Abbey Speaker Series: Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education

good evening and welcome I'm Chris Clemons Provost and chief academic officer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill I would like to welcome you to tonight's Abby speaker series event intellectual diversity in higher education The Abbey speaker series is hosted by unc's program for public discourse which seeks to build our students capacities for debate and deliberation and to foster a culture of constructive dialogue about issues of national importance and even International importance at UNC and Beyond four times each year the Abbey speaker series brings together experts from different fields and disciplines to Showcase productive Dialogue on timely issues across a range of perspectives on behalf of the University I would like to thank the Abbey family for helping us bring such important programming to campus the topic of tonight's event intellectual diversity on college campuses is an important one I wanted to say something here about the ecosystem of ideas but I I've decided I don't like the word ecosystem of ideas so I'll say something about the garden of ideas because ideas have to be tended sometimes sometimes ideas are seeds and they're not suited to compete well until they grow a little and so I think of this as the garden of ideas and the reason we need intellectual diversity I will illustrate with some examples from history when the radical seditionist mathematician gay org Cantor introduced set theory there were riots in Paris buggies were overturned in London cities broke out in fire you remember that no that's not what happened what happened was his mathematical colleague said these ideas are dangerous they don't fit with traditional mathematics these in infinite sets are products of your adult mind and teaching them to students will undermine mathematics at its foundations and we should not do that do not let your students into Dr cantor's math 101 or they'll be ruined forever and we're done today's set theory is of course the foundation of all mathematics which was reformulated around its premises or what about the radical anti-aristotelian geometers who said let's throw out Euclid's fifth postulate there's a terrible idea make all of geometry on which so much is based Teeter from its foundation was shocking but nothing really happened except non-euclidean geometries began to develop and the complaint was the Provost said these are not useful they're expensive we're teaching things that have no application no that didn't happen what happened is they were taught for about 30 years and a radical physicist undermine Galileo's gravity Newton's gravity with a new Theory based on non-euclidean geometries because the tools had appeared to change our understanding of space and time that's why ideas are important these debates around mathematics and physics did not happen in the media they happened at the University and the language we used when we described what was happening is not the language that I was using and there were no buggies overturned but it was important to make those Revolutions in mathematics to let those ideas in one case percolate and in another case be taught to a generation that would take them and dismantle math to its foundations and build it back up so I know I chose controversial examples and not everyone will agree that these things should be talked about on these terms and that maybe it's too dangerous even now to revisit these questions but it's important so I look forward to hearing tonight how our University can fulfill this mission that we have done in universities since bologna uh 1100s for almost a thousand years and now I will turn it over to associate professor of History Molly Worthen who's serving as the acting director of PPD this year and she will tell us a little more about the panel thank you Chris thank you all for coming I want to thank Nancy and Doug Abby who have made this tonight's events possible and and we look forward to hearing the unspooling of ideas that were introduced with some historical context from our from our Provost I also want to thank the General Alumni Association who is co-sponsoring this event for tonight's discussion I think we have brought together a really neat panel of people who are teacher Scholars at least one teacher scholar administrator and they all are kind of coming at these questions of intellectual diversity from different backgrounds and different fields and have been working very actively on these questions so let me quickly just tell you a little bit about them Rob Henderson is a doctoral candidate in Psychology at the University of Cambridge where he studies as a Gates Cambridge scholar he's also a founding faculty fellow at the University of Austin where he serves on the board of directors Rob is a veteran of the U.S Air Force and he has published article in a variety of outlets the New York Times The Wall Street Journal and Colette among other places and he has a memoir coming out next year with Gallery books Amna Halid is an associate professor of history at Carleton College she grew up under a series of military dictatorships in Pakistan so she has a strong interest in censorship and free expression this year she is a fellow at the University of California National Center for free speech and she also hosts a podcast called banished about what happens when people ideas and works of art come into conflict with our modern sensibilities Michael S Roth became the 16th president of Wesleyan University in 2007 and at Wesleyan he has overseen the launch of a number of new academic programs such as the Albritton center for the study of public life and the Shapiro Center for writing his newest book is called safe enough spaces a pragmatist's approach to inclusion free speech and political correctness and IT addresses some very contentious issues in American higher education including affirmative action safe spaces questions of free speech generally our moderator tonight is my colleague in the history Department associate professor William sturkey William teaches classes in modern American history and he is the author of a book called Hattiesburg an American city in black and white and also the co-editor of a volume called to write in the light of Freedom the newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom schools and I'm really excited for this conversation and I'm going to hand the mic over to William to get us started thank you so much Malik everybody hear me okay okay great we're gonna have a really good time in here tonight um might not be the most fun that you have this Thursday night but it'll be the most interesting event that you attend um I have a few housekeeping things before we get started I just want to let everyone know we're going to be taking audience questions beginning at 6 30. um those of you that are here in person can line up and we will take questions from the audience in person we will also take questions using the zoom q a and those questions can be submitted at any time obviously if you're in the audience you'd prefer to ask a question via Zoom um that's you know feel free so um a member of the um of the administration here is monitoring those questions and we'll get them out to us um as they're asked starting at 6 30. for students interested in receiving CLE credit for the event you can check in if you haven't at the entrance to the hall here and make sure that you take care of that there's also going to be a link that will be posted at the end of the discussion for students watching over over Zoom additionally as we approach the end of our discussion there will be a small two-question survey going out about the event responses are optional of course but we appreciate your feedback as it helps us better plan and facilitate future programming and finally a recording of this event will be made available on YouTube within a few days from now so if you want to revisit the event or share it in any way you can check out the PPD YouTube channel and you can re-watch it there in perpetuity we'll Live Forever on there all right okay all that out of the way we get to have our discussion now so I'm going to ask questions basically for all the panelists um not one by one but just general questions I'll invite you all to jump in as you feel called and then we'll we'll um contribute with other follow-ups and then of course we'll get the audience involved as well but the first thing that I've got to ask is let's make sure we get a handle on what intellectual diversity actually means it can mean a lot of different things I think depending on who's asking that and what is it what is intellectual diversity mean for the purposes of of our discussion as it relates to higher education well I I can jump in uh and and for me intellectual diversity is always situational so depending on the classroom or the campus one would have to be sure that there was space or views that were not held by the majority of the people in that situation and so it'll it intellectual diversity will vary uh across campuses and uh different regions of the country I think having some emphasis on lived experience is important I I don't uh I think it would be a good thing let's as I'm Wesleyan is a small University you know just three thousand or so students so uh I think it would be pretty terrible if we took all our students from um a small private high schools that were excellent um and when I was a student I was saying I was shocked to find there were people who went to a private high school that hadn't been thrown out of a public high school that was my only experience of private high schools they were probationary but we could do that but we we strive to find people from all over the world and at Wesleyan for a long time that meant all five boroughs of New York City uh and like we got somebody from Staten Island we were like wow that's fantastic diversity but we we do feel now that having people with different lived experiences from different regions different ethnicities and races uh that makes a that makes a big difference but I do think that's the easier part in a way that making sure you have in the room and you're having a discussion and not just about hot button topics I'm a historian most of the topics I deal with are at least 100 years old but you have people in the room who are willing to explore ideas from perspectives that were not there the ones they grew up with um and that you need of diversity in that room so that they can be challenges to the dominant ways in which some students and some faculty approach important questions I just want to follow up on that and and uh I agree with with most of what you said um but your point about ensuring uh you know students who who hold maybe views that the majority of their peers don't hold it's important for them to be able to share their views but I I also uh think it's equally important for you know the the views of the students who actually hold the majority opinion but too often with help withhold it uh to also feel comfortable