The Common Room: State Legislators and Academic Freedom

[Music] welcome welcome i'm jonathan friedman and this is the common room pen america's conversation series about free speech diversity and inclusion in higher education america's mission is to celebrate creative expression and defend the civil liberties that make it possible and i invite those of you in attendance today to consider joining our national membership of writers journalists scholars and their allies in support of our mission today we'll be talking tackling a pro a topic of immense interest in higher education state legislators and academic freedom i'm joined by musa al garby paul f lazersfeld fellow in the department of sociology at columbia university thanks for having me thanks for being here second lindsay ellis senior reporter at the chronicle of higher education hi jonathan thanks for having us hi lindsay and finally jeffrey sachs political scientists at academic at acadia university thank you very much for having me so before we get into the main topic of the hour all here are reminded that this is a forum for interaction and open dialogue we ask that everybody speak to one another with respect and remember to mute when not speaking of course we'll reserve time at the end for questions from the audience but all are invited to put comments or questions in the chat throughout the session so to the topic of the day since the start of the year a wave of bills have been introduced by state legislators around the country taking aim at the ideologies curricula and teaching approaches in colleges and universities proposals include surveying the political leanings of professors banning the teaching of divisive concepts and curricular materials from the new york times 6019 project as well as limiting the availability of financial aid to certain academic majors state legislators have made requests to examine concepts and terminology taught in specific classes or have called both publicly and privately for some professors to be terminated for their speech particularly for their tweets some allege the wave of activity is having a chilling effect on professors already while others say these elected representatives are merely executing their official duties let's start with you musa to set the stage i know you've written numerous op-eds expressing concern for the state of free speech and academic freedom in higher education particularly for conservative students perhaps you've even experienced these challenges personally as an undergraduate and graduate student can you tell us a bit about the problem or problems as you've diagnosed them yeah uh so as i see it there's sort of a handful of interrelated problems that kind of feed into a lot of these uh issues that we see um so one of them is self-censorship self-censorship by faculty self-censorship by students on the student side um part of what drives it is fear of professors judging them or professors docking their grade because they said uh but a big part probably the bigger part actually from some of the surveys seems to be concerned from their peers um peers judging them uh offending their peers uh peers not not wanting to like hang out with them anymore and actually this is one of the big things that drives faculty self-censorship as well um so um because you know faculty even if you're not worried about getting fired uh so let's say you're a tenured or tenured truck professor you also don't want to be the person who goes in the room and everyone's like uh like you want to be invited to parties you want to you know um so uh so even among faculty uh faculty who lean conservative for instance tend to avoid working on um the kinds of subjects that where their political leanings would be relevant they tend to try to uh kind of downplay their right so they're self-censorship among faculty and students a second problem um that's sort of uh is that there's this problem of ideological homogeneity within the academy so um in social research fields uh you know uh progressive uh people who are aligned with uh the left out number of people aligned with the right by effect by around ten to one um and that's not and the problem here isn't the isn't some specific number that the pro problem is that when you have when people are too similar when they all agree to the same uh you know view things in largely the same ways you have it undermines our ability to understand certain phenomena so it makes research worse it makes teaching worse it leads to group thinking extremism important questions are never asked or never explored so that's a second problem a third problem is uh ideological discrimination um and this is more of a problem the higher you go so for students uh undergrads they don't really face too much um ideological discrimination uh within you know from official like official discrimination so they have a lot of concerns for instance about getting docked in their grades um for saying the wrong thing but there's not a lot of evidence that that happens um but as you go higher um so for instance if you're applying to grad schools discrimination does become a little bit more but most importantly is when you're uh going on the job market or when you're a faculty member that's when the discrimination becomes most pronounced because it's a higher stakes decision so when a department hires you you're going to be around for the foreseeable future they're going to be working closely with you they're going to be uh right uh and um and how that plays out is not just in the hiring decision question um but then also on other things that are related so um there's a lot of research showing that there's ideological discrimination that happens in terms of peer review for journals in terms of institutional review boards when you're uh trying to get projects approved in terms of grants when you're applying for funding um and so this ideological discrimination is is another problem um uh and then there's two more uh one is the growing disconnect between institutions of higher learning and the publics that they're supposed to be serving um so growing number of uh a growing share of the public see feels um left behind by institutions of higher learning disconnected from uh experts and elite you know um and they don't understand the value of uh of certain lines of work especially um critical work related to the humanities they don't understand what the point is what the value is why their tax dollar should be funding that work um and that's um and that at least part of that problem is i guess ours to own in the sense that we could do a better job engaging with the public and making the case for why you know um uh and then the last thing i'll note is that there are changes in the structure of higher ed institutions which feed into a lot of these problems too um and i'll just name a few uh a customer is always right approach that a number of sort of campus leaders have adopted with respect to students understanding students as customers and the customer being you know uh right uh can lead to problems um professional governance uh among faculty like faculty governance is being under undermined um in some cases by administrators who have a bigger power and and represent