Steve Hsu: My guest today is Amy Chua, the John M. Duff Jr. Professor of law at Yale Law school. She is best known, at least in my family, for her 2011 book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which popularized the term tiger mother, and which has become a cultural touchpoint for high-investment parents all across the country.

Today, I hope to gain some insight from her about elitism in America, parenting, and the culture wars at universities like Yale.

Amy, welcome to the podcast.

Amy Chua: Thanks so much for having me, Steven.

Steve Hsu: Great. I've been looking forward to this discussion for a long time. I wanted to start by talking about your family background and I detected a lot of similarities with my own personal history.

Amy Chua: Yes.

Steve Hsu: Your father is a professor or was a professor. I don't know if he's retired yet. Professor of engineering. And you grew up in the Midwest for at least a big chunk of your childhood.

Amy Chua: Exactly. First eight years of my life.

Steve Hsu: And we, so we have those touch points in common. So, we just wanted to talk to you a little bit about that.

Now you, you came to America. I was born in Iowa.

Amy Chua: I was actually born in Champaign, Illinois.

Steve Hsu: I see. And you grew up in places like West Lafayette and Cambridge?

Amy Chua: No. So, what happened is my family was from the Fujian province in China, but when my mother was one and even before my dad was born, their families picked up and moved to the Philippines.

So, my parents actually grew up as part of the Chinese minority in the Philippines. And I coined this term market-dominant ethnic minorities to refer to this type of very small, but actually economically very successful minority group. And my dad was from a pretty big business family. And my mother was from a very poor intellectual family. And my dad's family disapproved of the marriage. So, they eloped to MIT of all places.

They got here in 1961 and my dad got his Ph.D. here. My mom got her master's and I, the oldest of four girls, was born in Champaign, Illinois. And then, you know, when I was really little, we moved to west Lafayette, Indiana, and I spent my first eight years in Indiana. You know, like only Asian kids, you know, in the class, you know, in the whole neighborhood.

Amy Chua: And then when I was in fourth grade, my father got an offer from Berkeley, where he is still a professor. And so, we picked up and drove across the country and I spent junior high school or, or, you know, the rest of elementary school and high school in a place called El Cerrito, which is kind of like a, a poor man's version of Berkeley. And then after that, I went back east to college.

Steve Hsu: So, you, by the time you were in high school, you were in, I think, I guess what was a more multicultural environment, is that right? You were no longer in the Midwest.

Amy Chua: Right. Right. I actually went from a place where there were very, very few Asians to a place, the Bay Area, that was, you know, very diverse, and not only was there a lot of Asian Americans, but my school was also about 70% African American and Hispanic American. And it was a very big public school. Most students were non-college bound, you know, more of a vocational place. And there were also so many Asians. Suddenly there were Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, and people from Taiwan. People who found me were from the mainland.

So, I definitely went from a very homogeneous American Midwest society to kind of the polar opposite.

Steve Hsu: And so, growing up in that range of environments and with parents that had come to America via the Philippines from China, were you already absorbing ideas about how different ethnic groups relate to each other and assimilate? Were, were you already absorbing that from your parents? Or was that something that you thought about through your adult life and, and crystallized some opinions on?

Amy Chua: It was so much a part of my identity being an outsider. I mean, first growing up in the Midwest, I'm sure you had somewhat similar [experiences].

By the way, it wasn't a bad experience. I don't have any terrible memories. Everybody seemed to be very nice to us, but we were a weird family with funny haircuts. I had a very strong accent. I still remember this one kid making fun of the way I pronounced restaurant because I said rest-o-want. And he ran around the yard saying hahaha, you know, rest-o-want. And you know, I, we had to bring for lunch, Chinese food, leftover Chinese food in a little thermos. And, you know, I was always mortified.

This is something kind of, I guess it's more, my mother. My dad was very, you know, just fit right into America. He was a real rebel. Like he's the one, he was the black sheep in his family and America was perfect for him. My mother's much more traditional and she's the one that from an early age, you know, we had to speak Chinese at home for, for every English word we accidentally said in the house, I got one whack of the chopsticks. You know, I had to write letters to my grandmother in Chinese and we learned, you know, how to write Chinese calligraphy and recite Chinese poems.

Amy Chua: So, I always, from the moment I was very little Chinese was actually my first language. I have this sense of being kind of bicultural. I'm from a very different culture. And, you know, I learned to kind of move back and forth very quickly. And even the funny thing is when we moved to Berkeley, California, I still felt almost just as much an outsider, partly because of these crazy strict rules that my parents had. You know, there are lots of different kinds of Asian Americans, and not all of them at that time were very strict. In fact, a lot of my parent's friends were much more lenient. They were worried about their kids not fitting in. They often spoke English at home. So, I felt we were an outlier there. Like my parents were extremely, they're the [unclear] tiger parents. I mean, all the stuff that I put in my tiger mom book, which was sort of semi-comical in my case, was applied to me straight when I was little. You know, no A minuses, you have to be the top student every single class, and you have to come straight home after school and no dating and no short skirts.

