 Again, welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a really good guest and we have a great subject and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Here at the forum, we've recently been diving into the questions of free speech and academic freedom on campus. And we've done this in a couple of different ways. We hosted Hank Reichman, who is with the American Association of University Presidents, and he does a lot of work there for protecting academic freedom. And of a couple weeks ago, we hosted two professors who had written a pretty interesting book trying to think of some limits for academic freedom for faculty. Now, I want to bring up the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. This is a group that fights very hard for freedom of speech. They've been doing this for quite some time and in fact until recently they were called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education. They publish a lot of reports, they do a lot of legal advocacy work, and recently they've been publishing reports on what they see as the climate of free speech on campus. So, where are they telling me what they do? Let me bring up Sean Stevens. He's a senior research fellow there. Not too far from me, geographically, here on the East Coast. He's the author of some of this research and I'm gonna, without any further ado, I'm gonna bring up on stage so we can start talking with him. There we go. Hello, Sean Stevens. Hi, how are you? All right, good to see you. And where are you today, I should ask. I'm in that Jersey City, New Jersey. That's right. Well, here we have the East Coast fully represented. At least the middle and the northeast. Shall we have a tradition on the forum where we ask people to introduce themselves by talking about what they're going to be doing next? I'm curious, in the next year, what are the big projects and the big ideas that are top of mind for you? Yeah, so as you mentioned, we've recently kind of started doing these reports on on college students in the climate on campus for free speech. So we are planning to once again run that survey. We're gonna up the number of schools to 250. The previous year, and so we're gonna up that to about 250 probably there's usually a handful then there's usually a handful more because there's usually alumni at some schools who are just interested in having them surveyed and so we kind of added them after we've actually already made the selection. So that's why we just wind up with kind of a weird number. So that's one thing. We're we also recently completed a faculty survey, a nationwide faculty survey, which asks about free speech and academic freedom. Some of the questions came from our student survey so we can actually make some cross comparisons there with what faculty think versus what the students think. Others were completely new questions geared more towards what faculty would experience potentially encounter on campus. We so we did that and we're going to have next week, we're actually going to have a new research fellow starting whose expertise is in surveying faculty and studying faculty attitudes. So we're kind of launching more of a research project into kind of capturing what faculty think about these issues. Now, we think we have the students down fairly well with the ranking survey and a few other things. But that's only part of the picture of trying to capture what a climate is like on a campus. And I would actually argue it's probably maybe more more important to get the faculty added to as important. If not more, they're likely there for longer students for four or five years, leave campus, go elsewhere. Faculty can be on a campus for decades. So those two major projects. And then there's a number of like as far as spending, we have a number of other other things going on. But I'll let's get let's get to the more pressing matters at hand. I guess those are the things that sound like you'll be busy and I'm delighted to hear I'm looking forward to the next releases. Friends, if you're if you're new to the forum, I'm going to ask our guest a couple of questions just to get things rolling. The forum's purpose is for you to ask your questions. So again, go back to that white bar on the bottom of the screen. And if you are if you want to ask a video question, just click the raised hand button. And if you got a text question, press the Q&A box and type it in. I'll remind you about that. But I think you'll find quite a lot to think about my first question is how far back have you all been doing this? How many how many years have you been doing the survey of students? The survey we did the first survey in 2020. So he's done it in 2020, 2021. And then now in 2022 each year it's gotten larger. The first year is about 20,000 students. And then we hit about 45,000 this most recent year. Is there three years? I mean, is that enough for a longitudinal analysis yet? You know, I would say no. I for there's for a few reasons, like number one, it's it's yes, it's only three years. I mean, I think that we want to continue to do this. So it grows into something more like the general social survey, the American election study, which are asked repeatedly and they build up a data set over decades. And there I think you can really start looking more at trends over time. Another reason why is we've, you know, we've changed some of the questions each year to try and better, you know, get a better measure. What, you know, the first year we did it, we're trying questions out and then we want to tweak them, improve them, make them better as we've collected data on them. So some questions have been asked every year, but others haven't. Some have been slightly tweaked. I think you can probably still make those comparisons as long as you know that they were slightly tweaked. But yeah, I don't I don't think it's long enough to really capture any long term trends yet. It's just a nice repository of data right now. Got it. Got it. Appreciate that. And within that repository, I mean, what are some of the what are some of the top line findings in your in your take? I mean, my sense is that we get some students who say that they leave in free speech and some students who say they think you should be limited for certain reasons that seems it seems kind of contradictory in some ways. I mean, but but you're you're the expert here. What's what's your sense? So you just described, I think, something that's a very called