a bigger share of total personnel and universities um there's this justification of the professoriate which is also uh a very big problem with respect to you know academic freedom and um and and so these like uh five problems i guess um kind of interplay with one another and create this sort of toxic stew we find ourselves in now um and um they're often kind of run together in a lot of these discussions so when you see some of these bills or you hear conservatives complaining about higher ed they kind of run together the issues of self-censorship and ideological homogeneity and discrimination ideological discrimination but they're actually um importantly different problems that have different causes that have different solutions um so it's um they are related but it's important to kind of pull them apart and to not like run them together all right that's a lot so i'll i'll come back on the on the question of solutions because i think there has been wide varying um widely varying diagnoses of of the extent of these problems and i think faculty at different kinds of institutions students um you know the public in general has had differing perceptions of the extent to which each of these things is truly a problem or not a problem or uh what it is that should be done about it but now there's definitely activity being you know undertaken and i think that that point you made about the disconnect with the public is really key uh numerous surveys showing that republicans and conservatives generally no longer really value higher education in the way that they used to that's quite alarming now i know lindsay you've been tracking closely uh all of these developments for some time with the chronicle reporting in particular on the activities of state legislators including the introduction of bills that have implications for academic freedom and other activities by elected officials that appear to put professors you know pretty squarely in the crosshairs i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the trends that you've been seeing um what's new what's different in this you know as as people i think are scrambling to try and do something about what they view as the problem yeah it's a it's a really um good question so a few years back i think the focus from a lot of state houses and state senates was on student conduct and how students were responding to speakers that for example they didn't agree with politically what speakers were doing on campus and how and where students were expressing themselves when they wanted to protest or they wanted to hand out flyers and the like i think what we've seen this year that feels distinct from that and notable is that the focus appears to be on not what's happening in the college campus writ large but what's happening in the college classroom the legislation that i've been following is you know relates to what's on the syllabus what's part of the course outcomes um how professors approach certain topics and you know topics related to um oppression and privilege and the like in particular um i think two notable examples to get going in our conversation would be one in arkansas where a bill in the house basically explicitly would bar um a class that addressed you know social justice for any particular group or the oppression of any particular group um and just you know that that bill has not passed it was something that was introduced and sort of got some attention and then secondarily an effort in georgia that um a lawmaker had basically asked the state's public universities i think there are 25 or 26 of them um you know how do you teach oppression how do you teach privilege and that required you know any number of or every single one of these you know more than two dozen campuses to go through their syllabi look through their course outcomes and in one case that i i talked to um interview faculty about how they were they were doing this and so that that places a you know a sharp spotlight on the classroom and um these concepts and how professors are approaching them and i think that distinction you know on what's happening in class versus what's happening on the quad is probably the thing that's notable over these last few months so let's bring you in jeff um this shift from uh student conduct to now faculty conduct and things that are being taught you've been pretty vocal in trying to raise alarms about many of these bills around the country um what do you think of of these legislative solutions and you know if you have thoughts about how we're characterizing the challenges in higher education you know and how you see them those are welcome too actually i really agree with many of the description the description of the problem that musa presented and in particular i think uh he's right to highlight the importance of self-censorship both among faculty and students and i think as he has correctly points out this is principally a peer-driven phenomenon i i think that there might be cases um where students self-censor because they might fear official sanction from administrators or professors but generally it's because people want to fit in they want to you know look smart or cool or just get along and that can be very pernicious especially in environment like in higher ed where people are so overwhelmingly in many cases of a specific political ideology it can lead to that kind of group think and i think that in many ways what we're seeing now is an attempt by legislators to address this problem of self-censorship the problem though is that self-censorship is not an issue that lends itself easily to a legislative solution it's a cultural problem not really uh one of institutional design and uh what we're seeing here with these law or these bills is uh kind of a back end way i feel to address self-censorship so for instance in much of the rhetoric surrounding some of these bills like in new hampshire or west virginia or arkansas they're described as ways of creating a space within classrooms where students who don't subscribe to what these legislators describe or refer to as a critical race theory point of view or a uh a left-wing point of view it's intended to create a space by regulating that speech where conservative students feel more comfortable expressing themselves so i think in some ways it's responding to this problem that musa is describing of self-censorship a problem that i think um as a faction of myself i think i think we should all care about uh but it's uh it's it's trying to use a tool that's not designed to perform this particular task the result i think and the fear that i have and the reason why i'm raising this alarm is uh it would really deeply limit the ability of many faculty and in in other places like in arkansas some students as well to operate freely and organize and express themselves openly in the classroom or elsewhere on campus uh and uh i think in the the the the when we think about how these bills are written and the language they contain they're often so vague so poorly written that they lend themselves to all kinds of of uses that might end up limiting or regulating all kinds of very very important speech that we should absolutely want the campus to be host to musa lindsey any response