So, I always had a sense that, you know, that I was different from everybody else. And in some ways, I see my life as kind of turning that sense of being an outsider from a liability into a strength. I mean, every book that I've written has actually tapped into that and I think has benefited from me being an outsider.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. You know, interestingly, so, so I was wondering about that. So, it sounds like, as you said, your mom was the [unclear] tiger mother in your life.

Amy Chua: Oh yeah.

Steve Hsu: We, we were the other kind of Chinese family where we kind of got it fit in. Mom would make bologna sandwiches to bring to school. No.

Amy Chua: Oh, all I ever wanted.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, no thermoses full of rice, although that's what my dad got when he went to his office because he wanted that.

Amy Chua: Right.

Steve Hsu: And so, yeah, we grew up. My Chinese is terrible. I can't read Chinese. So, we're the other side of the equation.

Amy Chua: And it shows that look, either way, you do it, it comes out fine.

Steve Hsu: Maybe. Yeah. Well, that, that's, that's one of the things I'd really like to get into with you after we talk a little bit more about your background, is really what your belief is in terms of how much it matters, how much of that parental striving really affects the long-term outcomes for your kids.

And there's quite a big scientific subject in the field of behavior genetics, where people study this, as well as they can. So, I'd love to get into that, in, in a little bit. so, you had a strong sense of being an outsider, an outsider, and did that persist all the way through Harvard and Harvard law?

Amy Chua: Yeah. You know, I wrote a book with my husband called the triple package where I say, there's this, this, I mean, you're a scientist and this is going to sound very unprofessional to you, but that this combination of what I, we call a superiority complex, with a deep feeling of insecurity, that combination, can result in a lot of motivation. And, for example, taking it out of ethnicity, Steve Jobs definitely had this. You know, he was, everyone said he had such a narcissistic personality. He thought he could do anything. And yet at the same time, he always felt a little bit looked down upon, like he wasn't, he wasn't quite good enough in that combination really fueled him.

I was nothing quite like that, but I did have that sense of great pride in some. In my Chinese ancestry that my mom instilled in me. I mean, she just, a pretty famous story. I've said this to a bunch of people, but when I was in fourth grade, a guy named Jeremy, the person I mentioned, pronounced the word restaurant wrong and he started running around the playground, making slanted eyes saying, ha, rest-o-want, you know?

Amy Chua: And it's what I guess other people would call bullying. I mean, I was this fat kid with glasses and no friends and an accent. It was kind of horrible. But when I went home and told my mom about it, what was amazing is that she was not at all comforting to me. She was really upset, but not at this kid, but at me, she was like, why do you care?

What do you care about this stupid boy? And then a funny non-sequitur. She said, we come from the oldest, most magnificent civilization, you know, we invented everything. And if this dumb boy doesn't even know that and, and I can't see that, why would you waste one single second on him? And it's a bizarre story, but I actually have, you know, done some research on my own. And it's it, it turns out that it's quite a common phenomenon for immigrant groups, whether from Kenya or Nigeria, or really anywhere, for, for parents to kind of almost like give them their children a, a kind of armor against prejudice and discrimination by telling them, you know, like Iranian Americans, you come from this ancient civilization.

And, so that's, I had a sense of being an outsider, but I also had, interestingly, a lot of pride. I wasn't somebody that was kind of ashamed of who I was. I had a strong sense of pride in being Chinese American also.

But you know, every even now, and I'm almost going to be 60, I feel so much like an outsider, even at a, you know, a law school where I'm one of the most, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm quite a very popular teacher.

But that sense of outsider-ness has never really left me, whereas my daughters they're half Chinese because my husband's Jewish, they don't feel it at all. So, I think it's very interesting.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. I think times have really changed. I think one of the things that shocked me most, in talking to my kids in their school experience, they're, they're rising seniors in high school, this coming fall. They seem to claim, they claim to me that bullying has been almost eliminated. So, there's almost,

Amy Chua: yeah, I think there's a lot more monitoring. Yeah.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. So, I was shocked.

Amy Chua: They also just are way cooler, Steven, you may have said that they're way cooler.

Steve Hsu: I'm not sure. Yeah. My brother and I were very well assimilated.

We were both athletic and had a lot of friends and stuff like that. So, we. Didn't really go through that. Quite exactly the same experience that a lot of Asian Americans experience.

Amy Chua: Right.

Steve Hsu: So

Amy Chua: I was, I was, I had a lot of friends, but I was always the last person picked for the kickball team. The last person picked for anything when it came to the gym.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. So, it's, it's amazing how those childhood experiences there, they're so strong that, you know, you still remember that one incident of bullying and, uh, the effect that it had on.

