 Greetings, everybody. And thank you very much for coming. Just a couple of preparatory comments. This gives me one more chance to say thank you to those who have organized a truly excessive program of activities over these five days. And I succeeded in sparing the campus some of them, but not all of them. But I did say if there was one colloquium, one set of exchanges that I thought would be highly appropriate and important to me was the one you're about to hear in ways that I suspect the panel will develop. Your questions may draw forth further. Freedom not merely of speech, but of inquiry. I hope we all have come to understand on this campus is not just a basic human right, a basic constitutional right in this country. That's justification enough. But it also is so central to the academic enterprise in which we're involved. And when dissent is stifled, and when even heretics are not at least given their opportunity to speak, and when ideas no longer collide, knowledge stops advancing. And we cannot allow that to happen at a community of scholars and scholarship like this. So for all those reasons, I'm enormously grateful you're about to hear from three of my heroes. The organizers could not have found three people whose work I have admired more or for a longer time. And now to introduce you to those heroes, Steve Schultz. Thanks, President Daniels. You know, each August I have the pleasure of sharing the stage at Elliott Hall with some of my esteemed colleagues here at Purdue as we walk several thousand of our incoming first year students through key free speech principles and the types of situations they're likely to encounter while they're on campus at Purdue. But I have to say it's a real privilege to, as Mitch said, share the stage with some of our free speech heroes tonight. Scholars and public thinkers who write so eloquently and speak so boldly about issues of free speech and academic freedom and their vital importance on the college campus. Glenn Lowry is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University. As an economic theorist, he's published widely and lectured throughout the world on his research. He also is among leading critics on racial inequality. His 1995 book One by One from the Inside Out, Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America, won the American Book Award and the Christianity Today Book Award. He hosts a weekly podcast. I'm a regular listener. The Glenn Show, in which he covers issues of race, inequality, and economics in the United States and throughout the world. Welcome, Dr. Glenn Lowry. Nadine Strausson is the John Marshall Hardlin Professor of Law Emerita at the New York Law School and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 until 2008. She spoke on this stage at a pivotal point in our commitment to free speech at Purdue in February 2016. She's a senior fellow with a foundation for individual rights and expression or fire and a leading expert and frequent speaker and commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties. She's testified before Congress. She serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, the Heterodox Academy, and the National Coalition Against Censorship. The National Law Journal has named Nadine one of America's 100 most influential lawyers. And her 2018 book Hate, Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. And we're going to talk about your book a little bit tonight. Hopefully. Has been selected as the common read by the Washington University in St. Louis. Has been selected as the common read by Wash U in St. Louis in 2019 and Washburn University in 2022. Welcome, Nadine Strausson. Keith Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton, Chair of the Academic Freedom Alliance, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He works on United States constitutional history, politics, and law, and on American political thought. Keith is the author of, among other works, Speak Freely, Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, and the University of Texas School of Law. He's a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well. He served on the Presidential Commission on the US Supreme Court. Welcome, Dr. Whittington. About 10 years ago, Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirchner wrote that the panel discussion was invented by someone who liked to sit three feet above the audience, talk with three of his closest friends for an hour, and barely pay any attention to the 100 other people in the room. Well, I'm looking forward to this discussion with three new good friends. And with due recognition to you all in the audience, I'll venture to say they are too. Nadine Glen Keith, it is really an honor to have you here, and welcome to Purdue. So as we wait into this discussion, I'd like to lay some conceptual groundwork and ask a couple of threshold questions, terminology, and the like. Make sure we're clear on that. To get us started, Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Deermeyer provides a fitting keynote, I think, to the discussion. In his Investiture Address last April, he said this. And I'd like you to think about it and comment on it. Universities are by design where we come to debate and probe the questions that matter to us most. And our explorations are richest and most fruitful when they are informed by a wide range of viewpoints. But this very lifeblood of a university and with it, a free and thinking society is under threat as the culture wars encroach on our campuses and actors at both ends of the political spectrum politicize our conversations. Threats to open inquiry and free expression are coming from outside of universities and from within them. As misguided legislation seeks to control what ideas can be taught and discussed as intolerance of certain viewpoints on campus leads to speakers being disinvited and shouted down and as some students and faculty keep their opinions to themselves for fear of backlash and censure. This state of affairs is corrosive for university and antithetical to what we do and stand for. Sounds right to me. I would make this observation. There is the formal statutory intervention in the open and free exchange of ideas and then there's the informal customary constraint. And I think the latter is a stickier wicked. There really is no free speech in the sense that one always pays the price of having been heard to say whatever it is that one has said. So as we talk about what the rules should be, I think we might also wanna bear in mind civility and a kind of culture of mutual care and concern that tolerates the expression of views with which we don't necessarily agree. I agree with everything that's been said so far before I add my comments. I want to thank Mitch Daniels and Steve and everybody here at Purdue for your support of open inquiry. Mitch Daniels has been an inspiring leader and I hope that the trend that he set, including adopting the Chicago free speech principles, will continue to be realized not only as a matter of principle, but here's where I'm gonna segue into adding