(audience clapping)
- As I say these days it's
a pleasure to be here,
it's a pleasure to be here.
So both of which are true.
So my talk today, you know,
I didn't have a snappy title.
My talk today, because we
kinda put this together
on fairly short notice.
But my talk is, my working title was
Faculty Self-Governance,
Social Change and Free Speech.
And what I hope I can do,
I'm gonna kind of loop my
way through a bunch of things
and kinda come back
and hopefully tie them
all together at the end.
But really the three things
I want to explore are,
what do we mean by
self-governance in the academy?
And particularly,
what does it mean for
faculty to govern themselves?
Then I'll talk a little bit about
what that has to do sort
of with social change
and the structure of the academy,
and how we think about what professors do
and how we might change it.
And then I want to come
back to the free speech
and open inquiry question.
And when Josh sort of first proposed this,
the first two parts of this were easy
'cause that's more or less
what that book chapter covers,
and then,
and I read through it and I thought
I don't say anything
about free speech in that.
What exactly does this have
to do with free speech?
And as I was sort of
jotting some notes down
and thinking about it,
I got something I think
interesting to think about here,
that I think matters for how we might,
and I'll sort of foreshadow
it but not the details,
how we might think about what it means
to program around free speech
events on college campuses.
How do we, if we want to get
students more sympathetic to
free speech and open
inquiry, how do we do that?
And I think there's
something to be learned here
from all of this what I'm gonna do today
that suggests a way into that.
It's not necessarily an easy one
but it's a different one
than I think a lot of
people have talked about.
So that's your sort of teaser
for where we'll end up.
So let's start with this
idea of self-governance.
And probably before self-governance,
we might even wanna talk
about the idea of democracy.
Before we started Emily and I were,
I was saying to Emily
that I wrote this chapter
for this book she edited all
about sort of self-governance
and never cited Vincent Ostrom in it,
even though, if you read it,
all the ideas are like Vincent's.
So first my apologies,
Vincent, for not citing you.
What's important, if you
haven't read Vincent Ostrom,
what's important in Vincent's work,
particularly in "The Meaning
of Democracies" book,
is this idea that
democracy is more than just
the formal structures of
voting, of electing people,
of who has what office,
and checks and balances
and all these,
and in fact, he's very
clear in the last chapter of
"Meaning Democracies", that the emphasis
that political science has on power,
being the core to political science,
is a bad way to start, right.
For Vincent, and for Elinor,
too but certainly for Vincent,
democracy is about collective
problem-solving, right.
We have these problems that we face
as human communities, as human beings.
We have to get together and
solve those problems somehow.
And if we wanna think about
it the way that sort of
classical liberals would think about it,
we can talk about the state
as being one way to solve those problems
and markets are one way
to solve those problems.
But what Ostrom, what
Vincent's really interested in,
is things, and Elinor too,
that fall outside of those two categories.
What are the ways in
which we work together
to solve problems that
aren't the formal structures
of the state but are not the sort of,
to use a term from Hayek and Mises,
this sort of catallaxy of
the market, the catallactics,
the sort of monetary
exchange in the market.
There are other ways.
So democracy and therefore
self-governance, right.
The ability to engage in
this problem solving, right.
And governance, if we think
about governance as meaning
developing rules and
enforcing those rules,
they're more than just
those formal processes.
And this certainly goes
back to de Tocqueville
and the art of association
and when I'm done here today
I'm headed down to the
gateway which is like
my home away from home and
that Marriott Fair Oaks
to do a program for Mercatus, right,
as part of the Bastiat fellowship
and we're reading a
bunch of de Tocqueville
and Vincent Ostrom which is a nice way
to bring this all together,
but this certainly comes
back to de Tocqueville
in the art of association in the way
in which that third sector
of the civil societies,
or whatever you wanna call it,
is really important to how we think about
solving the problems
we face as a community.
One of the things that
Vincent Ostrom talks about
that particularly interests me
and is gonna come back later in this talk
is that this is also related
to how we learn as children
and how we raise children.
And Ostrom, Vincent is very
repeatedly notes that these skills, right,
this art of association, these
skills at self-governance
are things that we have
to learn as children.
If we don't learn them as children
we may not ever develop
them, and I want to,
that's something I'm gonna
come back to later on.
So what do we, again, mean
by self-governance here?
In order for people to get
together to solve problems
and you can think about sort of
Elinor Ostrom writing about the commons,
you can think about a
committee doing its work,
there's all kinds of examples of this.
For us to do these things we
have to be able to operate
with other human beings
in a realm of mutual trust
where we can exchange
ideas with one another,
where we can be open to criticism,
where we can work together
and sort of figure out
what's the problem, how
do we set this thing up,
how do we talk about it,
how do we solve it, right.
You need those sort of
foundational relationships of trust
in order to do that.
And much of what Ostrom points
out is that when we need that
but how do we generate that?
I'm gonna talk about how we
might generate that trust
in the context of faculty
and academia in a little bit,
but you can think about in
a more broad sense, right.
The time we spend face-to-face with people
engaging in conversation,
talking about what it
is that we do, right?
Trying to figure things out,
are all ways that we build that trust.
One of the things that
I am always disturbed by
by my economist colleagues who I love,
I was department chair for many years
and they used to drive me crazy with this,
is how much economists
hate meetings, right.
Because they say, "Oh,
it's a transaction cost,
it's too costly, I don't wanna go to that,
I got better things to do,
we're not gonna get enough."
