 Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We've got a fantastic guest writing about one of the great issues of our time and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. We've been thinking and talking about future free speech and academic freedom in higher education on the forum for several years. We've had several great panels and sessions talking about this from all kinds of angles. Everything from what is the role of faculty departments and trying to manage or support free speech to the role of presidents, thorough outside organizations like the AUP. Now we are going to approach this from a bit of a different angle with the help of a wonderful writer. Len Gutkin is a writer who has done, among other things, a really nifty book about the figure of the dandy in late 19th century literature but also for a few years the Chronicle of Higher Education. He's been writing a series of fascinating newsletters and articles about free speech and higher education. He's been tackling this from a whole bunch of directions. Everything from religion and race to governance to state and national politics. I've just been eager to get him on the show because he's a terrific writer. He's a fascinating thinker and I think a great guide to our topic. So without any further ado, let me bring up on stage. Hello Len Gutkin. Hi Brian, thanks for having me. Oh a pleasure, a pleasure. Where have we found you today? I'm in Wheaton, Maryland in my home. It's always outside of DC. Excellent, excellent. And you have a wonderful setting. You've got a great big wing chair and you've got some nice cloth and weaving behind it. It looks delicious. Well Len, we have a habit on the form where we ask people to introduce themselves not by talking about their past but about their future. I'm curious, what are you going to be working on for the next year? What are the big topics that concern you? What are some of your projects? Sure, so I am actually working on a book. It's sort of in the proposal stage on some of the topics that you've already mentioned, the history of academic freedom and free speech in American institutions of higher education. And it's geared towards sort of trying to understand what's happened in the last, I would say 10 years beginning in around 2013 or 2014 and culminating, I would say, in the present. I think that the, and I'm sure we'll have a chance to talk about this today, but the events on campus around the Israel Gaza war have offered a kind of neat and tragic bookend to the tale I want to tell about what's happened to campus in the last decade or so. Excellent. Well, good luck writing that and when it hits print and ebook format, please let me know so we can bring you back. I would be glad to spread the word. Thank you. Friends, if you're new to the Future Trends Forum, what I usually do is I interrogate our poor guest with a couple of questions to start with. But then I get rid of my role with the mic and give it over to you. So as we start talking, you start thinking about what questions you'd like to ask. What comments you'd like to share? What ideas do you think really matter for you in your work and in your life when it comes to free speech in academia? So we just start off by saying, or asking them then, you mentioned 2013 or so. And I'm curious, what happened then? What started off this current wave of free speech controversy? Yeah, it's a great question and one that I don't, in fact, have the answer to. I think there are a range of answers. Some are offered by thinkers like the psychologist Jonathan Haight who, in his view, the kind of new period of activism, student activism, very much centered around feelings, around a sense of vulnerability on the part of the students. In his view, it's a kind of downstream effect of technological, sort of technologically induced psychological changes on the part of late adolescence. I'm not dismissive of that explanation, nor am I entirely convinced by it. So I don't, frankly, know something changes radically in that period in my experience and I've checked with a number of people, including people. So I was finishing my PhD in 2013, which was the period of some very sort of impassioned and upsetting, I think, for people on all sides of these issues. Protests at Ivy League schools like Yale and Harvard, that's when it seems to me that things have changed, that the student culture changed quite dramatically at that point. And when I've asked people who are older, quite a bit older, who have been in the academy for a very long time, they tend to corroborate that point of view. My own sort of the larger historical spread that I think we're seeing is something like at least a bicyclic, maybe a tricyclic narrative in which the student activism that first emerged in the late 1960s and the mid to the late 1960s, which then really evaporated in the 1970s and into the early 1980s, was resuscitated in a different key, much less militant, much more feelings-based in ways both good and bad in the late 80s and early 90s, and then went into a kind of a kind of quiescence again and in the middle of the 2010s re-emerged. Those are the three sort of points or climaxes that I see, and I think accounting for both the continuities and some of the really sharp differences between those three periods is the work of anybody trying to understand the politics of the academy at present, other really galvanizing events in this, in the most recent part of the history are the election of Donald Trump, which I think seemed to authorize or confirm many of the worst suspicions of, let's say, the campus activists left, the murder of George Floyd in the middle of the COVID pandemic, again supercharged, but was already a very kind of heated situation. So in the most recent period I think those are what were said, you know, those are the most salient events that I'm hardly original in saying that. Well thank you, thank you, that's a very, very nicely framed answer. We have in the chat our friend Mark Rush, who is a polycyon law professor, points out that the country has endured numerous cycles of speech