my comment. The rules that protect free speech and open inquiry are essential, necessary, but not sufficient for a meaningful experience and enjoyment of free speech. We need to supplement the free speech law, if you will, on a university campus, the rules with a free speech culture where every member of the campus community is educated and encouraged and empowered to robustly exercise his, her, or their free speech rights, including on the most sensitive, especially on the most sensitive, most controversial subjects. Thanks, Nadeen. I agree with every word of that and so I really appreciate those kind of remarks and I particularly appreciate the connection between the importance of free inquiry with the particular's mission of the university, right? It's critical that we be able to engage in free speech more broadly in a democratic society, but particularly in university context, you need to be able to explore difficult and controversial ideas, you need to be able to put hard questions on the table, you need them to think through carefully what the range of arguments are surrounding them. I think it's much too easy to take for granted that universities will be places where you can have those robust conversations. These are very fragile institutions, these are hard won fights on behalf of free inquiry and free speech in general. And so it's really critical that we continue to maintain them and extend them into the future and that requires both policies, but also a culture that's supportive of those kind of conversations. Thanks, Keith. Speaking of the importance of civility and the Chicago principles, our version of the Chicago principles is called the Purdue Statement of Commitment to Freedom of Expression. And in that statement, we say, although the university greatly values civility and although all members of the university community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas. However offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community. How can we have it both ways, Nadine? You need to have it both ways because I think in a university community in particular, the highest respect is respecting diversity of opinion, diversity of ideas, and also respecting and promoting the common truth seeking mission which cannot be advanced without a climate in which you dare to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, you dare to question the seemingly unquestionable. That is the only way that you are gonna foster the major reason why we all come here together to promote knowledge, to promote understanding, to promote education. May I add, isn't it obvious? Your argument hurt my feelings is not a counter argument. What business are we in here? We're in the business of trying to get after what's the truth of things. To play that card, you made me feel bad by bringing those facts to my attention. If we allow that to govern, we've already surrendered what the enterprise is supposed to be about. Sometimes the truth hurts. I think we're out of these civility codes. I would just raise a couple of points. I mean, one is I think that universities are interesting and complicated speech spaces. We have very different expectations about what kinds of conversations ought to occur in a classroom or a seminar room, for example, compared to what kind of conversations might occur in a dorm room or on the public square of the university as well, and it's appropriate to recognize the kind of civility, the extent of civility we might expect in a seminar room and demand that we engage with may not be appropriate and perfectly reasonable to expect when people are having public debates on the quad more generally, and so universities have to navigate that, but they have to make space, I think, for both kinds of conversations to occur. The other real concern about sort of the demands of civility which are often made is it's very obvious that those can be and have been weaponized in order to suppress speech people don't like, and so while in the abstract, it's very easy to imagine, especially in a university context, we should expect people to engage with each other in a civil fashion. We should expect people to be respectful of one another, but once you make that a condition under which people are allowed to exercise speech rights, it's very easy to use that against people that you have disagreements with in order to try to punish them not simply for how they said things but the particular content of what they said. May I add something, please? One function of critical speech is ridicule. It is exposing the absurdity of an argument. I'm not advocating making people feel bad, I don't wanna be misunderstood, but to preclude making fun, to preclude the lampooning, the caricature, the cartoon, you impoverish the discourse to some degree when you do that. I think that's why stand-up comics are useful. They can go out onto the edge of what's acceptable to say and in the laughter that they evoke, they give us a license for a certain kind of critical expression that might otherwise not be possible. So I'm very concerned about the imposition of civility constraints that preclude that edgy kind of critical discourse that is intended to some degree to unsettle. As with all sensorial concepts, civility is inherently subjective, right? And so once you license any authority, even on an enlightened university campus, to enforce that concept, you can predict that it is disproportionately gonna be enforced against ideas that are unsettling or controversial. And in fact, when you look at the legal system in the United States, when we did use to allow government officials to enforce civility codes, they are constantly enforced against civil rights protesters, anti-war advocates, people who burn the American flag, people who burn their draft card. And on a campus, it would be those who are objecting to university policies. Thanks, Nadeen. Glenn alluded to it a minute ago and that's the business of the university, what we're about here. And Jonathan Hyde has, in a well-known lecture in 2016, has, in a subsequent article, has described this, the Talos, quoting Aristotle, the Talos of the university. What is the end purpose or goal of an institution of higher learning? And Keith, you write about this very well and speak freely your book. Let me read you another excerpt from Purdue's statement and then I'll ask the question. So, it says this, because Purdue University is committed to free and open inquiry in all matters, it guarantees all members of the university community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn. Except insofar as limitations on that freedom are necessary to the functioning of the university, the university fully respects and supports the freedom of all members of the university community to discuss, in the words of former University of Chicago president, Robert Hutchins, any problem that presents itself. Keith, why is that statement sort of key to the mission of a university? Well, it's a contingent feature of modern universities, right? So notably, that was not always how universities