almost like a classic finding or an expected finding in most literature, polling data and like peer reviewed scholarship on support for civil liberties, support for free speech or how it's kind of proxy measured a lot of times in the political science realm and in the general social survey as tolerance for a controversial speaker or individual. And you generally see that when asked in the abstract about issues like free speech, free expression, academic freedom, people are supportive of it, almost overwhelmingly supportive in certain cases. Like you'll hit like numbers like 90, 95 percent. Wow. But that evaporates when you then add specifics and ask about more detailed cases and you say exactly what the person is expressing or what they're saying, then you are always going to find, like, you know, notable portions of people to even majorities that are opposed to these types of targets. So I think that, you know, we kind of have that. We don't necessarily have that pattern in our data because we don't actually knowing that that was the case. We didn't really ask an abstract question about do you just support this stuff in general? But so so our top line findings, I would say, is what we do find is students are they're certainly there's a notable like majority to probably about 50 percent about two thirds who say there's some level of discomfort expressing views when they disagree with a professor, whether that's in the classroom or in writing. When we ask follow ups as to why students self censor, you said number of students answer that they're afraid of for their grade. This is an interesting finding because while it's challenging to study that people who have attempted to study this and capture if this is actually a thing have found essentially no evidence that like a student's politics impacts how the professor grades them. The professor is not looking to get them for their politics, but I think it's still a concern if students think that they are, like whether or not whether or not it's actually happening, that it's a concern. I think it's it's something that we should note and try to address. There are other things that come up are there's definitely just like social media is seen as a place where they're not comfortable expressing controversial views that could be pylons, things like that could damage their reputation. Students predictably based on ideology, liberal students are, you know, pretty intolerant of pretty controversial conservative speakers. But the same is also true of conservative students for controversial liberal speakers. You know, notable portions find they say and, you know, I'm very careful. You got to like think about how the questions were. And so I don't think students are going to rush out there and, you know, physically block entry to events in mass numbers or you can get violent. But if they're asked if the behaviors are acceptable to disrupt the campus event, pretty notable portions say shout-downs are acceptable to some degree. But we don't under 40 percent say blocking entry to an event. And the way we've the way the data looks like it seems like that's being interpreted as physically blocking entry, like not a not like some kind of line where there's not going to be physical interaction because it is seen as less acceptable than shouting down a speaker. So we kind of read that as they're probably taking that as physically blocking entry. And then about one in five, you say the use of violence could be acceptable, you know, most of them say rarely, but they're saying it's acceptable in some circumstances. So what was that? What was that number? Was it one in five say? And, you know, I've very, I was very like, no, it's like one percent say the word always acceptable and something like five percent say sometimes. And most of the rest of that 20 percent is saying rarely. So it's in very rare circumstances, but rarely is different from never. So we would say that they're finding that acceptable to some degree. And then we've found the last two years when we ask it in a frequency based way that about one in five students say they self censor often, like very or fairly often because they're, you know, afraid of how other students, faculty or administrators will react or respond to what they say. Oh, so it's not just their grade, but it's it's the whole academic community. Yeah, the broad finding, I think I would say is is what we found is in this year, we added questions that kind of got more out. Are you worried about your reputation being damaged? Things like that. The broad finding is, yeah, it's just people are worried about social consequences. If they say controversial things that then, you know, if they if they weigh in on a political matter or what's obviously a controversial topic and they both say the wrong thing, they're worried about the negative social consequences that can happen. Got it. Well, thank you. That's a terrific set of top line findings. I've been treating this out and Lisa Durf has been following along. And there's been some commentary in the chat. And in fact, we have we have some questions already. And I was I was going to follow up with one. Let me just ask you one more. Just just to poke things a little, a little further. What's a once you publish this research, what surprised you in the reactions to it that has occurred? Well, so honestly, I mean, we kind of always expect there to be like some people like we expect there to be some people who like love it and they kind of maybe need your send it around or tweet it out or talk about it without necessarily like really diving into it and seeing what it says. And then on the flip side, there's like the typical kind of criticisms that may fall in that category as well. It's reading of the executive summary or top line findings and not necessarily a full dive into the report. There's like criticisms about methodology or questions about who was in the sample, things like that. And so what was surprising, I think this year was kind of that ladder didn't happen. It didn't really happen. The critiques that we found are actually very thoughtful, like methodological and engaging critiques. And then we had pretty good back and forths with the authors of those critiques. So I thought that was like really that was cool, actually, and somewhat surprising. Yeah, I mean, other than that, I mean, like the results, I don't think anything was necessarily that surprising in the results this