 Wow, it's so silent here. Hi, everyone. I'm Urs Gasser. I'm with the Berkman Klein Center. And as you can see, Urs Gasser has a big smile on his face tonight. I couldn't be happier to welcome all of you to this official launch of a truly wonderful book, Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces, by our amazing colleague, collaborator and dear friend, John Palfrey, head of school at Phillips Academy in Dandover. I won't go through his full CD. It's well known. It's more like a coming home for you, John. Certainly that's the way it feels for us. But I would say someone wrote on John's Facebook wall news feed earlier today. And I thought what this person wrote captures it very well. And the quote is, John is a voice of calm and reason in a crazy world. And indeed, I can't think of anyone better to write this book, a book that helps us as individuals, as educators, as society at large, to navigate through a question, which is how can we renew but also reconcile our commitment both to diversity and inclusion, as well as free expression? I trust tonight we will have a far-ranging debate about these issues. Of course, also considering the current political environment, a crazy world indeed. But I also believe it's brilliant, as John does in this book, to start the conversation by reflecting on what's happening on our campuses here, but also across the world. As academic institutions are, in a way, seismographs of what's happening in society at large, but also in some ways a laboratory for how we can shape our society in the future. And I believe, John, in this book you really provide a roadmap how our future could look like, and I'm personally very grateful for the vision you present in this book. We're very fortunate not only to have John here tonight, but it's actually a little bit of a reunion in many ways. We have a number of friends and colleagues from Andover. We have also students from Andover, as well as from Harvard College, who will be in the conversation with John tonight. So it will be very interactive, and we're looking forward to a fun discussion. Also, of course, a series, a discussion, but we'll make it fun as always. This session is live-streamed, so please be aware as you introduce yourself or as you have questions or comments. What is not live-streamed is the reception that follows after the session, to which you're all invited, who are here together tonight. So with that, I want to turn over to my great friend, John, for his talk, and let me congratulate you to this really amazing book, my friend. Of course, thank you so much. You were all very kind to come here tonight, and thank you to anyone on the live-stream who is also watching, or people after the fact watching this session. I'm delighted to be here. It is indeed a coming home. I've taught in this very classroom. You didn't know that, but to be in 1023 is a wonderful thing. It's also just a great combination of friends who I see here and friends who have been willing to put this event together. I will admit I'm one of those authors a bit ambivalent about having book talks of any sort, because the focus is inevitably on the person who wrote it. But I'm very grateful that we do this in a collaborative style as we do today. And the hosts are three tonight. One is, of course, the Berkman Klein Center and, worse, as the Executive Director. Thank you for your leadership, and Alba Hancock, who did so much work putting the event together. Second host is the Harvard Law School Library, another former home of mine, and I see some former HLS Library staff here. Thank you for being here as well. And third, our friends at Andover, the Tang Institute, and many of our current students and others are here. Caroline Nolan and Eric Rollin, thank you for your help in putting this together. So the combination of these institutions, I'm very grateful that you've come together for this event. I thought I would start briefly talking about the thought process behind the book and the argument behind it. And then I want to talk briefly about the format of the book, and I'm very grateful that our colleagues from MIT Press are here. We've created an open access version, which is behind me. I want to talk about that briefly. And then what I'm going to do is actually open it up to a group of students who have looked at the book, maybe even read the whole book, which combines some students who are currently at Andover and some students who are currently at Harvard and look forward to their questions and comments and critiques. And I have encouraged them already to challenge me, and I hope that they will do that. And then we will have an open discussion after that, if that makes sense. The basic argument of the book is really, really simple. It is that I believe we should find a way in both our academic settings and in the Republic at large to find a balance between diversity and free expression. My sense is that both of these things are crucially important to a Republic, and they are crucially important to a learning environment. And my experience as someone who has been in an administrative role in a college and in law school and in the context of a high school is that very often in the last several years we have pitted the two against one another. In other words, you either are on the left and you favor diversity and equity and inclusion, or you're on the right and you favor free expression. And very often the debates get put in this way that pits the two against one another. And the argument that I've answered in this book is that that is not ultimately constructive, that instead we should find a way that these two things, which I actually think ultimately do, reinforce one another, and that we should find ways to embrace them. That is not to say that it is easy to do so. There are extremely hard cases and I hope we'll talk about some of them tonight, which simply can't be reconciled in an easy way. I think hate speech is the most obvious one in the context particularly of our academic institutions, but also in society at large. I would say some examples around sexual violence, particularly gender-based violence would be another example where it's very, very hard to find a reconciliation and in those cases we simply need some rules and some boundaries. But ultimately I think we are much better off if we find the common ground, the places where diversity on the one hand and free expression on the other in fact are reinforcing values. And I realize that this may sound old fashioned in sort of an old fashioned liberal way, but I think in fact that's true and possibly in a really positive way. On the other hand, I would also say that one of the reasons I think we are having these debates is the young people in their wisdom have been advancing some concerns that we probably haven't been as responsive to at those of us who maybe are old school liberals in one sense and that as we inform, as we improve our institutions, that we actually have to listen to those voices and to those debates and that it does cause us I think to ask some hard questions about what we mean when we support free expression and it may be that we actually need to change some of those rules in a variety of ways and I think that's actually really worth listening to. So I do see some dynamism in this argument and one that ought to prompt us to take hard looks at these topics. So starting with the diversity side of the equation, in the particular book I use the fissure, the device of the fissure cases that are around affirmative action as making the case for diversity but of course it's a broader thing than just the way the Supreme Court has seen it. I think our institutions can and should be deeply devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion. We can talk about what we mean by those things. I think that our institutions have not been as supportive of these ideas as they should have been in the past. The history of elite institutions like Harvard, like Andover, like many that we've worked at have been stories of exclusion for far too long. I think we are getting much better at it. I think we are better at acknowledging the effects of structural and systemic racism as an example but I don't think that we are at a place where we can yet say that work is actually done and in fact we need to keep pressing on it in a variety of ways and that's a hugely important statement and I will be interested in the students' perspectives on the progress or the lack of progress that we've made in those ways in these institutions. I also think that in some ways the diversity argument pushes us toward the proper examination of the debate around safe spaces and part of the title here is safe spaces. One of the arguments that I think pops into the press a lot around this topic is the notion that we should or shouldn't create safe spaces for students. In this book I argue that we absolutely should in the context of universities and schools and perhaps more broadly in society. I favor safe spaces in a very specific way but I think it is heuristic for thinking more broadly about how we support our students. I think safe