saw themselves, part of what universities wound up developing by the late 19th and early 20th century is an idea that the goal of a university in part is to operate on the bleeding edge of knowledge and partially to advance knowledge further outward. And if that's part of the goal of an institution, then it requires people to ask controversial questions, hard questions, unpopular questions, and sometimes wrong questions, right? I mean, part of what you have to tolerate if you're going to have a university trying to advance knowledge is the possibility people are going to make mistakes of various sorts. And so universities need to be spaces that precisely encourage people to try out ideas that people think they otherwise would reject and sometimes fall on their face in doing that. And it's through that trial and error, that process of debate that we think we can improve our understanding of things and move forward. And part of what I've always appreciated about universities, why I wanted to make my home in universities ultimately is because they are places that take ideas very seriously. They don't expect everyone to agree with each other. I certainly do not agree with all my colleagues. I don't expect them to agree with me. But I know that they are also places where people get a hearing and you'll be asked to make arguments on behalf of your ideas. And that's all I want. Thanks, Keith. Didine Glenn, thoughts? We can go to the next question. Okay, sure, sure. That was so well said. We couldn't amplify on it. Free speech is hard. It can be hard. And we grapple with free speech incidents a lot on campus. I'm gonna read something that our mutual friend, Jonathan Roush, said when he was on campus a few years ago and get your reaction to it. Free speech is the single most successful social idea in the history of humanity. It's also the single most counterintuitive idea in the history of humanity. The idea is that a society that allows dissent, even of the most wrong-headed, obnoxious, and offensive type, is a stronger society than one which prohibits these things. So why is that the better alternative? Or in your words, Nadine, from a few years ago, why do we tolerate even the speech we hate? And it is a constant conundrum because by definition, the speech that is suppressed or threatened with suppression, which then becomes the occasion for defending the free speech principle, is the most unpopular, most controversial, most despised speech. So if you are a free speech defender, you end up defending freedom for ideas that you completely reject, including, I think, as head of the ACLU, I will refer to what everybody has in mind as epitomizing this paradox. Here you have the major civil liberties organization in the country defending freedom of speech for Nazis who oppose every human rights principle, including free speech for which the ACLU advocates. So you have to look through the particular speaker, the particular idea, and see the underlying principle and remind everybody that that very same principle is required for the opposite idea, for the anti-Nazis, the pro-civil rights demonstrators. And in fact, so this famous ACLU case was from Skokie, Illinois, a town that had, at the time, not only a lot of Jewish people, but many of them were Holocaust survivors who absolutely opposed Nazis demonstrating in their town. And the ACLU pointed out that just a few years earlier, we invoke the very same robust free speech principle, which is, you know, to paraphrase Voltaire, I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death you're right to say it, we invoked it in another town in Illinois, Cicero, on behalf of the Martin Luther King movement because his ideas and his movement's ideas were seen as dangerous and subversive and threatening in that community. Thanks to Dean Glenn. And let's not forget the argument in John Stuart Mills on liberty to the effect that there's value in allowing an erroneous argument to go forward and then vigorously rebutting it, which is that it strengthens one's own understanding of exactly why the argument was wrong in the first place, precluding the wrong argument as somehow not worthy of being refuted leaves us in a situation where our own intellectual muscles are atrophied for not being confronted by the error that we have the rebuttal at hand to refute. Is that clear? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, okay. I think free speech is a process value in important ways in that as Dean said, the instances where you wind up defending it are precisely the instances in which the speech in question seems substantively wrong. It seems particularly offensive, particularly dangerous in various ways. And there are similar kinds of complications in defending rights to religious freedom and free exercise, similar concerns in the criminal justice process where you look at somebody and say, well, he's obviously guilty. Why should he actually get a fair trial in those circumstances? Before there are free speech debates, there are religious freedom debates in which the arguments are very similar, but a similar concern about why should we allow people to hear wrong-headed views about religion, it will ultimately dam their souls to hell. And so we have to protect them from having heard those wrong views. And so if you're convinced that you're right, if you're convinced that the person that you're focused on at the moment is deeply wrong, it can become very counterintuitive and hard to actually bring yourself to have to defend them. And yet I think it's also true in these other contexts we recognize there's value in defending the system, there's value in defending the process, even if this particular instance of it may not be very valuable, may not on its face look like it's worth defending. Thanks, Keith. So we hear a lot about hate speech and it seems there's a popular misconception that hate speech is not protected speech. And why don't you comment on that? I knew your book was entitled, Hate, Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. So maybe just address that misconception. We've actually heard politicians, government officials, and law school graduates who should know better saying hate speech is not free speech. Well, in fact, the United States Supreme Court correctly and with no dissenting views. I mean this is something that's agreed upon from left to right across the Supreme Court has never recognized a category of speech defined by its hateful content as being beyond constitutional protection because it goes back to this viewpoint neutrality principle. You know, no matter what the viewpoint is, no matter how hated, how generally feared by how wide a segment of the public that is not a justification for censoring it. You disagree with it, then refute it, ignore it, debate it, and so forth. But I do wanna add this, Steve, because too often people will make the opposite but equally incorrect statement that hate speech is constitutionally protected, not quite, along with speech with any other message. If you get me on the content, the viewpoint of