Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) graduated from Stanford in 1982 before attending law school and going into politics. He has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2001, representing a district east of Los Angeles, California. He currently serves as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, where he has distinguished himself by the rigorous, objective approach he has taken to his position. Stanford Politics talked to Rep. Schiff on Nov. 26, 2019, when the House’s impeachment inquiry against President Trump was not yet completed and his Intelligence Committee was conducting hearings with relevant witnesses. Rep. Schiff spoke about his time as an undergraduate at Stanford, his career choices, and emerging challenges in our 21st-century political environment.
Stanford Politics: Did you and your family pay much attention to politics growing up?
Adam Schiff: I did pay attention to it. I’m originally from Boston. We moved to California when I was eleven. Just growing up in the Boston area during the Kennedys it was hard not to breathe politics in the ether. I came from a divided household. My father’s side of the family were all Democrats. My mother’s side of the family were all Republicans, and so I think my brother and I grew up believing that neither party had a monopoly on good judgement all of the time, but we followed politics, and at the same time I wasn’t really involved in political life at Stanford. I was premed, and I was a poli sci major, but I wasn’t involved in student government or anything like that. And I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I thought about medicine and then I was interested in public policy and in government and I’m really grateful now in hindsight for my indecision because I ended up taking a broad variety of classes at Stanford, everything from Shakespeare to history and political science to chemistry and modern physics to photography and I feel I got a really well-rounded education. And when I think back, the most memorable class I had was actually modern physics, where I felt like I wanted to find people off the street when I left the classroom and tell them what I had learned because it was just so mind-blowing that you could shoot a beam of energy into a vacuum tube and have a positive and an anti-positive particle fly out where there was nothing there before. It was just incredible. And had I not been premed I would never have taken that class, so I’m a big believer in using your undergraduate years to be a generalist because throughout life you just become more and more a specialist.
SP: Do you have any regrets about not studying physics in grad school or becoming a doctor?
AS: No, I don’t. I represent the jet propulsion laboratory—JPL—so I get to meet with JPL scientists all the time, and I consider it, every time I meet with them, part of my lifelong PhD program. But I’m grateful for the choice I made to do what I am doing because I find it enormously rewarding. Not always easy, like not right now, not easy at all, but I’m grateful that I made the decision I did, and it’s certainly been an interesting career path.
SP: Do you think that our media environment makes it difficult to make a difference doing your job?
AS: I think that the way we get our information now is so balkanizing of the country that it is enormously difficult to break through the political divide. When I was at Stanford, I remember rushing back to my dormitory to watch Walter Cronkite’s last broadcast, and that was a time when there was a broad category of accepted facts, and we might differ on what to do with those facts, but we at least agreed that they were facts. Now we are in an environment where social media algorithms curate the news they know we want to see and we turn on a channel to get the news we want to hear, and there is much less ability to be exposed to contrary points of view. And of course, on top of all that, sits an administration that believes the truth isn’t the truth and people are entitled to their alternate facts, and I don’t think there is anything more corrosive to a democracy than an idea that there is no truth.
SP: Do you think politics has fundamentally changed since you were growing up in the 70s?
AS: I think we are going through a period of enormous disruption right now—economic disruption with globalization and automation—but also an information environment that is incredibly polarized, and the revolution in communication represented by social media I think is every bit as significant as the invention of the printing press, but we had hundreds of years to get used to that innovation, and this has happened overnight. It’s a medium by which lies travel faster than truths and by which fear and anger literally go viral, and I think we are still trying to adapt to it and haven’t figured it out and so I think it’s enormously jarring to people, and it’s going to take time to acclimate and I hope figure this out for the benefit of our society.
SP: Do you think there is a solution to this social media information polarization?
AS: We are going to need to find an answer. I don’t know what it is. In a country where we rightly venerate our First Amendment it’s difficult for the government to do anything about this problem, and of course we are in a global information environment as well, so I really don’t know the answer, but the problem is clear enough. The impact now, how we get our information has deeply divided the country, and that shows no immediate sign of abating. I have confidence we will get through this, we have been through worse divides in our history, but we are in a fight over truth, in which some of the most significant political actors in the land, including the President of the United States, believe that they can make their own truths and turn fiction into some form of alternate reality.
SP: Do you think that your educational background has given you a special appreciation for facts?
AS: I think I was lucky to receive get a wonderful education at Stanford and a well-rounded education with a grounding in history, with a grounding in values, and an intellectual curiosity. I think it’s just a magical environment at the Farm and one that I have carried with me throughout my life. I feel so fortunate to have been able to go to school there.
SP: Do you think your study abroad experience had an impact on your undergraduate education?
AS: I think it did. There’s nothing like traveling to broaden your horizons, and what I’ve said about my current job, I think was equally true of my college experience, which is, hour for hour, minute for minute, second for second, there is no better education than travel, and the most rewarding experiences of my current job are when I get to visit our service members and our intelligence community professionals around the world in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen and Pakistan and the Philippines to see the work they do, the courage they demonstrate, to learn from others around the world, and I had my first experience with that as a Stanford student. I think it’s just an incomparable experience.
SP: Do you think the values in Silicon Valley need to change if the truth is going to reclaim its place?
AS: I think that [people in]Silicon Valley, like all the rest of us, are going to need to step back from what they’ve created, understand the danger they’ve unleashed, along with the good, and figure out how to mitigate it. You know, these algorithms, which are dividing us, weren’t designed to divide us, they were designed to keep our attention to their platforms. It wasn’t an insidious idea. But the effect has been, nonetheless, to divide us. And so I think that there is a social responsibility to figure out what can be done about that. Awfully brilliant people in Silicon Valley created this social media world, and they are going to have to turn those talents and figure out how to minimize the damage that some of those tools have wrought.
SP: Is there anything else you might be able to share about your time at Stanford?
AS: You know, the only other thing I would say is that some of those wonderful experiences are not necessarily academic, but they are part of the wonderfully well-rounded nature of going to Stanford. I rowed crew my first year, I had a brief rugby career before I got hit by an Australian student—that was the end of that. And then I did karate for my last couple of years at Stanford, and I have wonderful memories of all of that. I loved taking photographs, I loved running by the dish, I loved hanging out by Lake Lag or getting bao at the Asian Tea House, going up to San Francisco to get my ass kicked at a dojo up there, I mean all of these were just great experiences and made Stanford just such a unique place.
Cass Plowman, a junior, is the newsletter editor and a staff writer for Stanford Politics.