Nadine Strossen:
Good morning, everybody. I’m Nadine Strasson. To summarize my career in one sentence, I think the most important factor right now is that I recently became one of the first two senior fellows of FIRE, as you all know. You all know because you’re clapping even before I define it, the Foundation for Individual Eights and Expression, a recent expansion. Unfortunately, our moderator is not able to join us and so we decided that we would moderate ourselves. Each of us is going to speak for a maximum of 10 minutes. I will maintain the time and give people three minute and one minute warnings. And we will proceed in alphabetical order by last name, which means the first speaker is Greg Lukianoff, and I want to remind you that our topic is what is academic freedom and what is it for? Thank you, Greg.
Greg Lukianoff:
Okay, my name’s Greg Lukianoff, I’m the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. My mic, is it working? Okay, apparently if it’s here, so I have to do this. That’s not weird. So, I’m the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. I’m the co-author of Coddling the American Mind with my friend John Haidt, and I’m working on a book called Canceling of the American Mind because I’m incredibly creative with my titles. So, I really want to just jump right into it because I’ve only got 10 minutes to go over some stuff and I’ve been hearing a lot of discussion about what to be done with higher education and, honestly, I don’t think anybody’s being sufficiently ambitious on what should actually be done. But one thing I want to call out first is there have been a lot of mistakes and there’s been a lot of bad laws that have been coming out of state legislatures, including HB 7 coming out of Florida.
All of these laws are probably constitutional as applied to K through 12. As applied to higher ed, with some exceptions, they are unconstitutional very simply. So, we’ve actually launched a lawsuit against HB 7, if people try to pass unconstitutional stuff, FIRE will sue and we’re going to win, just so you know. But this occasionally gets confused with the idea that maybe we don’t really care all that much about reforming higher ed. No, but we want to do it in a way that will survive legal scrutiny and there are lots of things that we should consider doing. The simplest one is, I wrote a thing called Five Things Everyone Can Do About Their Alma Mater, five recommendations. It’s easy to find. By the way, since I’m going to cover so many things, my email is greg@thefire.org, because I’m not even going to have much time to explain what a lot of these are. But you’ll be shocked to know that most schools don’t have an orientation about free speech and free inquiry, that they don’t do faculty surveys of attitudes about freedom of speech there.
And these are reforms that can actually help at, say, schools that aren’t far gone, like big state schools and that kind of stuff. They won’t do much to help private schools. There was a lot of discussion of FIRE’s ability to help from litigation, and I didn’t want to be like, “Actually we can’t really help that much on some of those examples,” partially because private schools, even though you can file lawsuits saying that they have to live up to their free speech promises, those are risky, expensive, and in some jurisdictions, including North Carolina, you will fail. But that doesn’t mean you just give up hope on litigation. You can have things, but you have to be able to willing to work with legislatures, either state or federal. And we’ve actually had a lot of success getting laws passed over the years, at least we were for a long time.
You can have things like liquidated damages, that if you lose a First Amendment lawsuit, that you actually have to pay out a certain amount of money that would actually get schools to notice it. We’ve talked about a National Leonard Law within FIRE. The Leonard Law is the law in California that nominally requires schools, and specifically Stanford, to abide by First Amendment norms. It’s been defanged largely in the state of California, but even though it’s not the official position of FIRE that we should have a national Leonard Law that extend First Amendment protections to private schools, I’m increasingly in favor of it and we’re we’re going to be debating that as well. Interesting thing is going for qualified immunity. Qualified immunity means that if a state official can say that they didn’t know and it was reasonable that they didn’t know that they were violating someone’s constitutional rights, they don’t have to pay out of their own pocket for damages caused.
At this point I think it’s ludicrous that administrators bound by the First Amendment are claiming that they didn’t know that they can’t censor people on the basis of viewpoint, but nonetheless, there are ways to address it so that you put everyone on notice that they risk personal liability if they violate students’ and faculty members’ First Amendment rights. You can give them constructive notice in this case, you can actually give them actual notice. And in this case, one of the problems is that insurance will still cover those administrators and universities will still usually pay to defend. They should no more do that than someone accused of murder, that essentially insurance should not cover administrators who flout the law in these cases. And when there’s actually something that can personally happen to you as a person, I think that would change things surprisingly fast.
