 Let me welcome you. Let me welcome everybody to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted that you can be here today. We have a vital topic with two really, really good guests. I'm looking forward to our conversation. We've been exploring what academic freedom might mean in the future for higher education for a few years now. We've had a lot of debate, a lot of really good references, some good research and some good discussion. And now I wanted to welcome two folks who have authored a really, really useful document. Stephen Bloom is with the American Council on Education. Jeremy Penn is with Penn America. Excuse me, Jeremy Young is with Penn America. And they've authored a resource guide to academic freedom. If you look on the bottom left of the screen, there's a kind of tan-coloured box. That'll bring it up. It's about 30-page PDF, really concise, well-resourced. It'll keep you up to date on everything and give you a lot of good ways to think about this. And I'd like to ask them, what does academic freedom mean in higher education moving forward? How does it change under the impact of new technologies and new politics? So without any further ado, let me welcome them up one by one. And let me bring up Stephen Bloom. Hang on one second. Let's see if all the machines are connected. Hello, Stephen Bloom. Good afternoon, everyone. Hi, Brian. Good to see you. Good to see you too. Where are you today? Is that the home office? Yes, this is our home office, you know, like many of you. We have my wife often works above me and another child, the oldest daughter over there on the second floor. We're not zoned for a private office, but that's the way it is nowadays, working in a hybrid way at A.C.E. a couple days a week and then the rest of the time here at home. Nice. It's very similar to me when I'm at home, although I usually get overrun by some of the animals. And now I'm here in Georgetown's campus, so we'll see if one of the grad students stops by to say hi. My dogs are in their crates behind me, so hopefully they'll keep quiet. Oh my gosh, okay, but we'll understand. If we say something particularly provocative, they may respond. Yeah, that's possible. Or if you were the mailman. Don't say it. Don't say it. Stephen, I'm just curious. We have a customer on the forum of asking people to introduce themselves, not by talking about their life so far, but looking ahead to what you're going to be working on. And I'm curious in your position at A.C.E., what are the big topics that are ahead of you for the rest of the year and what are the big projects? Well, thank you, Brian. So let me give a little, before I even get to answer that, I'll tell you a little bit what I do at A.C.E. As you may be familiar with it, so we all know. So Stephen Bloom, Assistant Vice President for Government Relations. I'm part of the lobbying team. I am a registered federal lobbyist here at A.C.E. I have been at A.C.E. more than 15 years. A.C.E. is not a hardware store. It's the convening umbrella organization for higher ed representing everyone from community colleges to the major research universities like Georgetown and public institutions and public and private and everyone in between in addition to our institutional members, we have about 150 higher ed related associations that either represent segments of higher ed like the research universities or the community colleges, et cetera, or administrative officials on campus. So what do I do? My portfolio includes this work on what we've labeled so-called divisive concepts, and we're going to spend a fair amount of time today talking about that. But in addition, I work on tax issues and have for many years those are sort of for things that are important to individuals and students and families like saving for college, paying for college, repaying the cost to college, things that are important to both individuals and institutions like charitable giving and endowments. And then other provisions that are really only the most hardened tax official on campus would care about. And I don't need to bore you with. In addition, I work on healthcare and healthcare reform issues. Some immigration issues, labor and employment issues have worked on other things over the years and at the moment a lot on free speech and this stuff on the so-called divisive concepts. Part of that is as a result of the fact that I'm a lawyer, we did practice for a number of years in Boston as a litigator and so have some skills and familiarity with sort of free speech and First Amendment issues from time in law school, I suppose. That's the usual route. Right, so what going forward this year? I mean, obviously this issue of divisive concepts, Jeremy and I will be talking, I think, at length and trying to answer your questions as best we can and how we got to this point in our work and the coalition that we've assembled, which is made up of not typical higher-ed associations, but many of the sort of the scholarly associations or their sort of coalitions of associations, so the Humanities Alliance, the American Historical Society and then also or associations, excuse me, American Historical Association and then also non-higher-ed folks like the ACLU and the ADL. And then in addition to that work, I have my other part of my portfolio and the biggest issue there are going to be, I suppose, on the tax side, endowments and that is a huge issue on Capitol Hill, I suspect, and that will be a huge challenge this year. I think there's likely to be focus on endowments and institutions of higher-ed, the more well-resourced ones, particularly in the house. And then maybe some issues are in the sort of healthcare trying to work for... I like student mental health, that's an issue I work on and Yellow Health, which was something that was a big deal during the pandemic and I'll continue to try and work on that too. Steve, you're a one-man army. I mean, you're covering a huge amount of policy issues at the grand scale for higher education, I have to say. Yeah, I'm