year, per se. You know, they're honestly not terribly different from last year's. And I don't think that's that surprising. I don't think things are going to change in the snap of a finger or things like that. What was encouraging from like a validity standpoint, I think was by expanding the number of schools and including a lot more. There is interesting little nuances when you dive in and look at individual schools and how they explore items compared to nationally. And you can cut, you know, for one example, we surveyed the all five of the Claremont colleges this year, last year we went to the department kind of the year that we had at the other four. And as going through the data and we were writing up kind of a smaller summary of those five, I noticed that at like Pomona College, something like three quarters of the students said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was this very difficult topic to have an open honest conversation about. And so it's like, OK, so what happened on this campus when it's not happening? Now, like all these other ones, sure enough, there's been a recent controversy over the Israel-Palestine relations on Pomona campus, Pomona College's campus. So like little things like that, I thought were interesting and surprising, but it's like to me encouraging like from a validity standpoint of the survey itself. Well, that's a tricky thing. I mean, American higher education is incredibly decentralized in many ways and local conditions are so powerful. At this point, Sean, just to let you know, I usually pause and say, please submit questions. There are 10 questions already and I haven't anything. But these come from all over the place. So I'll start flashing on the screen. Again, friends, if you want to join us on stage, you can see that it's we're all pretty friendly. This is a question from Annie Epperson. Is fire more concerned with issues of free speech in the classroom or on campus like non-curricular discourse? I'm thinking of free speech zones at a student center or protesting controversial speakers. Say equally concerned about both the policies, you know, the administrative policies that set up things like free speech zones or certain things fires known to, you know, frown upon and urge schools to change in some ways, kind of challenge, expect their unconstitutional will file, legal freeze, et cetera. But there's also a whole arm of fire where we defend faculty and students like pro bono because they've gotten in trouble for things they've said in the classroom or, you know, on campus space, professors in case where they're getting in trouble or maybe targeted for research that they've done or research that they've published. So I would say it's actually it's an equal concern on both. And, you know, as mentioned at the outset, that was the college campus was fires primary concern for the first 23, 24 years of its existence. We only recently expanded to kind of now care about off campus issues. Thank you. Annie, that's a really good question. Thank you. And actually, Annie followed up with another clarifying question. Let me just quickly pop this up. Does fire differentiate between public and private institutions? And are you so or finding different from one to the other? Yeah, we do. We we differentiate between public and private and we even do private like we differentiate between secular and religious institutions. And in those cases, in terms of like our college survey data, broad finding, I could say is one thing we see is with the larger public state schools. Typically, we tend to do better or have better results. I mean, there's clear exceptions. I mean, the U of Chicago has always been one of our top ranked schools. Each year we've done it. And has been in the in the top ten both years we've surveyed them. So it's not a hard and fast thing, but we have noticed this pattern where schools with like a larger student body, which particularly are your more public state universities, students in terms of the scores and the rankings, they do better. Like one hypothesis I have on this is at a smaller liberal arts college or a smaller elite college where there's maybe a few thousand students in the student body, 10, 15, 20, 30, in some cases over 40,000. This has the feel of like a small village almost where almost everybody knows everybody. And so if you kind of run a foul and become like the pariah for something you've said, it probably has a lot more consequences in terms of that smaller setting that it does in a larger setting. In a larger student body, chances are you can probably find other like-minded individuals who share your views and you can feel comfortable expressing them with, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's one of the broad findings we see. I'll be honest, haven't done much in terms of looking at religions, first non-religious institutions. We have a handful in there. So those comparisons could be done, but haven't looked at that really yet. So I couldn't comment on any differences there. I appreciate that. And Annie, that's another really good question. And friends, if you're new to the forum, those are two great examples of a Q&A box question. I do want to another Q&A box question. This is from our good friend Glenn McGee. He actually has two. And these are both kind of material research questions. And these may be technically, you might want to take these offline. I don't know. But one is he has a public records question. I filed the public records question in Florida, lost the local circuit, lost the Pelec Court, but later found a case that won. How do you reconcile these? Well, fortunately, since I'm not an attorney, I'm not extra. I don't know. I can give you the best answer there. I'm happy to put you in touch with people at FHIR that could give you a thoughtful answer on that. OK. Very good. Very good. And then Glenn had another, again, detailed question. How can we access the survey forum? Oh, yeah. So you could go to rankings at the fire.org. That brings you to, that should bring you to the landing page. Let me just make sure that's it. Yeah, that'll bring you to the landings page, like a landing page where you can see the rankings and download the report. Another way you could access it is if you go to the fire.org. At the bottom of the home page, kind of on the bottom left-hand side, you can click that. That gives you more of a landing page where you can, it lets you view the rankings. You