 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Robbie Suave, associate editor at Reason.com. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Robbie. Thanks for having me. So the first question here, Aaron wrote the first question, and I think it's a good way of starting out our entire theme of this. And for the record, before Aaron and I went to see you bolder together at a time that we might have thought this was a pretty crazy place, but things are getting crazier. So what the hell is going on on college campuses? Yeah, we've seen over the last few years, I think, a major upswing in these high-profile instances of students censoring each other, professors being punished for saying the wrong thing, administrators taking actions against students, students calling on administrators to take actions against people they don't like. And that's been the major change, I feel, over the last couple of years it used to be, and if you talk to Greg Lukianoff at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, he'll say the same thing. It used to be that the administrators were doing this to students. They were violating their rights. They were not respecting their free expression rights. But now the students actually kind of want the censorship that administrators are capable of giving them. That's among their demands, among their pressing demands. You've seen that at Mizzou and at Yale and then the bunch of other places of students saying we don't like this kind of thing, we don't like maybe offensive Halloween costumes or theme parties on campuses or various organizations that we don't like or professors that have said something in classrooms that have bothered us and we demand the power for you to punish those people or stop those things from happening. So what's changed? I mean, like Gerber said, we were at the epicenter of crazy leftism. Or at least one of the multiple. Maybe Madison. Or Berkeley. But I mean, and there is none of this. I mean, this seems like a fairly recent. But nothing like this. I mean, there was some PC stuff, definitely. But something's happened. Yeah. So I have an answer to that that I think a lot of people aren't aware of. And it's actually, I blame sort of explicit government guidance that came out in 2011. So I graduated from the University of Michigan in 2010. My college experience was pretty good. There was not, you know, these things have always been happening. There have always been kind of a minority of very active, angry liberal students who kind of want some variety of censorship and are mad at people. That's always existed. But in the last five years, ever since 2011, these students, they haven't grown in number. They've just gained institutional power on campuses. And they've done that because the federal government started giving out guidance in 2011 the Education Department, specifically the Office for Civil Rights, which administers Title IX, which is that gender equity law you hear so much about in the trans-bathroom debate saying that there has to be a quality of between the sexes in education. But the Office for Civil Rights interpreted that guidance, it began interpreting it in 2011 to hold that all forms of harassment had to be very vigorously policed on campus. The administrators had a responsibility under Title IX to protect students from everything that would bother them. They were kind of changing the definition of what constitutes harassment to be. It's no longer offensive to an objective person. It has to be severe and pervasive. They're saying, this is a subjective standard. If someone says, you know, they are harassed, then you have to do something as an institution. You have to investigate these claims. And it's transferred a lot of power, I think, to the students. I think they get it now. I think this is, you know, this happened five years ago and over that time period they figured out they know what Title IX is. They cite it all the time. They say, I have this Title IX right to be protected from things that offend me. They say that all the time. And the administrators kind of think that too, even if that's not actually what Title IX really means, they're just, they're worried they're going to lose federal funding if they don't take their students' claims very seriously. But you mentioned that, so there's always been this small group of the angry activists students who think no one should ever say anything they think is mean. So they've been empowered. But does this mean that the, so one of the things that's hard from outside, from sitting here not on a college campus, is to get a sense of how big this movement is versus just being fairly vocal or being juicy stories in the sense of being ridiculously dumb and so fun to report on versus this is some sort of growing movement. So is this really like on the college campuses are more students buying into this than used to or is it just this empowered always minority? Yeah, question reminds me of kind of like sometimes my dad always taught, he went to college in the 60s and my friend, one of my, asked him at some point, like weren't their hippies just everywhere. I have this image of going to college in the 60s. He's like, no, I mean, they were actually quite rare. They took, the image became entirely hippies, but like they were quite rare. So like on Aaron's point, is this being overblown or do you think it's becoming more and more widespread? Yeah. So these, these are very difficult things to measure for exactly those reasons because now in today's world, we have social media, we have someone can do something stupid on campus and all of a sudden, we're all talking about it on Twitter, I'm writing about it bigger news outlets than I are covering it. And then it seems like it's a trend that, oh, this is getting, you know, so much more common when really this has always been happening. So in a sense, yes, it is overblown. However, it's definitely true that the kinds of things that students are complaining about are different. Students are more safety obsessed than ever before. Their concerns come from a place of the language they use to express their grievances is much different. And I would argue much more of a threat to a classically liberal society, to a free speech, a pro speech society. The language they use is one of, of I have a right to be not offended, to be protected, to be that, that if I were provoked on this campus, that would be the same thing as threatening my physical