suppression. World War I, McCarthyism now, and then Mark Corbett Wilson takes a different tack, and says student activism and diminutive apparatus, it was crushed by Reagan Republicans. Yeah, I would, I think that's probably not quite right. If you look at, there's a very good book on campus, Culture, Student Culture by Harwitz, Lefkowitz Harwitz is her last name, I'm blanking on her first name, but she's now in America, historian at Wellesley. In her construction, no, it's at least as she puts it, it's not simply that it was crushed, I mean things changed, one of the things that changed is that the stimulus of the draft, which was a real prod toward campus milligency, stops being there. I mean with the end of the Vietnam War there was less of a, you know, so by the, you know, by the late 70s things were just changing profoundly. So yeah, I mean there, that's a hard question, but I think that things changed for reasons other than the Reagan administration. In the chat, my dear friend Joel and Parker says her first name is Helen, and he got that for us. We have, that's, well thank you for saying that, thank you for saying that, and thank you friends in the chat, already the conversation is picking up. I guess a second question, which is a another large, you know, framing question, which is, we often hear the discussions around free speech and academic freedom as a kind of overlapping, but not completely coincident Venn diagram. The academic freedom is a form of free speech, but it has certain limitations that we don't associate with free speech in the larger nation. Can you just say a bit about that, that intersection or the overlap between free speech and academic freedom? Sure, yeah, it's one of the hardest questions I think about the theory of academic freedom, because the theory of academic freedom and the law of academic freedom are not coincident. The theory of academic freedom informs the law of academic freedom, but the law, the constitutional law of academic freedom is primarily applicable, of course, to public universities. You know, where it's had a kind of, it really was because of McCarthyite persecutions and resistance on the part of activist faculty members to those persecutions, a series of really important decisions in the 50s and 1960s made academic freedom a first amendment issue in public universities. And that's a tremendously fascinating history, and it maps on only very imperfectly for the private school situation. So there are schools like Stanford that are in theory and maybe in law, you'd have to ask somebody else committed to something like a first amendment style academic freedom norm. There are other schools, many of the schools in the message, maybe all the schools in Massachusetts, I think, which are bound by their, by the promises of their contract admission in a way that's really more sturdy than in many other states. That's a state by state thing. All right. The law of academic freedom is super complex, and it brings academic freedom into a realm of speech, which is of course not primarily what academic freedom is. It's not a free speech, right? It's not primarily free speech, right? And even it's critical to say. It's a complex overlap, and thank you for that, I think, very elegant tour. In fact, I'll give you a, because it's become an issue again, very starkly with the attempt of Ron DeSantis to ban the Students for Justice in Palestine, which is a student group, and is in Florida and in all states at public universities, students have the right of association. That's actually part of the academic freedom right. It doesn't apply to faculty, it applies to students in this case, and DeSantis can't do that. I mean, he's realized now that he can't do that. Columbia University, as I'm sure you know, has temporarily suspended the SJP and Brandeis University has banned it entirely, which they probably can do legally. But here's a case where a 1972 Supreme Court case has made the law of academic freedom result in a much sturdier protection in public universities than in private ones when it comes to student groups and student association. So that's a very, very important distinction to make, meeting public and private there. Friends, I have a couple more questions to ask, but already your questions are coming in. And we have some questions from two people who couldn't make it, so I want to make sure we get those. And the first I want to ask is from our friend in Malta, and since it's getting later and later right there, I want to give him a chance to ask first. And Phil asks, I teach Chinese students in the People's Republic of China using WeChat and consciously self-limit discussion, knowing that we're probably monitored. To what extent has sensible sensitivity in academia become self-censorship? I hope not anything like to the extent in the PRC. But yeah, that's a great question that I suspect can be answered better by many of the people here who have spent time in the classroom recently than by myself. I've certainly heard anecdotally about all kinds of neurotic self-censorship. I've also heard from people who feel that the whole issue is overblown, that the need to self-censor has been overstated by various kinds of interested ideological actors usually on the right. And so I wait to be informed. I don't know. Yeah. Well, let me just volunteer the forum. If any of you would like to share such a story or an observation about that, please feel free to use the chat box. If you would rather do that anonymously, please direct message me and I'll be happy to share your story without sharing your name. In the chat, to go back to your previous point, then Mark Rush adds another aspect which is different accreditors. So different accrediting agencies. The three of us have been talking about the current American Bar Association trying to implement or considering implementing a new free speech law for accreditation there. So if anyone would like to... So first, Phil, thank you for that great question. And I'd love to hear some time about what you think of teaching with WeChat. But if anyone wants to share a