During a town hall on Tuesday, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) spoke about President Trump's attacks on universities.
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00:00My name is Carl Muller. I'm from Greenville. And my question sort of keys off of what you just said about Harvard.
00:10What can be done in Washington and all across the nation to stop this senseless attack by Trump on colleges and universities?
00:20Yes.
00:51Just consider the difference in our age and let that account for the score that I'm putting up.
00:58But we don't agree on a thing politically.
01:05What I think we have to do is keep the lines of communication open.
01:10This is a great institution.
01:14Walford College, you know, I hadn't seen the recent rankings, but I remember the rankings used to be way up there, Reese.
01:22And so Walford College, but I think the greatness is in our ability to share ideas, to really get the knowledge of that, not in shutting down ideas.
01:42When you've got somebody sitting in the White House saying, you can't teach this, you can't do this.
01:48Come on.
01:48You know, I studied the elections at Tocqueville when I was a student.
01:56Now, some of you may remember, Lester Tocqueville wrote a two-volume work called Democracy in America.
02:05And there's a little line in one of those volumes that says, America's greatness is not that it is more enlightened than any other nation, but rather because she has always been able to repair her faults.
02:24Think about that.
02:26Think about that.
02:27Now, how you do that is with communication.
02:31And people have to keep the lines of communication open.
02:37When you say, when I was in high school or elementary school, we were taught, and I still believe, that the greatest inventor in American history was Thomas Ellison.
02:59And Thomas Ellison gets that designation simply because of the light bulb.
03:07Everybody considers that to be probably the greatest invention of all time.
03:13And that was in our textbooks.
03:16But guess what wasn't in our textbooks?
03:19It's that Thomas Ellison couldn't get that light bulb to work too well.
03:25And it was not until he got Louis Latimer's filament to put in that light bulb.
03:37Thomas Ellison, Thomas Ellison, the white guy, doing great work up there in Massachusetts, Boston, the son of former slaves.
03:54Thomas Ellison, his filament is still in that light bulb right now, R-A-T, right now.
04:05And so what's, how is that to be insulting?
04:11What is the danger to anybody of knowing that two people, one black and one white, successfully sat down together, successfully worked together, and we can all see each other in the other night because of their collaboration?
04:32And so I just think that we have to, I'm amazed at, I remember the first time I really told that Thomas Ellison, Louis Latimer story that I remember sharing it, it was at Gallaudet, I think that's the name of the school.
04:56So in D.C., when, you remember, we went through a period, everybody, some of these are having a black history.
05:04So they said they wanted to have a black history program.
05:06And they called my office, asked me would I come and speak to them.
05:09And I went.
05:11And the staff was a little skittish about it.
05:14But when I got there that day, there were a lot of other people a little skittish about it because I think they had more parents there than students to see what I was going to say.
05:24But when I shared that story, I had so many parents that come up to me afterwards and thanked me for that.
05:32So many of them told me, I never knew that.
05:36That wasn't in the books at that time.
05:39Is that true?
05:40You know.
05:46Yeah.
05:50As my late wife would say, Google it.