 Thank you, everyone, and thank you for joining us at this last event of a day of inquiry and discussion about inauguration, what it means to our nation, what it has meant historically, and what we hope it will mean moving forward. I want to start by thanking all those who organized on fairly short notice this series of programs and special thanks to our friends from the Hall of Music for making it all a presentable and professional. To complete our program tonight, we have with us one of the most esteemed journalists in all of America. He is ideally suited to talk about the assigned topic, but that could make that exact same statement about a host of others. Just as there is hardly a major publication for whom Jonathan Roush has not written over the last couple decades of an illustrious career, there's hardly a subject he hasn't covered in one way or another. I made a partial list, adultery, agriculture, gay marriage, height, discrimination, bio-rhythms, marijuana legislation and animal rights. He wrote a book more than a decade ago called Gay Marriage, Why It's Good for Gays, Straits and America, more than a decade before the triumph of that latest civil rights cause. He wrote a book called The Kindly Inquisitors on what he perceived as a growing threat to free speech and freedom of expression, the First Amendment generally. He wrote that book 27 years ago. So we have with us a remarkably prescient and thoughtful observer of our times, ideally suited, I believe, to talk about the possibilities of this inaugural day as well as its potential implications for those of us who toil in higher education. On behalf of all of Purdue, welcome, Jonathan Roush. Thank you. With an invitation, an introduction like that, I should just quit now while I'm ahead. Well, you're not permitted to do that. If you want to go change the red sweater, I'd give you 10 seconds for that. But what would be the right color? Yeah, we'll orient you to black and old gold, maybe a little something as a thank you. Jonathan, let me just start with the most basic questions. What were your reactions to President Biden's speech today? How did you like it on a literary basis? How did you like it in general? Well, I liked it for all kinds of reasons. One reason I liked it was sheer relief of hearing an inaugural speech that sounded like an inaugural speech. He tried to reemphasize what he said from the beginning. His theme is to do what he can and to unify the country, but also to encourage Americans to unify the country. It took the form of a pep talk almost to sermon. Basically, he said, I can't do this myself. We're going to have to stop this what he called uncivil war that we're in. It's just getting us nowhere. His message, as I understood it, was kind of, we got a respite now. We had a close call in the insurrection and now with the pandemic. We've got a window now to try to get ourselves back to a place where we can work with each other as a country and live together. Not always agree, but live together. So let's not waste that opportunity was the message. So I was pleased and impressed. I was pleased and impressed that he only spoke for 21 minutes, which I believe is one of the shorter such speeches in at least a while. You know our partial Hoosier William Henry Harrison holds the record for the longest one at almost probably over an hour. And as you may recall, he died 31 days later from pneumonia. So that didn't go well for him. No, served as an object lesson to some of his successors. When we were talking in advance of this evening, Jonathan, you made a I thought a very interesting comment. You suggested that this particular inaugural speech by virtue of the extraordinary times we've been living through was something of a relaunch as opposed to an expression of continuity. Could you elaborate on that? I thought it was an interesting way to put it. Well, I'd love to elaborate on that, President Daniels. So I have to say that my elaboration will take the form of saying I was wrong, actually, in an important respect. The point I was making is that we've had four years of a very disruptive chaotic kind of politics and all ending with an insurrection aimed at disrupting the presidential transition process. And I thought, well, you know, and President Trump wasn't there, of course, he left in the morning. He didn't show up. Last time that happened was Andrew Johnson in 1869. And I thought, well, this is going to be a very unusual inauguration because it's got to be kind of a reboot. It's got to kind of be a relaunch. It's got to be saying, let's start over. And Biden actually took a different path. Instead of arguing it that way, he kind of said, you know, the last four years were an anomaly. He did not mention President Trump by name. He did not allude to him, actually. He alluded briefly to the insurrection. But most of what he talked about was continuity, which surprised me. And he basically said the last four years of an anomaly. And what we're really doing here today is reestablishing the continuity with the past that goes back right to the beginning. He talked about Lincoln's second inaugural under the shadow of the Capitol Dome as yet uncompleted, a symbol of unity. He went back even before that. So I wound up thinking, you know, that's probably really smart. He's kind of telling the public, you know what? Continuity really is the American story. You should view the last four years. It's kind of a one offer. At least let's try to make it