one among a number at ACE, so each of us has these kinds of portfolios and so it makes for an interesting job, I'll say that. It must, it must. Well, speaking of interesting, hang on for a minute, let me bring your co-conspirator, your partner in writing up on stage as well. And this is going to be Jeremy Young coming to us from Penn America. Hello, Jeremy. Hello, as Stephen says, I'm the better dressed of the two, so happy to be here. Yes. I'm not going to get into that. I mean, neither of you have beards, so I'm already dissatisfied. But welcome, where have we found you today, Jeremy? Well, according to the name of this call room I'm in, I'm in Toronto, Albania, that's the little photo up here, but actually I'm in our offices in D.C. at Penn America. We have an office in New York as well, which is the larger of the two. But yeah, I'm in our D.C. office. Well, excellent. Well, I'm just a few blocks away from you, and I'm physically, and I'm glad to see you, but I appreciate the image of Albania over your head. That makes me happy. That's great. Jeremy, you heard how we introduce ourselves here on the forum, and I'm curious, what are you going to be working on at Penn America for the next year? What are the big ideas and the big projects for you? Oh, gosh. Well, here at Penn America, which is, your listeners probably know, is a 100-year-old free expression organization made up of writers. We, I am involved in our education, our free expression education unit, which focuses on threats to legislative threats, in particular to free expression in higher education and also in K-12 schools. So, you know, the work I do in that area is, they are the leader of our team organizing against what we call educational gag orders, these legislative, maybe known to your listeners as anti-critical race theory bills or divisive concepts bills. You know, we do a lot of, we run legislative tracking and analysis of these bills. We put out a commentary every year and a report at the end of the year to see round up how these bills have progressed and hopefully haven't progressed. We, and we do a lot of coalition building work to try to bring higher ed leaders and stakeholders together to fight this legislation to keep it from becoming law. Well, that's a very, very close focus and one that's badly needed. And I'm really, really glad to hear it, Jeremy. Thank you. And by the way, if you haven't had a chance to read that PDF yet, there's a great appendix, which is just a sampler of the laws that the authors are worried about. And that's a really handy starting point. Well, here, let me just rearrange the two if you're here on the screen a bit so everyone can see you if they work carefully. Friends, what I'd like to do is ask our guests a couple of quick questions to get them to unfold their thinking about this report and their work. And then I'm going to open the floor up to all of you. So as we proceed, please start revving up your engines for your own questions and your own comments. I'm sure that we have a great deal to talk about. To begin with, I'm fascinated by a lot of the work that goes into just a few pages early on. It seems that you're drawing heavily on the Association of American University faculty for the key sensual definition of academic freedom, which is very distinct from the American tradition of the First Amendment. And I'm also fascinated by your reliance on the Chicago statement, the Chicago principles. And I'm curious if you could just say a few words, both of you, about how those two key documents fed into your thinking and how they inform your understanding of academic freedom. Stephen, you want to start on this one? Sure. Well, I think that when we were putting this document as our first resource guide, we thought that need to be a couple of basic concepts needed to be woven together. One was academic freedom and what we see are threats to institutional autonomy. And academic freedom, as many of your guests today know if they're on campus, is a longstanding principle in American higher education. In a lot of ways, it marks us as sort of, you know, it's certainly unique compared to institutions of higher education in some parts of the world, maybe not so much in Western Europe. But it's a bedrock principle, right? It's allowed us to create institutions that are enormously important that attract the world's smartest students and faculty that have led to, you know, dynamic society, a democratic society and, you know, a vibrant economy in a lot of ways because it allows faculty to engage in research in the way they deem most appropriate that generates all sorts of important outcomes that can and do benefit the larger society in the common good. And so we thought that it was important to go back and look at these founding documents, or statements, I suppose, the AAP, the early 20th century formative document, and then their update in 1940 of statements about academic freedom because they really are quite good. And we thought it was important to include that in there. And then the Chicago principles is, you know, a pretty prominent example of the way in which a very selective institution had a number of years ago made a very deliberate and, you know, important statement about the value of free speech on campus and that all views should be, you know, should be heard, even controversial views and some that folks on campus may not agree with, right? That that's an essential part of American higher education. So that was why we think we wanted to include that, right, Jeremy? I don't know if you agree. No, I agree. I mean, this is a document that is, you know, is intended for a wide variety of institutions and a wide variety of stakeholders. And so it was important that we find as many points of consensus or near consensus as we could. You know, these are documents that have been, have achieved if not consensus, particularly in the case of the Chicago principles, certainly wide application adoption at a variety of types of institutions in a