Academic Freedom in Higher Education: The Role of States Defending Freedom of Thought

foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] thank you foreign all right we're gonna stick to our schedule we've stuck to the schedule all day and I'm not gonna start losing now um welcome everyone to our final panel of the day um thank you so much to our audience in person watching online and on cspan um um the day's conference on the freedom of thought the final panel focusing on freedom of thought in higher education I'm Elita Cass vice president for strategic initiatives and director of the freedom of thought project I want to turn things over to our panel and moderators just thanks in advance to the panelists for preparing and coming to engage in some really interesting conversation taking I think some of the themes from the day but then applying them in the context of higher education and thanks especially to our moderator judge Kyle Duncan judge Duncan sits on the fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and we're delighted to have him here to moderate our final panel of the day Church Duncan floor is yours thank you and thank you for inviting me it's a great privilege this this is a panel that we were talking on our call yesterday about what the panelists were going to talk about and it struck me that this is a subject on which um you know because conservatives right-leaning people can reasonably disagree so I hope to see some reasonable maybe even some vigorous disagreement on the issue the the problem of course we'll talk about is is one that I don't think any reasonable person could disagree about which is that there is a problem of academic freedom of freedom of thought of freedom of speech in higher education from all sorts of different angles the problem that we'll talk about is what can one do about it what can the state do about it should the state do anything about it would the state intervention be counterproductive would it would it make things worse or does the state have an obligation to intervene when there is such a problem of such magnitude in an institution so important to our Civic life and so to bring to bear their thoughts on this matter we have a great panel assembled and let me introduce them and turn it over to them uh first to my immediate left is Mark bauerlein who is an editor at first things and a professor of English Emeritus at Emory University he's taught there since 1989 from 2003 to 2005 he served as director of The Office of research and Analysis at the national National Endowment for the Arts uh he's written or edited 12 books and I won't read them all to you but my favorite title uh of the well my favorite two titles are the dumbest generation how the digital age stupifies Young Americans and jeopardizes our future and then the sequel uh coming 14 years after that the dumbest generation grows up from stupefied youth to dangerous adults and I just asked Mark if he was planning a third book is this a Trilogy uh maybe the title could be the dumbest generation dies I don't mean to express any opinion on the matter um and uh Last Thing Mark has written for everywhere and everyone and appeared in all sorts of uh important places uh and in January 2023 with particular relevance to this panel he was appointed a trustee of new College Florida by Governor DeSantis um and two are you no not it's not at the end of the panel there we have Joe Cohn uh who serves as the Director of fires legislative and Policy Department uh Joe is a 2004 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Fells Institute of government Administration um let's see um he graduated from UNLV undergrad where he co-founded the Student Chapter of the ACLU and he's a former staff attorney for the United States Corps of appeals for the third circuit and a law clerk in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and he's done many other important things as well that I'm going to skip over Andrew Ferguson the current solicitor general of Virginia appointed by attorney general Jason miares prior to that um he served as Chief counsel to leader McConnell in the United States Senate he is a graduate twice over of the University of Virginia and the University of Virginia law school he clerked for judge Henderson on the D.C circuit and Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court he also practiced law at several D.C firms including Bancroft pllc and has worked for other very important people in the Senate uh and we're glad to have him uh and then finally professor John hasnas professor of business and professor of law uh at Georgetown he's also the executive director of The Georgetown Institute for the study of markets and ethics at the McDonough School of Business Georgetown um he's done many important things and taught many important places and he has his being philosopher from Lafayette College or do they say Lafayette in Louisiana we say Lafayette his JD and PhD in legal Philosophy from duke and his llm in legal education from Temple Law School and as Elita said I am judge Kyle Duncan and so we will let me turn over the panel now to mark take it away thank you judge Duncan uh glad to glad to be here and and talk about the situation I'm not a lawyer I'm an English Professor so I will just try to serve to set a context for some of the uh more legal issues that follow in the context of course is is higher education is the University and I pose a question is there any uh more uh signal indication of the uh utter incompetence or betrayal of the Republican party than the public universities in strongly red States any any stronger uh signal of the failure of the conservative movement than higher education in in the United States all you have to do to understand that is to go to a red State a comfortably red state run by a governor a conservative legislature and click on the website of the School of Education in the Maine public university in that state and go ahead and look at the practices the policies the premises of it and ask whether those are in accord with the vast majority of conservative voters in the state not to mention the conservative politicians who run the state what's been happening is that they that that has been turned over to progressivists uh progressivist ideas and personnel and they continue even even today and the hard progressivism of those schools of Education you can also include the humanities departments the Arts departments uh the softer social sciences even in some of the Sciences such as public health and see that in in those places academic freedom is is sorely constrained that's a soft way of putting it there are areas of discussion you simply don't touch unless you tow the the party line if you're you know issue you know that the topics gender and sexuality race U.S history world history family formation male female difference uh climate these are all areas in which a Dogma has been laid down and if you cross the Dogma you're you're in trouble and and we see that time and again and I don't mean just the extreme examples the newsworthy occasions such as what what judge Duncan under that disgusting moment at Stanford uh not too many weeks ago where you saw right in front of you uh the the coercion the intimidation uh taking place I mean actually the regular normal practices of colleges and universities and how they violate academic freedom and they corrupt a peer review I mean does anyone here doubt that admissions offices in selective universities are hives of mendacity they've got to get around the law in order to get that entering class with the proportions that that they strive four uh when you look at hiring practices how many universities uh include a in the application packet A diversity statement which is really a litmus test it's a political bending of the knee to the the Dei Outlook if you've been in tenure decisions uh you you know how all these issues are in the room often unsaid because they don't need to be said the identity politics can just go without saying because it's in the air everyone knows what is supposed to happen and who are the favored candidates uh certain departments uh specific departments are openly political advocacy programs women's studies gender studies black studies they have a set political Outlook and if you come in and uh want to be want to join that department if you want if you're a graduate student and you want to do choose your dissertation if you want a career you've got to once again observe the the reigning outlook on things even if you do solid academic work you follow all the disciplinary protocols you compile if you're a social scientist and you compile the evidence along the uh the guidelines laid out by your discipline if you reach the wrong conclusions you're in trouble if you study uh differences in academic achievement by race you look at test scores you better not go to IQ better not touch that issue zap you know you're you're done if you if you talk about that the Dei policies and programs are squarely contrary to academic freedom and peer review and I can I can explain why that is in in the Q a if that needs to be explained I did a after some new College uh controversies I mean the reason why this little postage stamp of a campus with only 650 students should become such a national story that that's that's an issue in itself but I I the Miami Herald editorial board asked me to do a zoom conference call with with all of them and they asked me you know are you you've said you're against Dei programs at new college and I said that's not what I said I'm against Dei programs at every single campus on this on this entire country and they ought to be terminated tomorrow with extreme prejudice and they kind of looked at me you know with a blank look on their face no no apologies no excuses done and they actually asked me to write an op-ed which I did in the in the Miami Herald um a few days later but when they said why I said because you can't do peer review under the pressures