- Good evening everybody, and welcome.
Thank you for being here.
My name is Emily Chamlee-Wright
and I'm the president
of the Institute for Humane Studies
at George Mason University,
and for those of you who
might not be familiar
with the Institute for Humane
Studies, or IHS for short,
I just wanna say a little
bit about the work we do.
Since 1961, IHS has been
promoting debate and discussion
of classical liberal
ideas within the academy.
Ideas like individual
liberty, economic freedom,
and the appropriate limits
on government power.
Classical liberal scholars
tend to ask questions like,
what are the rules of society
that lead to widespread human flourishing?
And with questions like
that, who wouldn't be excited
about classical liberal ideas, right?
I mean, these were the
ideas that got me excited
as a student when I was
at George Mason University
many, many years ago,
but those are also the sorts of questions
that have sustained my
intellectual curiosity and growth
ever since, and that really
gets to the how of IHS.
How is it that IHS champions
classical liberal ideas?
The main way we do that is by supporting
the growing community
of students and scholars
who are interested in plumbing the depths
of the classical liberal tradition
and wrestling with the tensions
and as yet unsolved questions
or unanswered questions
within the classical liberal tradition.
And that's really what IHS does.
So speaking of that liberal
tradition for a moment,
one of the core principles is that
human beings ought to have the right
to pursue their life projects
unencumbered and uncoerced from others,
particularly from an
overweening and intrusive state.
And so from that starting point,
the principle of freedom of speech
follows directly from that.
The right of people to engage
freely in exchange of ideas
without fear and intimidation
just tumble right out
of that core principle.
Our best ideas, the
best ideas that we have,
they need the bright lights
of intellectual scrutiny and criticism
so that they can get better,
so that they can be improved.
And just as importantly,
the worst ideas we encounter in society
also need the bright lights
of intellectual scrutiny and criticism
so that they can be weeded out.
One of the other fundamental principles
of the classical liberal tradition
is that it's discourse,
slow discourse, that is the best way
for us to solve the differences
amongst ourselves, right?
And we know that discourse can be slow
and aggravating, frustrating,
sometimes even deeply upsetting,
but it is far better than the alternative,
which is either monolithic power
or worse, violence.
This is then the context
in which we enter into these conversations
about free speech,
is that if you want a society
that enjoys widespread human flourishing
and lots of lots of
peaceful social cooperation,
then free speech and open inquiry
are going to be necessary
ingredients in that.
But on college and university campuses
in the contemporary context,
we're really facing a
fundamental existential challenge
with people challenging and doubting
the very value of the
free exchange of ideas.
On college campuses now we
have those in the community
who might be faculty,
might be administrators,
certainly students,
who are doubting the value of
free speech and open inquiry.
Especially if that rubs
up against other concerns,
concerns for social justice, for example.
Concerns about the well-being of students,
the psychological well-being
and emotional well-being of students,
that in the throes of
contentious and open debate,
that these other concerns
might get sacrificed.
This represents a real challenge to us.
This questioning
represents a real challenge
to the classical liberal tradition,
but it also represents a real opportunity,
at least I believe that's the case.
And at IHS I think we
believe that that's the case,
because it's an opportunity to articulate
to a new generation
the fundamental values of open inquiry
to a liberal society more broadly.
And it is an opportunity for us
to lay the groundwork of what's necessary
for achieving, maintaining,
and yes, improving
a free society.
And in the course of our discussions,
we are going to be talking a
lot about the value of reason
and its critical role in a free society.
I also want to talk about
reason's fair companions,
which include intellectual humility,
respect for our intellectual counterparts
on the other side of a debate.
Tolerance and civility.
These are also liberal values
that you'll be hearing more about
from IHS in the months to come
about what are the makings of
a really good conversation,
a genuine conversation in which
we're actually listening to
and learning from one another.
I'm delighted this evening to host
what I know will be one
of those conversations
that will meet that standard.
We have with us four scholars
who are really at the forefront
of free speech and open inquiry
who are pushing forward our understanding
of the connection between free speech
and what is necessary in the enterprise
of achieving the liberal society.
John Hasnas is to my left here.
He is professor of
business at Georgetown's
McDonough School of Business
and professor of law at Georgetown
University's Law Center.
He's also the executive director
of the Georgetown Institute for the Study
of Markets and Ethics.
And we have Todd Zywicki also to his left,
who is the George Mason University
Foundation Professor of Law
at George Mason University's
Antonin Scalia Law School.
He is also a senior scholar
of the Mercatus Center,
our sister organization
at George Mason University
and senior fellow at the Mercatus Center's
F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study
in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.
And to his left we have Nadine Strossen,
who is the John Marshall
Harlan Professor of Law
at New York Law School.
In addition to that
work she has been doing
for a very long time as a faculty member,
she was also the president
of the American Civil Liberties
Union from 1991 to 2008.
What an incredible legacy
she has left there.
She has a forthcoming book titled
HATE: Why We Should Resist It
with Free Speech, Not Censorship,
which is forthcoming from
Oxford University Press in May,
and we can't wait.
And to her left we have Jonathan Rauch,
who is a writer, a
journalist, and senior fellow
with the Brookings Institution.
His 1993 book, Kindly Inquisitors,
is a classic account of how open inquiry
really is essential for
the liberal society.
And if you haven't read it in a while,
I encourage you to pick it up again.
And I encourage you also to pick up
the latest most recent edition of the book
which has really, if I must
say, an exquisite afterword
that is worth getting a fresh
copy of the book itself.
Please join me in
welcoming these panelists
for what I hope will
be a great discussion.
(applause)
Let me dive right in and I
want our focus to begin with,
we're gonna expand away
but we're gonna come
back to students, right,
because it's students that
we're really focused on here.
I want to ask the question, and
anybody can pick it up here,
is what's the best way
for us to reach students,
to help them to understand
that freedom of expression on campus
is part of, is fundamental to,
the educational experience,
even if it's really, really
uncomfortable sometimes.
- A professor should go first.
- You know, the reason
I'm hesitating, Emily,
is that I find once
students are in the room,
I can make the case, but my problem
is there are so many students
that are boycotting
discussions of this issue.
And I was recently speaking
at a very prestigious liberal arts college
that has had some of the
problems that you discussed,
and the professor said to me,
she said it didn't apply to me,
but to other speakers that
she was urging her students,
it didn't yet apply to me.
Maybe after my book comes
out they'll boycott me, too.
But to other professors whose views were,
and we're not talking about alt-right.
We're talking about
people who are advocating
the kind of values that
Jonathan has written about
and the rest of us up here have advocated.
And she said her students say to her,
"Why should I waste my time
"listening to somebody
"that I know I'm going to disagree with?"
So my question is, how do
you get them in the room,
and I think the best way to do that
is to have a discussion.
I prefer that to debate
because I don't see this
as a zero sum game,
where you would get people
with different perspectives,
probably much more diverse
perspectives than we have here,
and list various student groups
across the ideological and other spectrums
to be co-sponsors.
And then once you have them in the room,
my major contention is
for all of those students
who are crusading in ways that
I so applaud and champion,
crusading for social justice
and for racial justice
and for equality and
diversity and inclusivity,
too many of them misunderstand
that freedom of speech, including
for hateful, hated ideas,
they see see that as the
enemy and don't understand
that that is their essential ally.
Once I get them in the room
I think I can make that case.
- If I could just pick up on that.
- [Emily] Sure.
- Because my comment flows so
naturally from yours, Nadine.
I'm not a professor, I'm not on campus.
I don't play a professor on TV.
I do a fair amount of speaking
on this issue on campus
and recently conducted an
informal non-scientific survey
of a whole bunch of Brookings interns
who come out of elite campuses.