yeah i mean um that last point uh jeff made well for one i i two two things i'll just say one um wholeheartedly second and agree with um this point about how a lot of the challenges that that that i described there are fundamentally cultural problems and you can't yeah and it's very difficult um if not impossible to sort of legislate cultural solutions to cultural problems um okay and i can talk about that more later maybe but um but i just wanted to uh underline how much uh i agree with that and in fact i got so distracted by underlying that that i forgot what the other point was so i'll just i'll just pass it on there's definitely something i think also particularly you know odd in numerous numerous bills that we were talking about here i think it was in in iowa where one of the democratic uh officials who you know was opposing the bill there said you know it was talking about just how incredibly ironic well it is that a bill that is trying to ban divisive concepts in the classroom and you know put it borrowing some of the language from trump's executive order from last year about barring race and sex stereotyping in classrooms that that is a bill that is being called a free speech bill i think that hypocrisy here um as a free speech advocate as an organization that that fights for free speech i think what's so alarming is what are going to be to me the long-term consequences you know not just of the way that these conservatives and republicans have taken up free speech but in particular the way that the things that they're doing that so clearly are at odds with those principles yeah and one thing that they should also be concerned about um and i've noted this in other articles and and jeff noted this as well is that um once you have something on the books you know it can be used for a lot of purposes that you didn't necessarily intend um and and this is something that conservative students should be uh so for instance when trump tried to do this executive when trump uh did this executive order on on campus speech uh one of the things i learned about in an article i wrote in the washington post afterwards is that when you set this precedent where um you can basically defund schools who are who are insufficiently um uh who are who who you've evaluated by whatever means to as insufficiently protective of free speech that same kind of law could be used to for instance um defund liberty university you know prevent liberty or university from or or other religious or religious institutions um who who uh try to preserve um you know uh in principle in a world where you had uh sort of a democratic trifecta over the government and they were aggressive and wanting to kind of get rid of these kinds of institutions they could really in principle rely on similar kinds of arguments with those laws on the books to to um to defund those um and and and we see this with a bunch of with speech laws um in a range of you so so for instance uh a lot of laws that were intended to ban hate speech um some sometimes disproportionately affect and even primarily affect the very people who they're supposed to be defending so you know people from historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups african-americans et cetera um have been you know uh censored and and and things like this in the name of laws that were passed to prevent hate speech in fact some of the hate speech laws that are um that were created are already used for instance to silence criticisms of israel and to to to try to apply the rules to um silence uh bds uh movements on campus um trump this is a thing that happened under the trump administration as they tried to apply existing rules um regarding hate speech in a in a way that would make it much more difficult um for a sort of uh um perceived anti-israel speech for for that to be interpreted as hate speech as anti-semitism uh and so this is one of the problems with getting these laws on the books as they they they can be used for a lot of purposes other than the ones you intend and and charles maybe they just made this very concrete because it listeners might not fully or might not be aware of the details of these bills but a good example of what musa is describing could be an outcome from a bill b considering new hampshire so the new hampshire bill like bills in west virginia oklahoma would prohibit the promotion or endorsement by faculty of certain kinds of divisive concepts there's a whole list of them a divisive concept for instance that the state of new hampshire is a sexist or racist state or that the united states is is inherently sexist or racist other kinds of divisive concepts um racial or sex or sex based stereotyping for instance that certain kinds of attributes values beliefs character traits are or privileges or statuses are possessed by someone on the basis of their uh their race or their sex now i think that when the legislators are drafting these bills they have in mind a very specific sort of example and i'll probably they imagine something like white privilege right the idea that all white people by virtue of being white possess a kind of special privilege or status and that's the kind of claim that i imagine a lot of these legislators want to prohibit in the classroom but as musa points out this could easily be interpreted in other ways for instance affirmative action let's suppose a law professor wants to defend affirmative action wants to endorse the policy of affirmative action a policy that an opponent of affirmative action could say aha that professor is endorsing the idea that we should treat people differently afford them a different status or privilege based on their race or maybe a psychology professor wants to describe certain characteristics that he or she believes people have according to their sex certain kinds of behaviors or character traits it doesn't matter whether you or i or anybody else believe that that sort of thing the point is that that is a kind of speech that i think we all should want to be permissible in an academic context but because it would involve attributing to someone based on their sex a certain trait or or behavior it could run afoul of this divisive concept prohibition in these bills those are just off the top of my head but you only need to be you you shouldn't approach these bills the way you a rational sane person would we should approach these bills the way the most paranoid member of a university's legal team would approach these bills because they're the ones that will be deciding whether or not this class gets offered whether or not this speaker gets invited because they are will be acutely aware of how catastrophic it would be if the university was found to have breached these laws there could be cuts in funding there could be uh they could be barred from bidding on certain kinds of state contracts really severe penalties and you need to put yourself in those that very paranoid position to understand how easily these bills could be abused you know i think that's an excellent point and it's very clear that that efforts to legislate in this fashion have these kind of you know just endless possible ramifications and that's why they're so uh dangerous and they're so worrisome um you