of Dei it corrupts the the process the the sort of the liberal procedures of individual Merit and a sort of blind fold in in terms of your evaluation of candidates and of manuscripts for I've written red manuscripts for for a dozen University presses and a dozen more scholarly quarterlies and I know the pressures that editors are under if they publish something like Bruce Gilly's piece on colonialism a few years ago that editor may be out of a job even though the editor followed all the standard practices that go along with uh the proper functioning of the the university so uh we we have a situation here where the institution has has been corrupted uh academic freedom started going away you know half century ago and the steady deterioration has been marked by one the purging of conservative Personnel from college faculty there are many more conservatives back in 1985 when I was in graduate school at UCLA then there are now political correctness has never ever been worse than it is today my liberal colleagues the professors who've never voted Republican in their lives they're nervous you may have taught Huck Finn for 20 years he probably don't teach it now big mistake you have a class of 35 students you do course evaluations by the end of the semester if two of those if 33 great teacher grade class but you know wonderful and two say I was uncomfortable I felt deeply distressed by having to read Huck Finn it's got the n-word uh the administration because it's a federal issue that could come up especially if the student students of color uh you could have three months of hell you come out of it you know okay I won't teach it again I'm sorry it's so offended doing the usual uh apology but the process is the punishment the chill has said and you're not going to do it again and it only takes a few cases for for everyone else who wants the trouble right who wants who wants to deal with this so what do you do and this is sort of the question I'll pass this along wrap up what do you do if you've got an institution that was the modern institution not the old university the the liberal University is is only you know 140 or so years old uh what do you do when the liberal values of of Merit of individual individual treatment disinterested evaluation on apolitical disciplinary criteria have crumbled what do you do when the people within it won't reform because they can't they can't the the jobs are on the line and we don't need how many more cases of people who've been hit because they said something off campus you know Amy wax uh or or or Professor Klein at UCLA uh in his his refusal to engage in differential treatment of students I mean we know all the cases that have happened what do we do when the campus can't reform itself well that is what we will talk about and that is a wonderful introduction to this I do want to encourage you to try to to try to like really tell us how you feel in the follow-up comments because I felt like you were holding back a little bit there but I'm going to try to encourage you um that's a wonderful introduction and I'm going to hand that off to now to General Ferguson I should have called you General earlier I apologize um and uh you're going to give us some thoughts to sort of start opening the conversation on well what is to be done thank you judge John I'm really pleased to be here and I'm pleased to see so many people who care about I think one of the most important topics that conservatives can debate because um For Better or For Worse and I think increasingly For Worse our future is molded on college campuses and so I hope at least we can all agree that the days of don't worry these kids will grow up when they hit the real world you know the reality check will set in that we can't hope for that and we have to do something about the college campuses now so I think the question is what to do and before I propose some ideas I want to be very clear I'm here in my personal capacity hopefully all of the government officials that were here today said this I'm hearing my personal capacity I don't represent the Attorney General today I don't represent the governor just here representing me so anything I say hold it only against me don't hold it against them I am a lawyer um uh unlike professor bowerline and so I am stuck thinking about this issue in the way that lawyers do which involves a lot of reasoning from analogies and I had not spent a lot of time dealing with the problems of higher education until I joined state government and then spent kind of on a daily basis dealing with the problems of higher education um and in trying to come up with ways to think about this I started to notice some parallels between something that conservative lawyers talk about and think about a lot which is the administrative state so when we talk about the administrative State and why we hate it um there are a couple of reasons one is it's inconsistent with our constitutional design and that's important but if that were the only problem I don't think we'd all get as animated as we do it would be kind of objecting to form and not to substance the real reason we don't like the administrative state is because we don't like being governed by experts self-proclaimed experts who are insulated from any accountability from the governed that's why we don't like it we don't like the results that such a system of government produces and particularly talking about public universities which is what I spend most of my time dealing with this is what they are they are organs of the state governed by insulated bureaucrats who have proclaimed themselves experts on their topics who get to decide who else qualifies as an expert on the topic and they govern themselves they take unbelievably huge amounts of public money resist any public oversight associated with that money and insist that the way this needs to work is take the money keep the oversight we want the money I mean there are some people in the room right now who I know have run large academic institutions in Virginia the large academic institutions in Virginia including the public ones spend millions of dollars on lobbyists that they employ in-house to come to the legislature and fight for money and no oversight and uh that is has a remarkable parallel until we talk about the administrative State the administrative State our agencies run by experts who are not accountable to the public who make decisions ostensibly on the basis of their expertise that the rest of us have to live with and kind of hope it turns out okay hopefully after the way the experts handled covid we are all deeply suspicious of and trusting experts with government I think this we need to think the same about public universities um and and I think that the main problem is the problem that Professor bowerline identified which is the physician is not going to heal himself he can't he's too far gone we cannot expect the cabals of professors who governs these universities who decide who else gets to join the cabal decides who doesn't get to join the cabal and who ejects dissenters from the cabal there's no hope and we can't possibly reasonably expect that these people are going to govern themselves consistently with what we have established these universities to do and at least particularly for public universities we pour billions of public funds into these universities to educate our children to mold future citizens to achieve human flourishing and to search for the truth and if the public universities aren't doing that the public has a very reasonable expectation to ask what are we spending the money on the cost of higher education has exploded an unbelievable amount of nonsense seems to spew from these publicly funded institutions and we continue to pour money into them I think the public not only can should be demanding of their political leaders who are routinely signing off on the money to these public institutions but not accountable for what comes out of them what are we spending this money on I can barely afford to get my kids through college I'm also taxed to pay for these institutions and it's not just public institutions an unbelievable amount of federal money and state money go to private institutions as well what are we spending the money on what are they doing because the best as I can tell it's not good and so in terms of solutions I think that the Frontline solution is the solution in which Professor bauerline is actively participating and in which Governor DeSantis has led on and Governor yunkin is doing the same thing which is find figure out and it's normally pretty straightforward what's the governing mechanisms of these institutions are and subject them to political accountability and if the current system isn't working replace the Personnel I mean you know much of my experience from the last five years has been in judicial nominations and I know that there are some people who have been affected by the judicial nominations process right here in the room right now but this was sort of my animating Theory when I got involved in that too which is the courts are not producing decisions and judgments that are consistent with the law we should change the Personnel we did I don't see any reason not to take the same approach to public universities and frankly I think that as public institutions that absorb an unbelievable amount of public wealth but to do not have to show what public good they provide I think politicians basically owe it to their constituents to subject these institutions to substantial oversight and demand and then enforce changes uh if the physician cannot heal himself and I'm not an expert on the state of the universities I saw what happened to Judge Duncan I've seen what's happened to others to some extent I've dealt with it as a as a lawyer for the government but if the description of the way that 10-year decisions and publication decisions and expenditure decisions are being made that Professor barolin just gave us are accurate