And I've concluded that we don't know
how to reach this group,
and that's a problem,
that going to campus
and hitting the John Stuart
Mill libertarian talking points
about the marketplace of ideas
is just not cutting it with this group,
and that they're coming
from a different place.
They're not worried
about traditional stuff
like censorship and the government.
They're worried about personal safety.
They're worried about feeling
attacked in their own home.
And I don't think we figured out
how to talk to them about that.
I strongly support the idea
that Nadine just mentioned.
In fact, I'm working now with a group
called Better Angels to see
if we can get some support
to actually do a pilot on a
university that wants to host it
to get students in a room on
both sides of these issues,
all sides of these issues,
minority rights, speech rights, and so on,
and have a structured conversation
and see if we can reach
at least a few points of breakthrough
as a way to begin to learn
how to talk about it.
'Cause I think we've
gotten pretty good at the,
what I call the supply
side level of free speech,
which is attacking and
knocking down speech codes,
embarrassing campuses that do it.
Foundation for Individual Rights
in Education, for example,
is marvelous at that.
We're way behind the
curve on the demand side,
which is the grassroots demand
for students for protection,
and that, I think,
is where we really have
some homework to do.
- That's a great point.
One of the things that was
quite frankly chilling to me
when I watched the videos
of what happened at Yale
and that sort of thing, is at one point,
some of the students were identified.
They were freshman.
That was a month into their freshman year,
and they were already
attacking free speech
or already attacking
these sorts of things.
Kids are coming to college today
already preprogrammed through,
whether it's bullying,
anti-bully curriculum or whatever,
but they come into college
already predisposed, I think,
towards the kind of
attitudes that Jonathan,
I think that was very
interesting point that you made,
which is they've got a
predisposition when they come in.
I think it combines with the
fact that it's very heady stuff
for a college freshman.
It's very empowering for them, I think,
is a lot of what they feel
like that they're doing,
that they're flexing their muscles.
And too often we get weak backbones
out of university administrators,
who cave to them rather
than standing up to them.
And I think that's a dynamic,
that empowerment dynamic
and a predisposition
combined with a sort of,
I think what Jonathan
is to some extent saying
is a sense that it is justified
by these other feelings that they have,
their feelings of safety
and that sort of thing,
give them a sense that is
a justified sense as well.
And I think it's quite a...
I mean, I think it's a
very vexing challenge
to think about how we deal
with all that as well.
- I heard your question in
an entirely different way.
My hesitation was because
it is a large question
and a small question.
The question of how you
get them in the room,
how to get students in the room,
that might be the large question.
But I'm a professor.
I have students in the room.
And the way I thought of it was,
what do I do when I'm in front of a class?
And students are in the room,
we still make the rules,
and the rule for the
class is anyone can say
anything he or she wants,
as long as you're willing to back it up.
The students are different
now than they were in our day
because they have different
cultural assumptions.
So that requires some
cleverness on our part.
When I present what would be
interesting civil liberty issues
that I dealt with without any kind of,
we just went for it,
now you have to be a little
clever the way you introduce it.
If it has to do with a
social justice matter,
you just give them the case
with the roles reversed.
So it's women in the position
of authority and men who,
you take the assumptions out of it
and you can still get them
to look at the principles
that are underlying it.
We get to make the rules we can enforce,
the fact that everyone
gets to say what they want
to as long as they're polite,
and if we structure the class properly,
the kind of thing we're worried about
represents, in my opinion,
still a minority of the students that are,
it's a different culture,
but it's a minority of the students.
Most students come to
college the way we did.
They still think that this is
where they're gonna discover
the world of knowledge.
This is where real learning goes on.
They don't know yet, they're freshmen.
They think that this is gonna
be real scholarly study,
and they come in serious,
at least for their first year.
And if you expose them to a
good classroom experience,
most of them will go for it.
That doesn't mean there aren't problems.
But it means you can do a lot
by having the proper
structure in the classroom.
- But you know, it's too late by the time,
or, I'm sorry, it's never too late,
but it would be so much better
if we could start this educational process
much much earlier so they don't come in
as first-year college students
with those preconceptions.
Certainly at the college
and graduate school level,
when you're having orientation sessions,
it would be really important to complement
the kinds of diversity
education that are going on now
in terms of tolerating and respecting
and including a range of different people,
but how about tolerating, respecting,
and including a range of different ideas?
And make up for the lack of
education and information
about freedom of speech principles,
I mean, start to make up for it
in those orientation sessions
and acculturate them to that.
But preferably that would have started
even back in kindergarten or pre-K.
- Purdue is doing what you're suggesting,
getting good results.
And I've hit this myself.
Most freshman seem not to have any idea
what the First Amendment says.
They assume hate speech
is not protected by the Constitution.
- That's true for a lot
of government officials--
(audience laughter)
- Well, it is indeed
true for most Americans.
I remember in the early '80s
in my first newspaper job
in Winston-Salem, the managing editor
would point out in no uncertain terms,
if you put the First Amendment
up to a plebiscite in America today,
that being the early '80s, it would lose.
But since civics education is no more,
if I could think of one thing
that was administratively fairly easy
and relatively non-controversial,
it would be to imitate
Mitch Daniels at Purdue
and add an hour on the First Amendment
to freshman orientation,
'cause a lot of students
apparently respond to that by saying, "Oh.
"Okay, I didn't know
that," which is a start.
- If I can say something
else about education,
Heather Gerken,
who's the fairly new
dean of Yale Law School,
last summer wrote a
really interesting op-ed
in which she observed that at that point,
she said none, I don't know
if that's factually accurate,
but she said none of
the disruptive events,
shouting down speakers,
shutting them down,
had occurred on a law school campus
or supported by law schools.
And her theory was that
because in law schools
it's inherent in the educational process
that of course you've got to
contend with a range of ideas
and learn to debate against them
and to learn to advocate
all plausible perspectives
on all issues, as I
constantly say to my students.
But that's really just
critical analysis in thinking
that should be part of
our educational process
all the way through.
- Let me play devil's advocate
in this vein for a moment.
Jonathan, in Kindly Inquisitors,
you talk about free speech
as being a pillar of liberal science,
the process by which we sort
good ideas from bad ideas.
And in our private lives,
we have other people sort
good ideas and bad ideas
for us all the time, right?
Think of whether you have
an auto mechanic or a heart surgeon,
we let people sort good
ideas from bad ideas for us,
and so in a college or
university environment,
especially where learning and knowledge
and conveying of hopefully
the right ideas is happening,
if there is something
that's fairly well-settled,
what would be the argument,
what's so bad about just saying, look,
the Holocaust happened, and we know that.
So let's move on.
Look, there aren't
intelligence differences
across the races.
Let's move on.
What's so bad about having
a college or university
saying, now we're gonna
put those bad ideas
that are really kind of
a settled matter aside?
How do you make the case--
- Well, it depends.
First of all, thank you
for the plug for the book,
which is available for only $12 on Amazon.
- [Emily] Just in time
for the holiday season!
- And incidentally, this
gives me an opportunity
to publicly thank some people in this room
who made that book happen,
including David Bowes
of the Cato Institute,
who put it in print when
commercial publishers wouldn't,
and Nadine Strossen, who
gave it its critical blurb
on the back cover, and Kate Shevchenko,
who had the brainstorm
of doing this 20th
anniversary reissue with me,
a new afterword.
So my applause, at least,
to people who have helped.
Nice to have a chance to have those people
in one room together.
It's never happened before.
So it's a question of who we is.
If we is the community of intellectuals
who decide a question is
settled and no longer debated,
and that would include, did
Auschwitz have gas chambers?
What is the speed of sound?
Is evolution something that's real?
Then they just don't debate it.
It's not on the science agenda.