that way. To some extent, the hope for depolarization of what has become such a bifurcated society, at least recently. The resumption, if that's what you were just talking about, of a greater sense of national purpose really is the theme of this. We hope to view it throughout this conversation. But talk to us a little about that. You've lent your name and stature to an organization called Braver Angels, which aspires to try to bridge some of these deep cultural divides. Tell us a little about that. And what are the possibilities now that we can step back from the polarized state in which we have found ourselves the last couple years? Well, thank you. I'd love to. Braver Angels is a national grassroots depolarization movement founded by a man named David Blankenhorn, who I got to know when we were debating same-sex marriage because I was for it and he was probably the country's leading opponent testified against it in California, many other things. But we got to know each other and he invited me on the board and I got involved. Braver Angels began as Better Angels, had to have a name change along the way, but Better Angels, of course, is a reference to the better angels of our nature and that is, again, an inaugural address. That's President Lincoln, trying to stave off the Civil War in 1861. Braver Angels is built on the proposition that people are not as polarized as we think we are. And what we began to do is just start getting groups of people together, equal numbers of red and blues, in guided workshops using some techniques developed by family therapists, which are about getting people to listen to each other before they give their point of view, making them feel heard, building some trust. And the reaction was absolutely electric. People would leave the room, they'd want to do more of this. And before we knew it, this was out there. Now it's in 50 states, thousands of members. Now we're doing something we call Braver Angels debates and hope to bring them to Purdue. They may even be happening there already. And these are, these are truth-seeking debates where people speak from the heart on either side or both sides of an issue. People love that too. It's a safe space to really talk about what you think without getting denounced, because it's a very structured conversation. But what we're finding here is that there's a hunger out there, a deep hunger to get beyond the intense polarization that's being thrown at us by social media and by politicians and by people who frankly have a financial interest in dividing the country in order to, you know, outrageous, get addicted to social media. It's a good business model to be outrageous and addictive and polarizing. But people have had enough and what this is doing is giving people a tool to change it in their lives and communities. And this is just one of dozens, if not hundreds, of grassroots civic rebuilding efforts that are going on out there. And that's really the big news. Well, I hope that you're right that there is an innate hope among many of Americans to back away from this abyss that some of us feel we've been staring into. And so I'm sure I'm not the only person listening who will commend you for your efforts to see if that's true and see if you can make it more obvious. I'm not the one doing the work. It's the folks out there. But if anyone's interested, it's braverangels.org. Check it out. Jonathan, certainly part and parcel of the of two phenomena, related phenomena you just talked about. First of all, the division among Americans. Secondly, the apparent role of the new media and the social media in in driving that have troubled a lot of people and caused a lot of debates lately. I'd like to hear you talk about that a little bit. Why don't you, if you would, start by reacting to the decision by some of these platforms to bar first the president, but then many other people from being heard on on what are right now the probably the through the biggest megaphones we have. How did that look to you justified or left in that? Well, it looked like a decision that I had hoped we'd never have to reach. As you mentioned in your introduction, I'm a First Amendment advocate, a free speech advocate, and then not just in terms of the law, also in terms of the kind of society and culture we have should be one of very open debate and discourse where people can't shut other people down by claiming to be offended or where you don't get fired from your job because someone doesn't like what you said. So I'm the last person who wants to start pushing people off of social media or social media platforms. The problem becomes when somebody's behavior becomes so outrageous and so far beyond the bounds when they're for example using these platforms to help launch an insurrection or to give false information about an election, you know, vote on vote on November 4th, that kind of thing. When they're using it as a channel for wholesale disinformation and lies, you back these companies into a corner. They tried as hard as they could not to do that. They really didn't want to. Both Facebook and Twitter are actually quite oriented toward the First Amendment and free speech. But at the end when the insurrection happened, I think they felt their position was that they would lose their credibility in the world of advertising and more important that they would lose the support of their own staffs, that there would just be a mass uprising if they didn't pull the plug at that point. And