Now what you don't see is
the time that we spend in those
conversations in meetings,
if used wisely, are ways
in which we build up
those foundations of
trust, of understanding,
of empathy that enable us as a group
to work together more effectively.
When I talk like that
economists all roll
their eyes at me, right?
Okay but the problem is if you
don't build those things up
and you can't figure out
how to solve those problems
collectively in those constructive ways,
what you're gonna end up with
is somebody making a decision
and everyone else being
unhappy about it, right.
And my joke for a long time,
especially at St. Lawrence,
was about you could always
tell who a faculty member was
because they would say
the following two things
without noticing the problem.
They would say "I have to
go to one more meeting,
"I'm gonna kill someone."
And then their next sentence would be,
"Wait the administration made a decision
without consulting us?"
Right?
Okay wait, you know, you can't
have it both ways, right.
If you wanna self-govern,
you have to self-govern,
you have to actually be
involved and do those things
and build up those relationships of trust.
In Vincent's work, what this
leads to is what he calls
covenantal relationships
and I love the word covenant
used in this context because
it's not a contract, right.
It's not a contract.
It's an agreement among us
and there's a whole
biblical use of covenant
that I think is fascinating there, too.
But it's covenantal
relationships and agreements
where we get together and we come up with,
you can think of this
from a kind of standard
sort of public choicey type perspective
but rules of the game, right?
What we're agreeing on is what
are the foundational things,
norms and so on, that
we think are important.
We agree to those, we
agree to certain processes
that enables us to engage
in this problem-solving
and again this is neither
the market nor the state
and it's not this formal
democracy of the state, right.
It's about how we problem-solve
and you can see why
Vincent and Elinor, because Lin's work
on governing the commons
is exactly this, right.
It's about how communities
develop these covenantal relationships,
these agreements, these historic practices
to govern the commons,
to govern the various,
I mean, if you think
in the commons narrowly
but you can think of this in terms
of a whole bunch of different problems
that people might have, might solve.
These sorts of things are what
we mean by self-governance
within the context of
democratic institutions
and I think it's important
to talk about it this way
for a bunch of reasons.
We've allowed the word
democracy to become defined
in the way that Vincent
wants to reject, right?
Rightly, which is in this sort
of formal notion of elections
and balance of power and
all this kind of stuff,
but there is this bigger
notion of democracy
that de Tocqueville and others
write as self-governance,
as how do we solve our problems together?
It doesn't have to be through
the ballot box, right?
It can be through these other
these other kinds of ways
and in fact when we think
about all the ways in which
during the course of a day
we come into conflict with other people
and we figure out how
to solve those problems
through our sort of
acquired notions of fairness
and so forth, we really
do invoke this notion
of self-governance a lot.
We don't expect the state to solve
all of our little problems, right?
We don't expect markets
to solve all our problems,
sometimes just human
beings getting together
have to do that.
So, with that, what does this look like
for faculty in the academy?
And it's the same, the same
dichotomy exists there.
When we talk about faculty
governance in higher ed,
when faculty talk about faculty
governance in higher ed,
what they tend to think
about is committee work
and elected positions, the
formal governance process, right?
And my former institution
is in the middle of,
their every 10 year review right now,
and one of the things I was asked to do
as, sort of, part of my retirement process
was to serve as a kind of consultant
for the review document.
And the chapter on the
governance process there
is always the hardest one to write
because every college
has the same problem.
"Well, we want to be
self, faculty want to be
self-governing but there's
too many committees,
and there's too many this" right,
but everybody has the
same kinds of problems.
But notice, right, they're
focused on the formal structures
and they're not thinking about
the kind of faculty equivalent, which is,
what are the other ways that faculty
and other members of
the university community
work together.
What are the informal ways
that we work together and problem-solve?
So just as one example, and these are,
I'm gonna pull some examples from the,
from the chapter in the book Emily edited,
that come from St. Lawrence,
but are generalizable in
a whole bunch of ways.
So, what are some examples
of things faculty can do
that amount to self-governance
but are not part of the
formal governing structure?
Well one is working on
new initiatives right.
We want to create a new major,
we want to revamp our writing program,
we want to create a
community-based learning program,
whatever it is that we might want to do,
faculty who get together,
and this is the shop floor metaphor
that's in the title of that chapter right,
faculty who get together on the shop floor
and say "there is a
problem with our students
or with our curriculum,
or with our pedagogy,
that we hope we can solve by
doing these kinds of things."
Many of the examples in that chapter are
taken from St. Lawrence's
first-year program,
which I was involved
in as a faculty member
for all the time I was there
and was associate dean for six years,
and the interesting part of
the history of that program was
there were several
problems it was designed,
that faculty had noticed
in the early to mid-80s,
that it was designed to to try to solve.
One was our students weren't
writing very well, okay.
Second was that our students
didn't really have a conception
of what Liberal Education was.
The Greek system was extremely powerful
and dominated social life on campus
and the notion of living,
learning communities
the only thing one could
imagine close to that
was a Greek house and, it really,
the learning going on there
(audience laughs)
wasn't really what we had in mind.
I was about to say there
wasn't any learning,
no, there was learning going on
but that was, in fact, the problem, right.
So as a kind of countervailing
force to the Greeks,
and so there all these
things happening right,
and faculty we're thinking
about these things,
got together and sort of
said, "Well we've got,
we're doing these little things over here,
can we pull this all together
and sort of create something
that goes after all of
these kinds of things?"