spaces are crucial in the same way that every human being needs a place that they can come to like a kitchen for instance in a home where they're surrounded by people who support them and love them where you can say something really stupid and you know it won't get out, it will not be recorded and I do hope in the spirit of the Berkman Klein Center we talk a little bit about the effects of social media and how this has affected this debate but I think we all need spaces where we can come and where we are supported by people who love us and where there are ground rules whether they're explicit or they're implicit whether they're something that's written down or they're just understood by all of us and it's a zone of comfort for us. In the context of a school or university I think a safe space might look like a Hillel for instance here on the Harvard campus it might be an LGBTQ group there might be a space where people actually often come to or it might be a virtual space where people know they can come but I think these safe spaces are essential for us there might be a group or an environment where students who have been subjected to sexual violence survivors of sexual violence might come together they would know that there were certain things that wouldn't be said or done to them that would have certain triggering effects in that environment I think we owe it to our students in fact to have safe spaces of those sorts at the same time I make the argument that we should also in the context of a learning environment have what are brave spaces for our students safe spaces I think of this space a classroom space perhaps I think of the outdoor spaces that one might walk through on a campus where you might be subjected to people with placards and you might be subjected to people who are saying something that is less comfortable so if a safe space is primarily about ensuring a degree of comfort it actually is the case I think in other settings educational settings where students should be uncomfortable there should be discomfort I acknowledge at the same time that these spaces might be experienced or one might experience these spaces in different ways depending where one has come from so to the extent that one comes from a place of enormous privilege and you're the kind of person as I am where a family has been at a particular place as my mom is here and she's went to this very college before I did and she's on the faculty here so for me to be a student here and a faculty member here I have a sense of real safety and I have a sense of real confidence for other people who might not be might be the first generation to college might feel marginalized in a variety of ways you might experience different spaces in different ways and I think it's important to acknowledge that different students have different pathways through these safe and brave spaces that we create at the same time I do make the argument that I think all students ought to have some combination of these spaces in the context of their education so that's really the core of the argument I'd love to get to some of the specific cases that have come up in the last several years the examples that I use in the context of the book include trigger warnings they include safe spaces they include the debates over campus symbols that have been moved or changed over time they include the disinvitation of speakers they include the way in which we respond to claims around sexual harassment and sexual assault and so forth so all of those things which are I think incredibly hard sometimes to navigate seem to call out for a series of principles that we as schools and as communities adopt and bring forward in my book I argue that it might be different the way that different schools approach this kind of thing so we have some colleagues here from GAN Academy which is a Jewish day school here in Boston I run a school and over that is also a private school same age kids to some degree but a Jewish school might actually take a very different view on certain aspects of this work than a school that was founded 240 years ago in the Calvinist tradition and I actually think that's okay I think it is totally appropriate that we might have heterodoxy in that sense in terms of how we approach these things it's also obviously the case in the context of state institutions the First Amendment has a particular role to play which is less strong not irrelevant but less strong than in private institutions and so one thing I argue for is that it actually may be a good thing that different schools have different approaches to this topic and so long as we're here with students as they come into our environment that that might be entirely appropriate to have different sets of roles in different ways of navigating some of these very hard topics as they come about okay so last point before turning it over to the students and their thoughts is actually about the format of this book I very much hope that as we move forward as a community that we find ways to share our knowledge in different formats and I'm very excited that the MIT Press has partnered with me in this particular way which is to have an open access version of the book I hope that anyone who has views on this even now during the session or afterwards who wishes to disagree with the text you have a great way to do it online it is up here at Bravespaces.org is the URL and I just wanted to really acknowledge the great work that the Berkman Center over time and the library and others who are supporting this event have done in terms of ensuring that we can have an public discourse on topics of this sort and in particular to make the kinds of arguments that take place in academic settings more broadly available I think it is a hugely hugely positive thing and several of our colleagues here have published books in a similar way. I see Yochai Benkler who was one of the early open access publishers with his famous book about the wealth of networks and I hope that in the way in which this book is rolled out and others that we continue to make the case for open access publishing as well as the kinds that is in this format which is also a lovely and wonderful thing. So let me pause there and I'm going to turn over the microphone virtually anyway to some students who have done some work on this and then we will open it up for questions more broadly but I think that the elder statesman of the group is from the Andover class of 2015 and the Harvard College class of 2019 which is Davante Freeland and Davante if I might give you a microphone for the first comment slash question over to you. Thank you really great to be able to be here and share some of my perspectives as was said I'm currently a junior at Harvard College and I graduated from Phillips Andover three years ago, two years ago in 2015 and so have thought about this text both in the context of my experience studying at Andover under John Palfrey's leadership and then also my time here at Harvard where I was confronted with even more so a lot of the issues around safe spaces, what does it mean to invite a speaker, when or when should you not protest a speaker and so I have learned a lot about my own place and my own views around that and so interacting with this text has been really exciting for me. I think the first thing that really stood out to me was recognizing this either or fallacy that's presented between diversity and between free expression was an immediate first step for me and signaled for me going through the rest of the text that this was something that I really wanted to grab it with because this was an insight that isn't being acknowledged in a lot of ways. I think if you were to just look in the New York Times at an opinion piece around free discourse on college campuses, you just see a lot of straw men arguments being presented against each other and so I'm excited to see some genuine reconstructions here on the other side, I think if I went to a school for three years and 100% agreed with my high school principal that would be also a red flag. Bring it on Devante, come on, absolutely. That would be a red flag and so I wanted to address Chapter 5 which I think if anything is sort of the linchpin of the text in that it deals with some of the most difficult to measure issues which is hate speech there's a particular part of Chapter 5 which presents this idea that each institution whether secondary school or university ought to one really assess its own values and its own principles in coming up with what its policy is around free speech and diversity and that those differing traditions should inform what type of policy that they come up with and then that policy should be communicated clearly and transparently and held consistently. I entirely agree that it would be great if all institutions were consistent about what their values were to their students but also I would push back in the idea that I think this thought experiment that we're engaging in should be around what is a baseline set of values that we can establish across all of our country, across all of society for how institutions ought to