sharing their views as well um you know some of you may be familiar with these surveys indicating that the rise in self-censorship uh among undergraduates you know it's there's this uptick uh 2019 about 60 of undergraduates reported uh engaging in self-censorship by 2021 at a jumped to 82 percent I recently uh taught a summer course at the University of Austin uh they're calling it The Forbidden courses program and you know I had 10 students in my seminar and I asked them how many of you have self-censored in your campuses back at home and out of 10 nine of them raised their hands aren't we all self-censoring right now right no but there has to be a distinction right I think the self-censoring of the sort where I don't say Michael I hate the jacket you're wearing which is rude and wouldn't be acceptable and that's the kind of self-censoring which is called tact and then the self-censoring where I'm afraid to air a point of view because of social censure for instance or the Professional Center well I actually think that so so so that's right that that we're also censoring and I think many people would actually they think that number's too low they actually think nine out of ten or you know if it's 82 or if it's 90 I would say for many people who would like it to be 100 but every but everybody at you at your new school knows they're supposed to say they self-censor that's why they go to a course on forbidden things because we all know that dominant universities encourage people to be woke or politically correct and so the thing you would say today is yeah I self-censor I am now of victim even though I'm in the majority of culture I am now a victim I'm a victim of War culture and so everybody gets now to say oh I'm I'm for me I can't spout off racist well well it wasn't that word it wasn't just uh the students that in my course I was also assigning a survey from inside higher ed 82 of students I'm also wondering about the students here I mean how many of you have engaged in self-censorship on your campus so I mean so on the one hand you're saying we also have censor are we all victims many of these students are raising their hands I mean are we crying are we victims but then we're also censoring at the same time and say that you know I disagree with you good but um I do think you're hitching on something that is important which is that we're focusing so much on survey data that we collect and these survey data questions have issues and problems and there's only a survey data is important and I think we need to collect it to get a general sense but I really wish that many of these organizations that I admire and am a member of um like fire like heterodox Academy would invest more time and energy into collecting qualitative data and I think that's where we're going to get into what's the nature of censorship who does it in which classroom in which context I'm talking about it in the abstract only gets us so far or not the abstract but you know with this kind of survey data and it's useful but I'd like to have a more specific conversation about what are the contexts in which students are self-censoring and professors yeah and and I I do think some people are afraid to spout off and right now or in a moment where they get credit for their fear I mean you can join the group of people who say I I self-censor to I'm stuck in this world culture I can go instead to a well-funded university in Texas where I can be myself and say that I've been self-censoring I mean I think there's a there's a wave of Interest especially among aggrieved white people to sit to say I have been plagued by this dominant culture of wokeness and I I think there are times when people Express themselves by conforming to the folks around them that happened in Geometry it happened in math it happens in history courses but I I think there's a some so someone here used the phrase moral panic I think there's a there's a there's a little industry now People Like Us who go around talking about wow we need more intellectual diversity I do have one follow-up about the self-censorship question from whoever wants to take it um you know I I do think that there is this idea that there's this sort of Crisis that's increasing on college campuses but I wonder um how unique is this to college campuses I mean is this not something that also happens at the family dinner table at church on sports teams and high schools I I struggle to see a lot of high schoolers that come out really prepared for robust debate because they had so many open ideas and forums to you know engage with their ideas with their High School football coach or whatever so I just wonder you know how much of an alert should we you know be sitting setting off about this happening on college campuses versus the rest of society there's certainly political parties other organizations Civic whatever the military you you you could speak about that with authority was there self-censorship in the Air Force well the military is you know stock and trade isn't ideas though the university is intended to be a place where people can really speak and you know so so would be I mean they're you know these are different environments right I mean actually self-censorship in the US as a whole is increasing uh there was a paper a couple of years ago political science paper indicating that there's a rise in self-censorship among Americans as a whole and then when you break it down by education uh you know the most educated Americans are the most likely to self-censor so 25 of high school graduates uh engage in self-censorship for fear of losing their employment and uh among college graduates is 35 and postgraduates it's 44 and so you know postgraduates you know if you're asking them certain questions you can basically flip a coin to know whether they're going to tell you the truth about what they think uh so yeah I mean the university is is an environment where we're supposed to engage in the free exchange of ideas and yet educated people are the most likely to self-censor I just want to piggyback on that and say that I think you're quite right we are living in highly polarized times and that means that if a particular situation is dominated by one supposed dominant point of view the minority might stay silent or or vice versa depending on um what the consequences of speaking up are but I will say you know universities don't exist in a bubble they they do sometimes but but they are of course reflective of what's going on um in society at large but precisely what Rob is saying that this is the space where we should be having a flow of ideas and an exchange of ideas a robust debate in discussion and it's a little bit of a Pity that this is the place that is also being infected by this kind of self-censorship I I I think that this is a failure of of teaching I mean if people are afraid to speak in your class your job is to get them to get over their fear it's not to count how many people are afraid it's as you described in this recent piece you wrote where you you talk to the students in such a way to elicit their diverse viewpoints and you're obviously a very good teacher and so that happens when people teach but here in North Carolina and all around the country there's overt censorship by government officials that are taking books out of the library they're telling your faculty what they can teach you what they can teach this is real a real problem this is not about I'm afraid to say something in class because I might not be treated well on social media that's a that's a growing up problem the but taking books out of your library defunding institutes withdrawing offers to distinguished historians to come and teach at the University because they the the rich people don't like their points of view that's real censorship we should be talking about that not about what make people are afraid to talk about because I focus on more than one thing at a time exactly and I I do think that by way of augmentation I'm not fond of saying this isn't a problem because there's a bigger problem here I think that is a bigger problem in that it is coming with legislative teeth I think we need to be paying attention to that but there's no reason why we need to not look at the other problem that might be happening the kind of censorship that is emerging from within college campuses it's so when you have a pandemic you could also talk about the common cold you could it's real the whole is real but when you're faced with a deadly illness you you have to ask is a historian you have to ask who is being served by by creating uh organizations and a discourse and well-funded uh uh surveys to show that the university does not deserve the confidence and respect of of the citizens of the state I mean that that I I think that yes you can talk about one one thing at a time well I'm not so sure about that but you can spend more time in other things so let's move on to those other things and I just sort of research just a little tiny bit um Amna Rob um whoever wants to jump in how would you assess the state of intellectual diversity in higher education and and what's the best way to measure that I mean I assess it every day in my classroom for instance and um I take Michael's point that part of being a good teacher is eliciting disagreement but how do you take the temperature when tenured faculty are not speaking up because they're scared of something or how do you find out what's going I mean the self-censorship happening in the academy throughout all these layers so to return to your question about how do you measure it I mean these surveys are one one way of measuring it and and I think there are a number of organizations that are doing it I'd like to see more qualitative data I'd like to see more of that um it's unfortunate that we're not moving in that direction I think some organizations are I think fire is trying to do something um but I'd like a lot more energy to be spent in that context to figure out what the state of intellectual diversity is on college campuses Rob yeah I agree with that I mean I would like to see more more data on I mean so so I think the self-censorship point is is one you know do you I mean to even measure uh whether there's a diverse array of viewpoints you know do you actually feel free to express your view in the first place I mean the the state of intellectual diversity you know I I my my experience has been not great uh with with it I mean my so so I had sort of an indirect path to higher education uh you know I I grew up in foster homes in La and I barely graduated high school and I joined the military to basically you know get out of that environment and then I attended Yale and GI Bill and I arrived at Yale in the fall of 2015 uh and within a matter of weeks you know I I saw these campus eruptions uh you know hundreds of students calling for two professors to be fired and this was uh mystifying to me I mean I my no one in my family gone to college you know when I grew up around had ever gone to college so my impression of what campus life was like was just