The inaugural Harvard Law School Rappaport Forum | When is Speech Violence?

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JOHN MANNING: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the inaugural Harvard Law School Rappaport Forum. 74 years ago, in the shadow of World War II, Jerry Rappaport, then an 18-year-old first-year law student, decided that aspiring lawyers needed a regular opportunity to engage with the ideas and issues that connect our study of law to a complex and dynamic world. For Jerry, this engagement with vital contemporary issues was an essential part of preparing new Harvard lawyers for the leadership roles that so many of our graduates assumed. In 1947, he told the ABA Journal, and I quote, "In this day, no one will seriously question the truth that one can think as a specialist only after one has qualified as a competent citizen of this changing world." It is that sense of civic duty and of the responsibility of leadership that inspired him to found the Harvard Law School Forum, a student-organized speaker series dedicated to public discourse, held for many years at Harvard's Sanders Theatre and broadcast on WHGH at a time, by the way, when public affairs programming on radio was pretty rare. The Forum speakers addressed a range of subjects that were both urgent in their times and in many cases, continue to be pressing today. On March 8, 1946, in the midst of the Nuremberg trials, the Harvard Law School Forum hosted its inaugural meeting. And the theme was War Crimes, Revolution in Legal Theory or Law Enforcement. And this began a wonderful series at Harvard Law School of important conversations about consequential and difficult issues. Over the past seven decades, the Forum's list of speakers reads like a who's who of post-war leaders, thinkers, and cultural icons, including Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Caspar Weinberger. Nearly 3/4 of a century later, we come together with Jerry Rappaport and Phyllis Rappaport to open a new chapter in this history. Through a generous gift of the Rappaport Foundation, we are able to build on that original vision by launching a new vehicle for robust discussion and debate, The Harvard Law School Rappaport Forum. As we'll see shortly, as soon as I stop talking, the HLS Rappaport Forum is designed to promote full, open, vigorous, and respectful discussion about critical and complicated issues facing our community, our nation, and our world. With the launch of the Harvard Law School Rappaport Forum today, we hope to further several values. First, a great university must be a place of free, open inquiry, a place where disagreements, debates, and differences of opinion deepen knowledge and bring us closer to understanding and truth. Second, a great law school must be a place of free, open, and vigorous inquiry, a place where we differ about important things, but also listen generously to those with whom we disagree. You cannot-- you cannot understand your best argument unless you understand the best argument against you. It's that simple. Finally, in a society that is badly divided, this Forum will serve as a reminder of how important it is and how much can be learned from the respectful clash of ideas. With that, I want to thank Jerry and Phyllis Rappaport for cumulatively nearly 75 years of support for Harvard Law School, for their commitment to civic discourse, and particularly, for their generosity in making this new 21st century Forum possible. They model the type of engagement that we should all aspire to. So let's please give him them a big thank you. [APPLAUSE] OK, now I have subsided. And I would like to turn things over to my colleague Professor, Jeannie Suk Gersen, who will introduce today's topics and guest speakers. But before I do, I just want to thank Professors Barrett and Haidt for being here with us today, and Professor Gersen for moderating what I know will be a very interesting forum. Thank you. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Today's Forum asks, when is speech violence and other questions about campus speech. All three of us have contributed in our writing and in public debate already about these questions in our own ways coming from each of our different disciplinary backgrounds as a neuroscientist, a social psychologist, and as a lawyer. And I am delighted to moderate this Forum today, which puts Lisa Feldman Barrett in conversation to reflect on these questions with Jonathan Haidt. And the questions that we are taking up today are about campus speech. But they're really more deeply about the nature, possibilities, and boundaries of discourse in our society. And given that this conversation is taking place in a law school with the law school audience, I do want to note that for law students, especially who are about to go into the profession and for lawyers who have practiced, the question of speech and violence and its connection is one that is particularly germane. And I remember one of the first things that I learned in law school was from my criminal law teacher, Carol Steiker, who is here today, about the way in which, following Robert Cover, we do have to understand that when lawyers speak, when they use words, what happens next is that someone either goes to prison, or loses a job, or loses their child, or loses money. And these kinds of consequences are backed up only because violence at the end of it is possible, essentially the violence of the state. So I think that the connection between words and violence, it's not one that is new to law students. And it's one that has come up in recent years with respect to speech in general, both campus speech in the classroom and outside of the classroom. And so I am very delighted that we are able to talk about some of these issues today with our two guest speakers. Let me introduce you. Lisa Feldman Barrett is the University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She is a neuroscientist doing research at Mass General Hospital. She's also a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on the nature of emotion from both psychological and neuroscience perspectives. She is the author of How Emotions Are Made, The Secret Life of The Brain. And she also has a forthcoming book, which I hope that we will be able to talk to her about when it comes out. Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU's Stern School of Business. He is a social psychologist whose research examines the intuitive foundations of morality. He's applied his research in a variety of settings, from helping people understand and respect the moral motives of people with whom they disagree, to asking how companies can structure and run themselves in ways that will be resistant to ethical failures. Professor Haidt is the co-author of The Coddling of The American Mind, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure. So to introduce the topic, I'll start with a brief quote or a paraphrase from each of you. Lisa, you have said that if words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech, at least certain types of speech, can be a form of violence. And Jonathan, you have said a campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. So our purpose today is to take the care and the time to explore the context and the reasoning that led each of you to arrive at your views and to explore the reasons for your agreements and your disagreements. What is so great about your talking with us today is that increasingly, it is the case that on campuses like ours, the question of speech is framed around the question of students' mental health and their physical health. And given that, I don't think we can have a conversation that is truly informed, even though as lawyers, we think we know how to talk about speech. I don't think that conversation can be informed without the kind of research and expertise that you bring to it. And of course, the framing has consequences, and those consequences are the subject of disagreement. So let me start with a question. What does it mean to think of speech as violence? In what circumstances? LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Sure, OK, so I think the first thing to understand is that what we mean by violence. So harm, physical harm to your brain or your body, so losing arborization of neurons. So the neurons become less bushy, and they end up being more expensive to run. Or we're talking about an increase in metabolic dysfunction, which leads to heart disease, or diabetes, or depression, or other metabolic illnesses. So that's really what we're talking about. And it really is, I think, at this point, incontrovertible that chronic stress, not an instant of stress, but stress from which people do not