the message, and look at it in its overall context, in particular facts and circumstances, speech with a hateful message may and should be punished, specifically if it poses what the Supreme Court has called an emergency. It directly intentionally causes specific serious harm such as intentional incitement of imminent violence that's likely to happen imminently or a true threat that puts people in reasonable fear. I have a question for Nadia. Yeah, Glenn. What about when the hateful speech is used as evidence of the motive of someone committing an offense, the punishment for which it's been enhanced if it is a hate-motivated crime? I could give a very long answer, as I did in my student seminar today, but I will self-censor to say that the United States Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of these laws against the First Amendment Challenge. Yeah, and then the laws are to show that there is intentional discrimination in the selection of a victim of a crime that can be treated as a discriminatory crime subject to heightened punishment, but there has to be a tight and direct causal connection between the expression and the crime so that it does prove intentional discrimination. It should be completely inadmissible that somebody, for example, belonged to a discriminatory organization or a week earlier made a discriminatory statement. Thank you. And yet, in circumstances where we don't have sort of the true threat or the imminent harm associated with the words, we still have forces of censorship invoking this sort of words that wound doctrine and Coulter last month at Cornell was shouted down with a hecklers veto with phrases such as your words are violence. So how do we think about that in the context of hate speech or hateful speech? Words are the antithesis of violence. Sigmund Freud was credited with saying, I don't know if he really said it, but that civilization began the first time a word was used instead of a rock to respond to something that we disliked. And yes, if there is a tight and direct connection between speech and imminent violence that is likely to happen immediately, then we can and should punish the speech. But the fact that you dislike in Coulter's ideas is not a justification for violating not only her free speech rights, but freedom of speech is the right to receive information and ideas. Every single member of that audience, some of whom had driven for days literally to hear her speak was deprived of their free speech rights. And going to the point that my esteemed colleagues would have made, people who disagreed with her were shortchanged. They were not given the opportunity to try to demonstrate the incorrectness of her ideas. I think that kind of example in episode, though also indicates the slipperiness of the hate speech language, right? It's often hard to grapple with what exactly we're talking about, let alone formulate rules to address it. Because often when people are talking about hate speech they're talking everything ranging from actual instances of threats, or harassment on the one hand, to hateful ideas of various sorts. And he is particularly critical that we protect things that might be regarded as hateful ideas. In part precisely because we have disagreements about what constitutes the hateful ideas. And so I'm quite confident there are lots of examples of where in Coulter, given this opportunity we'd be perfectly happy to use hate speech regulations in order to censor her opponents as well. And so it's precisely by disarming everybody from having that capacity that we can force people to actually have to have conversations. And then try to hopefully overcome our disagreements through language rather than through fighting. May I add something? There's something else really pernicious about this false equation between speech and violence. Which is the latest survey that was done by College Pulse and FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which came out just this year. 25% of the college students surveyed said it would at least sometimes be appropriate to try to silence as speaker whose ideas you disagreed with with violence. 25% of college students. Yeah, we strive to disabuse our students that that is appropriate in our free speech seminar when they get to campus. Glenn, did you ever thought on that point? You know, I'm thinking about Commissioner Ray Kelly who was running the New York City Police Department in 2013 and was an advocate of stopping frisk, policing techniques in New York City, which was of course controversial and he came to Brown University to give a talk and he wasn't permitted to speak. No justice, no peace, no racist police. I'm thinking about police violence, which is necessary for the maintenance of order in society, which might be racially unequal in its application and which might occasion a sense in which the defense of the police through the speech of that commissioner was itself, if not literally an act of violence that nevertheless somehow legitimating or promoting in some institutions which were behaving violently. And I'm thinking about the rebuttal that I would have made to that argument to the students, which is along the lines of, we don't like stopping frisk? No, we don't like it. He thinks it's a good idea. He has his reasons. You wanna get rid of stopping frisk? From the guy who was appointed commissioner by Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York who was elected three times the last time I counted, let's have an argument about it. I see no way of actually effectively quelling this link to what you're calling violence without having an argument. So that's what I was thinking. Thanks. And maybe it was connecting this back to the Jonathan Hype point earlier, right? I mean that the free speech in part and free inquiry is a critical civilizational advance in the context of scientific inquiry, for example, right? That you need the ability to be able to challenge, receive wisdom in order to actually promote future knowledge better. But it's also a critical civilizational advance in terms of how democracies work, how liberal society and free society can work, precisely because you replace the idea that we ought to solve our social disagreements through violence with saying we ought to solve our social disagreements by voting, by arguing, by trying to persuade people we disagree with. I'm writing a paper now, for example, on the abolitionist struggle in the United States, precisely when mob violence was routinely used against abolitionists. And abolitionists were the ones arguing on behalf of free speech precisely to say, they fear our arguments. They fear that we will persuade people and the only response they have to that is to use violence instead. And we don't want to settle our differences, ultimately, through seeing which side can have more people engage in violence on the streets? Who's gonna bring the bigger clubs? Who's gonna bring the bigger guns to the conflict? At the end of the day, we're all much better off if we can say, let's set the guns aside, let's set the clubs