story about that, please feel free. We have a question from one person who can't make it here today. And that's our good friend, Don Shalas. And Don asks, what do you make of Charlie Kirk and the Turning Point USA's Professor Watchlist? Oh, wow. Yeah, I mean, I think it's the Professor Watchlist and it has, you know, predecessors I think from David Horowitz had a version of this, right, going way back. It's obviously meant to chill speech. It maybe has that effect to some extent. On the other hand, I think it can be about... I've talked to faculty members on these lists who feel that it's a badge of honor. I think that it's, as long as, you know, as long as institutions are committed in the way that they're supposed to be, to academic freedom and to protecting faculty members from political persecution, Professor Watchlist should be sort of a joke and not an emergency. If it becomes really dangerous, I would say it's less Charlie Kirk's fault than it is the fault of those state legislators who permit certain kinds of public pressure, which is maybe given momentum by the Professor Watchlist to affect administrative decisions. You know, Kirk would say he's just a... He's an activist journalist on the right. He's arguing for a certain kind of transparency. And I think that that is... From a legal standpoint, that's just undeniable. He has the right to assemble these Watchlists. And so it's up to institutions and administrators to respond appropriately, which is really to say to not respond at all when they get pressure from people, parents, donors, various constituents to act on these Watchlists, to punish or investigate or whatever. It's the burden of responsibilities on the institution. And again, we come back to the different contours that you mentioned before, the difference between public and private institutions, the issue of accreditation that Mark mentioned. Well, this is... Well, first of all, Don, that's a great question. Thank you. Thank you then for that answer. This is one key piece of the story. We have another question that came in here from Leslie Harris, and we put this up on the screen so you can all see. I wonder how universities can balance the desire for free speech and the responsibility to protect their students from harm? Yeah, that's... I mean, I think that's become sort of the question of the last few years. And we at the Chronicle Review have run a number of sort of point... counterpoint debates by people on different sides of that issue. It's become, I think, in my own view, the sort of certain kind of incoherence of the harm theory has become very palpable after the outbreak of all of these protests over Israel Gaza, because you have multiple sides of protesters claiming harm. Symbolic harm, not physical or literal harm. That's obviously not appropriate. And appealing to the institution for protection from these harms. And the institution... The institutions are unable to adjudicate between these rival claims. And are now, I suspect, or I know, because they've issued statements very much to this effect, regretting ever having gotten into the harm adjudication business now that it's become totally impossible. And so I expect that we'll see in the future, at least when it comes to institutional statements about solidarity with the harms or traumas of one group or another group, I think we'll see much less of that. When it comes to harm in the classroom, I think that's a more... That issue will probably persist in various ways. But I suspect even their institutions will, there may be downstream effects where they say, look, we need to weigh in less, be less certain about whose harms count or whose harms we recognize, because it's getting us in trouble or tying us into knots. You know, I think Claudine Gay, who's the new president of Harvard, was raked over the coals for what was perceived by many as a sort of insufficiently aghast statement over the massacre on October the 7th in Israel. And in my view, her statement was basically fun. She said a terrible thing happened, and we are hearts are with everybody. But her predecessor, and this didn't happen under Claudine Gay, the previous president who was an interim president at Harvard, had at the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, gone sort of full... I mean, they rose the Ukrainian flag on Harvard Yard, and elsewhere sent out and so on and so forth. There was the kind of... You know, Harvard became a kind of national outpost of Ukrainian patriotic fervor, and so in that context, and no fault of her own, you can see why Claudine Gay's statement seemed rather pallid. And I think that a lot of presidents, whether they announce what they're doing explicitly, as Maude Mandel has at Williams College, or whether they just sort of under the radar decide that they're going to shut up going forward, will do something like what Maude Mandel has done, and say, you know, no matter what happens now in the world, there's no need to hear from me about it. You know, unless it affects Williams or Harvard directly, I think we'll see a lot more of that. That's fascinating. You covered a lot of ground there. I just, if I could, if I could ask a question about something that you've written quite a lot about, you mentioned the... Or the differences between speech, such as the university proclaiming solidarity with Ukraine against Russia, but then you zoomed into the question of classrooms and following Leslie's excellent question, and you said that the question of classroom harm and speech is likely to persist. One of the fascinating stories around these lines is the Hamlin University case, where an adjunct art professor taught an image of the Prophet Muhammad, and things blew up from there. And I'm curious if it wouldn't be too much, if you could speak a bit about the Hamlin and how that's unfolded and what that might tell us about the free speech and higher education and these questions of harm and academic freedom. Sure, yeah, I'd love to. So Hamlin is, those of you who don't know the story, the quick and dirty version is that an adjunct professor of art