 All right. Well, I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator. I'm your host. I'm your guide to the next hour of conversation. And conversation is what this is about. We have a terrific pair of guests on a vital topic. Every week, it seems to me, we've bounced off of the idea of what does it mean to have academic freedom? What does it mean for students, faculty, staff to express themselves in different places and in different venues, sometimes with different technologies? What are the parameters of that? What are the impacts? How do they play out in the real world? I'm just delighted to have two wonderful, wonderful people, two great scholars who can help us explore that topic. We have Jennifer Ruth, who is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. There's a lot of work on films that I'm really interested in, and I really admire that. And Michael Berube is a professor of English who has worked on everything from disability studies to helping run the Modern Language Association. Together, they have written several books, and most recently from Johns Hopkins University, press a new book called It's Not Free Speech. And if you're curious about it, look at the bottom left of your screen. You should see a little laws and shape button there that says It's Not Free Speech. Press that button, and you can take a look at the book. Vote makes it very provocative, and I think in many ways, radical argument about what academic freedom means in the 21st century. Now in order to get out of the way and let them talk, let me first of all bring them up on stage. So to begin with let's see if we can put the spotlight right on Professor Ruth. Hello. Hello. Can you hear me okay? Good just to hear you. I can hear you, and I can see you brilliantly. Great. How are you doing this afternoon? Or this morning, I should say, if you're on the list guys. Well, thank you for having me, and thank you to the Patreon to support this important program. Happy to be here. Here, here. Well, Jennifer, we have, if I can call you back, we have a wave introducing people. I'm happy to talk about your work in film, but this is the future transform. So what I'd like you to talk about, just to introduce yourself, is to talk about your next year. What's lying ahead for you? What are the big projects and the big ideas for you? Well, as far as film goes, which I know you're interested in, I have a piece coming out on Chinese art film from the sixth generation and a Rutledge anthology. I'm also working on a project on the Taiwan New Wave. However, the project that I want to mention here, because it's most salient, is a book project that I'm, I've undertaken with Ellen Shrecker, historian of the McCarthy era. Most famously, she wrote Know I Retoward about the McCarthy period and Valerie Johnson, who is a political scientist at DePaul University. We're co-editing a book on the legislative attacks on academic freedom. This is what I call the sub-national authoritarianism, because it's at the state level, to try to censor teaching about race, gender, and sexuality. Penn has coined this the education gag orders, and that has stuck, and that's a good sort of way to refer to it. But we have been listed at about 12 different contributors to write about these gag orders and to write about the different kinds of efforts that people are already undertaking to fight them. So that's the project that we're working on now that I hope will be out by spring and hopefully we have various conversations with presses, because we all need some guide books, some campaign strategies to fight this, which is the most serious threat on academic freedom since the McCarthy era. Agreed. I'm so happy to hear that. I'm a big fan of Ellen Shrecker. Please tell her, I've met her a couple of times, tell her I said hi. Her son, Michael was my roommate in college for two years. Oh, that's great. Very, very small. I'm going to talk to her later. Please do. Thank you. Thank you. Now, let me bring up your co-author. This is Michael Berrubé, and he is coming to us from Penn State University. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, Brian. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's a real pleasure. It's a real pleasure to have both of you here. Michael, you know I'm going to be happy to talk about your praises of what you've accomplished so far, but if you could introduce yourself by talking about what you hope to do over the next year. Right now, I'm just hoping to get through a 70-student class in science fiction, but that actually ties into what I'm doing next. I'm working on a book. The main title is The Ex-Human about the end of the human civilization as imagined in various science fiction scenarios. So it was partly inflected by the pandemic. There aren't too many viral apocalypses in this book, but there are attacks by hostile AI, benevolent or not benevolent aliens, things like that. I actually wish I were part of this project that Jennifer just described, because I think no surprise that I think she's exactly right, but these attacks on things like critical race theory are in fact the most, as she said, the most dangerous threat to academic freedom since McCarthyism. I think Ellen Shrecker wrote a couple months ago that in some ways they're worse. McCarthyism went after individuals, fellow travelers, true believers, whatever. And this kind of campaign is trying to de-legitimate entire areas of thought. I do have a couple irons on that fire as well, but not in book form. But obviously, I think anyone interested in the topic of academic freedom will find that to be item agenda one for quite some time. If you could, if you could just make the distinction that you make in your book between the First Amendment right or free speech that all Americans enjoy versus the more narrowly construed version of academic freedom. Michael, you want me to go? Yes, please. Do you start? Okie doke. So, yeah, we all know we have the First Amendment. The First and Second Amendment seem to be sacrosanct in America. And yet, you know, just this week we found that Florida is trying to uphold the Stop Woke Act by invoking Garcetti. So let me back up and just say all of these legislations that we just were talking about, we've been sort of, those with whom I'm talking