so they did. But no one wants to be in this position. And this is why we should not behave the way that so many people, including our president, were and are behaving on social media so that we can stop short of that breakpoint. It seems very clear that your point about the views of the staffs had to be on their minds. Apparently it's on the minds of a lot of newsrooms, too. Are we seeing censorship in this way? And are those who perceive a severe double standard somewhat justified in perceiving things in that fashion? Well, I got this book coming out about this. It's called The Constitution of Knowledge and Defense of Truth. And it tries to make a broader point, which is that we have in parallel some quite different efforts that are going on to try to reduce the ability to have productive, constructive, truth-seeking dialogue in America. And one of them does come not exclusively, but primarily from the right. And that's these massive disinformation campaigns that you're seeing coming from the president and his allies and some conservative media outlets. But another is what's popularly called cancel culture. Before that word came along, I used the term coercive social coercion. And that's a form, that's where you try to exert pressure on people to be quiet by influencing their employers or their place of work or their professional associates. And where you go after, say, Mitch Daniels, you'll launch a big campaign against him. You can bring literally thousands of voices out against him overnight, and you can get him fired potentially. And a lot of people have been fired. And that is also, that is not a good thing if you're interested in a culture that is healthy and productive and vibrant. And I've been, I started pushing against that back in 2014 when a business executive named Brandon Ike, Mozilla, you may remember this. So it turned out that six years earlier, after being appointed to head Mozilla, big software company, that he had supported Proposition 8 in California. That's an anti-gay marriage proposition. And some activists got in an uproar about that, and he was fired a few days later. And I and a bunch of other friends of gay marriage, many of us gay, but many of us straight, all said this is not the way to do this. People should not be in fear of losing their job for taking an unpopular position. So I'm sorry about the long answer, but the answer is yes. I think we do have a problem with cancel culture. I think it's pretty hard to deny when you've got 40% of Americans saying they're worried about their career, their job, if they express their true feelings about politics. And unfortunately, a big place where this is happening is many American campuses. Well, we'll get to that in a minute, but I want to ask you to pursue these thoughts just a little further. There's a very arresting line in a chapter in your forthcoming book that I got a sneak peek at. And you said that something to the effect that you know, gays knew all about cancel culture before we had the term. And, you know, that analogy seems very plain to me, must be even more so to you, but say a little more about that. Yeah, long before it was cool, long before it was even a term, this idea that if you're a non conformist, you're going to be socially punished, you're going to lose your job, you're going to lose your professional associations, you're going to lose the respect of even your friends, not because they don't like you, not even because they think you're wrong, but because they're afraid to be seen with you. They're afraid they'll be the next target if they continue to associate with you. Well, that is not new. That was what McCarthyists, for example, did to people who are alleged communists. But what people don't realize, this is the much bigger target for that kind of weaponization was homosexuals. If it got known that you were a homosexual, and if that got out, you could lose your job, you often did. If you worked for the federal government, you would be fired. That was federal policy. If it got in the newspaper, if you were a teacher, for example, you were finished. And then people wouldn't associate you with because hanging out with a homosexual could mean, well, what would people say about me? So this is the culture that people, I was born in 1960. This culture is still very much alive. Homosexuals were considered mentally ill. We were considered a form of sociopath. So I grew up with this, and it breaks my heart now to see that so many minority rights activists, including gay and lesbian and trans rights activists, are going in for this kind of piling on of people whose views we may disagree with and may be wrong and may even be harmful. But piling on them and trying to punish them is doing to them exactly what we suffered from so much. We should try to be persuasive. We should be confrontational in a way that involves argument and correction. But going after people's jobs, trying to turn them into social pariahs, that is the last thing that people like me ought to be involved with. The word unity must have appeared in the president's speech a dozen or two dozen times today. And I can't think of a better theme that he could have emphasized. But I moved to observe that there may be some people who think the sort of unity that should be achieved is the unity of Romania pre-the-fall, or places where people are united by virtue of the fact they all believe or at least pay allegiance to the very same set of beliefs. Is a canceled