 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. Joining us today is Keith Whittington. He's the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author of the new book, Speak Freely Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Thank you so much. You said at the beginning of your book that the problem of free speech on college campuses, quote, is not new, but is newly relevant. What makes it newly relevant? Well, I think it's newly relevant in part because we're seeing, I think we're seeing more episodes, although it is a little tough to tell whether the episodes are actually increasing or we're just, or they're just more visible and we're aware that there are more episodes over time. I think there's certainly some ideologies represented on campus. They're very critical of free speech. I think there are sort of a general background of a lot of students really not appreciating the value of free speech and why the principles might matter. And as a consequence, I think their commitment to free speech is not as strong as we might hope for. So there are some, I think, particular variations of the current free speech problem that are distinctive. Some of the problem may be a little more important than it might have been, say, 10 or 15 years ago. But it's also true. I think we should be cautious and recognize this isn't a unique threat to the Republic. It's not like we've never experienced students who are intolerant before or for that matter experienced Americans who are sometimes intolerant before. So what sort of past university free speech you write about some instances in the book? And it wasn't always liberals against conservatives, correct? It used to be the other way around in many different instances and it's been going on for a while. It often used to be the other way around. In the 19th century, universities were very closed off institutions. Graduates changed toward the end of the 19th century. But through much of their early history, universities were very conservative institutions, often religious institutions, and didn't view themselves as necessarily skeptically searching for the truth, open to controversial new ideas and unconventional thinking. That changed in the late 19th century and in the 20th century. But even still, across 20th century universities were often not as open as we might like. And the pressures came from various places. Often they came from outside universities. So from parents and alumni and from politicians. Campus administrators were often relatively conservative compared to the students. And so you often did see campus administrators partially out of their own beliefs, but partially in response to worries about what will the parents think and that kind of stuff. Really trying to suppress students who are often on the left, but maybe just sometimes culturally and socially on the left. So students who were too profane or talked about sex too much or various things like that or sometimes faculty. And campus administrators would try to shut that down out of a concern about protecting the brand as they understood it. And so it was a somewhat different kind of censorship and motivated by somewhat different concerns, but in some ways it's kind of familiar. How much of these concerns or I guess the activities and the behavior that are leading to these concerns, unique to universities. How much of this is like I guess a problem of the universities versus just the universities are representative of the culture as a whole. Because we have, so we have left wing students protesting speakers on campuses right now, but we also have the right in this country has become very hostile to free speech. They're just not doing it on universities as much. So are they just a symptom of a broader problem? Right. I think in lots of ways they are a symptom of a broader problem. I think of this as being a larger problem of the culture and of society, which is why I think it's important for not just students and faculty and campus administrators to come to a better understanding about the principles of free speech and what it means to have a civil society. But it's important for parents and alumni and general voters and politicians to have a better appreciation for those liberal values as well. In part because they express their intolerance on a college campus, but they also express their intolerance in lots of other places and contexts as well. So universities are particularly visible episode of a kind of conflict I think is a broader societal conflict that we should be concerned about in general. It's also true that universities I think are an important site in American society for vetting controversial ideas that we want universities to be places where people can explore things outside the mainstream in various ways. And so people who are hostile to that then have a particular interest in sometimes trying to capture those institutions and make sure that only their unconventional ideas find a home there. But others also have an interest in trying to shut that down precisely so those institutions can't explore unconventional and controversial ideas. And I think it's important for the vibrancy of American society ultimately to have institutions playing that kind of role that they're trying to carve out for themselves of there are going to be places where ideas are going to be taken very seriously. There are going to be places where ideas can be explored that may not be in the mainstream more generally and that students can get exposed to ideas there and but also a place where people can make mistakes intellectually and learn from them. And those are all important things that we should want to value that universities and try to preserve. Can liberal societies liberal values support the speech of people who would like to tear those values down? Is there inconsistency there? If they in fact won then all of these principles would go away. Sure. I mean I think it's a problem in liberal theory and how to think about how much do you tolerate the intolerance. But it's also a genuine political and social problem in some context. What do you do on the extremes? And I think there may be circumstances and cases where you have to reevaluate depending on the particular situation that you're in. So for example I teach among other things free speech to college students and among the kinds of court cases I put in front of them to think about or blasphemy