the help has to come from outside and I think that the only way the help will come from outside are people in government who are answerable to the electorate for what goes on in the government including for the largest organs of government which in many states are the flagship state universities people need to expect their politicians to hold them accountable and to make substantial changes if the product that we are paying for is just not useful to the public at all if this isn't a way to achieve human flourishing change it and if they can't change themselves change it from the outside that's what we're electing people to do thank you General we will return to you now now two references have now been made to my recent unpleasantness at Stanford I just want to I just want to assure everyone that I'm okay and and I and I wish I wish mark would stop touching me though but I have had a lot of therapy now and I'm okay I'm okay I don't wake up screaming about juice and oranges in the middle of the night but it's okay all right now uh we will move now to uh I think a different perspective on this uh from Professor hasnas so please Professor take it away the characterization of the nature of the culture inside universities so to a large extent it is a monoculture faculties tend to be ideologically all on the same side there's a great deal of ideological bias among the faculty if you want to say there's unfairness in hiring yeah from my perspective there's unfairness in hiring because it's more difficult for people who agree with me to get hired that's true there the biggest problem that I deal with is that the universities consistently fail to live up to their own policies um I don't want to exaggerate things things are much worse in an institution like mine than in many of the ordinary colleges and universities throughout the world the country that are not one of the elite schools where most professors and most students just do their stuff learn their craft and go through college in a normal way but the more you get up to the elite level the more what Mark described as an accurate description of the culture of the University I'm here I work at Georgetown University so I should have a lot of insight into this fire rank 203 of the top unit of the schools the country's universities with regard to their Hospitality to freedom of speech What's the culture like for freedom of speech Georgetown came in 200. there were three below us but we were 200. however we've managed to excel in the sense that for in 2023 fire awarded us the lifetime censorship award well deserved okay so we did earn that um and I I and I will tell you that it's true to say that in the humanities and in the law school there's a lot of ideological Conformity and a lot of ideological hostility to certain positions but that's not how you earn these reverse accolades I've been working inside Georgetown University for 10 years to try to alter policies and in fact I have managed to alter two policies that means I work with the administration all the time and there are no bad guys in the administration the Deans the president the Provost these are not bad people they're well motivated people they care about the good of Georgetown University administrators are not ideal locks faculty are ideal locks administrators are not administrators respond to the incentives built into the structure they respond to their incentives and the reason why you get these results that we don't think produ is a good product is because of the internal incentives within the university structure um I do I teach in the law school most of the time I teach in the business school part of the time what I've learned from the business school is the effect of organizational behavior features on the way organizations behave it's not that somebody is out there trying to corrupt the system it's that people following their incentives end up doing things that produce a result that's completely at odds with the actual goal Georgetown University has an excellent freedom of speech policy it's the Chicago statement built in there and yet we managed to get the censorship award by simply departing from it consistently and the reason is because this we don't have anybody in charge of making sure that that's honored because the incentives of the parties that are involved are to make problems go away we have you know in business is this old saying you are hoping for a and paying for B well that's what's going on inside the university that's what the problems are things are bad our job is to try to make them better some of us work within the university to try to do that I've been doing that for about 10 years it's a somewhat frustrating exercise I make a little progress I get the policy changed and then we ignore it that just means I have more work to do however the only thing I can think of that would make the situation worse is if we got politicians involved yeah let's get the state telling us what we can do this is suppose this panel is supposed to be about academic freedom so the way I understand academic freedom is professors students are allowed to pursue truth pursue knowledge pursue their research wherever it leads them free from sanction and interference by the administration of the university and by the government that's what academic freedom is it means we get to argue about truth um it seems odd to say to preserve academic freedom we have to get the state to regulate it it's a it's a little bit oxymoronic don't you think and we've done things like that before and it hasn't worked out that well I mean I can remember the McCarthy era where you had to if you advocated anything associated with the left wing you would be fired so that's the last place we want to go um it's not easy to persuade your colleagues that they're wrong I'm in a monoculture I'm the odd person out my job is to try to change people's opinion I do my best and I regularly fail my inability to persuade people I think is unfortunate but it certainly doesn't suggest that because I can't persuade them I should have the state come in and win the case for me right the kind of policies that my colleagues are pursuing I think are very very bad policies for all of the reasons that have been described and I've got to try to change them but if I have the state able to interfere I have to be careful because I'm talking about George Georgetown which is a private university I don't think state universities are such a good idea but we have them if you want to have a State University then the state determines how much money it gets as they can determine how much money it gets but the solution to the fact that you don't like the product being put out by state universities is not to abrogate academic freedom it's not to have the state control so that they put out the right product if you don't like the product don't pay for it there you want to cut the amount of money that's going in because you think it's not doing the job right I guess that's a political decision but in order to correct what's going on inside the universities even State universities it seems like a bad idea to abrogate academic freedom it's true that professors are not held accountable to the administration and to politicians for the products that they put out for their research for their conclusions and when I make some points and everybody thinks I'm an idiot and wants to condemn me for what I'm saying that goes with the territory it's not easy defending Freedom it's not supposed to be easy to defend Freedom it's not easy being the outlier when everybody else disagrees with you but that's our job we don't need outside enforcement we have all the enforcement we need inside the system we just are not brave enough to use it using Georgetown for an example couple of years ago two adjuncts were fired for what they said direct violation of our speech policy clear and what do they do they've left they didn't fight they left had either of them I'm also the chair of georgetown's faculty grievance code committee had either of those people decided to bring a grievance against the law school dean it was a sure winner it could we could have said you can't do this but they left we had the same problem last year with Ilia Shapiro he wasn't sanctioned but had he continued in the job and been sanctioned if he brought a grievance it would win we need people willing to stand up and fight and even if the even if the grievance committee goes the wrong way then you get to sue because the policies are part of our contract with the professors and although the administration maybe um worried about incentives there's one party who's who has the right incentives and that's University Council University Castle care is only about one thing don't let the university get sued and the surest way for it to get sued is for it to violate its own policies once people start showing that if we don't honor our commitment to freedom of speech if we violate the tenets of academic freedom The Universities at risk for lawsuits that party has all the incentive to try to change Behavior you know our training for our incoming students is terrible that's changeable why would any why would they change it there's no incentive yet threat of lawsuit that'll change it okay the part we have a problem our job as academics is to deal with it we have an enforcement mechanism that we don't use the most destructive thing we can do is invite outside political interference to make sure that we're putting out a good academic product I mean academic freedom is supposed to be we explore we talk about we discuss we search for search for truth and then if it doesn't come out my way I'm stuck with that I have to try to change Minds but if it doesn't come out my way I don't get to say okay everybody else is wrong let's have the state make it so that things come out right okay that's a extremely dangerous and damaging route to take we've done it in the past and it's been disastrous so I think we should not repeat