history on a year-to-year contract in an art history course showed a very famous 14th century image of the Prophet Muhammad after several warnings, trigger warnings or whatever, because she had a number of devout Muslim students in the class. They complained anyway, and she was not rehired. And the AUP got involved, they issued a decision basically against Hamlin, although they didn't formally center them because they were hoping that Hamlin would reform. Hamlin sort of dug in its heels. The story gets very complicated and very ugly. But it's fascinating because not just because it's, I mean, it's fascinating in local terms, it involves clashes between this Somali immigrant community that's quite observant and more liberal Muslim professors at Hamlin. I mean, there's all kinds of journalistic interests, but the real interest is in how not novel the story is, if you look at the sort of longer history of academic freedom and blasphemy concerns. And this is where I think that, I mean, academic freedom is at root, or one way of thinking about it as an intellectual historian is that it is at root the refusal to recognize blasphemy claims in either scholarship or in teaching. And that becomes very clear if you look at the 19th century cases in which when academic freedom didn't really exist in any particular way and with scholars with formal appointments in Europe and through a lesser extent in America where there was less developed research profiles got into trouble. These are very famous people who got into trouble and were fired or at least harassed. It was basically scholarly textual work on the Bible. That was the big issue. Scholars who were working on dating the composition of different portions of the Old Testament, so on and so forth, all of which tended toward a kind of secularizing and relativizing attitude toward Christian scripture. And people lost their jobs, Ernest Renan at the College de France was fired for suggesting in a lecture that Christ was a great human but not a God man essentially. And that kind of thing happened over and over and over again. By the time you get to the 20th century in the United States and even long after the AUP has been sort of founded in 1915 and has released this great statement that I'm not going to include him, you continue to see controversy over religion in the classroom. But there it doesn't tend to be about research. It's not that they're getting mad at scholars for working on textual history of the Bible or whatever. It's more for views expressed in class. So very continuing for the sense of that we see so much of now. And there's some wonderful and sort of funny episodes that are planted in a great book by Robert Post and Matthew Finken called for the common good 2006 book by two law professors about the law and theory of academic freedom. It's short and very readable and anybody interested in the topic should read this book. But the cases are, you know, they're sort of hilarious. There's one which a professor of classics at a school in Tennessee, a small like branch college of the I don't know what he's called at the University of Tennessee public institution is teaching a course on the classics and they're translating something from Greek. The word hell comes up or a word that they translate as hell. And then they start talking about hell. And he says, well, I as a liberal Christian don't this is 1940, by the way, as a liberal Christian, don't believe in eternal hellfire. And some of the students get angry and try to get him fired. And I forget now what whether he's fired or not. But it becomes one of the important day U.P. cases of the period. And there's several other similar ones from the same period, either about expressions of insufficient respect toward Christian doctrine or about Darwinian theory, which is in that period. As I suppose it still is in our secondary. But it does come to turn very much on the feelings of the students. And that happens in the first half of the 20th century. It's not a novel development. And this is one of the reasons I'm not entirely sold on the height model of sensitivity as a function of digital sensitization or whatever. Because you in fact see enormous individual sensitivity around the fronts to religion going very far back in a far less technological age. And so I think this issue is just obviously very, very much with us right now. It's one of the many of the most salient cases do involve Islam. Their Hamelin is not alone. But they also involve Christian belief and Christian events. So it will, I suspect, continue to be a thing until institutions sort of recommit to what is in my view the fundamentally secular project of academic freedom. It's just it comes out of a matrix of secular liberalism, small liberalism that can't exist. And so it does require those commitments. Thank you. Thank you. That's a very, very great historical tour through this. And I'm fascinated to hear that we get as far back as the 1940s this question of student feelings as a driver for responses to faculty free speech. In the chat Nancy W. Corrects us both and points out that it's Hamelin not Hamlin. So thank you. Thank you Nancy. I appreciate that. We have more questions coming up and I want to make sure people get a chance to put them up. And here's one that's this is actually perfect timing for our friend Stephen Volk who asks about the modern trend towards responses to freedom of speech. So the number of contemporary critics like Yasha Monk and Barry Weiss attribute the current crisis in U.S. society to campus culture in terms of post-modernism, post-structuralism, critical race theory. Your thoughts? I tend to think that the like the location of the affronts to campus freedom in those like critical or theoretical schools is probably very overstated. There are I think ways in which so-called critical race theory has been institutionalized in DEI departments that might you know that maybe there's some there there. But as a general rule I'm not convinced that the like the I mean critical race theory as I understand it is a is a race specific variation on a kind