cases from the United States in the 19th century. One thing that's interesting you know some most people of course don't think that we ever had blasphemy laws let alone blasphemy cases in 19th century and what's also striking is courts generally appell blasphemy convictions in the 19th century. This is just saying goddamn or something. Yeah well all kinds of things including things like Jesus wasn't really the son of God. Oh say a heresy too. Yeah exactly. So all kinds of things including you know but standing outside people's church services and screaming at them. They were all sinners and you're worshipping the wrong church and so there's a wide variety of things but that could get yourself charged under these kind of provisions at the time. And it's a little shocking given your expectations about what constitutional law looks like in the 21st century that judges thought it was perfectly consistent to have blasphemy convictions and to have the First Amendment for example in place. But part of what I try to get students to think about is that those things were often justified not on the grounds of we have to protect the truth of God and we ought to marshal the state in support of that. But instead the argument was these people are disrupting the public peace. If you stand outside a church and say bad things about the things people in that church believe you're going to start a fight. And the way that the state should intervene in order to prevent that disturbance of the peace from occurring is to whisk away the person that's causing the disturbance by saying the things that people are going to be offended by. And that was the way the law generally worked until and not only in this context of blasphemy but in other contexts as well that if you had a provocative speaker the concern was somebody's going to have a fight with that provocative speaker and the person who ought to be prosecuted for it is the speaker and not the person who wants to throw the punch. And the challenge for students is to think about well if you imagine yourself living in a society in which it's genuinely in the case that people are going to haul off and start hitting each other on the basis of what people are saying to each other, what is the right legal rule to have in that kind of context? And do you as a judge for example have to take really seriously the problem of how are we going to have a peaceful society in which people are all on the edge of throwing punches all the time or worse, right? And that's a genuine problem I think in some social context and so part of what I think we've gained over the course of American history is we've shifted the burden, right? So we've told people it's not okay to throw a punch even if you shouldn't punch the Nazis, right? Even if you find them extremely provocative and offensive and disturbing. But in the 19th century we sort of said well it's natural to throw the punch. There's a much more honor society. There's more of an honor society. We accepted violence as being a more sort of everyday part of society in common and I think it's a genuine advance that we don't think that way anymore, right? Instead we put the burden on people to say look you should control yourself. Well in Ciplinski what did he call him a damn fascist? No, exactly right. Is it the court ruled that that was a protected speech because clearly you're going to have to sock someone in the nose if you call him a damn fascist? Right. So Ciplinski is an important case from the early part of the 20th century characterizes so-called fighting words as not being protected by the Constitution and specifically by the First Amendment. That general notion of fighting words was something it's given sort of new form in Ciplinski but it was something that was sort of recognizable under the law previous to that. And in Ciplinski's case it's sort of representative of the complication that Ciplinski was a Jehovah's Witness. He went, he was a street, a sidewalk preacher would say controversial things that people found deeply offensive because he would criticize their religion. And he'd go in neighborhoods precisely in order to criticize people's religions and people get hot under the collar about it. And in this particular case then not only were people getting hot under the collar about what he was saying about the religion but then when the cops tried to drag him away he started calling the cops fascists. And now you've gone too far and charged him with a crime as a consequence. And Ciplinski raises them both with questions. And people want to say, well, fighting words, we shouldn't protect that under the Constitution. And the court since then has sort of really backed off that and so it's not clear there's anything left of that initial move. But people who find themselves attracted to that notion fighting words are unprotected. You have to think seriously about, well, okay, well, how do you feel about somebody like Ciplinski, right? So the sidewalk preacher who says things, people find offensive and people are worried he might start a fight and therefore he's on the wrong side of law on that basis. And he wants to call the cops names and the cops find that offensive. That's what the court was concerned about suppressing there. And if you really think that fighting words aren't protected by the Constitution, you should come to grips with the fact that you're okay with the idea of if you call the cops a pig, they can arrest you and put you in jail for that. I mean, they can do that obviously at any time anyway. Well, I mean, so that's, of course, that's part of the problem now. And the courts I think have been increasingly clear and there have been subsequent cases where cops continue to try to arrest people through the 60s and 70s, for example, on the basis of calling them names. And the courts were increasingly carving away that and saying, well, that's not, that's protected speech. You're allowed to do that. And sort of what we now sort of find ourselves in, and I think it's a legal regime where the courts say we can't actually prosecute somebody. But that doesn't necessarily prevent the police on occasion from arresting you and throwing you in the loose gal for a few hours before you come out. And actually, there's been cases that are saying on like flag burning, for example, even after the court said flag burning is constantly protected. There's still been instances of the police will arrest