can view the report online. There's a direct link to exploring the data, which there's a dashboard set up online. And then you can download the press release, which is the executive summary. The report in the appendix, the report has all the survey questions with the top line results. Also happy to share the raw data file with anybody that wants it. They can just send an email request to data at the fire.org. Oh, thank you. The CSV file and the code books. So you can analyze the data yourself. Well, that's very kind. Glenn, thank you for those questions. Glenn's a hardcore data associate. I want you guys. I'm sure you'd be happy to see these. We have more questions piling up. I have to stop asking you guys to ask questions, because this is from William Colucci. Is most of the student pushback against free speech not just in the elite schools? So I think the problem that, you know, the pushback problem that you see is probably more cute in the elite schools. But controversies over speech aren't, like they happen on campuses like all across the country. I think regardless of their status. But I would say, yeah, the problem is probably more acute at the, at more of the elite institutions. Some of the schools that were in the, like more in the, like near the bottom of our rankings. This year we started incorporating, we maintained these two databases as well. So campus disinvitation attempts and scholars under fire. And so the latter, the former I think is pretty self-explanatory. What it is, it's like a speaker gets invited to campus and there's a campaign to disinvite them. And so we kind of log if they're successful or not, if the event was disrupted. So we have kind of that data. And then we have scholars under fire, which is a tries to log attempts to sanction. It's not just professors. That's why we call it scholars. It's basically anyone who's kind of participating as an academic. So this could be PhD students who are doing, you know, they're doing peer review research and they're teaching courses. It could be, it's mostly going to be professors and faculty, but it could also be people at postdocs, research fellows who are at like a university center. But the key thing is you're affiliated with a university and you're kind of contributing to the academic discussion in some way. And so we attempt to track attempts to get them investigated, suspended, terminated, et cetera. So we factor this data into the rankings this year. And some of the schools in the bottom 10, they're fairly elites. And they're the schools that have kind of the most attempts to sanction scholars at them. So I think that's one example of it being maybe more acute at some of these more elite schools. Interesting. Interesting. Oh, great question. And thank you for that great answer, Sean. We have another one come up from Michael Meeks at Louisiana State. And Michael asks, are you picking up a reason we have this cancel culture? Shout-downs are acceptable. Do you pick up why? They're reasoning, I guess. They're reasoning. Yeah, so I have ideas on maybe why. So we, but I have my own ideas on maybe why, you know, that kind of brings in other stuff. But we do ask, like I said, we ask an open-ended question after a self-censorship question. So if they say they never feel uncomfortable sharing their views because they don't see these consequences from people like I mentioned before, they don't get the follow-up. But anybody who says anything besides never, we say, can you tell us about a time that this happened? There's a lot in there. But so I think there's a lot of the reasoning for why students push back on certain forms of expression, certain things that are being said. There is this shift. There's been, I think, kind of a normative shift. And you see this in some political science data as well, where previously, like for decades, people with college experience, with a college education, compared to those who didn't have that experience and don't have a college degree, there was like this tolerance gap. And the college educated, that group was always more tolerant, even of the really, like, loathsome speakers who were talking about biological genetic determinations of racial intelligence, like speakers like that. So that gap has vanished in the last decade. And it's primarily because the college educated group has become less tolerant of those more loathsome speakers. And so there's this idea that there's kind of this normative shift where free speech, free expression, this idea, it used to not be contested as a norm. It was considered like this value. And like we talked about earlier, when asked about in the abstract, almost everybody says they value it. They believe it. They think it's really important. But the idea in the political science literature, and I think what we see in some of the comments from students, and they're talking about why things have changed, things like this, I think there's been this shift. It's not like this cherished, like, uncontested norm anymore. It's actually contested. And the value of it is it's being seen as in conflict with other important values that students have. Well, thank you for that very thoughtful answer. And Mike, thank you for that good question probing at this. We have a quick question from Lisa Durf, which I can read to you. I can't share clearly, but she asks, is this a generational thing? And I think you just started answering that, saying that there's a shift, at least in general attitudes. But are you seeing this broken down by age? Yeah. So, I mean, my inkling is, I think it might actually be more of like a generational, like cohort thing, and it's not a college student non. It's not college, non-college. It's more, I think it might actually be more of a generational cohort. We don't have as much data on general public and people that aren't enrolled in college. But we have a few data sets where we survey the general public. I have a data set from about two years ago, where in particular, requested a sample of college students and a sample of equivalent aged 18 to 24 year olds who are not enrolled in college and asked them as similar questions as we could. I mean, obviously you can't ask non-college students about how they feel in the classroom about certain things. But, you know, so try to make it as power as possible. And, you know, what I see in those data sets is there's not much difference. It's the younger, like 18 to 24, 18 to 29 tend to be