safety, that physical safety and emotional safety are the same. I mean, they're on a spectrum. They're similar things. They're all things that authority figures have, have not just a right, but a responsibility to, to create a safe, this is the safe space idea. It's easy to mock, but it's very powerful. It is very powerful. There are a lot of students who have bought into that kind of thinking. Now, it's still just a minority of students, I say, and I, I've tried to measure whether the vast swaths of students, whether their attitudes about the First Amendment are changing. There are some surveys on this. They're kind of mixed. There's some support for the position that, yes, their, their attitudes are getting, I would say, slightly more hostile to free speech. It's a really difficult thing to measure because you guys know people give very contradictory answers to, do you support the First Amendment? Well, but do you support it if, you know, people, religious people are offended about a cartoon? You know, people, people get confused. So we're, so we talked about Title IX, and, and I know you're not saying that this, you know, kind of sprung out of the government without any backing because the very ideas that the, the, it was a letter, correct? A guidance letter. Yeah, a dear colleague letter. Those very ideas about what constitutes harassment have been percolating for quite a, like a broader, looser definition of harassment for interpersonal harassment, bringing in things like microaggressions and the, how language perpetuates, I don't know, class struggle. I'm trying to, Aaron and I took classes about things like this and we learned about, you know, from people claiming that things like, you know, the phallic nature of airplanes was oppressing them in some nature or things like, like, like seeing this everywhere. So that's been around for a while. Did it just get up to the fact that someone in Department of Education decided that it was one of these people who believed that all these things are microaggressions and problems and therefore put this letter out and then, but also people on campus have been learning this though, I mean, they have been learning things about how oppressive words and attitudes are. Yes. And if you talk to these students, they, they think that everyone should basically be required to study that. That's the thing they want to study. They don't, they've already made up their minds that that's the case, that they're horribly oppressed, marginalized people. And, you know, in some cases they are, but in general, college students. And generally, if you're on a college campus, you're among the more... I mean, I think horribly oppressed and marginalized is a bit of a stretch, but I see your point. You're probably a privileged person if you've managed to go to Yale or Princeton or something. But these students think, if you talk to them, they don't think they're in college to be changed. They have all their ideas already in their head. They think they're here to educate you. They're here to educate their teachers, other students, the world at large about how oppressed and pathetic and marginalized they have been and, and that there should be more classes, they want, you know, more diversity classes. They want more... But diversity classes, you mean classes about specific groups and races of people. Yes. They want entire college departments. At Western Washington University, this was one of the demands of students. They wanted a college of power and liberation. That's what they were going to call it. Where everyone would essentially be trained. And again, it's fine to study these issues. Like, I don't have a problem with that if professors want to teach them. If you should have a wider range of classes in college, that's fine. But they don't actually want it to be an educational thing. They want it to be like the mission of the universe. Yeah, they want, and they want it to be an activist model. They essentially want training. They want everyone to be trained to be a social justice activist, not, not someone to like dissent or question or, or kind of think intellectually about social justice and what that means. They have it in their heads, what it means. They want everyone kind of, and they want everybody to, to live and breathe it even in the residence halls. They think they think it's not just in the classroom where you can actually challenge your professors. If, ideally, you can challenge your professors if they're saying something you disagree with. But they want it in the, the residence halls where it's much harder to, it appears, I think, to the average student that, well, I have to accept kind of this ideology being forced on me or I'm going to be like kicked out of my dorm or something, which is not a healthy, conducive environment for a dialogue. So this story you're telling sounds familiar in the sense that in the 90s and the early 2000s in particular, we, there were a lot of stories of conservatives upset that they would, you know, kids would go to college campuses and they would have to take courses that touched on queer theory or feminist theory and that these things were anti-American or in some way disrupted their socially conservative priors. So is this, is this related? Is this, is that a, is that a precursor to this? And this is kind of the same thing going on on the left or are these distinct? I would say, I would say it's related, but, but now you could, you know, you, it's not just like hyper offended liberal students. There are conservative students bothered about all sorts of things and that are going, that have begun and will in the future. I absolutely believe this is going to be the next big trend is conservatives saying, well, we're actually marginalized on campus. No one shares our views and they'll actually have a better case because kind of everyone on campus shares the, the offended left students views in, in, in some sense, they're all their entire faculty does. So the conservative students are going to start saying, well, wait a minute, our ideas are not represented. We don't have anyone who thinks like us. What about, what about this kind of diversity? We need the, we need the coddling, the protection. Our, our ideas are under assault and I, I think there will be no sort of argument against that. Well, there won't be a principle. Yeah. I mean, they'll just be playing the same game. But Aaron, were you asking about the first wave of the PC