Also some controversial ones, I would love to ban legacy admissions. I can explain how that would help the situation for academic freedom and free speech on campus. It takes a little bit, but these are things that change the dynamics. One of the big problems is the fancies, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, they are frankly too influential in our society and there’s ways to reign that back in. One of them is stop legacy admissions to perpetuate this endless cycle of being run by the same people. Ban political litmus tests. This is one I think is a no-brainer. Again, as far as constitutional law is concerned, political litmus tests should not actually be constitutional to begin with, but partially because of the new form of political litmus tests, like DEI statements, will probably need a law flat out saying, if you’re using additional mechanisms to ideologically screen professors, that you should not be allowed to do that at a state school. I don’t even think you should be allowed to do that at a private school.
Require academic freedom, free speech ombudsman, use administrators to battle administrators is something that I’ve increasingly come around. I can think of ways to keep that position from being captured, but, again. One thing that really drives me nuts that nobody’s talking about this is massive studies. I taught a little bit of First Amendment law. I’m not a professor myself, but I like y’all, I like professors, but how rarely it comes up that we should be doing massive state funded studies on this, including the academically adrift theory. We should be doing that for the entire country. We should refine it to improve it from the original academically adrift. Now, I will remind you that about 10 years ago, what this showed was on something like 34 campuses that they looked at, they saw no improvement in critical thinking skills for about half of the people they surveyed.
Now, think about this. I used to work at Burlington Coat Factory. I can guarantee you that my critical thinking skills improved from the ages of 18 to 20, or for that matter, 14 to 16. So, in that sense I’m saying if you show no improvement in critical thinking skills during those formative years, they’re actually harming you, they’re making you dumber. So, academically drift, we should be testing Brian Caplan and everybody else’s signaling theory. I think that basically it’s such a scam, a lot of these schools, and I say this is a proud Cardinal myself, that they take smart people who are hardworking and then all they have to do is not ruin them during their four years and then take credit for, “Look, this person’s smart and hardworking.” And how many people actually know what the signaling theory is? I actually assume most of you would know.
I think that if you actually studied this, you’d start actually realizing that the cost benefit analysis of the amazing amount of resources we’re pouring into higher ed is way over the top, and I think these are all ways that can rein in some of the excessive power of fancies in particular, but higher education in general. We should be calculating overhead. What’s that?
Nadine Strossen:
Three minutes left.
Greg Lukianoff:
Oh, my God. We should be calculating overhead. I think most schools, by the way that nonprofits do it, probably have about 80%, 85% overhead, if calculated correctly. That’s outrageous, the idea that these are nonprofits, that actually have overhead that high, and, remember, overhead is administrators plus development. And you look at who’s paid the most, a lot of these schools, it needs to be reined in. So, cost, bureaucracy, overhead is the other one. I think that the hyper bureaucratization of the university is one of the reasons why we have so many troubles.
Most of the cases come from either administrators or a combination of tolerance or encouragement by administrators working with students. We should be doing comparisons of full time versus non-teaching staff and we should be looking for a ratio that’s much better than the ridiculous ratio that we have now. The number of administrators slash staff has long since succeeded the number of people who actually teach. Make reducing expenses, not just the cost, and I can explain why. Competition, Minerva, University of Austin, Ralston are great, but I think that if there was such a thing as a super hard BAGED, essentially a test, a crazy difficult test that you could take and just skip Bachelor’s all together for the super hardworking and super smart, I think that that would scare the living hell out of a lot of the elite institutions because we know people who would pass that and could go straight on to law school.
Designated one university in every state that can only admit according to academic accomplishments, something that is objective, because I think what you have to do is you to have to start getting employers saying, like they’re saying to me in private but not in public, that, “I no longer hire from Yale or from the Ivy League because they’re too difficult and they come in with too many ideological problems,” that if there was one school in each state that was just on academic merit, period, that employers would start pulling from those schools in preference to a lot of the other schools that have a lot of these problems.