from movies and TV shows and my impression was just though these are like where smart people get together and share interesting thoughts and befriend people who have different viewpoints than themselves and what I was seeing was very much not that I saw friendships ended over disagreements about whether these faculty members should be fired but the friendships were terminated only by people who were in support of those professors being fired Never by the people who didn't want them to be fired so if only from one side um so then I arrived at Cambridge for graduate school one reason why I wanted to go to Cambridge was because I thought that maybe that those kinds of demonstrations were limited to the US uh and that wasn't the case you know within a matter of a couple of months my arrival at Cambridge I saw people being fired I you know famous you know I guess the most famous case of this was Jordan Peterson's this invitation but there were other uh less less uh lesser covered instances in the media and currently I know a couple of graduate students who are uh you know in danger of being thrown out of their departments so you know just for my my lived experience uh intellectual diversity doesn't seem to be uh particularly uh in a good place when a lot of people um measure or think about intellectual diversity certainly on on cable news they go right to political parties and they say well there are this many registered Democrats in a department there are this many registered Republicans in a department um the college fix the conservative website recently ran an article about several departments at UNC Chapel Hill saying see there's no intellectual diversity because there's all these Democrats and not that many Republicans is party affiliation where does that fit into considerations about intellectual diversity I mean is that an appropriate way to measure intellectual diversity why or why not one of my pet peeves is that intellectual diversity gets reduced to partly affiliation I mean intellectual diversity is so much more than that and um I'm a little irritated I'm not surprised that it's places like college fix that try and play it up in a particular way because they haven't asked to grind and they have an agenda but to my mind we have an unproductive conversation when we get stuck in this idea of Party politics and representation on campus I'm not saying that's not part of the problem or that we don't need to pay attention to it but I think that's just an aspect of it and it's important very important because we want to train citizens as well right one of the missions of most higher ed institutions in the US is to train Democratic citizens um and for that reason sorry you just said Democratic citizens I just you know or Democratic question and and um for that reason diverse political points of view are important but that's not this end-all and be all of intellectual diversity as I see it let me do a follow-up you said intellectual diversity so much more than that what is it what do you mean it's so much more than that it's bringing different methods different practices different strategies to Bear upon difficult problems or as wicked wicked problems as someone here likes to call them um but it's about method you know within disciplines I think there's diversity and what's being discussed and studied I think there's cross-disciplinary and diversity so it really like it does matter what the context is in which we're talking about intellectual diversity it can be anything however I will say that intellectual diversity is also doesn't mean that all ideas in even within a particular area are equal right certain ideas are not worthy of much air time because they've either been disproven or are deeply flawed and I think one of the problems that's happening with um cable news and channels like foxes they want equal air time to be given to all kinds of ideas and they see that not happening as a reason to say well there isn't you know political diversity or intellectual diversity as they say but that's not the case that's not what I see but not everyone gets the same air time um in my view yeah I I just wanted to go back to the Yale Yale example um and and uh it is uh I I wrote to those two faculty members immediately with uh sympathy and solidarity um but the woman who who uh behaved so badly by screaming at Nick um uh of course was was um videotaped I think from someone from Fire and her images were sent around and she received and may still be receiving death threats for um for months and months and months and so the story was oh these yell kids privileged kids uh uh more than half of whom are on financial aid like you were um uh they're behaving badly but you know that they did behave badly I I thought uh but the consequences of that were somebody got yelled at uh she she didn't get just troll on social media she had people showing up at the house she had people threatening to kill her it's a different it it's not it's not commensurate uh these these forces against uh thinking and I I do I don't think that the party affiliation is a is a great proxy but I do think that universities should do more to proactively find great students who have conservative views whatever their party affiliation and great faculty who have conservative views whatever their party affiliation to fill the ranks especially of departments in the interpretive social sciences and the humanities I do think we have a real problem of bias in the academy that makes intellectual diversity less likely to occur and that means that hiring committees they say I'm not trying to hire someone like me but they do and you know when I was registered the old farts that I we would love to hire women but we hire the best person they always turn out to be a guy it looks a lot like us and and that was nonsense and I do think today a lot of hiring committees at universities they say they're hiring the best person but that best person happens to resemble them politically uh in ways that suggest real bias and so I've for the last five years I've been trying to beat this drum of affirmative action programs at colleges and universities to bring conservative thinkers and Scholars onto campus um and um with limited success but I do think it's an important issue why with limited success well because I I think um the prejudices are deep their prejudices are deep that people say I have this conversation with my faculty you know I've I wrote this piece in the Wall Street Journal uh uh I checked it for five and a half years ago about it and I've been talking with my students and faculty about it and I don't need to convince them that I'm right because maybe I'm wrong but I do think as long as we're talking about the issue that biased it's less implicit is less likely to be acted upon and so I I think um in political science and sociology in English and anthropology I mean across these there is the replication of world view that I think is disastrous for the Academy now the introduction from the Provost may be a little bit more hopeful because in the examples in The Sciences in mathematics it wasn't that intellectual diversity actually led to advances in mathematics it's just the old guys died and the young guys came along and remember they didn't win the argument at least Q's view of scientific revolutions it wasn't an intellectual debate that settled things it was that people who were wedded to their old beliefs will get old and disappear and there'll be new beliefs young people coming in to do new things but that will only work if we stop hiring people who resemble these older guys like me and I couldn't agree more that we shouldn't have this kind of political litmus test that is coded in terms of you know the best person for the job but I don't see how having a different kind of political litmus test is going to solve the problem how does these affirmative action proposition work like what are your political views is that what you ask them and then you recruit them I mean I can say I'm conservative if I'm going to be guaranteed a seat or at least given some kind of preference and that's my point is that this is also something that these are areas and Views that we hope that people feel comfortable debating about and changing so to my mind we're not really solving the problem I see the problem I see where your views are coming from but I don't think that the solution you're proposing is actually well workable nor do I think that it's going to solve the problem yeah you're probably right uh I mean I I I think what would happen on the search my fantasy of the search committee is that you're applying for a job um and in our cycle our social psychology Professor is is very radical at least he thinks he's very radical and and he's really a great teacher at everything and so he would say let's say that we're going to hire someone else than you and then he he stops and says you know I wonder if I'm doing this because I'm just prejudiced against veterans or I just don't like the the direction of your research I'm and that's all I'm asking I'm asking for somebody to say really I'm hiring somebody who's doing the same kind of research I do and and then stopping and thinking again because I don't think a litmus test will work I do think though if people believe that they would choose more conservative sounding topics to have a better chance to get jobs I think that would be good actually that kind of gaming the field because I think we need that in feels like social psychology sociology anthropology yeah I I agree with I mean it if you look at the numbers of you know the ratios of of conservatives to liberals Or democrats to Republicans the ratio is actually becoming more and more skewed in favor of Democrats and liberals and part of that may be just you know Republicans or conservatives uh self-selecting out um you know it may not necessarily be due to any kind of overt discrimination or political Prejudice or anything but I I mean there have been some interesting studies indicating that people do tend to uh you know in in academic departments they do tend to discriminate again if you present them with with two applications uh they're more likely to discriminate against the person who holds opposing political views to themselves and you know for you know on average there are more uh Democrats than Republicans in Academia and so you know over time you will get this sort of uh greater and greater skew and so yeah I mean it's and I and I think that a political orientation is not um you know it's not the only measure of intellectual diversity but I think it is it is one measure and there just like there are a diverse array of people on the political left there's a diverse rate of people on the political right as well I think a lot of you know there's this so I study you know social evolutionary psychology so yeah I I say this is this idea of uh out group homogeneity where we tend to view the other side as all sharing the same exact viewpoints you know people on our team are unique and individual and special but that other you know