know just imagine telling all the faculty at a university you know tell me anytime you say the word oppression in your class or privilege or what have you and um the notion that we would on on the one hand be supporting liberal arts and you know debate in the classroom an open debate open inquiry free speech um by somehow suggesting there are certain words that can't be said when context matters so much to what is being said and some of the most dynamic professors are ones who think on their feet who raise interesting examples on the fly who bring in um current events to connect to their students so this i think has a significant potential to dampen and make everyone kind of think twice makes education a lot more sterile i also want to ask and and lindsay i'm thinking about this one for you a little bit you know i remember back to last summer when the george floyd protests were happening and there was a hashtag black in the ivory that you know spread on twitter and facebook and unleashed all these stories of experiences with racism uh in higher education and i'm thinking also about the um complications tensions challenges that we've seen recently surrounding student athletes particularly black student athletes kneeling before games and you know these are examples to me uh not of you know conservative ideas being censored or silenced or chilled on campuses but you know progressive ideas and so you know when when you've been tracking these issues for some time do you you know is is your sense of this that the issues really are just about censoring of conservative ideas or not sufficient conservative representation on campus or is it more complicated yeah it's i think that's a great question i think it's a couple of interconnected issues um i mean i think the first is that you know when you hear the word professor in a lot of cases you think of a tenured academic who you know has all of the protection in the world to pursue the research and the kind of teaching that he or she wants to do and not simply on a lot of cases on a lot of campuses just isn't the case anymore um the job status of a lot of faculty members is far more precarious and you know can can be sort of at the whim of of public outrage too if if you know someone says something that generates a lot of controversy either you know a liberal point of view or a conservative point of view i think when you saw a lot of reaction to some of the the black and the ivory posts from over the summer and um you know in a separate sort of example athletes and student students kneeling at the beginnings of games i think it's important to recognize that the the emotional response to that type of demonstration um you know isn't isn't quite protected and that there is a degree of risk that faculty members are taking on for speaking out in that way and that students are taking on and speaking out in that way um you know the structure of of many institutions you know there's the board of course that in many cases is appointed by the legislature or confirmed by the legislature that that entity hires and fires the public college president and so when there are controversies on campus it doesn't necessarily just get blow back from the legislature you know i think it can also bring some internal political pressures as well on on top campus leaders so all of these sort of interconnecting dynamics make it so that simply speaking out you know whether it be on a particular issue that's important to you or on your own experience that you could be assuming a degree of risk while doing that i mean just just in terms of the possible political pressures that you could see yeah and if i could just double down on that i mean this is something that i have uh firsthand experience with um so before i was at columbia i was an instructor at university of arizona and following one of these uh i had the privilege of being the focal point of one of these sort of fox news witch hunts and in the aftermath despite having blowing teaching evaluations and teaching a core course and all this my contract was just not renewed because a lot of these you know university leaders um if they think that they can make a mob go away by giving them a head they'll just give them a head because they want peace on campus they want to protect you know they they want to placate um possible uh uh you know uh donors or trustees who might be uh annoyed or upset um and uh and so this is the case i mean for contingent faculty which are approaching 70 of faculty on overall these days um academic freedom in many cases is like almost a joke um and that's the you know and so there is a lot of risk involved and one of the things um that jeff has pointed out um through some of his own work he put together a database uh to this effect showing that when you look at the professors who are fired for political speech a large number of them are on the left i mean um per capita it's more common on the right but in terms of sheer numbers uh most of them are on the left so we have a question in the q a which i'd like to go to next and then um i'm going to come back to some of the other solutions but just to to kind of round out the question of how we diagnose the problem question comes from elizabeth niehaus who asks what evidence do we have that there is actually a self-censorship problem on campus i know there are a ton of surveys out there that people use to back up this claim but generally the questions asked our problem really problematic and often don't tell us much about how students actually think about what to say or not to say in class i think that is to say there is a great deal more nuance than perhaps is captured in some of the surveys which are uh used a lot to make these claims so jeff i know that you have written a lot about these surveys what evidence do evidence do you see that you find convincing on this point or in other words that you say you know these state legislators indeed are responding to something that is real right well first of all i think very quickly you'll find that musa is the real expert on this topic but um what i can say is that um we do have surveys um as as elizabeth mentions from organizations like paradox academy which releases annually it's campus expression surveys uh we have similar surveys from um uh many organizations like the the knight foundation and many other organizations as well um and and really their questions normally look something like this they'll ask have you ever declined to express an opinion in the classroom or elsewhere on campus because you were concerned how others might respond and sometimes these surveys will offer a menu of possible motivations that you can choose from to explain why you declined to express yourself now the thing about these surveys and i think where the questioner is absolutely correct to kind of raise a red flag is that some kinds of reasons for self-censorship are maybe not uh you know uh something we should celebrate but are deeply understandable and maybe just natural to any kind of social environment maybe you decline to speak because um you don't know the answer to the question in the classroom maybe you decline to speak because you want to you want to impress your friends you don't want