culture? Is blacklisting? I think it's fair to say, have seen suggested in some places, certain people should never be hired again. Is that compatible with democracy or with free institutions? I don't think it is. Alexa de Tocqueville did not think it was. When he came to America, as you know, as anyone who's read Democracy in America, his famous 1830s and 1840s classic evaluation of America, what he worried about was what he called tyranny of the majority, by which he meant majority opinion. And he wrote, I wish I could quote it to you, but he wrote one of the most accurate and shilling descriptions of canceled culture anyone ever has. He basically said, if you're an American and you get on the wrong side of public opinion, you'll have the formal right to speak. But socially, you will be treated like a non-entity and you'll come into line gradually because objecting can be so painful. He thought that this was, in many ways, the biggest threat to our democracy, the sense of constant moral censure of anyone who is perceived as deviant. And then 20 years later, the greatest free speech advocate of all time, probably, certainly of modern times, John Stuart Mill made the same point in On Liberty. And he said that the biggest threat to free speech and freedom of thought and the advance of knowledge was not the actions of the government. He says, actually, even more dangerous than that is enforced conformity. He said, social progress comes from those who are different, those who speak out. He called it genius was the term he used. And he said, if you want a healthy society, you need to make room for that. You need to foster it and not hammer it down. Remember, he was writing in Victorian England, which was a highly conformist society. And he's saying, that's the biggest threat to us. So many of the founding fathers, the people who back in the beginning looked at our cultures saw this as a threat and it still is. Well, hold that thought about social progress or progress in social thinking because there's a case that it applies to other things that are in close to the heart of our mission in the advance of knowledge more generally. And I want to ask you about that before we wrap up. But one last, I might ask you about that too. You're president of a university. Yeah. Well, you can ask, but we're here to hear you. If there was a chilling, and there have been several, but a chilling comment made recently, at least from the perspective of some people, it was the suggestion by a very prominent journalist or at least former journalist, that people who are not insurrectionists, not people like President Trump himself, but anybody who had voted for him needed to be reprogrammed. Now, that's a term I'd not heard used in this society before. We know where we've read it. We know where we've seen it operate. How did you react? Should that be excused as just a impulsive hyperbole? Or does it reflect a mentality that really does believe that some thoughts must be purged and the people who hold them likewise? Yeah, I heard someone refer to that just last night. I wasn't sure where it was coming from because I hadn't actually heard that. You know, it doesn't surprise me that people think that way because human beings are naturally inclined to assume that people of good will who are well informed and not stupid will agree with us. It's very hard for us to understand. You know, if we're Christians, how could anyone believe that silly, I don't know, whatever it is, Hindu or Muslim stuff? On moral issues, we're even more inclined to think, well, of course, I'm right. How could I be wrong about this? Maybe I believe the Bible says it, or maybe I just believe it's a foundational right. So we're naturally inclined as humans to be pretty intolerant of other views. And the constitution of knowledge, as I call it, that's the system of which you're a part. Everyone in the Purdue community is part of it. This is the community that tries to break down those tribal boundaries, those tribal distinctive truths, and force us to engage in a social process of persuading each other. And that's what we really do when you publish an article in an academic journal or an op-ed piece. You're saying to the world, okay, here's my best case. Have at it. Well, it takes a lot of work to structure society to make that happen and not revert to our tribal basic method of either killing the people who disagree with us or silencing them or reprogramming, whatever that means. I don't even know what it really means. So the work that we have to do here is the work that President Biden laid out for us is to recommit to the civic processes that force us to encounter each other and persuade each other and share the country. And that is just always going to be hard. So I guess what I'm saying is it doesn't surprise me that someone would make an intolerant statement like the one that you just mentioned. That's, in fact, the least surprising thing in the world. The hope is that we can push back against that and that's the mission. And if that person, if that journalist were here, I would be saying to him, why don't we change the word reprogram to persuade? That would be a much better word. You mentioned that humanity has tried to move beyond its instincts and that is to solve problems violently. It's also been suggested within the last week or two. People are not for the first time are trying to differentiate between mobs of one kind and mobs of another or violent behavior