those people all think all the same and you know that's that's not the case I mean people on the left on the right there's even within those categories there's a diversity of viewpoints so I think that's important to remember as well follow-up um so one of the things that that that the college fix pointed out was that there were many more Democrats in the chemistry department at UNC than Republicans I think the idea about the selection bias in terms of hiring might make sense in more like Humanities Fields gender studies um English perhaps but why chemistry because I can guarantee you that partisan political affiliation does not come up during the job talks for salary I mean I I think a self-respecting republican would be an industry not I mean I'd rather than take a job what's the starting salary for a chemistry professor at UNC Mr Provost is 190 85. you're in graduate school and chemistry for 10 years you're going to take a job with loans you can take a job at 85 or you're going to go work at the Research Triangle or at DuPont I mean you've got to be a liberal okay all right Rob what do you think yeah there's probably some some truth to that I mean you know there are personality differences and you know there are you know people don't all want the same thing I I mean this is this is another um uh quibble I have with you know a lot of the debates around you know Dei is that like why would you expect an advance to get equivalent representation of numbers across every single conceivable category um you know I wouldn't expect chemistry departments to be you know exactly 50 50 or whatever the sort of breakdown in the general public has happens to be but um yeah of course I I I I think that a lot of you know people who are on the on the political rights they are interested in stem Fields but there's just this sort of general feeling of discomfort and you know people also through the process of graduate school recognize that maybe certain views aren't aren't tolerated and maybe initially I mean I I personally have friends like this who they start out you know they were in and my cohort or uh you know roughly in the same um uh period of their careers and they started out wanting a sort of typical tenure track academic career and they see things happening around them and decide to go a different direction and these aren't like you know these aren't even political conservatives many of these people are political liberals and they're seeing what's going on and they're also uh concerned as well I'm not a jewel um I was going to talk about something different but um I was going to say actually Michael going back to a point about what do we do to break down this kind of homogeneity that we see on college campuses um among faculty well let's get them let's reinject courage to disagree among faculty I think that is the solution it's not affirmative action it's not hiring I think if we get more comfortable disagreeing then we will entertain job applications which we disagree with with a slightly different lens and I think the problem is that there's too much consensus building and it starts at the top it starts at faculty meetings it's deeply troubling to me that people with tenure I mean I feel most of them have reneged on their key responsibility of speaking up and disagreeing that's what we get paid for for life and that's why we should be able to do that and I think that piece um we don't pay enough attention to that but if we we don't model this agreement we have no business walking into a class and talking about highfalutin disagreement and I'd like my students to do this and that it's not going to happen you've got to show them how to disagree and I hope we're doing that right now I think you're wrong but I think I really do think that the problem of you know yes nobody in chemistry departments is looking at your political affiliation yet we're creating a certain kind of homogeneity and that's gotten that doesn't have so much I mean I think what you were saying has some Merit but I think there are other ways in which we create sameness and homogeneity that needs to be challenged and one of the key places is we've got to make more room for disagreement when I think about intellectual diversity within a field let's say history um I think not so much about Democrat and Republican I think about the different approaches towards doing history and how many are welcome and not welcome military history is uh Nobody Does it anymore or very few people you know departments aren't looking for military historians no I'm just trying to indicate that there when we think about lack of intellectual diversity we would do well to widen our frame Beyond Party politics and look at the kind of homogeneity that has been created within disciplines and that happens not just in terms of what we're teaching and how we're teaching but also the research so they're bigger things that play over here yeah yeah I think that's I think I think that's right that I mean I noticed it was in about 35 percent of the new faculty cohort we're teaching courses with the word empire in them and and it's I I it's not like we shouldn't study Empire but it was obviously an it's an intellectual wave and everybody's participating in it in the same way and I think it's a real disservice to our students it it we should say something about the capacity of teachers to teach points of view that are not their own and I assume you have that in all over the place in Chapel Hill that people can teach things that they don't agree with I I teach um you know Aquinas uh one week and then in two weeks I'm teaching uh Rousseau and and I sell both of them as hard as I possibly can to the students and so what they learn is not just about Rousseau and Aquinas but they learned there are uh deep enduring questions about which really really thoughtful people profoundly disagree and um I find that one of the things my students really don't like about this class is that I tell them not to tell me what they think about Rousseau or Aristotle or or Maggie Nelson or whomever we're reading uh towards the end of the class I want them to tell me why that thinker has said what that thinker said and their first instinct not so I wish it was they had more self-censorship their first instinct to say Aristotle said this I think our style is wrong and my response is always I don't care what you think about Arizona nobody does nobody cares what I think about Aristotle and nobody should we have to think why did Aristotle say this and everyone we read in the class uh I I make the same argument about at some point they realize Ruth can't really believe all these things because they're incommensurable but you can hold them in mind and explore them and that's to me much better than having a debate about a tax policy I I think that's a great um great way of doing it and one of the things that I've started doing in my class is I tell them we're going to play a game and your class participation grade depends on me never knowing what you truly think you should cons how confused I am about your personal political view on something is is good for you I should never know so you have to try on different hats and play this game um so I think these kinds of strategies are effective strategies for fostering intellectual diversity I'm going to ask a a follow-up to omna so where exactly does the Box stop because I think a lot of us are obviously interested in disagreement in faculty context and certainly in classroom context but we quite specifically are at a place where people who have spoken out against the Board of Trustees or the Board of Governors or have different ideas have lost positions let's the former head of UNC press lost his position largely because he openly disagreed I mean there's a very clear um reason that people don't speak out and disagree I think and we've seen this on this campus so I wonder you know how do we navigate this when there's a lot of people who are on Boards of directors and trustees that don't feel that way this is precisely why academic freedom as a value has to be defended to the Grave and that is the only way that we can actually have people disagreeing this is precisely why this kind of Party politics and way of thinking about University campuses makes me tense because that politics then starts bleeding and encroaching on academic freedom so I think faculty should unionize I think we should have um very clear statements from institutions about academic freedom I think presidents and other senior administrators would do well to make those statements and make it clear that they have that commitment and that's one thing I see statements as a way of signaling but then you have to Foster that culture and that's a harder harder thing to do but that's the thing that needs to be done I think we need to have a wider conversation you know I'm surprised by how many of my colleagues can't differentiate between free speech and academic freedom these are my colleagues tenure advice tell us what they do what you want me to differentiate between them yeah hmm academic freedom is the freedom to teach and research without any kind of constraints but that pertains to your area of research so political constraints don't come in there there's a third piece of academic freedom and that's the piece that I think is getting more controversial these days which is extramural speech so there's the freedom to research there's the freedom to teach and freedom to teach it doesn't mean that you've been going to class and talk about random stuff there's a responsibility there too the freedom comes with the responsibility that what you're teaching is pertinent um and then there's the third piece the inter um the extramural speech and that is the piece that I think is getting in getting faculty into trouble and leading to these firings and those are things we need to have a conversation universities need to have a policy about are they going to be policing the accounts of faculty and students or not social media accounts are they going to be watching what you're saying on the quad or not and this is something that like I said we don't think about this enough among faculty faculty don't know the difference free speech is very different free speech is the right to say whatever you want to say um you can't do that in a classroom I can't walk in and just decide I'm going to say whatever I want to say yet I do have the freedom to say and I should have the freedom to say anything that pertains to the topic and the class discussion and my area of expertise I just I just want to point out to the audience and and to you on the panel there was a story that came out our student newspaper a week or two ago about UNC actively monitor during the social media accounts of faculty and students um going back to 2015. undergrads undergrads as well or or grad students in in the various departments or somebody would have to clarify that for me but definitely faculty um and graduate students and monitoring them for what there was some sort of hot spot around different protests