And last one, Solomon House, this is a joke from Gulliver’s Travels, that essentially having an institution, it could be some people in this room, where it would be esteemed people from across the political spectrum, and I would want it to be semi-anonymous, what the actual decisions were, but just doing replication as a goal, an institution that does replication, that actually evaluates how poor scholarship [inaudible 00:10:58] can make a big difference. Yay, I did it.
Nadine Strossen:
Next up an alphabetical order is Hollis Robbins.
Hollis Robbins:
Hello, is this on? Good. My name’s Hollis Robbins and I’m dean of humanities at the University of Utah. And I first of all want to say thank you to the organizers for inviting me as a late add when I had noted that there were no deans here, and thought about the role of a dean and the dean has come up over and over again. What is the role of the dean? Both a hearing and listening and adjudicating part of this process. And listening to how this has been discussed, I want to more be responding to what I’ve heard thus far, and I wanted to call out John Hasnas, who’s been very thoughtful and was very thoughtful yesterday about the role, what is the role of the deans in the centralizing of adjudicating academic freedom questions? And also John Rose, who was so lovely and nice yesterday about the responsibility of faculty members in teaching controversial things, that there is responsibility of an administrators, but there’s also responsibility of faculty members. And also to thank Tyler Cowen for the first two points on his lovely and witty list yesterday.
The first one being be kind and the second one being talk to your dean, because we do have a responsibility and one of the responsibilities when things emerge is separating the question of academic freedom from free speech. And I would actually urge you all to read a book by a Stanford colleague here, Emily Levine’s Allies in Rivals, a recent book that she’d written on the history of the American University, and has a really great chapter on the birth of academic freedom in some early cases here at Stanford from 1905. So, it’s a book that very much helped me, and as you were saying, we don’t always get training. I’ve been a dean for five years now, I’m only recently at Utah, but deans get lots of training in things like the Clery Act and what do you do with course fees and how do you do late ad drops? And all sorts of adjudication, and who gets on the dean’s list?
But we’ve never been through, I’ve never been through, a training on how you tell the difference at a granular level with a free speech question and an academic freedom question, and so deans should be part of this conversation. And I also want to actually thank Tyler for bringing up a question of Kyrie Irving and a sports free speech question, because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the kind of media training that sports figures get. I’m not a big sports fan, but when I watch sports, I always like the end of the game when you can script what people are saying, “Well, the other team, they fought better than we did, we gave it our best shot, but they really fought better than we did,” or, “I applaud the other team’s grit and determination,” and, “Well, this was just one game and there’s going to be another game.”
And that last one is the kind of conversation that I wish we had here, because one of the things that I see as a dean is that every skirmish is one gain. Everything is not an anecdote that’s representative of a slippery slope. Sometimes it’s just this one case, but sometimes the same little skirmishes get talked about as if they’re representative of things that are happening everywhere. And I’d like to say that I don’t think that that’s true. I actually think things are going pretty well. I may be the only optimist here, I may be the most leftist person here, I am the only dean here, but I’m actually fairly optimistic. I think most of the time, any other dean would tell you, most of the academic freedom cases that come to me are really about sequential courses. And the person who’s taking the second class being mad at the person who’s teaching the first class for not teaching enough to be ready for the second class. And I go to the first person, and they say, “Well, I have the freedom to teach it the way I want.”
And, sure, they do, and it doesn’t rise to the level of headlines and people aren’t getting canceled. I was involved with a case couple years ago where during COVID there had been a program that said if you fail the gateway class, you get kicked out of the program. And nobody ever actually really followed it, but during COVID, a student wasn’t able to make it and the chair of the department gave them a late withdraw and allowed them to keep in the program, as any of us I would think would do. And the professor said, “No, that’s a violation of his academic freedom to give the grade he wants and we should kick him out of the program.” That’s actually the kind of thing that I have to deal with. Now, in listening to the science panel this morning, there’s clearly greater stakes in some of the science questions that I don’t have to deal with as a dean of humanities.