it in the present Professor thank you I know you will get to say more on that subject as we go forward but I will now turn it over to our final panelists Joe Cohn and and I know he will speed it take takes some I think perhaps somewhat of a middle position between the last two speakers thank you so much your honor and it's such a great pleasure to be here with my fellow panelists and at a conference about freedom of thought that even has a fire Emoji behind me it's a tremendous Delight so I'm Joe Cohn the legislative and policy director at the foundation for individual rights and expression or as we're better known fire and we are equal opportunist critics and you know that does put me in a position here of being able to describe you know what you know a lot of common ground that I have with each one of the of the panelists and some you know disagreement as well the first thing you know I want to point out I think uh some consistency across the panel is that uh none of us think that everything that's going on in higher ed is well oiled smooth running operating machine we all see a tremendous amount of room for improvement I do think it's important to remember though that there's never been a golden age of academic freedom Free Speech you know Etc in higher ed or anywhere else so it's a constant and it's going to always be regardless what we do a constant thing that we need to be engaged on but what I want us to really think about is how we take an approach to this problem that doesn't trade one set of constitutional issues and problems for another and what I mean by that is that I don't have any horse on the race whether or not Academia Academia is dominated by the left or the right I don't want it dominated by either so what I look at and evaluate proposals I want to see what they do to elevate you know the voices that are being chilled and not whether or not they silence people whose voices are in the majority uh what I'm really looking for is how do we establish you know a free speech culture and a culture of academic freedom because I agree with uh Professor hasnas uh with respect to the fact that academic freedom is primarily about insulating students and faculty from external pressures either from the administration or from the government and so that's why I look at the different policy proposals that are put forth in different states and I evaluate them each independently and don't take an All or Nothing approach of they're all you know hunky-dory or they're all trash and some of them are mixed bags where there are some Provisions that are really helpful and other Provisions that aren't so give with one hand and take with the other so uh I'll start by by comparing some of the different approaches and different contexts that this has been thought in in the different state legislatures and I'll just list them real quickly you know we've seen efforts to regulate the Dei administrative apparatus we've seen efforts to regulate uh curriculum and what ideas can be in college classrooms we've seen not in bills necessarily although one or two that responded to this problem efforts by government officials to try to punish faculty for expression on matters of public concern inside the classroom and outside of the classroom on Twitter Etc and we've seen efforts to either eliminate or reform uh tenure so all of these things are kind of in this ecosystem of pieces of legislation that are percolating throughout the states and they all need to be thought through separately in terms of the legal implications and the social implications of it and let me just start by saying you know uh I'll start with with one where I think you know is uh you know helpful and uh where I don't agree that it's appropriate for us to just take a step back and let the institutions themselves just do whatever they want to do when we're talking about administrative enforcement of Dei we're not talking about whether or not the concept of diversity is worthwhile and whether or not institutions should be doing things to make sure that they are productive places for people to learn of all different types we're talking about overhanded approaches to it that squeeze out dissenting views we're talking about the kind of political litmus test that Professor borderline was talking about the screen out dissenters either at the point of higher or at the point of you know whether they're being considered for promotion or tenure and I think it's perfectly appropriate for the government to say you know what there are some things we're not going to let you use when in the hiring process says in the promotion process to evaluate candidates and that's why you see groups like The Manhattan Institute and like fire crafting model pieces of legislation that say that those kind of questions that you know a lot of survey data some that's run by fire itself shows are being used as described as political litmus tests are off the table but what I also want us to think about when you're crafting that in state law is to not trade one political witness test for another so how about no political litmus test not just this is the one issue that we're particularly sensitive about that we don't want you you know screening out to centers don't screen out to centers okay you know take you know it's craft things carefully to make sure that you can still evaluate a faculty member's actual work in the subject area but don't just screen people out curricular bands curricular bands are unconstitutional I want to say that full stop and this is a somewhat in response to the prior panels you know question about you know the stop woke Act so far there have been over a dozen state legislatures that have introduced bills that would say certain ideas around race and gender are prohibited from discussion in the college classroom of those states only one bill was enacted in that form that said these ideas de facto discriminatory may not be uttered in the college classroom that state was Florida that's the stopwoke ACT fires lit fire and others have litigated against it and it's currently enjoined and that's because there's over 60 years of legal precedence saying there's no idea that you can borrow from college classrooms so these ideas are not all created equal in terms of the legislative Solutions I'm going to go really quickly because I don't I want to make sure we have more time for a conversation here no you will we'll have time to go through more but I would like to hear the other one more view the other you know two productive things I'll be really fast about is tenure uh tenure has been instrumental in defending the rights of professors who have minority viewpoints from being you know purged from the academy now we might want reforms in terms of how tenure is granted but there's no question that it has been helpful in making sure that those who are in charge can't just Purge conservative voices I'm not saying the tenure is the only way to protect Free Speech but maybe gutting it without putting something better in its place is not the way to go and while talking about what's better in this place having statutory protections for faculty to be able to speak their minds on matters of public concern is something that legislatures absolutely can appropriately do and the last point I want to make and then I will close on this is that what I find so interesting about this discussion of late is the reversal of the political parties on this for years fire has been telling those on the left that in the tension between equality and Free Speech you must allow Free Speech the chips should fall where they may but now you have conservative legislators saying these ideas are so bad that they must not be allowed to be spoken that's the stop woke act and others like it and I'll be here to tell anyone on either side of the political spectrum that when you prioritize the equality over speech you are in the wrong here and uh and and with that I would say I'm really looking forward to the rest of the conversation with my fellow panelists uh it's a great honor again to be here thank you excellent excellent I think um I think it's I'm not going to interject anything frankly I just want to hear Mark's um if I may start with you if if you would respond it it I think at some level we do have an agreement on there that there's a problem I think do you do you agree that everybody on the panel sees the same problem or do you think the problem is somewhat different than is being characterized by somebody or say whatever you want I think we probably disagree more on the degree of the problem the degree to which the university has has been corrupted the degree to which again regular normal routine practices violate academic freedom not just the extreme cases the ones that get the publicity it really is again the standard operating procedures that have become again just like the air that people breathe on on campus which again is is in a way more more debilitating right than than the than the open aggression right toward toward conservative so it would be it's not that conservatives have been drummed out of the professor it's just that over time those conservative professors are there were retired and and younger conservatives weren't weren't hired it's it's that it's that process and that they weren't hired because of their traditionalist outlook on on things now again what do you do about about that kind of thing again it's slow takes place you know year after year I mean God and man at Yale was what 1952 the closing the American mind was 1987. uh you know the these these concerns have been around for a long long time and my my dismay and I'll just wrap up with this is the Oberlin decision Oberlin got slammed as it deserved to to get slammed badly I don't see maybe I'm wrong but I don't see that that has changed the behavior of any any administrators any any Universities well let me just let me ask you though so you say God and man at Yale was in the 50s and then we had the closing