Can We Talk? Student Thoughts on Free Expression at UNC

my name is molly worthen i'm the acting faculty director for the program for public discourse i'm also an associate professor in the history department and i am happy to welcome you to tonight's event which is called can we talk student thoughts on free expression at unc and the topic of this event really gets to the heart of the program the public discourse's mission we seek to build students capacities for debate or deliberation uh to work on just getting better at civil discords both at unc and hopefully in a wider community later on you will probably hear about one of our programs which is called the agora fellows program and it's a super exciting opportunity for undergraduates it involves chances to do discourse and get better at it it involves a pretty decent stipend very exciting so uh listen for that and if you want more information on how to apply you can find it on our program's website i also want to thank the department of political science for co-sponsoring this event tonight's event is inspired by a 2022 report called free expression and constructive dialogue at the university of north carolina and it includes some really interesting survey data from students at chapel hill some of the research is reassuring i was glad to read that in general our students say that faculty encourage them to express a pretty wide range of perspectives in class but there's also a lot of room for improvement judging from the data i hope that tonight's program will give us a better sense of how to do that how to strengthen public discourse go back unc and in other campuses because of course we know that the problems that we have at unc are not unique in this age of pretty intense polarization we are very lucky to have with us tonight one of the researchers involved in free expression in front of whom i am rudely standing mark mcneely who is a professor of the practice of marketing at kenan flagler business school he also serves on the program for public discourses advisory committee before unc he worked in global marketing and he has published several books including one on how business managers can learn from sun zu's book the art of war we also have four current unc chapel students who have agreed to join us to talk about their own personal experiences with free expression on campus aiden mueller is a junior he's a philosophy and economics double major he describes himself as having spent the last five years touring the political spectrum he is also an agora fellow and was a research assistant on the free speech and civil discourse report next to him is max vernon a sophomore who is a political science and peace war and defense double major with a minor in music she is from hillsborough north carolina and is involved with the dialectic and philanthropic societies and the undergraduate senate at unc then we have nate dixon who's a senior majoring in political science he's also the editor-in-chief of the carolina review and is looking to go into government consulting after graduation then we have cho nikoi who's a senior majoring in history with a minor in philosophy politics and economics on campus she's a radio dj and business manager at wxyc89 fm she's also co-music director for the unc laurel eyes and is a very involved agora fellow in the program for public discourse when not in chapel hill chill lives in dakar senegal but she grew up in italy south africa and the united states i want to give these students extra advanced thanks for being willing to take on what's a pretty challenging and complicated topic now i'm going to turn it over to professor mcneely who will give us a brief overview of his research and get the conversation started and then we hope to have time for audience questions after that thanks very much okay thank you molly okay so a little bit of housekeeping before we start there's gonna be an opportunity for q a uh after i moderate the panel uh in the room you can stand the queue up behind the mic and then zoom you can write a question in the question section for students who want to get the cle credit uh there's going to be a link at the end of the session that will verify your attendance and the recording of the events can be made available shortly on the dvd youtube channel and feel free to forward that to anyone that is interested okay so we're going to talk a little bit about pre-expression and constructive dialogue at the university of north carolina which we the research we did in 2022 so i just want to give you a little bit of history what's where we've been at the university on uh free expression um we have a green light rating from fire fire is the uh foundation for individual rights um and expression um they primarily were focused on campuses we got that in 2015 for not having any speech codes we adopted the free speech principles from the university of chicago which has been adopted by about 80 universities around the country basically saying we believe in free speech program for public discord was started in 2019 by our current provost chris connox we did their first wave of this free expression discourse uh constructive discourse research in 2019 just on unc uh we also are the 26th ranking uh out of 200 universities uh in 2022 of fire rankings so they've ranked all the universities unc is number 26 on that um just recently in july our trustees so the unc board of trustees adopted the chicago statement and the calvin principle so they did that as well as the faculty alvin's report i'm not going to go into that a lot but it basically says universities should focus on institutional neutrality they should not take positions on the issues of the day and then lastly just this last friday the faculty again passed another resolution on the write and do the faculty members to speak and a duty to protect uh beauty of the university to protect those faculty members okay the research released the unc research a couple things that uh are important here basically this is interdisciplinary you can see the different disciplines that we came from also had very different viewpoints uh on politics but we were able to work together by having different viewpoints uh we were able to challenge each other's in an interpretation of the data so that was very useful i also want to give a special shout out to professor tim bryan from political science department uh he was the guy with the research chops that really really made this thing possible and probably i would say made this one of the best uh most mental methodologically sound pieces of research that has been done in this space we've done two ways of this as i said 2019 we did a wave of unc graphs it was funded by the provost and then this this time the research i'm going to be talking about was the 2022 research so we were asked by the board of governors after they saw the 2019 research board of governors watches over all the public uh universities in the system uh to do it for eight system universities we had uh you'll see in a second that was funded by the board of governors and the individual universities we just presented that to the board of governors in may and our own board of trustees in july you can see the participating institutions everything from out of state um they went over texas a m um some of the other ones right we had we work with local research partners in a lot of these um unc specifically uh the key thing i want to show you there is we have 506 respondents and an 11 response rate which is within the industry standard and it was representative demographically of this institution okay findings also i would add are directly consistent across the university so pretty much the same things you find at unc you're going to find at f state and the other universities and directly consistent with a lot of other research by these uh other instant organizations right so all the research you're going to see is pretty much on point with what you're going to see if you pick up any of the reports from any of these other institutions except they're looking at it nationally world to get it in the state so let's get into the research here real quickly so what you'll see here on every slide you're going to see all the different universities in the middle i'm going to have highlighted our university right and you can see student population were self-described identified as 59 liberal 40 moderate 50 conservative and 11 percent who chose not to identify which they were so that all has up to 100 so you can see primarily a liberal student canvas so we're going to go through four findings um professor worthing mentioned one this is the first one faculty generally do not push political agendas we had a question in there really asking uh do you agree or disagree that the court's instructor encouraged participation from liberals and conservatives alike so this was the percent that disagreed so you can see even here only about 11 of conservatives disagree with this statement so this was again reassuring finding what you found in this report was some things that we were reassuring um some people some things that i would say people that are more liberal like some things people who are more conservative likes there was something for everybody but big takeaway faculty generally do not push political attendance second finding though this is where you get in some of the issues that we have campuses do not generally consistently achieve an atmosphere of free expression so again if you look at unc this is the percent of students that agree that this is an appropriate response to a statement that they found objectionable right so we gave a set of a set of statements that would you know upset potentially liberal students the senate statements of conservatives and out of that sixty percent of students said it was okay to create an instruction twenty percent said it was okay to hit a fight to fire a professor 11 said report a student on that same finding right campuses do not consistently have this atmosphere