I was so surprised when my kids said that they had never even witnessed a fist fight at school. Whereas it seemed like one of the best entertainments when I was in junior high or high school was the, you know, fights that would break out in the hallway. So, yeah. apparently, it's a different world we're in now.

So, what motivated you to write your first book, is, is that a normal thing to do for a law school professor? Because I kind of perceive that as a slightly general interest book.

Amy Chua: Yeah, my first book, it was called “World On Fire” and the subtitle was how exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability.

And, I guess you could say that I got really lucky with timing. So I was, to be totally honest, I didn't know what I was doing in law school. You know, I was always a very good student, worked hard, but I mostly applied to law school because I didn't know what else to do. I did not like science. I was terrible at it. I thought I was good at math until I went to Harvard and discovered uh oh this is absolutely not. There are people like Steven. And I really applied to law school by default because again, in my family, there was no question. Of course, we had to go to graduate school. And I went through a pretty tough phase for almost about eight years where, you know, again, by studying insanely hard, I did well at, at, at, at law school, but I knew, I knew deep inside me that I was not a natural, I didn't have instincts, like other people. I didn't like litigating. I hated oral arguments. I didn't relate to the constitution and, and sort of the rights of, of criminal defendants in a way, like anybody else, I. I was like a fish out of water in law school.

So, I went to, you know, I went to a law firm and again, you know, just by sheer working hard, you could do fine. But again, I knew that this was not really for me. So, I started going back to things that really do interest me. And I found a little field for myself. It was my dad who gave me this advice when I was young. He said, you know, Amy, try to invent your own field, which sounds very crazy ambitious, but it's actually great advice because he said, you know, if you aren't in some big famous field, you have all this competition and people always trying to take you down.

Amy Chua: So, the really dinky little area that I went into was-- it's not even an area, you know, because there are the big things were like constitutional law or criminal law-- I started doing something called law and development, which is kind of like bringing democracy and markets to developing countries. And what I always tell my students is the best advice I can give is find your comparative advantage because I just knew that I was not going to be the best legal analyst. I was just not going to be able to do that. It wasn't natural for me. But, you know, I had all these insights because again, from being an outsider.

And what's interesting about World On Fire is I coined this term market-dominant ethnic minority to refer to something that Americans or, you know, most Caucasians or Westerners just had never heard of. And it's this small minority like the Chinese and the Philippines or the Chinese in Indonesia. They're just 3% of the population. And yet they actually control 70. Percent of the private economy and it's not a stereotype they actually do. And, and there are Indians in east Africa that occupy the same role or the Lebanese and west Africa, obviously for totally different reasons, you know, whites and Zimbabwe or whites and South Africa.

So, I identify this phenomenon almost just because I drew on my own family background. You know, I was aware of this, and I could see that nobody else was. My thesis was that when you bring overnight democracy to countries that have this little hated minority that controls all the economy and you have markets at the same time, too, you're not going to get peace and prosperity like you expect, but you're going to get backlash. And just my timing was just weirdly good. it was right during September 11th, everybody was interested in sort of resentful, angry, poor majorities. And the book weirdly became a New York Times bestseller for like one day.

But that's, that's kind of the circuitous route that led me to that first book. It was technically in an area called law and development. There were a lot of rule of law projects at the time. A lot of lawyers were trying to democratize and marketize developing countries everywhere. And I wrote the book as a voice of caution saying, look, I also favor markets and democracy, but if we don't recognize that developing countries often have ethnic and religious and political and social structures totally different from the United States, we're going to get it wrong and you know, we're not going to bring it about free-market democracy like we expect. And I, you know, I've been proven, right. I predicted exactly what happened in Iraq, Venezuela and in Indonesia.

Amy Chua: So that's, that's kind of how the first book happened.

Steve Hsu: When you wrote that first book, did you have in mind at all the example of Jews in Europe of being a kind of market-dominant minority until they were persecuted by the Nazis? Was that on your mind?

I actually have a chapter where I dared to go there. But I wrote about the Jewish oligarchs of the former Soviet Union. And interestingly Steven, I used a very strong definition of a market-dominant minority. I did not just mean, you know, sort of an entrepreneurial minority or even a disproportionately successful minority. My definition was actually that you had to control or dominate the economy, like 60 to 70% of the economy. And it turns out, for example, that it is actually not the case that Jews, you know, control the U.S. economy right now.

Amy Chua: If you look at, you know, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. And they, for much of human history, Jews were often very entrepreneurial, but they were not economically dominant. Part of the reason is if you throw them in shtetls or, you know, put all these restrictions on them, then they can't dominate the economy.