of one kind and another. Are there good mobs and bad mobs? Are there some that can be excused by virtue of their motives as opposed to the plainly unacceptable heinous activities of January 6th? I don't know about good mobs and bad mobs. I don't know that there are any really good mobs. You may be alluding to this debate about how different or similar were the January 6th riots at the Capitol to various street actions, riots, protests that occurred over the summer. And I was pretty disturbed by some of what happened in those protests. They clearly devolved in some cases, in too many cases, into violence. But I didn't feel with them that the main gravelman in most places, most time at the main intention of those protests was to overthrow the United States government or disrupt and disband the counting of the presidential vote because it didn't like the outcome. And I also didn't feel more importantly that those protests were built on top of and encouraged by a months-long intensive campaign of disinformation to persuade a large portion of the public of something just in fact was blatantly untrue, in this case that the election was stolen. And that came from the very highest reaches of the government. These were not street activists, people who just beside themselves with rage and get into the street and start breaking windows or whatever. This was the president of the United States and many leading lights of the country. So in that sense, I think the whole comparison is off. It's like when George Orwell said, there's some comparisons you shouldn't make because it's putting elephants in the same scale as fleas. They're just different magnitudes, different kinds of things. And I guess that's what I would say in this case. It's not good mobs or bad mobs. There's no good mob option in a democracy. I'm not even sure how I feel about the Boston Tea Party. But there are different kinds of things. And these two I think were very different. Is that responsive to what you were looking for? Yes, very much so. It's a distinction. I think people are trying to decide whether they, to what extent they accept it. I think you did a very good job of clarifying it. So thank you. Let's go back to the Constitution of Knowledge, which I believe I'm correct is the title of the forthcoming book. And define it for us please. And then I want to ask you some questions about what it means broadly in society. The effect it's successful defense or its atrophy may mean for the body politic, but then in specific we'll talk a little about here at the universities like Purdue. But first of all, for those who were here in the term for the very first time, what are you getting at? Every society, every community has what you might call an epistemic constitution. Epistemic refers to the truth or knowledge. And this is a way in a world where people's perceptions and ideas and opinions conflict with each other to come up with enough of a social consensus about what's true and what's factual so that you can go on about society's business. Not that you have to agree on everything, but you have to agree on enough some of the basics. And every society has a way of doing that. But the usual way of doing it down through history has been either you go to war over it because you have competing sects or you have authoritarian control. You have princes or priests or the government deciding what's true and what's false. And those both turn out to be very bad ways of doing it. Same has been true in politics for most of history. You usually have war or authoritarianism. So along come people like James Madison, who launched our political constitution, which is really a mechanism for forcing people into compromise. They don't want to compromise, but the only way to get something done under our political constitution, because power is so dispersed is to compromise. There's no other way to do it. You can't use force. And that turns conflict, the heat of conflict, into policy, often creative policy. That's been the magic secret of the constitution. Well, it turns out we also have an epistemic constitution is created by some of the same people at the same time. And that says, well, look, the way you're going to make truth in society, you're going to have to persuade other people that you're right. You can't use force. You can't use social coercion like firing from their jobs. You're going to have to make your best argument, put it out there for evaluation, and we're going to see what we see. And then we have tons of rules around that and norms and especially institutions like universities. They're at the very core of the constitution of knowledge. They are to the constitution of knowledge, what the court system is to the U.S. Constitution. They are so important to this, but the constitution of knowledge are the rules we use as a society to come to conclusions about what's true and what's false. And they're just as important to the proper function as our society, as the formal, as the political constitution. And President Biden said so today. I noticed the second big thing, number two, after Unity today, the other word he used again and again, truth. He just made clear that he is worried sick about the epistemic crisis we face, the crisis of disinformation, conspiracy theories, inability even to stand tough for basic facts. Is maybe the problem will solve itself. The single biggest that as you've identified, as you've seen it, the single biggest malifactor here or