of the American mind and so presumably there's been discussion and there's been some ferment on these ideas and yet you said in your opening remarks that things have quote never been worse than today and you described universities of quote hives of mendacity um which is which I'm going to write I'm going to put that in an opinion not not on this subject of course but I just it's got a nice ring to it citation um no citations yeah yeah I mean uh yeah I mean unless yeah maybe to a literary journal I don't know is that that's not even secondary Authority but um so so why why is it worse never been worse than today don't we learn from history don't we learn from doing bad things so now we can do good things why why are things worse never and I'm not I'm not disputing that they're never been worse but why are they worse today in the past very Broad a very broad answer to that which again is is a is a tentative answer and and that is that the social movements of the 60s and 70s the civil rights movement and I'm women's lib and then the the gay rights movement had a certain moral Authority that gave mortal 32 identity politics and the conservative movement in the 70s they just gave up on on on the education world except in the areas of long economics they went all in on Law and economics and say you know those Humanities people the Arts people just you know that they they do their their own thing and I think it was the left understood you know the old Downstream politics uh from from culture the left understood you know we lost we lost in 70 we got hammered in 1972 and then we got hammered in 1980 and 84. we got to do our Long March through different institutions education media entertainment publishing the art world that's where we get in and you know it was a big liberal when I came out of graduate school in 1990 I'm working at Emory and boy suddenly queer Theory it was the thing all the energy was going into the uh uh that field in in the humanities in 1985 you never saw it by 1995 all the journals were filled with the words of transgression subversion right heteronormativity it was it was astonishing but we all look said okay you know they do their own little you know their own little sexuality stuff in in that world and the rest of us will will will go on well we didn't know they'd end up in the Obama Administration they won that we we misconstrued the the force of this socio-cultural Outlook and and I mean I went conservative you know in in you know I had a child and then you know the oughts and I realized boy did I did I uh did I underestimate this uh this movement that's not a satisfying answer but I'm curious about your reaction to one thing and then I want to ask Andrew something uh Professor hasnas um describes this as an elite problem I think that's what you set an elite problem sort of this is these are the things that are going the yales and the georgetowns but there's a large group I don't know if you said A large group but a significant group of universities where professors and students are just doing their thing um and now and for you know I want to believe that's that's true certainly do you agree with that or do you think that's right or not I actually don't don't think that that's true I think it's just as bad at Cal State LA as it is at UCLA uh I think in the more uh the more empirical you get right uh engineering schools in in um a m schools and maybe the the schools that are more oriented toward you know certification the the labor market less so but I I do think it's drifting down uh farther farther farther than the professor Andrew um so you you seem to be on the panel the one most uh sanguine about State intervention or the most that that's necessary and yet we heard from the other two panelists that there's there's an important value called academic freedom um and I noted down two aspects of that the first is insulation from external pressures and the second one is um in order that we can pursue the truth in the University so do you have a response to I think the implicit criticism which is if we have aggressive State intervention then we're going to erase we're going to damage what makes the university as uh an important social it's it we're gonna we're gonna compromise its important social function if we do that uh yeah that's a good question and I think it's a that's a legitimate criticism and I think that's also you know one of the best criticisms of government intervention in any Market is the unintended After Effects um you know the idea that good intentions uh are are great but um they don't justify regulation I I think here though the the you know the point of academic academic freedom is is security from external pressures I certainly think that's one of the means we've used to secure academic freedom I I don't think that's an end of itself and I think that we now confront this problem where you have you know these tenured cabals defining Orthodoxy and imposing tremendous pressure on dissenters effectively amounting to a heckler's veto um that say toe the line of this Orthodoxy or you will be excluded from the profession um and you know I I guess my question is if you have this sort of you know that is pressure external from the speaker but it's internal to the institution and I guess the question is if you have this sort of malignant internal pressure that is that is resisting the kind of unalloid search for the truth um is external pressure to defend the right to search for the truth really that bad and I think the answer is no we use government regulation to promote the First Amendment all the time I mean look if you're marching down the street protesting something and a gang of thugs shows up to beat the crap out of you because of your position the first amendment is a meaningless parchment barrier if the government doesn't promptly intervene to protect the rights of the speaker that's the principle of the heckler's veto all of our first amendment rights are only uh only go so far as the government is willing to secure them against the heckler's detail I just don't understand why we wouldn't say the same for the University if it tenured cabal is willing to show up and in the case of in some cases physically obstructs speakers from pursuing the truth I don't understand why we wouldn't say it's time for someone outside of the institution to intervene and something that professor hasna said with which I strongly agree I just I I see the way to achieve it very differently is his View and it sounds correct to me although I don't have an Insider's take is that the problem for University administrators is one of incentives that they have the apparatuses in place but they don't have internal institutional incentives to use those apparatuses to defend these important values I agree I agree the incentives have to be changed and the physician won't heal himself that's the point especially for public institutions if the if the physician is sick it needs to be healed by someone else and I think that's the point the incentives are bad they are terrible they need to be changed and we can't expect the people subject to those incentives to change them on their own they have no incentive to do so and in terms of my my friends down the panel and it's nice to be every time that fire is on my desk they're writing a brief opposing something I'm about to say and so it's nice that we have some some agreement here but one of the things that I've heard my friends say is that we need to resist the idea of kind of state regulation which at least in my mind generally describes some sort of like intrusion into an otherwise operating Market I do think that there probably are circumstances where that's called for but I think at least in the first instance I'm proposing something considerably more modest maybe adjust the spigot of money that flows out of every state capital and out of Washington to these universities sight unseen irrespective of the way they treat their students and the way they treat their faculty these are public Investments I don't know why we would be surprised that the public would say hold on if you aren't actually searching for the truth if you aren't participating in the achievement of human flourishing it's fine we aren't going to come for you and throw you in jail but we're not going to give you access to public funds the point of public funds is to achieve public goods and if you aren't doing it no more public funds and I you know I I do think there probably are some circumstances in which more government intrusion is probably called for but at the very least if we're going to continue dumping tens and hundreds of billions of dollars into these institutions let's expect them to put it to a use that is a public good um so I I want to I I do want to address a question Professor haznus but Joe you just raise your hands if I can jump in real quickly I'll recognize you thank you I appreciate it um you know I actually think there's a good amount of common ground on this point but it needs to be refined a little bit because what I'm concerned about is not the question of Regulation or not but what does your regulation look like it's one thing to say you know this year as we're considering your budget we're also going to be putting in a stronger cause of action for people who have been censored and you know that's going to be in it you know we're going to make sure that people who have been centered have an opportunity better to defend themselves it's one thing you know to say that you're going to provide due process rights and you know in campus hearings you know you're coming into me you're asking me for gazillions of dollars we're going to insist that you do certain things and we're going to insist that you protect the academic freedom rights of even you know your your professors who say the most controversial things including you know teaching Huck Finn if they want if you're going to come to us and ask us for money but what I'm concerned about is when