engage and interact and what are the promises that a student should be able to expect that are held whenever they enter an institution no matter what that institution is rather than coming up with differing values and differing sets of systems and commitments to either diversity to some degree or to free expression to another degree across an institution. There is a particular set of paragraphs which present that an institution like the University of Chicago might have a different set of values versus an historically black college or a Catholic university or a Jewish university and that was okay depending on the values of those institutions because of the unique history of a school like Howard or a school like Notre Dame versus UChicago and it feels to me that as a young person we don't always sort of have every single option in the world around schools whether it's in high school or it's in university and that there should be if anything we should be using our energies as a culture towards establishing what is the very minimum baseline that a student ought to expect and the type of education we ought to receive across all institutions of higher learning so not so much that I believe that the statements in this chapter are false or don't hold but that if anything we ought to really take that next step and actually line up what is it that at every school should be some baseline set of interactions around free expression and diversity and I think that that would really be helpful to offer up to the world as we're all trying to figure this out. In other ways I think my experience here actually having protested speakers who have come and being out a few weeks ago protesting Charles Murray who was here to speak about a book and brought by one campus group that in my opinion is particularly divisive and counterproductive I would love to also be able to have the opportunity to offer that to the discussion if it becomes relevant. Fabulous, we definitely want to hear that for sure let me respond briefly because it's a brilliant and important point and then we'll go around and hear some more comments and I think first of all well struck I think that is a great critique of that chapter and I think it's a great critique overall of my argument and obviously moral relativism is not a good idea I shouldn't say obviously moral relativism is not a good idea in my view so the point is not that there should not be any bounds in terms of how we set these rules. I think what I was trying to stress in a way and I'd be very interested those who run for instance a Jewish institution I don't know if anyone here happens to run any other type of institution that has a particular either faith tradition or kind of a cultural tradition is to say I don't think that one size fits all in general and in educational settings and that at the hardest kinds of cases it seems to me reasonable that there might be sharper limits but I guess what you point to which I probably didn't do as well as I should have in the book is to say that there ought to be some kind of baseline in terms of commitment particularly around diversity equity inclusion I think that's a really really good point I would love to see a higher baseline for diversity equity inclusion we have tried over time with ANOVER to bring up that baseline it is a work in progress as you know you've experienced it as a student recently and I think that's right but there should be pressure in that direction. One thing that I think I was reacting to in a way in crafting that particular chapter is that for in current jurisprudence the idea that a state university presented with any of these challenges hues only to the First Amendment is one place where I actually deviate from the standard view and I make clear that I'm arguing something that probably is almost certainly is inconsistent with current law so an example that I think about is if a neo-nazi group were to wish to organize event or whatever it is some kind of a speech here on Cambridge Common and they follow the set of strictures that the Supreme Court set out in the recent Skokie case they probably could do that right there might be restrictions in various ways but they probably could do it if they came to ANOVER and the group said they wanted to bring a neo-nazi group I would say no and I would be entirely supported in doing that under the law in my view particularly given what we've told students they can expect when they come to ANOVER and I would feel totally right in doing so likewise if a speaker were to come who was praising sexual assault against women or something that might be protected in some settings but is completely antithetical to the values of our school we would say no the argument that I extend in this book is that I could see a change to the current law that would say the First Amendment might not apply in every educational setting if the speech was such that it actually would detract from the educational experience of the students because it's so obnoxious it would be a very hard line to draw it would be a very hard law to craft it would absolutely not fly for lots of people and plenty of people in this room would disagree with it but what I am trying to argue for in that setting is to say that we are rethinking I think the balance between these values one is effectively equality and one is effectively liberty and I could see changing the way in which we think about it in some schools even if we did that you still might have a setting in which private schools with different viewpoints might adopt different sets of rules and I think that's probably okay but very well done thank you super nice Pepper may we go to you and then come around this way would you be okay so Harvard College of 2021 Andover Class of 2017 exactly so I believe I've spoken after Devonte before at an Andover event and it's always very daunting but I'm lucky to be able to do it here so after reading Safe Spaces Brave Spaces I came away from the book I think with one impression well with many impressions but one dominant one and that was from experiences I've had I've understood that they're definitely not mutually exclusive and I think brave spaces are often built from safe spaces and I've seen this in a lot of my own personal experiences for example I did Scholastic Bowl in high school at Andover we had a lovely team that would go and do academic competitions but the thing that I noticed about it very quickly was that it was very gender and balance there were very few women I think at one point it was probably the only female captain in the region and there was a lot of outright misogyny that would take place so I think we started off by building a Facebook group where we'd all share our experiences it was just for female members of quizball teams and from that we'd refine our ideas and talk about the things that we'd experienced and those would turn into plans like an action plan we ended up making a competition that would focus upon female achievements and academia and so eventually that turned into a group wherein people of all genders were invited to talk about things that they'd noticed within the field of academic competition and the sexism that often is engendered there so that was a brave space of course I think according to Mr. Palfrey's definition we could understand that as a brave space we're in everybody's welcome to bring up controversial points but everybody's also very engaged in discussing those points and coming to a greater understanding of what's at play but that came from a safe space also responding to one of Davante's points rule setting across across schools I think one thing that I've seen on the micro level in my own few months here at Harvard as a freshman is rule setting in small groups so we often begin a discussion by saying well this is we'd like to create a safe space where everyone feels safe bringing forth their own personal experiences without fearing that they'll be judged how can we do this and we're often asked to come up with rules which can be a really daunting thing I think wondering how we can really make ourselves feel that we can say what we feel without being judged or wondering if someone's going to talk about us later it's something that we've said being offensive and so I guess I would be interested to know and how other people here in this group would think about the rules that we can establish in small groups just so that we can express ourselves because that can be a very interesting task Thank you as always super insightful and interesting I look forward to hearing some student reactions to that one brief what I would make is I think you're exactly right that the brave spaces and safe spaces ideas truly just a heuristic there's obviously much in between those and I think you're right that they build upon one another I do think that giving students a sense of safety from which they can be brave is actually a really important way to think about it as well which is that we do experience environments very differently and we might experience them even differently over time and it could be in a relatively short period of