about these things have been somewhat, I wouldn't say complacent, but hopeful that the First Amendment was going to be able to strike these things down. And that's not necessarily the case. And we can get into that in more length, but more specifically with regard to the book, academic freedom is not free speech. They are not the same thing. It's a special consideration of the First Amendment as a certain legislative ruling said, academic freedom is a special consideration. But academic freedom is specific to university. It's the collective exercise of vetting each other's work, of peer review, so these kinds of things to say what's the search for truth and how do we maintain our disciplinary mechanisms to uphold it in a legitimate and defensible way. Free speech, you can say whatever you want. The legitimacy of the country relies on our being able to criticize anyone, any ordinary person being able to criticize the powers that be. Academic freedom is a different thing. While they overlap, and while they're both critical to the legitimacy of any democracy, they're not the same thing. And we're realizing more and more particularly with this legislation that we need to make that distinction. But you want to add to that, I haven't really covered. Yeah, I'm getting some weird sort of wave interference in the background. Can you hear me now? Yeah, I'm fine. I just switched networks and hopefully this would be better. Okay, great. I'll just add to that by saying we've done a couple of these joint interviews. My usual metaphor is in free speeches, the ocean on which we all sail without, it is the precondition for academic freedom. You actually can't have academic freedom without an underlying assumption that things you can say are not subject to prior restraint by the government. Again, Florida is challenging that because Florida is taking the lead in challenging every kind of open society freedom there is. And it'll be doing that for quite some time unless there's a change in leadership. But to underscore what Jennifer said, we rely on Robert Post's book, Democracy, Expertise and Academic Freedom, because we think as Post does, there's a difference between democratic legitimation, which is free speech, which is my right to go out on the street and warn people about the lizard people who control the world government. About time. It's David Ike's idea, but it's actually believed by millions of people. But if I try pulling that in the classroom, it's a different story altogether. I am calling it to question my fitness to teach anything, let alone theories of government, theories of media, what have you. And so the bar is much higher. So on that vast ocean of free speech we have this very fragile vessel called academic freedom that needs to stay afloat, but at the same time is distinct from it and actually does need to have guardrails that prevent it from becoming a sort of free for all. So that's, thank you. That's one of the major distinctions of the book. And friends, if you haven't read this book, again I strongly recommend that, not just because I'm hosting these folks, but because it's compellingly written. It's really, really hard to stop reading once you get into it. Given that distinction, then how does how should colleges and universities implement a sense of academic freedom now in a way that is just and also maximizes our ability to produce and share knowledge? I can lead and Jennifer can deliver the actual suggestion. Jennifer, I can't hear you. She muted herself. It's okay, we all do it. And I can sort of say scattered things and then you mop it all up for us. So you don't mind. I think that what we're, you know, you said that what we're proposing is in some ways radical perhaps, but in some ways it's quite conventional and it's a request to update the way we think about these things for a contemporary era in which the majority of instructors do not have tenure day and B, we have a social media world in which that is affecting the public sphere the sort of paradox of democracy. We can say whatever we want including we can say things to try to persuade us towards more authoritarian ways of being that way of that. And we also have an erosion of any ability to, with the erosion of tenure, I think they go hand in hand, an inability to think through even as faculty members, right? I mean the joke sort of is that the people you don't want an academic freedom issue to come to a trial because a jury not made up of faculty isn't going to understand academic freedom. Well, most faculty don't really understand academic freedom either in the sense that we it's sort of deteriorated to be conflated with one and the same as with free speech. So the book is a kind of intervention into making that distinction between academic freedom and free speech and then also explaining what we need to kind of update, bolster our guardrails because the kinds of processes that have been in place since, you know, AUPU was successful in promoting the gold standard of tenure and it's spread throughout the country that is eroded so profoundly. And so the kind of processes of peer review, peer evaluation, peer promotion those things in order don't happen in many many faculty in fact. So and of course after tenure they for the most part stop happening. So we would like to see academic freedom committees. These already exist in many places. They don't always have the same kind of charge that we would ask them to sort of shoulder but an academic freedom committee so that look at issues that come up when people are academic freedom might be violated in one way or the other or it might be being used as a pretext or a weapon to defend what would be more typically because it wouldn't be able to withstand your scrutiny free speech. So the, if you have an adjunct instructor who has said something controversial that a parent or an alumni or you know, a legislator has ginned up a campaign about that person could bring her as her case to an academic freedom committee as opposed to simply a chair saying it's easier not to rehire that adjunct instructor next term. If we have situations where we have opportunists in the public's faculty opportunists who are in many ways peddling misinformation and disinformation we can convene faculty in that person's areas to