of demystifying sociology of law that goes back to the 1920s. And it's it's relativizing in much the same way that secular attitudes toward religion are. It says you know law is is a mask for various kinds of interests and that's the kind of theory that of course should be debated intensively in universities. And so I think that those those become sort of bogeymen for some observers on the more conservative side of the spectrum. But if you if you look more closely I doubt that they're responsible in the ways that they're supposed to be except in so far as they've been sort of crudely institutionalized in non-academic departments elsewhere in the university that is various kinds of administrative departments. That's that's how it looks to me and ditto for post structuralism and you know those are the buzzwords if you look at the sort of round of books that came out about academic freedom in the in the mid 90s which were sort of trying to process this earlier round of controversy over free speech and academic freedom and so on. And critical race theory was not on the agenda at that point but certainly post structuralism and post modernism were. And yet there's like a sophisticated version of the argument that says something like well academic freedom depends on a theory of objective truth. It requires its motivation and so if you espouse relativistic epistemological theories then it loses its form or something. You know I I don't know. I think it has more to do with less theoretical kinds of motivation again primarily around taboos sacred objects things that one doesn't want offended or transgressed or insulted. Thank you thank you that's that's a very solid response to a terrific question. Steven I'm just I'm waiting for Monk's book to arrive in my hopper right now actually. And so I really appreciate Len your your reframing of this. In fact if I could friends just just you know just remember to remind everybody please feel free to ask questions again the bottom of the screen that Q&A box just you know click that question mark and type it in. And if you want to join us on stage this is one of those sessions where it seems like you have to have a beard in order to be on screen but it's not true it's not true and anybody is allowed regardless of your facial configuration. I do want to pull one question that is kind of emerged from the chat a few different people called Mark actually have raised this that in the Hamlin story there is one of the issues was that the professor in question was an adjunct. What do you think of the difference between institutional support in terms of speak free speech for tenure track faculty versus adjuncts in which case in the United States of course in the past 20 years we've seen the foreign population shrink and the adjunct population swell to being the largest population instructors we now have. Oh yeah I mean adjuncts don't have protection I mean there's just I mean as we saw at the Hamlin I mean there just there isn't any and I think even even administrations more positively disposed toward free speech are going to sacrifice an adjunct if there's too much external pressure so yeah I mean the adjunctification is just a like a horrible accelerant of of the diminution of free speech at academic for academic freedom let's say be precise as a force on campus I don't think it's the cause of the new skepticism toward academic freedom I think it's more like an amplifying a factor that is making everything worse but not to my mind. Well I do wonder we asked the question collaboratively before but if anybody has run into instances of self-censorship and I think that would be one where the adjunct versus tenure track would be very precise. Thank you Len I appreciate that answer. And tenure versus pre-tenure I mean I think that this has made tenure you know tenure track but not tenure faculty members again anecdotally in my experience are much more nervous than they used to be. But again others deny that so it's you know it's one of those sort of empirical sociological questions that's hard to answer and it's easy to assume that the answer is whatever sort of lines up with your ideological priors. Well said we have a question from another friend who couldn't make it today but this is a friend who is co-authored a book on academic freedom Michael Devereux Bay and was also a great guest on the program last year and he wants to know if you could expand a bit on your recent writing about the free speech of administrators and how that differs from the war. Yeah it's I have to say the question that I um it turns out it's one of the trickiest questions in the in the book and depending on who you ask you get depending on which expert you ask you get very very different answers so you know when I did write about free speech of administrators Brian Leiter who's a law professor and philosopher at Chicago wrote to me he was like well administrators just don't have free speech as administrators at all and any version of the theory that things that they do is is confused and I am sympathetic to that as a norm I don't think it is the case in the theory as far as I can tell or in like a up case law so the question is one administrators speak out let's say extramurally or intramurally but on charged political topics should are they limiting this is one version of the question are they limiting the free speech of their faculty members or not so this came up comes up in various settings so all of the chancellors of the University of California system several years ago signed a letter about the BDS movement in which they said that the boycott divest in sanction movement against Israel is wrong violates academic freedom and they're not interested in it it was a page long and they there was a sort of campus outcry from faculty members who support BDS and they said well this is awfully chilling like the the most powerful people in this system are telling me that my political position is like formally not prohibited but formally disputed by the by the University of California and what Carol Crisks said in response to that was well