somebody for burning the flag in part because they're worried about community reactions and other kinds of things. But they won't prosecute you because they know they can't make a prosecution stick, but they nonetheless can take you out of circulation for a little bit. This concern grounded in provocation, I wonder how much that gets to answering something I was curious, I've been curious about, which is, you know, campuses have been, so this gets framed as, you know, these left-wing students are rejecting ideas that they disagree with, but campuses have been left-wing, that's not a new feature. But like when I was in college in the late 90s and early 2000s on a very left-wing campus, I don't recall any instances of speakers being, you know, disinvited because there were threats of protests and so on and so forth. One of the things that strikes me as different now is that the bolder like campus Republicans or other more conservative groups, they would invite speakers, but they weren't inviting speakers expressly in order to provoke, like speakers who had nothing to contribute to a debate in exchange of ideas other than being provocative. And so is that one of the things that's changed? Is that what's caused it or are there other things going on that's made this a problem now? So I think it's a little hard to tell because we just don't have enough empirical evidence to know for sure. So I went to college a little earlier than that. I was in college in the late 80s. We didn't have those kind of episodes on the college campus I was on either. And I suspect that one thing that was happening was that there were places where people were being disinvited and shouted down. It just wasn't getting reported in the same way. And so we were less aware of the extent to which it happened because it's also true now that you could be on any average college campus and never experienced during your four years there a single instance of somebody being disinvited or shouted down because it's not that common. But it does happen and happens a fair amount across the country as a whole. And now we're very aware of how often it happens in a way that might not have been equally true in the 90s or the 80s, for example. So it's a little harder to know whether it's actually happening more. And I think these things do probably go in waves a little bit too. And so there were instances of people getting shouted down the 60s, for example, that were very visible and prominent sort of episodes of that happening. And so it may have been that that went away a little bit in the 80s and 90s, for example, now is making a comeback to some degree. On the other hand, I wrote for a conservative college paper, for example. And that conservative college paper was routinely vandalized and thrown away and destroyed by liberal students on college campus at the time. And so we didn't have shouting down episodes, but we had plenty of other episodes of efforts by, in that case, the political left to try to suppress speech. And so those things are persistent. I think partially there's also a sort of international left-wing movement that has embraced what was called in Europe sort of no platforming kind of positions that encourages disinvitations and disruptions of speech. And that was very common in Europe and in England, for example. And I think now it's migrated to the United States. So to some degree, I think we're seeing tactics and ideas about how to suppress speech under what circumstances and what ways that people in other countries were dealing with before we had to deal with them here. And so I think that's grown. But then as you say, I think there's this other issue of groups on campus and off campus that are funding and encouraging speakers to come to campus precisely to rob people up and try to provoke people. There's a business model that some want to exploit that they get attention and it's good for them to ultimately have their speeches disrupted. And so they're perfectly happy to have it happen. And I think that's a relatively new phenomenon as to, I mean, there are people who were controversial, including some people that were well outside the mainstream and would get themselves invited to campuses in earlier periods in American history, including 80s and 90s, for example. But not quite in the same way and with not quite the same intent as what we would see, I think, with some of the people now. And so I think we also have this then really problematic dynamic between some people on the right who want to be as provocative and stick a finger in people's eye and people on the left that are more than happy to rise to the bait. How should we feel about trigger warnings? I mean, we talked about the fighting words and that there's some sort of line between calling someone a damn fascist or something else that would make someone punch you and then other things that disrupt and things that make people very upset. And now we have this trigger warnings thing and of course the conservatives love to make fun of the snowflakes on college campuses and all this stuff. But maybe it was the case that for a very long time we didn't take triggering seriously enough. So is that something we should endorse or at least be wary, maybe endorse and be wary about? Yes, I think this notion of trigger warnings in safe spaces is sort of what gives rise in particular this sort of idea of a snowflake generation that's particularly sensitive and delicate and can't confront sort of the hard reality of the world kind of thing. Once you dive into sort of looking at sort of the argument surrounding trigger warnings in safe space and the people were advocating for those kinds of notions, there's a kernel of something genuine and real in that that we all take seriously. So in the context specifically of trigger warnings, there's a genuine concern that some people might find things not merely offensive but in fact mentally emotionally disabling in a way that can interfere with their educational progress. And it's unfair to expose those students to things in a way that they can either accommodate or anticipate that's going to take place. I think the problem is that and so there's a genuine therapeutic core. Yeah, like parental advisory. Right and you might think of course it's also sort of unproblematic in exactly this context of parental advisories and like that's sort of much more familiar of saying well you should get a warning as to