to appear stupid as a as a teacher myself i struggle with students who won't open themselves up to the possibility of being wrong in public but i think that's a very common characteristic a common reason and might be a bit different from what these state legislators are responding to they're responding to a more partisan reason um and maybe a more pernicious reason to self-censor self-censorship because uh as a conservative you fear that your ideas are not valued and that you will not be valued personally for holding those ideas and uh and that kind of fear i think these surveys do sometimes succeed in in picking up um for instance we know that conservatives and especially very conservative students self-censor at far higher rates according to these these uh their responses in the classroom than liberal students do now everybody wants to be popular probably the same amount so the popularity argument or the not knowing the answer explanation doesn't really work for explaining that gap a more partisan kind of censorship does though and i think that kind of gap and the fact as well that that gap tends to be most pronounced along certain hot topic issues like questions of race questions of gender and sexuality the fact that's most pronounced along those lines i think does give us a bit of leeway to say that there is self-censorship taking place that we really should be concerned about i think the legislators are not making up this problem okay the sales trip problem is is real um we can have a really great discussion about the scope of it i do think that these legislators sometimes air on the side of catastrophizing this problem but there is something going on there the issue and the one that we're dealing with here i think is that laws cannot solve this problem at least not without excessive censorship of its own and lots of second-order effects that might damage the very cause of free expression that these bills are ostensibly being designed to to protect um if i could just add quickly i mean i think the you know i i was reporting specifically on that georgia effort to see you know what classes and what course outcomes had oppression or privilege in the description um the lawmaker told a local news outlet that he did that after a constituent complaint or constituent question um i think the the sort of natural question that follows is you know one constituent raising a concern i mean certainly lawmakers need to be responsive to the communities that they serve but it's the type of inquiry that then you know created this whole search process throughout the whole system throughout every class and so i think when when folks raise questions about are the responses proportionate with the degree of question or the degree of concern i think that's the sort of dynamic that they have in mind uh one thing that i'll just add is um okay so what about measuring cell censorship is that one challenge of course with measuring self-censorship it's similar to measuring um sensor so like is that you're trying to measure things that were not that were never put in the public right so you're trying to measure an abs um which is uh you know it's the same when you look at um when you're trying to decide if there's publication bias in um you know you have to look you're trying to measure um papers that were submitted but never public published and why they weren't published right um so so it's so measuring and abs um uh sort of challenging intrinsically but as jeff noted um and one thing that's critical is for with regards to any kind of surveyor no one should ever read one survey and uh and over interpret what it means or think it's reliable you know super reliable because you can poke holes in any any survey or question has problems and limitations with respect to the questions it's trying to answer but one thing that you do notice um that that i think jeff did a great job of pointing out is that um there are a whole bunch of these surveys conducted by a whole bunch of people um and we're increasingly getting longitudinal data as they've been you know asking them year to year and year and what you see is you see systematic um between different groups that's persistent over time and that's consistent in a range of surveys and in a range of questions that aren't asked the exact same way and things like that and so when you see that kind of a pattern that kind of robust pattern um then you have reason to think that there's a there there um and uh and i'll add in addition to the sort of survey-based um investigations into this um problem there are also more ethnographic research projects that have found the same thing so again the book passing on the right is about conservative faculty members who self-censor and why there's great work by a sociologist amy binder who also studied student groups political student groups around the country and did a lot of sort of ethnographically oriented research about a lot of these questions so um so it's not even just a thing that's captured in sort of polling although polling is the thing that people talk about most because you know the media politicians everyone they love numbers if you can say such and such percent of you know whatever people love that so so polling is where the conversation happens a lot but it's not the only place that it's captured and then the last thing i'll say is to double down on the point that jeff made about why self-censorship is a problem especially for uh self-censorship among students in the classroom for instance is because um because you know um if you if you people yes it's it's like one a critical skill that students need is the comfort with being wrong and learning from mistakes and if if people are unwilling to do this if they think it's catastrophic to be wrong and um that in itself is a problem it's not setting them up well for sort of future life stuff um but then there's there's also important pedagogical costs right because it's not like if they don't ask that question they somehow get the right answer to the question they just persist in error um and other students who who maybe share that error also you know lose the opportunity to learn from right um so it's it's an important pedagogical problem this self-censorship um and uh yeah that's i'll leave it there i think let's come back to the bills here uh at this point but i will say just one thing which is in my mind you know we're living in a time where it's actually you know there's a lot of movement in how people identify politically there's a broad range there's a lot of infighting on both what we might consider the left and the right and so a lot of these polls and surveys i think do you know they can tend to be um imperfect at or or kind of they tend to be tools of feeding more polarization and caricature of you know people in their political leadings i think actually some of the stuff that amy binders work and others has revealed is some of the nuance and complexity that you know it wasn't like every conservative on campus was cheering milo necessarily you know there's a lot more gray area in in in a lot of these things and i do worry sometimes that that you know that as just as you're saying that hunger and thirst and affection for numbers