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.