less supportive of speech and expression than older counterparts. So there is some a bit of a generational skew. Thank you. Lisa, thank you for the question. We have a couple of people who have circled back to ask more questions. Annie Epperson asks a partnership question. Would Fire Routini partner with the American Association of University Professors to help protect and defend faculty votes? Or perhaps even with the American Civil Liberties Union? Yeah, I mean, we've partnered with both organizations in the past on cases, on briefs, on other, like, not on, we haven't partnered with them on any of the survey research that we do or things like that, but we have partnered with them in the past on legal basis in briefs, yes. Okay. Thanks. Good question. And then, again, this comes back to my clumsy attempt at a longitudinal question for you. Glenn asks a much better question, which is what's been the impact of COVID? So that's actually pretty interesting. I'd say so in year two the 20-21 data set which we collected kind of at the peak when there were a lot of students not even on campus, we asked questions, right, the outset, like, basically, are you even on campus and in the classroom? And so that year I think was very interesting in that we found that a lot of students were remote. They still commented on there being these issues. So some students if they were in their first year when they were asked about to elaborate on an open-ended thing about their experience on campus a good number of them noted that they haven't even been on campus yet. They still have concerns about doing it even in these remote settings or whatever or they've heard things, blah, blah, blah. The students that have been on campus an interesting thing we found was we did ask if you've if you have been on campus before you're now taking kind of like remote classes how do you feel about them and it was like an equal, it was roughly equal percentages said that it's about the same, I can express my views, nothing's really changed. But then what was equal with that was no, it's actually kind of more intimidating and worse and, you know, very few said it's easier essentially. So I think one trend there is with the online with being more online I think that could for some students make it more difficult. You know, this is more speculation now because we didn't ask follow-ups on this question but reasons for that could be the sessions are being recorded you know, they're on the screen and everybody can see you and you can see everybody and things like that. So that's speculative but I think there was definitely something interesting going on that year for sure but in terms of the data itself like the questions that we've asked repeated every year the top lines didn't really move around that much on those questions. That's interesting, that's very interesting so we may have something stable that appears from this we have a question that came from on Twitter from our good friend Robin DeRosa wasn't able to make it but she wanted me to ask the question so let me just read this. It's three tweets and I think there's a couple of questions here how does the fire campaign relate excuse me, sorry I missed your point fire has raised millions of dollars for a three-year litigation opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free speech values. How does the fire campaign relate to the extreme right wing's recent targeting of teachers and curriculum that is ironically branded as a free speech campaign and who were the major funders of this fire campaign and what relationship do they have to the funding of recent legislative campaigns like divisive concepts and don't say gay creatures? First off, we've actually sued the state of Florida over the don't say gay bill and things like that so we've filed legal briefs against these kind of bills going on across the country so our stance on that is we're obviously against them. We think they're a threat to teachers academic freedom in the classroom where we were involved in another example is we were fairly involved in last year at Boise State there was the state of Idaho had passed a bill that potentially was going to limit a number of courses that could be offered at the college level, Boise State in terms of like diversity courses, things like that so we were involved in that so we were our stance on those bills is they're unconstitutional and they threaten faculty and teachers academic freedom and we would challenge them or file briefs against them in terms of the campaign to expand it we do have foundation donors but most of our donors are small donors and individuals it's a lot of alumni from these various colleges that I mean some of the many of them that we've surveyed we have some money from the Stanton Foundation as part of the expansion we have some money from the Koch Family Foundation as part of the expansion we have funders from the left and the right okay so most of the funders are small yeah and then you do have some from the left and the right yeah we have funding from across the ideological spectrum we have a few foundation sized donors that are you know they are larger than the individuals obviously can but the majority of donors are individuals and I'd say mostly alumni of these colleges of colleges across the country oh that's interesting that's interesting I mean obviously that's you know in the last six not even six months it's like I guess it's the last like four or five months that's obviously expanded because of us announcing the expansion and making kind of a PR push so there's probably that's probably diversified and it's not only you know primarily alumni from colleges now but I'd say a good chunk of them are just alumni from these institutions interesting interesting thank you thank you and thank you Robin for that great question always look forward to hearing from you we've got a question from our dear friend and frequent guest Tom Hames who asks a typically provocative and deep question are you saying that colleges should be required to give anyone a podium who wants it no not necessarily but I think you know what we you know what we argue is you know a student group invites a speaker to campus right and their their constitutional rights allow them to do so you know our approach is we don't want the school stepping in and canceling that event we'd certainly oppose a heck of a veto type scenario where a protest of it turns into a shout down