does tend to you know give us a feeling that we're looking at something that's quite static and simple to describe when it is indeed so complicated um so turning to the bills here you know putting aside you know whatever whether the extent of the problem is is you know open to some debate but um which of the bills are have been enacted at this point i don't believe any though they are moving in a few places um and which ones are most likely to be enacted in the near future jeff you've been monitoring these most closely i think uh well i can't speak to to how closely uh i think lindy's been funded very closely as well i guess what i'll say is some bills that were flagged at the start of this legislative session have already failed uh so for instance i believe um arkansas had a 1619 project ban that failed uh south dakota had one it was withdrawn by its sponsor so some of these bills have already been removed from from the calendar other bills like new hampshire's bill that would prohibit divisive concepts it has advanced out of its committee but the governor governor sununu has already announced he would not sign it so it seems unlikely that that bill is going to go anywhere other bills though are very much live and very much on the table um iowa is kind of clearing house for these sorts of bills and there's real momentum in its legislative chambers uh to get these bills signed so for instance iowa has a 1619 project ban that um would prohibit uh universities and public universities and colleges from making use in their history curriculum or any other curriculum of uh of any part in whole or in part the 1619 project anyone mentioned what's anything like any discussion of it right well i i i don't want to get the language wrong it's it's i i'm the bill is not designed to prohibit students from or professors from acknowledging its existence rather it's it's meant to prohibit history faculty for history classes from making use of the 1619 project in whole or in part in their curriculum um and of course you know there there's a lot in that project you know uh it would be very very easy i think for a student looking to claim a faculty scalp or a legislator with the same motivation to point to something in uh you know well-accepted body of scholarly literature that can be attributed to the 1619 project and get a professor in hot water um and then uh iowa is also moving ahead with with one issue we have not talked about that's that's related um and that is a bill to ban tenure in the states i i think i don't quite know exactly what the status is of it this this week but this ban this this revocation of tenure has been tossed around in iowa multiple sessions now and it peters out um it has a lot of momentum this year and there are a lot of legislators who are talking about talking this bill up and and describing it um i think the lot the word that the expression that was used as it was a live grenade this session um and so i think you know that's iowa is a place where i think if you want to see the cutting edge innovations in the area of regulating faculty speech or reining in quote-unquote left-wing academics iowa is the place to look and that and that tenure um legislation or that that bill um you know in conversations in state chambers it is explicitly tied to this issue i mean college leaders there are seeing complaints about um the political leanings of professors and on free speech issues and so that is you know stock and trade part of the conversation when lawmakers there are trying to revoke uh tenure and you know in iowa it stems from this controversy surrounding the dentistry school uh most recently so you know it often starts in these kind of sensationalized stories you know i used to say to people um when i still travel to universities you know trying to explain how complicated and large these things are as entities you know the notion we don't tend to think of universities like cities that have a mayor you know and nobody really knows what's happening them um but but the the sort of all it takes is one little um one thing and you know i'm just not to say that what happened in the dentistry school there was little or not significant i do think that um you know the conservative student in that case probably you know surely didn't deserve to be silenced or censored in the way that they were but the question is like is that one experience something from which you know we really need to get rid of tenure as a result um um it seems pretty extreme as a response well and of course uh i mean it's it's actually almost the exact opposite of what of the direction that people should go all right so if if the idea is you want people to feel more comfortable expressing views that other people disagree with making it easier for them to lose their job if they make someone mad it's like basically the worst way to approach that problem right um and uh i mean and and this isn't and it's not and this kind of mentality about addressing this problem i should add isn't isn't just restricted to the right so for instance amy wax made a lot of people angry uh you know there are all these movements um he whacks her most recent but uh what was but what i argued in the chronicle of higher education in the middle of that um sort of scandal was people were calling for amy wax to be fired or to make it easier for her to um you know to move her and this is the exact again this is the exact um it's getting the problem backwards the problem isn't that amy wax has tenure and is protected the problem is that so many other academics in fact most academics today don't have those same protections if you want if if you want to make it so that people feel more comfortable expressing again controversial views if you use one disagrees with one people need to defend one people need to work about uh you know be again focused on increasing things like protections and job security rather than eroding them and then two uh people need to stand up for people who's who they themselves disagree with right none of these [Music] academics things none of them matter in a world where everybody's the only time they matter is to protect people uh who who we disagree with especially when there's strong disagreements and so you know people who care about things like academic freedom should start by defending people that they themselves disagree with who articulate views that they themselves load um they should really be modeling uh standing up for those people uh anyway i'll just leave it there right now and if i could just jump off that point jonathan um moosa's quite right that the these bills and the bills that we're describing largely today are have their origins among republican legislators but this is a bipartisan phenomenon both parties are trying to pass bills um or initiate policies that will restrict uh faculty speech or expression on campus there's a whole discussion we could have for instance about the implications of how universities and campuses handle uh hearings surrounding allegations of sexual assault that has been vigorously litigated back and forth between different kinds of guidances issued by the trump administration versus the obama and now by the administration on this issue and how it