 a case that you cite in your lawsuit called Purnell versus Florida Board of Governors of State University System, where you say, you quote from that, the judges ruling there saying that it's not acceptable to impose the state to impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoint about the content allowed within university classrooms. And of course, the case that we're talking about here is one that fire is also party to against the state of Florida's law that has become known as the Stop Woke Act, the Individual Rights and Education Act. I produced a short documentary about that issue, and I'm going to play a quick clip from it where Purnell, the named plaintiff in the case, Professor Purnell, speaks out about his feelings about the Stop Woke Act and how it would affect what he's doing in the classroom so that we can see the flip side of that conversation. Purnell, a law professor at Florida A&M University, or FAMU, and historically Black College, is a plaintiff in the ACLU's case challenging that part of the law. He's afraid that the law will outlaw discussions of systemic racism, which he says is part of FAMU's institutional history. The state created the law school in 1949 to accommodate two Black law students who applied to the racially segregated University of Florida. In 1966, the state forced it to seize admitting new students, until then Florida Governor Jeb Bush signed a law to reopen it in 2000. Purnell worries that if instructors were to characterize that history as systemically racist, they'd run afoul of the law's restrictions around teaching the concept. I have no way of knowing that my passion for teaching students about history, about change, about the ability to bring about change, I have no way of knowing that that isn't offensive to these subjective judges of what is endorsing, what is not endorsing, what is promoting, what is not promoting. So I do now live with the idea that at any moment the state can come and take negative action against me because of my thought. Let's say that there was a blue state that did kind of the opposite of this and they said we're going to ban a professor who has a different viewpoint and thinks critical race theory is wrong and that we should be talking about color blindness as a legitimate concept and things like this. Anytime you put state and ban together, danger, all right, why does the state ban any thought if we are in a free society that exists and develops based on free exchange of ideas? So Professor Purnell there is taking a very principled stance. He believes in systemic racism and thinks critical race theory is an important academic concept but he does not, it sounds like he would not be in favor of a law like the California law that forces professors to embrace or promulgate these concepts. I guess my question, this could be the last question for you Bill because I know you have to leave so feel free to jump off whenever you need to after this but do you feel the same way in the reverse direction that professors who do believe in many of these concepts we've gone through in the DEI framework should be free to teach those in the classroom? I would say that their students are free to disagree and not be graded negatively. I would support that as long as it goes both ways but frequently that is not the case. You know I support Professor Cornell's freedom of speech in the classroom to teach the material as he sees fit but I also support and would make sure that this is brought up in that discussion that his students have the right to disagree with him and lay out their case and that's the whole point of higher education anyway is the free exchange of ideas may the best idea win and sometimes even though we're right and we're arguing for a particular position that is is right our arguments may be weak and we lose that particular argument so you go back you regroup you redevelop and come back again and that's that's how it was when I went through college and that's how it should be. The idea of may the best idea win I think is so important and many of the DEIA cheer leaders are in a sense betraying a sense of like their own insecurities if you're attempting to so rigidly impose this orthodoxy and mandating it from on high at least to me that indicates a certain sense of like ooh maybe they're not so confident that these ideas would win in the marketplace because they're not choosing to use those sort of like classically liberal means of duking it out it is instead a different approach being tried right now and that really raises my hackles at least where I sort of am like wait a second you know is there an insecurity being communicated there are they actually confident that these ideas would win. Yeah and you know Liz when I raised that that phrase the marketplace of ideas with Chris Rufo in a previous live stream that we had he disagreed that we even have a marketplace of ideas in higher education we're going to drop links to all this media in the description so you know you if you're interested in this conversation you might want to check out that full stream with Rufo but I want to play a clip of what Rufo's our counter argument was in that that debates were discussion with with me and Nick Gillespie and then I get you to react to the argument that he's making in favor of the Stop Woke Act Jesse because he was one of the intellectual architects behind it. This has argued that it does have a say over what's taught at taxpayer subsidized schools teaching kids that it's not the right clip I don't like you I guess I don't support abolishing them but when they're off track when they're not supporting those values when they're not pursuing those as the telos or the highest principle of the university it's up to the voters to institute reforms and what we have is a situation where there is not there's a kind of a kind of written idea of academic freedom but the actual on the ground facts I've talked to a lot of professors in the UF system that are conservative that say I can't express my opinion I can't do the research I want if I say that I'm conservative I won't get tenure my ideas are suppressed I'm forced to go through these diversity trainings this is a problem for people within the system it's also a problem for the public to say hey wait a minute if you're public if you're professoriate if your faculty because of the hiring and because of the funding and because of the selection process is now in many public universities 20 30 40 to one depended on the departments between progressives or liberals and conservatives you have a massive imbalance in faculty you have an administration that has adopted the high as the how does this stop how does this problem and forcing professors to to bow down to left wing diversity ideology they're forcing professors to sign diversity statements okay forcing professors to be hired on the basis of their commitment to these ideologies you have a huge problem and yet what I'm hearing is that well you can't do anything about it because you know government