 I want to thank you, first of all, for coming out on a Friday afternoon. Your presence here clearly shows the importance of this topic to our community right now. So I've been thinking deeply about free speech for not weeks, months, and the more I think about it, the more I realize how complex an issue it is. It's not that the law is that complex, but it intersects, indeed, conflicts with our values in very complicated ways. So I thought a good way to enable the community, the Berkeley community staff, faculty, students to engage with this issue is to ask some of our faculty who have thought deeply about it to discuss it. So the form of this event is going to be that I'm going to ask each of the faculty members on the panel, after I introduce them, to talk for about five minutes, giving their perspective, then I'm going to ask some questions, and then there'll be time for you to ask some questions. I think this event will last until sometime between 5.30 and 6.00, so that's the kind of time frame. I feel like I should channel the fire marshal right now and to suggest that please try to leave room up the aisles. I know we have people sitting in the aisles, that's fine, but to enable people to get through them and to not block the entrances. So let me now introduce our panelists starting at the far left, sorry, and I have to keep my politics straight. As David Landrath, colleague of mine from the Department of English and a specialist in Renaissance literature, sitting next to him is Irwin Chemerinsky, the new dean of the law school and a constitutional law scholar. Irwin has just published a book on free speech, which I suggest you all read. It's a great book. Next to him is Stephen Hayward, who is a visiting scholar at IGS, the Institute for Governmental Studies. He's a columnist, and he's the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. Sitting next to Stephen is Arlie Hochschild. She is an emeritus professor of sociology, written many books, but most recently a wonderful book called Strangers in Their Own Land, which I hope she's going to talk about some in our panel today. And then finally, to my immediate left, John Powell, he's a professor of law, African American Studies and Ethnic Studies, and the Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion and the Director of HIFIS. So please welcome our panelists. And I'm going to begin our panel with asking Irwin just to talk a bit about what the state of the law is so that we're all on the same page in relationship to the First Amendment and what it guarantees. Thank you. It's such an honor and a pleasure. We're part of this terrific panel. We certainly can and should have discussions what our ideal is in terms of free speech on campus, how to balance that against other values. But the reality is what the campus can do is constrain by the First Amendment because this is a public university the First Amendment applies. Above all, the First Amendment means that all ideas and views can be expressed on a college campus. The government, including a public university administration, can never prevent or punish speech because of the viewpoint expressed. Now that doesn't mean that free speech is absolute. Long ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said there's no right to falsely shout fire in a crowded theater. But the Supreme Court has said that the categories of unprotected speech are limited and they have to be nearly defined. We mentioned them to you because, again, it very much can influence the discussion we're having this afternoon. The Supreme Court, for instance, so it's not relevant to our discussion, has said that child pornography is speech not protected by the First Amendment. False and deceptive advertising is speech not protected by the First Amendment. That speech the government can punish. For our purposes, though, there are some categories that might arise on college campuses where speech can be prevented or punished. Incitement of illegal activity is speech that's not protected by the First Amendment. But the Supreme Court has defined incitement in a very circumscribed way. The Court has said in order to be incitement, there has to be a substantial likelihood of imminent illegal activity and the speech has to be directed at causing imminent illegal activity. The Court has said that true threats are speech not protected by the First Amendment. A true threat is speech that reasonably cause a person to imminently fear for his or her physical safety. So if a person was surrounded by an angry mob and the mob was shouting at the individual, so the person feared for his or her physical safety, that wouldn't be speech protected by the First Amendment. Harassment is speech that's not protected by the First Amendment. There's no right for an employer to say to an employee, sleep with me or you'll be fired even though it's just words. From the context of employment, from the context of education, usually to be harassment, it has to be speech that's directed at a person. It has to be pervasive. It has to interfere with the person's educational opportunities based on criteria like race, sex, religion, sexual orientation. Now you'll notice as I go through these categories of unprotected speech, what I haven't listed, and that's hateful speech, it's an offensive speech. In fact, the Supreme Court has made it clear that speech cannot be punished, cannot be prevented, just because it's hateful or offensive, even if it's very deeply offensive. In the early 1990s, over 300 college universities across the country adopted so-called hate speech codes. Without exception, every one of them to come to court was declared unconstitutional. Why? We all know that hate speech can cause real harms. We protect speech because it has effects. Speech was meaningless, we wouldn't regard it as a fundamental right. The effects can be positive. Speech can be ennobling, uplifting, but it can also be hurtful and cause great pain. Hate speech does that. And yet what the courts all said is it seems impossible to define what's hate speech. Usually the hate speech code said, we'll prohibit speech that stigmatizes or demeans. But what does that mean? Also, we've learned that laws that prohibit hate speech, whether it on countries or on campuses here, are much more often used against those that we're trying to protect than any other group. When the University of Michigan adopted a hate speech code, literally every prosecution under it was brought against minority students. Perhaps most of all the Supreme Court has said that hate speech is protected because it expresses an idea. And remember what I said to start. All ideas and views can be expressed on campus no matter how offensive. One other thing that should inform our discussion and your thoughts about this issue, campuses can have time, place, and manner restrictions with regard to speech. Even though free speech is protected on a public university campus, it doesn't mean there's a right to speak, literally at any time, at any place, or in any manner. The campus can restrict speech, so as to preserve the educational opportunities on campus and also to protect public safety. You have a right to speak, but you don't have a right to come in my classroom when I'm teaching and disrupt what I'm doing through your speech activities. Nobody has a first amendment right to come in this auditorium now and yell in a way such the panel can't go on. That's what time, place, and manner restrictions means. And so the campus can limit where and when and how speech goes on to make sure that it doesn't disrupt campus activities and also to protect public safety. The issue of public safety has been much in the news and certainly very relevant on this campus. And the Supreme Court and the lower courts have been clear that the campus has the obligation to protect speakers of all views. Even if it's expensive, the campus has the obligation to do so. But if the campus, through every possible effort, cannot find any other way to protect public safety, then it can cancel a speaker. That should be a last resort. It should be only if there's no other way to do so. And it can never be based on the viewpoint of the speaker, but the campus does also have an obligation to protect the safety of its students, its staff, and its faculty. So I've covered for you in a little less than five minutes what I usually spend a semester going over and I lost students and undergraduates. But maybe the most important thing I can say to frame this discussion is something that again Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said. He pointed out, we don't need freedom of speech to safeguard the speech we like. We would naturally let that happen. He said, what we really need free speech for is the speech we hate. And he said that the best response to the speech we don't like is more speech. So David, why don't you share with us some of your thoughts about free speech? So I'm a scholar in the English department. As Carol said, I teach Shakespeare and other folks from the 16th century. My immersion in contemporary free speech issues dates from this January. I mean, I've been speaking as freely as I can as an American citizen for some time. But this January I was involved as wound up being about 100 faculty in a letter to the chancellor that asked that Milo Yiannopoulos not be permitted to speak on campus. Our rationale for this was based on the distinction that Professor Czermerinsky just drew between speech that is protected and conduct that is impermissible. Our argument was that the conduct that Yiannopoulos engaged in over the course of his tour across other campuses in the nation consistently violated the standards of our campus code of conduct. And that it was growing more and more egregious as the tour went on. And for that reason we asked both the chancellor at the time and the sponsoring student organization to rescind the invitation. Since then a lot of water has gone under the bridge for this particular speaker. And I am told that he has in receiving a new invitation to speak, agreed to abide by our campus code of conduct. Agreed to stop targeting individuals for harassment based on protected categories. So we need to hold him to that. I would, it seems to me that a motivation for him to stick to the campus code of conduct is precisely that he is holding a multi-day event. And we will be watching. In this appearance I wanted to articulate again that distinction between speech that is protected and conduct that is impermissible as well as my trust that our guinopolis is turning over a new leaf. Fingers crossed. I'd also like to talk in my capacity as a scholar of the history of the English language a little bit about larger issues of where freedom of speech has come from in order to be sort of enshrined in our constitution. And where freedom of speech seems to be going in our imaginations. And the question that I have for all of you is when you picture someone speaking freely now in this