time as educators I think we want students to be able to experience the discomfort from which they grow but sometimes we really need to ground that in a sense of safety so I think it's really an important insight thank you I'm going to bring another mic or grab that one actually for a sec over to Tanvi and since we're on a live stream I won't use your last name since you're a current and ever student but class of 2019 at Phelps Academy Yes hi thank you I'm very happy to be here and yes my name is Tanvi as Mr. Poffin mentioned and one thing I would say is different from my experience than Devonte and Piper had mentioned is that I have not spent a lot of time outside of a secondary school institution I've not spent a lot of time in a college such as Harvard I've spent most of my time in Andover or in other or most of my time thinking about these issues critically within Andover and the scope of Andover and one thing that I think say spaces and break spaces that really stuck out to me was this idea of the reason why diversity exists and the reason why diversity is helpful in these institutions at least from the perspective of a supreme court case level and one of the things that has been said was that this idea of cross-pollination of ideas that people on different sides especially get to hear from different experiences but from my experience a lot of that has not really occurred because we've kind of stuck in our own groups people who are kind of radical liberal or think of themselves as like on the far left end of the spectrum kind of tend to stick towards those those people and don't really engage in that cross-pollination of ideas and I guess one of the questions I would ask is on an institutional level how do you enact policies to commit to certain ideas that would allow students to to have that cross-pollination of ideas and I think the other thing that I came away from this book thinking about was yes there's this polarization of of free speech and diversity but then another thing that I thought about was also like there's this polarization between the institution and the adults and teachers working in the institution as well as the student and the student protesters there's this kind of thought about this unsurmountable divide and I guess and I think the perception of a lot of student activists is that they're kind of like going through a phase they're doing something just for the sake of doing it in college and then when they leave they'll enter the real world and I think another question I would ask is how do we bridge that gap and how do we commit to kind of taking down that perception of student activists and commit to taking them more seriously in this environment? It's a great point and I'd love to we should catalog these questions and then come back to it and hear other views but let me try these two and then we'll hopefully open it back up I think the first one about how do we encourage more cross-pollination as you say of ideas and students engaging them is a really hard problem for all of us as educators and should be a problem for you as students right I put this back to you to some degree one thing I've been struck by the difference between teaching in this exact room at Harvard Law School and teaching at Andover is there is a much higher degree of comfort in the Harvard Law School setting of disagreeing across political boundaries that I've experienced and that the range of political views that have seemed sort of acceptable in the classroom is much broader in the context of Andover it has been much more there are various degrees of how far on the left you are but it's all within a relatively modest band and in fact at least in the context of the classrooms I've observed and some of the political conversations I think it's been hard to be outside of a certain orthodoxy so one thing I have encouraged students to do in my own classes and otherwise is respectfully to try to find ways to disagree and to have a conversation to advance the truth around the edges and I've said to students in my class if you write a paper that I disagree with totally but it's a beautifully written paper it's a great argument you've got great evidence as an historian you're not you might even get a better you actually will get a better grade than if I think you are just parroting back to me my sort of general left of center Massachusetts liberal viewpoint that you properly have assessed as my point of view so I think that is actually really important for us to engage that into and to and to live it ultimately your second point about taking campus activist seriously is a really good one so I open the book and I've written in other places about this I think the kind of mainstream media view of students as cry babies and snowflakes and all those kinds of things cry bullies is another variant of it I think it's stupid I think it is that is taking and kind of reducing to caricature today students and actually part of what I urge in this book is to take more seriously their kinds of concerns the students are raising students sometimes take it too far when they start shutting down other kinds of speech absolutely but actually I think one of the thing that we do need to do is to say this is part of the an important set of messages from a generation to another generation we need to take it very seriously I think and I would be interested in those who are older and their reactions part of what's going on that's really interesting is that the people who are now running institutions like this one and other elite institutions generally speaking I think many of them kind of grew up in the 1960s and 70s at times when they thought of themselves as the reformers they may have sat in they may have marched on Washington they may have done things that they felt like they were the reformers and now all of a sudden they're being criticized by students and they can't figure out what's going on I think there is an interesting historical dynamic intergenerational dynamic that's playing out right now which is affecting I think how people see one another and I think you've pressed on that really nicely thank you that's great over at Albert also a current and over student but the class of 18 thank you I'm currently a four year senior at Phillips Academy and I actually had the privilege of having Mr. Poffers to the lunch last year in our US history course for the whole year and I could see really embodying values you brought up in this book like for example actively encouraging students to put forward diametrically opposing opinions with you and with each other thank you I'm glad that came through that's a relief you can say anything you want about your head at school I noticed that one reason we were able to do that was that our history class was actually not at all lecture based we did our reading assignments and it was more seminar based but then not all secondary educational institutions have a group of students capable enough of doing that so I wonder what will be your take on the generalization and universalization of the ideals you brought up brought you put forth in this book so for example wouldn't for instance for high schools the kids at this age some of them are not are still in trying to formulate their own value theories and their understanding of the world and shouldn't the so how would you strike the balance between liberalization and guidance as to teach people what to do and encouraging them to think freely how would you strike the balance of that that's my second question and then my third would be so wouldn't at this level wouldn't more potentially encouraging more ideas create sort of schisms or tensions that among the community even though it's a safe space and brave space how would you for example reinforce the type of school identity or communal identity and the unity among the student body thank you lots to impact there and in fact I hear some echoes of Davante's point about the kinds of values that ought to maybe be a baseline and from which you will be building and I will just do a broad answer to your three questions and then maybe again we'll come back to it in the discussion I feel like the essential point in response to what you're saying is that we should allow in the case of students particularly age 14 to 18 in the context of high school or for 18 to 22 or whatever in college and in law school after that students need to be exploring ideas on their own and in fact I think that's part of why I'm so insistent on having both a combination of comfort and discomfort I think if all it is is received wisdom in other words there are fabulous professors who are lecturing but in fact not much engagement with that I think that's ultimately not a fantastic form of learning and engagement I totally get that having a high school that has the kind of resources that Enever has doesn't scale particularly well last year the class you're referring to we had 12 or 13 students and two faculty members right that doesn't work economically for most of the world so I realize we're in kind of rarefied air in that way but I think figuring out a way that there