weigh in on whether what they're doing deserves the protection of academic freedom. So in many ways what we're suggesting is just a bull string of what should already be there which is faculty authority over our work. So the most important point I think is to make it to sort of preempt misunderstandings is that we're not in the big question is who gets to say what is true what isn't true in this post-truth world who gets to say what is too far left too far right well state legislators politicians don't get to say administrators don't get to say we have to say well that always be foolproof of course not but faculty as bodies in the areas of the discipline we're the authorities and that is what academic freedom is the source of the authority is within that peer community. Thank you. I want to ask two more questions that I need to get out of the way and let everybody else and these have to do with some of the distinctions that you make that I think are so important. The first is the one that you just touched on between tenure track and adjunct faculty depending on your statistics adjunct faculty are roughly 70% of the instructional faculty in the United States now they lack all the protections that tenure track especially tenure faculty have what do you recommend to shield them would this committee be sufficient protection or should universities and colleges do more? Well one of the things I think short answer is unionization would also help and we're strong advocates and Jennifer has an easier road to hold than I do because she's already unionized but on top of that we thought of these academic freedom committees as Jennifer says as things that would not pay no attention to whether a person is tenure of the tenure track the question is whether they're doing legitimate work so if I can back up for just a second I'll just start with a book does the book opens with the question does academic freedom extend to white supremacist professors now this has led a couple people down the primrose path here part garden path we've gotten some pushback that says well there aren't that many as if that's the issue or we've been caricatured as you know woke social justice warriors our argument has nothing to do with hurt feelings or words that wound or whatever our argument is that the theories of white supremacy have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever they should be over there in the bin alongside the theories of the lizard people the fake moon landings COVID is a hoax there's a worldwide Jewish conspiracy and Sandy Hook was a false flag by the way there are many and we discussed them in the book who believe some of those things and actually teach them so the question about white supremacy is something that's I think immediate moment to people in the United States but the larger question here that opens onto is what constitutes fitness to teach and that's why we draw that distinction between free speech and academic freedom because academic freedom does not cover all those things now so the other pushback we've gotten is well this is basically calling for star changers is calling for committees to vet the utterances of people on social media and so forth and Jennifer and I went back and forth a good deal even before we sat down to write about that because I think Jennifer had the definitive answer I'm just going to say what she said this is already going on when faculty are disciplined for controversial speech there's already an apparatus for disciplining them it's the wrong one it's DEI offices it's H human resources offices it's upper or middle registration or sometimes it's campaigns led by donors trustees alumni parents whatever that's not the way we want to educate these things and part of our response to the critics we've already accumulated is what else you've got how else would you like to adjudicate these disputes over what constitutes a legitimate idea other than with faculty expertise because nothing else is really adequate and right now we have people especially off the tenure track being disciplined with no recourse whatsoever not even to a jury of their intellectual views and so then that comes back again to that question of pure review if you will very broad and pure support and as Jennifer says not that it's foolproof but it's the worst alternative except for the all the others just like democracy thank you thank you which it's a lie right yeah and then the last distinction that I wanted to ask you about in fact let me stop let me stop asking because I'll just there's just so many good things in this but I'd like to open the floor to everybody and again if you're new to the forum you can ask a question either by clicking the raise hand button to join us on stage or you can click the question mark to give us a question or if you're more comfortable in the chat let me know and I can hoist your question from the chat we have one question right now from our good friend Tom Hames let me just bring this up on the screen for everyone to see how has digital transformation changed the conversation academic freedom these things are a lot less visible before they're to go sure I thought Jennifer you said you wanted to go first but this is we actually do have a section in the book it touches on matters broader than we can address here or anywhere because let us go to the part of the book that we discussed because we had more or less a Habermasian belief in the public sphere and in rational and rational debate with reciprocal recognition among more or less you know people operating in good faith and again one of our critics has said look just the fact that there's you know there's always been anonymous pamphlets there's always been yeah but I'm sorry media are not a difference in degree their difference in kind what we have now is basically a flood of disinformation that you know Facebook Twitter are just barely trying to get their arms around and the fact that something can go viral you know within seconds whether it's a cat video or a controversial remark offhand remark either on Twitter or in a classroom I think is game changing we both think is game changing that means that I mean what I hope this term is caught on we call Twitter a decontextualization device very very hard whether it's the Steven