aside, and let's have actual conversations. One of my very favorite statements in favor of free speech was by Frederick Douglass, who was, of course, subject to disruptive violence, shutdown, protests in Boston, right? We're not just talking about the big, bad, deep South. And he said, slavery cannot abide freedom of speech. Five years of its exercise would ban the auction block and break every chain in the South. It's a tool to write injustices, for sure. We try to make that point in our first year orientation module and in the civil rights context as well. Nadine, you've said that, remember that Martin Luther King wrote his letter from a Birmingham jail from the jail because what he was saying, people deem to be hateful speech. It's interesting, I think most people know that he wrote this, I think it's his most famous piece of writing. And I don't think most people even question, what was the crime that he committed? It was trying to exercise what is now classically protected free speech. And yet it was not until the era of the civil rights movement that not coincidentally, the Supreme Court in the United States for the first time robustly enforced freedom of speech, which before then had been kind of honored in the breach along with the Equal Protection Clause. And so the civil rights movement really grew up in a mutually reinforcing relationship with protection of free speech. Thank you. I'd like to pivot to a slightly different topic, but it's the university's exercising its voice, whether it's, and I think these are two different issues, but whether it's in response to a speech incident on campus, maybe there's some speech that the vast majority of the community would say sort of violates our campus culture values and so forth. And then something, Glenn, that you've written on in response to your university president's statement, which is should the university take a position on moral and political social issues being contested in the public arena. So let's first, Nadine, when you were here in 2016, you said so the university won't censor or punish speech and certainly as a public university, that would be unconstitutional for us to do that. But you said that doesn't mean that university leaders can't and shouldn't. And you cited a recent example of President Daniels having done that in a couple of months before you were here. So is it appropriate for individual university members and university leaders, let's say, to specifically speak out about speech that, again, people take offense with? You're looking at me and you're making me eat my earlier words. And I think this is a really important object lesson and tribute to John Stuart Mill. I have my thinking on that issue has evolved. I of course defend the free speech right of not only Mitch Daniels, but every member of the university community, including leader to exercise free speech rights to condemn certain ideas or praise others. But as a strategic issue, going to the question of how do we most effectively create the kind of free speech culture that we've been striving for, I have become very enamored of the so-called Calvin principles from the University of Chicago, which aren't as well known as the other Chicago free speech principles, but are becoming more a subject of discussion. That report was issued in 1967 and toward the end of really encouraging every individual member of the campus community to vigorously express their own ideas without fear of chilling or potential retribution from the university officials, the university itself, including through the president, provost, chairs of departments and so forth, should not make statements on issues of controversy. Not that they don't have the right to do it, but the decision is made that it would have a negative impact on the free speech where it really resides, which is in individual students and faculty members. But we recently discussed this that I'm looking at Keith. The Princeton has been very active in discussing the Calvin principles and whether they should be carried forward and the advantages and disadvantages. Yeah, certainly a policy issue that Princeton's thinking about as are a lot of other institutions as to whether or not what kind of rules and principles ought to be in place. I think it's a more high profile issue than it once was, in part because it's so easy for so many members of the institution as institutional entities within the institution to have access to websites, to have access to social media. You can now learn what the view of the anthropology department is about something in ways that once wasn't true. And so it puts more of a premium on figuring out what kind of rules and processes ought to be in place relative to that. I am very sympathetic with the idea that institutions as institutions ought to be generally neutral on these issues. The institutions are homes for lots of dissenting and disagreeing views about issues. You wanna make a space in which those debates can thrive. And there's no particular role for the university then to declare itself as, well, here's the right answer to those things that scholars inside the university are supposed to be disagreeing about. I think there's a variety of downsides to having universities do that. And not least of which is the universities tend to be very selective about when they want to issue statements. It's likely get them into political hot water as a consequence of issuing those statements better for the university itself to be silent and try to protect the ability of scholars within that university to take a range of different controversial views. I'd like to know what Steve, you mentioned Glenn's letter or response to the president's statement. I confess ignorance, I'd love to hear about that. My president, God bless her, Christina Paxson, president of Brown University in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis issued a dear colleagues letter that was sent to the faculty, to the student body and to the alumni in which she took a political position, a position against the scourge of racism which bedevils us even to this day of which George Floyd's killing was said to be exemplary. The letter was signed by the president, by the provost, by various deans of schools and so on, 40 administrators signed this letter. And I published an essay that said I must object. I must object to this imposition. First of all, the chilling effect. We have the leadership of the university who have declared now substantive politically specific positions about a controversial matter about which there are arguments that could be made. That is problematic. How am I supposed to go into my classroom and conduct a effective dialogue and debate with students about these ideas when the university has also declared where the right side of history is. We must stand on the right side of history. We must stand against these things. I'll be honest with you. I wasn't persuaded then, and I'm not even persuaded now that what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis was a racial event. He was black, the cop was