And it turns out that program
at St. Lawrence was created,
to use the language, it can be stated that
from the bottom up,
right, from the shop floor
by faculty and that's really important
and I'm gonna come
back to that a little bit and talk about
why that's important but you can already,
perhaps this crowd in particular,
understand why that's important but
generating new initiatives from faculty
is really a key part
of the self-governance.
Many top-down administrative edicts just
don't work and one of the things I saw
happen when I was associate
dean of that program,
I would go to other schools who
were thinking about
something like this, right?
And, you know, you'd sit with the
administrators who would clearly think
"Oh we got to have a program like this
'cause it's working so well and we need to
deal with retention" or whatever problem
they had, right?
And so "we really need a
program like this" then you talk to the
faculty, and the faculty
are like "I don't know."
And I would just walk away going
"Well that's not gonna work."
Right?
Because until you've got
faculty buying into it
and recognizing that these sorts of things
are the way they solve problems that
they can solve, right, you're not
getting, one, you don't
have self-governance, right?
You've got imposition,
administrative imposition of things
from the top down, so, when I would go on
these kind of consulting gigs to these
other schools, I would, my main goal was
to kind of to go to the faculty and say
"you need to persuade yourselves that
something like this is worth doing and
if you think it's worth doing,
you need to take control over how
this process unfolds.
Otherwise, you're gonna
have it imposed on you
and it's not gonna,
you're going to be miserable,
it's not gonna work, and so on.
So collaborating on new initiatives.
One of the advantages of
the shop floor, right,
is that people at the shop floor
know what the problems are.
So if you think about
sort of Lin Ostrom's work
on governing the Commons, right,
how do we solve these Commons problems?
You need to know what's, well okay,
what's the resource, right?
What are the ways people use it?
What are the patterns here?
How do people respond to particular kinds
of enforcement mechanisms?
That's all very localized,
spread out, bottom-up knowledge.
It's those people with that knowledge
who need to come up with the ways of
governing the Commons, 'cause they have
that kind of information.
Same is true with faculty, right?
So working, finding faculty,
and getting faculty to recognize
that they can and should control these
kind of processes and instigate them
I think is really important.
And once you begin to work on
new initiatives, right, there's all kinds
of ways that self-governance plays in to
making those things happen.
One of the most effective
things that was part of
the culture at St. Lawrence was
peer to peer workshops, right?
We sometimes would
bring in outside experts
to help us to teach writing
or teach speaking or,
you know, something like that,
but we quickly drew on other
faculty at St. Lawrence
who had experience in teaching
the whatever the topic was or using
that particular pedagogical, you know,
innovation, and we let them work.
We taught each other in a number of ways.
And we had faculty in the
English department, right,
who did a lot of work helping
faculty and other departments learn
better how to teach writing
and especially, I should, we
could do more than English,
folks in our Communication,
Speech, and Theater department
were, you know, devoted
hours to helping us learn
how to teach students to become better
public speakers because,
by the way, right,
as faculty, we write all the time
and we have, I think, a
little bit better sense
of what constitutes good writing
and how to kind of get it out of students,
even if you've never
been formally trained.
Teaching students to be good
public speakers though, one,
there's plenty of bad faculty writers but
there's plenty of bad
faculty speakers, right?
And sort of this, I think
there's a different,
we're not at all trained to
teach the speaking skills,
and certainly, you know, over the years
that Emily and I have worked with
the Mercatus PhD students, right?
You have much better skills
than I do at teaching that,
but I think it's something you really have
to work hard to acquire.
It's not natural in a way
that writing is a little bit
more natural, I think, than speaking.
So again, peer to peer workshops,
bringing faculty into this.
The other thing we used a lot,
and this is why you need
that culture of trust,
is peer review of teaching materials.
So one of the parts of
the first-year program was
every course that was part of that
program, the syllabus was peer reviewed
by other faculty,
groups of small faculty.
When I was associate dean,
I read all, whatever, 32 of
them, 36 of them at least,
you know, gave each one of them a read
and provided some feedback,
so the idea of exposing
your syllabus to peer review
from other people in your
local community, right?
That's a very powerful form
of self-governance, right?
If you think about what that does,
it enables groups who have
a certain set of values
and a certain set of goals
to help continue those,
to maintain those goals
and to bring those, constantly make sure
that the things in the program are
living up to those goals because you've
got this accepted procedure, right,
and there's the trust that
it involves to do this.
We also put all our syllabi online,
which was another, right?
That eliminated some, you know,
people couldn't get
away with stuff, right?
'Cause you'd go look and see
what are you actually
teaching in this course?
Part of our, by the way, part of our felt
responsibility to the rest of the
university as well, right?
This was a university
program and so, you know,
the whole college should
know what we're up to.
Related to that and taking it
actually to the next level,
and this is something I talk a lot about
in the chapter, I'm not gonna talk
quite as much about today.
Another way to develop, for faculty
to develop this sort of self-governance
and this mutual responsibility
is team teaching.
Now team teaching is, we
as faculty, most faculty
are used to thinking of our classrooms as
these very private spaces.
Yeah there's, you know, a
bunch of students in them
but they don't count, right?
They're private in the sense that
our colleagues don't
invade that space, right?
And when they do invade it, right,
and I use that word intentionally here,
it's often within the context of
some kind of structure or power dynamic.
You're coming in to review me for tenure.
You're coming in to review me
to renew my contract, right?