Saleta de-hiring in Illinois or a remark about all I want for Christmas is white genocide or just some toss off remark about an election very very hard to reestablish the conversational context and intellectual context in which those tweets occur in the sounds that we have not faced before so I do think we're in new territory thank you thank you this question about social media and voice the way that different platforms amplify different voices it also gets at the problem of conflating free speech and academic freedom and that there's that unfortunate phrase that is powerful in some contexts and disabling in others of the marketplace of ideas but when you have more money behind your loudest voices is not always the most honest or accurate voice right so putting things back into the deliberative discourses of the academic world and sort of bracketing the social media world seems really critical and figuring out how to have some guardrails so that people can't use their academic positions to promote misinformation disinformation okay thank you thank you both great question again that's an example of a q&a box question thank you both for that answer based on the question of context we have a good friend of the program who I don't think can make it right now maybe coming in later this hour but he wanted to put this question to you specifically about context collapse George station says quote several educator researchers Dana Boyd Douglas Rushkoff I think Mike Wesh talk about context collapse in different contexts I wonder how were you using the term here we don't use the term context collapse we actually have a bit of a chapter in chapter one about the oldie debate about context and intention in literary theory and this came up so I don't know how many people know this or want to revisit it but the idea of cancel culture began in 2014 with the cancel coal bear campaign and the person behind the cancel coal bear campaign had no intention of canceling coal bear it was a much more nuanced argument than that but twitter is not always a good place for nuance I understate slightly so I don't know we don't have anything to say specifically about the heading of context collapse we do have to we do take issue with the claim that effect is elevated over intent we understand why people would believe that because we actually cite the philosopher Harry Shearer on the concept of if apologies oh I'm sorry if you were offended right which is another reason we don't go to the harm argument we saw this with Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania which she came out with various white supremacist nonsense the response to it was well I'm sorry that the truth hurts suck it up alright so even when but at the same time you can't say well you intended X but it took on the meaning of Y and therefore we will punish you we have a number of cases in chapter one that are pretty tough that require difficult calls and that's why it's the first chapter it's sort of setting the table for an understanding of how to adjudicate claims when someone is especially in social media because as we've just touched on there the interplay between academic freedom and free speech is incredibly complex very hard to parse if I can just cut to the chase on it basically professors have more protection for what they say on Twitter if they don't know what they're talking about then they're speaking as citizens when they start to speak as experts then they have less protection because the thought is that if you're an electrical engineer who denies the Holocaust you're a crank but if you're a historian who denies the Holocaust you're obviously prima facie unfit so that's the reason we took some pain to try to establish what kind of weight should we give to context and intention where it's not just another literary theory debate in critical inquiry from 1977 but something we see play out every single day usually in social media that was thank you George always asks really deep questions and I hope he can come in and follow that up but that was the other distinction by the way that I wanted to get at earlier that you made between the professional speech in professional context like a scholarly speech on their own topic versus on social media talking about whatever thank you. Jennifer do you want to add to that as well ok more questions are coming up and I want to give everyone a chance to bash them around so here comes a question this is from David Huld the discretion of former professor Jordan Petersen strongly claimed academic freedom in his refusal to use non cisgendered pronouns while tenured at the University of Ottawa what is your take on this? my take on this is worked out in part by working closely with my friend Valerie Johnson at DePaul University who is very active and like me at Portland State at DePaul she's very active and shared governance and faculty senate kinds of committees she also has a much stronger background in diversity and equity and works with her diversity and equity office much more closely I worked with the diversity and equity office as a union steward who would come with faculty who were being investigated for various things but so with Valerie Johnson and I increasingly argue and it's very interesting I think with the values and premises of Michael and my book is that these things can't be legislated by DEI offices they have to have buy in on campuses with shared through shared governance with faculty so what I would like to see and what I would like to see on campuses is for faculty senates there's two things here there are unsaid rules that faculty are violating that then get them investigated by DEI offices but that have not been actually publicly stated in a way that faculty even understand that these rules exist that's very problematic and then the second thing is that if it's a shared values kind of thing if faculty on each campus and different campuses Brigham Young might have a very different take on this important state but faculty on campuses say it should be our practice we sort of collectively will vote on this right we'll vote on this but we believe that you should respect the pronouns that any particular person asks to be identified with and so we're going to pass a resolution about this it's going to be the