and maybe even like an event disruption where in these are certainly rare but they do happen where you know students are pulling fire alarms to kind of disrupt the event and basically drown out the speaker's talk and then if you know there's been a few instances where that's even spilled over into violence so the heck words veto itself is not it's not constitutional because you're limiting other people's ability to hear the speech so those are the types of things we oppose so in those situations where a woldsome decorable speaker has been invited to campus we'd encourage actually there's a good example I think of what happened is like a good contrast of it University of Wisconsin this week Matt Walsh was there and they encouraged a basically there was like a counter protest counter event at the time you know basically to run at the same time and there's like a counter protest and there wasn't a shout down there wasn't like a disruption of the speaking events itself we'd far prefer something like that then I mean at Penn State I mean it's not queer to me it probably was the right call it seems like the crowd was getting there was violence developing in the crowd and there was like opposing groups of protesters but at Penn State this week the cancellation of the Gavin McGuinness event is kind of the flip side or contrast of that and so I think it's like what we would encourage in those instances is hold a counter event might be better to have more people at your counter event at the original event than the speaker itself and then you're also not giving a lot of these lousome speakers I would say their goal actually is to get that rise and get that reaction and so you're not giving them what they want Thank you, thank you Tom has a gift for the for the deft question that goes right through and I appreciate Sean your gift at having a very concise and thoughtful reply Thank you We have more questions coming and I should just say please submit questions and again if you want to join us on stage too just hit the video button we'd be glad to see you and this is a kind of follow-up on the COVID question since the destruction moved online how have things changed do you want to say a bit more about that Yeah so what's interesting is really heavily through the one year it seems like and in this year's data we kept in one of the questions where it was basically like are your classes mostly online mostly in person and all and etc and this year the data shows that it's largely shifted back to mostly in person there are a handful of schools I don't remember them offhand right now but if you go through and poke around in the data there's a handful of schools where they remained I think more online but a lot of schools it seems like have largely returned to mostly being in person I think what changes are likely going to be permanent is like well I think there's going to be more of an option to take remote courses if students want them I think for some students that's great some people learn well in that setting and for other students that might not work so well I'm just thinking I used to be when I was getting my PhD and when I was a post doc I taught plenty at Rutgers so it's like I'm just thinking of for some students I think that would be really great and for other students I think they'd struggle with it just like I think like almost any human it's like some of us these Zoom meetings and some of us I can't really do this every day all day and I need a break from this it's kind of it's very hard if we're demanding so I don't know if I could say much else because I don't think there's much in our data that says that gets more at like what's going on for them in the classroom like in terms of their educational experience like we really stick to like asking about expression in the questions very good and one thing just to make it worse is that we have various terms for this but where you blend face-to-face and online instruction so you know some people are online some people are face-to-face some of us call this hybrid some of us call it iFlex or other terms but it's interesting to think about just in terms of how the online environment is different in terms of speech but let me just get out of the way because we have more questions John Hollenbeck actually from I believe he's from an area asks you a big question what would the ideal heaven of free speech on campus look like? yeah I mean so I guess it would be this place where ideas can be contested including ones that come from different political perspectives and it doesn't there isn't like this air of almost like a persecutory persecuting society students don't I don't think I certainly don't think everybody has to agree I think that'd be kind of boring so I want people to be able to have these disagreements I think like a campus is one reason why the environment was so focused on campuses for so long and why we still continue to care so much about it is it's the ideal environment for modeling this behavior and taking young adults and showing them how to do this so that they then take this when they leave college out into the world like you're creating almost this space where we do have these more hard or complicated discussions that have them we want to be respectful quite I know I'm using like a lot of buzzwords that sound great and it's like I have no idea how to actually make all that happen but it looks like a place where different views can be discussed openly people can disagree sometimes even very strongly but it doesn't evolve into like a need to get the other person like for what they think or what they said that's pretty clear that's a pretty concise and clear answer to John's great question thank you the chat box by the way has just been going like gangbusters and I I want to pull out one theme that came from that which was I'm going to paraphrase this because it happened a couple of times the question of hate speech so if I get this right and people in the chat please correct me if I got this wrong the idea that somebody can support free speech they can say they're supporting free speech as a cover for them saying hate speech those in the chat if you want to just jump on that and flesh that out give it actually some verbs and Sean is that something you want to wrangle with yeah we can we can discuss I don't think anyone has followed this up yet but I think this is one of the interesting problems on campus is the question of hate