is a dialectic that there is an engagement with students where they are trying on ideas and having them in fact subjected to commentary and critique I don't think there's anything better than that in terms of learning to your third part of your question in a way and this is where I think it connects up so well to Devante's question is I think we have to communicate values and I actually think one of the things that is most bizarre about this moment and as we're said earlier this moment feels very dislocated it does for me in historical terms in some ways is that there's such a challenge against institutions and I actually think there's a huge place for institutions at this moment and institutions that do express their values really really clearly so just to take in the end of our context we talk about youth from every quarter the idea that we bring students from all around the world to a particular high school because we believe in diversity and inequity and inclusion in a particular way I think there needs to be some top-down communication of those values whether that's in a lecture hall or that's in a class or that's in discussion it's not to say you can't press against it it's not to say you shouldn't challenge it in how it's played out because I think from that truth will come but I think conveying some values of the institution is really important to do I think Devante has the appropriate counter to that which is to say yes but shouldn't there be a limit on the outside boundaries that I'm putting words in your mouth but my sense is that this gets at one of the hardest problems at the core of this topic which is to what extent do we have to tolerate the intolerance and if an institution happens to have really intolerant values do we welcome that in our community I think that's where that argument finds the hardest counter-challenge so thank you maybe over to Zeezo Benassi class of 2021 at Harvard and 2017 at Phelps Academy good evening everybody my name is Abdulaziz Nasser Benassi I go by Zeezo in most cases so yeah I'm a recent graduate of Andover student at Harvard so I'm learning as much as I can essentially okay so I am an Egyptian-American student from North Plainfield, New Jersey I was born in 1999 after my parents immigrated a year and a half earlier and I bring up that particular set of dates because I along with everybody else on this panel have grown up in a very different age than I assume most of you did we have access to the internet for example right an 8 year old child who is browsing Facebook watching videos of his favorite cartoon might encounter political comments might encounter comments that that actually you would not necessarily want to show an 8 year old child or an 8 year old child is looking for something fun to do but they end up encountering this conversation that they don't necessarily know how to respond to now I just bring that up in case you have any further connections within the next few minutes but I guess my question at the end of the day is what happens when what is assumed to be a common safe space what is supposed to be somebody safe space ultimately becomes a brave space for one person and not for the other so say you're in a dorm at Andover I'm not going to name my particular dorm but it was very much victim to this kind of problem you have students who assume this space is their own they speak freely like you said this is their kitchen they assume they can say what they want without any sort of correction or necessary response they don't want a political conversation they don't want to hang out with their friends and develop this personal relationship what happens when those default values what people have accepted as the standard and as what a community needs to build overrides what somebody else views as comfortable and overrides what those other students view as what they need and so ultimately this question is one about what the actual power of an institution is to develop that community and what the power of an institution is to monitor and to perhaps mold a little bit how people actually feel I was reading a piece for my expository writing class recently which is a wonderful Harvard freshman yeah and this is a course called terrorism or freedom fight and we read a theory by Irving Janis called group think group think is a situation in which students in this context or human beings just potentially and in general default to a common set of ideas because they feel either comfortable psychologically and they want to fit in because another perspective would cause them to expend extra energy and they might not have that energy to expend at any given moment or they don't have the benefit of having another perspective brought in which is why diversity is super important and why we should have safe spaces so people can ultimately build their benchmarks intellectually but when you have communities that have this group think in dorms for example or on the internet when people are self-selecting and viewing what they want to view how in the world can an institution actually construct safe spaces when some safe spaces override others and create brave spaces it's a fantastic point I do not have an easy answer to this one so I'd be interested in somebody having a better answer than my initial thought one is really just as you suggested is to think about these spaces as experienced by different people in different ways and when you're coming up with a rule set to ensure that there is support for all students and noting that these contexts will change I think in some ways the best learning that I've ever had in my life anyway are late night both sessions in a dorm whether it's at a college or at a boarding school and figuring out how to make those spaces ones that are as constructive as possible I think is one of the very highest jobs I have as a head of school but I also think that there need to be protections in case things either leave that context and I think the spread of the internet and of social media which can take a very small sound bite that was in a very proper safe space and can share it in a very different context on the web can be very dangerous as well as the fact that I think we are learning that people who have been marginalized in these communities are reacting quite differently to these environments than those whose families have traditionally been there and saying those things put a good challenge on this rule set so thank you for raising it it's excellent Miriam if you would take up the mic that'd be awesome in class of 2018 and then ever Hi Miriam I thought a lot when reading your book about the through line you pose of forms and how we should have different guidelines for forms of different sizes and I think that Andover in particular is very lucky to have forms of very different scales we have things as small as hallways which might be six girls to the dorm which might be 30 to a club which might be 15 and your cluster which is a sort of neighborhood system that we have at our school and as someone who's worked in student government and residential life we get kind of our pick of the lot when we sit down to intentionally have these conversations we can decide is this a conversation we want people to have in their hallway is it something we want to happen in a classroom or at an all school meeting when everyone is there my question to you then would be for communities like maybe a more traditional public high school where you might only have a 30 person classroom as your community standard forum size scale mix of people how do we have the more difficult conversations that a community like Andover might choose to have in a much more intimate setting it's a great question and again I'm always aware that in well off institutions we can do things that really help that virtue of that so not everything is universal I think you've had an insight though Maryam as a student leader that not everyone has had which is in the context of these hard discussions what size the group has and what the rule set is for that matters enormously and as you suggest having 1100 people in a public space is very different than breaking it down what I would suggest in the case of a 30 person public high school setting you still can break down into groups of two or three or four right there's nothing I think that stops the teacher and maybe there will somewhere in the country in public high schools but that say you always must be lecturing from the front of the room to 30 students right I always think it's at your one is able to break down the discussion and to make it more intimate in that ways or to change things up so I think the answer is to try to figure out how do you hack the space and how do you figure out how to bring these insights to bear in any given classroom that's not to say there aren't huge challenges to the signs of scale and time and the pressures that a high school teacher might have who's teaching to a test and doesn't really feel like they can afford that kind of time there are other kinds of pressures I think that are put on it but I think your essential insight which is often