standard practice and if you violate it there will be repercussions so at Penn State there is a policy on this and yeah you're supposed to respect people's pronouns now I'm I just turned 61 so I don't understand these kids and their pronouns the point is that it's not my thing to get and I watched a colleague this actually happened in real time on Facebook I was sitting there fascinated a colleague of mine said I don't really understand what dead naming is can someone explain to me why that's an issue and as this unfolded he was a little older than myself he said oh I think I get this if there were sports writers by the mid to late 60s who were still calling Muhammad Ali Cassius Clay that would tell me everything I needed to know about that person good that's not a bad that's not a bad analogy in fact the more you go down that rabbit hole you realize them with this guy Luel Cinder changed his name almost no one cared Ali drew all that fire for being joining the nation of Islam for being for resisting the draft and by the time it became a general thing no one good went around calling Jabbar Luel Cinder right it is also part of being a minimally decent person if someone comes along and asks you could you refer to me in this way to say no is just again Jennifer and I actually don't fire anybody in the course of this book we make no decisions about what should be done we actually think there appears at the university or in some consortium should make that call personally I don't think misgendering or mispronouncing someone is a firing offense but it's not good it's suggesting that you're just not respecting someone's right to be hailed and recognized as a fellow human and I would just add to that fitness should also include saying somewhat up to date and good pedagogical practices so if you have a more diverse you know over the decades as campuses have become more diverse I do think it's within reason to say I'm going to continue to learn about the best ways to conduct an inclusive classroom that can be considered part of your continuing to prove your fitness which sounds like it leads to a slightly different topic than one's professional speech in one's field I mean that's not talking lizard people or sandy hook that's more how you talk about lizard people or sandy hook we have more questions coming up and friends you can tell that our guest Jennifer and Michael are superb respondents to your great questions and Michael is already doing the multitasking genius of responding in chat which is great so let me just bring up one more question this is from Annie and Annie asks would our guest address the continuum from public and school library book challenges into and through what we're talking about in higher ed perhaps they would opine on first amendment audits and if you're mic and camera working if you want to join us on stage talk about that too I'd be happy to Jennifer have you heard the term first amendment audits I have a funny my spider sense tells me it's not good but I've not heard the term I have not and my initial reaction so I'm going to keep it brief Michael and let you respond my initial reaction is that this is very tricky because K through 12 operates under a different set of rules than higher education traditionally and we can claim academic freedom and the freedom from political interference state interference and higher ed we can and should claim that it's what distinguishes a democratic country from total authoritarian one but K through 12 doesn't have that kind of it's more through labor it's authority so it's a difficult one although there too Florida is like leaving the way pushing the edge of that envelope stop woke act and a lot of what's being passed in Florida Zain bit K 12 don't say gay but it also had tendrils that reached beyond as we as we're seeing I mean it never intended despite the disingenuous claims of its proponents it never intended to stop at third grade fifth grade whatever and I think that's especially obvious in book bands book bands also have a long long tail I'm sorry I got all these tendrils but you start banning things in K 12 people will not have written in college I mean that's the idea right so yeah no I think we're seeing I mean if I'd known I would live so long as to see the American right start rooting for Putin and Victor Orban yep but here we are here we are well any that's a very very pregnant question with a lot going on now I'm adding embryonic metaphors to the tendrils I'm sorry but thank you for that and we have more and still more questions coming in so this is one that we've got from Joseph Robert Shaw hang on let me just bring this one up on the stage here what ideas about a f have come forward and grown in this book from the days of the humanities high education academic freedom three necessary arguments how would you connect that work and this what a lovely question that's so nice to look back at our earlier work and our early days yeah to think about the relationship so that book was very much focused on the rise of contingency and the exploitation of adjunct labor and how that affected academic freedom for faculty as a whole so tenure track faculty as well as adjunct faculty so that in that book it is through faculty activism faculty shared governance that we hope to propose something that could turn the tide on the exploitation of contingent faculty and the loss of academic freedom that resulted from the overuse of contingent faculty we very much hoped to propose a track for teaching given the fact that so many state universities and so many sort of aspiring second tier third tier universities who decided that they wanted to be research won over the decades and they gave their tenure track faculty lower class class loads and gave adjunct faculty and then sort of outsourced everything onto non-tenure track faculty given that the budgets were such that it was very hard to imagine being able to turn this around and give real job security real voice a real voice in academic freedom to share governance to non-tenure track faculty by simply reproducing all of the same kinds of jobs in terms of service research teaching we should at least value if we need to have some tracks if there's some universities that have some tracks with higher teaching loads and less