what you're about to be exposed to. And in some ways of course in college I think we ought to be doing that. We ought to have a syllabus that tells people what the content of the class is, that tells people what they're going to be exposed to. Those don't, I think a standard syllabus doesn't quite yet to the level of detail and specific content warning that people who advocate for trigger warnings are sometimes looking for. I think there's also nothing necessarily problematic about individual faculty members deciding on their own that I should warn students about what they're about to encounter because I want to prepare them in various ways for the material they're about to see on a video for example or in a text or the conversation we're about to have in class. And I think that's totally reasonable and appropriate. The thing that I think we ought to be concerned about is sort of blanket policy and campus administrators saying everybody ought to adopt these trigger warnings even in circumstances where the faculty think it's inappropriate or unwise. In part because it will alter how those conversations go in class but also there's a real worry that if you have to start including trigger warnings on things that one will discourage some students from taking classes they otherwise ought to take. And from reading materials they otherwise ought to read that you've scared them away from it by attaching a trigger warning to it. So it also seems like it might encourage. It might encourage some to know exactly. So it's sort of the video nastiest phenomenon, right? Once you've labeled this as banned in Boston then people are going to come rushing out to try to see it. What's this thing I've been banned from seeing? Well that's kind of boring as it turns out. So yeah, there is that I think but the other concern likewise is if you have to include it on, if there's a mandatory policy that if you're going to do certain things you have to include a trigger warning. That the easier thing to do is okay I'll drop that off the syllabus, right? I just won't do that because I don't want to deal with the hassle of administrators looking on my shoulder and students complaining about it and all that kind of stuff. And then you potentially are going to lose some really serious things out of your curriculum and what universities are covering if everybody is being overly cautious about what they're willing to expose students for because they're trying to avoid controversy in one way or another. And as a consequence it's a similar worry to worrying about sort of dumbing down the curriculum but it's a worry of how do we go to the least common denominator, least offensive thing possible and only expose students to that. And that's just a shoddier education than what you would hope college students are generally going to get. You mentioned professors sort of reacting to this in sometimes you hear stories that they're afraid in the current regime that they're afraid of getting a report from a student, getting a report that you did exit at Y and Z, whether it's something totally innocuous or whatever. And that is seemingly sufficient. That's it. Accusation is guilt. That's it. Do you think that's true? I think there are places where that's really true. I think there are other places where maybe that's a little less true. And I guess I would say there's sort of various ways that might play out, right? And so one way in which you might imagine worrying about the reaction as consequence or self-censoring as to how you do things is you just worry about the hassle of having to deal with it, right? And so do I really want students camped out in my office? Do I really want students to come screaming at me? Do I really want to worry about students complaining and having to deal with the emails or the phone calls or the whatever? And so the more you think that you're in an environment in which that might happen, right? Then it just leads you to shy away from anything that you think might deal with it just because you don't need that in your life. So that's one kind of concern, right? Just sort of worried about people worrying about the environment they're in and just thinking it's too much of a hassle even if there's no sort of broader repercussions. Just this isn't a thing I need to worry about if I can work my way around it. The other thing though is genuine occasions where you worry that there might be professional consequences to it. And so if you're untenured, if you're an adjunct who's working on a semester by semester contract, for example, it's a serious threat if students are lodging complaints against you and objecting to what you're teaching. And for a lot of administrators in lots of places, why should they second guess that, right? So a student complains about somebody, they're a contingent faculty anyway. Fine, we just won't hire that person again. To teach in the future, we'll hire somebody else. That kind of risk averseness about people who don't have larger protections than tenure to their teaching can easily wind up sort of getting people disciplined in professionally and very consequential ways as a consequence of that. The other thing I think is on some university campuses, the environment is just so bad and sensitive on some of these issues that even if you're fully protected by tenure, you might think the consequences are going to be quite dramatic. Socially, if not necessarily economically, but maybe in terms of your ability to stay on that campus if you get too many students upset with you, too riled up, if administrators get too upset with you. And there's certainly, I've talked to faculty on some campuses that see their local environment as poisonous enough. You know, it's not just this would be a hassle, but I think their life would be dramatically messed up if they find themselves embedded in one of those controversies. Are there characteristics of the campuses that seem to make this kind of behavior more or less likely? Like is it, you know, really small liberal arts colleges have at the worst? Public universities are better than, I don't know, but are there other ways, are there things that seem to be going on that predict this? So I think it's a little hard to tell because again, I think we have a sort of data problem of really knowing what's happening across all these campuses. It's clear that there are some things that occur on any campus. I don't think any campus is