You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast.

Hi, Steve.

Hi, Bob. How are you?

I'm doing okay. How are you?

You know, not too bad. All things consider.

That's all a person can ask for when a person is at Harvard these days, which you are, which is part of what we're going to talk about. Let me introduce us. I'm Robert Wright, editor-in-chief of the non-zero newsletters. This is a non-zero podcast. You are Stephen Walt, and you are a professor at Harvard, as I suggested, which is good, because we're going to be

talking about Trump's, I think you could call it war on Harvard, maybe, and his war more broadly on

certain aspects of higher education, I guess you could say. And you, more specifically, you are the Robert and Renee Belfour professor of

international affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School. You're also the author of the hell of good intentions,

America's foreign policy elite, and the decline of U.S. primacy, a not entirely flattering look at the U.S.

foreign policy establishment. If people are curious about that, there's actually a conversation

between you and me about it on YouTube that they can search for. Probably your best-known book

is the Israel Lobby and U.S. foreign policy, co-authored with John Mearsheimer.

Now, when I ask you, and I'm not going to ask you this yet,

but when I ask you whether this book has any relevance at all to Trump's kind of conflict with Harvard,

I suspect you'll say it has at least some relevance, but let's lead people in suspense for now.

And why don't we for now, just ask you to give us some sense of the magnitude and

scope of what Trump is trying to do to Harvard, leaving aside the question of whether it will

ultimately be validated in the courts.

There are a couple of things I've gotten the most publicity, but I don't even know whether they exhaust the whole subject.

So what's the biggest stuff from your point of view?

Well, I think the way to understand it, this is an attempt to get Harvard University to, in a sense, surrender its independence as an intellectual institution, as a university devoted to free and rigorous inquiry on a wide variety of subjects from the natural sciences to the social sciences to the humanities.

...