I wasn't speaking you know as I was just speaking in my own capacity as an administrative citizen and scholar not as an attorney and check me on the facts but I think that's how she responded and that seems unconvincing to me uh you know I could imagine good reasons to prevent uh administrators at the very top of the administration from making political statements extramural or intramural political statements of that sort uh on the theory that it chills faculty and student speech um but the case I mean the the law gets super complicated at public places around this the there's a famous case uh about a uh Leonard Jeffries from the 1990s uh who was the chair of the black studies department at uh the city college and he had made a bunch of uh public speeches uh in which he like accused the Jews of having a special role in the slave trade and he prepared the theory of uh sort of melanin based superiority of people of african descent over lighter-skinned people get a bunch of weird ideas and he happened to be the chair of this department and there was a series of court cases they uh in which they tried to fire him from his chair from his position as chair uh they weren't trying to get rid of him from the faculty it was obvious to everybody at the time I think it might be less obvious now I think the climate has changed in some way it was obvious to everybody at the time that Leonard Jeffries was well within his rights to say all these things as a faculty member but that as an administrator and a you know an administrator at the bottom of the you know he's a chair he wasn't a dean or anything but as a as a chair he wasn't within his rights to say these things and keep his chairship and the case was uh twice uh the appellate that he was fired from the chair he sued he won twice in the I think second circuit uh on academic freedom grounds on the constitutionally uh inflected academic freedom grounds that were then recognized by the courts uh on a third go-round the supreme court remanded the case to the uh to the appellate not on academic freedom but on a newly decided law about public employee speech oh those are complicated this is pre-garcetti so it wasn't garcetti um and said look actually you got this wrong think about it again and this time the second circuit said okay jeffreys can be removed from the chair um but the point is at least at that point it was a super obscure it was obscure it was unclear to the courts how this should go and i don't know what the law looks like in cases about this since that very famous case um but it's confusing i guess is what i would say and the experts that i've spoken with including brian leiter including uh Henry Reichman formally uh you know had a drup who has several books on academic freedom uh they all give me sort of different versions i can't get a um there doesn't seem to be as far as i can tell settled consensus on this issue well that's fascinating that's fascinating and and and administrator we've been talking about department heads and presidents but does does that also cover the full range of non-faculty staff from custodians and librarians technologists and grants officers deans and vice provost uh so i think the answer is no as far as i understand um that public employee law uh does not protect non-academic faculty members in the same way that or non-academic employees in the same way that protects academic employees uh but this again is a complicated question that i am not fact qualified to to weigh in on um my understanding is is that the answer is no uh even after garcetti because there's something called the garcetti exception garcetti is another public employee speech decision uh in which um the same thing just this said well i hope that this new limitation in 2006 on public employee speech doesn't uh doesn't compromise the long settled academic freedom uh the long settled first amendment interested in academic freedom that the court has recognized and the majority justice kennedy said we don't rule on whether it does or not that's not the question before us um and so that's that's the so-called garcetti exception as i understand it and i think people you know people like like faisal mohammed it gail who pays a lot of attention to this stuff i'm sort of looking and watching and waiting to see when the garcetti exception will be either affirmed uh or uh or or destroyed um there's a great article uh if i can recommend something from the chronicle review by the law profi- indiana law professor steve sanders uh we published about a week ago um we've got steve sanders at the chronicle review and he unlike i i'm like me he knows what you know he knows the law inside and out he has a good rundown of the state of um public employee law and and some of the recent both supreme court and the pellet court decisions so i would direct anybody to that and i bet if you wrote to him and asked him for he'd be a great guy to have on the show actually he'd uh you know excellent excellent um well thank you for that thank you for that detailed answer that sounds like a real deep question um uh that we don't talk enough about anything and you mentioned hank reichmann who we've had on the forum as as a guest it was terrific um friends we have about 12 minutes left so uh we have a couple of questions in the pipeline but i want to make sure that each of you get a chance to ask your question or share your concerns so again if you'd like to either click the raised hand and join us on stage uh or just you know hit the q&a box and give us some some questions be happy to see them uh we have a question that came in from chris aldrich uh in the chat he asked i'm curious if anyone has any experience with free speech rankings like that of the foundation for individual rights and expression and how well or poorly they've done with respect to the methodology and actual on-the-ground experience i'm curious lenn if you want to take a whack at the fire which most recently gave harvard its worst possible rating yeah so i um have no insight into how that uh sausage gets made i don't know how the criteria are weighted