really immune from it. But it is true that places that see more are smaller liberal arts colleges, often relatively elite colleges, although not always. I think in part because they are more humanities centric those colleges and humanities are the places where there's the most intellectual debate over some of those issues. Whereas if you're in a larger, more complex campus where a good chunk of your students are business majors or engineering majors and the like, right? Those students aren't as interested in those things. They aren't in classes that's encouraging that kind of stuff. So that's a more intellectually diverse campus on certain dimensions that might matter compared to a smaller liberal arts college. I think the small places are just also more homogeneous and the campus culture can be more stifling if you're not careful. And so there are fewer places to hide. And so if you find yourself in an environment with 4,000 students and even if it's only a small fraction of them, they're willing to be really vocal and annoying. You may find yourself in a position of saying, you know, do I really want to go the next four years having to live in this environment where these 15 students are really mad at me? Whereas, you know, I was an undergraduate at a giant state university. Lots of us were anonymous. It's easy to escape other people. You know, your worries are just different in that kind of environment than an environment where there may be 4,000 or 5,000 students. When this stuff is going on at, so pick a campus where we seem to think that this kind of stuff is bad. Whether it's a broadly cultural, like, characteristic of the students or a handful of essentially hecklers, veto style bad apples. And so if it's really concentrated among bad apples, why are administrators so willing to capitulate? Like, why can't they just say, look, you, like, if you're offended by this or you're having a problem with this or you're going to be disruptive, maybe our university is not the place for you. I think in part we're going through a moment where we're trying to figure out how many bad apples there are. And so there is some uncertainty, I think, genuine uncertainty among most students themselves but also administrators and faculty about just how popular are these ideas, how many students feel this way. And so we're in a bit of a feeling out process. And so I actually think that in most cases it's a relatively small set of students that are most committed to some of these illiberal ideas. But there's genuine uncertainty about how big that population really is. And I think we're now going through a process and I hope in part this book is encouraging it of trying to speak to, to borrow a phrase, the silent majority on a college campus where most people aren't committed to those ideas and as a consequence can be led to say, look, you don't have to go along with that. You can pull back. And so you can do some of that, I think. And so there's some question of sort of teasing apart. Well, how many people really are talking about it? Are they isolated minority, et cetera? For some campuses that minority though is big and then it becomes much more troubling. So I worry that a place like Milbury, for example, may find itself in that kind of situation where, in fact, the number of students who were really committed those ideas are quite large. And sometimes they're in campus leadership and so it's not just that these are easily isolated individuals that you can punish and then move on. Instead, it's really picking fights with large contingents of your campus population, including campus population that may be supported by sympathetic faculty and sympathetic administrators. And that's a tough fight for people to pick. Aaron mentioned we went to Boulder together and one of the things, classes that we'd like to take, we took a fair amount of literary criticism classes. We enjoyed them. They're kind of like a game and listen to some interesting stuff and you can read some Foucault every now and then, which is not the worst thing ever. It's probably not historically accurate, but it's not the worst thing ever. But in that world, it was like 15 years ago, I saw that there was an ideology of how the power structures of the world were kind of distorting it and oppressing people. And one of those parts of those power structures was speech, for example, just the words that we used to describe things that embedded in there is the patriarchy and race stuff and all these things. And that, I think, is some of what is being said when they say words are violence and this is going to be a problem. And we need to stop people from saying these things because an entire system of violence has been put up around people and words are part of that. And so they want action and they want people to stop talking about things that have created a bad world in their view. And that's what they view as hate. How should we respond to that viewpoint? The world has been power structures that weren't very friendly to minorities for a very long time and trying to reform that might require talking in a different way. And so should we say, no, no, no, we should just say everything we want or should we accept some of their premises? I think it's perfectly reasonable to accept some of their premises. I've learned a lot from Foucault. I encourage people to go read Foucault and others along that path. And likewise, in researching the book, for example, it's been a lot of time reading people are advocating for true warnings, which turns on a different kind of argument. But in the same general path, but more generally, I often find that things that seem like very pernicious ideas or silly ideas that if you start digging into them and find the people that are most serious about them, there's often something interesting there. And there's a real starting point in those ideas that you want to take seriously. That doesn't mean it's necessarily right, but it often means that what you're seeing express most often is sort of a crude version of it or a bolder dyes or exaggerated version of it that is being applied in simplistic ways. And that ought to be resisted, but that doesn't mean you necessarily ought to throw away the baby with the bathwater. It's a challenge to find the baby sometimes. Sometimes there's an awful lot of dirty bathwater. But I think we ought to, and especially those of us on college campuses who are trying to