purveyor of falsehoods has now left the, has left office, perhaps the scene over time. Will that alone enable us to get back to a truth seeking system of the kind you recommended? I don't know, but I don't know the magnitude, but I sure do know the direction. The direction is positive. People talk about and worry about, and rightly so, social media and the way its business model is to use addictive outrage, to use instanticity and pulsedness. The fact that you can say something on Twitter and it goes out to the world before you've had time to reflect on it is just a crazy way to run any kind of information system. And so people worry about social media and they should. But it turns out, when scholars look at this, that by far the biggest spreaders of disinformation, that is of harmful lies calculated to mislead the public, are politicians. Because they have such powerful pulpits, they can set the agenda. And I don't just mean President Trump, you can think about politicians down through history and all over the world. That's why, as so many people have emphasized over this since January 6th, that's why it was so devastating that so many politicians participated in spreading lies about the election. Because we've got to be able to count on political leaders to try to tamp down this constant temptation to use these powerful tools of propaganda and disinformation that go back to Lenin's time. Instead, many of them did the opposite. It was very nice to see Mitch McConnell come out yesterday with a strong statement saying that the protesters on Capitol Hill were lied to. That is correct. Of course, the biggest propagator of these tactics was President Trump. I say that not in a partisan way. It is an objective fact that he used falsehood disinformation in a way that we've never seen from an American president. People who know this kind of operation, influence operation call it the fire hose of falsehood. It's a Russian tactic. You swamp the information system with so much garbage, so much falsehood that people can't even keep up with you. They become disoriented. They become confused, mistrustful. We had four years of that culminating in the biggest campaign of it ever. So in answer to your point, yeah, having a president who tries to recommit himself to truth and who tries to recommit others to truth is going to be a big help. It's not the whole story. The cat's out of the bag in terms of disinformation. Everyone has seen now how powerful it can be. It disrupted the peaceful transition of power for the first time, I think, in American history, right? So the cat's out of the bag, but yeah, the change of leadership is very important. It's not the whole story, though. There's some other things we've got to do. Some of them out there where you work. Well, let's move to that because you have intimated tonight, and I think you suggest very directly in some of your writings that people in the academy, I'm sure you meant to make an exception for Purdue University, but people in the academy elsewhere, have some, bear some responsibility for the devaluing, I'll call it, of truth. And that this then, I'd like to hear you talk about its implications for our public life, subject we've been on so far, but also what it means for the success, the credibility, the trust people put in in us as an academic institution. But first, the spillover, if any, into the political problems you've just been outlining. Well, both of those points, those questions actually kind of fit together in a whole. As you know, there has been a steep decline of public trust in the institutions that historically we've relied on as a society to distinguish facts from fiction. That's journalism, fact-based journalism, mainstream journalism, as some people call it. Trust is way down. Trust is still actually pretty high in science. But as we've seen in the pandemic crisis, there are also some pretty severe problems developing there. And then trust in academia is way down. And what's happening is for reasons both good and bad, there's some bad reasons like, you know, people launching unfair attacks. But for reasons good and bad, the public is less willing to accept the considered judgments of people, professionals whose job is to try to distinguish fact from fiction. Now, I'm all for reasonable skepticism. I'm not saying anyone should just sign up to anything, Mitch Daniels or Jonathan Rauch has to say. That's not my point. My point is that we've got a massive infrastructure, a world called the reality-based community. And these are the people whose job is to sort fact from fiction. And they do it pretty darn well for the most part. And I'm not among the people who say that academia is a bunch of corrupt left-wingers who've all fallen into bad habits. I think actually to the contrary, there is huge amounts of extremely important and good work coming out of the American Academy today in many, many fields. But here's the problem. People won't listen to that good work if they believe that the American Academy has become dangerously politicized. If they believe that it has become so one-sided that it's become in effect a mouthpiece for left-wing ideologies of various kinds. And I'm sorry to say that it appears that in certain fields at least, and at certain universities at least, that has increasingly become the case. It's not a malicious campaign. They reach a tipping point where you can go through your whole career. Your training as a graduate student and your