I did, however, say that Jews were a market-dominant minority in several Eastern European countries between the first and second world war in countries like Romania, Lithuania, and Hungary. They actually were the full definition of a market-dominant minority. So yes. And then in the former Soviet Union, they were, you know, I kind of wrote about them too. So yeah, I went there. And amazingly that book did not get a blowback. It was pitched against Thomas Friedman's book, the Lexus and the Olive Tree, because I was a nobody and my editor said, look since you're a nobody to get people's attention, you need to kind of disagree with somebody of, of substance. So, they pitched it against Thomas Friedman. He was basically saying markets and democracy are the answer to everything at the time. This is a long time ago. And he was very gracious. Actually. We had a couple of debates and he said, you know, I never thought about this phenomenon of market-dominant minorities.

You know, it never occurred to me that majorities, democratically empowered majorities could actually be destabilizing. So, he's now a friend of mine.

Steve Hsu: That's great. So, and, and at that time, I think when I actually read your book, I think many years ago when it first came out, but it just didn't strike me as a kind of thing that was typical for a law school professor to be, to be writing. You’re totally right in, in that sense. I'm lucky to have been. Ironically, I think that that probably wouldn't fly if I were at schools that were more practically oriented like I probably couldn't get a job, you know? But Yale, I mean, geez, all my colleagues of the law school, they sound more like philosophers and sociologists and my law and economics colleagues, you know, do just pareto optimal and, and they do equations.

Amy Chua: So, so ironically Yale was actually a pretty receptive place for an interdisciplinary approach to the law.

Steve Hsu: And I think you have some colleagues that write mystery novels or thrillers or things like this, right?

Amy Chua: Yes. Steve Carter. Yeah. Yeah. He absolutely. And my husband, he bought a, you know, a big bestseller in, in England in addition to his constitutional law stuff.

Steve Hsu: So, what was the impetus to write “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”? Was parenting something you had thought a lot about before becoming a parent or was it that when you suddenly had children, you started thinking analytically about how to do it?

Amy Chua: Oh, okay. This is so funny, Steven. This is like the biggest misunderstanding. And for a while, I was really upset about it. But now I just, like, I just think view it as a, as a blessing in disguise. So, I am absolutely not a parenting expert. You know my other three or four books, I did so much research. I spent like seven years researching “World On Fire” and “Day of Empire” was like three years.

I wrote the first two-thirds of the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in three months. And it was not, it was supposed to be a funny book. And believe it or not, I started writing it in a moment of crisis. So, I have two daughters, and to make a long story short, whatever people think of tiger parenting, it worked for me. And I know fully, I mean, boy does it not always work, but in my case for my family, I adore my parents. So, I kind of wanted to raise my two kids the same way. My husband was weirdly on board because his family was very 1960s. You could do anything just; you don't have to wear shoes. You kind of, you know, experiment. And, in some ways, things didn't work out so well with the siblings. So, he was kind of on board.

And with my eldest daughter, Sophia things went really smoothly, and I thought, oh, this parenting thing is so, so easy. What is the problem? And then my second daughter came along Lulu, three years younger and this is just fate, you know, boy, I had no idea what was going to hit me. I mean, Lulu was born a rebel. And even when I was carrying her, she was kicking and she had, after she was born, she had colic for like three years. She was very similar to me in personality, that is a big temper and very stubborn, and essentially said no to every single thing that I ever proposed.

Amy Chua: You know, from very little, I want to grow up to be a garbage man. I'm not going to college. I don't care about this, you know? And the first two-thirds of the book is actually funny if you people don't realize it, but it's pretty funny. But what happened is when she was 13, she rebelled in a not funny way. She got extremely angry and since you have older kids, you must have done something right. But for a lot of parents out there, my heart goes out to you. It's like adolescence, it's hard for everybody. And she, she, you know, we used to argue and fight, but always jump in bed at the end of the night and giggle. And we would read together every night and, you know, my oldest daughter almost thought, oh my God, you're you favor her. You're closer to her. You're always, you know, because she was so much so difficult.

But when she was 13, she suddenly just got so angry and alienated from me and cut off her own hair. And I, there was just one huge fight we had. and I wrote about it, you know, it was in Red Square, Moscow, of all places. And she just said basically the most painful things that anybody to this day has ever said to me. You know, not just I hate you. That's nothing. But like, you're the worst mother. Everything you say you do for me is actually for yourself, you know, you make me miserable.

And for some reason I finally heard it, like, I was like, oh my gosh, I might actually lose my daughter. You know, and I had this complete crisis because I realized, wait, my dad was the black sheep of his family and he hated his own mother and he left, he left the, he left, Asia never went back. So, I actually went cold turkey. I said, okay, we can, you know, I'd been so angry making her practice the violin. And I said you can drop the violin. You can go to your friend's houses. We're going to, we're going to try to work this out. And that is when I started writing the book.

The day after that fight, I just went to my computer and started writing it. And it was just supposed to be like a family thing. Like I showed them every page and I think it, in the end, I think it actually helped my daughters understand what I was doing. I think from their perspective, it was just like, why are you being so mean all the time and you won't let us do anything? But I think when I, when they read it from my perspective, they were like, that's what you were thinking, you know.