take ideas seriously, we have an obligation to try to sort of really think about the ideas that play here. And then having explored those ideas and tried to come to grips with them, you want to think about, okay, what are the good parts of this and how do we go about trying to salvage those good parts and try to reconcile them with the larger set of liberal structures that you think are important and can they be reconciled? If you think they are serious ideas, but maybe not necessarily good ideas, then you want to think about how do we resist those ideas and encourage people to turn away from them in various ways. And I think that's a challenge confronting us on some of these issues that the idea that words are violence comes out of an intellectual tradition I think is a serious intellectual tradition. It makes some valuable and important points about how the social world is constructed and how power gets exercised within it. And we shouldn't be too dismissive of that. On the other hand, we shouldn't get too caught up in the metaphor and lose sight of the fact that the words themselves are not actually violence. Violence means a thing and violence is not violence. Exactly. We ought to be able to distinguish these two things. And moreover, then we ought to talk seriously about how do we go about changing that. What if you think that there are coercive social structures, for example, that have been built up in part through certain kinds of linguistic discourses? From a classical liberal perspective, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to think and something one ought to take seriously. And then you all think about, okay, how do you effectively dismantle that? And there, I think we're going to have lots of disagreements between those of us who come out of a more of a classical liberal tradition and those who are coming out of certain other traditions who might think, you know, the best way of dismantling that is to have the state smash it in various kinds of ways. And from a classical liberal perspective, you might think, you know, there are lots of problems with giving the state a great big hammer to smash things with. Because it'll be used against you next. It's going to be used against you next, right? And we all worry about that. And that's very much my worry and this concern, right? And so my starting point is not to say, oh, don't be stupid. Of course, words don't matter, right? No, words matter, right? They matter a lot. They matter seriously. And so we all worry about these things. The question is how do you respond to it, right? What's the best way of moving forward given those concerns? And, you know, I'm committed to thinking that the best way of dealing with that is not by empowering censors with a lot of power suppressed things, not by shouting down speakers, but to expose ideas to critical scrutiny and engage them. And in the long run, we'll be better off as a consequence of that. One of the things that seems to motivate at least some of this, and you see it not just in the we're going to shut down conservative speakers on campuses, but like the gay wedding bake shop case is almost what I'll call like a culture war victory lap. That the left has, I mean, has won the culture wars. They're basically over and the left won. And so now the left... Rock and roll is here to stay. Now they're just doing the mopping. Yeah. So now they're just grinding it in there, you know? And so that there isn't a motivation. They're not about protecting people. They're not about protecting people from triggers or creating an environment, but just putting their boots in the necks of those social conservatives who they battled for so long. If that's what's going on, that seems like that's a harder thing to fight back against because you can't say, well, we need free speech or exchange of ideas because people are just, it's just gloating. But then on the other hand, maybe that they get that out of their system. Well, I think there's a little bit of that on both sides. I think there are people on the right who, and sometimes they think they have legitimate grievances, but for whatever reason they think that I want to see liberal tears and I want to stick my thumb in the eye. And that's going to make my life better and more pleasant in various kinds of ways if I do that. And I think similarly there are people on the left that are genuinely interested in saying, no, no, I want to rub it in and I want to show that you aren't going to be tolerated around here and that will make them feel better about their position in various kinds of ways. And some of that's natural at one level on a college. It's natural to the cultural war in general. People are going to feel that way. In some ways it's natural, I think, to college campuses because students of that age are likely to be a little more enticed to want to behave that way. Juvenile delinquent. It sort of comes with, I mean, there's a reason why provocative speakers are popular on college campuses. Sometimes you just want to burn things down, especially when you're 19 years old. Sometimes you just want to burn things down. And so that's totally right. And so we should recognize that this is, and that's one reason why these things are kind of endemic and they repeat on college campuses and you sort of have to accept the fact that these are sort of ongoing efforts to how do you deal with this. And to some degree it is a management problem rather than a somehow we're going to drive it out and it will never happen again. Instead it is a question of, okay, well when it rears itself up, how do best do you deal with it so that it's not too disruptive and the main activity of the university can continue. And I think it's also true that we want to be able to separate, and we should encourage other people to separate, those who are acting in bad faith from those who are acting in good faith. There are some people who hold ideas that we might think are genuinely provocative, but they are genuinely trying to advance those ideas and they're trying to get you to think about what they take to be serious and important ideas. And that's one thing. And those people may be wrong, you may find them dangerous even in the kinds of ideas they hold. But that's one kind of person. In some ways you want to encourage those people on college campuses because at least those people are grappling with ideas and you can engage them. There are other