variety of states and state with a variety of political orientations. So, you know, being able to find these touchstones is certainly valuable. And I would also add, you know, we did include one more source which is that Penn America has its own principles of campus free speech, which draw on some of the same concepts but which have additional, we like to think of them as being the most specific of the campus speech statements that are available. They provide specific practical guidance for how to address a variety of situations. So we draw on those as well. Oh, excellent. Excellent. And thank you for drawing attention to that third document. This is a topic that is obviously very, very controversial, very fraught and very deep. We've had two previous sessions on this, one with a couple of authors who had written a recent book on this, one from Portland State, one from Penn, and then we had a researcher from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Right to Expression, I think is what they're called. And there was a lot of different angles, a lot of points. And I wanted to raise one right now which has been in the news for various events that have happened. And I'm not making this point. I'm ventriloquizing it because I've heard this and I might not do it justice. And anybody else who wants to ask this question better than I, please, please feel free. There's the argument that some speech is harmful in the sense that it may either do psychological harm to the people who witness it, who hear it or read it or see it. And that it may also tie into structures of inequality or even active violence. Or it may encourage people to act out on horrible ideas. We saw this, for example, most recently at the fracas at Stanford University Law School where one very conservative justice was speaking at the Invitational Campus Group. And students along with a dean protested this and saying that the speech was harmful to the student body. That was the language of harm. That was the angle here. And that ultimately it might not be worth having. And I'm curious. This seems to be, I think historically, a twist on an old concept. But it seems to be one that's very current. How do you kind of link these two or integrate these two? The defense of freedom of speech, academic freedom which leads to our great research enterprises with the idea of trying to protect vulnerable members of the academic community. That's a really good question. And the people you've had on before, it seems like you've had a lot of my friends on this show recently. Michael Barabay, Jennifer Ruth, some of those folks over at Fire. All people we, I talk to regularly and we have really good and spirited debates over these issues. I mean, I think our perspective at Penn America is that we do have to acknowledge that some speech can cause harm. If someone walks up to you and shouts a bunch of racial slurs at you, that's harmful. You can't just say that speech has no impact on people. Of course it does. But it's not the same thing as physical violence. It's not the same thing as a sort of physical actionable harm. And the problem that we run into when we talk about how to develop principles around speech is that it's very difficult to... Who gets to decide? What is the speech that causes harm and what is the speech that doesn't? There are legitimate disagreements over whether certain types of speech are beyond the pale or legitimate views, whether they're hate speech or not hate speech. And if you create a regime where someone is empowered to rule some forms of speech out of bounds, you are creating a situation where who is able to speak and what is able to be said is really dependent on who is empowered. And that is not a good situation for a university to be in. It's not a good situation for anyone to be in or any society to be in. Our view is that the response to... The response to the speech of someone that is offensive, that is wrong is generally to speak in opposition to it. There's no restrictions on that. We don't think that universities, for instance, should hesitate to speak up against speakers on their own campus who are saying things that are manifestly offensive or racist or wrong. But to ban speech, to declare certain types of speech other than a clear threat of violence is out of bounds, is really creating a situation where those same rules that are being used against that harmful speech can be used against speech that amounts to the descent of marginalized groups just as easily. Yeah. I think ASEE, we would agree with that. I mean, this notion of the best response to bad speech is more speech. Sort of a classic liberal, not a political definition, but sort of Western liberalism, right? I mean, a good example of this, it's now a few years ago, but when Columbia hosted then President of Iran, who had a long history of engaging in anti-Semitic speech, and the President of Columbia, President Bollinger, defended the right of the department that invited him to do that because that's a core academic freedom, right? And he thought that was essential to an expression of what Columbia was all about. And then when the President of Iran came and gave the speech on stage, I think he introduced him or as part of that was extremely critical of his anti-Semitic statements because of the principle of you respond to bad speech with more speech, not censorship. And I think that is the position of ASEE on this. So today, we have a joint ASEE Pan-America op-ed that got published in Newsweek that makes that point very strongly and starts out with the first paragraph is censorship is something we associate with authoritarian regimes like China and Russia. It is an American tradition and it shouldn't be an American tradition. Thank you. Thank you, both of you. That's a full-throated explication and I really, really appreciate that. Friends, I'm going to ask one more question but then I would love to stop my speech so I can hear yours instead. And this is a question about technology. At this