moment, what scene do you envision? Do you envision a great Roman orator berating his opponents in the Senate? Do you envision Mario Savio on the roof of a police car surrounded by a movement of thousands of his fellow students? Do you picture a troll sitting in his or her basement provoking someone that whose words are represented on a computer screen, a person whom he will never meet? The reason I ask is that freedom has changed a lot since the concept emerged in ancient Greece and Rome. There, freedom was a class privilege. It was the privilege of the ruling class to participate in the political order, the Republican order in Rome. Only a very few male subjects of that order were citizens. Only those few could speak freely in the Senate. The great contribution of our society has been to push that privilege toward a universal condition. The 14th Amendment declares that the privileges of citizenship shall not be abridged for anyone who is a citizen of the United States. That universal privilege, as we know, has not yet been achieved. The law cannot restrict it, but some of us remain less free than others. We will not be able to confirm that universal privilege of speech until all of us can talk back to a cop regardless of our ethnicity or appearance without fearing for our lives. Universal privilege is a paradox. Privilege is an idea that comes out of a culture based in domination, a slave culture in which the masterful few cherish their freedom. How can we assure that each of us is equally free? How can we ensure that our concept of freedom does not entail domination, does not entail simply competing to be the loudest voice in the room? So I guess those are two questions. One, the question of the scene that you picture when you picture someone speaking freely. The other, this more abstract question of how we can make our freedom, make our voice as heard for each of us, as it is heard for any of us. Stephen? Well, thank you, Chancellor Christin, all of you for coming. I think I ought to just say a little bit more by way of introduction about myself, so I'm still pretty new here in the way of full disclosure as the saying goes these days. So I am in fact a card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy. I spent most of my adult career in Washington, D.C., mostly at the American Enterprise Institute. I write for National Review, Weekly Standard, commentary, Wall Street Journal, Editorial Page, all the usual places. And used to do a lot of media, I'd get on CNN a lot, the News Hour and PBS, CNBC, and of course, most often on Fox News. I want to give people a chance to boo if they want to too, I thought, okay, so I was, I'm gonna pause for a reason. But I am trying to practice a, I think I may try and trademark this phrase, I'm trying to perfect us a reverse hoax-chilled and get out of my bubble. So I am telling my conservative friends that I'm now spending a three-year hitch as an inmate at UC Berkeley and enjoying it immensely. And so I have two opening thoughts about this. And the headlines are these. One is that I think the controversy of free speech needs to be placed in a broader context of what I might be called the crisis of legitimacy of democratic institution and democratic values today. I'll explain that briefly. And the second one is that if we're gonna make some progress on the way forward in our conversations about this on campus here and around the nation, I think we need to treat some fundamental prior questions that might set up what the basis of any limits on free speech might be. Now, Chancellor Christ has written, I think, beautifully and eloquently championing the, what I call the old liberal tradition of free speech as understood by John Stuart Mill, that classical tradition stretching back to Milton. I'm in heated agreement with that point of view. I know you'll want to disagree, but I can't find any daylight between you and me on that. The point, though, is that what was once a nearly universal accepted principle is no longer universally accepted. I'm struck by polls, especially millennials, that would be the student generation today, where you get a large plurality, sometimes more than 40%, saying they no longer think free speech is a paramount principle, or one that should be elevated above or put it this way. The survey question suggests there's substantial support for restrictions or regulations of some kind on hate speech. However, we come to define that concept. So that represents, I think, a very sharp break from previous public opinion surveys on free speech going back decades. But I think it goes with a couple of others. The same surveys often find that, especially among millennials, and not just in this country, by the way, this is a phenomenon that's going on worldwide in the advanced democracies. Also a large plurality, often over 40%, saying they're not sure about democracy itself anymore. When everybody's kind of frustrated with democracy these days, you can see that in the unrest and the various populisms in all the advanced countries, as I say. But that's a startling thing. I think, I mean democracies have always had problems. I think pretty much there was universal agreement with that old line of Churchills that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have ever been tried. Except today there does seem to be a renewed openness to other forms of rule that promise to make the trains run on time. Which is something that troubles me and then the third one that troubles me a lot, and I know Chancellor Christ you want us to argue some, but I think Arlie and I are gonna end up in close association on this. There's some survey findings, I follow survey data as a political sign, some survey findings that really disturb me. Trust in institutions has been falling for a long time. There's some variance, higher trust in the military, the church has been going down, government, local state, all the rest. Universities lately have been seeing some wobbles in public regard for universities, which ought to worry administrators everywhere. The one that really jumps out at me is a survey question that says along the lines of, do you have confidence on your fellow citizens? Used to be the people who said no is 35 to 40%, that's 15, 20 years ago. Now that number's up around 60%. In other words, a majority of Americans are saying they do not have confidence in their fellow citizens and the problem here is when we see each other as utterly alien, it becomes impossible, difficult, maybe impossible to be fellow citizens. So I wrap up all these questions. The controversies on free speech, the legitimacy of democracy and the growing divide, it's been talked about a lot, the polarization of politics as a crisis of legitimacy. And so I think that the answer to the free speech question answer, some progress in our thinking about this is gonna be dependent on thinking about some of the connected questions to it. Now the second point is, here I'm a little bit heterodox with standard current conservative views on things. I'm not entirely happy with the view that hate speech should deserve the unqualified protection of the First Amendment, however we define hate speech. Now this could get weird, because in a small way I could end up possibly to the left of Irwin on this question and I think getting the left of you was really pretty hard to do. By the way, I have to say that it's in my union contract, Irwin, I hope you don't really mind. So think about how it runs this way. I mean, here's what a lot of conservatives are actually saying, whether you pay attention to this, say hate speech, Milo, Ann Coulter, whoever, hate speakers. And then someone from my side, yeah, but free speech, First Amendment. And I raise my hand and say, wait a second, are you saying that we should invoke our right to be, let's see, bigots, racists, homophobes, patriarchs, Islamophobes, have I left anything out? That's sort of the comprehensive list, right? Really? And if that's really the way your argument is gonna run, why should anyone listen to anything we have to say about anything at all? It's a really dumb argument. It would take too long, I don't now want to sort of engage Irwin, maybe in some events for your book we might talk about this, but just to give one example, I'm not sure the Supreme Court was right when it said the Nazis could march through Skokie in 1978. At the end of the day, I come down, I think it's your side that, at the ACLU side that have to let them exercise their right to free speech, but I think that's an arguable question. And I think that becomes an arguable question because the prior question I want to raise is, are there, either for a democratic society or a university, the question I think we should argue about is this, are there any closed questions? You know, the principles of free speech is utter openness about anything, right? Are there any closed questions? Now, it's a long subject, this is very briefly, the ideological left and the ideological right have answers to that question in the affirmative. And I actually think they overlap in some ways, that could be interesting to discuss at leisure, hard to do here. Once upon a time, back when we used to have Western Civilization Survey courses, that by the way I think died out not for the reasons the right usually says, but that's another story. Sometimes we had to argue the question, maybe Athens was right to have executed Socrates. I know a professor at Yale who years and years ago who used to torment his students for a whole week defending that proposition. And you know, maybe they were right to excuse, well that's a fun one to play out and a useful one. Maybe it's one worth doing again because it's, of course, it raises the fundamental questions of what are the boundaries of what society can tolerate while preserving itself, but it's detached from some of the hot button issues today at least starting out. Might be a format for coming into all that. So I'll just close very quickly. Okay, I'm gonna use the phrase campus orthodoxy. You can see there's a lot of sins, it's inadequate, but for the purposes of brevity I'm gonna say, the campus orthodoxy today is pretty much dominated by the left. Wasn't always true, the campus orthodoxy, and so the point is, is therefore we should prohibit mylarian colter or Ben Shapiro next week, whenever, from speaking. You know, the campus orthodoxy in 1950s was, if you were a communist you would lose your job. By the way, an orthodoxy enforced mostly by liberals, not by conservatives, conservatives never really run universities, universities have been liberal for at least since the 1930s. And in private industry we know that you got blacklisted in Hollywood if you were suspected of being a communist. Well today everything has revolved, and if you don't conform to campus orthodoxy today, well we're not sure we're gonna let you speak. You are now blacklisted at Google, if you dissent from certain forms of the current orthodoxy about diversity