‘A period of great disruption ahead but big opportunity for country like India’
LSE's president and vice-chancellor, Larry Kramer, emphasises India's need for strong universities and partnerships, advocating for interdisciplinary education
You head one of the best social science universities in the world. Most of the good universities are still in the West, which is now in a state of demographic decline. The demographically dynamic countries, India included, have a lot of students but do not have many good universities. What do you think we can do about this asymmetry?
I suppose two things. One is you can send more of your students to LSE. We have a long-standing relationship with India, right back to the very beginning of the school. We love getting Indian students. We’re like an export industry. We give them an education and export them back to their home country.
In India itself, it is just a question of building. Obviously, the talent is here, so it is a question of developing the universities. I do think it makes sense for government policy to develop strong partnerships with universities from outside India that are longer and more well-established. I would be as interested in working with Indian universities directly to help strengthen them as setting up an alternative.
In India, one of the biggest challenges in the economy is employability despite higher education enrolment rising continuously. India’s New Education Policy is trying to promote the idea of inter-disciplinary learning. Do you think it can work? As the Dean of Stanford Law School, you are known to have pushed for inter-disciplinary approach to legal education.
Not only do I think it can work, I think it is essential. I think it is the right way to educate people. The problems of the world cannot be solved from within a single frame of thinking. So, students need to be, as they become non-students, as they enter the market, capable of talking to and working with people from other disciplines. It really broadens your ability to problem solve well beyond just the two or three disciplines that you get exposed to.
LSE has had an old association with India. B R Ambedkar had a doctorate from here. I G Patel was a director at LSE. Many on your faculty have worked and continue to work extensively on India. Do you see a scope and imperative for deepening, and may be, institutionalising LSE’s engagement with India? Government of India is looking to kickstart internship and credit exchange programmes for students in Indian universities. You met finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman along with N K Singh, an honorary fellow at LSE, on Monday. Were any of these things discussed?
Yes, we talked about exactly these things. The purpose of the meeting with the finance minister was very much to get a better understanding of both India’s ambitions for economic growth and how that might relate to education and then where we could play a role. I think the ambitions that the country (India) has are incredible.
Back to the earlier point, I think the need to grow the education system and make that accessible to more people is imperative. And, you know, I think LSE can have an important role to play, not so much in size, I mean, we are one institution and we are still relatively small. I think the approach is basically the right idea.
As far as the employability problem, I think is more key to economic growth than it is to training. People are getting appropriate training, but there need to be jobs for them. And that’s where the economic growth ambitions become so important.
You said something very important during a conversation with Maurice Saatchi in LSE earlier this month. “I think one of the major problems we have today and we’re experiencing it every day on campus are people who are so firmly convinced that they have the truth that it kind of justifies all sorts of shutting out and closing down and cancelling and all of that”, you said. Samuel Huntington made this argument in 1988 where he said good political science, unlike pure sciences, cannot thrive without democracy. Have the social sciences lost their democratic ethos to some extent? Can we describe it as self-defeating self-righteousness? On the other hand, you have, in your home country (US), the government is trying to dictate terms to universities.
Let me start with the first question. It’s not a problem of the social sciences per se. It’s a much broader problem. We are not having students come with a kind of open mind and then shutting them down. They are coming very much primed with the idea that there are ideas that they disagree with so strongly they want to close them out and they want them not to be allowed on campus. And that is not just in universities and so on. It is a shift that has taken place over the last 20 or 30 years. It is not as though the issues today are more divisive than the issues were two or three decades ago, but the way in which people have come to think about dealing with them has shifted. I think we need to kind of remind ourselves of the importance of actually remaining open to engagement with ideas that we really hate and remaining open to the idea that trying to shut them down is usually counterproductive and a bad way to go about making any kind of progress anyway.
I think what’s happening in the US is a massive mistake. It’s also going to be massively damaging to the American university system in ways that are going to have huge negative impacts both globally and domestically. And partly for this point, right, what you do is you create an atmosphere on campus which we have to fight, where people don’t feel free to explore ideas, don’t feel free to express their points of view and learn, or to try and teach people. And as soon as you do that, you undermine kind of the fundamental goals of education.
“How capitalism should change is something we must debate. The only position that makes no sense is protesting that any change is anti-capitalism”, you wrote in the Financial Times in 2022. You think this debate is getting any better?
The debate that I was talking about was what people now call neoliberalism, is just one version of a capitalist system. And somehow, they captured the word capitalism so that anything that’s other than their system came to be treated as anti-capitalist. I was trying to make the point in that column that there are actually multiple versions of capitalism, which is fundamentally a commitment to a free enterprise system, and we need to think about how to do that.