So, so that's the genesis of the book. And, and the last third of the book of course took me much longer. But so, I did not write this book as any kind of expert. I wasn't trying to be controversial. I thought it was going to be like a funny memoir. And friends of mine tried to warn me. They're like, oh my God, you, you, you said this to your daughter, you know? And I just said, I just, I don't know. I guess I would just blind to it. I thought people would see that it was very humorous and that, you know, that my daughters got all the punchlines. And also, that at the end, there's a giant switch where I basically totally switch gears, you know, and just kind of try to figure out, like what's the best balance to have.

And then what happened is the book, I don't know if it would've been controversial at all, but the Wall Street Journal, about a week before the book came out, excerpted the most controversial parts of the book. Like the most just everything. And they put this, they slapped this headline on it, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” which is the opposite of what I think. I mean, the cover of my book says that this, this was supposed to be, you know, about how Chinese parenting is better, but instead it's about a clash of cultures and how I was, you know, humiliated by my 13-year-old or something like that.

So that's, I think what triggered the firestorm that a lot of people didn't even know there was a book that had this arc to it where I actually kind of questioned the way I parented. They just thought it was this big manifesto and it became this international firestorm everywhere. I was controversial here. I was controversial in China. I was controversial in Europe. It was, it was wild.

Steve Hsu: I think for every person who read it all the way to the end, there are probably 10 people who just remember the Wall Street Journal headline, or the, the firestorm, the controversial firestorm that, that, that triggered.

Amy Chua: Totally. Maybe a hundred to one.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, a hundred to one. So, when your daughters raise their kids, what do you think they'll do?

At least what they say. So, there's kind of a happy ending to this. It was really difficult with my younger daughter and even now, our personalities often clash, and I have much more nuanced views now. But the weird thing is I think I would pretty much do the same thing again with some adjustments, which I'm happy to talk about. And both my daughters in these interviews have more recently said that they would probably like to raise their kids the same way, which really surprised me. I don't think they felt that way, you know, when they were a little bit younger. But I think right now, you know, when you were saying that it's a different era, I think, you know, my kids are so much older now they're 29 and 26. And they do see that they both have a lot of opportunities. They have a lot of grit, that is they can deal with failure. And this is something that I'm seeing among my students and younger generations that there's a lot of fragility. You know, people get very easily offended, and they can't take things.

Amy Chua: So, I think just looking around at some of their peers, they can see there are people who are, you know, won't leave the house or can't get the jobs, you know, people who were told, oh, just pursue your passion. But fast forward, you know, 15 years later they actually can't get a job that fulfills their passion. Can't get a job at all. So, so at least so far, that's what they say. But you know, we'll see what happens.

Steve Hsu: You know, on the, on the difference between your two daughters, a joke that behavior geneticists always make is that people don't believe that personality is heritable, i.e., partially determined by genes, until they have their second child. And then when they get the second child, they realize, wow, we're raising the second child the same way we raise the first one, but he or she turned out totally different.

And my kids are twins and a boy and a girl, and they've had radically different personalities since day one.

Amy Chua: Yeah, you know, it's something you were asking about. You know, with my oldest daughter now, despite all the work that I put in, I realized, you know, I probably didn't need to be strict with her at all. She was so self-motivated, such a kind of natural student, and loved taking tests. Probably if I had literally let her do anything, she would've been like you, she would've just still, you know, done well at school and been self-motivated.

And the ironic thing is it's with my younger daughter, the one that made that, you know, I made our lives so miserable for 15 years. She's the one that I actually am proud that I applied strict parenting to. I actually think that she came out stronger this way and I, and, and I think she would agree with that. I think that she was afraid of competing with her high-powered older sister who was, you know, just getting straight A's and she was good at everything. And I think that when Lulu was little, she just said, oh God, but what's in it for me? Like, I don't want to do this. I want to do something else. That's why she said, I don't want to go to college. I'm bad at school. You cannot believe how many teachers she said, you know, I see visions. And she had to be tested for all these disorders because she, she would say all these things.

But in the end now, I think she realizes that by proving to herself, that she actually could do things that she did think she could do, you know, and that she was, could, could go to the same school as her sister. I think that she did develop a kind of stronger self-esteem and a more of a self-sense of self-confidence.

Amy Chua: So, so on the question, would you do it all again? I kind of feel like it's, it's with my oldest one that I actually didn't need to do it. And with my second one, you know, at least some version of this, I think I would probably do the same thing.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. You know, my, some of my older colleagues say that, you know, you're maybe at loggerheads with them when they're teenagers and then you get the real verdict later when they're fully adults and they can reflect on the experience and they may come back and say, hey, I'm really glad that you parented me the way you did. And, and that's maybe when you finally get your, your reward or your, your satisfaction from your kids.