It's never, I shouldn't say
never, but it's, you know,
it doesn't nearly happen
enough that we say
to our friends "come watch me teach today.
Help me get better."
Right?
That's a, you know, we don't
do that a lot and enough.
If you're team teaching
a course with someone,
every single day there's this other person
in the room with you.
You're watching them,
they're watching you.
You have to, the two of
you have to engage in
this kind of Ostrom problem-solving
all the time, right?
But you're also exposing
yourself in these ways.
You've unprivatized the classroom
and that's really powerful
for generating trust
and for generating the ability to be open
and honest with each other.
I think this also has an important
implication for the sort of free speech
stuff that I'm going to come
back to later on, all right?
But it, what it does is, the
way I would put it now is
team teaching enables us to recognize
that our colleagues, whatever
our disagreements are
with our colleagues over ideology
or disciplines or whatever,
when you watch someone teach,
you will recognize whether they care about
students or not and how they do it
and that that's an
important value to them.
And if you can get that out
there in the playing field
and get you to see that your colleagues,
who you disagree with
actually are good teachers
and they care about students
in the same way you do,
you've created that kind of foundation
for real work together that is often
missing, I think, in a
lot of places, right?
And you can start to see how this
might relate to the free speech
and open increasing but I'm gonna
come back to that later on.
Another quick point is
faculty have to be willing to take
leadership responsibilities for the
things that they value.
And I think it's, you know,
when I think about IHS and Mercatus,
I think one of the things
to pay some attention to is who are the,
and it's self serving for me to say this
but I think it's true anyway, right,
who are the faculty who
are rising to leadership
roles within their institutions.
And not just, like, people
who are in charge of,
they got a Koch Foundation
Grant they're in charge of
but really are recognized
by the other people at their
institutions as sort of
administratively capable.
Who are engaging in leadership
roles in various ways,
because that's a signal, right,
about their willingness
to take responsibility,
their willingness to engage
in the self-governance,
and their respect that their
other colleagues have for them.
Right?
So if we're thinking about faculty
who are effective in
working across barriers
and working across differences,
faculty who are aspiring to
and succeeding in internal
leadership roles on campuses
I think are important.
But I think there's
another dimension to this
which is a kind of ethical
responsibility for faculty
who create new programs to be willing to
stand up and take a
leadership role in them.
That's part of what it
means to self-govern.
If faculty are going
to take responsibility
for the curriculum, for pedagogy, for all
these sorts of things,
they have to be willing to
oversee those processes.
One of the great, and again, sort of
singing the praises of my former employer,
one of the great things
about St. Lawrence was
all of our main dean position,
all of our associate dean positions,
I think, all of those
rotated through the faculty.
We never hired from the outside since
the last dean we hired from the outside
hired me in 1989, so you can make of that
what you want.
But since then, everybody's
been an internal hire
and I think that's great, right.
There's a cost to that, right,
you don't quite maybe get the influx
of fresh ideas that might be valuable,
but at the same time,
it reflects willingness on the part of the
faculty to step up and take
responsibility for the kind of
things that that people are doing,
and that's a good culture,
I think, when you have that.
In general, time spent together
in doing this kind of work
among faculty develops
trust, creates a culture
of shared values that enables
open discussion and criticism,
and the progress that those can bring.
I'll note two other things.
It also means that the
formal governance process
becomes more effective.
When you have shared values,
you can, there are certain things you
have to, you know,
curricular innovations have to be passed
by a majority of the faculty, whatever,
you've got these by-law type rules
that you have to follow.
That process will work
much better when you
have the other things happening that
enable people to have
that trust in each other.
And places where we've seen
bad things happen recently,
I suspect our places where,
where that foundation of trust
just didn't exist.
I'm thinking now of
Wellesley in particular,
but sad to say.
The other thing is that when you do this
from the bottom up the right way,
you have the ability to codify
those informal practices
into more formal covenants, right?
You can then, sort of, take
the things you're doing
and say all right, now we're gonna,
this is a word we tend to like,
we're gonna institutionalize these things,
we're gonna make them into something
more structured, more formal,
you always have to watch that
it doesn't ossify and bureaucratize
and all these kind of things, right,
and sort of the challenge
of having an institution
that is still open to change and evolution
over time is a very tricky one,
I don't have any super
wise words about that,
but I think it's important
to be at least aware
that you want to make
sure to try to do that.
So, when you're practicing this,
when faculty practice these
forms of self-governance,
I think the formal structure becomes
more effective.
And this is again why you need,
this is a way of thinking about
a bottom-up social change, right?
That it's got to come from,
what we learned from
the Ostroms is, right,
it's coming from the people who are
experiencing the difficulties,
who know the circumstances
around the problem
that needs to be solved,
and who are willing to
engage in the self-governance
to attack those things.
And I think that effective
social change in the
Academy emerges out of these forms
of self-governance.
Social change tends to
stick better when it comes
from the bottom up rather than
the top down for all the reasons
good Hayekians understand, right?
Local knowledge, the ability
to coordinate more easily
among small groups who know each other.
I think it's important to also keep a
little, another little Hayekian point
in mind that I bring up in the chapter,
which is the sort of
structure of production idea.
And just remember that all social change,
whether it's, you know,
starting a new program
at a university or whatever,
goes through that kind of Hayekian
structure production process.
You have to start with
raw materials, right?