two people or three or four people have a very different conversation than just standing up in front of this or doing it when you're being recorded for posterity how different this is knowing that if I say something really really dumb it could be the end of my academic career that's a really really interesting insight and an important one I think and one that probably wouldn't have been something anyone would say even a couple generations ago thank you last of the student commenters Darius Lam class of 2021 I'm going to refrain from saying something dumb here four weeks into Harvard College maybe you should save that for a little later so my name is Darius I am a freshman at Harvard I am a high-princese and I really actually wanted to draw upon both their points that they made the first one had to do with sort of the idea of a safe space and I think if we define a safe space as a place where people can you know go without fear of being judged and talk about what they want to say and have those words be you know within this community I think before the era of safe spaces we might just call them like friends right people who we can talk to and trust that our words would be kept private without fear of judgment so in the sense that that is what a safe space is I think it's a great idea the issue that I see arises when there's a strive towards an institutionalization of safe spaces and a misdefinition I guess of what a safe space is one example when I was at Andover there was a speaker a female entrepreneur you know very prominent to come and the event I remember I was just in the maker space at Phillips Academy you know minding my own business and I heard there was this event here and I was like okay you know why don't I just check it out turns out the event was female only a safe space for females I guess to discuss like business or something I wasn't particularly sure what it was but that sort of event struck with me because it seemed to be something that was exclusionary another more subtle example would be if for example it's a space for only a certain like culture of students and another person who is not of that culture decides to sit in should that person be allowed even if that person is not contributing often times it there can be like a chilling effect on the other individuals in the room that somebody out like that's different from them is there but I think that tension of having somebody that's different from you being there having a chilling effect on your speech is something that is really important to like dissect and figure out why that's happening as opposed to just separating it out the other thing I wanted to mention is a lot of my work recently has been around like technology and AI and stuff and I want to bring up the idea of action plans and I think that was brought up before as sort of galvanized by social media I think on the one hand as we've seen through like democracy movements around the world like the ability to get together in large groups and act is really powerful and really important but I also think it does lower the threshold between thoughts and words and then words and actions and that sort of lowering that sort of like joining the distinction between those three categories is something important and we have to really think about especially as you know a lot of people in our generation want to act more and like do things right they don't want to just talk they want to act and what that means for society that is very impressive thank you as always and you like your fellow students have this amazing way of honing in on something that really really matters and I love your first point about safe spaces as being like friends it's awfully nice I want to have the leave for the group maybe discussion of this idea of excluding some in order to include some more which of course is a challenging tension in diversity work the conversations often around affinity groups right so can and should you have for instance we have a group on our campus the sisterhood which is for women of color in particular that group if I were to show up I would not be welcome in that group and for a variety of reasons we think we can hand over to offer but to your point someone is included in fact most of the school is excluded from that and is that a necessary part of inclusion so I think that tension is one we should definitely surface and thank you for bringing AI into the conversation so maybe some of the Berkman people who are here who have very strong and quite informed views on that can comment so if I might I will open it back up to the larger group and we also may have some people tweeting in I know at least one HLS faculty member who is far and might tweet something and so we'll keep an eye out but the floor is open Mr. Fisher A typically fascinating presentation Thank you I wanted to explore a little bit your frequent references in the presentation here to rule sets let's imagine this was the first of a series of classes and we were going to shape the balance between the values that you had to have you could do it by announcing rules and advancing shadow house rules no racial advocates no atonement attacks rules another possibility is before you the organizer of space to announce a set of values at the onset say we adhere to the general principle of respect we want each of you to when responding to your colleagues to take the best versions of their arguments of the worst versions so they would be articulating values and the third possibility is to not say anything at the beginning but model through your behavior how you respond overtly to students engagement and the subtle signals any teacher gives of scowls and puzzles and descending okay when we went to school I'm including you in this only attached that's true there were no rules in classrooms like that I never heard of any rules and it was very rare for somebody at the outset to announce a set of principles but that's not to say they weren't efforts to shape an environment but it was all done in the third way it was modeling now things went wrong the modeling among other things the becoming gentleman idea the gender bias was all built through modeling and what it meant to be engaged and responsive when one should interrupt and not interrupt those are all gendered so there were problems in the transmission through modeling but there are also things that worked in the right hands beautifully my experience of you one of the things that makes you a wonderful teacher is you convey values through modeling really well now it doesn't surprise me that so many of your former students are here and in their precision and grace and openness engage these issues and I think this is likely connected to the way you taught them so I guess that backdrop I'm uneasy about the ironic from this standpoint inclination to develop rule sets they may be necessary as a prophylactic to overcome some of the biases in the older system but I doubt their effectiveness long term I have an intuition that the best hope for the future in this increasingly troubled educational as well as global environment is people embodying and conveying in the old method better values so students current and former of philips academy what you have just observed extraordinarily hard to question but also a dynamic that you don't know which I will unveil to you which is just as I have been your teacher this was my teacher in Terry Fisher the person who taught me well anyway a lot and an incredibly hard question so thank you for the compliments that make the question yet harder I would say my own thinking of it but this is incredibly tentative and wishing as always with your questions that I have more time to think about it which I will is that something like so the conveying of values of the institution seems to me essential they're conveying and in the case of and a bird's straightforward for me because I that's what I do is that of schools I try to talk about youth from every quarter the idea of non-siby or not for self the idea that we must combine knowledge with goodness and so forth which are a series of values that I think are the ones that ground our decisions in all of these different ways you have pressed hard on number one the rule sets I think of the rules as deriving from those values informed of course by the background law so I will stick for a moment with the rules around gender-based violence so in that case I think our values tell us something about the fact that we wish to have an environment in which there should be no gender-based violence but also that we deconstruct a world of toxic identity which we receive over a period of time and we are informed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts which has rules about hazing, harassment and bullying and therefore we must craft a rule set that responds to that we also are informed by the federal law shifting over time unfortunately led in a very positive way by your wife to your left at one point in history and maybe shifting the other way at the moment but informed clearly by these things and we must have I think reasonable I take this as an