bad how do you reply to that argument Rufo is making Jesse which is that these are public institutions and therefore the government through the legislative process the democratically like the legislator they should be able to shape the standards of what is allowed to be taught on a college campus well first I just say to think that in the answer to an insufficient marketplace of ideas is to censor part of the marketplace is a very odd response as for the taxpayer funded nature of universities taxpayers fund using universities because they are knowledge generating machines and they generate that knowledge by bringing together a lot of people a lot of ideas to kind of duke it out and hopefully from that process we can discover some sort of truth gain some sort of knowledge historically that has worked actually quite well in the United States and that's why we fund universities taxpayer funding does not mean that taxpayers get to tell every government employee what they can and can't say that's never how it's worked and it's not how it works when it comes to universities the interest of taxpayers and of the government in a university is both the knowledge generating and the education of adult college students again we want to expose them to a variety of ideas and that is very very different from say what you see in the K through 12 environment where your where the public's interest is more inculcating community values in young children in college you want to bring together all sorts of ideas and expose students to all of them you know Liz talked earlier a little bit about the I think she said tightrope that you are walking at fire where you are willing to take on both of these cases it's vanishingly rare that I mean I feel like it's maybe us and fire at this point that that are willing to that civil liberties oriented organization that I've heard so much about but I'm not sure there used to be another one that was but but I mean maybe that maybe that plays into why fire has rebranded you know you started as the foundation for individual rights in education and now you have expanded that beyond the educational sphere I mean is there any insight that you can give us there as to you know why has fire expanded its mission is it because of that that lack of people willing to walk that tightrope I think there was definitely a need for an organization to come out and be willing to defend free speech just because it's free speech and not on the grounds of the correctness of the opinion being given and I know that fire first before it ever wanted to expand it wanted to make sure that it was doing everything it could in the higher education space and so it grew enough to kind of perfect its craft there and then it became time where they could jump into the wider community and it also happened to coincide with a lot of the negative trends that we've seen in higher higher education as students graduate are kind of coming out into the broader world and it's a good time for fire to expand and counter that outside of the university system as well yeah this is also interesting to me because I feel like I got a very early taste of this I entered college in 2014 and left college in 2016 but it was interesting because I think so many people when attempting to trace this sort of second wave of political correctness on campus obviously we had the wave in the 90s which I know Greg Lukianoff of fire has actually written about wonderfully for reason for our print magazine of like hey actually this wave of political correctness on campus this isn't really the first time this has happened this has been a little bit of a cyclical thing throughout you know recent American history but I do think that this most recent wave is really traced back to starting around Ferguson Missouri 2014 that whole thing and it was really interesting to arrive on campus right as so much of this was bubbling up but then I see so much of my cohort I mean I got the hell out of college and early because in part because of this and so much of my cohort it's been so interesting watching them then go into you know major newsrooms and other different industries and it's fascinating how these ideas that I think were either you know inculcated at the university level or not pushed back on sufficiently at the university level you know circa 2015 2016 2017 have really now floured into something else and taken root in all kinds of other industries I reported a piece for our friend Mike Solana of Pirate Wires a few maybe a year and a half ago that talked a little bit about the DEI efforts at tech companies and the sort of like DEI HR convergence and how for many tech employees you know it's many of the same objections that we're lodging here and that Professor Blinken has commented on here where it's a little bit of like well wait a second doesn't this distract from the actual thing we were hired to do doesn't this distract you know in the professor's case from educating students from teaching them chemistry or in the tech employee case from sales goals or you know creating the best possible software to sell to their customers so I think there's there's something that people are sort of slowly coming around to you which is like a lot of these things distract people who actually want to roll up their sleeves and get hard work done and there's also a certain hollowness that I think people are sort of slowly becoming wise to and you know at the same time this also then breeds an entire industry of what I view as grifters like the Chris Rufos of the world who are really converting a lot of this craziness into their own sort of culture war and mandating another form of viewpoint homogeneity which I'm not super keen on so you know all props to fire for fighting the good fight and for the professors who are willing to stick their necks out and possibly take an unpopular position in pursuit of more academic freedom thank you guys so much for talking to us yeah and the issue with the the mandating aspect that's the key word Liz that you mentioned there is that you know we can sit here and have our criticisms of these concepts and I think they're warranted and you know even when they're not mandated I think there's a lot of self-destructive ideas that we've gone over today that that should be vigorously criticized but it is a the the reason we advocate a marketplace of ideas is because this stuff is really complicated and reducing it to its you know woke versus non-woke and this all has that this all is gospel or this all is garbage it doesn't really make sense it has to kind of play out in a messy social process and the less we have you know governments or community college state connected community college review boards trying to impose their vision of the social good the more we can actually I think progress and get to an actual social good hey thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Jesse Apple be a fire and professor Bill Blanken from Ridley College for the full conversation click here for another clip go here