus Professor of Law at Cleveland State University.

He is the author of the Artificial Intelligence Contagion.

We discussed that a few years ago.

And a new book, Conformity Colleges,

The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America's Universities.

That's our topic today.

Welcome, Professor Barnheiser.

Thanks very much.

Thank you, Mark.

So the last couple of years have shown what seems a rapid outbreak of illiberal protests and nasty identity politics on campus. But you say that there has actually been a gradual spread. This has been going on actually for a long time. It's maybe become more visible to the public in the last few years. But it's going on for a long time. The spread of, what are we kind of identity, illiberalism, and destruction has been going on? How has this slow growth proceeded and operated? Well, you you know there were very good reasons why

you needed an infusion of difference and i'm not a fan of the i'm a fan of diversity i'm not a

fan at all of the way it's being applied because I think that's in a very dishonest manner.

But even when I was at Harvard, getting a graduate law degree, an LLM degree,

Harvard was the center with Duncan Kennedy and Roberta Unger and some others,

the center of something called

critical race there, not critical legal studies. And in critical legal studies, they went through

that. It was all about fairness, opportunity, justice, confronting the negatives in the country, of course, but also not

giving away the positives. I mean, most of us who went into, there was a surge of people,

civil rights people, justice-oriented people in the 60s with the civil rights movement,

the 70s, that there was a surge of people,

including myself, who were committed. I started out as a legal service and civil rights lawyer,

did all kinds of criminal representation for minority, poor people, many of them black,

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