stuff? Well, that seems, the first wave seems a bit because we had, we had the political correctness. Yeah. Right. And it's still a word that, I mean, Trump is, it's still a word that stands for a bunch of, especially attitudes in conservatives. Like Trump uses it to note this huge thing. But I think we're talking about like Dinesh just uses a liberal education and a shadow university, which is what. But that, that first, that first explicitly PC movement is interesting in light of this second wave PC movement, because that one ended, I mean, it, it was a big thing and then it just became a subject of ridicule that we published like the politically incorrect bedtime stories book. I remember it was the best seller for a while. And it just, it became something you made fun of people for using these dumb PC terms or whatever and it died out. So does that, does that prior PC wave tell us anything about this one in particular, like how this one might play out? I, I think it tells us that this is kind of cyclical on its own and, and we're, I, I think maybe at a high watermark for this current phase or, or will be soon, hopefully. But then what, what are you going to write about? Yeah, no, I, I've perverse incentives, man. I have nothing ever to say. But is it cyclical in the sense that people paying attention to it or that there's actually the student outcry itself is cyclical? Like the actual. I mean, the student, I think the student protest movement is, is kind of cyclical. They're, they're right. There are more student protests now. They're, they're having, or, and it, it's certainly the case that they're having a more pronounced impact on the university. They're actually getting people to resign. They're, they're actually, administrators are at least pretending to try to meet their demands. I mean, they, they do have a bit of power at this moment. They, they, and they can invoke investigations of faculty members. That's a really, that's a big power. I mean, the, the balance between what students can do and what professors can do is really shifted in the last, I would say like two years with the kind of Laura Kipnis stuff. That's just, you know, the most well-known, but there are so many. Can you tell a little about what she is? Sure, Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis had written some article actually complaining about Title IX. She'd written it for the Chronicle of Higher Education talking about how Title IX just kind of messes up normal relationships between, between students and faculty or the kinds of relationships that were, existed between students and faculty when she was a student. And she talked about kind of some of the Title IX cases. Title IX also compels of sexual assault investigations in universities and, and, and very illiberal ones. Student, her students, students of the campus were so outraged by the article they disagreed with it. They filed a Title IX complaint against her that she had, that she had violated Title IX by talking about it essentially. And even though that's absurd, the university still has to appear like it's taking this seriously. So it has to do something. So it subjects her to an investigation where she can't have a lawyer. It flies in a team of lawyers. She doesn't get a lawyer. She gets a support person. Her support person, that person's advocacy on her behalf also caused people to file Title IX complaints against that person. So he had to be removed. So she can't defend herself against Title IX claims without violating Title IX, like some people believe. It's totally like a catch 22 of, it's the modern catch 22 of higher education that what it, everything that falls under it makes it so you can't even talk about it or discuss it. And, and you know, eventually she's cleared nothing bad happened to her, but that was after weeks of uncertainty. And, and certainly you would, if you had followed this, you would, and were a professor, you would take away from it. Well, I should just shut my mouth about this other things that could bother my students. And I hear this from professors all the time, professors who are afraid of trying to teach their students. Well, so the, the interaction there is interesting. And it goes back to what you were saying at the outset about Title IX or at least the current DOE's interpretation of the, through the dear colleague letter, but in interviews and research you've done in terms of the administration itself, how much have you found like that kind of, is this just extreme risk averseness? Like we might get sued by the government or is there actually communication going on between people in the DOE and on university campuses saying you need to investigate this? Because you, I mean, they seem to go gung-ho on this, but are they just afraid? Or are they zealots? Or is it a mixture of both? It's all, it's, it's three things. First of all, they really don't mind doing this because they're administrators and they like to run people's lives. I mean, it's just sort of bureaucratic mission creep. We can do more stuff. We can, we can prevent more people. We can interfere in more people's lives. Often their title is like the administrator in charge of diversity and inclusion on campus. I mean, that's like, yeah, that's it. Dean of the Office of Inclusive Excellence and yeah, diverse sustainability and I mean, what else is this guy gonna do? I could just see him like clapping his hands being like, all right, here we go. We finally got something to do, boys. Yeah, so it's that it is also extreme risk averse. Universities just are that way. They're big institutions. They're always afraid of their brand that somebody's gonna cause them public relations disaster. The students are gonna do that. And then also, but also it is yes, very explicit guidance from the government. The government is investigating more than 100. I think it's nearly 200 at this point universities for violating Title IX. It just tells you, we're investigating you for violating Title IX. It tells everyone it's a public list that you're under investigation and that you could lose federal funding. I don't think it actually has deprived anyone of federal funding and maybe very, almost never at least. But as part of your settlement for the investigation, it says, okay, you must implement all these things. And then the university agrees to change its harassment procedures. It's sexual misconduct procedures. The Office for Civil Rights has said, for instance, that you