point in 2023, we're enjoying or experiencing a great deal of technological innovation. Most recently, people are excited about generated AIs such as chat GPT and Bing's bot but we also have the huge access to recording and sharing information and mobile devices and the sharing platforms of social media and others. And I'm curious right now, thinking about campuses where people can record each other, they can reach out to people live, summon up flash mobs, get support and host discussions, interpenetrate the physical and virtual realm. Do you think the modern contemporary technology has changed or challenged that understanding of academic freedom in any way? I admit I have never gotten a chat GPT question before. So while I turn this over, Steven, do you want to turn this over? Brian, you're way more sophisticated technologically than the two of us. Yes. I do think that social media makes it more challenging, particularly for academic leaders. You know, our members, the presidents and chancellors of institutions, I just think it makes it more challenging because the speed by which speech gets spread and sometimes bad speech gets spread and their tools for both responding and managing that are in some cases very limited. If you're a public institution, you can. They are precluded under the First Amendment from taking steps to, if it's a Twitter account as an example of a student or somebody else, they can't take steps to restrict that. So I just think it does create bigger challenges for campuses and campus leaders for how they navigate and manage. That's the use of speech to spread bad speech, so-called bad speech. Yeah, I think that's true. I think about my strongest feeling here is that it's just one of the things that leads to, there is a clear through line between controversies over speech and the increasing difficulty we have in our society and on college campuses with having civil dialogue and respectful conversation with one another. And social media makes that more difficult. There have been some studies recently in the University of Wisconsin system in the University of North Carolina system, which have indicated that conservative students do feel censored on campus, but they don't feel censored by their professors. They feel censored by their peers outside of class. And one of the key ways those studies, especially the Wisconsin one, said that they feel censored by their peers is on social media. They're terrified. They're going to say something. Someone's going to record them or write it up and post it on social media. Look at this awful thing this person said. It's going to go viral and their social reputation will be destroyed. And so it's social media is a wonderful opportunity for people to connect with one another when used well, but it's also something that makes it more difficult to have conversations in what seems to be the relative privacy of the direct interaction. The fact that everyone is watching makes it harder to have free and open expression. To pick up on that, I think that Jeremy's made a good point, which is the polarization of our society and the ways in which social media sort of exacerbated that. They've taken root on campus that our students have and the studies that Jeremy was referenced, we include references to those in the resource guide. There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed yesterday. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to really read it, but talking about this very issue that it's students that are self-censoring because of fear about what other students may respond to what they have to say. That is a real challenge and it's a real problem for our institutions because it runs very counter to what our missions are. We bring people together, whether it's faculty, staff and students to debate ideas across a spectrum, including controversial ideas. That's how they learn students. That's how they learn to think critically, to confront ideas that are different than maybe their own. I was heartened to learn last week when I was at a conference on civic learning that there really is a growing movement on campus and there are some organizations that are very much engaged in trying to help this early sprouts to grow into a beautiful garden of teaching students and others on campus how to talk across difference. There are some organizations like Interfaith America that work sort of in the difference between students of different faiths and Campus Compact is working quite diligently to interpret America and I think maybe Pan America and others on teaching students giving them the tools to be able to talk across political difference and other differences on campus and that's essential because it goes to the core mission of our institutions and if students are censoring themselves and feel unable to engage in an honest dialogue it's a serious problem and it undermines what we're trying to accomplish. Thank you, thank you. That's a terrific, terrific answer. Let me get out of the way and just resume my facilitation role because there is more, there are a stack of questions that are just bubbling up and I want to make sure people get a chance to put them. And again, if you're new to the forum friends remember in the very bottom of the screen along that white strip or all the different buttons the question is to join us on stage and the question mark is to ask a question and I'm going to share one of those right now. This is from our good friend John Hollenbeck and he asks, doesn't every academic issue have a place where we can say we can't have that? See the flap at Stanford where students shout out Judge Duncan didn't those actions violate his academic freedom? So the, yeah, I mean yes but what's particularly remarkable about the Stanford case is not just what the students did something that we do oppose and we've seen in other places at Yale and other spots but the intervention of the dean who stood up ostensibly to calm the crowd and instead delivered prepared remarks