demonstrations around campus and they were like grabbing them from there somehow that's the extent of my technological expertise we have these things in England I haven't seen uh you know I haven't I haven't heard anything like this where the administration or anyone there you know monitoring the accounts um but I you know I I have heard stories of of students and you know groups on campus sort of informal groups that will take screenshots or you know save the receipts as the kids say and uh you know use those for blackmail later so what about Solutions how do we improve intellectual discourse or intellectual diversity in higher education um we've thrown out at least a couple I think that I've been hearing but can we sort of gather some some real solutions that could move us towards some real progress in terms of enhancing or at least protecting intellectual diversity well I mean I guess an obvious one would be to start a new institution and and you know uh you know experiment different ideas uh you know build something new and you know that's that's one possibility I mean I think they're yeah there's two two obvious ones not not limited to just these two but one would be to sort of Reform and do what we're doing here and you know explore different ideas and and see what we can do to sort of foster the culture of academic freedom and intellectual diversity but also to maybe uh explore Avenues such as starting something new uh you know testing whether you can build a university in the modern age that upholds the values that the existing institutions were supposed to be upholding I just have to say when when you um major comment about your example with with this with the students raising their hand or not at in Austin the thing that stuck out for me was that you only had 10 students I've never taught a class of 10 students and that were undergraduates I never will um and I think that it's something that funding is very different right right exactly the funding models and sort of mechanisms for free speech and diversity are a lot different where you can teach smaller groups of people I would say but I just wanted to share the observation yeah I mean these these were you know small seminars it was a pilot program you know just a summer program just to bring students in and you know give uh give them an opportunity to see what what the values were of what we're trying to build here um but but yeah I mean I wanted to to highlight that that point of nine out of the ten students but also bringing the survey data that were that's roughly aligned with that you know nine out of ten but also 82 percent of students more broadly Solutions um I have two thoughts one is I think you know that I've seen this happen at my own institution um is that we kind of compare ourselves to our peer institutions a lot when we're comparing salary when we're comparing retirement funds all of that stuff but sadly we've started comparing ourselves to peer institutions in a way I feel that is um we have to be doing exactly the same thing as them and that's how these Trends and Fashions and fads come like oh so and so has this kind of History we need a historian also in this field and this is where it's going so I think maybe maybe have just I would love to see educational leaders be a little more bold and present company excluded because I think he is quite bold um and kind of strike be willing to strike out a little bit and not follow whatever the trend is so that's one thing the other thing I think is to think about funding and to think about Federal funding and what kinds of um stipulations or uh guardrails those come with and those actually tend to produce a lot of homogeneity in the research as well because it has to be you know the kind of stipulations the Freer the funding can be I think the more diverse we might have and the more diversity we might have in terms of the topics that are being explored and also in terms of the ways in which they're being explored so those are two thoughts so very quickly I I think that these ideas about how to model uh intellectual diversity had a model constructive conversations and disagreement a real really important I'm encouraging students to um stray out of their comfort zone and encouraging faculty do the same really important but I have to say that for me the most important thing is making sure that we don't have a fascist government in the United States in the next five six seven years which is a very live possibility because if the authoritarian Trend that we see in many parts of the country continues this will not be this will be as our conversation is a joke I mean we we we're we're in danger of seeing academic freedom destroyed we're in danger of seeing the right to inquiry uh destroyed um as politicians stick their noses and hands and grimy feet more into the workings of universities and they're going to continue to do that unless students get into the street and organize voters and protests to keep authoritarianism from dominating the country that there are people in this country who believe the universities of Hungary are a model for us what does that mean that that that means there will not be free inquiry that means they will there will there will not be uh that professors will not be would not be choosing the the fields that they want to explore that will mean that some uh non-academic non-professional uh anti-intellectual politician is going to use the university as a vehicle for creating populist rage we see it now you you know you have you have football you have basketball you have all these distractions you have a lot of drinking on a Thursday night and they don't care about that but when politicians tell your University who they can hire who they have to fire that's the sign this thing can go south in a much more dramatic way you don't you don't want this University which has been a great University for a long time to be destroyed right people who have no comprehension of research and inquiry about so I think what we have to do is is fight in the politically to preserve the autonomy of universities and that universities have to exercise that autonomy to create productive conversations from a variety of points of view any other follow-ups to that um at the risk of not doing what I'm supposed to be doing which is modeling disagreement I agree um but I will say I think you're absolutely right I think the kind of pressures that are coming from state legislatures to try and control what's being taught is an Abomination it must be resisted academic freedom has to be fought for like I said we have to fight it down to the grave but I do think that for a long time in the U.S universities didn't have the threat of a fascist government looming and yet faculty and institutions became places that have produced homogeneity so I'd love to see that addressed in this process we can do two things at one time and I'd like us to be doing precisely that modeling disagreement and creating those spaces where people can feel less afraid to talk was there a time when there was greater intellectual diversity in higher education and how do we get back to that if so McCarthy era I would like to actually I mean I've never actually seen the survey data on this on um you know I mean I guess you know go back to our earlier Point like political diversity isn't obvious sort of low hanging throw for intellectual diversity like has has uh political diversity declined over time uh but also yeah intellectual diversity more broadly was there a time I mean I suppose you know another indicator you know survey data is you know did fewer students and faculty self-censor in decades past compared to today that wouldn't necessarily be an indicator of intellectual diversity but just uh sort of have like what the what the culture and the campus would be like do you feel free to speak your mind um but but yeah in any case I would like to see like better data on that I I think the problem with intellectual diversity in this regard is that most many students at Elite institutions like this one want to do the same thing when they graduate that their most the most important value for most students at most elite universities when they're not talking to their professors is to make as much money as possible when they graduate and so all this this stuff about you know bastions of leftism you know three years later is when I come knocking on your door asking you for money to give to the university and and uh or and and so uh I I think that the um the the uh the worry that about ideas not being considered carefully is is you know it's I I worry about it sometimes but what I really worry about is what build what's called as excellent sheep is that people come to the university with a lot of different ideas and they lead thinking here here's the gold ring this is what I really need to do in America because of of economic inequality and so I think giving students a better sense of how they might have meaningful and prosperous lives when they graduate without having to just conform to the status quo would be a great thing for the benefit of the university and for the culture more wildly well that's why we have the football and the drinking and so we distract them right well it does produce another kind of conformism it does produce another kind of conformism and and I and I I think that um universities are and this is probably one of them I mean America is so segregated by ideas race and especially by economics but here like Yale like Wesleyan uh you know your school we we we have students who can afford to pay a hundred thousand dollars a year and they're happy to do it we reject most of them who want to pay that much and then we have students who are coming from Foster Care and they live in the same dorm what an opportunity you're not going to find that after graduation those people are not going to be living in the same apartment or in the same building probably not even the same zip code but this is enormous opportunity where we bring people together from different have had different experiences and to try to give them put them into a cookie cutter is an enormous disservice are you suggesting that universities are actually pretty intellectually diverse I I I just think it's really hard to know I don't think we asked a question in 1975 by you self-censoring and I think there's a good reason because now self-censorship is like the Empire it's it's something you're supposed to talk about I we did ask people are you more interested in the meaning of life or are you more interested in getting a job and you can track that over time you see how it changes from the late 1960s through our own time um when I was a student at Wesleyan in the mid 70s there's no way we could have had veterans a veteran scholarship program there was no way we could have uh had a program for intellectual diversity we have now it was too homogeneous so I think there was less political diversity in the mid 70s at a liberal arts college like Wesleyan than there is today but I may be wrong there is survey data on self-censorship