that we want we saw the percentage of students with various concerns so concerned about peers um their opinions that they would have if uh you had a student gave their opinion right 35 were concerned about peers a little bit less so about instructors so we're finding that people students are generally more concerned about peers than they are instructors and self-centered more than once about 18 and the third finding is we found that students who identified as conservatives tend to have some more distinctive challenges so the percent the top one is the percent uh that were concerned they gave their sincere political opinions that their peers would have a lower opinion you can see 83 of conservatives were concerned but however 24 percent of liberals and also 40 percent of moderates were so it's not just confined to conservatives but they are more concerned the percent that were concerned about the professor having the opinion was that 72 percent for conservatives and percent of students at south central more than once it was 54 percent of conservative students so they're they're they're censoring more we also looked to see if there was any appreciable difference between males females and non-binary people and also white versus non-white we don't really see much difference between any of those right because that was a question are we seeing minorities that are more likely to self-censor or you know one gender or the other we didn't see any of that uh any appreciable difference this is another one so if you think about hey you're here at college you want to make friends with people right um these are the people that basically present that again as liberals and conservatives that disagreed with this statement so basically about 36 of uh students that were identified as liberal were not willing to have basically conservative uh as a friend or 34 didn't want him as a classmate 20 didn't really feel that they're important part of the community and didn't feel that the faculty determined faculty were important part of the community you can see those numbers are a little bit significantly lower i would say if they're concerned so as a conservative you're basically saying okay i'm a you know i'm a smaller part of the community and if i you know expose myself as a conservative you know then my chances for social interaction goes down okay also some what we see is the viewpoints of the other group right so liberal identifying students versus consent conservative identifying students perception of liberal students so one's perception of the other um some of the i mean none of these they are great except the 80 percent of the third of the liberals are intelligent um but you can see liberal students perception of conservative students only 43 of them saw that uh conservatives of intelligence isn't pelleted but about 70 to 73 percent saw them as either racist were condescending on the flip side about 90 almost 100 percent of conservatives saw liberal students discounted so you know some some stereotypes about the other group and then this is the sort of the piece of the good news at the end here right so you we found the students across the political spectrum did want to engage with people at different front they had different opinions so when we looked at the few opportunities to hear liberal speakers you know obviously the conservatives didn't feel that was really there weren't enough opportunities but when we talked about more opportunities here conservative speakers we saw interest not just about conservatives but also significant number of liberals and over 50 percent of liberals and about two-thirds of conservatives wanted an opportunity to engage constructively with uh their peers they've had different views and this is kind of so abe lincoln he was obviously president at a time of a lot of polarization i really like this spoke from him which i think kind of talks about why we do constructive discourse do i not destroy my enemies when i make them my friends and so i think that's kind of one of the takeaways i have here is how do we when we engage right kind of get past the stereotypes and polarization to really see the other folks as people i think constructive dialogue can do that okay so with that i'm going to go move to the students but i do want to say thank you to the unc students that participated especially these students participate now unc faculty that have taken this research to heart of the university administration which has supported this financially as well other board of trustees and the board of governors so the other takeaway i want to leave you with is that good organizations continuously improve right and so it takes courage i would say as an organization to look at where you're where you have problems and improve yourself and i think that's one thing that we can take away the group here and through the research that's been received that's something that unc is doing okay i think with that we're going to move on to now the students so let's hear from our students and let them get me up thank you first okay so our first question for you all is what are your personal beliefs about free expression constructive dialogue and how did you arrive at those beliefs so start with um i think that my interest in active interest and discourse as a concept kind of he was born in [Music] around the time they went to trump in 2016. um at that point there was any discourse about feelings of safety feelings of whatever you want whatever you call it in the liberal state that i was in which was a you know boarding school in massachusetts so it was kind of a small and very um concentrated population of people who were very felt very passionate about the conversation topic and i was interested so i kind of started watching a lot of different videos on youtube and engaging in discord spaces and it just became part of my life so i pursued it in college as well um in regards to my beliefs i think that ultimately it's just something that's fun i think i i enjoy speaking with other people and whether that's you know finding out an idea obviously you know um or tackling my own beliefs um with other people to remember me or to engage in my ideas critically i just think it's a good exercise that it helps you get better at your whether it's your critical thinking skills or your ability to to present an argument um yeah i think it's just a good thing to be able to do that especially as students in school where we're doing that every day um yeah i don't have necessarily strong opinions of its necessity for progress or for anything you know larger scale at an individual level it's a it's a fun thing to engage in and also an important step yeah so i absolutely agree with the fact that i think it's a lot of fun to be able to converse with people who disagree with you i think this belief was kind of boring out in high school uh joined the debate team and ever since then it's just always more interesting being able to flesh out your ideas and kind of hear the points of disagreement with other people makes you think more critically about what you believe and consider different perspectives that you may have not been able to consider just because of your exposure to them previously so i've always thought that as not just a fun but really necessary thought experiment to be able to construct a cohesive worldview that is in line with reality i think that you know jon stewart mill he's one of the greatest people who have been able to articulate a cohesive framework for why public discourse and being able to talk with people who disagree with you is so important we need to be able to have living truths not kind of imperative that dogmas that we have just ascribed to believing without real basis behind them without critical analysis of them so i personally really enjoy being able to discuss my viewpoints with other students who don't agree with me whether it be in high school or throughout my time in college being an outspoken conservative has definitely um kind of fostered more opportunities to talk with those people who do disagree with me in some instances but i also think that it's an absolute necessity of the university system to propagate that type of discourse between the fellow students yeah so i would really or i would really agree with uh both of y'all um for me personally i believe that being able to have healthy robust discourse especially with people who disagree with you whether that's politically ethically what have you um is one of the most important things you can develop especially as a student as an academic but also i firmly believe that it is in one's best interest and the civic duty to be able to have a conversation with someone without it getting inflamed and without automatically deciding that the other side is wrong um as i mentioned i have a political science background i was raised by a political scientist so i grew up at the dinner table learning to have discussions and how to articulate my thoughts in such a way that wouldn't offend someone else and being able to have a productive conversation rather than a conversation where you're just trying to win um so that fostered throughout my life um into high school and now into college and certainly pursued spaces where i'm able to have healthy discourse with people that i disagree with and i think it's made me not only a better critical thinker a better speaker and debater but also a better person who's able to approach situations with a more more open mind which i think is especially key today as things become so polarized politically and complex as social media so my experience in some ways has been a little similar to nate in that uh when i was in high school i was being conservative then and so i had firsthand the experience of being an ideological outlier in some instances of pariah i i got i got interested in free expression in some ways like the show and that i discovered certain arguments on youtube i read nil i was very persuaded by them but nowadays i would