i do know that uh journalists that i know who have tried to look into it um are somewhat skeptical that the rankings are it's you know are scientific um but i i don't know uh more than that um i know there's a lot of skepticism about those rankings including from people who uh who tend to support the mission uh the fires okay well thank you thank you and i i uh those can be um those can be very interesting to consider chris so thank you for raising them um we have uh another um a return back to our question about um uh turning point and uh and watch lists but from a different angle uh and this question comes from uh joseph robert schull asks where do these faculty and student watch lists and free speech persecutions figure in the freedom picture in the light of plans of dismantle higher education put forth by people like chris rufo oh that's a good question well i guess there i mean i i suppose you can see them as propaganda for the cause of rufo and the other sort of new trustees at new college um and uh yeah who knows i mean will he implement some kind of watch list style surveillance system at new college that probably won't go over well um yeah it's a great question i i guess i would see it you know primarily they're they're kind of propaganda for the cause that um perhaps helps rufo and other activists in that kind of sphere uh convince politicians uh to to let them have their way well that's uh that's a good answer i i don't mean good as in that's a happy and delightful thing the kind of way that's a very very solid answer thank you uh jesse for for the question and thanks don for raising us to begin with uh the checkbox has been going in a whole bunch of different directions mark over wilson takes us back to war church in this case which is very interesting for a professor who specifically gets in trouble for his speech we've also had some good questions or some good notes about the difference between tenure track and adjunct faculty and um a couple of notes on law uh fieldingard mentions the use of slap laws to uh silence journalists which may not be impacting faculty and uh then uh carl aho takes issue with mentioning brian leiter because he uh points out that uh quote brian leiter is notoriously litigant fatigious about the speech of others especially grad students um and so i i i don't know i'm not aware that he uh has sued grad students and i you know i uh but i i do i i think he's a uh a serious thinker about academic freedom and and what it entails uh yeah yeah yeah sorry i wanted to share that and of course um uh friends if you like uh i can i can share extracts from the chat uh anonymized on a blog post along the recording of this so let me know if you'd like me not to do that um in the chat uh i i guess i have a couple of questions while people are fuming and thinking right now um one is and this is tricky since the israel gaza story is so so intense and so unstable right now but where where do you see free speech and academia headed over the next few years do you think for example that the 2024 election uh is going to heighten free speech controversies as both uh leading candidates trump and biden have drawn attention to higher education their campaigns and as the individual campuses become areas for mobilization for support uh do you think that um uh ai is likely to worsen or benefit the free speech controversy look ahead a bit where where do you see this headed yeah so let me let me try to answer the um the electoral question because i think that the the coordinates i think seem to be changing be for a long time and i you know there are questions about rufo we've talked about the santas in florida uh you know for a long time it seemed uh that the threat to free speech or there was a perceived threat to free speech from the so-called campus left and various conservative politicians made a lot of this it was valuable to them electorally um that was the kind of rhetoric um what's happened in the immediate wake of the israel gaza war as far as i can tell with free speech on campus has been uh a crack down on certain kinds of left-wing speech that is i mean i think that the in the absence of uh really strong reasons which i have not seen they certainly haven't been made public columbia university's suspension of jewish voices for peace and uh students for justice in palestine looks very much like a politically motivated crackdown on on his favorite political speech um and to the extent that that is the case and to the extent further that this crackdown is motivated by donor pressure and there's another wonderful recent chronicle article that i recommend um by uh lila carwin burman uh and uh henry saskin i forgot his first name um about the sort of the ways in which donors can exert pressure on campuses or this uh you know to the extent that that continues i think that the whole sort of political calculus will change um republicans are not going to want to step in and say we support the sjp in fact they tried to make it genuinely illegal in florida though they're gonna fail um so it's gonna it's gonna compromise their capacity to um to use campus freedom and free speech uh as a kind of political tool on the other hand i think that it's going to compromise the capacity of the left uh or whatever you want to call it of the sort of campus sensitivity administrative class to continue to make uh very uh convincing prohibitions on the basis of sensitivity various kinds so you know i don't know i think it will i think it'll have a real i think it'll really mix mix the pot up in ways that will be fascinating to watch um my net the column that comes out on monday will it be about donor interference and the suspension of these organizations uh it's a truly fascinating situation and there's a um those of you haven't seen it there's a guardian article about an event an incident at bar college which happens to be my alma mater but it's not what i mentioned uh in which uh you know we have a very explicit kind of donor interference that we know about only because it was resisted by the president of the college in which a