in the US more broadly and it is on the rise uh you know they've attracted I think from the mid-1950s up until 2019 and there was an uptick you know so for example in 1980 about 20 of Americans uh acknowledge that they self-censored and by 2015 it had risen to 40 and these data also indicate that the most educated Americans were the ones who were most likely to self-censor but I guess what I'm just not sure of like do is there a stability in what people understood by the phrase self-censorship it at some point that mean to my my parents generation don't tell somebody their jacket has a hole in it and and to students today it means I'm afraid to speak about race I I mean I think for my parents that wasn't what occurred to them they wouldn't have spoken about race share something that blew my mind and actually might give us some more food for thought about where in educational spaces there is intellectual diversity so I remember speaking with someone who set up a higher ed program in a prison and I also then spoke with a few people who were incarcerated and subsequently came out and then went to college outside of prison and to my amazement though perhaps one shouldn't be amazed they spoke about how the level of intellectual freedom to test ideas was higher Behind Bars than it was out in the open world so there is an interesting relationship between lack of freedom and freedom of thought and pushing against that maybe that is one of the things that produces it um but I do think that that was instructive for me to listen to and and I'm still sitting with it and working on what I should do with that but it seems to be the case that there are other places where education is happening higher ed that there is diversity and maybe we could we could learn something from those um I remember speaking to one of those one gentleman who was formerly incarcerated and he said you know talking about race is not a problem in the prison it's everywhere like we're not it's not taboo so it doesn't rise to the level of oh my God this isn't something I want to talk about it's so blatant you know they're more black incarcerated people than like there is a conversation already going on about it um so that and the other thing and Rob you may know this what's the data on political diversity in community colleges I I don't know the data for a community colleges off handbook but my in my my speculation would be that it is it is much more political diverse I mean I took night courses at a community college before I transferred to Yale and I do remember the environment being much more free and I mean part of that is I mean I guess there was a sort of a greater diversity of opinion simply because the you know the people that attend Community College tend to be a little bit older they tend to you know commute they tend to work or and they just have a a richer uh uh richer array of experiences they're not just you know 18 year olds fresh out of high school um and then you know it was interesting and earlier you asked me this question about the military and your your comments about what was happening in the prisons I I actually remember so so of course officially there are certain things you have to carry out your duties but then you know there you do sort of speak freely with your with your colleagues and your peers and yeah I mean I I had so I live in a house you know so you know your first couple of years in the military you're stuck on base you're stuck on a Barracks but then you know once you advance in ring you can move oh yeah I got this house with a few of my friends and so there was me you know I'm half Korean I had a roommate it was black another roommate who was uh Puerto Rican and a white guy and the comments that we would say in that house like you know we'd get instantly canceled anywhere on any University campus but we were good friends and we loved each other and we still do um but it's it's just you know the military environment is you know on the one hand it is more stifling but on the other hand it was more free but is that the military environment or hanging out with your roommates uh well the military environment too I mean even you know things are changing and and so on but I I think that yeah you you can sort of speak more freely uh on on various topics um even with with people who who aren't your like your buddies uh we're gonna go to questions we're gonna we're gonna start with this physically people um here um so the question is how do the panel members think about the pros and cons of Dei statements in faculty applications do these promote or detract from diversity and it must might also be helpful since a lot of the audience hasn't done a faculty application to just explain what a Dei statement is I could I could so when when faculty apply for a job they often do a teaching statement a research statement and now it's very common to do a diversity statement explaining how you have contributed to diversity or believe in it in some way shape or form um and they're very wide open they're incredibly difficult to write um but yeah a lot of these are being required for job applications now just for the audience's benefit I'm adamantly against them I think they're a terrible idea because you know this is just one more thing for people to have to game I think diversity and equity and inclusion in these instances is ideologically defined it means some very particular thing it's focused focused almost exclusively on demographic diversity so you can get people who look different but think exactly the same way and that is exactly what's going to happen um I I think it's a terrible idea um precisely because diversity equity and inclusion are defined in very narrow ideological terms and it's going to be it's no better they're going to be exactly what you said you know the best candidate for the position is going to bleed into this is the person that that shows us the most di work they've done um so I'm I have no um flexibility on that position so I thought I'd just put it out there and be a little controversial I think I agree with you I'm sorry I didn't think it's anytime you have it you you create a uh obligatory filter like that I I think you're you're not advancing the real goals you're creating a kind of uh a a badge that people can wear I don't think it's very helpful and I think it I think it gives fodder to the enemies of universities because I think it's it's a disservice I think the statement's saying that you don't discriminate you follow the law basically uh makes a lot of sense but I I I do fear that these rote recitations of values that are political values um really have have no place in in a job application process I just want to say over here Michael that you've agreed with me that the that the pressure that is coming from the right to shape or on uh to bear on universities in in a way what you're saying is that this pressure that we now see coming from the left of mandatory diversity statements is doing precisely that it's creating Conformity and that is also an important one to fight because these pressures are coming in different guises but the end result is the same so I I concur with you that we need to pay attention to what the writer is doing and the legislature is doing but can I just tell you that most universities now are requiring these diversity statements and those that are not are going to require them in the next five years and there you have a way of producing the Conformity so the so what I'm just saying that these two things cannot be treated separately how the right react has a lot to do with how the left reacts and how the right then reacts and it's a we need to put it in a wideration there's this so we do disagree then because I just think this is rhetorical embarrassment to have this kind of statement that's very different from from state-sponsored censorship I I think it's embarrassing I think it's bad I don't think it produces Conformity except in The Superficial sense that people know how to use say a few things that get themselves through the gate but I I think so I agree it's bad but I think to say that it's like what's happening from the world I think it's like that's that's I'm just saying it no I said that there is is also important in producing Conformity but I'd also disagree with you if you see what that research was about um the UC system where they weeded out even before looking at the qualifications like the vast majority of applications based on these Dei criteria that they had a metric system to go through and they didn't even consider them not let you know if we're going to have that kind of doctrina um commitment to an ideological position frankly it produces the same kind of pressures in terms of what it does to the culture on campus as does legislative um undermining of academic freedom I think we can agree that we both are Die Hard um Defenders of academic freedom but where we perhaps disagree is that I think I don't think that what's happening within universities is is minor in terms of producing Conformity Bob did you want to jump in that we'll take another question I mean I I think I agree with just about everything that's been said so far um yeah I mean creating creating any kind I mean the the proponents of these statements my understanding is that they acknowledge that it's overtly political and I think that is that is dangerous and you know I wonder how people would react if you know so so if people on the right created some kind of filter of you have to fill out like an order in Tradition statement explaining how you know how your research will you know sustain order and preserve tradition or some something along those lines I mean from that point of view I think it's it's obvious that this is a terrible idea to create any kind of political filter so you want to go here so okay there we go um so you've already answered my first question um my second question is what is the role so I'm gonna make a distinction here between private universities and state institutions so UNC is a state institution receiving about 560 million dollars from the state every year more than we receive in tuition what is the role of our maybe not just us but any state institution the government to intervene when it sees its constituents see that the institution is not serving the interests of their people or not introdu bringing in their intellectual diversity not reflecting it uh well there's been this interesting uptick in um or a rather sort of decline in the confidence in universities uh you know within the last few years it sort of started out on the right which is you know not really a surprise but there's also been this decline in confidence among the left as well and you know I I think this is dangerous because if you have institutions that you know produce Innovation and knowledge and ideas and so on and people don't have you know they don't have confidence and then this is this is bad across the across the political spectrum and part of part of what makes the university system legitimate is that people um people feel represented