have to use a preponderance of the evidence standard when you're having a sexual assault dispute. Which is 50% plus one, what would they get? Small thumb, 51%, yeah. And the defense of that is that, well that's the standard you would have in like a civil procedure. But they don't mandate any other aspect of the civil procedure. So for instance, you don't necessarily have cross-examination rights. And in fact, in several of these settlements, at least two of them, the Office for Civil Rights has said, you may not allow cross-examination. So why would the reasoning be for that? That's traumatizing to a survivor of sexual assault. These are victim-focused proceedings. I mean, of course, if you accuse, you must be. Which of course assumes that they are actually. Well, the language they use always assumes it because they say survivor, they say they say. Potential survivor. I mean, it assumes the accuracy of that. So the procedure assumes the outcome in its structure, the outcome that the procedure is meant to determine. You're no longer even, you're not guaranteed a hearing. Actually, OCR's kind of preferred method now is a single investigator model where, so there's a dispute. It is handled by one administrator who investigates it, who decides which witnesses to interview, if any, who to talk to, decides whether there's a finding, not a finding of guilt, it's a finding of responsibility and then determines the suitable punishment. And one person does this instead of a panel or a hearing of three people. Do they have to inform the person accused that he, probably usually he, but not always, is under investigation or give him an opportunity to present evidence to? They don't have to do anything. They're the investigator. Actually, I covered one case. I think it was Colorado State University Pueblo, I think. What is the college in Pueblo, if you can remember? That's what it is. Yeah, CSU Pueblo. Yeah, CSU, it's CSU Pueblo. And this was a sexual misconduct dispute between two students who were basically dating. There was no actual, there was no actual, so someone else reported. Yeah, this is, you were talking about this. Someone else reported that she had been assaulted by him. She was a trainer, he was an athlete. Trainers and athletes aren't supposed to date, but like, I mean, you can, it's a free country. But someone else found out about the relationship and said he had assaulted her. When she was asked, she said, no, no, no. I was not raped. Those were her literal words. I was not raped. We're just trying to keep our relationship secret. She told her coach, there's nothing to report here. Everything's fine. They said, well, so you say, the Title IX people will sort that out. And the person, so they were forbidden from seeing each other while this investigation was proceeding. And again, there's no dispute between them. None whatsoever. So these are just, this is just like, almost like the government coming in and being like, we're going to investigate your relationship and decide whether or not we think. Yeah, yeah, we will let you know whether you were raped or not. Yes, exactly. And it was a friend of hers who reported it as an sexually assault. It was some other trainer, yeah. There might have been some jealousy component or something, or just wanted to get them in trouble. He was found responsible. And I'm not clear whether they actually interviewed him or her because it's, and he had other people he wanted to be interviewed. But the investigator said to him, I am the investigator. I will tell you, I will decide who gets interviewed for this procedure. And he was found guilty. He was, I believe it was a two-year suspension from the university. And there are, I mean, in some of these, there are some lawsuits that have been. Yeah, so he's filing the lawsuits. Yeah, how have any of these played out? I mean, have any of these been resolved? In recent months, there have been a number resolved in favor of the student alleging that he was wrongfully disciplined, either because the case was far-skill or his due process was violated. And now there is actually going to be a case that was just filed alleging actually that naming the education department as a defendant because it has advised these universities. It has forced them to do things that violate the due process rights of students. It's a University of Virginia law student who has filed a suit and his suit says, it's kind of an interesting little argument that, you know, are you familiar with the Administrative Procedure Act? I am, yes. We're both lawyers, kind of. Right, of course you are, not really. You actually probably know it better than I am. I'm actually, I'm trying to read this lawsuit and understand if it makes sense based on this. But so the new OCR guidance that came out in 2011 was never. Rule, it was never rulemaking, yeah. Right, it was never subjected to this law that says if you're gonna do a totally new rule you have to have the public weigh in. And the preponderance of evidence standard is a totally new rule, at least you can argue. It was never required before and this is kind of a sizable different thing. And because the preponderance of evidence standard was used in this UVA student's case, he was found responsible. Actually the person, the single investigator who did it said I would not have found you responsible if under a higher evidence standard. So he has a good argument. But in the past, we know we've had, we've had concerns or there are concerns about sexual assault on campus and there are concerns about people feeling marginalized on campus. I mean this has been going on for a while and they're not completely unfounded. Not at all. So what should we be doing about this if not investing everything to the absolute fullest degree? I think this Stanford case, the rape assault at Stanford, Brock Turner was the perpetrator. The swimming kid. The swimming kid. As horrific as this case was, he committed a terrible crime. This is a good model for how these things should be handled. And his punishment was too lenient. I think that argument makes sense. But he is going to be punished and he's been publicly branded a rapist and he's gonna be on the sex offender. He is being punished even though he should technically serve more jail time. But this is how these things should be handled, these sexual assault cases. This is, he was, the police were called. He gave an incriminating statement to police that he later contradicted. It went