the Appropriations Committee instead says if you teach what I don't want you to teach then I'm not going to give you you know the money because you're not talking about whether or not Virginia can do it if Virginia can do it so can California and so can Alabama and so can every other state and what ideas each state chooses to take off of the table in the strong arming of the budget is going to be different so that's why I do think there's an appropriate you know kind of role here in in regulating but we need to be careful that you're always talking about enhancing voices and not silencing voices in all of the state you know regulations not some of them thank you did you just one quick response that point is well taken but at least for public universities and again I'm sorry for the sort of insistence of my focus on this it's just what I normally deal with someone is deciding what will be taught and what will not be taught and in public universities it's always the government because the curriculum decisions made within public universities are made by the government so we are not having a debate about whether the government should make these decisions or not they are making them they're making them the cabal of professors who makes these decisions about what curriculum does what curricula will be taught and whether you are sufficiently within the scope of the Orthodoxy to participate in these decisions that's the government it is the government so the question we are deciding is is an accountable wing of the government going to make these decisions or is an unaccountable wing and my preference as a conservative particularly after years of resisting the administrative state is the accountable Wings should make these decisions thank you uh Professor I wanted to ask you and we will have time for questions we're going until 5 15 and so in a few minutes we'll open it up for questions I wanted to ask you a couple of things Professor um one was very practical you said you had managed to change some internal policies at Georgetown over the years and I'm sure that required a hero effort on your part but then you also said I believe that policies are routinely ignored and not enforced and so you pointed to the necessity of changing incentives so what are some of the incentives you have in mind that would be that could be changed uh that that would actually have a helpful sort of you know impact as opposed to just changing words on a piece of paper Chicago principles right yet we have nobody who's assigned responsibility for seeing that's enforced have you got Executive Vice Presidents across the board who are whose job is to make sure that things function normally that the students don't go off on protest we've got lots of people responsible for making sure that everything else works and nobody who's a champion for freedom of speech so when the parties get together and decide how to act there's no one speaking for freedom of speech another thing we could do that I've been working on without success is to have the policy of a statement added to the policy which says if you a complaint directed against someone is based purely on the content of their speech it will be dismissed without investigation because the way things work now the investigation itself turns into the punishment somebody says something that's improper next three months there you know on leave so that's another thing that can be done the other thing is to change it should not be we have a very good speech policy at Georgetown its purpose is to restrain the extent to which the administrators meaning the Deans the Provost the Dei people can interfere with students and faculty freedom of speech the parties charged with enforcing the policy are the Deans the Provost and the Dei people it's not surprising that the policy is not effective you know effectively enforced that reminds me of something Justice Scalia said about uh you know that there are many bills of Rights and the you know constitutions of the of the satellites of the Soviet Soviet Union they're not enforced because they have no governmental structure I use when I write about this is that the Soviet Union had an excellent protection for freedom of speech in article 50. right you could read it in the gulag it just means nothing and and on this point this point it's it's not I I try I think that it's a big problem but we're over generalizing to explain the problem so I teach at the law school in the business school it's an interesting dichotomy at the law school is highly politicized it's highly ideological and there's a lot of issues that's where our issues have come up I teach in the business school nobody cares about this stuff we just try to do our job and teach the students and make them graduate and make the school a better place same thing I've been at various institutions I spent a couple of years at George Mason that's not got the same kind of ideological problem as we do different fields of different the humanities and law tends to be highly ideological and it's not across the board because most of us just by teaching we want to do our job and we don't care about this the highly motivated ideologically partisan people make all the noise they make all the noise they get all the attention the rest of us just don't want to deal with it and the Administration has incentives to respond to the noisy people and ignore everybody else who just wants to get on with life we have to change the incentives so that the people who make the most noise don't get the response that they want and that's internal to the organization thank you those are all fair points and I think it's appropriate to have the first question go to you sir great uh elipiro professor emeritus at Georgetown I keep using that joke I'll keep using it until I stop getting laughs so anyway um so um I'm writing a book about the illiberal Takeover of legal education I think I've solved law schools you'll have to buy the book next year in time for the admissions uh cycle but my question isn't about that it's about so there's a lot a great deal of consensus that there aren't really legal issues with I think Joe mentioned uh my proposal with Chris Ruffo to abolish di structures and diversity statements these systems and processes and things okay no legal issues with that there's a policy pipe uh on the other hand regulating speech within the classroom big First Amendment red flags but then there's stuff that Andrew and others have mentioned curriculum which departments we have should we have a you know transgender black lives activism department and all you know that sort of thing and classes within those departments so clearly those decisions do need to be made by someone by definition someone has to decide what's taught um is it you know the Ben sasses having better presidents uh at these institutions is it trustees and we need to focus on getting better trustees not just folks who want to like uh get better football tickets and stuff like this but who care about stuff is it accreditation uh or is there a role for state legislatures or or or others because there's at different levels decisions are being made of what you know some University forget you know any ideological things a university could decide we're going to be purely about stem conversely another one is going to be we're purely Arts whatever right and within each department okay uh you know we need more military history or we we don't have anybody that does uh you know this aspect of biophysics or this aspect of cryptography and we need more classes of that right so those decisions need to be made let's talk about how to affect that sort is that is it just the legislature is that the only tool we have uh or are there other kinds of external pressures as Andrew was saying great thank you anyone would like to speak to those well good questions I guess I'll just do a quick entry here which is I think part of the solution is some different version of there being different layers that are involved what different kind of perspectives on it the problem is total group think amongst the people who are making decisions at one level or or the other and you know I get you know just as concerned about you know getting rid of you know transgender theory of X Y or Z as a class as I would be about trying to purge the ability to teach conservative you know thinking in this context and I just don't want either of the political leanings to be able to or have the authority to purge the other side and we think that that's happening now but that's a problem so I'm not interested in just deciding to say that no it's us who should be doing the purging not them who should be doing the purging you know so I I I so I think that you know the question isn't whether or not there will be human beings but whether or not there are multiple layers of checks and balances that are all incentivized through the lens of let's make sure that more ideas are included you know because that's the key here the more ideas thank you Mark just a quick Point uh uh on on classroom speech there's a professional uh restraint on that articulated by the AUP in its 1940 revision of 1915 statement on on academic freedom which says that the introduction of irrelevant material into the classroom is forbidden irrelevant to the to the core subject and the discipline all right anyone else two quick observations one a lot of the problem it has to do with Finance we get paid no matter what product we put out there it doesn't matter whether it's stem or some kind of identity studies program at Georgetown we're going to get students we're going to get Finance we're going to get the money no matter what we put out a lack of connection between the product that we put out and our finance means we can do whatever we want it's a terrible Finance system the other thing I'm going to say is completely unacceptable I have to think about whether I should say it or not but a lot of I shouldn't say what a lot of what