denouncing the judge. I mean that's completely we do say that universities should feel free to criticize speakers on their campus but not during the speaker's own prepared remarks filibustering those remarks out of bounds. So yes, there are there are plenty of infringements on academic freedom that we see on campuses around the country and we I should probably clarify Pan-American's origin story on our education work. We initially developed a higher education initiative because we wanted to confront sensorious behavior in higher education emanating from the left things exactly like what you saw in Stanford and we do that, that is a huge part of our work. What we are seeing and what concerns us and what we wrote about in this report is a response to that to things like what happened at Stanford that is not simply to denounce it to call for action from the university but to as you mentioned the university did act they have apologized, the dean has been placed on leave her boss also with dean put out a fantastic 10 page letter defending academic freedom in great detail just yesterday but these responses instead call for government intervention to shut down parts of universities that they view as sensorious and there is no universe in which government regulation of speech is preferable to the regulation of to a sort of sensorious culture that appears on campus not only are you substituting one orthodoxy for another you are substituting a cultural orthodoxy for government orthodoxy for exactly what the founding fathers were thinking about when they wrote the first amendment the heavy hand of government power telling you what you can and cannot say so that is what I would say it is we should all be concerned about what happened at Stanford we should all be concerned about the culture around the country at campuses that leads to things like this but we should also be looking for effective solutions that don't make the problem exponentially worse it was great that after the fact that the president of Stanford and the dean took such a strong position in some word of free speech on campus it is a terrible unfortunate incident that happened there I particularly as a graduate of law school astonished that law students who are being trained with the skills to debate different sides of an issue including sometimes very troubling speech one of the famous cases around free speech when I was in law school was the Skokie case involving the Nazis getting the right to speak not speak but engage in a parade in Skokie, Illinois which at that time was a community outside of Chicago with a large Jewish population including a number of survivors of the holocaust and my view that was the right result that the supreme court said that they had the right to engage in parade which is a form of pure speech so for law students to not recognize that they are being taught the skills to manage but to navigate challenging issues and to debate and to confront situations where a client they may have they may not like that is doing things they didn't they don't support but they have the right to be represented well by a lawyer that they were engaging in a form of censorship is really troubling in some ways when we put the resource guide together that we were talking about earlier why we wove those two things together which is pushing back against the efforts to intrude on institutional autonomy and academic freedom by state policy makers primarily at the moment as well as a full throated defense or telling reminding institutions about the need for them to engage in a full throated defense of academic freedom and free speech on campus by citing the long standing principles that Brian you referenced earlier by AUP and others that I think is in some ways why we put all of that together in the resource guide well thank you both for a very very rich answer to John's great question we have more questions piling up which I think is a good example of more speech following and we have one from a professor at the new college of Florida what are you in the spotlight right now she asked an important question that circles back to a point that came up earlier put this on the screen about the solution to more speech what do we do with unequal access to speech there are mobilizations of social media that amplify some speech or false equivalences this is a great question for my dear friend Mary thanks for being here I think that we do need to consider unequal access to speech when we look at what we mean by free expression on campus this is one area where I think there is room for real creative thought within the free expression community particularly as it relates to higher education but also in other ways free expression is not just about what the people within academia are able to say and do it is also a question about who is in the room who is accepted to college who is able to complete college who is able to complete a graduate program who is on faculty who is on staff the inequalities of our society as they manifest within the structures of higher education do have an impact on speech free expression there are two sides of the coin one side is robust protections for people who have it and the other side is extending access to as many people as possible and that is absolutely central to this question I think when we look at these laws that we address in the resource guide I think that you don't have to believe what I just said is true in order to mount a defense of higher education against these laws you can think everything is fine in higher education and still oppose attempts to for legislators to get involved and restrict it and again we are looking at messaging here that has the widest possible application for the largest group of people who want to defend higher education but certainly if you are asking my opinion if you are asking Pan America's opinion it is a question of access to speech is one of two halves of free expression the other being protection for those who do have access okay