Five Minutes With
Ben Stein
While Ben Stein might be best known for his nasal roll call in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and his deadpan plug for “Clear Eyes,” Stein was a politico long before he ever gave away his money on Comedy Central. After working as a poverty lawyer in New Haven and a professor at American University, Stein served as a speechwriter for none other than Richard Nixon, and was floated for years as a possible “Deep Throat,” the source for Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal. An advocate for free-market economics, Stein writes a regular column in the conservative magazine The American Spectator and frequently lands print space in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Though we at CampusProgress.org don’t share all of Stein’s policy positions, we couldn’t help but sit him down for a few minutes when we bumped into him here in Washington, D.C. (He also agreed to make this heartfelt video promoting the Campus Progress National Student Conference.)
Campus Progress: The average college student debt burden is $19,000. What’s the solution?
Ben Stein: Well, I don’t feel it’s bad if students are in debt. Students generally will add so much to their income by virtue of having a college education or graduate education that they’ll easily be able to pay off the debts. If they’re incurring huge amounts of debt for things like art history or Bulgarian folk dancing that are not going to allow them to earn more money, then they’re in a lot of trouble. But I don’t feel it’s the job of the factory worker in Detroit or the taxi driver to pay more taxes to help students learn Bulgarian folk dancing or basket weaving, so if people incur debts I think they should have to pay for them themselves.
What about the financial indiscretions of the student loan companies? Recent investigations revealed that lenders are giving gifts to financial aid officers as incentives for them to promote those companies to students.
If there’s bribery going on, it should be punished, as bribery always should be.
What do you think will be the most important and defining issue of the 2008 presidential campaign?
Iraq was such a catastrophic mistake, such a disastrous, horrible mistake that it’s almost too easy to say Iraq. I don’t know how we’re going to get out of it easily except by just one day waking up and saying, “We’ve got to get out.” But that’s one problem. Once we’ve done that, there’s still a lot of terrorists out there in the world who want to harm us. I think the big problem for the rest of America’s future is making peace between America and the rest of the world. I mean, there are just too many people out there who want to harm us. We’ve got to figure out some way to make peace with them. We can’t defeat them all, unless we’re just going to bomb the whole world with nuclear weapons. We’ve got to figure out what it is they’re so angry about and try to make them stop being so angry about it.
You wrote a New York Times column proposing a tax increase on the wealthiest Americans in order to fund the troops in Iraq.
I would like to see a very significant tax increase on very high income people. There are an awful lot of people in this country who earn $5 million a year or more. You’d be amazed how many there are. I would like to see a surtax on their income tax used to pay for additional pay for men and women in the armed forces. I don’t like the fact that while men and women are getting paid $1,500 a month to throw away their lives in Iraq, others are having $10 million birthday parties for their 13-year-old children. That’s an outrage. That is just disgraceful, that’s Marie Antoinette, horrible decadence, and I don’t like seeing it at all. If people want to make money — fine, it’s a capitalist system, they’re supposed to be making money. But for people to be living so decadently while others are suffering and giving up their lives and being paid miserable slave wages, is ridiculous.
Do you think that this war was premised on the idea that we wouldn’t need the wealthy to sacrifice?
I think Mr. Bush was just horribly misinformed about this. I blame Rumsfeld. I’ve known Rumsfeld a long time, he’s never been very smart, and he’s always kind of looking for the easy way out, and I blame him very much for this. But you know the buck stops with Mr. Bush: if he didn’t realize it by 2005 he should have realized it by 2006, if he didn’t realize it by 2006 he should have realized it by 2007—it’s either going to call for a massive national mobilization, or get out. And I don’t think even with a massive national mobilization we could win this war in Iraq, unless we were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people and just terrorize the whole country into submission, and if we do that we lose our souls as Americans. So that’s just what America’s not all about. America’s not supposed to be all about one group of people becoming billionaires while another group of people is offering up their lives for $1,500 a month either.
You were a college professor—
Three times. American University in Washington, D.C., U.C. Santa Cruz, and Pepperdine in Malibu.
One of the things we oppose at Campus Progress is David Horowitz’s academic freedom campaign. How do you feel about Horowitz’s attempts to fight what he calls liberal bias among professors by preventing them from discussing controversial issues?
I feel that the college campus situation is wildly skewed against conservatives; wildly, insanely. I’m not sure that legislation is called for to change it, but it’s a very bad situation in terms of how hard it is for conservatives to get their viewpoints across on college campuses. Although I must say very few have as hard a time as I did at Santa Cruz. I was there in ’72, and there were 1,500 votes cast on the campus precincts for the election, among which only 3 were for Nixon, all the others were for McGovern. Of those three, one was moi, one was my girlfriend Pat, and one was a fellow who was a Vietnam veteran who was just back. But I think it’s not that bad everywhere.
Illustration: August J. Pollak
JC Penney CEO Backs Ellen Degeneres After Conservative Group Calls for Boycott
Arizona Wants G-Rated Professors; Stanford Scores Six Billion with Fundraiser
Biden Echoes President’s Calls for Accessible, Affordable Education