say my interest in free expression my reasons for political commitment to it um in a more personal place like i think everyone here i enjoy exchanging ideas would be quite disappearing it's extremely stimulating exciting and important too when your beliefs on your issues change when you start realizing that you're living your life differently or voting a different way or whatnot but for me at least there's also an ethical dimension to it where as i've gotten older and older i increasingly realized in part of this personal experience that people don't normally choose their beliefs or if they do they certainly don't do so freely i mean politically i would be embarrassed to name an exact proportion of my beliefs that are the result of the youtube algorithm you know the same for this changes and i think for the vast vast majority of people uh your upbringing your psychological temperament almost everything that determines what you believe is outside of your control so given that i think that leads to an encouraging and empathetic and understanding approach to people with whom we disagree because it's really about ideas and not about these are problematic people um good okay so you talked a little bit about how you how you feel about free expression and how you came to use what has been your personal experience um with free expression and dialogue on campus well yeah i could kick it off um so i think that overall in the classroom setting my experience has been fairly positive i don't think that like a study shows professors tend to push a political agenda although there may be kind of underlying ideologies that you can infer that the professors hold i think overall they do a good job of encouraging discussion from all ends of the spectrum i think the chief problem comes from campus culture as that is you know especially working as editor-in-chief for conservative publication and go and refill our boxes you see routine vandalism you see you know just a lot of kind of close-mindedness in the sense that people associate anything that may be conservative or republican with some of those stereotypes that we just saw a couple minutes ago and i think that does permeate our campus discourse to i don't know how large of an extent but enough of an extent for people to generate a real fear of speeding their mind authentically which in my opinion is really the chief purpose of college to be able to you know speak what your opinions are how stupid or how bright they may be duke it out with other people who disagree with you and at the end of the day you know you'll be a more informed more intelligent person so i think it's a big problem and i personally believe that the campus culture in terms of encouraging people of all political ideologies to speak out and engage in those conversations they're so important definitely think they need some work yeah so i completely agree with that um classroom wise i haven't really ever seen a professor strongly push any kind of ideology like he said you can certainly infer sometimes from professors but that really hasn't been an issue for me the most observable issue has been campus culture and dialogue just between students whether that's you know in lenore or walking to class or getting into an argument in class about a certain issue but it's never perpetuated by the professor that said i have had a rather unique experience since i've gotten to campus um in my freshman year i joined a literary society the dialectic and violent prophet society that i've reported which is a space that does encourage freedom free interchange of ideas and i have debated head to head with now some of my best friends who have very different political ideologies for me um which has been really wonderful as a tool to strengthen my rhetoric but also really good as a tool to learn how to put political differences aside at the end of the debate and then go out for dinner you know together and put that aside um but that that space is provided with certainly a stark contrast to non-difficult spaces in which it's certainly a little bit more um homogenous in terms of what political groups that students put themselves into and then when they're faced with students who hold different beliefs than them it gets pretty ugly and not super productive as you mentioned so in certain ways i think my experience has been kind of like kind of like charismatics where the maybe even more so in some ways because i haven't even been that much in spaces outside of once rather like diet so the majority of the time i've been interacting with students here on campus it's been through agora bellows philosophy club spaces where people who already enjoy sharing ideas and debating them tend to congregate in terms of personally and the atmospheric experience with professors it's genuinely been pretty good i've never seen anyone really push an agenda i would say it's much more common for there to be an occasional political aside comment about trump here how much about climate change there that might lead me to wonder what well what what sort of ideas do i think for bowl sharing here but certainly certainly nothing victory and i would say that even extends to my peers generally speaking when i'm around people who i already know and trust on some sort of social basis political tension or cell censorship as far as i know has not been a huge deal like i can be grabbing drinks with the people in the carolina bluegrass stands and be talking about abortion with a catholic guy and our pro-choice girl sitting right next to me and we're all cool because we play music together and we like each other um but at those times when it is when it gets more tense when we're talking about issues that are difficult to discuss race gender and food what i've noticed is that even with conversations in some ways go well where there's no there's nobody shouting nobody's accusing it it's so hard to get over that hump of awkwardness and discomfort and even even a failure failure to listen since since you you can you can i've seen conversations about such issues where no no one's shouting no one's accusing but everyone seems kind of tense and sort of just trading you know it's it's a speech without really engaging with each other to really feel uncomfortable i think it's something that that can also be a problem it doesn't talk about um i similarly have had very positive experience in the classroom um i think it also is a testament to my professors and the department that i'm in for the department that core of which is you know dispersive engagement between students not necessarily to meet students individually in the professor um the culture within those settings has been really great and i think that that's also an important thing to consider if you're a student who enjoys engaging with others whether that's debate or discussion or deliberation what have you that you're picking not necessarily picking up opinion opinions so you're taking a place out of foster that sort of discussion i think it's hard to be maybe a student who takes stem lectures and feel like there's your voices being heard because no one's asking for your votes to be heard in your lecture um it needs to be considered um yeah my experience has been positive also in foreign fellows with aidan who has been there for past two years alongside me um but i will say one thing that is interesting to be brought up is the idea of a camp the campus culture being the problem not necessarily the professors or um i'm not sure what i'm wondering either last week's question you don't have to answer but um when one says campus culture are they referring to the students and the vibe that permeates campus through the students or at the institutional level and the reason that interesting for me is because it's as large as unc where undergrads i think are 18 000 i don't think there is really a campus are you a linear or unified campus culture or any sort of unified platform upon which students can speak there's obviously these elective spaces like aurora fellows or um die by or debate societies where you can choose to go in and that's the bottom line the reason for being there is to engage in discussion about very specific or you know timely ideas beyond that there are people in this school who i've never heard of i we don't have any mutual followers we don't we've never seen them on campus they don't exist in my realm it wouldn't happen at a small liberal arts college for example where i think a lot of these discussions also take place about free speech and free expression but um i think this idea that there's some sort of unified program or in some way maybe a conspiracy or whatever i don't mean that pejoratively um that students together engage in group things against certain students i think it's a little bit of a underdeveloped take considering the nature of our school like the way it started yeah i think a lot of that happens a lot of the discussion we have we we tend to think as professors and faculty of like what's happening in my classroom but a lot of what students experience is not in the classroom it just happens in the dorm it happens you know when you're going so a couple of you talked about you know potentially knowing that um your professor uh their political leanings and one thing we found in the research they didn't share with you but you know primarily about when we looked at the data 84 percent of the students perceive their professors as liberal and about four percent perceive them as conservative and just couldn't figure it out um how do you know right you're going to talk a little bit about some comments but how how was it that you could tell what do you think you could tell if you say because you don't know but let's go back and yeah so again i try not to make judgments about my professors if i can help it um because frankly some of the judgments are really taken at face value and probably have no actual um accuracy but sometimes especially as i mentioned i'm a political science major and peace