that their views are represented to some degree um but as far as you know what what the government's role is or or rather what people's role is I mean that's you know sense I guess send your send your kids somewhere else you know sign the petitions and so on but I I guess my my uh my general sense is you know I I don't really like government interference so room for government interference in what happens on college campuses even if what's happening isn't great right I I have firm belief that if we have there are other ways to work around it I could come from a history of military dictatorships and gross meddling um in curricula it never ends well I I do think that it's an important task for a public university to acquire greater legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry that's a complicated thing to do it's I don't think it's about representation exactly uh you know you don't want to represent all the views of everyone in the state some of them are that smart some of them aren't so smart the views um you know and so I but I do think people should say I'm really glad there's a university there I don't really know what the hell they're doing in chemistry that's what I would say or many most of the fields I don't really understand but I'm so proud I'm so proud that they're doing this work there and if if my if my kid or my niece could get into I'd be so glad they went there I I mean that's how they should feel and they should feel the way to achieve that citizens and their representatives is to create an autonomous University they will sometimes make you angry sometimes say the things that get you annoyed but that you want to protect the autonomy of the University like you protect the editorial autonomy of a newspaper or the radio station we license radio stations from the government you but you once you get you you have that autonomy but I do think the University's role is to say try to explain this is why we think we're serving the state if the university says we don't really want to serve the state we just want to do our thing then I I think they probably will get a deserved decline in support um do we want to take a zoom question or okay um I guess my question is more on a macro level but I think it pertains to Academia as well it's about social media and micro targeting and also this kind of tunnel vision that people can get in their ideologies political and other ideologies and how that affects um the diversity of intellectual discourse and also um my question is that um how do we instill confidence in students who have different viewpoints and allow a space for them to speak out when there seems to be sanctions whether they're formal or informal sanctions thank you you know to be honest what I found is that students are scared of speaking up not because of what I think or because of professional sanctions I mean in terms of grades in fact the survey done at UNC shows the same they're more scared of what their peers are going to say and the only people who can change it is you guys you know I'm not there at your Thursday night party and thank God I'm not there um but you in this is something that it's not on the administration and this is why I get frustrated with students constantly running to the administration to solve these problems it's not on the administration it's not I mean it's on the faculty to the extent that they create an environment in their classrooms that make space for diverse points of view but this wider culture is in the hand of hands of the students so Run With It Go disagree have the courage to disagree I think something else that helps is forming forming uh whether whether formal or informal student groups uh knowing that you know maybe you say something that upsets your class or your roommates or something along those lines but knowing that you have a group of students who you can sort of rely on to have your back or that you know that you can go to to give you some social support when you're feeling down uh and and I've noticed that there's been this rise in in these kinds of organizations forming where you know students can attend and share their thoughts and speak more freely so I think uh forming those those communities that's important to you I just add that I agree with these what's been said but I would just add that cyber bullying is a real thing and you know it's it there are times when uh authorities need to step in not because of the content of the speech but because of the the harm inflicted and I I think those that it's it can get it can be gray areas but there's often not a gray area that there really is a kind of a cyber harassment and I think uh there's a you know interesting scholarship about this and and I do think that's that does become the especially for residential University it becomes part of their responsibility to help students cope with that and to try to keep it from happening can I say one more thing to that I'm saying stop being so serious I mean students like playing with ideas is fun let's bring some playfulness back into it I become so serious and Tower with everything having such dire consequences you know if we air our views come on take it easy a little bit is what I'd say um another question from Zoom um this audience member wants to know whether the panel supports teaching of critical race Theory yes she I think professors in their classroom should have absolute freedom to decide what to teach and what not to teach I agree that was easy great thank you if y'all look to your left and right you'll see a sign that says College of Arts and Sciences and at times these two disciplines can feel a bit in contrast to one another every dollar that goes to funding a life-saving cancer treatment probably doesn't go to funding an answer to the question of what is the meaning of life this becomes a bit of a problem when we look at how University units become funded whether we should prioritize High interest programs such as those like biology or even political science in contrast to something that might be a little more specialized something you might see more at a liberal arts college such as English and comparative literature women in gender studies or highly specialized language so in the interest of promoting and preserving academic freedom and these different fields of interest and diversity among them at the same time balancing commitments to where student interests are where should we place our financial priorities foreign the easy answer and but it it doesn't get to the nub of your question is you should I think you should prioritize the places where you can do the most good for students or through in research and and and schools should I think invest in their strengths however I think universities have a historic uh obligation to teach in a variety of fields some of which will be unpopular for a long time but they should not they were not going to be equally funded but I think it's so important because we might be wrong about our current interests right they may not be the best interests to to maintain a scholarly and pedagogic profile across a range of unpopular disciplines I think is is the duty of a university and that um that's challenging but that's one of the jobs of uh the fundraisers the chancellor the president uh and others to to find those people who will help you do that so that the fields that are unpopular uh can continue to generate interesting classes and interesting research but I think investing in uh the things that will make the biggest have the biggest impact on students and on researchers uh more generally that's that's absolutely crucial um I concur in terms of the responsibility of universities to maintain areas and Fields of teaching and research which are not very popular at any given point in time and I will also say that I think the distinction between Arts and Sciences or these disciplinary boundaries we've come up with uh are more porous than than we think they are we have a lot to learn from each other and for and I think universities could do a better job of showing how the Arts and the Sciences are connected and what the benefit is that is where I think we've become you know there's been a kind of training for vocation or even vocation can benefit so much from broadening the purview of what is studied at college so yeah I'll leave it there uh yeah yeah I mean it's interesting because the student student interest in different disciplines kind of waxes and wanes over time which I think is another reason why it's important to sort of ensure that all of the different fields of inquiry are are you know relatively well funded there's this rise in uh students enrolling in computer science and a relative decline in the humanities but you know I think in maybe 10 or 15 years things may shift once more so yeah I mean I don't think that the the resources should should you know any any discipline should should you know uh be responsible for consuming the majority of the resources or anything like that um yeah this I mean the and that's an interesting this distinction between between the the Arts and the sciences and you know whether whether these two are clean categories uh but I think even even I mean you could you could build a whole class around that I I just read this this essay from uh the the 20th century Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin and he has this famous line uh where you know he's says that you know he's you know he was sort of taking this uh contrary imposition he didn't he didn't believe this but he said you know the the an elementary school student today knows more about geometry than you know the ancient Greeks something along these lines but you know what is what is the Roman historian today know that wasn't known to Cicero serving girl and he was sort of you know uh denigrating the humanities he didn't really believe this but he was sort of taking this position and and it was an interesting uh line and and it led me to sort of reflect and and realize that actually in in a way we should be maybe paying more attention to the humanities because um because so little is is actually known uh about that aspect of The Human Experience so anyway uh this goes to the issue of whether ideological Conformity is has a spillover effect after after University and I think it was downplayed somewhat but I think one has to consider what happens in professional organizations in the press in even in corporations which are highly conformist to begin with but in which certain views have become anathema and unexpressible and I would point to in that respect uh the recent uh paper the recent article by Jonathan height explaining why he uh is resigning from his psychological organization which requires an ideological litmitz test evaluation Olympus test for Dei in submitting a psychological paper and the the title of the of the police is when truth and social justice Collide and uh it's it's extraordinary in a sense that it goes to a deeper issue I think which is what is the purpose of University what is the Telos what is the same purpose