recover, does get under the skin and cause biological harm. I think at this point, there are really dozens, if not hundreds of studies which show that this is really clear. And sometimes, the harm takes 10 or 20 years to show up. But the relationships are pretty predictable. So when you go to the gym, as I'm sure we all do, you are stressing yourself. You have a flush of cortisol. You start to feel unpleasant. Because really, our brains, one of the main reasons we have a brain is to regulate our bodies. There is a fancy name for this. Scientists call it alostasis, but I like to refer to it just as simply a body budget. So your brain isn't budgeting money for your body. It's budgeting glucose, and salt, and water, and so on. So it's running a budget. And when you exercise, or actually, in any kind of stress, you're basically making a huge withdrawal. And then you have to replenish that budget. And if you do, that's a really good thing. In fact, stressing a nervous system regularly and allowing it to recover is actually really healthy, and it builds a really strong body and mind. However, chronic stress is really where the brain starts to run a deficit in its body budget, and you start to feel really unpleasant. And you are at risk for various illnesses, and you will show eventually, even brain atrophy in particular regions of the brain. So these are scientific studies that have been replicated and as close to a fact as a scientist would ever claim that a fact exists. Because for us, you know, the world is full of probabilities. And the evidence shows, surprisingly, that words, verbal aggression is as potent as physical aggression and sexual abuse by a non-relative. That's what the research shows. The research has linked words, verbal aggression, to brain atrophy, to metabolic illness, to just a whole host of things. So that doesn't mean that, if someone says something that you don't like, that somehow, you will immediately suffer from some kind of physical illness. But what it does mean-- and if we look at the brain, we can understand why. Because the network in your brain that processes language, also, regulates your nervous system, regulates your immune system, your endocrine system, your autonomic nervous system, all the visceral systems, your heart, your lungs, everything. So the point here is only that under some circumstances, particularly when people are already stressed-- your brain doesn't care what the cause of the stress is. It doesn't sort things into piles, like, well, this is a social stress, And this is a physical stress. Your brain doesn't really care. If you're chronically stressed, words are more likely to pile on and add additional stress. That's hard for us, I think, as a culture to accept. Because we have very strong beliefs about individual rights and freedoms. But the fact is we evolved a social dependent nervous system. And sometimes, whether we intend it or not, we actually can cause harm to people with what we say. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: So what are the consequences of that insight? That we can cause harm by what we say-- that's something that, as a scientist, you believe is established. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I don't believe it's established. It is established. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: It is established. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Yeah. Scientists are super careful about-- we don't like the T-word, Truth. Nobody likes to say the F-word, a Fact. I mean, other F-words are really OK, but not that one. Yeah, so we do try hard to understand that everything is complex and probabilistic and whatever. But when you have really many, many, many studies from many, many, many labs looking at many, many, many different types of people across many, many, many situations, you kind of get the sense that the idea that stress gets under your skin and affects your metabolism and your brain, I think, at this point is not debatable. And I think at this point, I would feel comfortable calling it a fact, although even saying that just makes me kind of-- JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Right. And here, I think that here is one area where, Jonathan, you're not in disagreement with the idea that words can cause that kind of harm. JONATHAN HAIDT: No, I certainly agree on that empirical claim. The question is what implication that has for the proposition that words are violence. So first, let me just say, I've been working on this issue of viewpoint diversity and how essential it is, especially since 2015, when I co-founded Heterodox Academy, an organization that advocates for more viewpoint diversity in the academy. And from the beginning, it's been really clear that there are three fields that really, really get it. And so in addition to the social sciences in general, we talk about all kinds of controversial things. And then Lisa has written beautifully-- it wasn't mentioned, by the way, that Lisa is the president of the Association for Psychological Science, which is the major psychological organization for scientists. And she writes these beautiful columns about-- there's this wonderful line, and she has one called "Take an Aisle Seat," where she talks about a project she did, deliberately meeting with people who have very different views on emotion as she does. And actually, Lisa and I have debated on emotion as well. And she has this wonderful line about how you can turn your adversaries into your greatest scientific resource, because it's only from having people challenge us that we actually get smarter. And so I'm thrilled to be here talking with Lisa about this. And she models what this is all about. But the three fields that really get it are social sciences, law, and journalism. Those three fields, the people I talk with, it doesn't matter if you're on the left or the right, everybody, at least if they're over 30-- it's a little different. It's a generational issue here. But everybody over 30 in those fields agrees-- and we'll talk about that, I hope. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Yes. JONATHAN HAIDT: Agrees you have-- we are all so prone to motivated reasoning. We are all so good at coming up with post hoc arguments for whatever we believe that you cannot get at the truth in law, journalism, or the social sciences unless you put people together to talk in ways that challenge each other's priors and each other's confirmation biases. And that's what Jerry Rappaport said in 1946. And that's what Dean Manning said just now. So we're all on board with this. Now, with regard to the specific claim that Lisa made about how words can cause harm, absolutely, there's no dispute on that. So Lisa wrote this up in an article in The New York Times, in an op in The New York Times. And she said the syllogism that she just told you. She said, "If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech, at least certain types of speech, can be a form of violence." Well, I don't think that follows, because all that follows from that is if words cause stress, and stress causes harm, then words cause harm. And we all agree with that. But a lot hangs on whether you will grant that harm to be a form of violence, because the moment we say we all-- we have a bright line on violence in our society. And the levels of it have been going down, and down, and down, to the present day, as Steve Pinker has shown. It's very, very important that we understand what violence is and that we all-- we don't, well, sometimes it's OK to use violence, and sometimes not. No, we have an agreement. We don't use violence, especially within the academy, within-- no, violence is bad. And if we now say, well, you know what? If I say something, and that causes you stress, and that stress causes you harm, then I've committed violence on you, well, now you've opened a gigantic can of worms, where we are all responsible for whether someone is upset by what we say. And not just that we're responsible, but that there are bureaucratic mechanisms that will enforce penalties upon us in universities, everywhere, so that I now have to be very careful. And, in fact, I do have to be extra careful in class what I say, not because I'm afraid of committing violence on my students, but because there's so many mechanisms by which they can report me that I don't try to be provocative. So I think it's extreme-- so Lisa wrote this article. I re-read it on the plane up. I agree with just about everything in it. It's great. It's subtle. She gets the anti-fragility point. We generally agree. But I thought that she was opening up room for the students who want to say that speech that we don't like, speech that we find not directly insulting, but speech that makes academic claims that we find to be threatening, that that is violence. To open a door even a little bit to allow that claim in, I thought, does an enormous disservice to universities and to the difficult, unnatural thing we are trying to do at universities, which is put people together to talk about things they disagree with, sometimes getting moralistic about it. We have to have norms that allow us to get together to confront each other and, in that process, find the truth. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: So I think that a lot hinges on what we think it means to say that something causes violence. Because the choice of the word-- and I don't want to make this into a semantic debate, because I think there was a reason that, Lisa, you chose the word violence, which came up several times. And lots of people think of the concept of violence as useful here, as something that truly reflects their experience of hearing something that is truly offensive. And it's a way of making the moral argument that it should not be allowed, because we know we don't allow violence. And so if you call something violence, that's an argument that it should not be allowed. It is, de facto, an argument about regulation, as you just mentioned, that there must be some bureaucratic means of dealing with this so that it doesn't happen. Surely, we have rules so that students aren't being inflicted with violence on campus. So I think that it's a normative choice to use the term, because it's not just saying that people are being harmed, like suffering. It's also saying that it's a kind of-- it's a moral claim to say speech is a form of violence. So, Lisa, what do you think about that? I think it gets us back to what is a fact, and what is value? LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: So I feel that, to some extent, certain things are being conflated here. So to take the sentence out of context of that article that I wrote is somewhat problematic. I was making a very specific point about freedom of choice. That is, if our goal as educators is to expose our students to ideas that they don't like and might even find offensive, which is really what the whole article is about, actually, the importance of doing that, and something, frankly, that I have dedicated my entire career to, as have you and probably many of the educators in this room, then we have to be prudent about choosing speakers who will-- for students to be exposed to who will serve that goal. There are many people that you could have invited to speak here today, but you invited us. That doesn't mean that all the other people who weren't invited are being silenced, or that their freedom of speech is being imposed upon. No, we were chosen because we do have a history, a 20-year history of being collegial in moments where we disagree. That being said, the point of the article really was, if you want to foster this, if this is your goal educationally, then you should be mindful about who you invite, who you choose to speak, because some speakers do wield words as weapons. They do. I don't think anybody would disagree with that. And so I wasn't making a broad claim about anyone who says something that makes somebody else uncomfortable is engaging in violence. I think that's really problematic. It's a bit of a straw man. I'm not saying that was your intent. But it is a bit of a straw man, because here's just the basic-- I will now use the word fact. We evolved as a species to have socially dependent nervous systems. That means I can text three words to someone halfway around the world, who can't hear my voice and can't see my face, and I can make their heart rate go up. I can make them breathe more quickly or more slowly, just by virtue of what those three words say. And if I do that, if you do that, if we all do that, which we do-- we regulate each other's nervous systems-- that means we are more responsible, actually, for people than we might like. We are also more responsible for ourselves than we might like, because we're making inferences all the time about what someone else means. So we say things in this culture, like we read each other's body language, and we read each other's faces. But we don't read anything. Our brains infer. So we are more responsible for ourselves than we might like. And we are more responsible for the impact we have on other people than we might like. And both of those things are biological facts. So I guess my feeling is that those issues need to be talked about separately. There are certain conditions where words are violence, I would claim, not the general case where you say something that someone finds offensive. I think that's really a separate issue, which is also important and bears on the question of how we function as educators to create a context for our students to do what we want them to do, which is to engage with difficult material that they might not like, and that they might find unpleasant, but that nonetheless is important informatively for the development of their minds. That's really a separate issue from consider not inviting someone who really does wield words as weapons, because that is just-- and that is a moral claim, I suppose. And that's just not productive for the goals that we have as educators. I just think of those as somewhat separate issues. JONATHAN HAIDT: So you're right. If I gave the impression that you were saying, oh, if someone's going to come and present ideas that are upsetting, well, students would be right to call that violence. You definitely did not say that in your article. And to really give you credit, I thought you actually-- the fact that you said that even Charles Murray, if he's coming as a social scientist, making arguments, that's legitimate. So Lisa definitely was not saying, oh, anybody who's upset by something can claim it's violence. So, no, you're absolutely right about that. Now, the question, though, is, what should we do about-- we both agree that things can happen, that speakers might come and say things that would be upsetting. We agree that there are different motives for speakers to come. And so Lisa draws the line. She says, Charles Murray speaking about data should absolutely be allowed, even if it's upsetting, whereas Milo Yiannopoulos, whose goal was trolling-- and he said as much. He wrote all kinds of essays about here's my goal, and here's why I always win. He wrote things like that. So I think we need-- JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: What does it mean to say that your goal is trolling? JONATHAN HAIDT: So Milo wrote an essay once where he basically explained that his goal is to make the left embarrass itself. And then he would show up on campuses. And then there are video-- you know, people take videos of people overreacting. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: And you consider it out of bounds to try to embarrass people? JONATHAN HAIDT: So that's the question. What are we going to allow on campus? And so I think what we might want to do is, while we can agree that words can cause harm, I think we should think about, what is the overall parameter in which we invite speakers? What are we doing? And here, I think we're likely-- well, let's see. Let's see if we end up at the same place. I think we're going to come at it with a different framework. So my framework, what I've found as I've been talking about this since 2015, is that arguments over free speech and where to draw the line are often fruitless and frustrating, that if you want to talk about what speech should be allowed in the public square, and what speech you should be arrested for, great. First Amendment, I'm thrilled that I live in a country with First Amendment freedom of speech. That's appropriate. But on campus, I think it makes a lot more sense to focus on what is our telos, or purpose? What are we trying to do? And I've found that this simple move clarifies things so much. When you're talking about speech, always look at what's the institution? What's the organization that we're talking about? Is it a publicly traded company? Well, then, of course you don't have a right. If you work for Coke, you shouldn't be allowed to go out and say how terrible Coke is. You know, you can be fired for that. That seems appropriate to me. But a university is very, very different. A university, our telos is right there on the Harvard crest. It's truth. It's veritas. And it's a very special kind of social organization, worked out in a grove of olive trees outside of Athens 2,400 years ago. Because there's all kinds of conversations you can't have in the public square with an audience. You can't raise provocative ideas if there's an