corps defense major so most of my classes are like politically oriented um so sometimes it's easy to tell they may slip up and you know call from a certain name or like speak you know unfavorably with him or vice versa with a more liberal president um the way they speak about certain international politics issues can sometimes give it away other times it's honestly to put it colloquially it's just a bi-check i just look at them i'm like i wonder what you are um the only time i've ever had like any pretty pretty solid indication of something was my professor was playing a video in class and on it was on youtube and on his youtube recommended which is all fox news segments so i was like but again it's it's really nothing very solid but it's really just my preconceived notions of what a liberal or conservative person looks like which i'm aware of isn't necessarily a productive metric i would say for me it's i i also in some ways use certain stereotypes whenever i want i want i mean it's i don't think i ever feel certain but often i have an idea i think some of that comes from just knowing that on average the expected value for professor politics is usually going to be left of center i mean most of the time i'm not even so much wondering whether my professor may be a conservative but whether they're a liberal or whether they're latins uh uh i think that by that is usually more meaningful so some of it some of the the things i wonder about comes from just just certain really strong correlations between particular beliefs i mean why is it that if someone uh is an evangelical christian and likes guns that they also propose immigration certain beliefs tend to cluster together just the way our politics has become so say a professor makes a particular account about trump or about climate change whether or not it's actually true i associate a whole bunch of other issues and political leanings alongside that so and sometimes it's it's just very very transparent in the sense that i actually the professor is politically engaged or has commented on politics and listen to this comment on politics you know once that grossery wrote a book on trump um but most of the time it's uh it's just those those small comments extrapolating from there knowing that odds are they probably already are on the left yeah so i think that they've covered a lot of the good metrics that you can typically use to gauge where a professor lies i think that it's definitely true that you go into a class with somewhat of a baseline expectation that a professor is most likely going to be left or centered i think that one valuable thing that you can also glean a little bit of knowledge off of are the example the professor tends to use for example they're talking about corruption in politics they're talking about views on immigration and they won't overly say how they feel about the issue but you can kind of tell by the connotations of the words they're using or kind of the sources they're citing small indicators like that and it's important not to take it too far and you know assume exactly what the professor believes and extrapolate that but if you're looking to try and gauge where professor lies i think that those are probably the most common metrics to do that with i guess i'll just you know this what y'all were saying about um professors they're being alive but also i think that's their professors it's quite intentional the vibe that they choose to give out um that being whether they're overtly political or overtly convicted in their political beliefs that they will find a way to weave it into classroom discussion or into their into their teaching method or if they're very neutral and you spend your whole semester wondering what any of their thoughts are about anything um and that can be considered a success in their teaching or it can be considered deficit depending how you approach it um but also i think this is past the question but i think it's important to ask yourself why you care so much what your professor's political inclinations are and whether that is more about you and how that will affect how you move forward in their class than them i think you have to try and figure it out or if you're kind of been you know at least like this thing one time and then also the financing thing but also you know abortion you know whatever whatever the little stupids they throw out for you are um if you have to question it by clearly you're the one that cares you know if the fact the research was showing that generally republicans aren't aren't indoctrinating their students most most of the time um and students fears about expressing themselves openly by more so and probably receive perceived by their classmates and friends um but clearly students still if that is considered a positive outcome of the research that would suggest that if professors were ostensibly you know indoctrinating them or be convicted about a belief that it would be a bad thing i don't think it has to be about them necessarily i think if they're able to balance it with their with a strong pedagogical method um i don't think anyone is hurt by that necessarily self-censorship when we saw you know conservatives tended to self-censor a lot but also a number of liberals self-censored should we care if one group on campuses are willing to speak up but it would not care and if so why all right so i think that's very important if there's one group on campus that is not willing to speak up particularly when you look at the composition of campus seen as nearly 60 liberal and 50 conservative i think that ideological diversity and being able to duke out those various ideas that's really one of the most important facets of getting a higher education kind of trying to culture that critical thinking and that's the point about how you know there may not be a campus culture that's distinctive with such a large school i think there's definitely some marriage to the idea that it's tough to you know make a generalization that's going to apply to every instance however i think that you know us as a campus um you can kind of gauge based off your past interactions and you extrapolate that as to how you think your future interactions are going to go well that's correct or not i think that's typically kind of a human nature-oriented way that we operate and especially looking at the study seeing that students are less likely to befriend people coming out group as opposed to 2019 students are less likely to even value them as a part of the campus community i think that things like that are what makes it more likely for a small minority of students to feel as though their thoughts aren't as valued as the majority and set aside politics i think that at large that's a dangerous thing to have you know as a norm that just because you're in a minority of opinions you feel as though your opinion isn't going to be as valued or it's going to be overlooked or shouted down whatever it may be and i think that those fears aren't just born out of thin air for there to be such a substantial percentage of students who feel the same way there has to be at least something underlying these assumptions i mean i can i can think of political reasons sort of sort of as you spoke to in the sense that yes it's important for people to be able to debate ideas talk the truth let's get rid of our dead dogma all these sort of real asset arguments but practically speaking i i mean obviously i agree that it's very important that minorities ideologically or otherwise should be able to speak up after voices heard more comfortable doing so but i think the greatest value of that is actually not so much to do with the beliefs they hold or what we might gain from them but rather just so everyone else knows that the people who hold these ideas they disagree with by larger fairly normal people and are like them a whole bunch of other respect you just suggested if you go back to conservatives or it could be liberals when we have caricatured stereotyped ideas of what conservative or what a liberal looks like i suspect a lot of that has to come from second-hand representations of conservatives or liberals people we see on the news or just people the the minorities of people on either side who happen to be very outspoken say oh i can recognize you oh i can recognize you as a liberal and because it's obvious ideologically it's like oh that must be what those people are like whereas if if people knew um if everyone just sort of had like a little meter over their head that you know showed whatever political belief they happen to disagree with you on i think most people would eventually come to realize that um most people are not radical or crazy or unpleasant on account of their beliefs that we actually have quite a bit in common and that people feel more comfortably shared comfortable sharing unpopular beliefs uh get a lot better at appreciating them for all the other things we have in common um so yeah as for self-censorship i completely agree with the two previous answers um so my curiosity now lies in well how do we fix self-censorship especially for minorities on campus and i think one way to do that and to kind of lessen that self-censorship especially because particularly at unc there's such a wide gap between the amount of people who are identified as liberal and not the people who identify as conservative the best way to do it is to just make these conversations normalized and know when to end the conversation once it becomes non-productive i think far too many students um self-censor because they know and you can correct me if i'm wrong either of you because they they self-censor because they know it'll get into an ugly dog fight that may lead to them losing friends maybe to their peers having lower opinions of them which i don't think is productive so i think that knowing how to have a healthy conversation come to compromises which i think so much of our generation is not very good at and then leave the conversation once you realize okay we