research expectations which has already been implemented and established in many places those people need to have the same job security so that they can enter into shared governance and faculty participation around curriculum decisions or on any number of decisions that are running their university so we wanted there to be a teaching intensive tenure track that book had a kind of slow burn I think where first there was a really strong negative reaction as if we had said some people deserve to research and some people don't of course that was far from our motivation our motivation was to create a tenure track that had equity at pay and equity in job security to reverse this trend that was decimating universities in academic freedom but that was the first initial reaction and then slowly it has kind of built and there have been different campuses that have let us know that they have implemented something along these lines and so that's wonderful and I think that it does go to show our fundamental stance in terms of faculty run universities and faculty need to make these changes now we've been a little personally it was a little disappointed in that a tenure track faculty didn't take on that fight to the degree that we should have unions have picked it up and it's going to be through unions that that fight for contingent faculty equity happens but nonetheless it goes back to this sense of what's faculty responsibility for the running of a university and for the protection of academic freedom which of course is at the heart of this more recent book just to add to that I think there are any number of ways you can come to an argument that the people off the tenure track should be converted to a tenure track there are any number of arguments from equity or academic freedom the Pennsylvania state system of which Penn State is not a member actually has a collective bargaining agreement that covers the Pashie system and one of its clauses does provide for conversion to tenure after 10 consecutive semesters of teaching California Faculty Association has something as like a doodoro tenure like clause for people who get through the I have the needle review after six years so we were incorporating all these ideas but I just want to give Jennifer credit for basically running to be 10 years ago with like the wonkiest argument I had ever heard namely that the only way to guarantee academic freedom and job security for non-tenure track faculty participating in shared governance was to move them to a tenure track I remember writing back and saying okay we're going to write a book about this but no one's going to understand this unless they already know what a provost is ordinary folks who are not an academic are not going to get this whole what do you mean shared governance thing because shared governance is the least well understood aspect of academic freedom but I can tell you at Penn State where the non-tenure track faculty we call them the teaching faculty now they serve on the faculty senate they have shared the faculty senate they have all the voting rights and yet they are much less likely actually to speak up on the senate floor when we passed our reforms for non-tenure track faculty basically giving them a promotion and review system that they run themselves basically people would speak to me privately they don't want to go on record they don't want to put their jobs in jeopardy and speaking of such and such a thing because they don't have a guarantee that doing so they can do so without fear of reprisal again it's in our academic clause our policy AC64 you can speak out on institutional matters without fear of reprisal but a lot of teaching faculty don't believe it and they have good reason not to believe it so we actually came at this from the perspective as Jennifer says of strengthening shared governance and we thought moving non-tenure faculty onto a tenure track would not only strengthen their job security but would strengthen shared governance in institutions because of course one of the things that's eroded shared governance in American higher education is the erosion of the tenure track so there is actually a through line and again thank you for the question takes us back to the early days when we were first emailing in 2013 whatever it was and coming up with the idea for the first book because the through line is this proposal too this academic freedom committee proposal also would affect it doesn't again it doesn't matter whether you're teaching on the tenure track or not the question is was your academic freedom violated or were your activities actually covered by academic freedom regardless of your tenure status so that has been an abiding concern about is there actually is a connecting tissue between the two books thank you I appreciate the labor oriented answer the question and the answers just thank you very much always good to see someone following multiple books through we have by the way in the chat I don't know if I'll be able to summarize this later any very very nicely laid out what a First Amendment audit is she gave some links she doesn't have video right now so she can't take the stage but there's she she answers that question very nicely so any thank you for introducing us to this that sounds like a pretty spooky idea we I mentioned George station earlier from Cal State Monterey he asked an earlier question and he did join us with a follow up so I think he's in a car let's see if we can get him on stage hello George okay hi and can you hear me alright perfectly okay great I'm in my car I got kicked out of the empty classroom I was in so I rushed to the parking lot well yeah because my class time overlaps FTTE and so that's at this semester anyway as a lecturer speaking of shared governments right which everybody just was I know so thanks for taking my question and I heard part of Michael's earlier response I think I think we're good there was a kind of a stray mention of context collapsing in your intro which is the part of the book that was quickly accessible when I heard about this session and so I got managed to read your introduction and so that's it was you know just a quick mention and no worries about I'm with you on your response and I appreciate that so my other question is actually about