white. I don't know that what happened was a racial event. I think that that's worth examining where were the motivations involved, where were the larger social forces at play, et cetera. Of course, it has subsequently come to be constructed as such. But this is my point. My point is that the processes by which we as a society end up dealing with these phenomena are arguable when the university's leadership should have been taking a position there. Finally, my view was who are these people? That is to say, the president, the provost, the deans, and so forth. They are administrators to be sure. But what's their substantive expertise in the relevant areas? That should be to the faculty, not to the administration of the university to decide. So something was usurped. There was something deeply unsettling to me about this edict that felt like it had been issued by a political or something as to how we are supposed to think when in fact it precluded the processes of thought and argument and evidence and so forth that ought to have been forthcoming. So that's my small claim to flame and fame. That was very thought provoking. Thanks, Glenn. Can I come back to academic freedom and maybe I'll look to you, Keith, because I found both your treatment of this and Speak Freely and also Jonathan Rauscher's latest book, The Constitution of Knowledge, very interesting. And it has to do with the distinction between the commitment to allowing expression of ideas sort of in the John Stuart Mill, we need untrammeled free speech for a civil society versus as you said, the ability to regulate how speech works in the campus, whether it's certainly in the classroom as Jeff Stone said, when he was here, free speech works differently in the classroom, right? Professors have the ability to conduct their classes, but it's the notion that sort of again, given this specialization that occurred, has occurred based on the German university model, the demands of expertise as you write, Keith, require that we discipline free speech among a community of scholars. And Yale law professor Robert Post has also advocated this approach. So how do you resolve this tension between, again, commitment to broad protections of free speech versus sort of the filtering that happens among a community of scholars to figure out which ideas are valuable and ultimately make themselves and make their way into the canon? Yeah, so like said before, I think universities are complex speech spaces and academic freedom was advocated on university campuses before free speech was advocated, right? And so a lot of the free speech principles we tend to take for granted on university campuses is really a product of the 1960s, as much as anything, right? Students advocating for the idea that their speech ought to be heard on campus without repercussions. Professors made similar kinds of arguments early in the 20th century, thinking that particular kinds of professorial speech at least ought to be protected. And for the faculty making those kinds of arguments, the particular concern is connecting it to free inquiry to be able to advance and promote knowledge. And the view and part of that is that it comes with certain responsibilities, but also certain qualifications and limitations associated with that. So we expect faculty in a classroom, for example, not to use their class time delivering political messages to students when they're supposed to be teaching them chemistry, for example, right? And so it's not free speech on the faculty's part to be able to use that captive audience to communicate with them about things that are irrelevant to the classroom context. We expect the university to regulate that and insist that faculty engage in the tasks they're supposed to be performing in that context. Likewise, we expect faculty to engage in competent speech. We expect them to meet professional standards in engaging in speech in the classroom. We expect universities to step in when they're not. And so in those particular contexts, in the context of scholarship and teaching, there's gonna be real restrictions involved and what kinds of ideas can be expressed, how can they be expressed, their appropriate moments for the university to be able to step in in that context. At the same time, academics have traditionally recognized that academics too ought to have a kind of free speech in the larger environment, more generally, much like students do and others on the campus ought to. And so if a professor says something stupid on social media, there should be no repercussions from an employment context for them having done so. And the standards that we use to evaluate that are just different than what we would say in a classroom context. And so the bundle of rights that go along with academic freedom serve somewhat different kinds of purposes and they're complicated in some tensions with one another. But ultimately they're all designed to say universities ought to be places where questions can be asked and answers can be debated and that that's, debate's gonna look different in different kinds of contexts on university campuses, but if we want free inquiry to survive, if we want the advancement of knowledge to be able to continue, we need to be able to protect that space to engage in that process. There have been some recent concerns expressed about certain orthodoxies that actually might be getting in the way of good science and I wanna turn to that next. 10 years ago, Mitch and I were coming to Purdue at the same time and we were both reading Greg Lukanov's Unlearning Liberty, Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and that book, he covered a lot of ground, but primarily dealt with sort of the siphoning effect of speech codes on campus. Then later we saw sort of in the 2014, the flavor of the year was the list of speaker cancellations and that got a lot of coverage. And then, and again, you all have made observations and Keith's written about faculty sort of getting canceled for taking positions and challenges from within the campus. John Yu at UC Berkeley Law School who was challenged in terms of whether he should retain his job after he returned from the Bush Administration Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel when it was learned that John wrote the memo on enhanced interrogation techniques. Rebecca Touvelle at Rhodes College from about five years ago in the Hypatia Journal. She, in her defense of transracialism, the Rachel Dola's All Incident, Brett Weinstein, we could go on and on about some of these, but now the more recent examples are expressions of concern by scientists who are actually saying we are no longer able to do good science because our orthodoxy is challenging our ability to raise these questions. And so I'll give you a few examples and ask you all to comment. So, Jonathan Hyte, who we mentioned, announced a month or so ago, two months ago, that he'll resign at the end of the year from his primary professional association because of a newly adopted requirement that all who present research at the society's conferences have