dissertation and then your promotion process without encountering a conservative. And you need to encounter a force to take seriously to think about it. But if you start get bubble in academia where you begin to get uniformity of opinion, then you cannot do science. Science depends on the conflict of different points of view. So that's going to degrade uniformity of viewpoint. It's going to degrade the quality of the work that's coming out of academia. It's going to degrade the amount of trust that's coming out of academia. And those two things are going to be very harmful to supporting the foundation of the constitution of knowledge. Once people think that the academy level that you guys are just mouthpieces for the ideology of the moment, well then they'll turn to sources of information like QAnon. And that's exactly what we're seeing. But might a person not honestly say that I can hold very, very strong and perhaps even extreme political views that doesn't have anything to do with my research into the genomics or physics or the scientific disciplines at which Purdue excels we believe and which do somewhat predominate on our campus. Can't those things be separated? Sure. And they often are. And I think that's one of the reasons why the harder, so to speak, the discipline, the more it is like a hard science like math or physics, the less politicization and the less worries about politicization you're going to see. That said, there are a lot of areas even in traditional, in fairly hard fields, where people are increasingly worried about politicization. For example, if a biologist talks about innate differences between the sexes, that can get them in trouble now in some circles and has got them in trouble now. Well, that's not good for biology. You need people to be able to state and develop their hypotheses without looking over their shoulder about whether a dean or a committee of some kind or a student protest of some kind or bad course evaluations are going to basically hammer them for that. So it's what you say is exactly right. It's the humanities and some of the social science fields that are more affected by these problems, but not just those fields. No, I think that setting all the political concerns aside, the strongest arguments that I read for protecting and preserving free speech and genuine academic freedom that protects its beneficiaries from the sort of social and professional pressures you're talking about is that the very advance of knowledge really depends so often on the heretic and on what is seen as the dissident opinion ultimately proves to have worth or value or greater validity than the dogma that it eventually displaces. I suspect you're saying that too. You said that is better than I could have said it. Science, the advance of knowledge depends fundamentally on diversity of viewpoint. It depends on intellectual pluralism. Pluralism really is the key word for the constitution of knowledge and it's also the key word that for the kind of society that Joe Biden talked about today and that's a society where people are free to be very different from each other because it's only in the comparison and clash of differentness that we can test our biases, our false beliefs. We can't see our own biases. We are blind to our own blind spots by definition. We have to rely on people very different from us and often with police that we find offensive, wrongheaded, crazy offensive, but we have to rely on those people to every so often point out the good argument that we missed or to force us to think well wait a minute I hadn't thought that through just to find out that we are wrong or they're partially right so pluralism is really what we're going for here and that's to me that's the core value in many ways that we're trying to so Jonathan to before we try either your patience or that of the audience I want to bring us to a point of natural conclusion here with with two simple questions for you. I hope that you'll first I'm laughing because you're like you're like Brian Brian Lamb beware when he says two simple questions you know that they're not going to be simple well if only I were half as good an interrogator as our alum Brian Lamb no I'm sure I'm not the only person that would like to know what it what advice now would you have for our new president and then I'm going to ask you what advice you might have for us as a significant institution of higher education but these these problems and concerns that you've uh very eloquently laid out for us uh what the what's the right way forward what can our new president do after the the start he made today to follow up on on that and then we'll turn to finish with with higher ed but first our new president there's so much on his plate but I think if I had to name just one thing it would be to try as hard as he possibly can to get some republican support to do some of the things that need to get done I realize that's going to be difficult I realize that there's some republicans you just don't want to play ball in fact we'll want to obstruct and I realize that there are going to be a lot of democrats who are going to say with some justification look we've got majorities we've got emergencies we need to do stuff but something people forget about our constitutional process which is as we said earlier is a compromise forcing mechanism is that the cycle works both ways polarization and animosity and extreme partisanship may compromise more difficult but compromise is