class on apartheid in israel and the class is devoted to the question of whether apartheid is an appropriate label uh for israel's political arrangements uh there was pressure to cancel it including from a very very big donor on the board of trustees uh was told to buzz off and to resign uh and we know about that because it became public because it was rejected but i think we can assume that versions of that pressure are happening across the university landscape right now um and it's going to have it's going to really it's going to really mix up how we think about campus speech and who's permitting it who's projecting it and so on perhaps to the extent that higher education increasingly has to rely on donors as our costs go up and the state support goes down and as also general the macroeconomic trend of increasing economically wealth and equality means uh we have more and more such donors perhaps this will this is a line that we need to keep an eye on yes and one of the things that lila points out is that not only do they rely on donors but they rely on mega donors far more than ever so a very small number of very wealthy donors i think could be the much higher uh proportion of the pie that has historically been the case so if one of them so you know this gives them enormous potential political sure you know well thank thank you that's a that's a really good point if anyone wants to share a link to that in the chat that would be great uh ed web our dear friend from dickinson college says there's also a structural problem that free speech has to be supported by financial security from the individual adjunct up to the donor dependent or state funding institution um thank you ed we have a video question from mark let me see if i can bring him up on stage i think his camera is having issues this may be an audio only question uh mark how are you doing sir thanks i'm doing well i hope y'all can hear me we can so uh you know i've been in higher ed for more than 20 years and i guess what i always find fascinating about this free speech on campus is how students greatly outnumber faculty and staff and yet we expect these students usually these young people right to come to campus already understanding what we are talking about and how we think about this and the fact of the matter is that is simply implausible and i just invite all of us that are here and work at a college or university how are you educating how are the students being educated about this because it's just like oh it's the first amendment it's like well the first amendment is 45 words but we all know it goes way beyond that and i just invite us to think about that how are we getting the students to understand their role and our role in what this means oh great question please go ahead let us you want to tackle that yeah that's i think it's a great question i think i've wondered if various kinds of orientation ought to be implemented around academic freedom and free speech both i think that um at at stanford law after the uh the sort of infamous kyle duncan incident something like that was implemented by jenny martinez who was the dean of the law school at the time and who is now i think the provost of the entire university um and so i wouldn't be surprised and maybe especially if these very fraught you know very upsetting to students and faculty both uh protests and counter protests over the war in the middle east go on if incoming classes or maybe students to the beginning of the next semester are orientated in some way you know this is how to protest appropriately this is what you certainly can't do um and so on um that's i i wouldn't be shocked in the personally i think it would be a good idea for sure well thank you thank you for that answer mark thank you for the really good question much appreciated um and i appreciate all of this but unfortunately i have to do the opposite of showing appreciation which is that to draw our hour to a close because it is the end of our session um len thank you so much for being just a great interlocutor for sharing all of your ideas it's been a real pleasure talking with you i'm curious what's what's the best way to keep up with your work should we should we follow you on social media or should we sign up your the best way would be to sign up for my newsletter which uh i think if you go to the most recent one it comes out every monday morning and then we'll be published on the uh it's published on the website of the chronicle simultaneously um and you can just go there and you know log in through your institutional chronicle account and hit like subscribe i think it's a little button at the top and then i'll be in your inbox uh and uh if if i'm showing up in the spam or promotions you know tell it go to the regular bit you know i'm supposed to tell everybody that it's it's in some way and it happens uh you know email defenses can be very rigorous well please i i strongly recommend uh following lens columns because they're just there's always thoughtful and always always good um thank you thank you so much for joining us much appreciated thank you so much for having me take care and good look with the book too thank you friends thank you all for uh for the great questions and great comments this has been a real deep dive into a really fraught and tricky subject i appreciate all of you taking the time to share all of your thoughts if you'd like to continue sharing those thoughts on social media please just use the hashtag ftte here are the places you can find me on twitter mastodon threads blue sky and of course on my blog if you'd like to go into our previous sessions where we've touched on these topics just go to tinyurl.com slash fdfr kind or take a look at our forum website in order to find the topics that are coming up thank you everybody i hope that uh as we are heading towards late november i hope those of you in the northern hemisphere are staying warm and those of you in the southern hemisphere are not too hot uh please take care everybody be safe and we'll see you next time 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