example because I think it's one of the areas where there are restrictions on speech that are appropriate and are grounded both in law and rules and at our school and I think you're right though that number three is the most powerful honestly I think the modeling idea is most important I take no credit by the way for the effect on these particular students informed by lots of other teachers but I do think that's in essence no at its core the most important thing is that we teach and lead through effective modeling and back at you thank you Dorothy well I'm very happy to see how well the admissions committee has done his work so welcome everybody I've been at Harvard for I guess about 70 years now and one of the things I noticed I was a freshman advisor and then at Radcliffe Dean let's say from the late 50's to the middle 60's and then Eric Erickson's head section man as we used to say Dorothy can you say a little more about Eric Erickson because this may name may be known very well to some of us but maybe not quite as well I'm just going to start there about the importance of an individual in changing what's going on there was a period at Harvard when a man by the name of George Bundy who then left Harvard went to Washington to become an advisor to the president had an idea that he should bring 12 people to Harvard who didn't have traditional backgrounds David Reisman and Eric Erickson were among them Eric did not have a college degree full professor university professor and no college degree it was a totally different era I realized all the things that these wonderful young people said none of the freshman I spoke to then ever mentioned any of them that these ideas have a time and one has to understand that time Erickson had been a disciple of Freud's he was actually an artist who was doing the paintings of Anna Freud's children in Vienna and he just looked at this university in a totally different way and the course was called the life cycle or as we called it the life cycle and every student wrote a term paper on Kesher and the Rye that was the book that every Harvard senior was reading now Erickson gave these lectures they were brilliant and I find these said to him one day look these are brilliant lectures but they're based on a male model what you see are brilliant young people coming here they grow they develop they move on they have these great careers and it's a lineal expression has nothing to do with the young women I'm seeing who are Radcliffe freshmen and he looked at me and he said so you do it meaning you think that's such a big thing write the lectures and you can give them that again is the power of the individual no more traditional Harvard professor would have turned to a graduate student and said you do it do you do it Dorothy? Of course we'll talk about it sometime that's so good but whatever I don't want people to feel that they have to be overly well formulated ideas to give you expression to your values on forming groups I think there's nothing like closing the door you can sit in each other's rooms close the door you can change it and I worry as I listen to some of this of too much being formed and not enough of people sort of being able just to let go and try a lot of ideas and I'm so old now I have my ideas anything I believe in now but I think you kids really have a way to think through do I want to be part of the group is there another way of looking at this and how do I incorporate incredible interpersonal experiences at this time of your life how do you incorporate those into the values you're now trying to delineate totally wonderful thank you Dorothy that's great thank you so much for writing with us and for making it available like openly and for your students I think those interactions were really excellent my name is Haram Mughayad and I'm a Ph.D. student of the Faculty of Law of the University of Cambridge I trace my December and have a very bright life and I emphasize that because I feel the boundaries of Sudan as it currently exists do not define me but since I am here I wanted to ask how do you create safe and brave spaces in spaces that are inherently exclusionary and how do you acknowledge those who are excluded even in the safest or bravest of spaces so for example how do you acknowledge the Native American tribes whose land this institution is built or the slave laborers whose work was put into building these institutions so who bears the responsibility is it an individual responsibility or a collective responsibility to be in a space how do we kind of create this environment where these things can arise organically or maybe even force a rise it's a wonderful question and I think the answer is we all have that obligation and in fact I think that there are some great examples from close by where it's been done well and I think there are lots of examples that we can point to where it's been done quite poorly I think that the symbolism of the plaque is that the law school is a positive one in terms of the acknowledgement of some of that slave labor that created in fact this law school for those who don't know the royal chair which was the first chair in law which basically became the money for the law school I think we need to acknowledge that I credit several of the professors in the last few years who have spent a lot of time thinking about how to redo the Harvard Law School shield I think that's again symbolic but important it was done through conversation with the consenting views on that committee and published another perspective in terms of how that came about and I give huge credit for that process it's just an example from right here but I agree with you, I think one of the things that I've always struggled with is how to think about the native peoples and the fact that this is land that they had to extend anyone can own land period before those who started this college did or the school that I work at now and I do not have an easy answer to that but that is all of our obligation and that I think that when we think about diversity and equity and inclusion that it is an ongoing task that I think is more of a verb than a noun and something that we're going to have to keep out for a very, very long time and I think what you point at with those two examples of in some respects some of the hardest cases we need just to remember that maybe there are cases we're not even thinking about in terms of people when they come to an environment like this in terms of its setup we have to be thinking about who are we not including as well my mom works a lot and for instance people who have various forms of physical disability are we as welcoming in these spaces for them as we ought to be as an example I often wonder at the end of it are we doing enough in that respect so I think there are lots of ways to think about marginalization and how we act more inclusively than we do and my hunch is that we're a generation away from what we're doing I hope directly when you all are university professors or administrators that you'll have figured out better than we all have but it's a great question thank you Thank you to everyone who's spoken it's been spectacular already when you spoke about safe spaces you gave the example of a kitchen which is such a great example we can all I hope imagine a kitchen in which we have had that wonderful feeling of being among loved ones and people who won't I can't say won't judge us of course though of course they judge us but that isn't terribly perotious way the thing about the kitchen though is that it's not established or protected by any institution or any authority on the contrary it is it is set up and its atmosphere is created and maintained by the people who are in it and only those people what difference does it make then when safe spaces are created and maintained and their rules are established and defended by an institution that seems to be a pretty new idea and do you think therefore that there should be safe spaces that are privately set up and maintained and also safe spaces that are set up and maintained by institutions and then finally should some of those spaces be permitted to exclude people and others not and is the bifurcation between institutionally set up safe spaces and not institutionally set up ones lovely set of questions I have a ton of views on this but actually I've not let any of the students answer any of the questions so I don't know if any of you would like to answer reply to this question should there be institutionally set up as opposed to or in addition to privately set up safe spaces I can try I can try I think this is also kind of similar to what I was thinking when I was asking my question as well what I do think institution can do in terms of establishing these safe spaces on one extremely high level is building a critical mass of students in any given identity right so at end over this was a problem we had as Muslim students there weren't very many Muslim students on campus it was very hard to have those particular safe spaces when you had 12 other people on campus who were of the same faith and only one or two of whom were close