You have to move your way through that
to the ultimate consumer or what the
ultimate output is,
and I think just remembering that
those things take time
and that different people
will have different expertise to add
at different points in
that process, right?
That division of labor matters is really,
is important there too.
Sometimes I think in
the context of academia,
faculty just want to, you know,
wave their magic wand
and make things happen
and remembering that it takes time
to produce things and that
the time involved in that
process is, itself, in
some ways, an input, right,
in the kind of conversations
that have to take place.
I'll just do one anecdotal story from my
time as associate dean.
I knew that it was probably time
to step down.
I loved the job but I knew
it was time to step down
when I was losing my
patience with process.
Where I was like I know what the
right answer is here.
You guys are busy, I know
what the right answer is.
You're still talking, I don't have time
to listen to you guys talk anymore, right?
You get that temptation,
and when you've been
in the job for long enough to know,
but once you start thinking that way,
you've undermined these very values of
self-governance and the sort of patience
to let people get to where you want to go.
We had a president at
St. Lawrence at the time
who was a terrific president
and I always said the
mark of a good leader
is someone who gets you to go
where that person wants you to go
without ever tipping their hand that
that's what they're doing, right?
And that sounds more manipulative
than I mean it.
I don't mean it to be manipulative
'cause it can be, right,
it can be a very good place to go, okay?
And if you're able to
create the conditions
and persuade people and do it
in a way that never feels like you're
being bossed around, but rather,
it's a person saying,
look, I know you guys
want to get to here, I'm
gonna help you get to here,
without you realizing
it's really me, you know,
sort of doing this and let you feel,
which is in some sense genuine
ownership over it, right?
Good leaders are good, to
use Hayek's metaphor, right,
are good gardeners, are good cultivators
who create, who lay the
groundwork for people
to do the things that will work.
And again, I think one of the things
to think about when we think about
social change on campus is
leadership matters, right?
Leaders create conditions,
they set the rules of the game,
they role model, they
do all kinds of things.
One of the other things I think,
and this is true for
any bit of social change
but thinking about faculty and campuses,
it's particularly important.
Those on the shop floor trying to innovate
have to bring skeptics into the process,
in whatever ways that they can.
If you try to do this without including,
at least, attempting to
include the skeptics,
you're also gonna fail 'cause you
don't have enough broad buy in.
The first year program at St. Lawrence
was very controversial for the first,
probably, 15 years of its existence for a
variety of local and national reasons,
and there was always a, kind of a core
group of skeptics among the faculty
and when I became associate dean,
one of my goals was to, every year,
have one of that group of faculty
agree to teach in the program.
How do I pull this person in?
What can I do to pull this person in?
And I think I did that, if not,
I came pretty close, all right.
And so I think thinking about
how do we bring skeptics in
and for me, when we
think about larger scale
political change, those of you who know
me and my work know that this for me has
been a long-standing
kind of concern of mine
and something I take very seriously,
which is how do we talk to
people we disagree with?
There's another terrific
essay in that collection
by my former colleague at
St. Lawrence, Traci Fordham,
about how we talk across ideologies.
And Traci has much to say
and Traci and I don't see
the world in the same way,
suffice it to say.
But we're very good friends
and we've, sort of, done,
we've done workshops and taught together
and so all these, so thinking
about these questions.
How do we talk across difference?
How do we bring skeptics in?
How do we frame our
arguments for whatever change
we're thinking about in ways that are
inviting in, rather than
shutting down, right?
All of those, I think,
are really important
and notice that fits into that
Ostrom perspective, right?
Where what we're trying to do
is collectively problem-solve,
build trust, all right,
and do all those kinds of things.
Okay, so.
I'm gonna take my quick breath here,
and then ask the big question.
What does this have to do with free speech
and open inquiry?
Maybe you can see some of it.
First thing I want to say is
when we think about those
issues on college campuses,
I want to remind you that there's at least
three constituencies,
three groups we think
we want to talk about.
We know two of them 'cause we talk
about them all the time.
We talk about faculty and
we talk about students.
We tend to forget, however, staff.
And in particular, if you
pay attention to these,
you know, these stories about abridgments
of free speech or open inquiry
or the craziness that happens on campus,
it's often the case that staff members,
and particularly Student
Affairs staff members,
are deeply in the middle of this.
Now I'm not gonna, you know,
I think there's reasons why,
let me put it this way,
Student Affairs staff are often
not very well enculturated
into the academic mission
of the university.
This is something that
universities have to
actually concentrate and
focus on to accomplish.
If you hire a residence hall director,
if you hire an assistant
director of, you know,
orientation or something like that, right,
most schools don't even think about,
well, how do we get them to think
about academic freedom and open inquiry
and life for the mind,
you're hiring someone for a job.
Schools that do think about that
are somewhat exceptional and it's awesome
when they do, okay,
but I want to emphasize, right,
when we think about change
on college campuses,
that group of people frequently
doesn't appear in the picture, right?
And they're really important.
In fact, if you talk to students,
students' experience of college,
those folks matter as much as
the faculty do in many ways.
The other group, by the way, who,
from a large group of students
who matters even more than the faculty,
are coaches, all right?
Our athletic coaches, all right?
But that's a trickier question
and especially if it's
Division One school,
much trickier question.
But if what we're thinking about
is what's the students experience
and what adults matter for students
and how do we want to help,
sort of, influence and
change students, right,
we get stuck on faculty and students
as being the thing,
but there's these other
people involved there who matter
and matter in ways we don't think about.