Science does that all the time.
They marginalize stuff like astrology.
Lots of people in
public, out in the world,
would like to debate astrology.
They'd like to debate Christian science,
and science just ignores it
because there's no research
job to be done there.
If we, on the other hand,
means a self-selected group of activists
gets to set the agenda for everybody else
and use a heckler's veto,
for those who do want
to discuss something,
then of course that's an
entirely different proposition
and profoundly anti-scientific.
The message I try to bring
to people on campus is,
look, if an idea is a really a bad idea
that's not worth discussing,
then the answer is don't discuss it.
- [Nadine] Or refute it.
- Yeah, or refute it,
if it's worth your time.
But in fact, a lot of what
these activists are doing
with people like Milo Yiannopoulos,
who does not have a single
original thought in his head
or interesting thought,
as near as I can tell,
is give him not only a platform,
but make him interesting
by challenging him
in this very brutal way that they do.
Imagine if he showed up on campus
and there were 10 people
in the room and crickets.
Then it's a very different kind of world.
- And Bernie Sanders had such a great line
about Ann Coulter when she was
being excluded from Berkeley.
He said, "What are you afraid of?
"Her ideas?"
- John?
- I was gonna say that...
Your question's an interesting question.
My answer will sound perverse,
but my answer's gonna
be, it's not a problem.
Why is it not a problem?
I'm at a private university.
I've been writing about
private universities.
Private universities could publicly say,
at our school, here's some
things that we won't consider.
The purpose of our school is to do this.
We won't talk about other things.
They could.
And none of them do.
Every private university,
as soon as something like this comes up,
immediately reaffirms its commitment
to freedom of expression.
So once you make the commitment
to freedom of expression,
then you're bound by your word.
So since they're making the commitment,
they've said they're leaving the door open
and there are no topics
that are out of bounds,
and the kind of problem
that you're opposing
doesn't come up at most
private universities
simply because they're not
willing to come out and say
anything's out of bounds.
They do make the commitment
to freedom of expression.
- John, I think we should
explain to the audience,
'cause most people don't
know that the Constitution,
including the First Amendment,
only directly applies
to public institutions,
including public universities.
So private universities are
not constitutionally bound,
but the vast majority of them choose
to honor those principles
as a matter of their academic
and educational mission.
- [Jonathan] Or they choose
to state those principles.
- State those.
Touche, touche.
- I just did research on this.
There's about 10 universities
that explicitly say, here's some limits
on the kinds of things
that you can do or say.
Some of them are religious
and have to do with what you can advocate
or what your personal behavior is.
At least one of them is not.
It's progressive and it's said explicitly
that some things are out of bounds.
But almost everyone else
makes the commitment,
and once the commitment's
made, the issue is over.
- Well, I'm not sure.
Disinvited speakers seem to
happen in private universities
as well as public universities
based on my reading of the news, but--
- They're not officially out of bounds.
It's not closed.
That may be a problem.
- Right.
Now to your point, Emily,
I think there's an
interesting parallel here
in terms of the only logic,
the logic behind the argument you make,
is one might be it's just a
waste of time, which is alright,
but the real logic is that
there is harm to the world
from bad and inaccurate ideas being aired.
And one of the things I think to me
is fascinating about that
is that actually has
a very long tradition.
It goes back to the Inquisition.
The logic of the Inquisition is,
there's no reason to
tolerate error in society.
Error just keeps people
from realizing the truth.
Error seduces weak-minded
people into doing bad things.
And so there's no good reason
to tolerate error, right?
And I just think that's kind
of a fascinating parallel,
that it goes back to the idea
that society is worse off
if we tolerate bad ideas,
and it's just an interesting
historical roots of that idea.
- And speaking of history, I'd
like to bring Jonathan Rauch
back in on this, because
so much of your work
has been around issues
related to marriage equity.
And if you wouldn't mind
thinking out loud for a moment
about the role that free speech,
or the lack of free speech,
has played in the progress
of that social movement.
- Well, I don't have to think aloud.
This is something I talk
on constantly, incessantly
on university campuses.
I don't know what works
with this generation,
but I do know what I tell this generation
because they don't know it,
which is that the reason for
the gay rights revolution
was not that we had money,
not that we had grassroots supporters,
not that we had political power,
not that we had votes.
We had nothing.
We had absolutely nothing
except our voices,
and we only got our voices,
people don't know this,
because of a 1958 per curiam
Supreme Court justice decision,
which means there was no opinion.
They just issued a one-line statement
that overturned the federal
government's ability
to ban gay publications
using the obscenity laws,
which is what they had
done until that point.
We got our voices on that day
and used those voices against all odds
over a period of decades,
and it didn't work and it
didn't work and it didn't work
until finally it did work.
So I, in the fact that
I'm now married to a guy,
as I constantly tell students,
am living proof that the
only really consistent friend
of minorities in a majoritarian society
is freedom of expression.
Without that, we would be nowhere.
- And the same thing was true
for the abolition movement,
for the civil rights movement,
for the women's suffrage movement,
for the reproductive freedom.
Name whatever cause you have.
By definition, as Jonathan says,
if you don't have majority power,
that you depend on individual rights
and you depend on freedom to voice ideas.
Jonathan didn't say this,
and it would be shocking
to the current generation.
Ideas that were hated and
were considered dangerous,
that were considered a threat,
not only to families, but to security,
and all of the harms
that are today attributed to hate speech
have been attributed to
exactly the opposite messages.
Pro civil rights, pro
justice, pro equality.
That was seen as threatening and dangerous
in the communities that
were being challenged.
- If one thing breaks my
heart about all of this,
it's seeing minorities of all people
turn around and make the same mistake
of oppressing other people
as we were once oppressed.
That is such a wrong turn.
- Nadine, talk to me
about Charlottesville.
Because these are great examples,
I think the kinds of examples
that I do think tap the kind of spirit
that a lot of students are
bringing to the public square
and to their public square on campus
about a deep respect
for the underlying
humanity in every person.
That's a powerful energy,
and we wanna seize that.
We wanna develop that.
And I can imagine what Thanksgiving dinner
must be like for you,
Nadine, or for all of you.
But seriously, Nadine,
doesn't your resolve get
shaky in favor of free speech
when we're talking
about white nationalists
and defending their right to speak?
And when it ends in the
kind of horrific violence
that we saw in Charlottesville,
how do you manage those moments?
Besides the fact that pass the gravy,
we'll talk politics later,
how do you when you're
in a serious conversation with someone,
still have the resolve
that you clearly have
that says yep, we're
gonna defend the right
of white nationalists
to march and to speak?
- You're asking so many complex questions,
so I'm not sure I can do justice
to the whole welter of them,
but most importantly, most fundamentally,
long before Charlottesville
there was Skokie, right?
And let me say, I am the
daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
My father was born in Berlin
as what was called a half-Jew in 1922.
He opposed the Nazis politically.
He was thrown into Buchenwald.
He almost died there.
I absolutely loathe the Nazis.
I hope that goes without saying.
And I do have to say this,
that if I believe that censorship
would obliterate fascism,
I probably would be in favor of it,
because I think I loathe Nazism
even more than I love free speech,
but I am absolutely convinced
based on experience in Nazi Germany,
based on experience with neo-Nazis
and other hate groups in this country,
that censorship does more harm than good.
I oppose it for principled
reasons as well,
and I'd love to talk about those,
but even putting that aside,
assuming that we're forgetting
free speech principles
and just talking about strategy,
the kind of point that Jonathan made
about what do minorities
need to advance equality.
What are hate groups looking
for in terms of retarding it?
Not only Milo, but Hitler
and his henchpeople
depended on the anti-hate speech laws
that existed in Weimar Germany.
