 I wanted to bring up this document which you've entered into evidence, Jesse, DEI, in curriculum, model principles and practices. This was put out by the California community colleges and really lays out point by point what it is they expect to see in the classroom. Could you, before we dive into the documents, details, could you tell us what is the import of this? Well, this is one of several documents that the state community college system issued to inform the individual districts and colleges how to apply the new DEI rules. And this document in particular is, this is what we want to see when you are applying DEI in the classroom. This is how you incorporate it into your curriculum. These are the kind of practices you should use and not use or the types of language you should use and not use to be compliant with the state's definition of DEI. So, this will be a sort of reference for, you know, if this system is implemented where professors are evaluated, where this is incorporated into their evaluations, be like, this is the reference document. Are you aligning with what is laid out here? It's one of several sources that they're going to be referencing. It's correct? Yes. And looking inside of it, this is the kind of big picture vision they lay out that you develop and implement a pedagogy or curriculum that promotes a race-conscious and intersectional lens and equip students to engage with the world as scholars and citizens. Develops and implements a pedagogy that fosters an anti-racist and inclusive environment for minoritized students, demonstrates an ability to teach culturally affirming pedagogy. What is your reaction to that, Bill, as someone who would be affected by these new standards? Well, again, it's this relative terminology is kind of the way I look at it. Anti-racism, anti-racist intersectionality. Race-conscious? Yeah, you ask five different people and they're going to have five different definitions. And I don't know how to work in the anti-racist ideology to Boyle's law. I'm sorry that Boyle was a white scientist, you know, physicist 200 plus years ago or something along those lines. But it really becomes, I think, it's preposterous because the periodic table of the elements is what I'm charged with teaching students about and explaining how that was constructed, et cetera, et cetera, and how it works. And I think it's relative in the way they're going to evaluate me and it's not objective. And I have real concerns about my future in academia as do the other people who have been joined in the lawsuit as well. Because administrators, you know, sometimes, you know, I would say I'm trying to figure out the most polite way to say this. They can bear grudges. And so I think that evaluation language can be interpreted so many different ways. Well, you're not going far enough. Yeah, I recognize that you did X, Y, and Z, but you didn't go far enough. You could have went further. So that's kind of how this, I think, and I'm anticipating this working. I just want to add that there's a certain hilarity. Like, you know, say we like put on our little Marxist hats for a second here, there's a certain hilarity to the fact that it's administrators who are frequently paid, you know, a pretty penny in the college environment, as well as some of the DEI consultants, where now there's like a pretty thriving industry. A lot of these DEI consulting firms make bank. And there's a little bit of absurdity to these very highly paid professionals being the sort of enforcers of this, you know, and implementing a very top down thing, which I would imagine many students at California Community Colleges do not come from the most, you know, economically privileged backgrounds in the entire world and or are working really hard to put themselves through school and to attempt to, you know, work their way up in the world. And so I just think that there's also something kind of fascinating about that of like, who are the people doing the enforcement of this? If they actually care about, you know, lifting the people who are the absolute most oppressed, there's a certain absurdity to the fact that many of them I think are probably paid an awful lot of money very handsomely to do this type of thing. So I want to add to that there's a there's a bit of a tempest happening in the not the community college system, but the state college system. So in California, you have the UCs, University of California, you have the Cal State, and then you have the community college system. So in the Cal State right now, they are negotiating. And I think it's system wide with faculty unions. And administration is playing hardball, they did want to give minimal raise, but contrast that to administrators, whose raises have far outpaced faculty and inflation, so to speak. And you have you have administrators in the California State University system. So that would be, you know, places like Cal State LA, Cal State Fresno, Cal State Fullerton, etc. You have administrators that are making, you know, just under a million dollars, you know, college presidents. And then you just kind of goes down from there. They get, they get housing allowances. There are people within the Cal State system who get a housing allowance and mileage, which is greater than what professors monthly pay is. And so I think you point out something that's really good that these administrators, this is where this is all coming from. And you have faculty, you know, that are definitely Marxist as well. But you have the administrators who are really pushing this, making tremendous amounts of money far more than they would ever make in the private sector. And I think you point out something that just is really remarkable. It's hypocrisy. It's, you know, there's a lot of different adjectives we could probably come up with to describe this. But yeah, it's it's exactly that. You have administrators making huge amounts of money compared to faculty. And they're the ones decrying, you know, white privilege and everything else. I know one aspect of the lawsuit to is about vagueness, because if I were in this position, reading some of this would be really confusing. I wouldn't even quite understand what the actionable like instruction is, because of the way that the language is just the the the kind of flowery or, you know, abstract language, they did helpfully provide a glossary, which I've pulled up here. And one of the terms that I know caught Liz's interest is watering up. Could you share with us, Liz, what watering up is? And I mean, this is the problem. This is the problem with so much of this. Like, I just literally don't know what this