I don't have any, I'm
gonna say one quick thing
about staff in a minute, but I don't
have great insights there, but I think
we just have to take that into account.
So, how does this all relate
to free speech and open inquiry.
With faculty,
hopefully you can see it already,
faculty who engage in these
forms of self-governance,
and done so successfully,
have built mutual trust
and a common core of values
that allows them to treat each other
with what I would call
a hermeneutics of trust,
rather than a hermeneutics of suspicion.
And what I mean by that is that their
default position with their colleagues
is to think "okay, Steve must be doing
that for some good reason.
I know Steve, right?
He cares about his students,
the students say he's a great teacher,
I've taught with him, I know this.
Why is he doing this thing
that I might otherwise
think 'why is he doing this', right?
But there must be a good reason."
I, just for a footnote here,
I often wonder what my
St. Lawrence colleagues,
well some said so but not many,
sort of, how they digested
my Koch Foundation Grant
and their perception of the Kochs
with what they knew
about me as a colleague,
like well wait a second,
Steve's done these, we
think are good things,
but now, he's got a Koch Grant.
Why is he taking money
from those people, right?
So what is, how do you
resolve that apparent, right?
I mean, hopefully, you
know, you have a kind of,
that hermeneutics to trust rather than a
hermeneutics of suspicion, and I think,
if you do the faculty
governance thing right,
and again, I'm taking
away from me individually,
faculty in general, right,
begin to trust each other
and begin to think okay,
let's let, you know.
There's a problem here, by the way,
which is a kind of
political economy problem,
which is if everybody trusts everybody,
everyone thinks everything
everybody's doing is great,
then when you actually
have to go to the formal
governance process,
there's a certain danger
of you saying yes to everything
everybody wants to do, right?
And then suddenly, we've got
4,000 majors and nobody
to staff it, right?
So hopefully, part of what you build up
in that mutual trust is the
ability to say no when you have to say no.
That's the really hard part.
How do you look at your colleagues,
who you like and trust,
and say you know what,
we just can't do that.
And by the way saying we is a lot
better than you just can't do that, right.
We just can't do that.
And making, being able to make that case,
sort of, again in this
shared set of knowledge
about the institution,
this shared set of values.
So I think that's a tricky part, too,
in this sort of internal
faculty dynamic here.
I think one of the ways to get faculty to
develop this trust and this sort of
hermeneutics of trust is, again,
the team teaching point, right?
Team teaching across disciplines
and ideologies is really key.
If you can begin, if faculty can begin
to see their colleagues
as liberal educators
who care about students in the same ways
that they do, the fact that you differ
about this issue or that
issue or those issues
becomes less important.
And as a kind of practical
what do we do about this,
I think supporting programs that
encourage that kind of dialogue across
difference among faculty are probably
worth investing in, okay?
I don't think debates
are the way to do this
because debates set it up as a
win-lose sort of thing,
but genuine conversation.
I had a whole bunch of fun
last, I guess, was it last fall,
would've been the fall, so '16,
2016 and I'm off next
week to do this again
with, you may know this
guy, Gerry Friedman
who's an economist at UMass Amherst.
Gerry was an advisor of the Bernie Sanders
campaign informal.
He is a very far left economist.
For a number of years, he and I have done
this presentation, this seminar at
Western New England University,
which is sponsored by FEE
partially sponsored by
FEE, which is we, you know,
we take two topics and we
present two different sides,
and it's not a debate, right,
it's just two different sides
and an opportunity for students to hear
the same topic approached in two ways.
Gerry is a great guy,
he cares about students,
it's never a fight between
the two of us, right?
It's always about how do we present
this material for the students.
Couple years ago, we went on the road,
we did this at Creighton and then at
University of North Carolina Wilmington
on inequality and it was great,
and the students loved it, and I think
these sorts of things where we expose
students to multiple perspectives,
where we give, where we
show them that people
can have a conversation across difference,
and not do it in that kind of artificial
performance way, right,
the way you see sometimes.
That's not what you want to do.
But a real conversation between two people
who like each other, right,
and who trust each other
and can converse and
disagree in these ways,
I think that's really, really valuable,
it's valuable for students,
but it's also valuable
for faculty in terms
of creating culture on campuses, right?
That enable the free exchange of ideas.
It's hard to attack your colleagues
when you've seen how
deeply they care about
Liberal Education and students.
Doesn't mean it won't happen, it's just
a lot harder when you've
got this environment
in which people,
when people know each other
as teachers and as scholars in these ways.
Couple words about university staff
like Student Affairs folks.
I think if you include
them in these processes
of self-governance in
ways that are feasible,
you can build similar trust there
and reduce their hermeneutics of suspicion
and the faculty's suspicion
about them, too, right?
That enculturating
university staff into the
world of the values of academic inquiry
and open inquiry and so forth
I think is really, really important.
And it helps them understand why faculty
do the things that they do,
it helps them know how
to deal with students
who might get upset when
they're being challenged
in ways we think are legitimate
and productive and part of
the intellectual process,
but if they're complaining
to Residence Life staff
about this thing that
happened in the classroom,
ideally you want Residence
Life staff to be able
to respond in a productive
way that's part of, you know,
forwarding the goals of Liberal Education.
So bringing them into that process
in whatever ways campuses can do it
is really, is really important.
All right, so what about students?
So
here are some things to think about,
including my sort of suggestion.