how you gathered resources and whose voices you may have included and so here I'll if I can just say what you said we know that to many the thought of handling judgments or handling judgments involving questions of discrimination over to a group coming out of a still white majority faculty is troubling at best and downright obtuse at worst and I know what you're saying about shared governance I share many of those thoughts because I'm in the CSU and we have a really strong faculty union and so shared governance is kind of a constant discussion with us here so in terms of though that argument I'm wondering how that informed your books argument and how you included BIPOC resources and maybe sources in your text and if that went as you expected did it work would you do it differently you know in a revised edition etc etc? Jennifer do you mind if I set you up for this one because this was I have to set the table for Jennifer because it was largely her doing we were humming along I mean George Floyd's murder was one of the I mean we were thinking about this over the summer of 2020 when that hit us as it hit so many people and of course it was not an isolated incident which was part of the point of the protests and we decided to carry that forward into the question about white supremacy in the academy the Princeton letter of 2020 followed a couple months later and we got you know we were bandying that back and forth that's when Jennifer said everyone's freaking out about this Princeton letter but they're not realizing that there are various mechanisms already going on on campus for trying to adjudicate these questions so here we were we originally had divvied up okay you do this part of the book you do that part of the book and I was a good deal I was busy than Jennifer was that semester so I started I was like I'm going to hand this off to Jennifer and Jennifer says you know what first of all she put me on to something I've been meaning to read for a long time the work of Charles Mills and so that part of our introduction from which that passage is drawn is a sort of check I was already familiar with the disability studies critique of the liberal social contract tradition I had not read Charles Mills's critique of racial liberalism but it's an interesting sort of companion parallel argument about the structural failures of social contract theory anyway at a certain point like October November Jennifer writes back to me and says you know we're actually basically rehearsing some things that critical race theory was arguing 30 years ago we really should be showing the receipts and paying our respects and you know yeah entirely right let's go back and let's let's let's dig deep we basically dug under what's now chapter five to write chapter four which Jennifer titled who's afraid of critical race theory today so in one case it was just a matter of doing our due diligence and working in the work of BIPOC scholars that have been you know not only foundational for that branch of legal theory but as we were watching it was turned into a national side show by Christopher Rufo and the grifters who found him and so the weird thing was we thought at first anthology over my shoulder that we were going back okay let's go back over the the early work of Derek Bell let's go back over words that wound let's go back over where disparate impact theory came from you know and at the same time we were dealing with an incredibly almost hallucinatory moving target as we watch critical race theory turned into something unrecognizable in the fever dreams of the right Jennifer have I got that yeah it was pretty unreal because we literally had started writing the chapter on critical race theory I think we'd even finished when we had finished it when Chris Rufo is sort of exposed although he wouldn't consider it exposed because he's quite proud of it as he explicitly said we're going to empty critical race theory of all of its actual content and put every boogie man we can think of in its place and so that sort of it just when we started working on incorporating critical race theory it was literally like there was this thing and then Henry Lewis Gates said this thing and then all of a sudden it was exploding in our in real time in front of us and so it was a really surreal experience but I think another instructive moment to speak to your question the George about how the process worked is that yes there was very much a reaction a very much a visceral reaction to the George Floyd's murder and witnessing the ways in which some people were treating that murder and the way in which it was it was contributing to a really ugly polarized debate society there was that but there was also the snowflakes remember this Michael there's also the whole snowflake stuff there had written a book about what the snowflakes get right and so I was on committee a academic freedom and I was talking I was sort of defending snowflakes and saying you know well there might be good reason to be more thoughtful about pronouns etc and I was told by another by a academic freedom scholar well Bear is great but he comes out of a German tradition and that's very different from our sitting with that for a while we did we did bring in Bear we have a chapter on Bear and his book but sitting with that for a while we thought all the more pity us in America that we have a record with our own traditions of racial fascism to the point that we're borrowing some insights from a German from the German tradition when in fact we have our own internal history we've got our own black experts who have been calling calling this out for decades and yet we want to say like the Holocaust over there versus reckoning with our reality here and so beginning to realize that there's an internal tradition and it goes you know it predates critical race theories of course but it's a their critical pivot point it doesn't it doesn't because one of the things that led us to is not in the critical race theory tradition but inspired by it was Susan Damon's book Learning from the Germans in which she's again this is not Holocaust comparison we don't we don't want anywhere near that nonsense but Damon's argument is that the kind of denial and defensiveness she experienced among Germans in the late 70s early 80s had