as it's popularly understood. So we've switched places and I think that, my concluding thought is this, I think that, if you're a liberal or a leftist, I think you wanna be very careful about wanting to institutionalize restrictions on speech, or what I made brief reference to, in the past we've seen how this has worked with the detriment of minorities, and it can again. It's a practical matter, I do side with the ACLU, I'm pretty much a free-speed absolutist, but do you think the questions that give rise to these controversies are entirely valid and deserve a lot more sustained and rigorous conversation and dialogue? Thanks. Harley? So I'm a free-speech absolutist too. You know, my very first semester here at UC Berkeley was the fall of 1962. This was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I remember walking out of my first class, it was in D'Winnell, and walking down the path and facing towards, say, their gate, and seeing not a mass of students, but hundreds of small groups that were all engaged in intense conversation, and I joined one of them. And the interlocutors in this group were smart, they were well-informed, they were differing. Well, I think Kennedy should do this, no, I think he should do that. How do we get into this mess? And it was just electric. All of these groups of real strangers, I think probably graduate students were leading it, but in each one, and I thought to myself, because I'd come to Berkeley blind, I'd never visited it, just all by reputation, I thought I'm in the right place. I'm in the right place. And just a year before I retired from a career, a fabulous, wonderful, exciting teaching career here, just from going down memory lane, I went down that same path and wondered what I would see and what I saw was students, everybody was on their cell phone, wait a minute, what kind of collective public square can we, what from the past can we restore and put together with what from our current fund of creativity can we add to that? I should say that that magical view of Berkeley that I always have, and the value on free speech it's linked with, I always have in the back of my mind when I have in this last five years been researching a book called Strangers in Their Own Land, which is, sorry, thank you, thank you. In which I tried to get out of the Berkeley political bubble of which I am a fundamental part, and take my alarm system off and try to cross over what I call an empathy wall to climb into the life circumstances and the beliefs of people I knew I would have profound differences with. It was an amazing experience, just last night I came back from yet another trip to see how they're responding to Donald Trump's presidency. They all voted very enthusiastically for him. And one of the very first things my friends in Lake Charles, Louisiana, these are mainly workers, pipe fitters in the petrochemical plants around Lake Charles and construction workers and custodians, teachers. And one of the first things they said, oh Berkeley, oh man, you guys are violent. And they'd been watching Fox News and especially one image of a middle aged man with a Trump T-shirt on with blood running down his face. And some young person with a black mask had smashed him over the head with a skateboard I think. So that was their picture and free speech was a joke. Oh yeah, Berkeley and free speech, yeah, yeah. So I had each time, each encounter, no, no, actually that was a separate group, we're all against violence. And it's not the students, I'm sort of stumbling over myself to say no, no, it's like I remember. And so I think we have a lot of work to do on campus, basically to restore what we really are and I think what we really are is a culture that is comfortable with difference, actually interested in difference. Not in the defense, oh, don't tell me new ideas that I disagree with, but no, hey, how come you disagree? So I think actually that Berkeley could be the leader. It could be the leader in affirming free speech. To do that, we need to beef up the culture of exchange, respectful exchange and not just polarizing speakers, but a smaller forums, we need theater. Someone was proposing the Klu Klux Clowns, get theater involved, get all of the various avenues of expression going here so that when you have one speaker come it's in the context of a very lively set of public debates that's, I should just say that since the publication of Strangers I'm just at my email looking at things coming in and there's a lot of energy on both sides to establish common ground across difference and there is actually starting, there's a group called The Bridge Alliance, you can Google this and it's the umbrella group that for some 70 or 80 different organizations with funny names like Hi from the other side or Living Room Conversations that was started by Joan Blades, co-founder of moveon.org and many other organizations. One of the founders is a Berkeley faculty member and some, I don't know if he's here, John Ryder who's in charge of a Berkeley Bridge and so there's some talk of maybe one of the people just give you a sense of what my email is like two Berkeley grads have bought a bus, filled it with books about the environment and drove, I just saw them now in Baton Rouge and they're gonna stand a whole year there and I was putting them in touch with some of the people I wrote about so I do see a lot of possible common ground and we do know that there are six to eight million Americans who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and there needs to be a conversation just with this group for example. So I see a lot of possibilities and I think Berkeley's just the place to be a leader in this movement. Thank you. John? Well again, I wanna add my thanks to being part of this panel and to our esteemed leader, Chancellor Chris. Chancellor, when we were getting ready, mentioned she wanted some disagreements so I hope not to disappoint. Couple of things by way of background. So I was at the ACLU, the legal director of the ACLU for a number of years, I think that's where we were in our first met. So I care deeply about these issues but I've also written about these issues and think about them a lot. And I wanna pick up on some of the threats that people have talked about and first of all, I think the country is in a very incredible place and I think in some ways I really applaud this effort to have this conversation over the year but I don't think this is a defining issue in the country. I think the defining issue in the country is the question of white supremacy. And it gets swept under the rug. If there's a new article out in the Atlantic about Trump being the first white president. And this is important. The country has not been this divided since the Civil War. We are fighting the Civil War and I would say the South is winning. These are huge issues and I agree with a lot of stuff that a lot of the panelists said. So Stephen talked about the country pulling itself apart but I would say the country's pulling itself apart because it refused to embrace the Gettysburg Address. When Lincoln talked about a new birth of freedom, when Stephen talked about where all the people who have been excluded could become part of the political community, that is what Trump and the right wing is fighting against. It is basically the critical question for this country is can we have an inclusive we? We the people and there's some people in power, in the White House who says no. It's not simply the people who disagree with me. People are saying like they did in Dresscott, you are not human. You don't belong. So many people who talk about the First Amendment and I think Dean Erwin Chemernski, who's been a friend for many years, his recitation of the Supreme Court, I would agree with. Except I think the Supreme Court is wrong. And it's not the first time they've been wrong. They've been wrong many times. They supported the future of the slave law. They supported segregation. They supported keeping women out of the work plus. They supported, and so it's not enough to say this is what nine usually guys and now we have some women. This is what they think. I'm old enough and Erwin's old enough to note that the whole meaning of the First Amendment has been radically shifted since the 1970s. You could not have had Citizens United in the 1970s. So what is speech? Is money speech? Is corporate money speech? Supreme Court's 100 years said no. This Supreme Court said yes. So it's not enough to say, well they said it. We are moral beings. And we have to sort of think about things in a much deeper way than just what the court said. Now Chancellor Christ, as others, go back to John Stuart Mills and in a piece I wrote, which I give you the name of, it's called World's Apart, I talk about John Stuart Mills. John Stuart Mills was brilliant and he sort of laid the foundation for both the concept of liberty and the concept of free speech. And so it's not surprising that people cite John Stuart Mills, but this is the point that I wanna make. He was wrong. And part of the reason he was wrong is because he didn't have the benefit of what we've learned in the last 100 years. So Mills' concept of speech is quite simple. He's a complicated man, but it's quite simple. He said, my liberty stops at the tip of your nose. What he meant by that, and he had a concept for it, he called other regarding acts and self-regarding acts. So a self-regarding act was something I did that didn't really physically or impact others. Those are self-regarding acts. And he said, those are natural liberties and speech is one of them. And we should not, the state, should not regulate natural liberties. But he said, liberties that actually harm someone else, he called other regarding acts. Liberties that harm someone else are other regarding acts and the individual does not have a right to other regarding liberties. Those are social liberties. Society decide how to deal with that. And I don't have time to go into it in great detail, but the point that Mills was making is that some things injure other people. And both the concept of liberty and equality does not allow us to injure other people with impunity. Now, most of the debate around free speech and hate speech or discrimination is really predicated on the notion that speech really doesn't hurt, or it doesn't, maybe a little bit. So we talk about offensive speech, we talk about hate speech. And when speech actually, when we acknowledge that it hurts, we talk about speech acts. And we talk about, so for example, libel. Why do we allow that to be regulated? Because we say it hurts. So when Mills wrote, the idea is that something short of a physical injury was not a real injury. Now that same rationale was used to support another case in the United States called Plessy versus Ferguson. And when blacks complained of being segregated on rail cars, the Supreme Court responded and they said, this is a stigma that injures us. And the Supreme Court's response was, if there is an injury, it's just in your mind. It's not real. And 60 years later, when another Supreme Court overturned Plessy, it said, the stigmatic harm of segregation is indeed a constitutional injury. So part of the question is, does speech harm? And the question is obviously yes. Some of you may have been here a couple of years ago when Claude Steele spoke and talked about stereotype threat. We talk about trauma. We talk about all the things, all the ways we know that speech can harm. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be careful about speech. It doesn't mean we should ban speech. But it means the rationale, the underlying jurisprudence for speech is radically incoherent. And we avoid that incoherence by denying the fact that speech can in fact injure. And I would go so far as to say, a lot of the people, and I don't mean they should be banned, but a lot of people who are talking about are engaging in harmful acts. That's their intent. They don't want to die long. Now, Emerson, another free speech scholar, talked about four different reasons for free speech. Talk about self-autonomy, participation, truth, and stability. So almost everyone who talks about free speech in a serious way say that speech is a multiple set of values. What happens when those values conflict? What do we do then? So in that sense, I would say it's very hard in a deep sense to be an absolutist because you're talking about a complex set of values. And one reason we actually don't like regulating speech is that it violates the principle of both autonomy and equality. So in the little time I have left, I just wanted to throw out a couple other concepts. I want to invite you to do what was just suggested, to think deeply. One of my buddies is a head of the Enterprise Institute and a very conservative, so I don't think people should just talk to people who agree with them. But there's a way in which we can talk. There's a way in which we can exchange. I was at the ACLU and I brought to the ACLU the question of racial harassment in the workplace. The initial response from the ACLU was that's just speech. And I said, so why is sexual harassment in the workplace not just speech? Now think about this. In the 1970s, women go into the workplace and they see nude pictures hung up around the wall. What's the response? The response is not the adage, you correct bad speech with more speech. And some people literally said if they don't like the pictures, the men are hanging up, they can hang up their own pictures. It doesn't make any sense. So again, I live or into homes. Talk about the marketplace of ideas. Most of us have learned that markets are radically incoherent. There are many different markets. And we don't trust markets to totally create the kind of society we want. Do we trust government? No, but it means we have to think of something in a much more sophisticated way. So let me just end by saying this. One of the points is that if we try to regulate speech, which apparently we do with child pornography, apparently we do with libel, apparently we do if you split up with your girlfriend or boyfriend or whoever and you post a picture, that's a new whatever, that's regulated. So, and why? Because it's a harm. Should we trust government? I don't know. What do we mean by government? Do we mean the police? The same people who are saying, and I would venture to say, the people in Louisiana when they, there's blood coming out of demonstrators at Berkeley. What about the blood coming out of Michael Brown? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. There's an article, I mentioned, the defining issue in the country today is who belongs? Can the other belong? And that's the question. So you have right wing nationalist ethnic groups popping up all around the country as the country, as countries become more diverse. That is what's challenging democracy. And going back again to Lincoln's thing, can we think of a new birth of freedom where all are included? And again, I actually believe strongly in equality, strongly in the First Amendment, strongly in free speech, what happens when they conflict? I think the animating principle is that belonging, participating, is what holds both equality and free speech. That's what we should be leaning to. And Canada, when they refused to allow sexist speech, they argued that the Canadian Supreme Court, they were not allowing it because it violated the principle of belonging. Now, by some accounts, Canada has more speech than we do. Canada has more demonstration than we do. They're probably not perfect. But I believe we can do better. And I think we do better by engaging these questions in a deep way, not in a sloganistic way, not in a simple way. Yes, we're in a hard place. And so I'm not saying we have the answers, but I think we can do better at posing the question. Thank you. So we have a really interesting conflict here, I think. And we're really fascinating. We have, on the one hand, an account of the jurisprudence of the country, where what the Supreme Court has said. And John is really challenging that as an adequate guide to the harm that speech can do. So I'd like our panelists to reflect on the differences between physical harm and emotional harm. Well, I agreed with a lot that you said, John. What I would add is that we need here in public forums to discuss injury. What is injury? Do we all see it the same way? Do we recognize it? Obviously, in this country at this moment, and you're right, it is about like the Civil War. And I do think race is hugely central to this. But then we need a conversation about it. And that's exactly, this is the forum, where it should be. So rather than decide what injury, we should talk about it. And did I get you right? Well, just two things. Most social scientists today, neuroscientists, health scientists, can measure injury. So it's not totally subjective. We all know trauma is real. We all know that if you do some things, you actually change the structure of the brain. And yes, I think we should discuss it. But I'm saying that some people who don't want to discuss it, they want to inflict the injury. That's what they're asking for permission to inflict the injury. And I don't think we should give them that permission. And oftentimes it's asymmetrical. We have these false equations. So Trump can say that the right wing, KKK, neo-Nazis is the same as people who are asking for an inclusive society. Fundamentally wrong. And so yes, I think we should have these discussions. And the last thing I'll say is this. There's a German philosopher named Habermas. He talked about what are the conditions necessary to have a true dialogue. And we actually don't spend any time with that. It's just to throw people together and let them and see who comes out on top. But I believe in talking to people who are different, but also believe in paying attention to injuries, paying attention to equality, paying attention to, and by this, the Civil War. Lincoln approached the South and he said, I actually don't want a war. So if you will agree to stay in the Union, I will help industrialize the South. They said it's too late. He said, if you will stay in the Union, I will allow you to keep your slaves. You can't expand it into territories, but you can keep your, this was Lincoln. And they said it's too late. And they said, we want to leave. And Lincoln said, that's not on the table. So your point, Stephen, in terms of, there's certain things that are closed. There's certain things that are off the table. And I think that everyone here belongs should be a closed question. That you can't say that transgender people don't belong in this community, get out. So that's what I would push for is like, and that's why I say the critical question is, who are the we? And that's the question that this country has been struggling with since this very inception. So I see Irwin and Stephen both wanting very much to say something. I do want to address your question. It's different between physical and emotional harm. But I think one problem with the discussion we've had is I think we're combining three very different questions. One question is, what is the current law with regard to the First Amendment that you as chance on this campus must observe? Second, what should be the law with regard to the First Amendment? Which is really what John's talking about. And third, how should we all act in this context? And I just want to comment on each of those in light of the question you posed. Be clear, the law of the First Amendment now is that all ideas and views can be expressed on campus. The campus cannot prevent or punish speech because offensive, no matter how offensive it is. Whatever you might think with regard to the Nazis in Skokie, every court to rule on the question held that the Nazis had the right to march in Skokie, no matter how much offense that caused. If the chancellor of the campus were to try to prevent speech because they follow what John believes, they will get sued, they will lose, they'll be liable for money damages, they'll be liable for attorney's fees, and they'll make martyrs of those who they're trying to suppress. So we have to separate what we might want the law to be and the ideal for what it actually is now. Second, we can then talk about, as John's talking about in others, what should the law be? And here I do think I disagree with John, not in terms of his description of the pain of speech, not in terms of a description of the nature of the country, but in terms of the basic premise what campus are about. I think it's the nature of campuses that there has to be full inquiry and ideas. That's what academic freedom is, and it has to be that, that if we're really gonna have academic freedom, that kind of inquiry, all ideas and views have to be expressed. The alternative to that is for a campus to be able to say, this is the truth as we see it in any other viewpoint we can prevent and punish. And if John were in charge and able to determine that truth, I might be comfortable with it, but what we know is that the people who are gonna be in charge might find my views or John's views to be too offensive. If Southerners in the early 1960s could have suppressed the speech they didn't like is offensive, they would have stopped the civil rights protesters. The only way our speech can be protected tomorrow is to make sure we're protecting this speech that we don't like today. And so to answer Chancellor Chris's question, the law is and the law should be to draw a distinction between physical and emotional harm. Now in reality there may not be that distinction. Great emotional harm can have physical manifestations. But the law is clear, well there's no right to cause somebody to physically fear for his or her safety. You can't stop speech because it's offensive and it'll cause emotional harm. Well that then leads to the third question. What should we do? Well obviously we should engage in discourse like this. We should also