I think where the debate has come in the last few years is, first, the critique of the neoliberal version has taken pretty broadly. I think there are still some market fundamentalists out there, but increasingly people recognize that way of trying to address problems in a world as interdependent and complex as ours, is not working for people.
I think we still have a long way to go on what’s an alternative that can be broadly understood and shared. That part of the debate is just getting started. And I should say it is one of the key things I hope to see happen at LSE. You know, we have an amazing group, not just of economists, but people in political science and the various disciplines that we’re bringing together around an initiative, which we’re calling Cohesive Capitalism, as one of the places to begin to develop and think about what comes next and what will work in the modern economy.
One of the reactions to growing populism and authoritarianism has been to bank on the safeguard of institutions. Your most seminal work, if I interpret it rightly, actually, talks about the dangers of institutional power grab. (US) Supreme Court judges should interpret the constitution “with an awareness that there is a higher authority out there with power to overturn their decisions—an actual authority, too, not some abstract “people” who spoke once, two hundred years ago, and then disappeared”, you write in the epilogue of your book “The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review”. Can you elaborate a bit more on how you see this dialectic playing out in praxis?
You start with a system that is committed to popular sovereignty, which is that the ultimate sovereign authority rests in the people at large. The initial practices are direct democratic practices. It is very active, in-the-streets democracy. Of course, you can’t really govern very well that way. The solution that was reached is the idea that we’re going to set up this government, we are going to give it different departments, we are going to divide the authority among them, they are all agents of the people, they all have different political interests, and then it is going to be the interplay between them that is a way for popular sovereignty to express itself. But ultimately, the clear decision of the popular sovereign has to go.
The way I used to explain this to my students was I would say, look, imagine I run a house, and I have a gardener who takes care of the garden, and I have a cook who takes care of the meals. If the gardener wants to keep coming into the kitchen and telling the cook how to cook the meals my answer would be to the gardener, that is not your job. Your job is to take care of the garden. If there is an issue with the cook, I will take care of it. The people are me.
That’s fundamentally the idea here, and I think we are seeing it play out in the modern context. Most of the time, the institutions of government, are designed to keep the government working effectively during times of normal politics. When you get to extreme stress points, institutions cannot protect democracy. People have to protect institutions. Those are the moments when it comes back to the popular sovereign to sort of settle how things are supposed to run and which institution they’re going to ban. They’re going to have to solidly express a view. It doesn’t require them to be in the streets because politicians are acutely attuned to where their constituents are. The politicians who are opposed to that are going to find it very difficult to maintain their positions and that’s how the institutional settlement will take place.
We’ve seen that happen in the US, across American history, both long periods of normal politics and these periodic points of high stress where one or the other of the branches makes a bid to fundamentally change the constitutional order and either wins or loses. That’s what’s happening now in the U.S. The Trump administration is making a bid to fundamentally change the constitutional order and turn a kind of three co-equal branches model into the president as CEO over the country. We will see how that plays out. We’re in just the beginning phases of it. But to my mind, it’s unquestionably a kind of constitutional crisis in the sense of a bid to fundamentally change.
Another tension that the world is having to deal with today is the contradiction between what one could call the sovereign and international law. Now, one can say that people in the country are free to decide what they want to do. But we’re seeing more and more governments, Trump included, invoke the sovereign to sort of question things such as multilateralism, climate finance, sustainability, which is once again a difficult question to navigate. How do you see this tension playing out?
First, there is no sovereign out there. Nobody believes that the people of the world are ultimately sovereign. So, it is something more along the lines of a lot of individuals. It’s more along the lines of a classic game theory problem where you have individual players who need to recognize that if they all just pursue their own interests, they are all going to be worse off and then find their way to cooperative solutions. We did that for a long time. And as often happens in game theory, you reach periods where one or more of the players forgets that, begins to act, and the other players have to act accordingly. I think we are in one of those periods.
So, what we can expect is a period of significant disruption. The question is, how long will it take? I don’t think I know or anybody does. What will the costs be? I don’t think I know or anybody does. But at some point, we’ll find our way back to a new kind of order that works for the players and is sort of in everybody’s interest, more so.
So, you’re fundamentally an optimist?
I am, ultimately. We had 300 years of middle-ages but eventually we found our way to something. The costs can be pretty high in the interim. For a country like India, this is also an incredible opportunity. There is about to be a huge leadership void, a vacuum that has been created by the withdrawal of the US. There’s only a handful of global economies and powers that are in a position to really help move us towards a different order that’s more constructive for everybody. India is certainly one of those and in a pretty unique position because of the size of the population, the growing economy, the fact that it is still a very strong democracy, you know, all those things together.