As Josh mentioned in his introduction,
I just recently wrote
and, you know, published
this book on Hayek and Modern Family
and so I think a lot
about these issues of kids
and family and so on,
and as I said earlier,
and Vincent Ostrom talks a lot about it,
he doesn't give us much detail,
but he talks a lot about the importance of
childhood and learning in childhood
these sort of, what we call,
kind of soft skills of
self-governance, okay?
And so one of my concerns has been,
in recent years, is
whether the sort of rise,
and maybe now decline,
of, call it what you want,
hyper-parenting, I like to call it
corner solution parenting,
which is no risk to
our children is acceptable, right?
We have, hm, right at the corner,
there's no trade-offs with kids,
no trade-offs whatsoever, right?
We can't expose-
we can't let our kids play outside,
because there could be
a predator somewhere
within a few miles who might scoop them
up and take them away.
Yeah by the way we'll put them in the
car, which is way more dangerous, but hey.
Just note that, right.
Whatever you want to call it, right,
this over-protectiveness,
and in particular,
the way it manifests,
and the thing I'm particularly
concerned with here
is the way it manifests in the
absence of unsupervised play.
Some of you may know this guy, Peter Gray,
who's a psychologist whose written on
the role of play and learning,
his book is called Free to Learn, okay,
is focused on, sort of, schooling issues,
but the chapters on play
in that are terrific.
Virginia Postrel way back in '99
in the Dynamism book had
a chapter on play also,
which is terrific, right.
So this thinking about
unsupervised play in particular,
not like formal Little League, right,
and that's part of the problem,
but kids just getting together to play in
informal, unstructured, unsupervised ways.
Think about the skills that children learn
in those environments.
I think that they're
exactly the skills Vincent's
talking about when we talk
about self-governance.
You have to figure out,
you've got to figure out,
you're gonna play a pick-up
baseball game, all right.
What are the rules?
Right?
Where are the bases?
Right?
What are the rules?
How many innings are you gonna play?
Right?
How're we gonna do balls and strikes?
Okay, the home run over that
fence or this fence, or-
you got to figure all
this stuff out, all right.
And then when conflict happens,
you have to resolve the conflict.
One of the most interesting points Gray
makes in that book is
in this very context,
he says when kids play
pick-up games together,
and there's large skill
differences between the players,
the more skilled kids take it easy
on the lesser skilled kids.
And when I read that,
I was thinking "why?"
And then I went to the next sentence.
Well of course!
'Cause if they don't take it easy
on the lesser skilled kids,
the lesser skilled kids leave.
I don't want to play if you're gonna
throw a 90 mile an hour fastball at me
and I'm a fifth grader.
I'm gonna leave.
So the idea of having that consent, right?
And having, getting agreement on everyone
playing the game requires that people
adjust and negotiate and
change their behavior in ways
to maintain that consent,
right, throughout
whatever the game is.
Notice that this doesn't
work in Little League.
There's no real exit option, right?
You're in the game, stalking the ball,
I'm not taking it easy on that kid.
Right?
Much less likely to see that happen.
And so, what we develop, Gray argues
and I think, again, you
can apply this to the
Ostrom's way of thinking,
is that when kids
engage in unsupervised play,
they learn all of these skills that are so
important to self-governance.
Both collective self-governance,
how we problem solve together,
but the more narrow sense
of literal self-governance.
How do I govern myself?
How do I learn to get
along with other kids?
I have two stepdaughters
who are 12 and 10.
The ten-year-old is, I think bossy is the
word I want here.
Very bossy.
That's why she and I are like this.
(pounding)
'Cause I don't take well to bossy
and neither does she,
but she's very bossy,
especially to her older sister, okay,
and they were making cookies
together the other day
and the older one has
finally learned how to
deal with this, which is when the younger
one starts getting bossy and insisting
on everything her way,
the older one said "I'm done here now.
You can make the cookies by yourself."
And walked away, right,
and went upstairs.
And I was listening to
this from my office,
I'm going.
(audience laughs)
All right, and there was this
moment of silence, right?
And the younger one then starts
pleading with her to come back.
Pleading's not the right word,
screaming at her to come back.
(audience laughs)
And I'm sitting there going,
I'm thinking, saying to myself,
the older ones name is Abby,
I was like Abby, don't give into that.
Let her scream.
And eventually, the younger one,
the tone reduced and the
word please appeared.
(audience laughs)
Abby came back down, I said yes.
Okay and they finished, managed to finish
making the cookies
without killing each other
or giving me a heart attack.
So it's that, it's the ability to exit
and the ability to say no, right,
and learning that negotiation process
is really important.
I'm gonna make a little detour,
and this is something I talked about
in a blog I did for you guys a while back.
It's not central to the point I want
to make here today, but
it's worth thinking about.
I think this point that I've just made
helps us understand why college students
struggle with roommate issues
and with sexual communication issues.
There's a really interesting
thing to be written
about sexual consent and all the stuff
that we're talking about here
and the ability for men and women,
this is not about just women, right,
this is about men and women
and the ability to engage
in the negotiations
over relationships,
whether it's, you know,
roommate issues or it's
sexual communication issues,
that are these kind of skills, right,
and if you don't have
those kind of skills,
either you're gonna just not exit when you
should exit, right,
you're just gonna give in
and be subject to the to
the will of the more powerful person,
or you're gonna try to solve them
by bringing in some
external authority, right?
And that is, I mean
obviously, there's cases,
and then we think about
you know sexual assault
where that's necessary,
but in a lot of these cases
where it's problems of communication,
it's not clear to me
that's the right solution.