eerie parallels to southern denial and and deflection we were the real victims here let's not forget what happened to us I don't see why you keep bringing that up and it took quite some time for Germany to come around and it took basically the post of Elmer Kohl era before they came around and the German stone were not there in Berlin until fairly recently the Holocaust Museum was not there until fairly recently it took a wrenching really polarizing kind of debate to which now AFD the far right German party is a reaction there is reaction both to immigration from Middle East and a reaction to facing the past honestly and I think the parallels to the backlash against CRT are pretty clear without getting into the Holocaust with anything else so once we open that door I think also that whole train of what do we have to learn about our own history of racial fascism again going back to the question of how many white supremacist professors there are right now not really the question what about the fact that we had an entire branch of historiography in the Dunning school that basically was the academic branch of southern redemption devoted to carrying out the project of rolling back reconstruction in inflectual terms and arguing against black self-government so that's where it really that opened the whole book up for and also made it harder to write because now we had a lot more work to do but also was the work that absolutely needed to be done by us well thank you George well great question yeah thank you I'm going to oh there were just a few minutes left so tell you what let me just thank you and maybe get a couple of other questions in because I know this has been a fascinating conversation so I appreciate both Michael and Jennifer thank you thank you well thank you George especially for your admirable persistence and racing to the parking lot yeah I don't know who won that one but I appreciate you bringing me up at the last second there always good to see you my friend thank you we have a pair of we have only a couple of minutes left and by the way that's a great example of video question also example of just how incredibly brilliant the forum community can be but we have time for one last question and I think two questions came up to ask more or less the same question so let me just flash these right after the other so you can see what I mean this is from John who says I find striking that learners are left out of the discussion academic freedom why do we not advocate for academic freedom for all so hang on there's that question and then what followed is all is really similar from Gail Hamner who asks Kim could our guest address the impact of student as consumer on academic freedom easy to valuations of student push back academic freedom so putting the next two questions put the students on the table here do we have enough time to tackle that is that I'll do it very briefly students strictly speaking don't have academic freedom they don't have expertise they do have various kinds of rights to learn that's a very different thing but I'm leery of it because I am having flashbacks to David Hurd which is campaign about 15-20 years ago where he had the academic bill of rights basically trying to shoehorn an idea of free expression for students in order to erode the academic freedom of faculty it's really dicey but it's very much a give and take my own position is that students learn best when their faculty are free to teach in their expertise wherever the questions may go and also be a good idea for them to recognize their students' pronouns. Jennifer? Yeah I I agree with that you know it's kind of a one of those moments I'm in conversations where I always have to see like I would love to say academic freedom for everybody but that's actually not what academic freedom is it's not it is Michael said I don't have any expertise yet and academic freedom is connected maybe needs a rebranding of something like faculty freedom but friends we've come to the end of the hour which amazes me I think we just started five minutes ago and yet we have covered so much great stuff thank you first of all Jennifer and Michael thank you for being fantastic guests I'm glad to hear you managed to express with great succinctness enormous swaths of knowledge and reflection thank you thank you both what's the best way to keep up with the two of you is it through your Twitter feed Michael or how else? We have no idea Jennifer's been in Taiwan for three months I haven't seen her but yeah I tweet whenever I can I no longer have a blog Jennifer how does one keep up with you? I don't do social media at all but I do have a web page where every new thing that I write I put up there it's not the most effective way to but it's certainly if you're kind enough to be curious about what I'm doing that would probably be the place to go and thank you Brian so much for being such a wonderful host thank you oh my pleasure and we really look forward to the work that you're going to be doing over the next year and I'll follow up and if you're up for it I'll bring you back thank you and above all take it and be safe you too but don't run away you friends I need to point you to where we're headed next and let me thank you again for the terrific stream of questions if you want to keep talking about this and some of you already are on Twitter just head to Twitter and use the hashtag FTTE or tweet at me Brian Alexander or at Shindig events or attack my blog at Brian Alexander.org to look into the past into our previous sessions or if you want to review this one in about 24 hours just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive where we have recordings freely available if you want to see what we're up to next just go to forum that future of education.us you can get a sketch of the next sessions coming up and if you want to share any of your own work please email me so I can share it with everybody else I'm really proud of everything you all do and I want to spread the word thank you all for a very invigorating thoughtful provocative I think discussion we may have solved some serious problems here or at least address them in a deep way the fall semester is rattling on I hope you all stay safe and keep working well and next time we'll see you online bye bye