Amy Chua: Yeah. And in your case, you know, your own childhood, I mean, it may be that you saw your own. Was it possible that you saw your own parents working so hard? That even though they didn't put any pressure on you, I mean, you know, you have, you have these models of, of like probably pretty disciplined people, right?

Steve Hsu: Yeah. Yes and no. I think. A lot of it for me is just hardwired. I think I just am the way I am, and it wasn't really, to me, it didn't seem that driven by what my parents did.

Amy Chua: Interesting. I believe it, I believe it, my husband's exactly the same way. So, driven and his family, you know, his dad liked, you know, did drugs at the dinner table, you know?

Steve Hsu: Wow. So, you know, you mentioned that the younger generation is different. So maybe I thought, because we, I think we only have a limited amount of time. I'd like to segue into the situation at Yale and other elite universities. And, how you view the, I think in, in particular, I'm interested in things like freedom of expression and freedom of ideas on campus.

And maybe you could say a little bit about how you think things have changed, you know, from say when you were a student?

Amy Chua: So much for the worse. It is unrecognizable now, the campus. Like my job is totally different. The way I behave is totally different. The way the students behave is totally different, and I do not think for the better.

You know, for years, I loved --the classes I teach sound boring, international business transactions and contracts, but I would always be very good at having my conservative students. And there were very few of them, Yale's a liberal place. But kind of, I would start provocative debates and we would, you know, have these amazing discussions and afterwards everybody would go out for a beer or go off for coffee and I'm so proud of friendships that I saw develop among, you know, conservative students, religious students with really left-wing students. Completely not the case anymore.

Amy Chua: Right now, everything is siloed. You know, it's just more and more segregated, self-segregated. Conservatives and liberals never interact. In fact, if you're a progressive student and you even have a friend who belongs to the conservative student group, then you, the progressive student will be shamed and, you know, ostracized. So, there's a lot of policing and this is the subject of my latest book, “Political Tribes.”

And I think some of this is growing pains. It's not all bad. Some of it is our country's getting more diverse and I think a lot of the turbulence we see is something good, which is that previously silenced voices are finally having a chance to speak. You know, it could feel very peaceful and calm and, oh, this is perfect freedom of expression, when you basically have only one dominant group, you know, speaking.

Having said that, I really think the pendulum has swung too far to the other side. You know, people are afraid. They are, you mentioned freedom of expression, and this is at a law school. I teach a very popular class where this is, it's a seminar and I ask people to write response papers. You know, I'll assign some provocative readings from the left and the right. I will assign some libertarian pieces, some law and economics views of contracts, but also critical legal studies, feminist pieces on contracts, and critical race theory, which has been gosh, demonized. And ask people to write reaction papers, just three or four paragraphs. And then I share them in class.

Amy Chua: For the first time in my career, the conversations are still great and I still do it, but these students now want to be anonymous. They're like, you can say what I said in my reaction paper, but please don't identify that it's me. They are now afraid to express their honest views. So, my class is still fantastic, but it's so sad that I have to say read these anonymous emails.

I don't think it's an exaggeration. I think people are genuinely afraid. I think there is a silent majority. One thing that happened to me is, I think similar to you, you know, I've always been a very popular teacher for 25 years. My classes had the longest wait lists, and I had the highest teaching reviews, but in 2018, I was asked to write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by some former students supporting then Judge Kavanaugh, Brett Kavanaugh.

Amy Chua: This is before the sexual harassment accusations came out. And I didn't really want to, but I thought, okay, sure. And I wrote a very limited piece in the Wall Street Journal that just didn't talk about his politics, didn't say anything about jurisprudence, but only said that he was a famously great mentor for my students, especially my liberal students and women and minority students, which is true. I stand by that.

After that, three months later, the Christine Blasey Ford accusations emerged and my whole school at previously, the Dean, had supported him. You know, he was very popular. It's hard to believe now that at Yale Law School, he was a moderate Republican. He would be brought to speak to our students, liberal groups, Black Students Association. But when the sexual harassment allegations came out, there were massive protests at the school and every single professor, pretty much every single professor, except for me, was asked to recant. Like in the cultural revolution, withdraw your support.

And I don't want to defend myself. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but I refused to do that. And again, it was a personal decision for me. I actually lost a lot of friends and I actually sympathized with the students who were angry at me for not doing it. But for me, it's like, I have worked with this guy for 15 years. I am not going to denounce him. You know and I refused.

And after that, this is in 2018, everything changed. There were just these concerted mass kinds of social media attempts to describe me as, you know, like a groomer. There was something about me. Amy Chua tells her students to look like models when they're interviewing him. It was so absurd. Everything was absurd and I denied it and, and there were, you know, but I survived.

Amy Chua: So, it's been like a long three years. Last year there was another crazy scandal. Totally surreal. 100% false about Amy Chua is having secret dinner parties with federal judges during COVID and I, this is such an un-Asian thing to do, my parents would, you know, that's in quotations. But it was so false, and I was just going to take it. And, but my daughter, my, my rebel daughter now with whom I'm very close, said mom, this gen, my generation gets our truth from social media. And if it's false and, you know, the Yale Daily News has reported these false things about you, you need to defend yourself.