Flemming Rose, who's now
associated with the Cato Institute,
has written about this,
among other people.
And they welcomed those prosecutions,
precisely because it gave them a platform
to get far more attention
than they would have gotten
and far more sympathy than
they would have gotten.
So even today, one of the organizations
that is best known for
opposing hate mongering,
the Southern Poverty Law Center,
this summer they put out a
guide for college students
about how to counter the
alt-right's recruitment
on campuses, and their first message was,
above all else, please try to ignore them.
Don't try to censor them,
don't try to shut them down,
don't try to shout them down.
That is just playing into their strategy.
The other point that's
raised by Charlottesville
is of course violence is illegal
and has to be opposed,
and that was the problem in Nazi Germany.
It was not that the Nazis had free speech.
It was that they were terrorizing
and engaging in violence against
their political opponents,
against Jews, against
other minority groups
without law enforcement.
The analogy in this country would be
as if during the civil rights movement
there hadn't been any
attempt to enforce the laws
against the violence that was meted out,
including assassinations.
So we need much stronger law enforcement.
I haven't read the full report.
I've read descriptions of
the report that came out
on Charlottesville earlier this month
that was extremely critical
of the failure to protect public safety
and interestingly enough,
not critical of the judge's decision
to allow the demonstration to go forward.
- Great, thank you.
Now, Todd, I wanna turn to you
because I think you would be
the exact right person to respond to,
not the argument that we
should never allow Milo
to speak on campus,
but the person who says,
I'm not opposed to free speech on campus.
I love free speech on campus.
I am just looking for a balanced approach.
As opposed to the extremist view
of protecting free speech,
why can't we have a balanced approach
which ensures free speech, yes,
but also an inclusive
learning environment?
Free speech, yes, but also civility.
How do you respond to what I
think people present themselves
as offering a balanced, reasonable middle?
Tell me about how you respond
to the reasonable middle sort of argument.
- Yeah, one of the things
I think's fascinating
to me is that,
take FIRE, for example,
which we've mentioned.
Do you know what it takes to get
a green light rating from FIRE?
It basically is,
your policies are consistent
with the First Amendment.
That's it.
- Your stated policies.
- Your stated policies, right?
And ideally even your actual policies.
I mean, that's all it
requires to have free speech,
is just basically follow the rules
laid down by the First Amendment,
which maybe, as you said,
a lot of people might say they're against,
but in principle, everybody
agrees with the First Amendment.
It's very reasonable rules.
It actually allows you to regulate
libel and actual harassment
and all these different sorts of things.
But all it does is it allows you
to place reasonable restrictions
so people can't stand outside your window
at two o'clock in the
morning with a bullhorn.
All these different sorts of rules.
That seems to me to be a
pretty reasonable policy
that works pretty well
in society at large.
In that sense, it doesn't strike me
as a radical policy to say
that you just abide by
the First Amendment.
It's striking, as John said,
that I saw a poll recently that said
only 36% of college students realize
that hate speech is protected
by the First Amendment.
Only 36% realize there's
no hate speech exception
to the First Amendment.
I think sort of the
larger picture here is,
what are we doing?
What are we trying to do on
these university campuses?
Isn't the whole point here
to create students who
are gonna be leaders
in our free and democratic
constitutional republic?
The kids who go to college are the ones
who are supposed to become the ones
who become the leaders
in American society,
whether it's politicians
or just community leaders,
and that sort of thing.
And it seems like that's
one of the problems
we have in society today,
which is maybe the optimistic side,
your earlier question about
how do we reach students.
I don't think anybody likes
the state of public
discourse in America today.
Everybody complains it's too polarized.
Everybody hates it.
It seems like everybody wants
to do something about it,
and maybe helping kids to understand
that allowing freedom of speech,
just ignoring ideas that bother you,
maybe developing a little bit thicker skin
about the hypersensitivities
and that sort of thing,
all the things that are
the premise of the values
that underlie the First Amendment,
let's start it on campus
and then maybe people will
take that out into society
and become a little more grown up
in the way we interact with each other
around Facebook and the
Thanksgiving dinner table
in terms of being able to
actually talk about ideas
that are uncomfortable and the like.
- This is an important cultural argument,
and I want to make sure to get John in
on this sort of institutional framework,
the institutional
influencers on this question.
I'm thinking in particular
of the 2011 Department of
Education Dear Colleague letter,
which was intended to provide college
and university administrators
guidance on navigating
Title IX legislation.
I'm wondering if you could
speak a little bit, John,
on your thinking on the connections
between the Dear Colleague letter
and the growth of speech codes on campus.
- Thanks, because I'm
working on this myself
with Georgetown University.
I may be the most
optimistic one on the panel
because of the work I've
been doing at Georgetown
and because of my
interaction with students.
For one thing,
I think there's a serious problem
with students not being committed
to freedom of expression today.
May have the poll that says only 36
knows that there's no
hate speech exception
to the First Amendment,
but that's not actually
a big concern to me,
because one of my
principles as a professor
is never forget what I was
like when I was a student.
And when I went to college,
most of the students
had no idea what the First
Amendment was either.
The level of ignorance
of these kinds of things
probably is not that much greater now
than it was before.
There is a difference.
There's a cultural difference
in the sense that...
We live in a society
that's so secure physically
that we're at a point
at which next generation
is raised where the most
important thing for them
is their psychic tranquility
and their emotional protection.
Because we don't have to worry
about assault and that
kind of thing anymore.
So they come in with a higher level
of expectation for comfort.
That's the way it is.
I found it very easy to get
the Georgetown University
to make a commitment to
freedom of expression,
because when the issue comes up,
most of the faculty are committed
to freedom of expression.
But everyone on the panel so far has said
it's a stated policy,
which means there's other things at work.
And I don't think there's
anything nefarious going on,
and there's not a lot of ideological bias.
It's something like this.
The commitment to freedom of expression
has been longstanding.
Most of the commitments go
back to the '70s or the '80s.
University's committed,
and between now and then,
the idea of harassment on campus
became a more and more
important and salient issue.
The Obama administration's policies
that you mentioned
put universities on notice
that they have to be
very, very protective.
And making students feel
comfortable on campus
is a way of being protective,
and there's nothing wrong with that.
We do want students to
feel safe, feel welcome,
feel comfortable on campus.
What people didn't
perceive for a long time
is that those two things could conflict.
The idea of a welcoming campus
was designed to just be
the university's commitment
to having no invidious discrimination.
Why would that conflict
with a commitment to
freedom of expression?
But as you get closer and
closer to the present,
people are saying other
people's expression
is making us feel uncomfortable.
Other people's expression makes
us feel unsafe or unwelcome.
And now there's a conflict
and the part of the
university administration
that's designed to protect, comfort
and safety and welcomeness,
they're just pursuing their mission
and they are creating a situation
in which complaints can be made
based on other people's expression.
Universities such as Georgetown
are becoming aware of the conflict,
and when you become aware of the conflict,
that's when you have to
do something about it.
So last year we made a commitment
to freedom of expression,
and once we made that commitment,
the next thing that we received
was permission from the board of trustees
to make all other university
policies consistent with that
because as long as they are not,
you'll have the problem
as your stated policies.
So now we move on to the next stage,
which is, well, how can we
make the harassment policy
consistent with the commitment
to freedom of expression?
And we're in the process
of doing that right now.
A big help is that harassment law
is limited by the First Amendment.
We've got a couple of cases.
There's a little legal
case from the Saxa case.
Which says expression doesn't
constitute harassment,
and once we get the law right,
the university understands
it's not legally liable
if it doesn't suppress speech,
and we'll have harassment policies.
At Georgetown, just to
give you an example,
it's not just the harassment policy.
We manage to get into the news
for all kinds of bad things.