of a university and uh is it is that is if the Talos is truth in research and education in instruction it can that at any point be in conflict with ideological field you know feel to you to an ideology and he answers that yes that basically and he while he allows for certain universities have religious themes but you know what you're getting when you when you enter into them others have uh have decided that their dedication is to social justice and you might as well put it over the door it's no longer Lux at uh Veritas uh so uh it's it's an issue that I think it's more pervasive I agree it's not privately as dire as governmental control uh because of the you know the the enforcement mechanisms that government has and how coercive it could be but I certainly would not downplay the issue because I think it's a very important one well um I I think John has done a really important work uh I think I think he his appointment is at a business school so the dedication to truth may not uh be as obvious in the history of Business Schools I think their dedicated to students are there to be credentialed to make money um and and which I think is fine because I think Jonathan's emphasis on truth to the capital t is unfortunate uh in other words I think it's the kind of thing that one says when one wants to be more scientific than one is most scientists don't think they get truth their goal is truth their goal is to actually get some results from this experiment their go their goal is to uh eliminate some error that they see in another experiment and I I think that you can have a university that's dedicated to inquiry conversation and research and teaching without the substitute religious category of of Truth which is my teacher your dick word used to say it's just a way of patting yourself on the back when you have good results and I would be particularly wary of doing that in social psychology or any field in Psychology where the replicability of any experiment is is is almost impossible well I think to be fair to him and I don't want to get into a you know an argument about this I don't think he's talking about Truth for the capital T at all he's talking about we have argued about this he and I so yeah okay he and I have also argued about this and I have he I think he does he it's not it's like a positivist view of truth that he is putting forward and I think and I've written about this I think the Telos of the University isn't truth anymore it shouldn't be it should be critical inquiry I know this gets controversial and I know philosophers in particular really get upset when I say this but I think you know the idea of seeking truth it was a historically contingent purpose of the University at a particular time and we have had so many intellectual Revolution questions which put paid to that concept now we need to think rethink what the institution's mission is it's the pursuit of truth it's not a fixed Point yeah but it assumes that there is and we it's the pursuit of epistemological methods to try to ascertain as best as possible within the social Community which which requires this affirmation Etc what what the best possible answer to the question with all due respect an art Department isn't interested in the best possible answer the music department isn't interested they're dealing with Aesthetics and thinking about you know so I I think the university is so much broader than what it used to be and I think the mission of the university has evolved part of the reason I think we have this infighting among faculty is precisely because there's those of us who think truth is the only Mission I think truth is part of what critical inquiry does I don't want to throw it out but I think it's more than that we are just about out of time but I want to give these these two folks a chance to ask your question I'm going to have you go back to back and then we'll just do what do our best with them okay then we're gonna have to wrap up um earlier in the talk you guys talked about um like bringing in students to promote intellectual diversity so like in this election itself they're all like diverse intellectually but um so you guys are on the side of the application process where you're choosing among students and then I came from the side where obviously I'm filling out that application um so I know like college essays and um all of these like short answer responses are kind of an attempt to like see the true personality and true thoughts of a student but in my experience a lot of these prompts still like point us to a certain type of response like I find the pressure to like write about my experience as a woman of color in the US and all of those other just um I guess experience that a lot of other people also have but that are seen as unique um so how do we truly what is the feasibility of truly like finding the intellectual diversity when even the process that's supposed to find it is still pointing people to um a response where they're conforming to how everyone else is thinking thank you let's have let's have your question as well and then we'll open it up so I have a sort of a meta commentary on the panel so if I'm not around like this discussion was marketed as like a discussion between people with different views about the issue of intellectual diversity uh but I feel like it is a sort of homogenous right in a way that logically on the topic of intellectual diversity it should be there could be like two categories right people who do believe it is a problem and people who don't believe it's a problem right so the panelists here I think I'll at least think that it is a problem uh and there's definitely a general sentiment against like Conformity um in the universities and you know maybe that's the whole reason you guys are willing to sit down and talk about this um so if I can uh narrow the question down a bit like I get the feeling that you know people who disagree and don't think intellectual diversity is a problem might not want to participate in discussions like this right so is there a way to construct panels with people you know of that major side which disagree that it's a problem at all yeah actually I I have uh listened to and been at panels where there are people who will say that intellectual diversity it's not a problem right they say political diversity is a problem but intellectual diversity they feel is not a problem so I think it's also partially definitional right how we Define intellectual diversity um but do you want to say something Michael I I love both these questions um and and uh I I agree with you that I think I think we probably agreed more than we expected to um we've disagree about some things but we're you know there may be more basic agreements on foundations uh when I talked to the faculty of Wesleyan about this issue they often say to me what I've been saying to my colleagues here which is this isn't the real problem the real problem is you know fascism the real problem is authoritarianism censorship and so when I've talked to my colleagues about it I say so let's talk about that I want to have a talk with the whole faculty about this and my friend said colleague said she said well so now you made me part of the intellectual diversity because she's telling me I don't want I don't think it's an issue I said well talk about that which is part of I'm kind of appropriating her position as part of the debater on intellectual diversity she's too smart to be caught unawares by that she told me I I know what you're doing but yes I'll do it and so hers for opening statement was a kind of you know a metacometer and why my attempt to have this conversation always really stupid um and I said thank you um and and but I do and my view is airing the issues not the answers but the issues can lead to less Conformity um and then on the other question uh I I I one of the things that really struck me about um uh conversations around this my saving of spaces book was a guidance counselor uh at an event said to me it would be professional malpractice for me to advise a student to list as her Civic or his Civic engagement activities that they were actually counseling women to not have uh abortions or that they were working on uh you know getting lowering the tax rates or but I I that I have students who feel this way I have students who believe in these values but I would he said it would be professional malpractice to let me mention have them mention them I found that horrible because it shows how a Prejudice we are when we talk about Civic engagement how biased our processes are and you know all I have in response is by articulating trying to make visible these biases that we can create some kinds of change but it is hard I do think there's a pressure for uh what passes as virtue um uh among uh in some admissions officers and uh faculty that does eliminate a lot of people who want to participate in the public sphere but not in the dominant ways that universities uh Foster yeah yeah I do want to focus on on that question as well I mean I I agree that the application process for undergrad and and for for graduate school as well often they're they do seem to be seeking a certain kind of response focused on certain markers of identity and you know young people many of them you know they they understand this and they will sort of play that game and you know find uh you know well yeah I mean if I've heard stories about this of you know maybe someone has dyslexia and it was a minor annoyance but in their application essay it's not it's it's it was this major obstacle they had to overcome and you know this extreme disability and it was you know and so you know a lot of a lot of these yeah this process sort of um uh encourages uh this sort of mindset of you know here's here's the sort of the the victimhood experiences that I've had and you know when I was filling out my own applications you know I actually a lot of people actually don't like talking about those things you know it's very personal to them uh but you know the University is like they want you to Bear your soul in that way and you know it's it's on you know on the one hand maybe it does sort of uh reduce intellectual diversity in a sense but it also has this effect of you know uh making students or or urging students to do things that actually they may not be so comfortable with all right so and um just some housekeeping things to close up uh the Youtube channel is going to have this up in the next few days um if you need the CLE credit we've got the the registration here you can scan the QR code we also ask that you please take some time to fill out the survey um people that are watching on Zoom please take some time to um to fill that out for us uh there's Pizza in the atrium if folks want to stay and hang out for a bit longer but for now please join me in thanking our panelists here tonight

Channel: UNC Program for Public Discourse

Views: 1,116

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Id: Va_YnkgDUlY

Length: 93min 35sec (5615 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 10 2022