people who are acting in just bad faith. They want to fly under the banner of whether it's inclusivity on the left or free speech at the moment on the right, but what they really want to accomplish is something else. And those people I think you do have to deal with a little differently and recognize what they're going to do. And if this is in part a management problem, how does management start to fix it? I think partially you do want good rules in place on college campuses that are consistent with free speech principles in general, but are trying to coordinate the use of this base in a way that allows everybody to conduct their own activities without too much disruption from others. And sometimes you need to sanction and discipline people who violate those rules in reasonable ways. But it's also a question of trying to educate students about what it is they're getting into and how they ought to behave on college campuses and try to lead them to behave in better ways. So for example, I think one reason why Princeton, where I teach, has not had very many of these kinds of problems. Knock on wood so far. Hopefully you won't in the future either. I think partially it helps that our faculty and our administration is deeply committed to free speech principles and they've been clear about that and they've articulated it and students understand that and faculty and administrators understand that and so everybody's sort of on the same page in some ways or at least understands what the page is and behaves accordingly. And it helps, I think, that we have, for example, people who are serious thinkers on both the left and the right who can treat each other respectfully, can articulate those ideas. Like Robbie and Cornell. Like Robbie George and Cornell West, for example, Peter Singer, who's a very controversial person on campuses mostly from the political left, is on Princeton campus as well. And as a consequence, students can see it's possible to be a serious conservative, for example, by looking at Robbie George and say, okay, well, this person has ideas that I disagree with dramatically, but he's a serious person, he's nice and polite and civil, you can actually engage him and he'll think about problems and you can have a conversation and you can learn something from that person, right? And that's a really useful thing for students to see, right? If instead they think, well, what it means to be a conservative is a Richard Spencer or a Milo or the average Fox News celebrity, you know, that's a very different image in their head about what it means to invite somebody like that to campus and to tolerate them and those kind of things. And so you want to expose students to serious people with serious ideas who are capable of talking good faith and even if you disagree with them. And I think on the political right, we sort of lost that a little bit by having people, for example, trying to bring in people who are only provocative and aren't really articulating good ideas in a reasonable way. So for, you know, one of the things I valued when I was in college was William F. Buckley came to campus one time, for example, which is who I've got to go see. I admired Buckley in lots of ways, I had disagreements with him in various kinds of ways, but he was a serious person, right, and capable of engaging in a serious conversation, could give a good speech in a relatively entertaining way that both the left and the right could learn something from experiencing. Bringing in William F. Buckley to campus is a different kind of thing than bringing a Milo to campus, right? And we should be making more efforts to bring the equivalents of William F. Buckley to campus and less effort to bring the equivalents of Milo to campus. Then should student groups that invite people like Milo be disciplined for that? So rather than saying we're not going to let Milo come and speak, we should say, like, look, this is, you know, not how adults behave. You don't invite people like this? I think it's an educational process. I mean, I think you need to engage them and talk to them, seriously, and hopefully they can find faculty administrators who they respect. And part of the problem I think in college campuses is there are not a lot of role models of that level, right? And so instead, those students often feel isolated and interceded and they don't trust anybody in adult roles on campus, for example. They think they're all out to get them and so they don't want to listen to them. So in some ways, you need serious engagement and to try to bring them to a point where they can see, okay, look, it's not in your long-term interest to bring in somebody just for the sake of being provocative. Maybe there's better people we can bring in who are going to be interesting and useful and that you can appreciate. And so I think ultimately that's an educational process more than it ought to be a process of disciplining. I mean, maybe there are circumstances where it's appropriate to try to discipline students for something that they've done in the front, but I think that ought to be extremely rare and it's hard to actually even think of examples where that wouldn't be a sensible strategy. In the changing university environment, and there's a lot of discussion about the meaning of universities now and whether or not it's always good to go to university and there's concerns about student loans, so we've seen big changes and maybe a little bit more savviness or discernment when picking a university. And so at University of Missouri, we saw an unbelievable dip in enrollment to the point of closing two or three dorms, I think, 30% after they had their highly prominent little protest. And insofar as parents are deciding to send their kids to different college, could it be the case that we eventually get to this point because you write a lot in the book about what universities are. But if some of these places, you know, Oberlin pops into my... because they've been on the top of these lists for a very long time, that they're not... maybe they just don't want to be universities. Maybe they want to be something more like Liberty University. It's a religious consciousness-raising endeavor. We're not going to have free and open inquiry here and you're going to know it. That's going to be on our mission statement. And so if you go to Liberty University, you're also not looking for complete free and open inquiry. So same thing, but then