always remember just because the First Amendment right to say something doesn't mean it should be said. And also we should remember that we as campus officials as a chancellor, as a provost, as a dean, also have speech. When there's speech that goes on that we think is offensive or inappropriate we need to speak out against it. We need to describe the kind of community we wanna be. But I believe we are far better off as a university, as a society, allowing the speech to go on than at all anybody in power to punish speech because they think it's too offensive. So yeah I could have some good rollicking fights with John I think. Cause I think for example, there's a whole number of, I have a whole list of cliches that I don't use and avoid cause I think they stop discussions and circumvent and white supremacy is one of them. Although the phenomenon is real. The whole complex is absolutely correct. Let me talk about where we agree to a certain extent though cause I think that might be more useful and then try a slightly different answer than Irwin gave. I don't normally do this but I'd like to state my bona fides on this question. Students here won't know this cause it happened I think 12, 14 years ago but the adults remember. So Trent Lott was a Republican Senate Majority Leader and he gave a talk for Strom Thurman's 180th birthday, whatever it was. And he said, the adults will remember this, right? You know the episode sometime. And he said, gosh, Strom, if you'd won that election in 1948 to be president maybe we wouldn't have all these problems today in the South or else run, right? It's like what the, right? I think if you check your chronology, I was the first conservative commentator to write publicly that he had to go. And some of my conservative friends disagreed and said we can't let the left tell us who our leaders are. And I said, no, no, we're not doing that. When somebody's a blithering idiot, doesn't matter what the left says, we ought to say who can stay as our leaders, right? Okay. It was not unusual back in the 1960s for a guy named George Lincoln Rockwell to appear on college campuses. I'm not sure how many of you know that name in students. He was the head of the American Nazi party until one of his own members shot him at a laundromat in 1967. How these guys end, right? Now his, I don't think he came to Berkeley but I know he came to Cornell and I know about his Cornell visit because I knew two faculty members there. One of them was Allen Bloom who opposed him coming. He was a conservative as opposed to him coming. And the liberals, some liberals opposed it too. It was not a strict left-right divide but the liberals wanted to have him on campus. Why? Because they wanted to confront him. I think you have more examples like this and that seems to me it's faded from the liberal university. I hope that there's no fool here who wants to invite Richard Spencer to come. Auburn University had to let him speak because as a public university, what the federal court had said, he has a First Amendment right, you have to let him speak. But if he did, here's the attitude I wish we had here. I wish we had the collective attitude, okay, he's got a right to speak here. We're gonna squash him like a bug. And I would join the rally to around, I'm not sure what phrase was the right one to use. Students would describe marginalized students today. Groups would be targeted and say we're not only gonna be your champions, we're gonna show up and... Turn it off, Max. That's one way of doing it. If there's questions, by the way, I'm not sure this will work. I have this line of questions I would do with him but conclude with saying that all of your principles of your state essentially mean you've renounced your American citizenship. So I'm gonna regard you as an illegal alien who should be deported and see how you would take all that. I think that'd be fun, right? And a lot of people here might disagree about that but I just wanna repeat this attitude. I think as much to you say, I think we are not, we don't, I think we can make out the intent of people who come who want to do people injury, emotional injury and otherwise. I think that's absolutely intelligible principle. I do agree with Irwin that once you make that an official policy and let governments use it, I mean, really want the Trump administration running with that doctrine. I don't think so. I think that as a practical matter, that's a problem, but I think that the argument is a very good one and I actually strongly agree with it. So I'm now gonna ask a question that goes in a different direction as these are the questions that keep me up at night. And so I'm looking for some advice from this panel about them. So we have two conservative speakers. Actually one is a set of speakers. Malo Yiannopoulos is gonna bring speakers with him starting on the 24th of September. Benjamin Shapiro is coming on the 14th of September. And two arguments that have certainly been made to me about restricting this speech. I've consulted with a lot of lawyers and they all say if these have been legitimately invited speakers by student groups, both of which are, you have to let them speak. But the arguments for cancellation of an event are either that it is going to cause an imminent threat to the safety of the community. So my first question is what would constitute that threat? And the second is that there should be, some people say, some reasonable limitation on cost. It's obviously won't surprise anybody in this room that it's gonna be very costly to put in place the security precautions we think are important. So do you think either of these safety or cost should be limitations on speakers brought to campus? I might say with Malo one of the arguments that's been made to me is this is going to be enormously disruptive of the campus's functioning for those four days. So how do you, if you were me, how would you be answering those questions? I'll jump in here for a minute. I think there's a lot that you could do, but I agree with Irwin's recitation of the law. I don't agree with a lot of what else he said. Oh, do also want you to sort of know the lawyer's trick he just did. He basically defined me in a way that's not right. And then he argued against it. If John was that he would say, well, I'm not talking about the truth. So I talked about it, engaging with conservatives, engaging with people who are different than you, but they're bound to it. It's not unbounded. So I'm not saying you only have people who you agree with. And the thing that the Supreme Court and most people who claim the absolute priority of the First Amendment don't really deal with injury. They trivialize it. So when Irwin did, when he went back to, started talking about offense. I'm not talking about offense. I'm talking about you can, and any medical person, you can check with this. The difference between physical and psychological injuries is small and sometimes even greater. So what I would say is that, first in terms of cost, contain the cost. So you might say, okay, this is a big sized room. Maybe we could get a smaller room. And for safety, we can't help people sitting in owls or whatever, but I mean, so you have a right to actually control time, place, and manner. And that's the current law. But I teach in the law school with Irwin and I teach students how the law is constantly evolving. So I think from my perspective, it's a cop out to just say, this is what the law is now. For you, Chancellor, you may be stuck with that, but you're not. You're here to actually make a new world. You're not here just to inhabit the world that we messed up. I'm certainly in favor of making the world new. I don't think we have, but we can start now. We won't be done by the end of this month. Frustratingly. To come back to the question of what to do in the short term, I mean, I'm not sure that I have an answer given how sort of close the constraints are on what the law demands of us, what our sort of precedent policies are since I gathered that if we were to sort of say, oh, no, we have a new policy, that would be a kind of prior restraint on these events. In this situation, I think that we are, the hand has more or less been dealt. I think a medium term question, while we are pushing to redefine the conversation at the Supreme Court about the relation of speech to injury is how here on this campus, we can sort of reshape the conditions of events such that speakers whose only goal is to provoke are not entitled to the steps of Sproul Hall based on the invitation of a single registered student organization. Whether that should be done in the long term, by the firm way by redefining policy or by a give and take, the dialogic way that would hopefully make registered student organizations less interested in demonstrating their rights through outrage and more interested in demonstrating the value of free speech through engagement. And as I said before, the sort of drawing for them a multiplicity of voices. I do not know which is the more feasible. It seems to me that the latter is the more valuable. I think my advice to you here would be, this is a place where you should follow the law. If you don't follow the law, you're gonna get sued, you're gonna lose. And what's gonna happen here is, you're gonna make martyrs of those very individuals who you're silencing. What Milo and Ann Coulter most want is to be kept from speaking on this campus. And if you do that, you're empowering them. Those who think of this as progressives cannot cede freedom of speech just to the right and let them be the champions of speech. Now, in answer to your specific questions, the law uses the word reason-ness. You have the duty to take all reasonable steps to ensure that they're able to speak. So you have to take reasonable steps to ensure that they can speak consistent with public safety. If despite all reasonable steps, you conclude, there is no way to allow them to speak and preserve public safety, then you can stop them from doing so. You have to show that it's a last resort. You have to show you didn't do so on the base of viewpoint. But your paramount duty as chancellor is to protect the safety of the students, the staff and the faculty on campus. You have to expend a reasonable amount of money in order to do this. Now, what's reasonable is gonna be assessed in the context. And there is a point at which you can understandably say, we couldn't spend any more than this, but there is a clear burden on doing so. And what's important here to remember is that freedom of speech also has been crucial for advancing civil rights, for stopping the Vietnam War. It's not just a tool of oppression. And if we don't allow freedom of speech in these instances, then it really does empower those who are most afraid of and give them a tremendous tool to use against us. I have to say, I really agree with what you just said. But I also agree that psychological injury is real and important, and I therefore think we