before a jury, a jury decided, 12 person jury decided beyond any reasonable doubt that he was absolutely guilty because he was guilty. And now we have faith in the outcome. We don't need to question, he's not, if this had been handled by Stanford, he'd be suing Stanford for depriving him of due process and we'd be hearing now how he's the victim of this process. And he would be if Stanford uses bad procedures for handling these things. But it's just, it's so obvious to me that you have to have the normal, warts and all, the normal criminal justice system deal with these things because that's the only way we can be certain of the outcome that we can be confident that this person actually did it, that justice is being served and that it's not going to be overturned in one of these lawsuits. Let me push back a bit on the criticism, not so much of the sexual assault issues but the speech and trigger warnings and safe space concerns. So one way you could approach that is to say, look, these students are being charged an extraordinary amount of money to go and spend for however many years getting their undergraduate degree. And this is a market and the provider should be providing what the customers want. So there's what's wrong with the students saying, look, I came to college for reasons X, Y and Z and we as outsiders or old people who went to college before this stuff was hip, I think those are stupid reasons but the customer's always right. So this is the college is just meeting market demand. Sure, that is an argument that is not totally wrong. I think the tremendous universities are public but sort of private, they operate independently but they have even the private ones have all this public funding and then it's sort of like taxpayers are on the hook for this institution that is then violating the rights of most of the students who go there just because some students want it. So it's so divorced from a true consumer. You deserve what you pay for kind of model that I think that breaks down. I mean, most of the students at these institutions just wanna go there and get a good education and take advantage of their First Amendment rights and hear interesting speakers and then you have this small minority of students that are shouting down everyone they disagree with and getting people like disinvited from the college. I mean, what if this is gonna be your only opportunity in life to hear controversial, interesting people? Like I remember when Bill Ayers came to my campus University of Michigan, I got to interview him for the paper, this was a really exciting experience for me as someone who wanted to be a journalist. You know, what if he was disinvited from campus because these offended students didn't want someone like him there. This would have hurt my education because I'm paying, I want a good education. So that's kind of my problem with that. Well, Aaron raises an interesting point because it's with the Title IX influence, you think of schools like Hillsdale and Grove City, which I believe are the only two schools that take no federal funding of any sort. Yeah. And they're both very conservative, of course. And they don't even take student loans from that are subsidized by the government because I think if you do that, that's the trigger that pulls you in. And that's two out of however many institutions of higher learning there are in America. And there's places like Liberty University which say to you, we put some other value on a higher pedestal than free expression. Our Christian identity comes first. And they're letting you know that. So don't go there if you want kind of your garden variety, liberal, classically liberal, maximum free speech, kind of post-enlightenment education. Which is, in a education funding system, I think all of us would support or at least something with so much of the government's foot on the neck of these universities. You could start a school that advertises itself as a safe space you're not gonna hear. Hillsdale kind of says, you're gonna get a conservative libertarian education or you're not gonna hear any of those neoliberals or anything, it's just gonna be Marxism and saying, but of course that's not the case. But which is the interesting question of what they're trying to do here because your discussion about the sexual assault prosecutions, I'm putting that in scare quotes. I mean, really, they're not criminal on these level, but it's like they flipped the entire Blackstone better than one, what is it? One guilty man go for it. Yeah, absolutely. 10 guilty men go for it and one innocent man is jailed. I mean, I feel like that they're actually substantively arguing against, tacitly if not explicitly, that they actually think it's better if they convict people erroneously as long as they can change the fundamental institutions of society. Because a lot of this in terms of the sexual assault is about a social construction theory of society, how we need to change the way people view sex, men in particular view women, and we can only do that with extreme force in prosecuting how they deal with women sexually in all these sort of situations. So it's actually better if we convict people, innocent people, accidentally because we're trying to change society fundamentally. Right, and I just thought that was sort of a bedrock, liberal, classically liberal view that no, it's better to let however many people go for it. Well, whatever it is, it's hard, why is that so hard to say at night? 10 guilty men go for you than one innocent man jailed. But I've been shocked by how many liberal commentators, liberal activists, people who otherwise you would expect them to say no, to be opposed to like torture or Guantanamo Bay or presuming people are terrorists, all that sort of good stuff that I agree with, have kind of thrown that out the window when it comes to these sexual misconduct disputes. They imagine that the person is always guilty and if they're not, they might as well be guilty and we should proceed like that. And it's people like, as recline have wrote articles saying that the affirmative consent standard, the different consent standard that requires that you have like a verbal yes to each and every sexual activity is necessary even though it makes no logical sense and would be bad. Because it's so widespread, but it's rape is such a problem. Right, just because, even though this is gonna result in people who really didn't do anything wrong, getting punished, even