also part of the solution to that because once you get people involved in dickering and negotiating you've been part of this process I see you're nodding your head and once you get them invested in achieving some kind of outcome even with people they don't necessarily like the dynamics start to change they begin to think about how can we how can I afflict and wound the other side so if we can relaunch some of the processes of negotiation and compromise on Capitol Hill and if President Biden can begin to do that on some issues that can start a virtuous cycle that maybe replaces the vicious cycle where the more negotiation and compromise breaks down the more polarized people become and the more compromise breaks down we can run that cycle in reverse and we have done it in the past as a nation so that's where I would start I would look for those areas and I think he will I think I think I heard today and through the campaign the sound of a man who is really committed to bending over backward to try to try to reach out so you're encouraging us or me at least to imagine that that compromise and an effective progress that might flow from it can be as addictive as polarization and we all have been in recent times I I for one hope that that you're right there what about us what about the academy what would you suggest we think about do differently what contribution can we make not only to more successfully pursue our own mission but perhaps to contribute to a better and healthier and more harmonious society well I'm grinning like the Cheshire cat because the president of one of the country's largest and greatest universities has just asked me for advice and and there are a bunch of things I could recommend I think it would be great if Purdue oriented its freshman students in first amendment values oh wait you're doing that I think it would be great if Purdue became a green light school on the ratings on the foundation for individual rights in education's rating school ratings for freedom of speech oh wait you've done that I think it would be great if the president of Purdue would tell alumni that you're going to go out in the world as they graduate and you may be offended but that's part of life you don't shut people down for doing that I think it would be great if that could happen someday oh wait it already did um so part of what I have to do here is embarrass you by by praising Purdue for showing other universities some of the ways to push back against cancel culture adopting the Chicago principles which I think Purdue was the first public university to do that the Chicago principles are a commitment at a university wide level to academic freedom to protecting professors and students who say unpopular things so I know you don't want to hear any praise Ryan Lam would never let you he wouldn't have let you get away with you know the last half of that so I can't either you know what we want to know is what we aren't doing well or what we might do better and I'm sure you've got at least a thought or two for us I do have a thought I just want to say in conclusion to that previous riff that's so embarrassed you I didn't do that to embarrass you I did it because there's also good news out there there are institutions Purdue's not the only one there are lots of institutions and organizations that are finding ways to push back and reassert their values and what is that your question that value is truth that value at universities is understanding universities where where lots of hats everything from vocational education to teaching civility housing and feeding students social activism has been an important part of American University since the founding days in fact that's why they were founded they were basically to teach ministers in how to make the world a more godly place so activism social activism is deep in the DNA the universities need to do all those things and they need to balance those things but they need to understand that one value is paramount it's not the only value but it's the most important value in a university and that is a fierce commitment to the constitution of knowledge fierce commitment to truth seeking as coming first and no matter how unpalatable that process may occasionally be if it's offensive to someone or for ask questions that people feel that they shouldn't have to be exposed to or if it's sometimes it hurts feelings science is not a fun process for people who get criticized but the number one value the the ball to keep our eyes on at all time well on my monitor we lost the last part of that but I trust the audience got to see it um Jonathan Roush I thank you for sharing your time and insights with us we can't wait to pick up the the Atlantic or the times or any of the myriad publications which seek your viewpoints on a regular basis as we have here we know there are more great book awards in your future possibly for the one that's just about to emerge we we value you because we do value the pursuit of truth that you as much as anyone on the scene today are have explained and and articulately defended to the rest of us so we thank you for being with us we thank the audience for your attention and for those who missed or would like to revisit some of the earlier panels and discussions today they're accessible through the Purdue website through the provost website under the heading inauguration thank you all very much for taking part most of all Jonathan you and good evening thank you so much