impacts um expressive rights of of students but then also you know more immediately this legislative session like all all other legislative sessions recently we've seen members of both parties initiate bills surrounding trying to regulate the expression of sentiment surrounding israel we see this with new york the new york legislator legislature introduced this past month a bill that would prohibit the use of student fees um or faculty uh or public universities and colleges uh faculty uh using their research funds to join scholarly societies that engage in support for bds the boycott investment sanctions movement there is there have been aggressive pushes in many state houses to have universities adopt um and define anti-semitism using the international holocaust remembrance alliances definition of anti-semitism which critics claim might uh uh prohibit the expression of certain kinds of opinions about israel um and i have no interest in this forum litigating whether or not this is uh you know the right way to think about anti-semitism but certainly what it does do is it is one more in this case bipartisan attempt to regulate the kinds of expressive activities that faculty and students and even administrators engage in i'm going to invite anyone in the audience if you have any additional questions to plot them in the chat or in the q a we have another one coming in a minute but i thought i would just put in the chat as well a link to a conversation we did in this series uh in december about free speech and adjunct faculty where we talked about many of the issues that have come up today surrounding um well the ease with which for adjunct faculty in particular are being dismissed from campuses and the ways in which uh across the political spectrum they can feel uh silenced and censored um so the question we have in the chat here dovetails with one i was gonna ask you lindsay uh uh that we prepped on our list so i'm gonna try and put them together but the question is really pointing out that actually a lot of the bills um not only do they tend to outlaw uh you know in an effort to ban ways in which people are introducing divisive ideas or talking about you know race and sex stereotyping a lot of the bills also have these clauses that say that nothing in this bill uh would prevent you know the dispassionate discussions of these things as academic topics so they seem to have these backdoor or almost contradictory sets of language in them so the question was um how do we get these interlocutors to recognize the the importance of not being too terrible or at least you know how do we i think uh have some of these state legislators understand that the bills that they're putting forward are basically you know i don't know so convoluted um and and my related question i had for you was actually to ask if you have the sense that really you know college leaders are really um doing enough about this paying enough attention to it presidents and others are they highly alarmed in iowa are they paying attention in arkansas or does this seem you know and and could this be one area where they could be doing more to try and i don't know work with state legislators to to try and influence these bills um it's a great question so i think it you know this is coming in the context of covet and the context of the public health side of covet and also the budgetary side of covid and that has totally consumed campuses especially campus leaders for i guess you know now 12 plus months now um so you know i think in terms of short-term practicality a lot of college presidents a lot of college boards their eyes have been on that ball and i think you know for for good reason um i think the question of you know are colleges ready to defend their their operations are our campuses good enough at showing their worth to the entities that fund them um that's been a conversation that many schools have been having for a number of years now um when polls sort of started to show this very sharp divide um on how conservatives and other right-leaning people were perceiving higher ed especially in red states that was very much front of mind for the legislature for the boards as and presidents as they talked to the legislatures um you know you'd see campus leaders talking about um research impact you'd see them talking about you know the disparate outcomes in the economy for college grads and even people who have had some college versus people who don't go to these institutions so certainly college leaders are used to defending themselves and sort of making their case for why they matter the question is really you know how how that message will be received um and i think the other sort of cultural context that we have now um and this has certainly waxed and wayne for the last few years but this this sort of culture war um that is you know sucking up a lot of the oxygen in in many conversations um you know i think it's it's natural and easy to take one thing that you've heard of on one college campus and fit it into a larger narrative about the state of free speech and and campus culture and so i think um you know it's easy for these tensions to be inflamed and and in this current moment and that's another thing that that we're seeing right now jeff thoughts on college presidents and and what is to be done about fighting these bills uh i i think i mean to be probably realistic i think many of these bills will will fail on their own i think that uh they might in some cases they're making it out of committee and they're making out of committee at a greater rate than i would like certainly but always on a party line vote and once they are presented to chambers as a whole um i suspect many of them will fail but i only say that because generally these bills when they're passed when they've introduced in the past don't make it all the way to a governor's desk for signature that doesn't mean that things won't be different this time in order to mobilize to address this problem i think i i would like to see greater journalistic scrutiny of these bills i'm not directing that at lindsay certainly who has been on the ball from day one but i think that there are many people who are vocal about academic freedom and campus free speech but generally they direct their fire at threats to free speech coming from the left um i think greater attention to these sorts of highly organized highly uh serious legislative threats um from journalists from commentators from the press would be very welcome and then i would also i think this is where we need to we also need to look to organizations like for instance pen america or fire the foundation for individual rights in education which provide legal advice or or representation to faculty or to other members of campus communities in order to uh you know ensure that people's expressive freedoms are protected um but uh i think this is going to be a long-term fight if if these bills don't pass this year um they might get you know the momentum is there it's building and even if they don't pass they send a message and it's a chilling one and uh even if they fail uh i think presidents of universities are getting a message and it's um avoid certain topics avoid certain issues otherwise