to explain how their submission advances, not their hypothesis, but how it advances equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals. He had cautioned against those kinds of litmus tests, which he saw as sort of corrupting of the Talos again, and he said that the request that was made to him would violate his quasi fiduciary duty to the truth. He said individual members are free to sign that commitment, but he didn't think it should be compelled. Dr. J. Badachari at Stanford came under fire for co-authoring the Barrington Declaration, an open letter signed by many doctors and scientists and in 2020 denouncing lockdowns is harmful. That was met with denunciation by certain health leaders, including Anthony Fauci, as nonsense and very dangerous. It's created, as he says, a hostile environment for him, including death threats. Last month, the Chronicle pointed to an op-ed by James Lee, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Minnesota, arguing that NIH is restricting access to the database of genotypes and phenotypes. The main repository of studies on relationships between genes and traits said that the NIH is actually turning down studies because they might be stigmatizing, for example, in the context of genetics research touching on intelligence. And then finally, one more example, Luana Meroja of Williams College just wrote in an article for Common Sense what she called an existential threat to doing good science, raise concerns about academic freedom. She observed that the journal Nature, Human Behavior, announced that although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded. The journal said that the study of human variation is itself suspect. She said that the journal advocated avoiding research that could quote, stigmatize individual or human groups or research that promotes privileged exclusionary perspectives. So her conclusion was that dangers, closing off these avenues of inquiry is that science becomes an extension of ideology and is no longer an endeavor dedicated on pursuing knowledge and truth. So is this a crisis in science? Glenn? Sounds like it to me. I mean, a crisis in science and a crisis in society given that getting the right answers to some of these questions has profound implications for the quality of life and the well-being of millions or billions even of people. I mean, think about the issue of COVID and the debate about the effectiveness of lockdowns which hindsight is 2020 and in hindsight, we can see that there was really something worth arguing about there. Or think about this issue about human genetics and diversity and group disparities. Don't we really want to understand what the root sources are of the expressions of various aspects of human behavior? Perhaps remedies for those who are suffering a disadvantage in that respect lie just around the corner to the extent that one can get one's hands around what's actually going on. These people are not that clever. Those who want to shut down the inquiry about sensitive matters that might be quote, stigmatizing close quote, they're not omniscient. So the curtain falls down on the inquiry. That keeps us from ever knowing what the actual answers are. That's the beginning of the end. It makes me think of John McWhorter's book about woke anti-racism when he talks about how it really is analogous to a religion because when you talk about the shutdown of scientific inquiry, my association is, oh, in the old days when it was religion versus science, but this is having exactly the same impact and it makes me, in religion you would use the term that, oh, this idea is blasphemy. But it's anti-woke racism inquiries are also blasphemous and that, of course, makes me think of George Bernard Shaw. Every great truth began as a blasphemy. There's a time when I think a lot of people in the hard sciences, if I can call it that, I tend to think this is a problem for the Mandy's, this is a problem for the social sciences. I don't know what y'all people are doing over there, but it didn't have any consequences for us over here doing real work. And so it's relatively easy for them to dismiss academic freedom arguments and concerns more generally to say this doesn't seem to affect us. And so it's not really a real problem. I think now they're learning, it's a real problem. And it's the same issues that have been dealt with by people on the humanities and social science side for a long time are now raising their head on the natural science side as well. And it's the same kinds of concerns at the end of the day. And while you gave a lot of instances of things that are often restrictions being imposed on scientific research internal to the academy and often from the left, it's worth noting that there are similar kinds of controversies arising from the right pressure being put on people, for example, their research relating to climate change, that those on the right do not appreciate as well as other kinds of research. And so once you open this door to say we don't care so much about the truth of these scientific questions, what we really care about is where the political implications of the truth, then we've gone down a very dangerous path in terms of our abilities as a society to actually grapple seriously with real problems and actually understand the world around us. That's a good segue to another topic, another external reaction to perceived threats to speech. And that is so-called divisive concepts legislation. Florida's stop-woke bill that was recently enjoined by a federal court in Florida. There was an article in the Chronicle last week by a Canadian academic Jeffrey Sachs, critical actually of our friends at FIRE for their collaboration with state legislatures in adopting some new legislation that is designed to protect rights of faculty and students on campus. The AAUP, for example, he points out, has always viewed that kind of legislative reaction as a threat to college's institutional autonomy and critics like him say that legislating in this area involves risking politicizing the issues and may even reduce faculty and student power. So how should we think about not that the university is gonna take an official position on matters being contested in the public arena, but how should we just think about these reactions by our elected leaders, which appear to be designed to promote speech but are sort of a clear reaction to the fact that they perceive it's not happening? Well, the devil is in the details or the angel is in the details. And I, to me, one of the most persuasive pieces that I've read against the kind of stop-woke act that was struck down in a lawsuit by FIRE is was an op-ed that was jointly written by four people, a prominent conservative, a prominent libertarian, a prominent moderate, and a prominent liberal. And they said, we really disagree on the substantive issues. We have different opinions about critical race theory. We have different opinions about the 1619 project, but we all agree that these laws, no matter how well intended, are a disaster for freedom of speech and open inquiry