need a series of public debates on what psychological injury is. And not presume that all people are on board with us, you know, because they aren't. And so have a public debate. I'm thinking of the debates on whether the US should have gone into Iraq, and you had Christopher Hitchens, who said yes, you must, and Paulie Baldwin, you must remember that there was a Mark Danner on the other side, and they went at it, you know, it was a debate. Now you might be offended at the idea that, wait a minute, we've already, we've come a long way on this, and so you're talking to people who don't agree with what we know to be true. But I think that's where we're at as a country. I often had that feeling, talking to people in Louisiana over those five years, thinking, wait a minute, this was a conversation I remember having in 1962, and you're still with it, you know, and sometimes someone would say to me, oh, I'll give you an example. I interviewed a guy, worked in, born on a plantation, white, Cajun, 60s, Tea Party guy, Trump guy, and born on a sugar plantation, he worked in oil all his life, so it's the old south and the new south, and I'm asking him, we're out on a fishing trip, I say okay, race, Mike, I really, let's just talk about race, I don't think I'm getting a clear read here, and he said, oh, I'm a reform bigot. So I said, well, what's a reform bigot? What is a bigot? Well, a bigot's someone who hates blacks or uses the N word, I never hated blacks, and the N word, well, in the 19th, I did use it, blacks also used it, but now I'm offended, since the 1960s, he said, been offended, and on Facebook, if anyone uses that word, I de-friend them. So, reformed bigot, okay. So I say, well, what was it like when your school, public school in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, in the lower reaches of the Mississippi, it's now called Cancer Alley, and Donaldsonville High, tell me how you experience integration, he said, well, in high school, the first freshman year, we had two blacks, and in senior year, half of our class was black, and I asked him, so, did you make any new friends? And you know what his answer was? A long silence. Nice, you're making me think. You're making me think. In other words, the conversation that was a new thought to him, so, okay, racism, sure, but the fact that he hadn't even thought about it, we need to talk about it, we need to certainly, there, that conversation needs to be moved forward, but even as you're saying, the whole nation is stuck here, so we do have to go back over territory we think is settled, and get that out in the form of public debates, many, many of them Berkeley, the leader. So now, I'm going to throw this open to questions from you. It's gonna be hard to pass the mic around, but we'll try. Oh, perfect, okay, I'm gonna sit here, yeah. Hi, thank you for being here, I'm Luna. So I will take John's proposition one step further, and Dean Chemerinsky, please don't hold it against me. So I think that we have an issue of definitions here. I don't think that this is a conversation about free speech or different views, or even how UC Berkeley as a university and us as students should respond to next week's events. I think this is a more fundamental question, and to answer it, I think we should first ask what the object and purpose of the law is, in general and specifically the First Amendment. I think the purpose of the law is to achieve certain values. The law is at the service of those values and not the other way round. So if the law is not an answer unto itself, why do we protect free speech? Not because the forefathers had an absolute truth handed to them and they just sat down and codified it, but because they sat down, talked about it and considered which values we, as a society, agreed we wanted to pursue. So I think perhaps this is a time when we should ask ourselves the same question that the forefathers asked. One, what are our values? This is a problem of definitions. We have to define the values that we want to uphold as a society. If, as John said, the values that we want are justice, fairness, belonging, and a we the people, then how do we achieve them? The law is not unquestionable. The law is not inevitable. The law is there to serve societal needs. So do we achieve these goals by allowing each other to engage in hateful speech that has very real and tangible consequences beyond emotional harm? I don't know. If that is not a way in which we achieve those values, then I want to push against the notion of the inviolability of the First Amendment because after all, and this is the last thing I'm gonna say, to amend is, and I quote, to change a text in order to make it more accurate or more fair. Thank you. Other questions? Yes, you win the purple shirt. I think that's purple. I don't really know the microphone. I think you can't, the people outside of this room can't hear us without the microphone. Hi, my name is Bill McGregor. I work up at the Lawrence Hall of Science and I'm the other conservative in the room. Yes, and I also wanted to say that I find it both dangerous and threatening the left's attempt to put anybody who supported Trump as a white supremacist. I think that is very unhealthy for the nation. I also think that when I get an email from the chancellor that says regarding the Trump's decision to end DACA, that says, we call on the Berkeley community to get together and respond in whatever way they see fit. Any way they see fit, I think, is broad territory. And I read that as kind of a willingness to tolerate violence. And I think that is unhealthy for the community. So what I would like to know is what is the best response from a top administrator to a situation like the appearance of Milo? My view is we deploy your views, we uphold your rights and leave it at that. I think there's been a wink, wink, nod, nod towards violence and I find that very disturbing. Thank you. Well, I want to be very clear that I am very much against violence, I won't tolerate it. I certainly didn't mean those words in the letter to imply that I did. That's you and the, with the computer. Hi, I'm Mukund. I'm a law student here at Berkeley. I want to thank you for the great panel. I think that there were some things in your discussion about free speech at Berkeley that were left out. And so I'd like to expand on some of those. I wrote on length about these in a September 5th op-ed in the Daily Cal, criticizing the chancellor and mayor for obstructing anti-racist speech on August 27th when white supremacists came to Berkeley and there were several counter-protests. This is a problem because the discussion about free speech on college campuses has been entirely about conservative speakers and right-wing provocateurs and not about progressive students and faculty who have been silenced for their attempts to use free speech to protest. So just to give the timeline on this, on August 23rd, Chancellor Christ made a very widely publicized statement on free speech saying that free speech is who we are. But two days later, she sent an email to the campus endorsing the city council's advice to quote, stay away from all of downtown Berkeley and to not attend protests. One day before August 27th, this was on August 27th, a coalition of 100 unions and community organizations planned to hold a safe Bay Area rally against hate on Crescent Lawn. And one day before that rally, UCPD barricaded Crescent Lawn and this coalition, these thousands of people were forced onto Oxford Street, which made it more dangerous because of vehicular accidents, not accidents, I mean the murder that happened in Charlottesville. So we had a rally on Oxford Street, we protected ourselves with the security seamen, it was safe. On August 28th, and this is two days after Chancellor Christ told people to not go to a rally, she said that by pushing people onto Oxford Street, she aimed to protect our campus and community and she applauded the quote, thousands who protested peacefully in Berkeley. I think, I mean, I'll be quite honest, I think this is shameful opportunism to on the one hand, encourage people to not protest, to push them off campus when they try to use their free speech rights and then to say that you applaud their protest. So the university has estimated that it'll cost $13,000 to secure and staff Zellerbaugh Hall, which is where Ben Shapiro is going to be speaking. I'm curious to ask Dean Chemerinsky and Professor Powell if it's legal to give a one-time offer of $13,000 to bring a political speaker to campus. And my question to Chancellor Christ is if you're willing to pay that much money to staff Ben Shapiro's event, would you be willing to pay that much money? My group, the International Socialist Organization wants to bring Stephen Slatt at a campus. He was fired from University of Illinois in 2014 for sending out tweets critical of Israel. He would have a lot to say about free speech on college campuses. So if we bring him to campus, would you also pay $13,000 to secure an adequate venue for him? Thank you. Actually, the security costs in Zellerbaugh are being paid by the BCR. The venue and staffing costs may be paid by the university. The venue and staffing costs are because I believe that it was critical to give Ben Shapiro the opportunity to speak on campus and it was the one venue that was available. Yes, in the... What? What? The same amount. When I pay the same amount, I certainly would pay the same amount for a speaker from a different point of view. And in fact, I already have made a commitment to the Division of Equity and Inclusion for a speaker series, which they'll be in charge of doing. And there's another group that's meeting to plan a point counterpoint speaker series with people with very sharply divergent views to talk to each other. Okay, yes, in the front. I don't have anything nearly so well-scripted or planned to say, but there's such a difference between words that we've heard such as belonging, common ground, who are we, engagement, and squash them like a bug. Right? Okay, all right, so I know you don't mean literally. Okay, I'm just working on the assumption that none of us are about violence here. Okay, I'm interested in the emotional slide from taking offense into violence, right? Which obviously happens pretty easily in heated times. I don't think outrage and free speech are in opposition to each other, which has sort of been presented also. I'm really interested in silence as a kind of freedom of speech. Maybe related to turning your back, like you said. Go to a speaker and turn your back. That's something, right? A lot of my friends felt that an appropriate response to some of the well-publicized, highly anticipated protests at the Civic Center would be really encouraging people just not to go to let people you disagree with talk to themselves and not create a news event out of it. Like you said, the thing that these people want most is to be martyred. So I'm just, I'm really torn between the extremes of