you might find yourself in front of the the iowa committee the iowa house committee on education being yelled at uh by an angry legislator has actually happened uh this this past month has actually happened and i think that point you make about momentum is so important here in in instructive um you know a lot of these bills at least the anti-1619 builds are based on something that was written by tom cotton last year and um you know they've just they were all introduced around the country with incredible speed i think we're seeing similar uh speed um and court i don't know if it's right called coordination that we saw behind previous rounds of campus free speech bills certainly at play now um that we're seeing in other kind of legislative efforts as well musa i'm going to give you you know the last word here i want to ask you you know you've seen you you know we started out with your diagnosis of some of these challenges um you say you know we need some kind of solutions but also you're skeptical that the state legislative you know efforts are the right answers what do you think are the right answers what do you think people need to be doing on campus just to kind of improve the climate for free speech that isn't you know this yeah well that's a big uh that's a big question okay so one thing that i'll just note at the top is again um because the the problem has actually several problems um i i think that there's um that similarly the solution is going to be sort of several solutions that are you know different tactics to address different components of the challenge um but uh but what what what might some of those be um so uh for instance um for the with respect to uh the lack of of um viewpoint diversity in the classroom like for instance on syllabi or among professors right um one of the things that's important um and that has been valuable is that when you when you demonstrate to professors uh a lot of people because there's because this conversation is happening in the context of this culture war and uh because some of the a lot of the actors who are pushing these things seem flagrantly um are uh hypocritical uh don't seem particularly interested in research and teaching et cetera um it's created skepticism from a lot of people justifiable skepticism about how severe these problems are about why people are concerned about them and what i've found is that when you when you show when you walk people through a lot of the data for instance on um on things like uh studies that show bias in what gets published or not um what gets grants or not things like institutional review boards things like that um uh it helps it helps people understand and when they understand they can do practical uh when they understand one that there is this sort of uh that that these problems are real and not not just right-wing talking points um and two um that there are things that that that actually needs to be had on it because right now uh people in higher ed do have some say and what we do about these problems and how we address them but if they go too long unaddressed eventually it will genuinely be out of our hands right um these these kinds of bills and heavy-handed ham-fisted things will eventually probably get through so right now when we have time to kind of think through this ourselves and to make changes ourselves that are resonant with the with the values of our institutions with the needs and priorities of our institutions that are mindful of the different purposes of our institutions and the different constituencies we're trying to serve right um we should we should really be putting a lot of energy into that some practical things people can do um so for instance uh professors oftentimes say you know what i would love to talk about conservative thought more in my courses but i'm not a conservative i have no idea even where to begin on this uh like who would i put on my on my uh syllabus on racial inequality who's a conservative and who's not crazy um and um and they don't even know where to begin uh and so organizations like um and so this is the thing like at header docs academy one thing that they're trying to do right now i know is for instance um create uh create a repository of model syllabi so if you're someone who has done classes on different topics um that and you've tried it and it's worked well um you know uh and putting that resource up there so that other people who want to do this kind of thing have somewhere to look um so that kind of collaboration across faculty is is helpful um again i think it's important for people to model on these values themselves uh so you know it's all it's all well and good to come to to point out republican hypocrisy on things like free speech and all of that but you know we have to model these values ourselves by by again standing up for people who's whose views we find repugnant and repellent rather than going oh man you know these these people on the right are trying to fire people all the time with these fox news witch hunts oh but amy wax she's gone or you know etc right we need to be consistent and we need to defend the people that we find repugnant um and and horrendous too um uh um let's see yeah i don't know i mean and the precarity thing is is a i mean i i think that there needs uh addressing the precarity uh within institutions of higher learning is probably the single you know one of the single most important things that we can do um how to address that is uh complicated part of it relates to the overproduction of phds in some fields part of it relates to the sort of again the financial uh for structural decisions within these institutions that are outside of the capacity of faculty by themselves but this is a case where faculty need to organize faculty need to show solidarity um tenured and tenure track faculty need to show solidarity with contingent faculty um to push back against some of these things that are outside of their own control um yeah anyway it's a big question so uh i apologize if i've been kind of uh but yeah more solidarity that's what we need more solidarity more seizing the day and and i do appreciate your point about taking action um before you know to to recognize that the that higher education is doing something and is doing many things to address these challenges and perhaps doing more to make legislators and the public aware of uh the initiatives that are underway uh musa jeff lindsey thank you so much for being here with us today and talking about these issues uh we'll definitely be continuing to monitor them and looking to all of you to help keep us informed um thank you to our audience for joining as well please stick with us next friday at noon 12 et we'll be talking with uh leaders of some of the association of american college american colleges and universities truth racial healing and transformation campus centers we'll be talking about race reconciliation and free speech on campus in the post-trump era so please join us then thanks very much thank you thank you so much for having us great conversation you

Channel: PEN America

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Id: wmeeiOWhb9A

Length: 62min 14sec (3734 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021