So, I couldn't believe it. I wrote a letter to my whole faculty and then I tweeted it saying how false everything was. And I guess because I'm such a controversial figure, the New York Times ended up covering it and The Atlantic did two pieces and then New Yorker, and some more left-wing places that hate me, like Slate.

But in the end, I felt vindicated. So, I feel that we're in a very, very troubling situation now where it's very hard to express your views. Like even to say, oh, I support this person. We're always being called on to denounce people, to sign letters.

But on the other hand, I don't feel that I was canceled. You know, I just got my class lists back and to my gratitude, once again I have the longest wait lists. So, we do still have some variety of free speech. I mean, I was able to defend myself. I lost a lot of friends. There are still students that are protesting me, but not, you know, publicly. But that's kind of where we are now Steven. It's definitely way worse, I think, than it was 20 years ago.

But maybe the pendulum again has swung too far. I mean, a lot of people have looked at my case and said, you know, this shows that maybe if you do fight back and don't just take it, eventually in a very painful process, the truth does come out.

Steve Hsu: You, you covered a lot of ground there. So, I would, if you don't mind, I'd like to ask a few questions about some of the points you raised. So, regarding Kavanaugh, it's been several years now. I remember while during the confirmation hearings, I found some of the, most of the allegations against him not credible. It did. They didn't seem like they could really be true. I realize that there's a whole part of the country that now will denounce me for even having had that opinion. But what, what do you, I mean, and, and feel free to punt on this question.

Amy Chua: Yeah. It's not even punting. But I just, like, I mean, just as a factual matter, you know, there was Christine Blasey Ford, and there was not a single witness or corroborating [witness]. Even her friend said that she had no memory of it. So, it's really one person's word. And on this, I won't take a position, you know? I mean, I was very clear on what people kept saying, do you believe her or not do whatever? And I just said, look, I am not getting any. So, I guess this is punting, but I was like, It's certainly if you use traditional methods of due process, the case was not made.

But I am not speaking on it. I understand how other people feel. I know that in the area of sexual harassment, it's often very difficult to prove your case because there are no witnesses. So, I didn't go there, Steven. I just said, look, I am not going to retract my support for him because every word that's in my Wall Street Journal article, which is only speaking about his mentorship, is true. And I'm not going to retract something that's that I still believe in. And I'm just not taking a position on, you know, on, on the other, on the larger issues. But that has really cost me.

Steve Hsu: I mean, the other, the, the, the main charges were things that he had supposedly done in high school. So, it, I guess it's tough for you to have an opinion on what he was like in high school.

Amy Chua: Yeah, it was that one. It was just one.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. And my understanding is that you have many former students that clerked for him. And so therefore you, at least through them, you might have heard if he were a sexual harasser or a poor mentor.

Amy Chua: Oh, every single one loved him. And, and these are very liberal women. I mean, every single one. That part, again is, this is not a controversial position in terms of all of his clerks. He's famous, Sonia Sotomayor even said so, that he's a famously, you know, excellent mentor with, with nothing close to wrongdoing. You know, the, the wrongdoing allegations were about a party in high school.

Steve Hsu: Right. Now, before you wrote that endorsement or at least opinion on Kavanaugh, you weren't considered a right wing or conservative professor, right?

Amy Chua: Oh my gosh, I'm not. Yeah, I'm an independent, right. I've always been independent. My views are all over the place. And, you know, this is, you know, we mentioned my dad and mom eloped to this country and what they loved so much about this country, it was sort of by contrast to many parts of Asia, where this was supposed to be a country where independence and individualism was valued. And that's what my dad loved. Like he was a rebel, and he had all these crazy views. So, I think it's a shame right now that, you know, you can't just be an interesting individual with eclectic views. Like if you are a progressive, you need to toe the line on every single issue from Israel to gender to criminal law to prisons. And that just seems strangely authoritarian to me and strangely, you know, not, not really healthy.

And what's even worse is that it just, I think it just forces people underground. That is, if you have people who might be moderate conservatives, and then you say, you know, all white people are terrible and admit this and admit that what it's going to do is it's going to force them underground and they're going to be more susceptible to very extremist, much more genuinely racist things on the right.

So, in Political Tribes, this is what I write about. Like I am an independent, I have views that are just kind of a combination of being an immigrant's kid with having two daughters. I'm very progressive on many, many issues. But I just kind of refuse to toe the line. And right now, if you just won't toe the line, that kind of puts you well right of center. Although I will say that my students are very progressive.