drives the curricular decisions has nothing to do with proof think or anything else it has to do with universities drive to make a diverse faculty I we can't when we hire when if we were well informed we would know that when we hire we can't make any decisions based on race sex gen yeah religion and any of those we can't use that as a hiring tool so how can you diversify the faculty you create positions that only minorities will apply for and are best qualified for and the way to diversify The Faculty is to skew the curriculum from physics or biology in a direction that gets more people like that on board it's a way of dealing with the restrictions of Civil Rights Act imposes on faculty hiring when a main goal of many universities is to have a more diverse faculty it affects the curriculum and what I think is perhaps a negative way in a way that's not related to what would be the best use of funds to put for students in order to achieve a goal it's an example of the tail wagging the dog in some ways thank you um I I think it's kind of all of the above um I don't I don't see these as as like mutually exclusive or dichotomous I think that the selection of boards of Trustees is one of the probably five most important things any Chief magistrate of a state does um because a Board of Trustees willing to resist the administrative apparatus and the faculty cabals can do a tremendous amount of work within universities and I think across the board both parties all 50 states there's a long tradition of rewarding donors or at least the donor class with positions on Board of Trustees I think that is a mistake I think it's a huge mistake Personnel is policy at the federal level it is equally true at the state level I think the first place that the changes can be made are University administrators who come to fear having to explain the insanity on their campuses to a Board of Trustees who has a hair trigger on firing people and your only going to get that if Chief magistrates or whatever the system that a particular state has set up for selecting the board is willing to kind of break the long-held multi or bipartisan Norm of selecting kind of the donor class as a reward I also am more comfortable I think than than Joe for example on legislative Solutions I think one great one is just blow up the 10-year granting system I I have yet to hear a particularly convincing argument about why the like the the the the group that decides Orthodoxy also gets to Grant these like lifetime positions it would be like the Judiciary deciding who the next judges are that makes no sense to me it doesn't work anywhere else and I don't if we're going to maintain tenure someone external to the group of tenured people should be making those decisions not saying not without consultation with the faculty because they have to have some understanding of what's important within that market but letting the current market participants decide who gets to join the Monopoly makes no sense to me whatsoever one of my apologies no you're fine oh that's that's all right I are we going back and forth between the front and the back one so the whoever is at the back mic now uh please Kurt Levy uh committee for justice in an earlier panel uh where we're focusing on um you know woke uh social media and corporations I asked about you know why not expand anti-discrimination laws to include ideological discrimination and you know Casey Maddox had a good point which was well do you really want to put this in the hands of you know of bureaucrats and only make the problem worse but you know as I'm sitting here listening to you guys describe how bad it is on the ground I'm like if there's one domain that you couldn't make worse it's Academia I can't imagine it being any way of making it worse so why not something like you know a title six or a Title IX um for ideological discrimination um where if you're going to accept federal funds then you can't discriminate and I know some of you up there would say that's you know would violate the First Amendment and maybe it'll be challenges but we don't say under Title IX or title six that a school has the right to if it feel if it very you know it doesn't have free expression to say we don't like black students or we don't like women um and I guess I would just you know also add you know whether you agree with Andrew or not why don't we see more of you know whether it's something like title VI or or Title IX why don't we see more efforts by state legislators to uh to Outlaw ideological discrimination I mean Joe doesn't like Banning CRT but I don't think we would need to if we had more diversity intellectual diversity so any reactions to a ban on quote ideological discrimination as some part of a solution well you know I I just want to start by saying that I do think it can get worse you know and I know that that's not what anyone in here wants to see given the uh the gloomy you know temperature uh you know that that we all feel is the status quo but I do think things can get worse and one way that you know that that uh the reason why I think this is because under at least the status quo with First Amendment litigation some of the people that are victims of some of the most egregious things that we are concerned about will win they went in court and now it takes courage to file suit uh of course and not everyone does and that's not the ideal thing to have to rely upon but I don't want to really shift law to not prioritize those individual you know uh rights now I'm not weighing in necessarily on the question of adding political classes of protected status that's been done in a number of states um you know I I think there's some positives and some and some negatives to it but I just say careful what we wish for modesty you know we'll go a long way to to leading to really good policy Joe I believe some states do include political affiliation in their anti-discrimination but that's that's easy that's clear Democrat Republican ideological awfully fuzzy right how do you where where do you set what's your ideology kind of thing yeah to her comments um if you made discrimination on ideological viewpoints actionable all we would do is Sue each other because that's what the disputation is about ideology the other quick observation is based on something you said in the last panel in DC under the Human Rights Act political affiliation is a basis for discrimination I'm going to just give this app as an advertisement I've been trying to convince a law student to work with me writing a lawyer of your article for a long time showing that under the disparate impact theory of discrimination Georgetown University should be being sued for not having enough Republicans and that it's a we need to write an article saying that they're discriminating on political affiliation Despair and impact shows it so if anybody would like to publish that with me get in touch so there you go I mean if anybody would like to see Georgetown just come up up front here and we can go ahead and do that just kidding that's a joke good one quick response my understanding of of one of the objections to this was well do we want to have bureaucrats making these decisions they are I don't know what you think goes on at the universities they are the question is not whether it's which the ones that aren't accountable because they get 10-year protection uh or they're responding to the incentives of the tenured or ones that when we find out about it we can go to someone and say fix it or we vote you out and that that's kind of my view here is present company excluded I don't see particularly public universities as sort of distinct categories of government organs from the other big agencies they are government organs when they do bad stuff they get to interpose sovereign immunity I mean they are the government and so the question is not should the government it's which part and I just have a strong preference for the part we can change as the governed as opposed to a kind of insulated cabal and I guess you know we've been feeding around the bush about this disagreement here but I'll get straight to the heart of where I where I believe the tension is which is the special nature of academic freedom is that this is the one place we're supposed to be challenging the status quo this is the one place where all of the ideas all of the ideas are supposed to be fair to debate and history is filled with the big g capital G government and I you know of course public institutions are also government actors we sue them under the First Amendment all the time but when you start inviting Big G government to have pressure and the ability and the authority to remove ideas and give them that Authority uh without redress under the First Amendment you know as as currently as status quo and faculty are ironing that out the political incentives of a polarized Society of whichever side is in the majority trying to stamp out the other are incredibly high and that's not to say that this isn't happening on the ground already because I do agree uh with the solicitor general on that point but I we're happy to litigate and fight that every time that we see it you know from fire you know and do it you know regularly and often on behalf of people through litigation and even not through litigation with advocacy as Mr Shapiro can you know attest so you know I I just I worry about what it means when you're replacing we say it's the accountability I don't know there is much accountability in the Electoral versus constitutional rights of free speech when free speech is supposed to protect minority views from the majoritarian view that's the whole point of free speech let's let's get another question I'm in Scalia law I wanted to follow up on something that Joe said if I understood correctly that you were interested in some kind of a norm that might say you're not supposed to um rule out dissenters at the hiring stage or uh and and the problem is right what you're going to hear is well you