I am glad that you two know each other Miriam and Jeremy and Miriam we are going through is hugely important and I think the word stressful doesn't say enough good luck and if you want to ask more questions or join us on stage please feel free we have more questions piling up and I want to make sure people get a chance to ask them this is from Professor Debra a professor of English at Tabor College and we put this up on the screen she asks do you guys say about the influence that donors seem to have on academic freedom at both private and public institutions how might we as professors deal with this concern I don't think we have mentioned donors so far Steven you may know more about this one I am not sure are you worried that donors are essentially telling an institution that they should or shouldn't have certain kind of speech on campus is that the nature I will tell you that to pick up the story I was telling earlier about Columbia with the I know that they heard from a lot of donors that that would be a terrible thing for the institution to host and I suspect that they also heard from donors that they would withdraw their donations but they went ahead because they believed it was the right thing to do and I think that that is what students ought to be doing which is to commit to the principles that have served us so well and to try to explain to donors that what academic freedom means part of the challenge here is that we don't know a very good job explaining it right some of us who work on campus and sounds like I am just a lawyer working as a government relations official for an association higher end association but I am sure that some of your participants today there are lots of faculty members they understand it in a much more intimate way than I do but I don't think we do a service to higher ed the concept of academic freedom we don't do a very good job explaining to the broader public what it means and why it is important to the broader public including donors and it isn't just the right of faculty to explore what they think kind of research they think and to test it against their peers and to teach it in a classroom so that students can test it as well that isn't just it it's also you know it has great benefits for the broader society and the common good we as a society have benefited enormously for the fact that this is a core bedrock principle on higher education and I think that's what institutions ought to be explaining to donors if they're trying to restrict the kind of speech that would take place on campus Steven you and Jeremy asked about examples of this for clarifications of Debra's question and in the chat Hal Heppner just said this quote Baylor University Texas can't show support for LGBTQ communities because of donors so I mean I think it was breaking up a little bit sorry the example was Baylor and LGBTQ communities and I mean I think certainly with Baylor there may be an issue with the university's mission statement as well but we've certainly seen this in Harvard where Ken Roth was briefly disinvited as a speaker or as a faculty member allegedly because of the involvement of a donor the truth is this does happen it is a problem donors do sometimes have too much influence but it doesn't seem to be as common of a problem as what we are seeing in this legislation where a single legislative body, a single law can shut down speech across institutions, across campuses donors will sometimes go after a particular issue or a particular individual certainly at a private institution their influence might be more pronounced and we don't certainly Pan America doesn't think that donors should be silencing speech on campuses, we spoke out of defensive Ken Roth, we tend to speak out on these cases thank you those are great answers and Deborah thank you for really really good question we have two questions coming up that are almost identical and I want to flash them both on the screen you'll see what I mean from our dear friend author and guest Tom Hames what about the impact of silent self censorship on campuses are we seeing more faculty not talking about or researching certain subjects because of either institutional or political pressures so hold that thought for a second because then we have a question just popped in from Heidi who asks what quieter and serious effects are you seeing from the efforts of legislators in Ohio, I'm thinking about faculty who preemptively cut controversial materials so they both have the idea of self censorship and they're speaking of faculty but I would include your earlier point about students who feel they have to self censor as well good question so self censorship does happen and it is caused by all of these phenomena we see conservative faculty conservative students censoring themselves because of in group pressure is essentially from students or faculty on the left we see left wing faculty or all faculty in some cases censoring themselves because of fear of what a law will do one of the arguments we make about these laws is that the chilling effect really is the point the laws are written in very vague ways so it's not clear what they ban and that amps up the self censorship because faculty only are faculty unsure what they can talk about but so are administrators unsure what their faculty can talk about and you will see administrators in some cases issuing overly cautious guidances where they magnify the effect of the censorship by arguing that by telling faculty they can't even touch a particular topic we saw one guidance from a college in Florida that said faculty want to discuss have a class discussion of the civil rights movement they have to start the class discussion with a verbal disclaimer that what the students are about to say does not reflect the views of the university which that just made me laugh because I'm thinking if ronda santa is sitting there in that classroom he's not going to think that what the students are saying reflects the views of the university and so yes