disagree and that's okay let's move on and talk about the football game that just happened where we looked at states but um and so i think that is one way potentially to kind of lessen self-censorship is to make it more of an okay space to have a charged discussion and then move on rather than having all of this fall out from said discussions um i think that i mean the first question you posed originally was should we care um i think the wii is ambiguous in that you know clearly some people care more than others or not but feel personally affected by it more than others um and that's unfortunate but i don't think that necessarily we institutionally have to care about this this might sound very like radical i don't mean anything so i don't think institutionally viewpoint diversity needs to be codified as a principle that we need to care about because the viewpoint diversity is naturally occurring i mean i think a methadone methodological um struggle that i'm sure research that you'll face as researchers was the categories you even use on these surveys of conservative and liberal and i think i don't personally believe like animals and ladies we don't personally believe in that those are two discrete categories of people i think that generally you're saying people's id ideas individually exist on those spectrums but not people as as you know individuals or part of a larger collective there's like conservative caucus and liberal pockets on campus and the conservatives are disenfranchised um i think that we do ourselves a disservice to limit ourselves to those those categories first in the first place um so now i don't think that the idea of this like you know universal fight of any any people when it comes to viewpoint is necessarily true yeah from an institutional standpoint when we look at unc as an institution one of our missions is to um well one is to seek through the knowledge so by looking at getting various viewpoints across right and having them debated we can approach knowledge of one institutional value um the other one is where we are supposed to be producing citizen leaders that's the other piece that um is important for us and one of the things that at least the things i wrote it's not just necessarily an issue for conservatives uh being able to express themselves but if liberal students never have to essentially defend their ideas while they're on campus because little business services don't speak up they exactly at this point they don't have enough they don't have to understand that these people are normal people right or they don't also have a chance to test their ideas um so what i do want to do and maybe something without getting into this but this is where i want to spend a little bit of time before we've opened it up for questions um so i got those instructions very clearly um so further research the significant number of students want opportunities to engage constructively with others and so what should our university be doing either the university itself or faculty or students um and thinking also not just about classroom spaces but also the spaces you have outside of the classroom what should we be doing to foster that constructive dialogue and also going to push that a little bit how do you make it how do you make it cool right if that's even possible i guess to the the first part of that question first not so much the cool part what could be done i think a very easy thing a lot of professors or graduate students teaching might be able to do would be to add just a little blurb at the bottom of the syllabus uh mentioning free expression uh we would hope that for many students the syllabus was one of the first things that again hopefully we would read uh so when you think about the purpose of you know the other sorts of things we encounter in syllabi the dimension of counts or non-discrimination or all of these things are about uh either giving resources to students they need or telling students up front we want you to feel comfortable with who you are so uh particularly for students going into a class knowing they already hold certain beliefs they're not the majority i think seeing a sort of a little even a little thing on a syllabus there might reassure people and you know let them know oh no the professor really wants there to be constructive dialogue and disagreement on these issues now in terms of making making free expression cool i think a big part of that is making it non-partisan in some ways i think this is ironically getting a little easier just because um well frankly i'm thinking particularly of things like the the stock work act where uh in addition to like you're just say cancellation of you know who you're supportive in english there's one instance we can we can look at really grievous examples of violating or threatening free expression from all sides of the political island which i think is making it a little easier to fix it as a non-partisan issue that hopefully people from multiple sides get together now pool-wise i i don't know if that that's probably not enough to make it cool maybe maybe we can make a little bit more of a lifestyle thing as opposed to a political project i think a lot of people hear free speech and they think oh first amendment law like what are you legally allowed to say or or what should the codes be what should the rules be when there's a there's a whole other cultural side of it an individual side of it like well how do you interact with your friends or your co-workers i think playing up that more and more might help it resonate with people on an individual level before we go on i just got to redo a real real check here of all the students in here how many of you before classifiers who read the syllabus that's pretty good so for the you on camera like pretty much everybody here is raising their hand because that's a that's a question we have perfect so thank you or not kudos to everyone the reason sold it yeah so i really agree with a lot of your opinions um i think as for what the university could do to facilitate uh rediscussion and free expression um i don't know that the university top down can do a whole lot right because this is an issue that really is much more individual based and much more on just a day-to-day on-the-ground social interaction um so i think it really just comes down to us the students to make her discussion cool to make it acceptable and one of the ways you do that is by holding yourself and your friends accountable so you're having a discussion politically and someone says oh yeah those conservatives man they don't know what they're talking about or some other disparaging remark you have to be able to hold them accountable okay well did you listen to them did you really truly take the time to see if you agreed with their takes or disagreed and why instead of dismissing an entire group out of hand because that's not productive and that's not helpful um in addition i think more people should seek out opportunities to have this for people that this they disagree with um it's been something that's been incredibly helpful for me here at unc and i wish everyone had the ability to to go through that experience whether you're you know politically oriented which i suspect much of you are since you showed up here or not um because i think that teaching people how to have productive discussions is one of the most valuable things a student can leave college with into the real world and i think it would do a great deal for our political future especially in america if everyone knew how to do that yeah so i definitely agree with a lot of what's been said um particularly the part that i'm not certain that there's a ton the university can do unfortunately i think there's definitely a ground up type of change that has to happen as opposed to a top down something that you can force students to kind of get into and on that same token politics isn't for everyone that's fine not everyone has to be this super politically engaged person some people are into other things and i think that's okay you're not going to be able to force everyone to talk about the controversial topic of the day and that's normal i think that the bigger thing is being able to recognize that there is a sharing humanity and you're all classmates when you hear somebody else talk about something that you may disagree with and this really is where it comes down to the individual level where i think that you have to have a sense of camaraderie you have to have paid in your classmates that they're not acting with bad intentions that maybe even if they disagree with you they at least someone know what they're talking about and kind of legitimately contend with those ideas as opposed to rushing them off or attributing them to negative stereotypes i think that in terms of something that the university could do events like this are a great start i like the syllabus idea i think that having more controversial classroom discussions is another good thing to kind of chip away at this block i think that a lot of the classroom discussions that occur are almost as to use an analogy it's like a bowling lane and they've got the they've got the side things up so that you don't fall into the gutter but you don't really know how to pull us and how to have these constructive conversations when you're outside of class because you have the ta or the professor there moderating everything so i think giving students more instruction on how to thoughtfully listen to others take varied ideas into account and be able to really intelligently respond to them and critically examine them i think that that's what could be done in a more classroom level but yeah i definitely think it's more individual the afterwards of campus um i definitely agree what we were saying um for some of you are saying um i think that one thing that is definitely about the classroom level is professors modeling behavior i think generally students mirror what they see their professors doing is what is acceptable what how their