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George Mason University

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George Mason University is a university in Fairfax, Virginia, and the academic affiliation of guests featured in four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show. In the excerpts it appears chiefly as an institutional credential — the employer of economists and law professors — and once as a litigant against one of its own faculty members. The excerpts do not describe the university’s founding, governance, or curriculum.

The economics department

Bob Zadek introduced Don Boudreaux as a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, who had been chair of the economics department from 2001 until August of 2009 Legalize Insider Trading (2009). Boudreaux was the guest for an episode arguing that insider trading should be legal, on the grounds that it produces more accurate stock prices and better capital allocation. Bob framed the episode around the claim that insider trading is a crime in the United States and much of the civilized world, describing it as conduct in which someone who works for a publicly traded corporation acquires material non-public information about that company and uses it to buy or sell the stock. He cited the indictment of the president of a company called Galleon on an alleged $2 billion insider trading scam, and invoked Milton Friedman’s words that we do not have enough insider trading. Bob also promoted Boudreaux’s blog, Cafe Hayek, telling listeners to subscribe.

Bryan Caplan was introduced as an economist who teaches economics at George Mason University, a blogger at EconLog, and the author of three books, the most recent being The Case Against Education, the subject of the episode Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Higher Education (2018). Bob noted that Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter had been labeled by The New York Times as the best political book of that year, and that his other books were Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and the education book under discussion. Caplan’s thesis, as he stated it, is that most of what students study in school they will never need to know after the final exam, and that employers nonetheless pay well for it because studying subjects one does not use impresses employers — a way of getting certification, or what he called signaling. He distinguished signaling from the genuine teaching of useful skills, conceding that literacy and numeracy are genuinely taught in school and that employers need them, while arguing that much other material falls into the signaling category. He identified three traits a degree signals: that the holder is smart, that the holder is hardworking, and that the holder is conformist — the last described as a person who, when told to jump, does not argue but asks how high.

Caplan argued that government subsidies encourage schooling because after subtracting the subsidy it becomes cheaper, and that a large part of the problem is government pouring money into education on the reasoning that if one person gets more school and does better, everyone would do better if everyone did school — a reasoning he called into question. He said most of his focus was the taxpayer’s point of view, and that his aim was not to make college cheaper so more people go but to stop the madness and return to a society where one can get a good job right out of high school, which he said really used to be the case. Asked whether most universities are in effect diploma mills, he said that is probably too broad a statement, because the classic diploma mill requires little work, whereas most universities make students jump through a sufficiently numerous and challenging set of hoops that a shocking number of people start, pay the money, and then do not finish; at lower-ranked schools, he said, most students would not finish even going full-time. He characterized his own account as in a way more pessimistic than the diploma-mill story, because students spend years doing boring work they do not like and get only the seal of approval rather than job skills.

Bob drew an analogy to healthcare, arguing that in education as in healthcare the person spending the money is spending somebody else’s money, and that students receiving loans or subsidies do not care much what things cost, at least not immediately. Caplan agreed that paying one’s own money makes one more careful, but said that is not the sole problem, and that it is important to look at what students actually study. Bob also pressed Caplan on whether a student with a degree in a subject with little job value — he used poetry as his example — still realizes sufficient value from the better job the degree brings. Caplan agreed that this is his whole point: people advance their own interests by showing off, which works individually but not socially, because the more showing off there is, the more impressive one must be to get an employer to take a second look.

The Antonin Scalia School of Law and the vaccine mandate case

Todd Zywicki was introduced as a professor who teaches law at George Mason University’s School of Law, the Antonin Scalia School of Law, and as the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the university Vaccine Mandates, George Mason, and the Bill of Rights (2021). Bob framed the episode as a case of David taking on Goliath in which Goliath caved as soon as David put a rock in his hand. According to Bob’s introduction, Zywicki objected to his employer requiring that he be vaccinated as a condition of teaching law at his law school — not because he is an anti-vaxxer, but because he had had the COVID virus and therefore had at least the same level of immunity as if he had been vaccinated. Bob said the university would have none of it and did not care about the medical facts, on the reasoning that a rule is a rule and nobody gets to violate the rule; litigation started and stopped quickly, and the university conceded the point, but not quite. Bob said the university caved rather than allow the case to establish a precedent.

Jenin Younes was introduced as Zywicki’s counsel in the litigation and as a lawyer with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which Bob described as a relatively new public interest law firm that had been around only a short period of time. Bob said listeners might recall Professor Philip Hamburger, whom he described as one of the founders, perhaps the founder, of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, and he praised the complaint in the case as beautifully written. The episode’s listed topics include vaccine mandates, natural immunity, bodily autonomy, George Mason University, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, constitutional law, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, and Buck v. Bell; the excerpt breaks off before the discussion of those cases and of the mandate itself.

David Bernstein and racial classification

David Bernstein was introduced as a Foundation Professor of Law at George Mason University and a blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy, and as the author of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America Exploring the Borderlands of Legal Whiteness with David Bernstein (2022). Bob said the book would be going out in the middle of July any day now, and that it concerns how government decides who you are and then what privileges you have or do not have because of the classification a government has assigned to you. Bob framed the episode with the phrase legally white alongside the familiar phrase legally blind, and said the founders rejected any concept of a peerage system in which rights, privileges, and detriments were acquired by the accident of how and where one was born and from whose womb one emerged. He also recalled that one of his first shows, about a decade earlier, had been with Ward Connerly, whom he described as an African American businessman and former regent of the University of California who had led a successful ballot initiative in California to overturn affirmative action. The excerpt breaks off before Bernstein’s own account of the book’s argument.

Across episodes: the university as affiliation and as adversary

Across the four episodes, George Mason University shifts from background affiliation to party. In the 2009 and 2018 episodes it supplies the guest’s title and department — Boudreaux as economics professor and former department chair, Caplan as economics teacher and author — and the university is not otherwise discussed Legalize Insider Trading (2009) Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Higher Education (2018). In the 2022 episode it again supplies a title, Foundation Professor of Law, for a guest discussing racial classification Exploring the Borderlands of Legal Whiteness with David Bernstein (2022). Only in the 2021 episode does the university become an actor, as the employer whose vaccine mandate Zywicki challenged and which, on Bob’s account, conceded rather than let the case set a precedent Vaccine Mandates, George Mason, and the Bill of Rights (2021). The excerpts show no development of a single question about the university across episodes; the topic is touched in four episodes whose subject matter otherwise does not overlap.

What the sources do not cover

The excerpts do not state when George Mason University was founded, where its campuses are beyond Fairfax, how it is governed or funded, or what its admissions and curriculum look like. They do not give the name of the vaccine mandate policy, the court in which Zywicki sued, the terms of the university’s concession, or the holdings of Jacobson v. Massachusetts and Buck v. Bell, which appear only in an episode topic list. The excerpts also do not report the substance of Bernstein’s book beyond Bob’s framing, and they break off before the guests’ own presentations in the 2021 and 2022 episodes.

Guests and episodes

30 appearances by 14 guests, 2009–2023.

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