though this is going to have, likely have a disparate impact on communities who already suffer from excessive rules and regulations and criminal codes. We know that when I talk to a lot of professors, they say more of the accused students are students of color, which is not surprising because we know that these kinds of systems of justice mistreat these people. And the left is often correctly outraged about these things in other contexts, but not in this context, the left community, I guess, is much more divided. Well, it seems to raise another potential way to defend this, what we would call illiberalism, which is, so you've got the college professors who are on campuses now or are largely the product. They were on the universities in the late 60s, early 70s. They were part of very large student movements that were important and successful in meaningful ways and came out of a society where the young people changed the world, or at least they perceive it that way. And they've identified maybe these problems, like one of the things that's happened at universities over the last half century or so is groups that had been marginalized have more access to the university. And sometimes that's for very good reasons, and sometimes that's for reasons that we might think are not so good, but there are more of these marginalized groups, whether that's women who now often make up major reasons. By now it's substantial, like 58% or something like that. Or, but racial minorities, ethnic minorities, and that these groups have been over the course of US history systematically disempowered compared to the elites who still largely run things and make up the bulk of the stuff that you learn on campus is like the perspective of these elites, at least the story goes. And so you can say like this marketplace of ideas is great, like you ought to hear controversial things, like what's the answer to bad speech is more speech sort of argument, but that that's only really works when the sides have some equality and power. But when your voice has been marginalized for so long, then the powerful people speaking their speeches significantly more weighty than yours. And so what we need to do to correct these things, and the way we correct them is that this young people, student level who are gonna be the future leaders of America is to put a thumb on the scale to push out the speech of the powerful so that the speech of the marginalized, which is just as true, if not more true than what the powerful is saying, can be elevated. Yeah, this idea, you're absolutely correct. This idea is very popular among students. It's punching up, punching down, dichotomy is another way of putting it, that yes, we don't have, even if we all had equal free speech, it wouldn't be equal free speech because some people have more institutional power, have more wealth, have more privileged status by virtue of their birth, and so their speech is counting for more, and so yeah, First Amendment is not all that great because that's just giving more power to the people who already have it if we're just all gonna have equal free speech. So it's just as you say, they want some kind of, so that is one of the arguments they use to combat the idea that free speech by itself is so great. So what's wrong with that? I mean, it's interesting because I think you have to get down to the core. First of all, these people are not liberals. I mean, they're no meaningful sense of liberal. I mean, they're basically collectivist Puritans, and they're adopting, the Puritans wouldn't say, oh, I believe in liberalism, like in the classic sense, they wouldn't have, the pilgrims would have been like, they were not places of religious tolerance. They were like, no, we're going to socially engineer society because of one, there's one thing that matters here, and that's relationship to God, for example. And we're going to socially engineer sexual relations. We're going to make sure women don't show their ankles. We're going to, all these things, we're going to have heresy, microaggressions, whatever, that's all the same. It's a tendency of human society. So first of all, say like, so they have this idea, but now what's wrong with it? Well, I would say what's wrong with it is that it's not, it's never neat who has the power in the situation, and they're kind of very warped about who is the powerful. I mean, someone who has the power to like, crucify you on social media might actually have more power than someone who's ostensibly wealthy and works for an important organization but doesn't have the same social media following, or you could have, I mean, even on these campuses, like I'm thinking of Gawker attacking that. Like Gawker used to think of itself as talking truth to power, but like Gawker is incredibly powerful, although now they've made, this is, let's post it, let's pretend I'm talking about this like one year ago. But so it's not always clear like who is actually the punching up, punching down party to me. And in these campuses, a lot of the times, the people who are claiming to be the most marginalized, most oppressed, most traumatized, most emotionally turmoil people are the like wealthiest, most privileged people. And keeping in mind that everyone already on the campus usually is filtering through some degree of privilege. But the students who have a much better case to say that they've had, they're marginalized, they've had very difficult experiences. Maybe they're students of color, maybe they're some other identity group. I hear, I've seen cases where these students are actually the ones who are being censored or whose speech is causing the more privileged students to say I'm offended, you shouldn't, I've heard of students being run out of like anti-war meetings cause a student who said like, we need to man up and confront this war. And he didn't, he was a less privileged student and didn't understand why that was politically incorrect language. You know about man up? Yeah, okay. So I have to continually update my dictionary of what's not okay. So man up is not okay, I guess. Here's another one for you. I just saw on Colby College's bias incident spreadsheet that a student reported another student for using the phrase on the other hand. It was filed under disability. So I must presume. Are they just trying, I mean that is like the joke stuff from the way. I don't think so, I don't think so. I think you're probably right, which is terrifying. I mean like that was