speech as far as I can tell legally doesn't have much of a standard the Supreme Court has shut this down a couple of times but we still the idea is a popular one just speaking in the US other nations actually do speech national laws I mean is this is this kind of the the bedrock tension here on campus where people actually want to say something which is going to be clearly defined as free speech or as hate speech and they use free speech to cover it up that's I mean it's certainly when I was talking about invited speakers and I mentioned that there's there are Wilson speakers who you could put in like a deplorable box or whatever and yeah I mean I think I think an example of one of these is Milo you know his this is going back a handful of years but 2016-2017 he's doing his tour on college campuses and the entire goal was to be a troll and get a rise out of people because he knew what he was saying is going to offend and he's not really contributing much if at all to the conversation at least on campus and yes there's no legal definition in the United States of hate speech but clearly his views would fall in that category when people say that's hate speech like most people probably would agree that those views fall in the bucket yeah I mean so he's a troll and there's different ways of handling that there's not giving the troll what he wants like that's my kind of preferred method versus you know kicking telling the group that invited him and that's like a different thing that gets put aside for a second there's ways of doing things of how to handle maybe that because it's like the student group invited him so you know the faculty member sponsoring said group there's actually at our conference someone told the story about this happening I don't remember what I think was that University it might have been University of Delaware I'm not sure but essentially I think it was Milo was invited to campus and the faculty member who sponsored the group basically wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper where it said yeah you can invite him you should be thinking about this and like there's gonna be consequences you're inviting him and basically the professor was like if you go forward with the event like I don't oppose you going forward with the event but I'm no longer going to sponsor I will no longer be the faculty sponsor of this group things like that so that's kind of modeling the behavior of it you know at the other end it's like I think Milo wants you to move his speech off campus and he wants you to like basically say don't allow him so he can make a bigger and bigger deal out of it and create this kind of false impression of what a university is like and then he makes money off it I mean he's lost all his money because he's there's other things going on with that guy but you know I that I would prefer to handle it kind of that way because it doesn't give them what they want and doesn't allow them to kind of create this or amplify this like moral panic that an impression that those people want to create that impression but then also you know the history of restrictions on speech and expression and calls for it and yeah it's great to it might be great to basically say oh this stuff is just clearly out of bounds and whatever but the way our minds work is our concepts creep we kind of keep expanding them and what we see a lot of times historically is when we pass things like this that restrict expression they ultimately get turned on the groups whose expression we don't want to restrict that's the problem it becomes a policy it becomes a tool and people can use the noble directions Lisa et al everyone who is who is discussing this thank you very much we have more questions and I want to bring in one this bounces back Sean a couple of weeks we hosted a couple of scholars Michelle and also Jennifer Ruth who have a new book about academic free speech and they had a very interesting argument one I haven't seen before and it was basically that free speech academics so faculty free speech I think they also applied this to faculty free speech should be surveyed by other faculty much like faculty publications should be surveyed in terms of peer review promotion tenure hiring review let me just put this up on the screen Glenn had a phrase of it so he's wondering what do you think of the definition of academic freedom as limited to faculty you know so Sean you're teaching a class on stats and you give a bad definition of a problem another stats colleague should be able to assess that rate and figure you're not going to be teaching it if I'm teaching a class on technology and then I start ranting about the protocols of the elders of Zion then people can say well as a faculty member you're out of bounds and you're saying something that's wrong but then they wanted faculty to assess that and formally they wanted every campus to have a make it this wrong I'm going to say a faculty free speech committee something like that I'm curious and that's a narrow slice of what you're talking about you're talking about faculty and students like but what do you think about that is that something that would make sense for your perspective so I mean I far prefer as someone who like I said I work at a non-profit but I worked at a university I was a grad student and I worked at a university as like a postdoc researcher and a research fellow for a number of years and so I know the setting and I've taught I would far prefer faculty pith ones in charge of reviewing other faculty than administrators like that's for sure I would think that you know the the idea of like some kind of committee like you know on that I don't know necessarily where I would fully stand it almost becomes another than almost like an administrative committee right like so I'm not sure if I would go that far but I certainly am far more comfortable with faculty being like the primary referees of other faculty than almost anybody else well thank you Glenn thank you for reaching back and Sean thank you if you haven't had a chance to check out the book I really recommend it it's beautifully written and I can send you our discussion because the both of them were just great interlocutors now we're coming close to the end of the hour somehow I feel like we just started but I wanted to put in one of my questions which is and Michael Meeks actually came up with this as well if we take a look at your years of analysis three years of