don't want to force the geology Department to hire flat earthers right it's not because you know if the if the if there isn't search for truth going on in the University there is going to ultimately be consensus that certain ideas just it's not that we're ideologically biased against them we're political activists it's just that there's some things that have been disproven and it's not it's a waste of our time and I think most liberal faculty members actually believe they think that they are following the objective search for truth that we're all saying they should be doing it's not their fault that conservative ideas are all tantamount to Flat earthism I mean and so the question is how I'm curious how how do you deal with that I mean that's that's exactly putting the thumb on the difficulty here and you know we've tried to Grapple with that with our own you know model legislation that says that you know when you know you're evaluating uh institutional hire that taking into consideration a person's work in their subject matter expertise is different than saying you know you're in the engineering department but what's your view on Dei right so you're allowed into consider consider their substantive body of work in the space that doesn't mean that there will be no ideological calls that are being you know made there I don't know that there's any statutory way you can prevent that from ever happening on the ground to perfection without error but that's how we're trying to Tinker with that it's a very hard thing to get exactly right which is why we revisit and revisit and revisit our language but in the back there thank you Greg Dolan from University of Baltimore and as a tenure faculty member at a law school in Blue State as well as somebody who's currently litigating a case where federal judges do try to pick their colleague or really this big their colleague I can tell you it can't get worse so my question is actually fairly narrow if we do blow up the tenure system a I hope it doesn't affect me but B more you'll be okay uh one will replace it and given that I teach the University of Baltimore and one of the blue states in the nation as an originalist as a conservative I am not quite sure that I would get a better shake out of the state legislature than I would get out of my colleagues as bad as they might be and um so if we Farm out hiring or we Farm our tenure to politically responsible people which certainly has some superficial appeal how will we deal with the fact that those people do have to respond to their voters who will probably you voted to give tenure to this guy or to that guy on the right or the left Etc why do you think that would be better than what we have now as bad as what we have now is do you want to take that first injury sure um I want to revert to something that professor bauerlein said right at the top of his remarks which is um and I don't agree with the first part but I'm going to repeat it which is is there no better signal of the failure of American conservatism than the state of large universities in red States so I do not argue mostly because I haven't thought about it well enough uh but I don't argue that things will get better everywhere if we subject a lot of these decisions to political accountability but they will get better in a lot of places lots of places where you have you know um large universities publicly funded that are like exclaves of tremendously Progressive Orthodoxy in states that if they knew the political identity or they saw a pie chart of the ideological identity of their faculty would say this is outrageous we aren't paying for this anymore get some ideological diversity here this is nuts so you know I it sort of sounds like I'm saying maybe we have to sacrifice concern as the University of Baltimore to achieve a greater good I'm not quite saying that but I am saying that there are lots of places where changing this system would be a dramatic Improvement even if there are other places where it's kind of like a wash really Mark just a quick thing about about tenure uh I love tenure tenure was fantastic I had over 25 years it was great I agree but the uh the the thing is that tenure is such a high stakes moment it's either you know a job for Life golden handcuffs or it's you're done and especially in fields where the job market is awful I mean the chances are if you don't get you know now if you don't get tenure in the humanities you're probably done in getting any regular job which means that Junior faculty are maniacal about ensuring that the threshold is is passed it makes the pressures of conformity right you become 100 other directed Man here and that the free thought the free inquiry uh the the you know the gadfly you know the Young Turk you know you you used to be the those young ones that that I I haven't heard and an original fresh statement come out of the mouth of an assistant professor in 20 years in the humanities and it's not their fault they're smart they're they're they're learned most of them conscientious teachers but my goodness it's my life right and and and so the narrowing right again the the the the the coercion the system really does squelch and it's one reason why the humanities are such dead zones and have been for quite a while if I just can real very quickly jump in and say that you know I think it's a smart question to be asked about whether or not tenure can be replaced with something better and something more thoughtful and I don't oppose you know having to entertain that that kind of question but I deal with the daily daily you know uh event which I see which is that we have enough lawmakers across the country there's at least one of them calling for a faculty member they disagree with to be you know to be you know punished or fired or what have you across the country it's so freaking common that I'm constantly telling my colleagues that they can't tell that those lawmakers they should take a hike whether they're Un-American or what have you and instead say let me engage them and explain to them why that's you know problematic and see if we can you know adjust this differently and I just worry about if it's good for the goose it's good for the gander and I don't think it will be a wash I think it's going to be really bad for minority viewpoints whichever view is on the minority in the particular location I think we have time for one more question Alan do you want to sure Alan Grayson for free speech I guess my question is directed more towards Professor hasn't but the rest of you guys can chime in um why can't a state decide that it has an interest in academic freedom and removed through the political process the administrators who are not producing it just as they might be removed for otherwise being ineffective and towards that end perhaps separately does the state have an interest not just in academic freedom but in Viewpoint diverse as a means of proving that so that perhaps there might be a role to say look the next professor at the school needs to be more right of centered considering that it's 99 Marxist here I'm not sure I understand the question I I've actually written an article on the need for Viewpoint diversity and how easy it is to achieve if there was the will to do it and the reason why we don't has to do with something else having to do with the desire to get demographic diversity but if your question was what's wrong with politicians making the decisions about this inside universities then the answer I think I'm going to have to get a very facile easy answer that's the last thing that we want it's not like this hasn't happened before the 1950s and the McCarthy era was all about political influence on the entertainment industry and the academic world and I always use that as an example with my students because of what ended those practices and what ended those practices were two brave men that was Louis nicer and John Henry Falk who sued the people behind The Blacklist and got a judgment that ended The Blacklist the next day people standing up for their rights and fighting back by standing on their rights is what we need more of the last thing I want to see is the politicians trying to do that for us because in the 50s it was the house on American Affairs activity that was putting the pressure on everybody to kick out all the left-wing people it's too dangerous I mean Joe's got I agree with Joe almost all the way down the line until he gets to his finally nuanced little laws that will just guarantee neutrality there's a good theoretical answer to every Problem by passing along there's a fear a law that will work in theory for every problem and that's irrelevant because all we have is the real world with real political influences and no matter how theoretically ideal the statute is you we know from experience politicians are not going to stick to that they're going to do what advances their own political interests and that are that's almost always to go in a particular direction that's Cardi's favor with voters we're much better keeping that entirely on out we open the door a little bit um we are I am I'm sorry we are out of time and so I need to ask Elita to come up and close out this panel and the conference all together but thank you thank you very much for a stimulating discussion and um yes it's very sad to close this out because it's been an amazing day but please join me in thanking all of our panelists and moderators thank you I also want to thank our audience for um their attendance and also for your engagement and participation in the conversation today you're all invited to join us across the hall where we had lunch um for a closing reception this concludes the programming portion of the conference today we are adjourned thank you

Channel: The Federalist Society

Views: 2,945

Keywords: #fedsoc, federalist society, conservative, libertarian, fedsoc, federalism, fed soc

Id: UETAEtJlwWI

Length: 98min 50sec (5930 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023