the thing that was the joke books. Yeah, when the first political pressures were moving. I'm high challenged and all those like jokes were coming out. Yeah, they're not really jokes anymore. Also on this list, a funny one was someone had apparently carved a swastika into a pumpkin but then there was an asterisk. Upon further evaluation, it was not a swastika. So is that what you do every morning as you go read the incident report? Do you have a few colleges you like? Yeah, I search for, yeah. Yeah, you can just search for these. And these bias incident reports by the way are terrible. This is, these are panels of administrators who are just like their job is to wait for somebody to complain that somebody said something else they don't like and then they hold a conversation with that person and consider additional disciplinary measures for professors, for students, for, and these are in place in a hundred different campuses. Now, I mean, but maybe what we need to be doing after Aaron's question about power relationships and what we're really working with here because we've all, if you've grown up since the 80s, we've all kind of grown up in this sort of emerging power narrative, I would just sort of call it, we added a bolder and it's something you can't totally disregard. I mean, for me. Post-Fuco world. Post-Fuco world, yeah. For me and even for libertarians, like that idea of a class of warfare or something, a proto-libertarians sort of came up with that power matters. But maybe, I mean, it seems that what we need to be doing is A, realizing that people are not liberals, I mean, and not let them use that word. And B, defending liberalism, like for what it means. It's because they're pretending they're doing it, but they're completely not. Yeah, and I would argue that they're wrong about power and free speech. I would still argue that absolutely maximum free speech on a place like a college campus is an advantage to the less privileged, is an advantage to the people who don't have power. The people who have power actually don't need these kinds of protections, because they can get their way regardless. They can game the system, they already have advantages. They have other advantages. So I would still say, even though free speech gives them the right to offend you, the right to bother you, it's still the best tool that the relatively disadvantaged have to speak up. So then in light of that, what do you think of the kind of non-administrative counterpart to these restrictions on free speech, which is the public shaming that we see so often. So you're not like, okay, we're not going to restrict your speech. We're not gonna prevent that person from coming to campus. We're not gonna institute these procedures to investigate you and discipline you, but what we are gonna do is talk about how awful you are on Twitter. Is that kind of a fair way to address this without being as bad, or is that as bad? Yeah, I think the actual dedicated principle classical liberal has to be very careful here, because publicly shaming someone is a former free speech. I mean, protesting is a form of speech. You can protest a speaker you don't like when they come to campus, that's fine, you should do that if you don't like them. So I try to be very careful not to discourage speech. I don't like still is, and even speech calling for less speech is still speech, right? So I must assert that you have this right even to call on free speech to be restricted. So yeah, and public shaming is obviously a better tool for bringing about desirable social change than prohibiting people from doing something you don't like. So yes, I would not, I think we have to walk a fine line when we criticize these students who are saying they're offended. You can say you're offended, things are offensive. That's not necessarily a bad thing. How much has social media played a role in this movement? Because you placed it at what was it, 2011, you said. But in the last five years, social media has exploded as well, and often if you've got these small activist groups on campus, they used to be fairly isolated, but now they can feel like they're an enormous nationwide movement. So has social media accelerated this? Yeah, it's made it much easier for activist students to find other activist students to organize under hashtags to identify people who agree with them on other campuses to appear like they really have something going for them. Like they're in the zeitgeist, things are going their way. So I think it's definitely helped spread. And like I mentioned earlier, it's also made it easier to pick on them, to kind of identify the outrage incidents. So it's having, I might be having a distorting effect on how much of a factor this actually is on college campuses. When it comes to the shaming incidents, I mean, I agree you have to support people's right to even talk about not supporting your rights or other people's rights, that is what it means. But I mean, should we at least be encouraging these students to listen to the other side? I mean, that's the thing here that's terrifying. And to me is that I think that liberalism in the correct definition of the word rests on a pretty thin read quite often. Most of history, people are not liberal. Most people in the world today are not liberal. The supporting, the freedom for the idea you hate is not a common thing. There are little bubbles throughout history, but most people tend to some sort of totalitarianism, control, collectivism of some other people. And they're all learning this now and embracing it and gonna go out and live in the real world. I feel like this should be terrifying to us. It is terrifying and I think it's too late to address it by the time they're in college. I think, actually what I think is a big problem is that a lot of these college students are just demanding the same kind of coddling and emotional protection and sort of illiberalism they've grown up with in 12 years of public schooling where I mean, these things are little police states now, these elementary schools are. People are disciplined for nonsense. There are police in half of all public schools now. So every disciplinary matter is immediately becomes a police matter. You can't have, if you punch someone on recess, you used to be, you'd get like detention or something for a week. Now you might be going to juvenile because there's a police officer in the school and they're gonna involve. So these kids, I think a lot of them