just saying if I really disagree and I don't wanna be violent and I don't wanna get hurt, I should just stay home, write something really eloquent, do something constructive that supports my beliefs in another way, be silent, and that's a way of being exercising my free speech or getting out there and engaging and hoping I don't get hurt, right? So I don't know if that seems, if that's passive or very consciously active, right? To turn one's back, to not show up, to not argue face-to-face to listen but not to give others the opportunity to, what's the word, silence me, right? Okay, I hope that made some sense. David? I didn't wanna suggest that, sure, that outrage in the First Amendment were incompatible. Clearly, there, you know, all of the victories that progressives have achieved through freedom of speech and through freedom of assembly have called for outraged fuel dam. I wanted to suggest that sort of deliberate provocation of outrage by sort of injecting a speaker like Enopolis into the campus environment was not the most constructive way to produce dialogue. I think outrage as a response to Enopolis as presence is entirely merited. But I don't think it's the only way that we can choose to sort of respond to that sort of barnstorming of a professional provocateur. I think coming and yelling back, affirming our own values in his presence is entirely among the right things to do. You're right, though, that that confrontation sort of invites just the further escalation towards all kinds of injury, both for the people who are present, for the people who are sort of taking part in the confrontation, and for the campus more broadly as the sort of atmosphere of fear may envelop not just Sproul Plaza, but the rest of the campus. I think there's a big difference between showing up and turning your back and going to another venue and using your voice and your rights in a more productive, excuse me, in a way that is directly productive and sort of about a different topic. And I think that sort of both the silent protest and the desire that Arlie suggested to produce sort of counter-programming activities that actually celebrate our rights and our voice in a joyful way are another option. I know that the sort of departments at our more creative end of the campus are thinking about creative counter-programs even now. My vote is for the Hamilton sing-along, but we'll let you know how it goes. You could go to the offensive presentation and all 100 of you turn around to express it, but you can have something written on your back as to what you think. And you know, backing up a little, I'd love to see the offensive lectures, one of a dozen lectures going on that day, in other words, more happening. Counter-programming. A counter-programming, exactly. It's as if without intending it, the Berkeley campus culture a little bit has been influenced by the public culture and the media, which is highly polarized and where people aren't having respectful conversations about meaningful issues. They're yelling at each other and verbal bombs are going back and forth. And so in a way, a lot of people are ducking their heads and lying low. And instead of being polarized like the national culture is, let Berkeley be the leader in rising up and creating a great deal of debate in every kind of form. I mean, let's make it up. And in a way, therefore, be an alternative to the national culture, not a reflection of it. You're not gonna say anything about how what that means to squash the bug. I meant that figuratively, right? What I meant was have a robust attitude. Well, here's what I mean. Let me do it more seriously, sorry. It's being a little flip. What I mean is that universities ought to be the best institutions for confronting this kind of problem. That's the premise of what I'm saying. And I think the university are losing this ability for a whole bunch of reasons. I think, well, I can play that a lot of what demagogic speakers out in a non-university audience do a lot more damage and inflict a lot more hurt, are they, a lot more mischief. So my point was is when I said squash them like a bug, I meant have the disposition that we have contempt for you, ridicule, by the way, is always good. We're gonna out argue you, we're gonna have some counter program. I'm gonna have a whole menu of things to show you give us the best and you're gonna run out of here. The attitude I'm gonna have, you're gonna run out of here humiliated. That's the disposition I wished we had. Now, that's not perfect and as I say, I think there needs to be some thought to the people who are genuinely aggrieved by someone who comes. I'll just say one more thing to Chancellor Christ about this, one practical difficulty with what? When is Milo coming? Two weeks, right? I don't know the guy, by the way. I can boast that I was a victim of one of his tweetstorms once for criticism I made of Donald Trump so I could wear that as a badge of honor. One difficulty that you have the university has is which Milo's gonna show up. He's a Jacqueline Hyde character. And I would suggest this, is if you have some time in inclination, go on YouTube and look up his name and it's got hundreds of YouTube videos. Pick ten at random. You'll see a Milo who's in his Cambridge University business suit doing an Oxford style debate. Pretty sober, his hair will be dark. You'll see the Milo with the feather boa with his hair dyed white and carrying on like crazy. You can see him on some news shows where he's running circles around the news anchors, I think, I mean the guy's very talented. Of course what I have also, there's one from his appearance at University of Massachusetts Amherst two years ago where his speech was five seconds long. Did anybody know this one? He got up, the microphone paused for a moment and he said, feminism is cancer. And then he walked off. That was designed to blow the place up, right? That's not the Milo you want. And I have a hunch, although I don't know this, I don't know him. I have a hunch the one who shows up in a couple of weeks may be better behaved. I hope I'm not wrong about that. I could be wrong about that. But we'll see, he's a Jekyll and Hyde character and that doesn't even span the range there. So there's a difficulty because we don't know how that's gonna go. The woman in the black shirt right in front of the camera. You. Many of our students and faculty have been attacked on social media, have been threatened violently, people threatening to come into their classrooms and set them on fire for expressing their free speech views in social media. And so one of the things I'd like us to think about are the ways in which the question of free speech is fundamentally and radically altered by social media because I think that's something that we haven't actually addressed. And I think that may also be one of the reasons that millennials have a very different kind of relationship to social media. Secondly, on that question of violence and on picking up the question of imminent safety, safety threat, it's not just about abstract students, abstract faculty, it's also about our staff, right? Some of whom are here today who have to come to work in what is ostensibly going to be a hostile workplace. And it's not just Milo and Koltor or Steve Bannon, it's their supporters that create a problem for us, right? That create issues of safety. And this is not just, again, this is not just abstract. Our staff are the first people who have to deal when our printers get hacked with racist and violent prints that just spin out all of our paper, right? With swastikas, et cetera, right? They have to answer the phones when we're being threatened in our departments. And also, so how do we, when this is happening, I am really concerned about safety. I'm also concerned about safety as a parent of a college freshman, right? I don't want my kid to have to engage that. And also, when we push it off campus, we push it next to Berkeley High, right? So we're in Berkeley Community College. So we're making our surrounding community vulnerable, right? So I want us to think very carefully, I do actually think that this is an imminent threat to our safety. And I want to figure out how we can address that. And frankly, I'm proposing that we boycott that this is not safe for us. And so students shouldn't have to go to class. I shouldn't have to teach in an environment in which, for a week, right? Amen. That this is going to be a circus. And I don't know if somebody is actually going to follow me home and knock me over the head. So does anybody on the panel want to speak to those questions? Well, I had a couple of thoughts. So first of all, thank you. And it's helpful because to me, sometimes, as you said, these are too abstract. There was a news hung in a school, local high school here yesterday. You had the secretary of education saying she's rolling back stuff on terms of protecting women in terms of sexual harassment. So these are threats. And it's actually coming from the top. And I respectfully suggest the solution is not to be silent. That this is something much more pernicious than just even speech. This is a concerted effort. And so one of the things I hope the university will do in addition to thinking about how do you protect students, faculty, our environment? And I think, yes, Erwin's right in terms of, you have some constraints in terms of the law. But affirmatively, what do we stand for? What are we as a university, and we stand for, yes, we stand for free speech. That was the one reason I came out to Berkeley or out to California in 1965. But we stand for something else as well. What's our affirmative values that we can really sink into and make those animate? So the safety issues are real. People are afraid, and they should be. And I don't think the answer is, stay home. To withdraw. I mean, your point in terms of democratic institutions die if everybody withdraws, if everybody goes inside. So I'm not saying there's a easy solution, but I hope we really grapple with this. How do we really make this a safe community day in and day out? How do we actually animate all our values? And I would be concerned if we only animate the value of free speech. The man with the gray shirt on the aisle. Thanks so much. My name's Joss Lavery, I teach in the English department. And I'm currently teaching a course called genres of free speech, which is designed to address some of these issues. And I'm really grateful especially to colleagues who've addressed issues of safety for staff and faculty in the context of mounting violence. I think it might be helpful since there remains, I think, a degree of sentimentality around the idea of offensive ideas to clarify the circumstances that we were facing when Mylaianopolis was headed to campus that caused me and Professor Landreth and others to sign a letter asking for his invitation to be rescinded. And that was not merely that he had appeared in front of a campus and said, feminism is a cancer, but