We got in the news recently
because there's a group on
campus called Love Saxa,
and this a group organized
because they believe in
monogamous marriage relationship
between a man and a woman,
and to act in accordance
with whatever the Catholic principles are.
They got accused of being a hate group
because they were committed
to monogamous marriage
between a man and a woman.
There was no way they
were gonna be defunded
as a hate group.
The problem was that group
had to go through a hearing.
There was the investigative process.
There was the trouble
of having to defend what you stand for.
And that has a chilling effect.
So the next step along the way is,
we'll have to make the policy one
in which you can't be
subject to investigation,
or you can't be called
in to defend something
if the only complaint against
you is what you believe
or what you say or what you express.
And when we get to that point,
then all of the university's policy
will be consistent with what
the stated policies are.
It just takes a while.
First you have to get the people
to understand the conflict.
Universities are bureaucracies.
It takes a while to move them.
But if you're willing to
take the time and do the work
from the inside,
you can get policies right.
And the reason is because no university
is gonna give up the commitment
to freedom of expression.
You just have to make it a real one.
- Thanks.
I wanna turn to the
audience for your questions,
and we have people circulating with mics,
so if you have a mic in your hand,
it means that you get
to ask your question.
So I'll leave it to you
guys to recognize people.
Here we go.
- [Audience Member] Thanks.
- Oh, and I'm sorry.
David, could you and everyone
else let us know who you are
and where you're coming from?
- Alright.
I'm David Bowes and I'm
from the Cato Institute.
I guess I'm sorta following
up on something John said,
but it's something I keep wondering.
We hear lots of anecdotes.
How widespread is this problem,
which might include how many
campuses does it encompass,
but also, how many students
are not simply passively
unaware of the First Amendment,
but actively hostile to speech?
Is it possible, John surveyed
elite students at Brookings,
is it possible that it's
widespread on elite campuses
but not so much on the other
3,000 or whatever campuses?
And also, John and Nadine,
you were involved in this
early PC wars back in 1990.
Is this different, is it worse?
Is it more widespread?
How big a problem is this, really?
- Well, I think these are
great questions, David,
and I've seen a lot of surveys
and the surveys seem
to indicate two things.
First of all, when I
say "a lot of surveys,"
going all the way back.
The first one I remember
paying attention to
was in 1991, because that
was the 200th anniversary
of the Bill of Rights,
including the First Amendment.
And the American Bar
Association did this survey
of adult Americans.
First of all, something
like 2/3 didn't even know
what the Bill of Rights is,
let alone the First Amendment.
And then when they were told what it is,
more than half of them said,
"Let's get rid of that."
And there were all kinds of questions
that showed ignorance at
best, not just among students,
but among the population as a whole,
and hostility at worst.
So I think this is a chronic problem,
but I think it is one that is,
okay, then the other piece of it is,
the surveys that I have read,
and there are some inconsistencies
and some of the surveys
have been criticized methodologically,
so one takes them with a grain of salt,
but my overall impression is that now
it is a minority of students
who are disproportionately outspoken
who want to affirmatively
censor ideas they disagree with.
The more troubling part of that
is that there is probably
a majority of students
who are passive, who don't care enough
or who think, well, maybe
hate speech should be censored
or ideas that we find
offensive should be censored.
So it's messy,
but seeing the glass half-full,
we have a lot of students
and a lot of people
in our communities in general,
who really hunger for
discourse, as was said,
who hunger for open inquiry,
and I think what we have to do
is fan those flames, get
them to raise their voices
and to respond to that tiny
but disproportionately
effective group of disruptors.
- But the anecdotes are great.
They're great, because like Nadine,
I believe that there's a
small number of students
who are opposed to freedom of expression,
but they're a vocal minority.
Same with faculty.
There's a small number of faculty
who are vocally opposed to it,
and since they talk all the time
they get a lot of the press.
But the anecdotes that come up every time
there's another one of these events
that happens at another campus,
what happens here is, everybody says,
We don't want that here.
We don't want that here.
Let's act prophylactically.
Let's take some steps now to make sure
that we don't have Georgetown in the news
the way Evergreen was
or the way Northwestern
was with Laura Kipnis.
The anecdotes are what motivate
the people who are passive
or sort of neutral to take
some preventative steps.
And you don't need to
mobilize the majority.
You need to mobilize one
or two faculty members
or one or two student groups
who are engaged enough
to say, let's make the change.
The situation got me mad enough
so I'm changing policy in Georgetown.
You can do it if you try,
and the anecdotes are what motivate
the apathetic middle to get involved.
- I think what concerns me
is basically the way to think
about universities today,
by and large, is they're
just one big brand.
We've basically got the rise
of the CEO university president.
An increasingly small number of them
come from academic backgrounds.
They're more and more now
chosen for their managerial
and fundraising experience
and that sort of thing.
I could tell you when I
was on the Dartmouth board,
we never had a single about curriculum.
In every board meeting we
talked about Dartmouth's brand.
They see it through the lens of a brand.
These are massive businesses
that these universities are running now.
And so the problem is, how do
they avoid the controversy?
Maybe they do what John says,
which is that they take
steps to put things in place,
but I think more commonly what
they do is they say, okay.
We've got to make sure
that we don't somehow let
controversial speakers
get invited by somebody somewhere.
We've got to narrow
the range of discussion
and take out anybody who's
gonna cause a ruckus.
The word goes out:
Charles Murray is not
welcome on this campus
and we're gonna put in rules
that make sure that somehow
Charles Murray doesn't
accidentally get invited
to come speak here at our campus.
And I think that's what the concern is,
and that's what the activists want.
The activists want to narrow,
informally narrow the range of ideas
and take these ideas out
step by step by step,
by any means that they
can to narrow the range.
And that's the difference, I think,
with the more formal sort of
enforcement-based policies
in the '90s, the formal speech
codes and that sort of thing,
which were too easy to challenge,
which could be challenged by litigation,
all these sorts of things.
But if you can just narrow the
range of allowable discussion
and just step by step take out the ideas
that are controversial,
you can almost always
get the administrators
to go along with this.
They are concerned about the brand.
They don't want to have to see their name
splashed across the front
page of the newspaper, either.
- So that was the second
part of David's question.
Since he asked both of us veterans,
do you want to answer that, Jonathan?
The difference between--
- Oh, so much.
First, on the informal
point you just made,
that's quite right.
I was invited to be a speaker on a panel
for a free speech national tour
launched by a British magazine
called Spiked in New York.
You were to have been there too.
- Oh, I was at another
one that got shut down.
- Yep, that was pulled because I think
it was Columbia University said, oops,
I don't think we want to do this,
and they find administrative reasons.
There was one here at AU similarly.
- That's the one I got kicked off.
- That was also pulled
when the university said,
I don't know if it was--
- They called it hate speech,
just because we were talking about--
- But often what they just say is,
you know, you went about the
facility in the wrong way,
or we can't afford the
security or whatever.
So there's a lot of this
squishiness going on,
and some of it is based on the fact
that they don't want to shell out
$50,000 or $100,000 for security.
That's another big problem.
To the larger question that
David raised, a couple points.
When I talk to people and
do my informal surveys,
the biggest problem that I see
is not top-down administration censorship.
It's bottom-up grassroots chilling.
Students are reporting to me
that although they personally
believe in free speech
and the majority on campus
believes on free speech,
no one wants to get in the sights
of one of this activist groups
and no one wants to get involved
in a classroom conversation
where there's a lot of
sighing, eyeball rolling,
and then there's a campaign
on Facebook afterwards.
So what they're reporting: 45% or so said
that their own educations
had personally been affected
by these chilling problems and by issues
which they were reluctant
to discuss on campus.
I would then ask them, does
it affect your friends?