to you right so building that critical mass for sure then this idea of actually constructing safe spaces as an institution which actually manifested on our campus through the through our camp days what we called it it's basically the office of multicultural development and community development excuse me and that does have a lot of power when you have students who are coming in and unsure of whether or not this institution is going to be their home that kind of this construction that an institution can provide is one that has the reflection of people who have been in the environment previously and also allows all that planning through whatever goes into developing the center like Kim D to try to hone in on an individual's experience from the start so yes it is a very new experience but can those safe spaces supplement and actually substitute for the safe spaces people create with their friends the safe spaces people would create in their kitchen I'm not entirely certain and so I do think the biggest role of the institution is to build those critical masses in any given capacity which is why I'm very much supportive of diversity. That's so good. Cesar do you think that affinity groups of the sort that Darius at least obliquely criticized have a place in a school or a university in other words an affinity group which would be exclusionary in other words might be let's say it's just to take that example those of Muslim faith are welcome in this room to be closed to those of other faiths so to be totally frank yes I do think they have a place in a lot of institutions and I'll explain a little bit so I mentioned earlier something I briefly mentioned was intellectual benchmarks and when I say intellectual benchmarks I'm referring to the contributions of another voice when you have discourse so in the ideal world you have a statement that warrants a response and that response warrants another response and through that dialogue and through that discourse you direct the conversation towards some kind of truth or at least some understanding of the truth that idea begins to fade and collapse when the other voice is either excluded or not even there or marginalized to a degree at which that voice does not want to speak up now how do you counter that marginalization or that fading of the voice I think it is by allowing students to come together and think about what they value without fear of criticism without fear of somebody determining whether or not they're right and so that is the role a safe spacer and affinity group would play it develops somebody's hands on intellectual benchmarks if I were to step back and actually apply this to something bigger and less personal we could say this dichotomy of brave spaces and safe spaces or affinity groups on the safe space side applies to different cultures as well so say Arab culture it's kind of touchy sometimes like you kiss each other on the cheek it's a wonderful experience say you are in an environment that by default that's not the touchy I thought you had in mind that's interesting different touchy but say the default culture at a place in America for example is determined you have this entire culture of people that love it so you're judging an entire culture based on the guidelines of one set of people and so when somebody comes in from the Arab culture and goes into this new culture they're not going to express that idea and in fact if you don't have that outside culture, if you don't have a space where that culture can manifest in Egypt for example then it will never nurture and so if you translate that into level and the actual human beings and students involved if you allow students to develop what they think allow students to develop what they feel and to try to bring that to some concise statement with people they feel comfortable with then you can actually contribute to those brave spaces and that dialogue that we mentioned earlier we have time for one more it's okay Alba thanks Marc Baker this is one of the Jewish high school that you alluded to earlier and where did you go for high school Marc? and I'm a proud alum of Phillips Academy and over it did very well with that 1993 I'm not sure where that puts me generation but I think I'm with you and Yale alum so that puts me a little on the out so I'm feeling both inside and outside right now I just wanted to point out that it was great and very important work and I think it felt very relevant to the work that we're doing and I would say speaking from a religious school since you brought it up in many ways we are struggling with the same things and even though we do it in a particular cultural language so there may be some nuances I'm not sure it's so different although I would say being in a liberal religious environment such as a pluralistic Jewish high school would be different than being in a more let's say orthodox religious environment where really it's as different as you alluded to but one thing that hasn't come up yet I think is the issue of social emotional learning and the degree to which to navigate the incredibly sensitive balance that you're talking about isn't actually an intellectual exercise and it's not a political exercise it actually requires tremendous self-management self-knowledge I think it requires the work of the heart and I think all of our institutions if we think of this only as a rational intellectual effort to create a new kind of cognitive language for this very nuanced work and don't tend to the hearts of our students and really start being explicit about the habits of mind and habits of heart that we need to develop in people such that they can navigate these very sensitive waters I worry that we're going to have lots of rules and lots of boundaries and even wonderful aspirational cultures that only those who have naturally developed in that way are able to navigate so the thing that I'm wondering about as we're talking is what does it take first of all to develop leaders and those leaders could be explicit institutional positional leaders or the kind of student who when you do close that door can actually turn a hard conversation into a generative one what to develop leaders who can help create these kinds of balance safe and brave spaces but also what would it look like to really take on in our universities and certainly in our high schools the work of social emotional development for our students and not assume that they're just going to pick that up even if we model it it's wonderful thank you and having visited GAN Academy I'm quite confident that's just what you and Frank are doing there so thank you for leading the way and I do think that in the panel of students that have spoken tonight you see I think some great social emotional learning in terms of what they've done and I think that the range of approaches that you've brought are ones because I think you have done that kind of that kind of learning in school I did the very first talk about this a couple of days ago for our parents weekend and I got some really interesting and hard questions from our current parents and the last question that came up was one actually about if a student at our school had at some point become someone who had some important views in this case they use the example of someone becoming a neo-Nazi would I expel them that this was a really really hard question in front of a couple hundred parents and of course the answer is yes I would expel them to the extent that there were actions based on that viewpoint if that were just in the back of their mind and ten years later we learn that I would be embarrassed that that had happened and so forth but I probably wouldn't expel them for the thoughts that they might be having we got into how one might think about that but in some ways I think it gets at the heart of your question which is what are we actually doing as schools are we ideally the answer is that won't happen that wouldn't happen out of eleven hundred students that we have because we're in fact teaching them in such a way that the social and emotional learning is that they wouldn't come to have those important views and yet we know in our society people do have those views and they are their interface in Charlottesville their interface in Gainesville Florida they're consistently there and I think in some ways what you bring it back to is the project of education the project of these learning environments and how they then relate to our democracy and I think in some ways it relates back to Terry Fisher's question about what of the various mechanisms we use between values, rule sets and modeling how do we use those in a way to produce really extraordinary kids who are going to then lead the way in ways we're super proud of so thank you for bringing it around to that it is a little bit after the time we'd set. We are welcoming everyone to join us for further conversation it's the HLS Pub which is just over here students still at hand over know beer you get the point others may have beer or whatever else but may we please actually just have a really big round of applause for our students who are here saying thank you