data and we extrapolated forward a bit say there's five in the next ten years how do you think colleges and universities will be different and I'm talking about the macro level every college is different and as you expand your data set it may adjust but how how does this you know kind of synthesis this concrete set of beliefs about free speech how might that change higher education moving forward well so one thing I'll say is that I'll draw on another data set first because it's relevant for the future actually the future of the first amendment done by the freedom forum they do this survey every so often every couple years of high school students it's put out a data set from 2022 and just one story short not to get bogged down in it because we're short on time but the current high school students basically their views and support and attitudes towards free speech for expression are lower than current college students so they were comparing data from the night foundation and a recent college students survey they put out so I would say like knowing that there's a potential for some of these trends to continue and maybe some of these speech trends to continue and possibly intensify as these high school students replace existing college students but I also think there's this interesting thing where I think you're starting to see schools I don't want to I don't want to dichotomize it and say like picking a side because I don't think it's actually that's not like it's not an either or choice or conflict but there are certain schools out there that are basically very clearly being like no we're going to go with like the free speech and and others that I think try to they do a number of things but it's maybe not necessarily fully clear to everybody then where they stand on the issue so it's like there's colleges and universities that are taking a very clear stance on being favor of free speech and expression and then there's a lot of others I think it's a bit more murky or we see this in our data we ask about perception I didn't mention this in the beginning on the top lines but we ask a few questions about their perceptions of the administration stance like is it clear that they support free speech and are they likely to defend someone during a controversy and at the schools like U Chicago Oklahoma, McKenna, Purdue places that have had a very clear public embrace of free speech academic freedom expression the students it's clear that the students are aware of this and then other at other universities and colleges it's a lot murkier so one thing I would say is a potential thing we could see is if more and more colleges kind of go that route and embrace it like we should start to see that in the data in terms of administrative questions and then at those schools like the other thing that's that we time to see are and I want to note U Chicago and Coymont, McKenna in particular on this because they have student bodies that are still pretty heavily liberal in terms of how the students identify and when we look at the tolerance for the different kinds of speakers they definitely still favor the liberal speakers by a decent amount like the gap between their averages are still like notable but there's still like two of the top like 20 or 30 schools on tolerance for conservatives so I think there's something going on at schools like that and I think if more and more schools adopted that kind of approach or model we would potentially see that in the data that we collect that's interesting thank you that's that's very nuanced that's I would love to follow this up and the problem is we're so when we do webinars and Q&As like I'm totally willing to always do this if someone wants to just pull all the questions from the chat like I'm willing to like we have a blog we can write up like you know call them kind of I'm sure some of them are similar so distill them into like this is a question but happy to write up some answers to those as a follow up well that's great friends in the chat do you have anyone have any objections let me know I can of course anonymize this as a text file and then send that to Sean at fire and give him a chance so let me know if you have any favorite objections to that and Sean while people are thinking about this what's the best way to keep up with the fires research on this and your own work so you know the fire.org is our main site we have a Twitter as well I'm actually not a Twitter person so you have to give me a second to find what that actually is but we have a Twitter feed too that's a good way like we tweeted out in announcements of this today you know the like I said there's you can sign up for like we have an email letter like newsletter said you get blasts about like that would be all the fires so that would be that would include like our research work etc that would probably be the best ways yeah the Twitter account is thefire.org I figured it was something like that yes well please thank you first of all for keeping for all these wonderful answers I really appreciate your inversion and taking each question so seriously I hate to let you go but I have to let you go take care and we'll follow up alright thanks thanks again Sean but don't leave friends I just want to point out we have a couple of pointers to our next our next sessions and thank you all for just fantastic questions and really really great commentary if you want to keep talking about this we already have some Twitter comments going back and forth hashtag FTT you can tweet at me of course Brian Alexander or Chindig events and of course on Brian Alexander.org I'd love to see that if you'd like to look back into our previous sessions that I mentioned for example Hank Reichman as well as Beurre Bay and Ruth just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive where you can see examples of all kinds of discussions about that looking ahead we have sessions on reimagining higher ed campuses and local inequality where you can learn from COVID just go to forum.futureofeducation.us and you can see more and if you have anything you want to share please just shoot me a note I'd be glad to share with everybody else in the meantime thanks again for a terrific terrific discussion I think this was really really rich I hope everybody's doing well in the Northern Hemisphere as it gets cooler and cooler I hope you're staying warm and safe good luck everybody be safe and we'll see you next time online bye bye