professors are acting how they're delivering what they have whatever it is they think and they mirror that and that's all they modify here in classrooms i think if a professor is is you know is noticeably not unconvicted in their beliefs but nervous about you know pronouns but a little bit um i know i'll just nervous about taking people to engage or how they engage with students um or ask for their contributions i think students are going to feel similarly a little bit disempowered but also faculty are students too and i don't i think there's this weird um super humanity assumption we have our professors that they should leave everything out the door and they shouldn't be able to include any of their you know personal whether it's their personal life or their personal beliefs in the classroom um all those things definitely i think students have to humanize their professors but also professors have to model behavior that they want to hear from their students um and one thing i thought was interesting is what i keep hearing is all your differences with people and then go out and have a drink after and definitely in many cases they need to be able to do that but i think one thing that would be important going back to the topic of cataract categorization what the categories being used are i think people for themselves have to be able to identify what exactly is political that they believe and what is moral and what is economic and where all those things work are all those things that think where do they merge um i don't neces i think if you are you know if your personal belief about something that you that you present as political is um about truly a moral a personal goal that you have um and can be separated from the realm of like policy making then i don't think necessary people have to be able to see that in the conversation and then reconcile i think if i think that the language of like you know identity is kind of tainted at this point but when when there are things that you would disown or not just ever leave your own family for i think the expectation that you there should also be a quotation that you're able to not have to be fine with people and also you don't have like necessarily a right to not write but it's not super it should be the most important thing that people want to be your friend i think honestly people would be it would be helpful if people were just had interests that were existed outside of the realm of politics like a bluegrass band or you know where that's not that can be conversation about politics and morals can be included but they're not the thing that unifies you and not the thing that um would even elevate your common humanity you know or your comment your common interests and enjoyment um yeah so the most basically just figure out what actually that you believe in and if you don't know that's fine but know what your non-negotiables are and those may be brought out of the classroom you don't have to cancel people in class or not or top conversation but i think you should at least be a little bit more self-aware before you engage in a space where you're going to judge others for halloween thank you okay so what we're going to do now is move the q a um there's going to be um questions taken from zoom um so i think uh is going to cover those and then if you're interested here um in asking the question um you can come down and you want them nora to come down wherever you were yeah it's a little there's more people than expected i think we're gonna have the mic around here so people can find form a cue around here okay and then are we still having pizza afterwards we are having pizza enough pizza for everyone yeah we were doing our best thank you forgotten things may have forgotten the napkins um and the plates but we are leaving it out there and maybe missing hands all right um so if you wanted to ask a question come down here otherwise so start doing that you want to do that and also you're going to give me some questions right so we're going to do a couple questions about the zoom and then we'll hand it over to some folks who have questions too all right so i'm going to start with two questions from you that i think are just too beautiful okay so the first question um i know that the study was bringing this year but when was the data content the data was collected i would say i think in the february february through march time for this year okay um and the second question i think this is more of looking for clarification about the um chicago and how principle sure in a presentation for the unc faculty last week unc law professor michael gearhart said that their instances were in those who make up the university may prefer the university do not remain neutral and even as an example the ones politically controversial issue of whether public universities should be racially disaggregated disaggregated and so are there contemporary examples of controversial political issues on which you believe the university in accordance with its mission and values should take a clear public stance promote free speech um would it um i thought am i right that like the why are they i think do i believe that or is the calvin in chicago i think it might be helpful here to clarify so just so you know so university of chicago is known as the private university known as probably the leader in free speech fired in their rankings they're like number one or the number one for ever since part of the ranking they have two foundational documents one is the statement of principles on free speech and expression which basically says faculty and students have the right to free expression on campus um and basically that's a fundamental right of those of that of all those students uh and essentially no opinions are um are not allowed um so that's the that's the university of chicago uh free speech statement um the calvin principles less less well-known report that deals with institutional neutrality and so the difference there is the government report is all about the university not taking the position on matters of the day in order to allow faculty and students not to feel their speeches chill so for example if the university were to take a position on issue a or issue issue number one right and they said hey the right position is a if you are a faculty or student who believes in b right you may feel like you are not you cannot safely speak up because you're going against the administrators in the university right so by forcing essentially forcing the institution not to take a position on the issues of the day is to free up the faculty and students to speak more freely so the basic foundational idea behind calvin is the university is not the critic of the society itself it's the faculty students themselves are the critics and the university is the host of those of those people that answer the question okay all right um what does it conserve a student at unc believe it defines them as conservative and right so versa what what makes a unc certain student playbook hey i feel like you should take first grade since you're you're here representing the conservatives yes yeah i mean i think that one of the guiding principles of carolina review although it's labeled as conservative and libertarian is more so being open to people who do feel somewhat disenfranchised the people who do feel like they have to self-censor and we've taken a lot of a lot of writers who you know they may not feel comfortable attaching their name to to their work and just as a study found i mean it's not that the self-censored ideas are things that are supremely controversial or bigoted or sperm report things of that nature um so i think that there's somewhat of an ideal ideological diversity that we're continuing to try after our publication so i'm a little bit hesitant to kind of draw firm boundaries on you know what you should be to be considered a conservative on campus but i mean certainly just in the classical definition it means that you know a lot of progressive ideals um are trying to change status quo and conservatism is trying to preserve it or at least you know encourage caution in changing what status quo nuance are so i don't want to get too specific on like each topic because i don't want to define what people feel they need to believe to qualify as conservative or libertarian whatever that may be but i think that's a good overall rubric you can't do something foreign um so one of you all mentioned this idea that there's this cluster of beliefs that we often infer instead of like forming our own like individualistic um belief systems we often go with what party ideologies are um in general so do you think this is dangerous and if so how do we confront this on a college campus and this is a question more so for the student panel but it's also open to the professor as well so in some ways i think making these quick judgments or judgments based off of stereotypes or very limited information in some ways could be solved by the person the very very problem that you're talking about where if people don't generally feel comfortable expressing all of their beliefs you you have a smaller and smaller sample from which to guess what their beliefs are so um i don't know if that would necessarily how well they would translate to professors maybe you could say professors should not turn their class into the time to share every single political opinion under the sun but generally speaking especially with students the more comfortable people are that sharing what they actually believe the less will rely on negative information and stereotypes to guess what they might be yeah so to compound that to clarify you're speaking about like you know if i identify as a liberal but i hold an idea that may not fit in with that definition of them yeah that's exactly what i'm talking about like how you can have your own individual beliefs that don't necessarily conform to cardiac obstacles yeah so this is tricky isn't it because it's one thing to go against