Does it affect people on other campuses?
Interestingly, the farther
from their own experience,
the higher the estimate of the effect.
They said on other campuses it's 60%
of students who are affected.
But 40% is a large number
of students to be saying,
this is personally affecting
my educational experience
in a negative way,
and that's a lot of what's happening.
The peer pressure stuff
is a lot harder to reach
than the administration stuff.
- Is then part of the answer, then, to,
Todd asked for grownup sensibility,
as part of the grownup sensibility
that we need to inculcate
is a kind of moral fortitude
amongst those who
- Some of that
- are bringing forth--
- will work.
I don't understand why
students at Middlebury
weren't suspended or
expelled, for example.
I think what would help even more
is already starting to happen.
We're starting to see pushback
from especially freshmen at universities,
starting groups like
Students for Free Expression.
It's mostly coming from
the younger students
who are coming in and saying,
hey, I'm paying a lot of money to be here.
I'm not gonna let some activist
decide what I can hear.
They're starting to organize.
The most effective single thing,
this is guesswork, conjecture,
but I conjecture the most
important thing that can happen
is counter-organizing by students.
And these freshmen seem to
be much less intimidated
by the campus pressure groups
than the older students
for whatever reason.
- I think that the biggest problem
is what you've identified.
It's the social pressure that
comes from other students
and the reluctance to say something
that will cross the line
and make other students
react negatively to them.
So that's the real problem.
Advocating unpopular
positions has never been easy.
It's not easy now, it's never been easy.
The cost of taking an unpopular position
is that you have to deal with the fact
that you have the
negative social feedback.
What can we do, someone like a professor?
What the university can do
is simply provide background support
for the people who are willing
to fight the social situation.
What that means is,
it's not just having a
freedom of expression policy.
It's having it be part of the policy
that's part of the students' orientation
that at our university, no
complaint will be entertained
that's based simply on a
statement of a position.
Here I'm trying to use some
language from the Supreme Court.
Your expression of a scientific, artistic,
religious, philosophical, or...
- Social.
- Social position
not only is acceptable,
but no one can complain
that that's a violation
of any university policy.
And with that background,
it's still gonna be up to the students
to fight the social situation.
But the university with that background
can be providing support.
And that's probably all we can do.
And then it's up to individuals
to advocate positions they believe in,
even if they're unpopular.
They have to do it now.
People had to do it in
the time of the blacklist.
Then it was communism, now
it might be capitalism.
The ideas are different,
but the need to fight social pressure
is something we have to take on ourself.
Advocating free speech is never easy.
It's not supposed to be easy.
Universities can provide support,
and if we do that, a lot
of good things can happen.
- Great, thanks.
Next question?
Yep, right here.
- My name is Gabrien Dallas.
I work for the Leadership Institute
and I work with California
students and Hawaii students.
And in California, we actually have--
- [Todd] So with California what?
- I'm sorry.
And Hawaii.
So in California we have the Leonard Law,
which essentially applies
the First Amendment
to public universities
and private universities.
- And even high schools.
- And even high schools.
Do you think that in
the interest of freedom,
this type of law should
be applied everywhere,
or are we violating private universities',
their own right to free speech
if they don't want to
follow the First Amendment?
- I think that's a great
idea, and actually,
at about the time that the
Leonard Law was passed,
there was actually a proposal in Congress,
this goes back to the 1990s
that David alluded to,
which was sponsored by
Congressman Henry Hyde,
whose name might not mean
anything to today's generation,
but he was a conservative
Republican Catholic from Illinois
who was best known for something
called the Hyde Amendment,
which withdrew funding for abortion
in government-funded programs.
He was not seen as a
liberal, to say the least,
and it was one of these
man bites dog stories
that the ACLU and yours
truly individually,
I was then president of the ACLU,
were strongly advocating
this law that Hyde proposed
that would have done the same
thing at the national level.
Now, I have no doubt about it
that a major reason,
perhaps the major reason
why Congressman Hyde and other
conservatives supported that
was that they saw that the views
that were being suppressed on campus
were disproportionately
conservative views,
but I think as a neutral principle,
there's absolutely no downside,
I should say that there was an option
for religious or schools
that wanted to stake out
a particular identity.
There was some exception
available for them.
But basically,
for the vast majority
of private universities,
they would be subject, not
only to the requirements
of the First Amendment as
interpreted by the Supreme Court,
but also, this is important to add,
picking up on something that Todd said
that's not nearly as well
known as it should be:
a lot of commonsense
limits that already exist
under the First Amendment.
You cannot directly threaten somebody.
You cannot incite violence.
You cannot engage in targeted
harassment or bullying.
A lot of the examples of
speech that are thrown out
as reasons why we should
censor hate speech
are already punishable,
completely consistent
with the First Amendment.
- So we have a difference
in opinion on the panel,
because I would be strongly
opposed to a law like that.
I think that if it's a public university,
the First Amendment should govern
and you have to follow
the First Amendment,
because that's government-funded,
and that's all taxpayers putting in.
In that case, the First
Amendment should apply.
If you're talking about
a private university,
private universities can
be organized for any reason
the organizers want.
Most of them are dedicated
to the pursuit of truth.
Most them make a commitment
to the First Amendment,
not the First Amendment,
to freedom of expression,
because that's the way you learn,
but there's no reason why
all of them should have to.
A university that says,
we wanna be what Jonathan Haidt calls
the Coddle U instead of the Truth U.
You come here, we'll make you feel good.
Everything will be comfortable.
You won't learn that much, but it's okay.
If you want to organize
a university that way
and you are explicit so people coming in
know what they're getting,
then you should be allowed to do it.
The only thing that private
universities should be held to
is if they make a representation,
they have to stick to it.
Otherwise they're acting fraudulently.
But I wouldn't support a law
that said all universities
have to subscribe to the same
level of freedom of expression
that government universities do.
- I'm sure you'll still disagree,
but I just have to clarify.
It's all universities
that receive a certain
amount of federal funding.
That was the full regulation.
- There's an interesting thing, though,
in what's called a private university,
which is so-called private universities
have so many tax advantages, for example.
These huge tax exemptions.
Now it's economics 101
that the only reason
that we would subsidize
something like that
is because they're providing
some public good to society.
If you're just going there to get skills
to get a better job, there's no reason
to give these massive tax
subsidies to universities.
Investment in human capital,
it's a very simple thing.
We've had the Strayers and the
DeVrys of the world forever
who could teach you how to
be a plumber or a mechanic.
We've got for-profit law schools.
The only reason we have universities,
these massive tax subsidies,
is because we believe that
they're providing something
that's valuable to society
that wouldn't otherwise
be provided directly.
And I think the argument is
that they're doing something
that enriches society and in
particular prepares people
for the duties of citizenship
in a free society.
And in that sense, I think
it's at least worth thinking
about the question about whether Coddle U
should be entitled to tax benefits
if all they're doing is providing benefits
to particular students and we can't say
that they're doing anything
that provides a public good to society.
I think that's the kind of
question we should be asking
about a non-profit university like Harvard
with a $25 billion endowment
that pays no taxes.
- One of the things that I
like about John's argument,
is I think that you're asking
exactly the right questions,
but one of the reasons I like
the fact that John's argument is out there
is that it puts the burden
on private institutions
to make the case for academic freedom,
and it's not just, well, we do it
because it's protected speech
by the First Amendment.
No, now we have to really think about why.
Why do we want to have
free and open discourse?
Well, it now is about making sure
that we're aligning with our mission,
that we're doing what we're saying,
what we say we're doing.
We're living up to our promises
to our students, prospective
students, and the people
who help make it possible
for them to get there.
And so it flips the space,
the place where you start the argument,
and then you start having to
make pedagogical arguments
favoring free speech.