And I was listening to both questions of whether deans and provosts were being supportive or platforming or adjudicating the questions. And it seemed mostly that the problems were coming external to the responsibility of the deans, what I was hearing is you were getting support for upper administration but getting canceled externally. And to the extent that happens, I was actually thinking at that point of, if there are any Red Sox fans here, of poor Bill Buckner in 1986, who the team supported him, the fans gave him death threats. Just go watch the video of the 1986, game six, World Series, bottom of the eighth, not that anybody’s remembering so closely. But when he passed, and I guess he came out on the field before that in 2019 and everybody applauded him, and it was a wonderful moment, the Boston fans, after giving death threats to this poor guy.
But what was interesting about that is perhaps he was canceled by fans but not by his team. And to respond again to this question of what we can do, and I heard really wonderful warm things about supporting each other, and perhaps one funny proposal I might make is a little bit more media training. There is free speech and academic freedom, but some training in supporting each other, some training in actually wanting the best out of people that disagree, perhaps imagining that some of the skirmishes that we go through are just one, that’s this issue at this point in time, it does not necessarily mean that there is a decline, because actually I do think that things are good.
Nadine Strossen:
Three minutes.
Hollis Robbins:
I was actually going to also suggest that in some ways finding new ways to channel disputes might be helpful and, thinking historically, that we’ve been through a lot in academia, some great changes for which there were some great disputes, and I was thinking, having been trained at many very nice elite schools, though I happen to be a Stanford dropout, Princeton Alumni Weekly, speaking to the Princetonians over there, one of the nice things about PAW, as it’s called, is it prints all the negative letters.
And if you go back and you read through the archives about going co-educational, there were some nasty letters. And even as late as 1991 when Ivy Club, the last eating club to go educational, was being forced from a lawsuit to go, it was so ugly, so nasty. And yet did any of the bad things happen with Princeton going co-educational? The worst things that would happen is that perhaps people would fall in love, which happens and that would be terrible. So, I think that we’re actually doing okay and I’ll just end there. Thank you.
Nadine Strossen:
That was an ACLU lawsuit. Thank you so much Hollis, and that brings us to Rick Shweder.
Rick Shweder:
Okay. So, I’m Rick Shweder, I am appointed in several units at the University of Chicago. My main intellectual home is comparative human development, which is the longest surviving genuinely interdisciplinary PhD program in the social sciences in the United States. So, what is academic freedom? What is academic freedom for? Let me try and address that. I view academic freedom as the preeminent value in what might be called classical liberalism’s academy. And the preeminence issue is very important because most university presidents these days are going to tell you they balance it against other values, and unless they are committed to it as the preeminent value, that is the beginning of the erosion of academic freedom. So, its preeminent status has to be articulated, when you put out a statement about sexual harassment at the university, it’s very important that it be said again and again that this is important, but, remember, the preeminent value at our institution is academic freedom.
I’m going to define what it’s for in a second, I want to link it to the institution, the value and the institution make each other up, they’re intertwined. And what’s it for? I would say it’s there to protect the order and fearlessness of scholars to follow the argument where it leads. I take that formulation from a potentially important 1957 Supreme Court case in where Justice Felix Frankfurter or and Justice Harlan couldn’t stomach the idea that a prosecutor in New Hampshire in a case called Sweezy v. New Hampshire was interrogating Paul Sweezy about a lecture he gave at a university and wanted to know the content of it and all sorts of issues arose. But in any case, Frankfurter and Harlan articulated this view that we have an institution that’s about protecting the fearlessness and ardor of scholars to follow arguments where they lead.
And you can elaborate on that unfettered of received wisdom and popular views and regardless of the practical, social, or even moral implications of their conclusion. In other words, instead of putting Socrates on trial, we welcome him to the halls of the classical liberal academy. And of course, as has been commented on these days, we seem to be back in the habit of putting him or her on trial rather than actually engaging the argument, even if we find the argument upsetting. So, that’s the context. I want to now, thinking about this relationship of this value, this preeminent value and a particular classical liberal conception of the academy, I want to talk about three University of Chicago presidents, something they’ve said. Let’s go back to the 1930s and Robert Maynard Hutchins, he was asked to define academic freedom and he said, “A university is a community of scholars. It’s not a kindergarten.”