someone you know say you identify as a liberal they're having a disagreement with someone who identifies as a conservative well that's easy to do because you supposedly just disagree on a large number of issues of them but what happens when you disagree with someone who's in your friend group who's in your ideology um i think it really again just comes down to individual and group accountability you know you can discuss with your friends your group who you generally agree with but may not always disagree with that hey one of us has a different opinion we can't immediately jump down the other's throats because it wouldn't make us very good friends very good peers and it certainly wouldn't do anything for strengthening our own rhetorical beliefs so um that's the only solution i could think of it really just does come down to individual accountability and that's that i think having different opinions than your primary political or whatever ideology is actually a really great thing yeah just to expand on that a little bit i definitely agree i think that it should be more normalized to kind of take pride in the fact that you differ from what your in-group ideology made promulgate for one specific thing i mean i don't think that buying into a whole narrative is necessary to consider yourself x or y and i think that it's important when you're talking with other students as difficult as it can be sometimes to refrain from generalizing and extrapolating based on one of their views uh what the rest of their views are and trying to cheat or trying to look at you know individually what they believe topic by topic i think that's definitely something that could use some work and i mean it's just a difficult phenomenon because people they enjoy just psychologically feeling like they're in a group everyone agrees with them and it's easy to kind of castigate people who step out of line so i think that you know like maddox is saying it really comes down to individual accountability and as a group trying to be more empathetic and understanding and this goes back to what we've been talking about the whole panel that you need to have a relationship outside of politics with people and recognize you know your shared humanity before you can really fully respect and consider all their political ideas um i think that's the basis that we will destroy when i think that when you consider your own your own political regulations or beliefs i think we all generally need to like humble ourselves a little bit and get belief or the expectation that we know why we think what we think and i think generally we need to interrogate our own experiences in our own like conclusions seem to have come to you out of nowhere a little bit more personally my own political development has been really amplified and made a lot more fruitful by admitting to myself when i actually don't know about something and looking it up i saw a video about which um when talking about how when you actually asked people who were vehemently against opposed to obamacare or what obamacare was most of them couldn't actually answer that i think that was just an example of something another example of obviously obamacare is a very just you know explicit policy which you can read up you can find the answers if you need them when it comes to maybe a little bit more ambiguous or enormous beliefs that are maybe philosophical or for some people religious you don't necessarily know where it came from but i think you should start with some self-interrogation first and also a little bit of um you have to rate yourself with your pride and know that you don't sell nothing yeah so a couple things i mean your point right so there's been uh these little videos where the last people on the street like hey are you conservative or liberal and they'll ask him like do you like obamacare or do you like the affordable care act right and and you can sort of say like i like the affordable care act the liberals i like obamacare they're the same thing right it's it's it's pretty interesting right so it's a little embarrassing from that um i think to your point eight and you know there's a couple points that were made about where we get our ideas from so carl jung who was a psychologist and and uh just had a lot of very good books he said uh something that's kind of always stuck with me is that people people don't have ideas ideas of people right and so the idea you know we think oh we have all these ideas that we came up with it's like well not really ideas tend to have followers right the correct brand people and all these people take that idea and they think they thought of it they think they bought into it but it's really the idea it has them um and then the last so that's something you gotta be careful about do i have this idea or is the idea happening and i guess the last thing i would say is that kind of helps us to think about the value of conservative liberals when i think about both of those i think both groups have value right so liberals will push a society to question why are things the way they are right how can they be better what can what needs to change how can we change it um and that's good but then sometimes the things that get changed right and create a lot of issues that maybe we haven't even thought about conservatives their value is hey we know there's things that the society has created over hundreds of years that we've got to be really careful about growing out right and so they're going to look at what we what do we need to conserve what do we need to be careful about not changing but the downside with conservatives is they can end up defending things that really need to be changed so there's value that both bring to the table but there's also problems that each each have based on their viewpoint of how of of either defending status quo or changing the status quo next question thank you thanks so um as an institution that is approximately one-third graduate students this graduate student myself is concerned about public discourse not us um do you have any data or understanding of the health at sort of an aggregate level among that third student's um no we don't would you like to do it yeah um yeah i mean it's just a matter of bandwidth and everything else i would you know i don't want to you know unless i have data i can't say that it's that it's there i would guess it's fairly similar there is depending on the graduate's age you know a difference um uh i think there's probably longer younger students more of a digital focus right and the fact that hey if something happens in the classroom they might be more willing to go put that on social media which then creates a number of issues of issues there that's probably one difference but i would say the things that we're seeing on campus are happening through society right the only thing that's different on campus is a we're supposed to be able to talk about this stuff and b unlike society we are predominantly liberal right now we are unlike society that you go to certain places and they're predominantly liberal other places are predominantly conservative so we hear that uh but we are not reflective of society so that's a little bit how we're different but i would say the things that you might guess would be if somebody said hey you know you know i think a lot of the things you saw are similar because we see that throughout society i mean the stuff you're seeing here is echo through research i've seen um but people in republic not just other students thank you thank you i think we have another truly there are more questions if i bring the mic to you will you ask a question all right use your hand again so my question is about the data i noticed that a few of the slides said that it was only based on 36 percent of respondents that said they have taken a politically oriented class so do you think that may have affected the results of the survey since it that does narrow the group a little bit and then those people might have certain interests that say like send majors who never really took a political class do you think they may have had a different perspective or do you think it also might not have mattered um well so what we tried so a lot of the other research that is done doesn't specify it just basically asks about your experience in general so one of the things that we wanted to do with the research was to get more specific and really hone in on those political uh items and so we did it this is getting a little bit nerdy but we had a student list like what were the four what fortified classes you took last last uh semester and then we would randomly top one of those classes out for them and they'd have to answer questions specific to that class right which made them focus a little more on you know the actual thing they had the experience they had in that class versus just generally in the indian it does reduce the sample size but again i would say a couple things one is you're seeing we're seeing the same responses across eight different campuses many of them very different um you know we had hbcu in there we had one that were primarily american indians like native american we're seeing the same results and you know fire research heterodox academy like ritter just generally yeah 10 minutes remaining why don't i collect a couple of questions and then we'll we'll turn it over to the panelists for answering those questions using them to make your final remarks we've got some gym questions okay raise your hand yeah thanks i have a question um for joe and um so in the north carolina policy watch article that was publicizing this event um the reporter talked to a few um people um and uh people that were meeting on the panel i think and maybe some other people um and he engaged mostly it seemed like an interview with like some of the topics but it um he identified show like in particular as just being black and then like that was all her little blurb was about and so i was wondering what you think about like how these identity politics