It may very well just be another way,
I think rhetorically it's valuable
to have entities out
there that are saying,
we don't have to, but we're gonna.
And here's why.
And it's a very different set of arguments
that they bring forward.
So I'm glad that there is pressure
to bring these arguments forward.
- I'll say one thing.
I see the force of Todd's argument,
and it's a strong argument,
it makes a lot of sense.
Nevertheless, I would resist it.
And the reason why I would resist it
is because the nature of that argument,
if it's supported with tax
subsidies, it's a public good.
That's the kind of
argument that can result
in everything being subject to regulation
as soon as you get kind of tax subsidy.
So I understand the force of
the argument, it makes sense,
but what I would like to see is,
that would drive me in the other direction
for having a lot less subsidization,
but not for more
regulation and encroaching
on the freedom of the private entities.
- And I'm not just concluding
that that's the argument,
but I think the argument
works something like that.
- [Emily] Right, next question?
- A better approach in my
opinion, for what it's worth,
I also am with John on this.
I would not want to see
the federal government
use its financial strings
to impose uniform standards
on private colleges, even if
I agree with the standards,
and I wouldn't want to
see Yeshiva University
be required to host Richard Spencer.
A better approach I think
would be something like a tort
making it actionable for a college
to advertise that it's
the home for free speech
and then not actually
enforce that on campus.
And do it through civil
litigation that way.
- Hello, my name is Eric Peterson.
I had a question on Jonathan, he hit on,
where he said that the thing
that got the gay rights
movement was free speech
and of course now there's
a Supreme Court case
about whether or not the
government can compel speech,
so I just wanted to get
your opinion on that case
and if you think the
shoe's on the other foot.
That was pretty much it.
- Big one, complicated.
This is a reference, I assume,
to the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.
The basic facts is gay couple
walks into a very high-end bakery
that does these really
fancy specialized cakes
and says, "We want a cake
for our gay wedding."
And the store owner says on the spot
without any further conversation,
"We won't help you here.
"We believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
"We won't do anything for a gay wedding."
Couple files suit.
State of Colorado finds with the couple
that the bake shop violated
discrimination law.
Bake shop now sues, saying it
has a First Amendment right
to refuse this business on the grounds
that this would be compelled speech.
It's all very complicated.
My view is actually very simple,
which is that there is no earthly way
the Supreme Court is going to be able
to set down clear standards
that distinguish okay,
what exactly is expression?
Photography is expression.
What about baking a cake?
Well, does it have words on it?
Then it's expression.
Does it not have words?
Well, what if it's customized?
What about auto styling?
What about cosmetology?
That's never going to work.
I think the right answer
as a policy matter
is to do what Justice
Kennedy seems to want to do,
which is kick this back
down to the states,
say, you're not gonna get
a Constitutional ruling.
You guys go work it out.
There's no reason in my view
that Mississippi and Massachusetts
have to have the same policy
and strike the same balance
between these two contending public goods,
so they should do it in different ways
and different locations
through the political process.
That's my policy answer.
I'll leave the legal scholars
to discuss the legal answers.
- [Emily] No one's jumping in.
- It's too complicated.
- [Emily] Next question?
- Chris Newman from George Mason Law.
I wanted to throw another
one of the buzz phrases
that's endemic to this conversation out
to get some reactions to it,
namely the concept of a safe space.
Now, this has become
sort of a trigger word
or I think it's become an emblem
that's often used by free speech advocates
in a purely derisory manner.
You know, these are the
snowflakes who want a safe space.
I wonder whether maybe what's needed
is a more nuanced
conversation about, okay,
what are the things that as
a student you do have a right
to be safe from on campus,
things like physical intimidation
or maybe some forms of personalized abuse.
And on the other hand, there
may be certain contexts
in which, I think the
pro free speech argument
can sometimes overreach
and make it sound as though
it's never legitimate to
structure a conversation
in such a way where
you only want to engage
with a limited number of viewpoints.
Sometimes we want to have a robust debate
with opposing viewpoints.
Sometimes we want to work out kinks
among people who are
basically like-minded,
or we want to have people
who feel vulnerable for whatever reason
and want to not be
challenged in certain ways
while they're thinking
about certain issues.
I wonder, should we be trying to get rid
of the idea of a safe space
or should we be making this
the centerpiece of the conversation,
having universities talk about,
what does it mean to be safe?
In what context within this institution
should you expect to be
safe from what exactly?
- [Emily] Great question.
- I'd be happy to start,
but I first wanna say
your question was a great one,
and the only reason I
didn't try to answer it
was it's so complicated.
I'd be happy to talk to
you about it afterwards.
And this one, I think
you're exactly right,
that as with a lot of
the criticized phenomena,
including, I would put trigger warnings
in the same category, that
the devil is in the details.
I think it is the worst examples
that we would all agree are inconsistent
with intellectual freedom
that are the ones that are
disproportionately publicized,
but that these concepts
can be used in ways
that actually promote engagement
of different individuals
and groups with different ideas on campus.
So obviously starting
with physical safety,
we know that for all of the excesses,
that the pendulum maybe has swung too far,
there has been a serious
problem of violence on campus,
including sexual violence,
that had not been treated
sufficiently seriously.
Now maybe we've over-corrected,
but that is a basic form of safety
that universities owe to
all of their students:
physical safety against crime.
I think where it becomes blurry,
oh, and then I should also say, to repeat,
certain kinds of expression that directly
cause specific imminent serious harm,
such as targeted harassment
or genuine threats,
can and should be punished.
Where it becomes blurry
is because it bleeds into,
oh, and then at the opposite
end of the spectrum,
you have no right to be safe from ideas
that you disagree with or find offensive.
Those are the examples
that have been publicized,
where we all say that's
a concept of safety
that is illegitimate.
In fact, it's undermining what
we owe students on campus,
which is that they must
learn how to confront ideas
they disagree with strongly
and find offensive strongly.
Now, the blurry point is
what you also alluded to,
and where the idea of safe spaces
as I understand it originated,
which is when you have an
embattled minority on campus,
a group of students that are
traditionally underrepresented
and still are maybe traditionally excluded
and are still underrepresented
and they feel very isolated and alienated,
you want to find a place
for them to congregate.
And that has been racial minorities.
At a time when gays were
deeply in the closet,
that might have included a space
where they felt comfortable.
The one point that I
would make, and I think,
I haven't debated this or
discussed it with others,
so maybe you could dissuade me,
but my starting presumption would be
that while one would seek
to affirmatively create
a positive environment for
students in those groups
to hang out with each other,
I think you could not
exclude other students.
I think you should not
exclude other students.
So it should be an affirmative attempt
to create a safe space
for certain students
who might seek it out,
but I think they can't keep others out.
- To some extent,
so many of these things,
it seems so simple
that Jonathan alluded to earlier.
It's like, just don't go to Milo's speech.
It seems so simple, a lot of these things.
The sort of farcical safe space examples
are somebody comes to campus
and you can't even bear the thought
that this person might
set foot on your campus
and other people might
listen to them, right?
That strikes me as ridiculous.
Just don't go to the talk.
Go to the gym.
Go do your homework, something like that.
And then you could start getting
into some of these more fine-tune things,
but it seems to me that most
of the problems that we have,
or the problems we read about, at least,
are these basic scenarios,
where somebody comes to campus
and you don't have to go.
So just let somebody else go
and do something else.
I mean, it just seems so
obvious and simple to that.
And then we can deal with
the nuance questions.
- It's the language.
Generally speaking, there's no conflict.
People are allowed to speak on campus,
and other people don't have to listen.
You have the right not to listen,
you have the right to
make your own safe space.
There's generally no conflict.
But it's the way you use language.