Steve Hsu: Yes. Would it be fair to say though that, okay, you have an extreme group on the left that are willing to really make life tough for their professors or colleagues, or fellow students, over, you know, any, any transgression against the, the dominant ideology, but that there's a very large silent majority. Maybe these are the people who continue to want to take your class. They maybe don't want to be identified publicly as disagreeing with leftist orthodoxy, but privately they disagree with it. Is that a fair description of this body?

Amy Chua: Yeah. This, this is what gives me hope for the country, because otherwise, you know, you're reading the news and Twitter, oh my God, you just want to, you know, give up. But yeah, I really do agree with that.

So, 143 students just, you know, Yale's a very small class, that's a quarter of the school. And my class is not that interesting. It's called advanced contracts. It's not some, you know, amazing topic, but 143 students bid for it, and it is making it the, apparently the class with the single longest wait list. You know, there are like 90 people on the waitlist. And many, I would say the vast majority of the students are minorities and first-generation professionals, very, very progressive people. So, I think that makes me think that what you said is right. Like I think people, may not publicly want to come to defense, especially on social media, because then you'll just be skewered, but I think people are starting to get exhausted.

Amy Chua: You know, and my class is pretty famous. So, on my syllabus, I have this big, huge disclaimer, which basically says this class will encourage lively debate across all different political views. And, you know, everyone is entitled to a presumption of good faith. Basically, if something sounds racist to you in this class, you're going to have to give the person a chance. We're going to talk it out. You can't just call them a racist. And I didn't, when I first put that banner on my syllabus, you know, a lot of my colleagues were like, oh my God, you're not going to get any students, you know. But that did not end up being the case. I mean, you could see, yeah, so many students signed up for it.

So that does make me feel that there is a silent majority that thinks that things have gotten a little too far and that, you know, they don't want all this shaming and policing and just being terrified to say anything.

Steve Hsu: You know, it's amazing. I mean that little bit of news that you just gave me really makes my day, because it is, it's one of the first signals I've seen, you know, in the, you know, empirical signals that things are actually improving, right? That you could give that description of the class and those rules of decorum and students still want to participate.

Amy Chua: Yes. Now watch me be fired tomorrow. But yes, well, so far that did give me some hope. I really, I really did. I had the same exact reaction. I was very surprised.

Steve Hsu: That's great. So, do you think it's possible that our elite institutions like Harvard and Yale and Yale Law School, are so leftward leaning that we're actually selecting elites based on a kind of ideology test? So that a student that kind of naturally leans conservative either has to opt out from these elite institutions or they have to basically simulate being a progressive in order to get through it?

Amy Chua: I actually, I do think that I do think that. And at Yale Law School it's actually empirically proven because we have a slightly different system. some, a very few number of students, like, you know, maybe 5% of applications will just be accepted off the top. And those are neutral, ideologically neutral, I think because it's just on amazing accomplishments and numbers. But the vast, you know, 80% of the applications to Yale Law School are farmed out to three random faculty members. And given that our faculty is 90% very progressive, it's much harder to get in as a conservative, I think.

And so, so I, my answer to that is yes. I don't think we have a single conservative professor at the law school. I think we have a, a couple of possibly moderate Republicans, maybe two out of like 50. But it's, it's very skewed. And I know, you know, that conservative students definitely feel like they're a minority, at least at Yale Law School.

Steve Hsu: I don't know if you know Amy Wax at Penn, but I she's now I guess embattled and I think she is saying that she's one of very few publicly conservative, Ivy league law school faculty.

Amy Chua: Yeah, must be, oh my gosh. Yeah. I haven't been following that so much. I, a hundred years ago, believe it or not, she and I clerked together at the same year on the DC circuit. But I haven't, yes. I would assume that's true. I know that she's very outspoken and probably going through a lot of, I mean, probably so much worse than what I've experienced.

Steve Hsu: I think the Dean has initiated some action against her, which I don't think that they've explicitly said they want to fire her or revoke her tenure, but it it's, it's sort of suggested that that might be an outcome.

Amy Chua: Wow.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. So, but you're the, you're the hopeful news of the day.

Amy Chua: I hope so. But I mean, what's really interesting is on the other side, Steven, I've made so many mistakes in my life, you know, I'm unfiltered and, but I didn't do anything remotely wrong, you know? I mean, I wrote an op-ed. That's all I did. And it's been a tough battle for, for three and a half years.

So, hopefully, you know, maybe so many people are being canceled and their friends are being canceled and subjected to this that, you know, it will, it will tip the balance a little in the other direction.

Steve Hsu: I hope you're right. I mean, for example, I don't know if you followed Jonathan Katz at Princeton, but I mean, he was just fired, so, oh, that's a pretty,

Amy Chua: I just saw that. I didn't know anything about it, but I, that, that was terrifying. He was a, I mean a tenured professor. And I thought he was already punished. I was very confused by that.

Steve Hsu: Yes. I think at least people on the right are very outraged over this and they feel that he was more or less targeted based on his, I guess criticisms of the president of Princeton.

Amy Chua: Interesting. Oh gosh.