Webster University President Julian Schuster; Coronavirus reactions, student loan debt & chess

About this episode

Vance interviews Julian Schuster, president of Webster University and an economist by training, about leadership under COVID, student debt, and — unexpectedly — competitive chess. Schuster frames the pandemic response through Putnam's "two-level games," arguing most leaders failed not by choosing wrong but by refusing to choose at all, deferring to "prevailing wisdom" (mask mandates, closures) without genuinely reasoning through tradeoffs — what he calls being a "wood pusher" in chess, moving pieces without a plan. He connects mask-wearing and social distancing to a deeper cost: losing the ability to read facial expressions and physical cues that have anchored human trust for millennia, which combined with economic anxiety, produces "rampant insecurity" that manifests as either aggressive assertion or withdrawal — undermining the interpersonal fabric society depends on. On student debt, Schuster (an applied economist) reframes the "crisis" as structurally identical to any leveraged bet on future income (mortgages, car loans), except distorted by two things: the removal of bankruptcy discharge (which Vance raises) and rising education costs outpacing income growth, meaning risk-based selection could systematically exclude bright-but-financially-risky students in favor of "low-risk mediocre" ones. He refuses binary free-market-vs-regulation framing, insisting each is a tool suited to different situations rather than an ideology. The back half covers his personal history growing up under a different economic/political system (former Yugoslavia) and his decision to recruit chess grandmaster Susan Polgar to build Webster's championship chess program, framing chess as "the great equalizer" that teaches strategic time-and-space thinking transferable to leadership, and closing on the philosophical question of whether you play the pieces or the person across the board.

“Nothing is the same as it used to be... we are part of the larger system... we need to take into consideration the environment that our students are coming from.”

“We have societal malice, that less and less we are questioning prevailing wisdoms. We are adopting those prevailing wisdoms and becoming crusaders of that wisdom without exactly understanding is this wise at all.”

“The rampant insecurity of individuals... what people do when they're insecure, it is flight or fight... some people become more assertive and some people are going back into their cocoon.”

Key moments

• ~5%: Putnam's "two-level games" applied to pandemic leadership — the domestic/international double board reframed as balancing technical vs. adaptive challenges.
• ~19%: "Wood pushers" — chess metaphor for leaders who move without understanding, diagnosing pandemic decision-making as reactive rather than strategic.
• ~24%: Masks and distancing erode facial-expression-based trust, amplifying societal insecurity and selfishness — "society... is only sustainable in which people learn to rely on each other."
• ~37%: Student debt reframed as a leveraged bet on future income, structurally like any loan, but distorted by non-dischargeability and outpacing cost growth.
• ~59%: Free market vs. regulation rejected as an ideological binary — "economics doesn't exist outside the society... it's a reflection of the relationship that exists in society."
• ~68%: Personal history under a different economic/political system — "I had the best of the two possible worlds."
• ~75%: Recruiting Susan Polgar and building Webster's chess dynasty — chess as "the great equalizer," a didactic tool independent of race or wealth.
• ~93%: "Objectively you play only the pieces... subjectively... you always play a human being" — closing paradox on rationality vs. psychology in competition.

Notable quotes

“We call them wood pushers... it is not even checkers, it is a level below checkers. You're just doing something to create the full sense of purpose.”

“Pandemic brings the worst in the human being, and that is selfishness... the same individuals who are wearing masks... are going to shift what is risky and what is not risky through a selfish prism.”

“Objectively you play only the pieces... subjectively, those pieces are moved by another human being, and we all have our strengths and weaknesses.”

“We end up with a tremendous amount of individuals unable to repay their loan... that is inseparable from the general situation which exists in our society.”