that at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, he had targeted a trans woman individually for sexual harassment in front of a large group of people, had projected a photograph of this woman, had traumatized this woman, and at a moment where UC Berkeley was facing its own internal debate about the limits of sexual harassment discourse on campus, it struck me and a number of other people as massively important that we protect our students from that kind of direct targeting. This isn't, in other words, a question of the distinction between hateful ideas and legitimate ideas, but the distinction between speech and violent conduct and harassment, and the truth of the matter is that this moment, this whole discourse around free speech is at least partly designed to bring harassment discourse more fully into legitimated speech. That is the stated goal of people like Mylaianopolis, who target millennials, call them snowflakes, try to attack and embarrass and humiliate people on any number of grounds. The purpose is not to debate outrageous ideas and for us to enjoy that, but really to legitimate and normalize a culture of targeted harassment of members of protected groups. So to that extent, I think one of our responsibilities as a community is really to think not just about how do we recognize freedom and what kinds of freedom do we want to cherish and protect, but how do we stand up for community values of minorities in our community when they're under attack, not by millennials who misunderstand Twitter, but by the executive branch of the US government itself. Thanks. Erwin, would you like to talk a little bit about, I think John raises a really interesting issue of when it is that speech in a public setting like this becomes individual harassment. It would be good to draw that distinction. To be clear, there's no First Amendment right to reveal private information in public about somebody. That if somebody were to reveal very personal information, that's not speech protected by the First Amendment. There's no right to say false things that are injurious to the reputation of others in public. There's no right to say things that cause people to reasonably fear for their safety. So if somebody is getting email messages that are threatening, I would hope that the campus would investigate, take disciplinary action as a student or faculty member, turn it over to law enforcement authorities if it's somebody else for prosecution because there's no right to make somebody fear for their safety. There's no right to engage or be regarded by the law's harassment. Those that earlier harassment usually requires that it be directed at a person, that it be evasive, that interfere with their educational opportunity. Now, the usual remedy of the law when these things happen is that the victim can sue for money damages. The problem with that is victims generally don't want to sue for money damages. They want it all to be over. They don't want to have to take all of the time and effort of going through the legal system. What they'd really prefer is if the campus would just prevent that speaker from coming on and speaking at all. The law doesn't allow that. It's called a prior restraint. Now, I'd love to debate, John, about what would be our ideal in terms of society with regard to speech. Would we be better off if the campus had the power to prevent the speakers that they find defensive from being there? We might think that's our ideal, but I so worry that that's what would have kept the students from protesting segregation or from protesting the Vietnam War. That when you give the government the power to censor the speech that we find offensive, it's gonna be used against us. But the basic bottom line answer to your question is the law generally doesn't allow preventing people from speak because we think that they're gonna say something that's unprotected speech. We have time for two more questions. Let's see, you in the red shirt. So something that I've been trying to sort out for myself. You can imagine a situation in which thousands and thousands of people each individually have a, you know, will say something that is clearly protected speech. I don't like this person. I want you to go away. But in aggregate, it adds up to something that feels like harassment. I'm curious how to think about that. Anybody wanna address this? I think it's an excellent question and it gets back to Professor Rayford's point about the real damage that anonymous targeting through the internet can cause. That, and we're talking about this because Unopolis was a master of this particular technique of sort of singling out an individual through an apparently innocuous tweet back when he was still allowed on Twitter that would then direct this sort of Sutteranian ecosystem of trolls to open this fire hose of anonymous hatred, anonymous harassment. I, the law as it's been sort of articulated here has just seems not to have caught up with what speech is now, the way that speech is no longer sort of mediated by a speaker who speaks as I am speaking to you now or by an audience who is present. And this I think is an opportunity for a conversation about present values and present technology to work together to try to push the law to some more sophisticated account of the harms that can be projected across virtual media through which so rapidly, so diffusely, so intensely, yet without any kind of accountability under the current sort of legal paradigms either for the platform or for the sort of individual pseudonymous speaker. In the green shirt, you've had your hand up for a long time, you. Hey, I'm Suzanna and I'm from Tennessee, so I've been participating in free speech for a while. And what I want to know is the people coming to this campus like Myla, for example, he puts the number of IC up on the board and says, if you know as he calls them illegal immigrants, then call this number. Like these are gonna, this is gonna hurt people in our community that I care deeply about. And we've said how by turning these people away, we would make them martyr out of them, but we're not gonna change the law until we fight the law. Shouldn't we take this opportunity to be a leader and say, we're not gonna allow people on this campus who will hurt our students. Like, shouldn't us fighting against them make us a leader and to try to counter this speech? And also, we have pamphlets for a counter protest that y'all are talking about. So if anybody would like them, we have them. Thank you. Would anyone like to address the question? I find so appealing the notion you say, that everyone in this room should be clear about what will happen. If the campus were to say Myla's not welcome to speak for the reasons you have, Myla and his lawyers will immediately go to court. They will immediately get an injunction so they'd be allowed to speak. The campus will have to pay Myla's lawyer's attorney's fees and perhaps some money damages as well. What's then been served by excluding Myla? Also what will happen will be, Berkeley will be the poster child for the suppression of speech. Was Berkeley as a campus and its reputation enhanced by what happened last January? I don't think so. So I think what you say may be a very romantic notion. Let's stand up for our community and keep Myla from speaking. I'm telling you, if the campus were to try, it would ultimately be very counterproductive and it really wouldn't accomplish what you want. One more question. The man in green in the corner there. You say to get me fired? Hi everyone. My name is Ruben. He, him, they, them. So I've been on campus now 10 years and there's been a couple of massive of protest demonstrations and all that. And in each one of those, there was events just like this and there was beautiful speech. And for those of us that have the privilege of showing up, we can. And many of us who have to work and can't come to these events couldn't come and their voices weren't part of that conversation, which is okay. I understand. What I don't see us spending enough time and I appreciate the clarification about some of the way the council is about safety and cost of the campus. And in that parameter, I'm curious if cost of the campus is staff time and the over hours that people are having to spend in preparation for all of these things and is that considered in that? And their emotional distress because some of them are being asked to do stuff that we didn't sign up for. And it's not in our job description but we have to do now all of a sudden. There's, I think like over a thousand student organizations on campus and just two are taking of the time of the majority of the staff. And the resources that are being allocated to two student organizations are being equitized amongst other student organizations that have just as much, if not more, needs that are imminent threats to their well-being in many different scenarios. Are all of those costs part of that conversation? And the other additional cost is what happens to the student that is being encouraged to show up and to be public and to voice your opinion and to be engaged shows up is injured or injured someone else and then find themselves in a position that they're going to end up in academic probation or dismissed. And then nobody shows up to that student a concern hearing. Nobody shows up to that session in the courtroom because I've been in that courtroom and nobody shows up. And I also know that when I show up to these protests a hundred faculty might have signed that letter but we're a hundred faculty present that night of Milo being there and being a protection of the students that were there because when we say we need to act better and be a university in those moments but then we militarize the campus in that defense then what are we being better of in those moments? And when you militarize a campus you're dealing with the unconscious and conscious bias of the police and militarization that targets people that historically have been vulnerable already. So when you add all of those things up when do we have that conversation and do we have the expenses ready to go for all of the injuries that that's going to happen? And in the moment of worst case scenario of somebody getting ran over or somebody getting shot and somebody getting killed what's the chart string to pay that off? You make, yes, we're very aware of the burden that is on staff who have been working with these extraordinarily challenging events and we're doing our best and really expending considerable resources to ensure the safety of our students. We don't want anybody to be hurt. Well, thank you. This has been exactly the kind of conversation that Arleigh was asking for. Conversation which clearly not all of us agree about all these issues but I think that we have to have more of these events in which we can talk both honestly and with thoughtfulness and civility about this issue that's so important to all of us. So please thank the panelists again.