means. I am a journalist. I spend all day writing words and parsing their meaning. And this is not super clear to me. I mean, read a little bit of it for our listening audience watering up is apparently, you know, instructional practices with the science of learning that we can apprentice students to be active agents in their own learning instead of watering them down with compliance oriented deficit views. This process requires students to build and braid together multiple neural, relational, and experiential processes to produce their own unique learning acceleration process. I'm sorry, this feels like if you fed chat GPT HR buzzwords. It's not clear to me how a professor is actually supposed to implement this or how this is a useful. I mean, the thing that I just keep coming back to you because ever since becoming a mom, I've been pretty interested in a lot of the stuff related to phonics education and the crisis related to how children have been taught how to read in many public schools in this country, which is obviously at a different level than the level that we're talking about. But I just keep coming back to this question of, like, wait a second at many schools across the country, there's this huge problem, which is that, like, there isn't enough instructional time or suitable enough instruction in the first place to get kids to the level that they need to be at. And then you also look at college classroom environments. And it's not clear to me why we ought to be trying to get instructors to be spending more time on these very vague wishy washy concepts versus actually ensuring that kids and young adults learn the things that they need to be learning. They need to learn how to read or like what you're talking about, they need to be figuring out how to, the basics of dosage. One of the things that I just keep coming back to is when we orient ourselves more toward these things, are we setting people up to fail because we're actually, I mean, it comes at a cost. And what's the cost actually useful instructional time? Do you have thoughts on that, Bill? That's exactly right. It takes away. We have a limited amount of time and we have a tremendous amount of material that we have to go over and skills that they have to learn. And I think what you said too at the beginning was right that it is, it's, there's multiple definitions of these words. This administrator or this advocate or I want to say, you know, I think advocate may be whether grifter may be a good word. They have a definition of this word and somebody else has a different definition of the word. Well, how am I going to be objectively evaluated in my faculty evaluation if I've got these multiple definitions of the word that I'm looking at? Who's do I go with? Yeah, it also to me, it strikes me as a little insulting to people's time. I recall, I came from a more privileged background, but I still, you know, was working as I made my way through college and my time was really scarce. And if I had been forced to, in my view, waste more time on these types of things versus actually getting useful instruction, that would have been really frustrating to me. I would imagine most community college students in the California system feel much the same way. And in a sense, this is very disrespectful to people who might be working a few jobs to pay their way through college to then force them to spend time on things that are perhaps pretty unrelated to them actually securing the type of success that they hope to get later on. Zach, could you also take us to the collectivism, individualism definitions? Yeah, this is the one that jumped out to me. Their definitions from the glossary of collectivism was an individual sense of connection to and responsibility for members of their group community. Sounds very warm and fuzzy. Individualism, the valuing of the individual over the value of groups or society as a whole. So I mean, these are both incredibly biased definitions, clearly written by someone more sympathetic to collectivism. And look, you can be a collectivist. I think history would show it's the wrong way to think about human nature, but using the state to impose that kind of orthodoxy on academics, people who are supposed to be intellectuals are free thinkers is incredibly disturbing to me and fire as the foundation for individual rights and expression. I've got to assume there's some people that are made uncomfortable by this as well, Jesse. What is just your reaction as someone who is trying to stand up for individual rights to that seeing that sort of thing being imposed? Well, I would say as a defender of individual rights, that also includes defending the individual rights of people who want to promote collectivism, as well as individualism. So I think we would object to compelling anyone to embrace any particular point of view, whether that be individualism or collectivism. And in both cases, we would defend the person whose individual rights were being violated. But yes, as an organization, we exist to specifically to defend the rights of individuals. I think this is the really delightful thing that fire does. I just appreciate it. I mean, I think we'll talk about it in a little bit in a few minutes here. But we really are so kind of delighted by the fact that we can criticize so much of this and the compelled speech here and fire is doing such a good job of representing these California professors. But then you also look at some of the things happening in Florida related to the Stop Woke Act and the sort of Chris Rufo one man mission to create a different sort of viewpoint conformity at many schools in that state. And I really appreciate and I think we as as libertarians at reason also kind of straddle that very, very tight. We walk that tight rope of like, no, don't mandate that thing over there. But then also even the thing that I like, you shouldn't be mandating any sort of viewpoint conformity in that realm either. It's really, really important that individuals have full ability to legitimately go out into the world and decide what they believe and authentically hold and articulate those beliefs for themselves as opposed to having any institution impose things top down. And I mean, without this, we don't have true academic freedom. We don't have the ability for people to really engage in robust discussion and come to, you know, take their half truths and, and, you know, have them blossom in like a very JS mill type way. Thank you so much for watching our conversation with Jesse Appleby of Fire and Professor Bill Blinken. To watch another clip, go here. To watch the full conversation, go here.