like um this great parents either have or this like discourse that we're having i mean i think to the journalists defense um he didn't just say chad was black and i called it a day he did exceeded some more context of our conversation so i mean it was you know we had a lot of rotation it was pretty cool as well um but i definitely felt something i noticed and um it was frustrating initially because you know before kind of reading through the rest of the article it kind of feels like a very unique politics box that you've been put in that because you were black you must he's first of all these lists of ideas must follow suit um which is you know limiting but i think to be sympathetic to journalists i was previously a media major so i'm just going to be all learning here um i think that every journalist has in some ways it's another kind of on an article we're trying to make something new of a topic honestly i think the this conversation that we're having today is not new if the fact that it faced you know this current iteration of research is um coming back to something that was studied two years ago shows that it's not new and i've had these exact same thing around the day in high school with i remember the young republican republicans we have this background conversation about enjoying diversity whatever um you're always trying to add something new to the conversation or something a little maybe sensational but you mostly trying to create some sort of analysis and i think what that journalist was doing in his article was questioning whether that's something that you consider the fact that i was the only black person in this panel um and also representing a more progressive perspective if you know however we were chosen you know sort of represent the student body i was the i you know it could come across as i was sort of like a character um you know i was doing sort of like meta analysis would be so annoying that analysis to do that um i was a little frustrated when i thought about it i mean he represented the work that i said um and he placed it in a larger a larger conversation about something i think worth discussing also generally focus definitely back in the public discourse from generally where the people are coming to this conversation for the people who are likely to contribute to these surveys also um you know i'm not a statistics person but it's just we sound you know just based off of people who are volunteering um even they might have more confidence about something i don't know but yeah yeah so that's a good point um so one of the things we did on the research was we had a ten dollar uh incentive because what you end up doing is the folks that are you know if you don't give an incentive for people to develop a survey you already get the people one way or the other uh are most interested in the topic um we've got i don't know time for maybe one more question but i also want to mention that there will be for those of you on zoom then informal or optional anonymous survey that's going to pop up on your screens pretty soon so we encourage you to take that that gives dvd some uh great data that we want to uh we'd like to collect um and then do we want to do one more question from zoom being hesitant about taking stances [Music] how do you reconcile the need to address and take action against dangerous ideologies such as racism anti-semitism which is a great expression is there a point at which free expression ends and the need to remove ideologies from public forums for the public interest begins and these are both quite great questions and i think you have five minutes and you can choose which fits to you and i think i'm gonna start over here sorry right democracy um [Music] it's always funny it's like we're not a democracy or a republic that's kind of an inside political joke but yeah so if you look at the calvin report institutional neutrality what it talks about is essentially um the the institution can talk about things people need that administration the institution can take a position on things that fundamentally affect the institution and i would say probably in this case a lot of these are judgment calls um universities see themselves as creating citizen leaders in a democracy so i would say yes that would be something that they would take a position on um that uh is something that they would they would probably take a position i know it depends on when you say take a position on you know when they take a position on trump's electoral uh fraud thing you know is that is that covered or is it democracy you might have been the second question or three things yeah are there some positions right it's pretty frustrating yeah i mean i think there are natural limits in some ways on your free expression that the collective will ensure you know they'll they'll work on it you know the institution won't come for you you know your people react to what you say um but i mean i'm the first thing i think of is a student recently um writing an opinion piece for the daily tar heel up in a critical opinion piece of students who go to israel for perspectives these real trips and they were that article eventually taken down at that student's owner class because they because certain students felt that it was certain people i wouldn't say these students felt that it was anti-semitic and other people um maybe who were also a bethlehem went as far as to send death threats to that person and to send a threat to that person's mother um and that's a unc student right there i mean the hr was an independent publication student run but it is an institution at the school that the school claims so i think in those cases when you know you can you can argue all day all day for the right of people to be offended by that piece but i think students should be protected when they are the victims of actual threats to violence to them to their person to you know their people and that i don't think necessarily defensible yeah absolutely in that regard i mean there should be no connotations or adverse suggestions of violence towards anyone with you know a relatively mainstream viewpoint do you disagree with um i think that some of this is naturally handled by like the overton window what's the realm of acceptable discourse on campus so i especially like i mentioned before the study was not finding that you know students are self-centered over highly bigoted or discriminatory views um so you know if you're thinking well yeah you shouldn't just go around saying racial slurs i don't necessarily think that's the main subject of conversation and this conversation however yeah i think that you have to react poorly to certain things obviously you know someone's out there saying openly very big things then that's the problem however i think that sometimes there can be differences in interpretation um based on your world view upon what you think is acceptable or not so i have a general inclination towards you should critically contend with ideas no matter how bad you think they are because otherwise i don't think it's a learning experience for the person who holds that bad idea it's more so just dismissal of them and that doesn't solve the actual rule of the problem so i think that we have to be diligent about understanding what are dangerous ideas you know we don't necessarily want someone going around promoting ideological fascism or things things of that nature that are not very constructive but you also i think still should contend with them and softly point out why they're on or else who knows if they don't have the opportunity to have an interaction like that in the future yeah really quickly because i know we're basically out of time um but i think compounding that that you should always engage with someone who is talking not always but if you feel prepared to do so you should always engage with someone who has a rather bigoted idea because when it comes down to it those beliefs generally are not rhetorically sound they cannot back them up with data they cannot back them up other than anything other than anecdotal evidence and opinions um so i think that would help that person ideally to see that you know their way of thinking is wrong and unacceptable and also think i would help to self-regulate you know whatever group you're in i've had experiences with someone that's gotten up and said something that was just blatantly racist and we self-regulated and they you know didn't come back and didn't espouse those again um so yeah it really just comes down to dealing with it calmly asking them why asking them to prove because at the end of the day those beliefs just can't hold water of tolerance not endorsement but tolerance of being willing to listen to people with great professional ideas is going to be a bit of a better way to change their minds not not even so much because the ideas don't hold water uh unfortunately i don't think uh the water building of our beliefs is really what convinces us to abandon them ultimately but just listening to people is a way to build trust and until you have that no one is going to change their mind about anything i just remember when we had dinner together you said you had a high tolerance for crazy nobody else to interact with different folks for politics weird for my social life yes okay so some posing comments uh first off very much thank you to the panelists for sitting here and taking questions and uh doing some very very thoughtful answers i think you yeah you uh presented yourself well you spoke well for uh for the university like to thank the audience um for being great participants and for being here to engage um there is pizza so don't forget to join us for that and for those of you who want to get cle credit make sure you click on the cle link for attending anything else thank you

Channel: UNC Program for Public Discourse

Views: 345

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Id: 5XHZelIOOd8

Length: 87min 44sec (5264 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2022