If the solution is providing young people
with the skills to negotiate these
things out more clearly ahead of time,
so everybody knows where
the boundaries are, right.
So how might all of this be
affecting the ability of college students
to deal with disagreement
in the classroom,
and to disagreement over ideologies?
How might it affect the likelihood
that they turn to authority for protection
or try to shut down the other side
rather than engaging in
true open inquiry and dialogue.
In the face of feeling threatened
and feeling harmed by
other people's words,
and I don't want to deny that
those feelings are real, they are,
but how does one respond to them?
If one responds, if one
has no set of skills
to respond to them by engaging
with the people who are bothering you,
and again, we know there's limits here.
If someone, you know,
we get a true neo-nazi
comes in and says things,
that's one thing, right?
But I'm talking about the
more challenging cases
where people say things that they
don't mean to be harmful,
but are perceived as being harmful.
How do we communicate that?
How do we talk about that?
How do we solve those problems, right?
We're right into this Ostrom
world of self-governance.
Yet, if young people don't
have the skills to do that,
we're gonna see the kinds
of disasters we're gonna see
where it's just easier to
stand up and yell and scream and shout
someone down or try to shut them up
than it is to engage the conversation.
And so here's my kind of way
of thinking about this now.
I think the mistake that we sometimes make
when we work with students on these issues
is that we assume-
I'm gonna put it the other way.
The challenge might be more that
they lack certain skills and experiences,
than that they don't care about the things
we value and that we
think they should value.
We say "oh, students don't care
about free speech anymore."
Well maybe they do care about free speech,
they just don't know how.
They just don't know what to do
when faced with these kind of situations
that we're talking about, right?
And that, when you look at it that way,
suddenly this looks different
and what it suggests is,
and here's my kind of
programming message, right,
when we think about campus programming
around free speech and open inquiry,
maybe we should be thinking more about how
things that focus on those skills,
and exposing students
to certain experiences
and difference rather than debating
the abstract legal and
philosophical issues
of free speech.
I'm not persuaded that
the latter strategy works
to convince people that
open inquiry and free speech
is something they should value, students,
that they should value.
It might, with the right people, it might.
But I think the fact that, my reading
of the polling data and
reading through all these,
I keep, you know, I have
a morbid fascination
with all these campus controversies
for a variety of reasons
because I'm wait for it to happen to me,
and what would, and asking my students,
I like to call it the airplane question,
what would I do if, right?
Oh, say a fan blade comes off
the engine of the airplane, right?
Well I'm on the plane,
what do I do, right?
You ask yourself that question.
Well, you know, when UnKoch My Campus
comes knocking at my door,
what am I gonna do, right?
So, I had it happen once
already at St. Lawrence.
So I think thinking about these things
and sort of thinking about
how we help students,
how we might create
experiences for students
that help them develop the skills
and aptitudes and trust and
all these sorts of things
that enable them to exist
more constructively in a world
where people disagree with them.
Right?
That's the challenge.
I am not, I don't have the expertise
to know how to do that,
right, in ineffective ways
and the last thing I want to do is sort of
get groups of students in a room
and have them play act all,
you know, no, no, no, no.
My daughter, my biological daughter,
is a senior at NYU and she's taking a
absolutely incredible course this semester
called Play, which is
taught by two medical,
they're psychiatrists actually
from Med School at NYU,
but they work a lot with kids stuff
and so it's a whole course
on the history of play
and it gets into this,
they're reading Peter Gray,
they're reading Flow and
all this sort of stuff
about how play is part
of the human experience.
It's just like, she's by the way
a dramatic script writing major,
so for her, sort of
thinking about how human
beings interact in these
ways is part of her,
you know, is a helpful thing
for her professionally,
but it's like the perfect
capstone course for four years
to sort of think about
this thing in those ways.
And it's taught by two
very young faculty members
who are doing it for the first time
and so they're trying
to figure this out, too,
and they've had them engaging in these
kind of group exercises in the class
where the students have to actually work
together and build something
and they were given like
this, like box full of stufF,
like a rubber band and a pencil
and they had to make, I
don't remember what it was,
they had to make something
out of it, right?
And so, these group
problems, okay I get it,
I'm not a big fan of that
kind of stuff, right,
but, and I don't think that's what
one wants to do around free speech,
but there's something there, right,
about asking students to
experience that process
of having to work together.
The other thing faculty complain about,
and students complain about,
is group projects.
"We hate group projects!"
Right, well, right now someone's always
gettin' a free ride, right?
And faculty say the same thing.
But the question again
is do students even have
the skills to sort of engage?
That's a process of
self-governance, right?
That's all that stuff.
So that's my, that's kind of
where I want to end today, right,
which is thinking about
whether what we see
on campuses as free speech problems
are really problems of this kind of Ostrom
self-governance and set
of skills that, perhaps,
faculty don't have too, but certainly
that maybe students don't have
because the way that students grow up
and are raised has evolved in ways
that they don't, they have never
developed as fully, perhaps,
as generations past did
those particular skills.
Students today have awesome
skills that parents,
that their parents didn't have,
but this may be something
that they're lacking.
So I think is as organizations
who care about these issues,
think about what do we do
on campus to, you know,
to forward free speech and open inquiry?
At least thinking about this point
and what role it might be
playing in those issues
seems to me to be worth
your time and my time.
So thank you all very much.
[audience applauds]