John Stuart Mill's harm principle
is you can do whatever you want to
as long as you don't harm others.
So then you just define harm
as making me feel bad
by what you're saying,
and now you can infringe
on freedom of speech.
So safe spaces, if you use the
word safe expansively enough,
I feel unsafe if I know
that people are on campus
saying things I don't like.
But that's not a safe space.
That's a linguistic
manipulation to make a conflict
where there really isn't any.
That use of the term safe
space is illegitimate.
Safe spaces on campus
are absolutely great.
People get together, they make
each other feel comfortable.
It's great, especially
if they're a minority
or they need support.
Wonderful.
It just doesn't go as
far as something like
you can stop other people from speaking
because you're going to call
that an attack on your safety.
- And I agree with that point,
that as a faculty member, I
used to teach on the Holocaust
and I would, when there
were images or readings
that were particularly
horrific to encounter,
I would give my students a heads-up.
I didn't call it a trigger warning,
but it essentially was that.
Here's a heads-up.
This is difficult.
So I have no problem
with any faculty member
who wants to codify that in her syllabus.
What I would object to is an administrator
telling her that she had to.
It's a totally different thing.
And so similarly, flip
the script a little bit,
safe spaces, we all know
some of the examples
that we would find objectionable,
but I read of a CUNY professor,
she's a graduate student
but has her own course,
who she's a feminist scholar
who teaches on women and violence
and she uses the language of safe space
in her classroom so that
she can get men to talk.
If I'm gonna be effective
as a faculty member
talking about women and violence,
I have to get men in my courses
feeling like they can feel comfortable
in asserting their perspective
and their opinions.
So you bet I talk about safe spaces,
because it's important
to me pedagogically.
So to me, I think that goes to your point,
that, do we need a more
nuanced discussion?
It's not all good or all bad.
Absolutely, it's how we use it.
Sometimes it's just a matter of providing
a space of basic respect,
and other times it can
be very, very intrusive.
We need to make sure
that we're clear on what
we're talking about.
- Emily, that's so
interesting, and thank you.
I'll have to look up that example
because you flipped it around
from the horrible situation
and made it exactly the opposite,
where it's safe to express any idea,
no matter how unpopular the idea might be.
- [Emily] That's exactly right.
I think we have time
for one more question.
- I just wanna say for the record, though,
I think the idea that you go to a room
with stuffed animals and
coloring books, is ludicrous.
Whatever safe space is, that
just strikes me as absurd.
(chuckles)
- Hi.
Jeri Curry, I'm a global
advisor for the Internet Society
and one of the things that
hasn't been brought up,
but I realize that we're
talking about on-campus,
but the idea that most of the students
that are coming on campus
are digital natives
and most of them that are coming on campus
have created their own
safe spaces digitally.
So the majority of those entering college
over the next three or four years
aggregate their own ideas
and debate and discourse
amongst like people and
they have been able to,
up 'til this point of entering college,
shut out any idea that they chose
that either offended them
or didn't agree with them,
and they could actually curate
their own news and
information much differently
than those of us not of
millennial age can do now.
And so I think that the
goal of universities
is really to try to understand
this type of student
that's coming in nowadays
is very different
and might not be as open because
they don't know how to be
because from a digital perspective
they Facebook anybody
that's like opinions.
They like these things
that are similar to their own thoughts
and follow those on Twitter,
grab their own news,
grab their own information.
And the only time that
they're actually exposed
to information that's not something
that they curate on their own
is during the hours of school.
So I think that there is a
big change in the demographic
that's coming on from
a digital standpoint,
and to Jonathan's point,
when they disagree
with something on campus
and if it's not able,
they're gonna take it onto social media
and then again, is that now protected
under a private or public
university once it's online,
just because it's not
on a campus physically,
it's still on campus online.
- [Emily] Great, Jeri.
Anyone want to tackle
the digital generation?
- I'll just say I recently saw a speech
by the president of Chicago, Bob...
- Zimmer.
- Zimmer.
And he made, I thought,
a fascinating point,
which he said it is human
nature for people to,
and Jonathan Haidt makes
this point very well, too.
It's human nature for
people to want to find ideas
that agree with them, that
affirm what they already believe.
It is very difficult to come into conflict
with ideas that disagree with you.
And so that reinforces that tendency,
the ability to create
these digital communities
and that sort of thing
that wrap you in a feeling
that everybody agrees with
you and that sort of thing.
And I think the point is,
his point, which I think adding
in the digital part
reinforces Zimmer's point is,
maybe we need to even put
more weight on the scale.
Maybe we need to be more aggressive
about forcing kids to confront ideas
that are uncomfortable to them
because your natural proclivity
is to surround yourself
with ideas that are similar,
and that seems like it reinforces.
It's a great point.
- And I think the way
that you persuade them
that it's for their own good,
and Jonathan Haidt and
his Heterodox Academy
have done a lot of this research,
is that it's essential for your education
and also for life after the university
that you can't function effectively
and it's really essential
for your mental health.
You're gonna become depressed
and anxious in the real world
if you have not developed the resilience
to deal with ideas that you disagree with.
And then from a political perspective,
because so many of these
students wonderfully
are engaged with politics
and want to be on campus and beyond,
you get people like Barack
Obama made this is a big point
and Van Jones has made
this is a big point,
activists in support of racial justice
and other social justice causes say,
you're not gonna be effective
as somebody who seeks
to change society and reform law
unless you learn how to engage with those
that you disagree with.
So I think we have to persuade them
that especially because
they haven't had enough
of that experience so far,
this is a transitional phase
to when they're going
out into the real world,
where they are massively, they can't avoid
being confronted with
ideas they disagree with.
We're gonna prepare you to handle that
in an effective way,
effective for you personally
and effective for the
social goals that you have.
- I agree with all of that,
but I wanted to thank
you for the question,
since it's the last question,
because it's an interesting question to me
because it's one that I genuinely
don't know the answer to.
Those are the best questions.
And for me, it's, are
things different this time
as opposed to the past?
I went off to college way before
there was anything like the Internet,
and yet I noticed that students
are still in their insular
little environments,
and they only talk, they
come from backgrounds
where they all share certain assumptions.
It was impossible to have
a more insular background than I did.
I came from a community in
which everyone was Jewish.
And I went off to college,
where there were other
kinds of people there,
and they were from different groups.
Yet we all came.
We were insular then,
without the Internet.
Is it different now that
they have the ability
to form their own groups?
Does it make a difference?
It's the new technology which
we still have to overcome
and learn about other
people through interaction.
I think that it only makes a difference
if it curtails human interaction.
And the idea of you being resident
at the university or the college
and actually going to class
and sitting there with other people
is what will tend to overcome
some of the insularity.
But it may be that it was the same for us.
We just did it with
books or something else
instead of with the Internet.
- And I want to thank our panelists
for joining us this afternoon
and I want to thank you all for coming
to engage in a conversation
which really is at the heart,
the foundation of the
idea of the university,
that we want places where
there is an opportunity
to have a fearless exchange of ideas
where we're all groping towards
this thing called the truth.
And that conversation is
something that we're doing
at IHS across the country
with groups of students,
with groups of faculty members,
with people who care
about higher education,
with academic leaders and administrators.
These kinds of conversations
I do believe are core,
and it's part of that opportunity
that we have right now
to re-articulate the
importance of open inquiry
as the central value of higher education.
That's the central value, I think,
that really defines a
free society, as well.
So I want to thank you very much
for being part of this conversation.
I hope you'll be along the journey with us
as we move these conversations forward,
and if you will please join me in thanking
our four panelists for
joining us this afternoon...
(applause)
- And thanks to a great moderator
and to the wonderful questions.
- Thank you.
(applause)