because their terms are so vague and over-broad, they become a license for whoever is enforcing it to enforce it against whatever ideas they dislike moreover. They create such an enormous chilling impact. One of these laws recently in Montana, the attorney general, it was specifically focusing on abortion after the Dobs decision, but the same idea. The general counsel of the university basically issued an edict to professors in all fields, whether it's law or medicine, politics, you name it. You should not talk about the subject of abortion in your classes because you might be running afoul of this law. So I understand, if I'm gonna be empathetic to what prompted the laws, there is a legitimate concern about indoctrination in the classroom and that really is on all of us as professors to be sure that we teach in a way that does not indoctrinate but promotes critical thinking and inquiry and questioning. But it is wrong and counterproductive to that goal to have the legislature mark off huge areas that might make people uncomfortable or create division. And I find it very ironic that it's the conservatives and Republicans who have harnessed these concepts that were pioneered by progressive students on campus that they then derided as snowflakes and coddled. And it really gets back to a point where constantly making is once you let the genie out of the bottle, it's gonna come back to bite you. And that's kind of a mixed metaphor, isn't it? And now there's been a role reversal with the students themselves, as Lukianoff and Hyde point out in their book. I'm gonna take advantage of the five minute dispensation that Mitch gave us earlier today to ask one more question because I think we do, I'd like to end on a student facing question. And Glen, I think I read that you launched a new course two springs ago at Brown on freedom of expression. You're having the students read Plato, Socrates, Milton Mill, Orwell, but also Alan Blooms, the closing of the American mind and that subtitle was how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students. You said the book is as relevant as it was today as it was in 1987. I guess my question, comment on that, but then everybody else speak to, how do we help faculty and others who are in a student support position on campus help students grasp these issues? I mean, we're already doing our free speech orientation, but what can we do to help them understand that, for example, words aren't violence. They have the right not to remain silent, Nadeen, as you said last time you were here. Glen, you wanna make a comment on that? Well, I think Bloom was prescient along a number of fronts in his critique of American higher education in the 1980s. I think we help our students by modeling what it is we want them to understand and to do in their own intellectual lives. So I'll leave it to others to comment further. I think that the university has to have a demonstrated commitment in every single aspect of its activities from soup to nuts. So starting from when you recruit students, you're pitching that this is a place that respects and encourages and facilitates robust exposure to ideas that you will disagree with. And by the way, if that's gonna make you uncomfortable, this may not be a place for you. And I've heard that some universities in their application materials are asking students to write essays about free speech issues, which would be very positive. Then you have the wonderful orientation program that you've initiated here, by the way, out of respect for Mitch and for the university. I'm wearing your colors, and thank you for having beautiful colors. But it goes on with, I would recommend that there be a required course on free speech and academic freedom principles and the history that gave rise to it because I've found that a little bit of education really goes a long way. I would encourage all classes to integrate debate and discussion modalities whereby all students are required to argue at least two different perspectives on every issue. And I would require papers to be in that format and exams to be in that format. And I think that that serves two purposes, not only strengthening students' critical analytical skills, but it also frees them up from inhibitions about expressing certain perspectives because of fear that that might be seen as insensitive or offensive and earn the ire of their peers. If you say, I'm not asking you for your opinion, I'm just saying make the strongest argument in support of this position and against this position. Thanks, Nadine. So I taught a class a couple of years ago on constitutional issues during the Trump years, of which there are many, and often weird ones. And so it seemed worth trying to have a whole class on it. And it turns out there was a lot of student interest in such a class, which was great. But among the things I required of them is that the students had to write papers both defending the views of the Trump administration and also criticizing the views of the Trump administration precisely because I wanted them to be able to step out of their own set of instincts and preferences on these issues and try, as lawyers are often called upon to do, to think through what's the best argument on the other side and how do you construct that argument, where are the strengths of it, where are the weaknesses of it at the end of the day. They don't have to believe those arguments at the end of the day, but they need to actually grapple with them in a serious fashion. So I often try to incorporate that kind of stuff into my own teaching. Certainly I try to model that behavior myself so that students see that I am trying to grapple as best I can with difficult arguments, including those that I disagree with deeply and I want to invite them into that process of engaging in those. I think we also have to appreciate that not only in the university context, but in a societal context, these are constant struggles, that there's no final victory on the free speech debates. We find ourselves constantly having to rehash these same debates. We have to relearn these lessons. We have to re-defend these victories that we thought we had gained in the past. And unfortunately, I think we're in a moment in which these things require a lot more defense than I would like, but we should not think there's gonna be some golden age moment in which we're gonna be past these things. We constantly have to be in the process of trying to relearn why these are valuable things and have new discussions and new efforts to socialize another generation into the view that we need to be a protect space for people to disagree about ideas. It echoes something that Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes-Norton says in a clip that we use for our boiler gold rush. She says, it's a lesson that has to be re-taught every generation. Well, thank you, panel, very much for this great, insightful discussion and thank you audience members for being here and on to the next event in Mitchfest. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. Thank you all.