Ben Sasse: evaluation

Transcript context

…Senator, you’ve been at both sides of the bridge in our logo “bridging academic ideas with policymakers.” What do we do well in building that bridge and what do we do poorly? Where can we improve? Well, I taught at the Lyndon Johnson Public Policy School at the University of Texas for a handful of years, and I think one of the things that policy schools, business schools, law schools are trying to do well but aren’t as good at it, as, say, med schools are, is integrate the fact that there’s both theoretical and classroom learning, and there’s experiential learning. We haven’t figured out in most professional schools how to create apprenticeship models where you cycle through different aspects of what doing this kind of work will actually look like. There are ways that there are tighter feedback loops at a med school than there are going to be at a policy school. There are things that I don’t think we’ve thought nearly enough about ways that professional school models should diverge from traditional, theoretical, academic disciplines or humanities, for example. But I really can’t blame the policy schools for that, fundamentally, because I think the bigger problem is that we don’t know how to have a big agenda-setting conversation about what policies we should be fighting over. I’m happy that we’re not talking about the president at all tonight — that’s not one of the purposes of our discussion. But one of the things that I find strange from a whole bunch of folks on the Left who are really critical of me is, they say, “You’re worried about declining norms and you’re worried about X, Y, and Z, and you’ve been critical of the president about this, that, or the other thing, or you’re concerned about declining public trust, but look at your voting record. You end up voting with Trump 95 percent of the time,” or whatever they say. What’s weird about that critique is, it just assumes that we’re voting on important things. And that’s not true. [laughter] You end up voting with Trump 95 percent of the time,” or whatever they say. What’s weird about that critique is, it just assumes that we’re voting on important things. And that’s not true. [laughter] Right? We’re not having legislative discussions about big things. Obviously there are some on the horizon, and I’m not trying to lead us down a path of going there, but by and large, in the last four or five months, we’re having policy discussions that have a Right-to-Left continuum, but they’re about really, really small things. We’re not having any conversation about what it looks like to have a national security strategy for the age of cyber and jihad. Getting 28 years past the end of the Cold War, and we still think about national security primarily as nation-state actors and primarily by traditional war-making means when lots of the targets of cyber attacks in the future are going to be civil society, not governmental. And a lot of the attacking entities are going to be nonstate actors, not just state actors. We’re not having any honest discussions about the entitlement crisis. We’re not having any discussions about what it looks like to think about a world where 40- and 45- and 50-year-olds are disrupted from their jobs. So we’re not talking about big policy. We’re not talking about anything that’s 5 and 10 years future oriented. How can we blame academics for not knowing how to help us facilitate those kinds of conversations? Because it would be stupid for academic programs in the university setting and professional schools to try to remake themselves, to come deal with the legislative small-ball issue of next Tuesday. And that’s really all we’re dealing with most of the time right now.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.