audience that will kill you or file blasphemy charges against you. So you have to have a special place. Plato called it the Academy. And we think of universities as-- we used to think of them as being like ivory towers, where certain kinds of speech could happen. Unfortunately, with social media, every place is now the public square. And this is being live streamed. So I have to be very careful what I say. But once you realize that what we're doing here together is this unnatural, difficult thing of trying to overcome our biases, canceling out each other's biases, and getting at a higher good, which is the truth, now you can say, OK, what kind of speech norms should we have? What speech norms are conducive to that telos? And if our telos is truth, then those speech norms should be things like your claims have to be backed in evidence. You can't just come here and say, oh, the Newtown shooting never happened. You can say that in America, but there's no point of having that be on a college campus. And so I think we all agree that a scholar who presents work that some people find horrible or hateful or upsetting is still playing by those rules and should be allowed as a legitimate person to invite. But now what about a person who is a provocateur? What about a person whose goal is to cause a reaction among the students? And what I fear is that we kind of have this norm that if it's coming from the right, then it's bad. But, of course, provocateurs from the left are good. When I went to Yale in the early '80s, we had all kinds of playwrights, and activists, and people who were not scholars, were not presenting evidence-backed ideas. They were provocative, and that was great. And so I think, yeah, if someone is spewing hatred directly, yeah, then it's another story. But even if someone is a troll, I'm not saying they should be invited. But I can see that there could even be something useful about having students engage with them. And that would be a short-term stressor, not a chronic stressor. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Well, I think it would be a short-term stressor for some people. So I just want to be really clear. I agree with almost everything that you said. I really do. And I really think it's important that people understand that we're talking about fairly subtle distinctions here. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: But fairly subtle distinctions that are actually crucially important to the lives of many, many, many, many people in this country and probably elsewhere. And that is this, that you could just say, well, does someone like Milo Yiannopoulos really fit our telos? I would just say no, and so invite someone else, right? I mean, it's a freedom of choice issue. And it's really a pedagogical issue. But I think there's a subtler point here that I think is really important. And that is I do think that we should have speech norms where we don't deliberately shame people and embarrass them, and if that's the goal. That doesn't mean that you're responsible when someone feels ashamed, necessarily, right? But I do think that actually talking-- we have developed a casual brutality in our culture that we now accept as the norm. There is really interesting research that's been done at Michigan State University that quantifies the average number of moments of bullying and verbal aggression in sitcoms, which is once every four minutes, to a laugh track, OK? So this is shaming and bullying to a laugh track, where the person who is the victim of this bullying shows no effect whatsoever. And adolescents then mirror that actually by increasing speaking that way. And I won't even talk about politics and what happens on the internet. But, again, I do think that it's important to make a distinction between what your intent is as a speaker and what someone feels, which you are not responsible for what someone else feels. On the other hand, we are educators. Our job as educators is to create a context where students can learn. That's our job. And if they learn, that is their success. And if they don't, they are partly responsible for that, and it's our job to teach them that. But I think we really also have to recognize that chronic stress is a little more rampant than we might think, right? What is the proportion of students on college campuses who are food insecure? What is the proportion of students on campuses who are housing insecure? What is the proportion of students on college campuses who feel physically safe on college campus in the evening versus in the day? You'd really be surprised at the numbers. What is the proportion of people who are depressed? And by that I don't mean, gee, I'm not feeling good today. I mean clinically depressed, which is a metabolic illness. It is a metabolic illness that has very serious implications for health. It's an epidemic. The World Health Organization projects that in 10 years, depression will overtake heart disease as a major killer worldwide. So these are the students. I'm not saying everyone. And I'm also not denying the fact that there are some very robust, resilient people. But I am saying that there is some non-trivial proportion of people who are in our classrooms, who come there already encumbered. And they are not prepared to do what we want them to do. That doesn't mean that we're doing violence to them. But it does mean that the context is not conducive for us to really meet our goal as educators. And frankly, I do actually think about that when I am educating my students, not in the sense that I ever-- I mean, I don't actually avoid difficult questions or topics for fear that I will be sanctioned. I just do it and then worry afterwards and hope that no one reports me. But I usually tell students why we're doing this. And I warn them, you're going to feel uncomfortable now. In fact, I warn all my graduate students, if in the five years that you are with me in the lab, if you don't at some point put your head in your hands, and start crying and wondering what the hell you're doing here, your life is miserable, why did you choose this, you're not doing it right. [CHUCKLING] So learning is hard. Facing topics we don't like is hard. But the truth is, honestly, that some of us are better equipped, just because of our life circumstances, to do it than others. And that doesn't mean that we play violins for those people. And it doesn't mean that they're off the hook for any responsibility. But it does mean that there is a context here. And we would do well as educators to pay attention to that context, or we won't actually meet the goal that we have. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Do you want to go ahead? JONATHAN HAIDT: Actually, yeah. So, as in so much of this, Lisa and I agree on the basic psychology, but we disagree on some of the implications. And so we are both very aware of the research on the incredibly fast rise in depression and anxiety, especially for gen Z, for people born after about 1995. A lot of people are coming to campus different from what we were used to early in our careers. And they are, in many ways, fragile. And then the question is what to do about that. And I think the implication of what Lisa's saying is we have to do more. Given that students are more fragile, we have to do more to remove stressors, verbal stressors, things that could be upsetting things that could add up to-- LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I don't think I actually said that. But-- JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Do you think something should be done to recognize this difference? Perhaps it's a generational difference. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Well, yeah, I think students shouldn't-- I don't think anyone should be food insecure. And I don't think they should be worrying about where they're going to sleep. And I don't think that they should have the debt that they have to carry. And I'm not saying we have to do anything about that. But I do think it's a human capital issue. If we want to educate-- if we want to take advantage of the human brains that we have, and educate them to do great, innovative things, as a society we should be paying attention to that. But if what you're asking is-- I have people here from my lab. They can tell you, we don't ever shy away from difficult topics. However, I do think that there is a way to address those topics with students, understanding that some of them might not be prepared. They might not be prepared to deal with the consequences of-- their nervous systems are already encumbered. They're likely to be more stressed by it. And that doesn't mean that they are off the hook. It means that we as educators have to do something different. I'll just give you one example. I'm originally Canadian. I am actually an American citizen now. But when I came here, the first position that I held had a training program for minority graduate students. And as part of this training program, I was teaching a course on clinical assessment, because originally my degree is-- actually, I'm a clinical psychologist. And as part of that, I had to teach eugenics, the eugenics movement in psychology, which is a very touchy subject. And I also had to teach statistics, because the way I taught clinical assessment, students were required to understand statistics. And some of the students in the training program were not prepared, not prepared. And they felt that I was being unfair to them by holding them to the same standard as I held all the other students, which to me confused me. It's like wait, OK, I'm treating all the students the same. And I'm holding everyone to unreasonably high standards. So how is that unfair? And being from Canada, I didn't really understand the way taxation works here and the distribution of taxes to schools. And I didn't understand-- there were a lot of things I didn't understand. So I did the only thing that I could think of, which is I went to the only faculty member of color in my department and said, will you explain what the hell is going on? I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. And then he very graciously explained it to me. And I went back to the students. I didn't say, well, you don't have to struggle. You don't have to feel bad about this. You don't have to work as hard as everybody else. I basically said, I understand some of you aren't prepared to deal with this material. You just don't have the background. So I'm going to hold you to the same standards as everybody else. But I will work with anybody, take any amount of time it will take in order to get you up to speed. I will hold remedial classes. I will tutor you. And it wasn't concern to me that those students were going to struggle a little harder. But in the end, they had to meet the same standards. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I think we have to acknowledge the fact that our students-- not everybody, but a substantial portion of our students are really stressed. They happen to be also probably the more vulnerable students. That doesn't mean I'm saying everybody is fragile. I'm saying we have socially dependent nervous systems. Those nervous systems, if we want them to learn what-- if we want to meet our goals as educators, we just have to acknowledge the fact that people are stressed. And that has a real translatable implication for how we deal with them. It doesn't mean that we let them off the hook. But it does mean that we have to consider how we present material to them, and to support them as they, for lack of a better word, suffer through the difficulty of learning hard stuff. JONATHAN HAIDT: OK, well, so we agree that students are stressed. But the question is what to do about that. Do we adjust our teaching to make them less stressed? Or do we do things to help make them stronger? And you actually gave an example where you did things to make them stronger. Now, the increase in depression and anxiety is actually larger among white and Asian students than it is among African-American students. So I want to really keep apart these issues of human capital-- LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: But that's because they're-- right, but that's because they have higher rates of other types of metabolic illnesses. Depression and anxiety are metabolic illnesses, and so is heart disease and diabetes. JONATHAN HAIDT: OK, but I just want to keep separate issues about food insecurity and money versus words, language, stress about social interaction. Just keep them separate for now, because that's, I think, what we need to focus on here. So you talked about how students are exposed on sitcoms to people making fun of each other or bullying. From reading Steve Pinker, and just from having been alive and watching TV in the '70s, the amount of violence or threatened violence, the sensitivities seems much greater now than it was then. I'd like to put on the table here this concept of anti-fragility, I think, is the main idea that we need to bring into the conversation. We both refer to it in our articles. And so it's the idea that our nervous systems actually need stimulation to grow. Our nervous systems are anti-fragile. The analogy is the immune system. Why are peanut allergies going up? It's actually because we've been protecting kids from peanuts. And, in fact, they just came out with the first cure for peanut allergy. It's peanut dust. You give people little bits of peanut dust when they're young. And then their immune system develops to it. And so the issue of teasing and things like that, in my kids' school, teasing is called bullying. There's no teasing. And I think this is horrible. This is absolutely horrible, because humans are a social species in which we do competition and cooperation. Teasing is a normal part of growing up. We do have to be cognizant of bullying, which is where someone is picked on for days. So bullying can't be a single episode. At least that was the old definition. We don't want to protect kids so much that we ban teasing. If we do that, what we're doing is we're adapting them to an extremely low-stress environment. We're preparing them for a world that doesn't exist. And this is what I fear we're doing on college campuses. Who was the Greek orator who would put pebbles in his mouth to-- AUDIENCE: Demosthenes. JONATHAN HAIDT: Demosthenes, thank you. So Demosthenes had a speech impediment. And so he would put pebbles in his mouth because he was preparing to argue his family's case before the court at Athens, which was the people. And because he had a speech impediment, he would practice by putting pebbles in his mouth, so when he took them out, he could speak better. And he would run up a hill and give his oration at the top of a hill so that when he was in the court in Athens and he wasn't out of breath, it would be easier. And Olympic athletes train at high altitudes so that their bodies will adapt to the thin atmosphere, so that when they're down at sea level they're stronger. And what we do in college campuses is the exact opposite of that. What we do is we say, we're going to do everything we can to clear out microaggressions, insults, anything that's upsetting. We're going to clear that out, give you four years so that when you go out into the real world when you go get a job, you will find it completely intolerable. And so I think that at least if we just focus on-- again, monetary issues, threats of violence, those I would be with you on. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Fair enough. But-- JONATHAN HAIDT: But teasing and this sort of words are upsetting and that's stressful, I think we need to not reduce it. We need to prepare them to deal with it because they're going to deal with it the rest of their lives. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Yeah, so I just have a couple of things to say. First of all, I know you want to keep separate food insecurity and all of those things separate from dealing with difficult topics. But what I'm actually saying is biologically you just can't. It would be very convenient to. But we just can't. The fact that we have so many students who are encumbered, that their nervous systems are encumbered means that they are more vulnerable. It doesn't mean that they're fragile. Look, we are not snowflakes. We are humans. And we have human nervous systems. And those human nervous systems have fairly predictable responses to chronic stress. And your brain doesn't really care where the stress comes from. It doesn't matter to a brain whether the stress is intended or not, whether it's food related, or whether it's lack of sleep, or whether-- it doesn't really matter. JONATHAN HAIDT: Right. But you're-- LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Let me just finish, please. And I agree with you. Teasing is not the same as bullying. However, if you have a child who's been bullied, when that child actually is exposed to teasing, they will experience it-- their nervous system will respond as if it is bullying. That doesn't necessarily mean that the responsibility is all with that child. But the point is that we have to make a distinction between what is teasing to one person is actually-- to another person, their nervous system responds as if it's bullying. That's not fragility. That's the reality of how nervous systems work. And for us to ignore that, I think, is irresponsible. JONATHAN HAIDT: But you're speaking as though there's a direct line between what happens and the nervous system. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: No, I'm not actually. I'm saying that-- I'm not going to give you a lecture on how your nervous systems work, although I do actually think it's very important that you understand how your brains work, which is why I wrote this other book, which is called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. And it's written, actually, for people who don't really care about science but might be interested to understand how their brains work, for exactly this reason. So microaggressions you mentioned. I think that's a place probably where we agree. And probably many people in this audience will not like what I'm about to say. But the research shows pretty clearly, like I said before, that you are not reading someone's expressions. There is no such thing as body language. Movements and vocalizations are not a language for you to read like words on a page. Your brain is making an inference. The whole problem with microaggressions is the assumption that there is an aggressive intent, which might not be there, even though there might be an aggressive impact. And that's the thing that we're grappling with, in part. And we want to say, well, who's responsible then, right? So I just want to be really clear. Microaggressions, the way that they're used assumes that because someone experiences something as aggressive, and their nervous system might respond as if it's aggressive, that, therefore, it's aggressive. And that's, as scientists-- JONATHAN HAIDT: And so we agree. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: --we would both agree that that's problematic. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: However, we tend to go from there to make the assumption that, therefore, the person who is experiencing the aggression is the only one who is responsible for that. And I would say, as an educator, I care as much about having the freedom to say what I want as much as I care about actually being heard. I speak in a way to my students, or at least I try, so that I am heard. In this country, we care much more about the freedom of speech than we do about whether or not we're actually heard, and that we have to take more responsibility for speaking in a way to allow us to be heard. And so I guess, yeah, I think if there is a student who I have good reason to believe might experience my facial movements, or my tone of speech, or whatever as a microaggression, even though that is not my intent, I think it is my responsibility to speak in a way that will allow them to hear what I want them to hear. That is my responsibility. And if we don't accept that responsibility, we won't achieve the goals that we have as educators. That's just the reality of the kinds of nervous systems we have. JONATHAN HAIDT: OK, so I can certainly accept that as not just norms change, but as the makeup of the students change, diversity does require that we all think more carefully. And certain kinds of speaking or jokes that might have been acceptable in the '70s and '80s are not acceptable now. So I would agree with you that as educators we all do have to think twice and keep thinking. But the point I wanted to put out here is the basic stoic and Buddhist insight that we don't react to the world as it is. We react to the world through our filters. And, of course, we agree on that. So this is the beginning of chapter 2 of The Coddling of the American Mind. We begin with Epictetus' quote, "What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance." And I think what that means is that any university that embraces microaggression training, and all of this whole set of ideas that encourages students to put on the least-generous reading, that encourages students to interpret ambiguous situations as though they were acts of aggression, as opposed to acts of clumsiness or carelessness, in so many ways-- and this was Greg Lukianoff's original insight that led to this whole project. In so many ways, somehow on university campuses we are training students to think in exactly the kinds of cognitive distortions that Greg had learned to stop doing when he was treated for suicidal depression by learning cognitive behavioral therapy. So I would just make the point that I agree with everything you say about the nervous system. But a big part of that nervous system is that it has some agency to reinterpret. And at universities, we should be doing everything we can to make people focus on intent more than impact, things like that. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I completely agree with you. JONATHAN HAIDT: OK. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I completely agree with you, except for the part about reacting to the world, because brains don't react to the world. No brain reacts to the world. None of your brains react to the world. No brain on this planet reacts to the world. Brains are architected, have evolved to predict. So when we talk about cognitive distortions, really your brain is always predicting. It's predicting what you will see. It's predicting what you will hear. It's predicting what will happen in your body. And it's preparing your actions to engage with what is predicted without your awareness. So it is true. In fact, I have a Ted Talk exactly about this issue. It is true that you can retrain your brain to predict differently. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, that's what we should be doing. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: It's extremely hard to change your interpretation in the moment. And if you don't have the metabolic resources to hear something difficult, you certainly don't have the metabolic resources to change your interpretation in the moment. That's actually a really metabolically costly endeavor. However, it is possible to train students-- it is our responsibility to train students to have the tools to grapple with things that are hard. But we also have to teach them that they do have an impact on other people. What they say, how they behave impacts other people, just like our behavior impacts them. And we all have to appreciate this. And it just requires more thoughtfulness on our parts and more care than we may want to give. But there is a consequence if we don't. And we see that consequence playing out in our culture, just on a broad scale. JONATHAN HAIDT: So that's Jeannie's first question. Do you have another one for us? [LAUGHING] JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Well, I don't. I don't have another question. I just have one thing I want to bring together. Well, we started off, I think, with two strands being put on the table. One was the telos strand, and the other was the chronic stress strand. And I think it's been really fascinating to see how they have come together in the way that you all have debated this. But it does seem to me that at some point I think what Lisa's saying is that the chronic stress strand actually interferes with the telos-- LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Absolutely. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: --of a university. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Absolutely. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, and I would agree with you. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: And that was actually why I wrote that article to begin with, actually, is so that-- that was exactly why. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: So I think that our audience would be-- I'm guessing that they're eager to ask us some questions, or make comments, and participate in this dialogue as well. So I think there are microphones. Yes. AUDIENCE: I don't need a microphone. I could just-- JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Please. I think that-- AUDIENCE: So I want to come back to the question of what do you do next? I'm a law professor downtown at Suffolk University Law School. I also serve on the city council. So I'm very interested in the question of discourse in two domains, obviously public and nonprofit. I guess I would ask, if we're trying to help both our citizens and our students do better as part of this collective inquiry that overcomes biases, what guidelines would you offer as sort of ground rules to sort of set the stage for how these conversations can go forward successfully so that we protect the vulnerable but also encourage them to develop the kind of immune systems that you seem to argue that we should develop? LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I'm-- you go ahead, and I'll respond. JONATHAN HAIDT: OK. So that's a great question. That is the question that the leaders of every educational institution, from kindergarten through graduate school, should be thinking. Because if they don't think that, if they don't take steps, then what's going to happen is the generational change is going to change the institution in ways that will make it less able to meet its goals. So one thing that's happened for the generation that's been raised with social media is that life is much more of a performance. Communication is much more likely to take place with large audiences than with private, one-on-one settings. And when communication is done for performance, then it's very unlikely that we're going to have the kind of progress that we've been talking about here that comes from putting people into contact with each other. So for one thing, I think leadership needs to define clear norms and goals and values. Leadership must have a clear moral narrative about what we're doing together and why. And that's why we justify these rules, these norms. So one of the important norms is no intimidation, ever. You make your points. You give evidence. And you never intimidate. And intimidation is, unfortunately, rising in all sectors-- from the right, from the left, harassment, trolling, the threat of social destruction. A report just came out from the University of North Carolina showing that-- and what Lisa and I were talking about before. In general, it turns out that professors aren't really to blame here in terms of students don't fear that their professors are going to shut them down if they give a wrong opinion. They're afraid of each other. And this is what comes out over and over again. The students are afraid of each other. And it's not that most students are difficult or are going to use intimidation. But a few will. And there's a few in every group. And so leadership must make clear, this is inappropriate. You respond to people's arguments with arguments. You don't shame them, try to cancel them, those sorts of things. So setting norms, training. So me and my colleagues have developed a program called Open Mind. If you go to openmindplatform.org, it teaches you why it's good to engage with people who are different from you. It teaches you skills for starting those conversations. So I think leadership of all educational institutions must take very active steps to define what they're doing, based in moral virtues of the institution, provide training, because there is a window. In those first weeks when students show up, there's a window on which either you set the new norms, or the other students will set the new norms. And so this really falls on leadership, to a large extent. And for the most part, what I've seen is that leadership tends not to rise to the challenge. They tend to wait until something blows up. And then they are in defensive mode, and then there's no good resolution. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I think it's really clear, for example, that repetitive, unambiguous feedback is really how you retrain a mind. Clinicians know this, and other training programs know this, too. I think setting norms is really important, because evolutionary biologists are also really clear. We copy each other. We learn from each other. It's actually one of our major adaptive advantages as a species. And we do it without even realizing it. And I would agree that it's really important to make a distinction between communication and entertainment. We confuse education and entertainment. We confuse a presidential election and entertainment. We confuse a lot of things with entertainment that have really serious implications. So there's really basic science about how to have a discourse where you're more likely to be heard and where you are more likely to process what someone else says. So you can not intimidate. But you can also ask. You can just be curious. You can ask, how did you understand what I just said? And you can make corrections. And you can also reflect back to people what they said and give them the opportunity to make corrections. It's really about creating space for people to actually communicate with each other. And being respectful-- there's really no shame in treating each other with human dignity as we disagree. It's just we seem to have somehow lost that. We're somehow seeing it as a kind of weakness. But the fact is that you will be more likely to be heard, your own point will be more likely to be heard if you speak to another person and engage them with a basic amount of respect for human dignity. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Other questions. Yes. AUDIENCE: Hi. Thanks. Mr. Haidt, it sounds like part of your argument depends on the idea that the universities, by becoming more sensitive to different types of psychological systems-- I don't know the right terminology-- but it sounds like you think that's bad preparation for the real world, as you put it, which is harsher. And I'm just thinking, why not condemn the real world, as you call it, and say the universities need to be the torchbearer, and we need to become more sensitive here, and hopefully lead the way, make the world, the real world, more sensitive to different types of people? JONATHAN HAIDT: So I see the logic in that. But let's play it out. Certainly, when we're talking about violence, and sexual harassment, and all sorts of things, yes, we, I would say, are leading the way in creating more sensitive environments that then get translated out into the world of business and elsewhere. But think about how far you want to go. One of the guiding dictums of our book is, prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. Now, it would be one thing if you had absolute authority over all the roads in the world. You could say, how about let's make sure there are never any pebbles or potholes on any road? And then we can be sure that our students don't need to learn how to step over a puddle or a pothole. But that's not the case. In fact, I'm actually very worried that students graduating now from American Universities-- so I teach in a business school at Stern. And students graduating now from American business schools, undergraduate in particular, many of them are going to work for multinational corporations. They're going to go overseas. And they're going to find it completely intolerable. So until we can control all the social norms, all the forms of address, all the ways that people greet each other, all the ways that people socialize after work in Japan, India, Guatemala-- until we can control all of that, I think we're better off preparing our students for the road rather than the road for the students. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I think what the person is asking, really, is shouldn't we be maybe preparing our students to build new roads? JONATHAN HAIDT: Oh, sure. But, yes, but as long as they don't have the delusion that they will be able to pave the entire world. And I think some of them think that they should have that right. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: No. Well, that may or may not be the case. I don't know what people think. I try really hard not to presume and instead ask. But I would say, we need to be maybe preparing our students-- as we prepare our students to deal with what's out there, we also need to be preparing them for the possibility that they will be the leaders of the future. And they will have the opportunity to build new roads. And we aren't really talking about a sensitive environment. We're talking about a thoughtful, respectful environment. Those are really not necessarily the same things. JONATHAN HAIDT: OK. But if we're going to prepare them to change the world-- and in fact, I think Yale did change its purpose. Yale used to have something about truth in its motto, but they changed their mission statement to be about improving the world, something like that-- the most important thing we could do to prepare them to do that is give them some sense of humility, some sense that things are really complicated. And what I see happening in activism, beginning as early as middle school, but certainly in high school in this country, is such certainty about good and evil, such a willingness to go in and change institutions that they do not understand. And we're all supposed to applaud them for it. And I think that this is ultimately foolish and self-destructive. The Parkland students, to me, are the model of good activism. They did research. They did research on gun control. I used to run a gun control group. I know a lot about the topic. I read the document that they prepared. It was brilliant. They did a lot of research. They went to Tallahassee. They argued for a bill. Now, they ultimately failed. But at least they took the time to understand the question before they just went out and tried to change the world. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Yeah, and I think what you're pointing out is actually something really important, and I think that we both would agree on, I hope, as scientists. And that is that there is research on a lot of these topics that actually could be brought to bear-- JONATHAN HAIDT: And rarely is. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: --in a way that's really helpful, and that inferences that are based on anecdotes and individual sense of certainty is probably not the way to go. One thing that you can tell people is when you feel really strongly certain about something-- this is what we tell our own students. When you react very, you would say, I think, emotionally. I would probably say affectively. Those are actually different in our-- JONATHAN HAIDT: I'll defer to you on that. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: --our professional-- yeah, thank you. When you hear something, and you think immediately, your reaction immediately is, of course, that's absolutely right. Or that person is out of their mind. That is the most insane thing I've ever heard. In both of those cases, you should stop and reflect for a minute, because when you hear something that you love, that means that whatever that is has touched a deeply held belief and validated it. And that's an opportunity for you to learn what that belief is and question it. And when you hear something that you think, that person is just full of-- I'm trying not to use colorful language. I'm respectfully in a law school with a university president here. [CHUCKLING] Then that is also an opportunity for you to pause and ask yourself, well, what did I hear that just violated some deeply held belief that I have? I think the issue really is questioning our own certainty. And, again, what I will point out is, you know what one of the hardest things for a nervous system is? Uncertainty. It's metabolically costly to do that. So, again, I would just come back to the point that all these things that we really want our students to do, and that there is science that helps us understand how to teach students to do these things, have a price tag. That price tag is a metabolic price tag. It's not a monetary-- well, I suppose everything comes down to that. But it is a metabolic price tag, and we just have to appreciate that as we invite our students to do it. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Mr. [INAUDIBLE].. AUDIENCE: How do you decide what free speech is-- what a speaker's motivation is in advocating ideas? And who decides who can speak, and to whom? And how do you protect those who aren't emotionally disabled from hearing the ideas in terms of the presentations and the limitations on speech at the university? LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Well, there are many questions embedded in the one question that you just asked. So I'll just start with what I think is the easier question, which is, so when we decide who to invite to speak, we aren't-- AUDIENCE: Does anyone have the right to invite? Or is-- when you say we? LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Well, I think it depends-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] JONATHAN HAIDT: It depends on the campus. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I think it depend-- well, I think-- AUDIENCE: What about a student? LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I think it depends on-- I think it-- who has the right? There are many constituencies in a university who have the decision rights of who to speak, of who should be invited to speak. So I think the trickiest bit is I don't think for-- well, I don't know. Actually, I wouldn't even say that. I think no one should be prevented from having decision rights. But I do think that it is our responsibility as educators to help students consider what their goal is in who they're inviting, what are they hoping will happen, and helping students to prepare if they decide to invite someone like a Charles Murray, who is going to incite-- even if it's all done respectfully, who is going to incite, by virtue of his science, it will feel offensive, and it will incite discontent in people. I think that students should have decision rights, as faculty do. The issue is what is the goal? what is the goal? What is your goal? Is your goal an educational goal? Is your goal an entertainment goal? Is your goal to incite, for lack of a better word, just sow the seeds of discontent and incite violence? I think that the issue isn't really who has the right to decide. Because many people have decision rights on a campus. It's more what's the goal? And some goals are not conducive to an educational context, I would say. JONATHAN HAIDT: Building on what Lisa just said, the model that American universities, especially research universities in the last 50 or 100 years, 50 years, has been, it's been very much open, decentralized. There's a lot of ferment, activity, all kinds of ideas. You can be the political union. You invite all kinds of speakers from the right and the left. You don't need permission from the president. You can just invite people. That's always been the norm at the places that I've been at. And that fits with our view of ourselves. That fits with our sense of a wide-open place, where all ideas are welcome, if they're going to be contested. But I think that in recent years-- and it really began around 2013, 2014, and I think it's in part because of the rise of social media-- the dynamics have changed. Because now the question has arisen without anybody addressing it not who has the right to decide, but who has a veto? And the answer given on most campuses is if a few students are loud enough, they have a veto. And even if the president almost never disinvites, although sometimes they have. Like at Williams and other places, the presidents have disinvited speakers, which is shameful, I believe. But the general response from universities is, well, if some students get angry about it and threaten to disrupt it, well, then we'll cancel it. And that, I think, is also shameful. The few universities that have laid down clear rules and said, look, here are rules-- like Chicago did this. Here are rules. And if you violate them, if you disrupt, how dare you? What right do you have to stop everyone else from hearing? If you do that, there will be punishments. And almost no school has actually administered any punishments. But Claremont McKenna is the only one I know of that did. But the few that have actually said, there will be consequences, they find that they don't then get disruptions. So I think every school needs to look very clearly at their policies. And they all have policies about who gets to speak. And, yes, you can stand at the back of the room and hold your signs. Everyone says that. But what they don't usually say is, but if you prevent others from hearing, there will be consequences. They don't say that. And if you don't say that, then you'll get disruptions. In other words, you're giving a veto to anyone who's upset. And that's a terrible state of affairs. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I think having those discussions in advance of inviting anyone is probably a really good idea, and, in and of itself, could be an intervention. I would suggest, for example, if you invite someone on the left, then you should invite someone on the right. And then make them switch halfway through, which we could have done. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Yes. [INAUDIBLE] discuss that. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: I mean, so my point-- even having a discussion with your students about who to invite, how to invite, how to protest, and what the goal is, in and of itself, is an intervention that teaches them something about the value of speech, and also its potential harms. JEANNIE SUK GERSEN: Thank you. Both of us have helped us to try to reach our telos today. And I really would like to thank both of you for being willing to be with us today. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: Aw, we can hug.
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Channel: Harvard Law School
Views: 17,831
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Harvard Law School, HLS, Harvard University, Jerome Rappaport, Phyllis Rappaport, John F. Manning, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Jonathan Haidt, Jeannie Suk Gersen
Id: FWcB9lImpyM
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 75min 5sec (4505 seconds)
Published: Mon Feb 24 2020
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