there is a lot of fear there is a lot of self censorship and ultimately we want to encourage people to not engage in that type in self censorship I tell people teach what you're prepared to teach teach what you're trained to teach unless someone or something has specifically told you not to in many cases that won't be the case don't look at the law look at the climate assume that there may be some sort of censorship coming wait for it to actually come and with the Idaho case yes when you have a climate what is going on in Idaho where legislators have been frankly intimidating institutions we see this in Florida as well it creates a situation where people are simply afraid even if there is no specific policy or law that is attacking their institution or their teaching they just don't know where the next attack is going to come from this is one of the reasons that legislative attacks on academic freedom are so pernicious well I would add yeah I mean it has a really corrosive effect on the life of the campus not just individual faculty that are intimidated and self censor and others who might do that on a campus it just undermines the whole academic enterprise and it's part of the reason that we set out on this work that resulted in the resource guide I think we wanted to tell people to try and send a signal to people that we need to stand up for these principles and I recognize that there will be some on campus who are more vulnerable to political pressure than others and that those who have the ability to stand against political pressure ought to do it ought to use it in ways to defend these principles this isn't I mean we're not we are focused on a particular state a particular piece of legislation we're troubled by the trend right because it undermines the academic enterprise and attacks these basic bedrock principles of higher education and so I think that we kind of need to stick together on this and to push back and to talk about why intrusions on undermining academic freedom and intrusions on our autonomy is a bad thing for our society and try and explain it that way and you know one of the things we learned and we talk about it in our in the resource guide we did some public opinion research about the public's views of you know so-called divisive concepts and their willingness or their their support or not of elected officials telling campuses what they can and cannot teach and I will tell you the results are overwhelmingly across the political spectrum opposed to public officials telling institutions what should be taught and how it should be taught I think it's because Americans recognize that the core value of our society is free speech across the political perspective across the political perspective and they see that as troubling and that you know one side may say you can't say this today or teach this today and the other side the you know the opposite tomorrow and the results from both is bad right and so and un-American in a way so I think that's you know why we were motivated to do the work that we're doing and I think the public has a lot of skepticism about elected officials telling campuses what should be taught and how it should be taught that's good to know in a lower case democratic way friends we're coming up in the end of the hour and we have a couple of questions I want to make sure we get into Steven thank you these are terrific responses we have two questions from different angles that we haven't yet addressed and this is one from in Florida do you have some thoughts about professors at public colleges and universities being seen as extensions of the state and how that might imply parameters on what we can or cannot say this is something that we see a lot more often in the K-12 space where there are court decisions that suggest that teachers may not have maybe essentially working for employees first and teachers second there is some jurisprudence around academic freedom that is supposed to go is supposed to set this issue aside largely aside when it comes to higher education certainly there are appropriate restrictions on teachers in higher education speaking for their institutions without permission we see this a lot this is not well understood by faculty and there are violations of this and they are dealt with at institutions but the AUP's definitions are pretty strong on extramural speech that is permitted that it is you are able to express your views on issues of as a private citizen on issues of public concern and the other area where we often see restrictions of this type it has to do with pedagogy it is more if you're doing things that are undermining your students in the classroom there is more that can be done or said about that but generally speaking we try to we don't try to see faculty as extensions of the state that's a great question thank you so much again Shelby is at St. Petersburg college so I'm very glad to see Florida's academics represented here today we have another question that comes in from literally down the street for me about two blocks away from Georgetown University's excellent library and this is from Ryan Johnson who asks are these pressures reaching into the scholarly publishing arena I would prefer new laws in Oklahoma which potentially make librarians liable for the acquisition of controversial content that's a great question we've mostly been talking about teaching extramural speech but scholarly publication is a well-defined area what do you think about that it's an excellent question so the way this is happening is the K-12 version of these laws which we haven't spoken much about on this webinar the K-12 version has been reaching very clearly into school libraries and increasingly into public libraries what is primarily being targeted so far are books offered to K-12 students often young adult novels often picture books some adult books such as worked by Kimberly Crenshaw and other critical race theory scholars that can be found in school libraries have been targeted we haven't