Princeton is going to say that's what you're going to get here. So actually that this will resolve itself in the sense that people will go to those universities choosing that and it will either be an open one or not and maybe those closed ones are not really universities anymore. I actually think that's fine in that sense. I mean, it's okay for me. I think one of the nice things about the American educational environment is it has a wide diversity of different kinds of institutions. They're different cultures. They do different things. They pursue those missions differently, including religious institutions that are pursuing a very distinctive mission that's a little different than the one I described, but primarily being a truth-seeking institution on the model of a secular research institution like Princeton. And if a university or college like Oberlin, for example, wanted to self-consciously embrace that identity and say we're the equivalent of a faith-based institution, except our faith is social justice, for example, and we're going to organize everything around that and we're going to have boundaries on intellectual tolerance and intellectual inquiry on our campus, on the basis of that, then give it a shot. And if students want to go there, that's fine. I wouldn't encourage it. I wouldn't want to send my kid there. I wouldn't want to teach there. And what's striking about a lot of these places, of course, is they don't want to brand themselves that way. Their administrators won't say that's what they do. Their faculty don't say that's what they do. Certainly, friends that I have who are on faculty at institutions like that are all very concerned precisely because they didn't think that's what they signed up for. And so there are some people on campus that say, basically, that's what this college ought to be. And then there's also people that say, wait a second, since when? So I think those will be worse institutions. That's not the model of higher education. I think we would want to embrace in general. My suspicion is the market demand for that is pretty small, ultimately. But if campuses want to brand themselves that way and go that direction, I don't have anything against them for doing that. I wouldn't want to teach there, though. This free speech crisis, I'm putting that in scare quotes, as you point out in the book in Cyclical and we've discussed today, but it also comes at a time of extreme, schismatic, political undercurrent where Donald Trump's election has been a trigger, a triggering moment for many people on the left. It's driven everyone nuts. Yes, it's driven everyone nuts including Donald Trump. But aside from that, so the, so is it different now because we have all this data about polarization and all these things, and then we have people who say it's not that bad, but from my perspective, it seems pretty bad. And one thing that polarization might do is cause people to not understand the other side of the point that they think it's a benefit to shut them up. So do those factors make it worse now? And what do you see going forward in this sort of free speech discussion if that's part of the backdrop? I do think that's part of the backdrop. I think polarization makes it worse on college campuses. I also think that polarization should make us nervous that the kinds of problems we're seeing on college campuses could replicate themselves through American society more generally, right? And so college campuses, you know, among faculty are relatively to the left. For example, the students are more diverse in general ideologically, but the faculty are more willing to laugh. So they have their own ideological blind spots as a consequence of that. And that creates environments that some students and faculty on the right find less hospitable than they would hope. And it leads people to behave badly in various ways, in part because they aren't exposed enough to the other side. And they think the other side is extraordinarily threatening because they seem so ideologically distant from their own set of views and perspectives, for example. And all their best friends. And all their best friends, right? I've never even met somebody like that, right? So of course they're, you know, it's easy to imagine the most horrible thing about the person from the other side because you imagine I've never seen somebody like that before. And so they must be monsters over there, right? And that's a problem. It's a problem for universities. It's a problem for American society in general that if we find ourselves in that position where we imagine people on the other side of the divide must be monsters because we hardly ever interact with them and all the interactions we have are fraught and mostly negative. Universities I think ought to be a place where we are learning how to work through that, right? It's not gonna make the polarization go away. But we have as a society to learn how to live with polarization, right? We need to be able to learn how to talk to each other and manage our disagreements and have a reasonable conversation and settle things peacefully, despite those disagreements. And that's a, I think that's a looming threat for the United States as we're dealing with this kind of polarized society more generally and we're seeing a microcosm of that on college campuses. I think one thing that college campuses ought to be contributing to American society is a model of how it is you can grapple with disagreements and learn how to tolerate it and overcome it and move forward productively with it. And instead I worry the universities will become the opposite. Instead they will become models of, yeah, this is how the partisan warfare takes place and we're gonna shout each other down. We're gonna have fights on the street and that's what America's gonna look like. And one reason why I wanted to write the book was precisely because I wanted to encourage not only those of us on college campuses not to behave that way and we gotta figure out a way of moving past these kind of disagreements and living together in a peaceful and productive way. But Americans more broadly who are confronting in their own ways these kinds of issues need to learn it as well. Free Thoughts is produced by Tess Terrible. If you enjoyed today's show please rate and review us on iTunes and if you'd like to learn more about libertarianism find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org