have been conditioned in a growing up, going to school in a post-columbine country where everything is dangerous and there's gonna be mass shootings all the time and we take safety, safety first, safety first, schools are so unsafe. Punished Pop-Tart, punished the kid who chewed his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun because he's probably some deranged mass killer. This is the environment they grow up in and then they go to college and then they have actual freedom for the first time and I think that is terrifying to some of these kids. I think they've been taught that the purpose of education is to protect you emotionally, physically and it's kind of hard to say no, no, you're here to be exposed to things that are uncomfortable. You're here to be unsafe. Lack of safety can be good, can challenge you because it's healthy to your growth but that's not how they've been raised. That's institutionally and formally not how our education policies have worked over the last dozen years. So the answer to this might be that it's, this movement is too new to know but do we have any data on what they do once they graduate? Like do they go on to their first jobs and demand similar coddling and complain to bosses when a coworker says something mean? So I can only answer that anecdotally but there have been, I think it was a New York Times article or something about them entering the workforce and kind of thinking they have the right to sort of critique higher up people's like imperfect speech or sort of, yeah it is kind of, it should be a safe space environment and it's kind of funny but I can't imagine that sort of being a sweeping trend because I just can't imagine that working out very well for most students who try that and a lot of them, I mean then there's some who just probably adapt to the entrepreneurial world of being out of college. Others I think kind of want to stick around college like as long as they can and sort of- Nothing wrong with that. Yeah, well, do you see that, in my experience and Aaron's too, I think in Boulder, I was libertarian there and Aaron was eventually too and the, I was aware of what was around me and I either, I did speak out, I mean it's me, I spoke out more but I knew people around just sort of like, just sitting watch the people yelling and saying, okay well they're doing this but like the silent majority is actually against them or is this more liberal kind of mindset. Could that be the case here? Is there, I mean, I know that some groups have been starting creating pro free speech groups on campus that's been growing and things like this so could there be a kind of silent majority right now that we don't have to be terribly worried about? Well, it's interesting because a lot of the opposition to this kinds of craziness going on is, well, it's partly, it's libertarian based and a lot of sent their libertarian student groups who are kind of, who are admirably fighting this kind of environment and conservative student groups. However, I can't, sad to report that it's also taking on like a pro Donald Trump bent because Donald Trump is the person the high profile person most addressing this with his invectives against political correctness that I think are stupid and totally wrong in like every sense except the campus sense where like the college is the only environment where you can make a solid case that there is like left wing censorship punishing people institutionally. That's true. That is happening at a lot of college campuses. That's not true for society at large. The rest of it is all nonsense. But I think a lot of Trump people, they send their kids to these places, they see what's going on, they maybe they read my articles at Reason Magazine, maybe it's my fault and they go, man, this is nuts and he's the one denouncing it. And then there's been lots of kind of semi ironic but I wonder how ironic pro Trump student groups now, they're chalking Trump 2016, they're saying build the wall. And again, they're doing it, part of it is just a free speech stunt and I'm okay with free speech stunts but it's a little, I don't know, it's not ideal for making a like a philosophically sound pro speech, classically liberal argument when like Trump is your spokesperson for that. I so wanted you to say yes to my question and you just made me even more. I want you to say yes, Trevor, there is a silent majority of free speech and then you just had to say the T point. You had to say the T point. We haven't banned it from free thoughts but I'm thinking about it. Well then, so how do you see this playing out over the next five, 10 years? I think the legal regime is going to face serious challenges. I think the sort of Title IX enforcement is going to come under additional scrutiny if not because of this lawsuit I just alluded to, other ones, I still think they'll have a lot of time to kind of, especially assuming that Hillary Clinton is president, I expect her appointments to this office to, because she has made more explicit promises to the activist community who wants the kind of bonkers Title IX enforcement than the Obama administration or anything. President Obama is actually kind of, at least says the right thing, good things about safe spaces being bad and all that, even though his administration has done, I think he's just probably not aware of what this undersecretary is doing. I think Hillary Clinton is aware or is more aware and has made promises and I think it could actually get a lot worse from a formal government administrative standpoint for a while, but like I said, it's cyclical. Do I think this is the end of American education? I don't know, maybe it might be the end, American education might be ending, of its own it might be become so expensive, everyone's going to take online courses or something, people might be waking up to the fact that it's not a guarantee of a job and if you have to take out all this money just to study like oppression studies, there's no point, so I'm not a pessimist about the long-term future of education or even free speech, but certainly in the short term and by short term, I mean the next couple of years, this madness might subside, but there's many reasons to think it might get a lot worse. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy free thoughts, please take a moment to rate us on iTunes. Free Thoughts is produced by Mark McDaniel and Evan Banks. To learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.