seen as much of this at the higher ed level we haven't seen as much of it yet in scholarly publishing I'm afraid it's only a matter of time there's no way people who want to ban books and censored teachers are going to stop at the university doors on this so I think it is coming but at this point it's entirely theoretical so I can't really say nothing's happened yet certainly I would be concerned if I were in that field thank you Jeremy Steven do you want to add to that at all not much I mean Jeremy said it quite well I do know that the librarians at higher ed are worried about this it's not surprising and we have to be vigilant to try and guard against scholars censoring themselves or institutions libraries within institutions being restricted in the kind of scholarship that they can make available on campus that is just really corrosive so we think that would be a terrible idea not to be opposed okay well thank you and I would like to take the moderators privilege and ask the last question before we completely run out of time which is we've been talking about the present very closely and the two of you have anchored your work very very nicely in recent history and of course as far back as the AUP statement I'm wondering if we turn your gaze around a little bit to the future what do you expect for the next few years Jeremy you just passionately spoke of the grim likelihood of more pressures on scholarly publication on scholars and librarians what else should we be anticipating in the whole area of academic freedom we have seen a set of bills proposed this legislative session that go far beyond even frankly what we're talking about within the report itself within the resource guide these are bills that one in Florida one in Texas we've seen one in Ohio there may be more with varying likelihoods of passing but these are bills that target not just classroom instruction but entire university governance systems that would hand control of core curricula approval and denial of majors hiring and firing of faculty over to politicians, political appointees rewriting of university mission statements and that sort of thing and so the fight for the autonomy and independence of higher education really is just beginning we are moving into an era that is very troubling in this area that really is in some ways without precedent and I don't know, I look at these bills I don't see a precedent for this anywhere in our history and that is this kind of vigilance this kind of coalition building awareness of the arguments that are effective on this is going to be very crucial just beginning yeah I think Jeremy it's it's bracing right and I think very troubling and I do think not just do we see this virus spreading across states I think we're likely to see more of this in Washington I know that the House Education and Workforce Committee is holding a hearing next week on defending free speech on campus I'll be curious to see what that hearing looks like but I imagine we'll start to see more efforts here in Washington unfortunately to impose these kinds of restrictions on our campuses that's a very very grim note to bring us to a close on I would like to say thank you both for that warning but also thank you both for your passion, your knowledge and your incredibly clear and elegant expression I'm grateful for your work and I hope that academics can benefit from it a great deal we are out of time and I'd like to end by asking you too quickly what's the best way to keep up with your work on all of this starting with giving, I mean you're covering a huge range of what's the best way to keep up with what you're doing well if you're on campus you can see what and you can go on ASE's website to see the work that we engage in on a range of policy issues including this one and I would just, on this particular issue that we've devoted so much time you probably would you might sign up for ASE's Twitter account and certainly Pan America's Twitter account I'm sure we'll be publicizing our work and the efforts in the future yes we also each have email newsletters you're welcome to sign up or to get to Pan America's go to our website pen.org and there's a list of email newsletters the one you want is called Educational Censorship News that'll send you a monthly report on the work that we're doing on this issue I also put my email in the chat jayyoung at pen.org you're welcome to email me directly if you have any questions I'm happy to talk to you further and our emails are in that report you can see in it Jeremy just gave you I'm happy to engage with anybody if they want to reach out to me too at ASE well excellent you both have been incredibly thoughtful incredibly engaged in a very generous way of your time and thinking thank you both so much and keep up the great work and but don't go yet friends I've got to point out where we're headed for the next few weeks of the forum and let me just thank you all for the great questions and discussion we've had so far just looking ahead just to remind you we have sessions come in educational technology and labor a session coming up on reimagining college metrics along with a session on some hairy guy who's got a brand new book coming out so just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more if you want to keep talking about this we have all kinds of places to do that including master non including linkedin including twitter this use the hashtag FTTE or tweet at me Brian Alexander or even Shindig events we glad to hear from you if you want to go into our previous sessions including our two previous sessions on academic freedom just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive you can find those there and above all thank you all for a great great discussion a brave discussion on a very very tricky topic I hope you're all doing well hope those of you in the northern hemisphere are starting to enjoy spring depending on where you are and above all I hope you're all safe thanks for everything take care friends bye bye