And think about what that implies broadly, being a kindergarten and protection and paternalism and so forth, and offices that are there to serve that function at the universities. “It’s not a club.” Think about what that implies for extracurricular comments that might be made by members of the faculty that get you kicked out, like in a private club. “It’s not a reform school.” It’s not trying to be a moral change agent. “It’s not a political party, it’s not an agency of propaganda.” You think about public relations extensions and universities and the kinds of things they say. “A university is a community of scholars.” Okay, now let’s go to 1967, fast forward, and we’re now at the year that the Calvin Report was written at the University of Chicago. And, again, I want to just think about the value, the classical liberal academy, and leadership.
This is Edward Levi in 1967 talking to the Citizens Board of the University of Chicago. And he tells them the following, “It’s not the role of the university to directly respond to the needs of the broader world of politics and commerce. It’s not the role of the university to be popular with the general public.” He tells them, “It’s not the true mission of an academic institution to be moral. The mission is intellectual, not moral.” He told them that, “A university does not exist to develop inventions for industry or to train or be a pipeline for technicians for roles in society. It’s not there to counter the injustices of the world.”
“The central purpose of the university,” he explicitly tells them its main reason for its existence is, quote, “To the improving the stock of ordered knowledge and rational judgment.” That’s what the university’s mission is. This is a particular conception, it’s a subculture, it’s a classical liberal vision of an academy. University presidents in the United States no longer speak that way. Many of them have concluded that this vision of the academy is unaffordable and impractical and they’ve more or less opened the gates of the academy to diverse interest groups with political, moral, and commercial missions of their own.
What Levi described, as I want to argue, is the classical liberal conception of the academy. We have a slogan at the University of Chicago which basically roughly translates, “Let knowledge grow so life may be enriched.” It was not meant to imply go to college to get rich. And you can go on and on. It didn’t apply, go to college so you can save the world, nor was it meant to imply that the aim of the university was to engage in beneficent social engineering or human rights activism or identity politics or to act like you’re a consulting firm or an urban lab to various kinds of actors in the world who are trying to change the world or to develop profit and so forth. Finally, let me just fast forward again to 1999, going back a few presidents, Don Randall became the University of Chicago president before he then went on to the Mellon Foundation.
The first interview he did publicly with the Chicago Tribune, they quote him as follows, this is very early on after being appointed. Quote, “The problem with being a university president is that you’re running a billion dollar a year business and yet there is no one to whom you can give a direct personal order,” Randall said, alluding to the virtual independence of faculty members. Continuing the quote, “In that sense, all universities are ungovernable and the better they are, the more ungovernable they are.” Since then we are being governed. Various forces now want us to be compliant. I’m sure all of you get orders to spend three hours on this training or that training, forced listening, forced speech gets involved and it often is accompanied by threats. We now get threats from our provosts. “Unless you do this, no salary increase. Unless you do this, you won’t be promoted.”
This is a total change in the environment of the university. We’re not a university anymore, we’re a multiverse. And it’s happened for a whole set of institutional reasons that go back a long way. 1972 is when Congress held hearings and created the IRB system. The IRB system puts all sorts of constraints on what was supposed to be the free right to conduct research and disseminate information unfettered. We can talk about the 1980 Bayh-Dole Statute passed by Congress, which made it all of a sudden profitable for universities because they can patent any discoveries that came out of federally funded research.
Nadine Strossen:
One minute, Rick.
Rick Shweder:
One minute or three? One minute, okay. So, Bayh-Dole all of a sudden gives administrators an incentive to want to control the research agenda of a university rather than have it come out of faculty. They can always find faculty to collaborate with to do this, but nevertheless, they now, and there’s a big argument at Chicago, it went on for a year, who decides what new centers are created? Is it the faculty through the faculty senate or is it the administrators? And the administrators and every dean went for the administrators.
We can go on and on, other kinds of things. 1976 is the Bakke decision, which opens the door to interest groups built around census categories who no longer are interested in all sides of stories. They’re interested in their story and perpetuating it. Okay, so what does one do? Very quickly. Seems to me we should start small. If I was looking for two things to point to right now, I would say reform the IRB system. They have gone way beyond what’s required by law and our legal offices should be looking into it. And secondly, let’s start advertising when we have job searches that we are open to all political viewpoints. It’s official policy at the University of Chicago, we never advertise it in a job ad, why not? I tried to get that done and was stopped right away, but nevertheless, it seems to me doable if there’s a concerted effort around it and that would be a step. Thank you.
Nadine Strossen:
Thank you so much. So, I’ll go until it’s 14. Okay, I’d like to start with a point of personal privilege, which I cleared with my longtime friend and colleague, Greg. As he mentioned, he is a Cardinal. That means he is an alum of this school and in particular I had the pleasure of first meeting Greg when I was speaking and he was a law student who came and introduced himself to me with great respect. And I think now Greg and I are not only colleagues, but I guess technically you’re my boss because you’re the head of FIRE and I’m only a senior fellow. So, I think this is very inspiring and I’m especially inspired by the students who have participated, including Mimi, who spoke yesterday, Abigail and Myers from Princeton, and Tim Rosenberg who is the president of the Fed Soc at the law school here. I’m sure there are others, but these are the ones I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. And for those of us who are concerned about passing the torch of liberty to another generation, this I hope is inspiring and encouraging.
So, our title is what is academic freedom and what is it for? Closely bound into that what is who is it for? Or I guess my grammarian father would say, “For whom is it?” And I have to start by saying I am a liberal not only in the classical sense but also in the political sense. And I’m constantly crusading and evangelizing for free speech and academic freedom all over the country and all over the world. I make about 250 public presentations per year and I am constantly telling liberals and progressives that free speech and academic freedom are not contrary to what they believe, are not only or primarily for conservatives and libertarians.
And I have to tell my conservative and libertarian allies the very same message. It is for everybody. And I have to make the same point because I hear a little bit too much to my taste in terms of effectiveness of rhetoric that is demonizing the liberals and progressives and suggesting that it is only or predominantly conservatives and libertarians whose messages are being suppressed. Unfortunately that’s not true. For better or worse, if you look all over the country, as FIRE has been tracking, you see that there are many, many instances of suppression, at least attempted and too often successful, until FIRE intervenes, against liberal speakers. Now, there’s a fabulous database that has been amassed by Sean Stevens and Komi Frey, both of whom are here from FIRE. It’s now up to something like about 800 incidents of documented, you can go on the website and go drill down into the details, of attempted retaliation against professors for exercising constitutionally protected speech, and something like 60% of these have been successful.
Now, on this question of from where are the attacks coming, about 40% of them are coming from the right of the faculty member. Yes, 60% are coming from the left, but that is a significant number. And let’s also not forget a point that John Haidt, among others, made, which is that most of the attacks are coming from the extremes of the political spectrum, so those who are being victimized are those who are more moderate, including the moderate left as well as the moderate right. In terms of being effective in our advocacy, we have a principled reason as well as a strategic reason for making common cause for advocating general principles, even handedly applied, of academic freedom and free speech. I think it’s really essential that the moral high ground be retained and you forfeit the moral high ground if you are uneven in your application of principles.
So, to me, one of the clearest examples of that is all of the conservatives and libertarians, who, rightly in my view, were critical of the liberal progressive campus snowflakes who were complaining about how uncomfortable and divisive they found it when they were exposed to right of center ideas or anything to the left of the extreme left, and then weaponized those exact same concepts and words in legislation that has been passed in states all across this country, one of which ACLU and FIRE are suing against in Florida. In fact, I just saw a statement in Reason Magazine, a libertarian publication, which said that great as the danger of cancel culture is, it pales in comparison to the danger of government censorship, which is what we are now seeing at the behest of mostly conservative and Republican lawmakers. I want to give an example from right here at home, and I can tell you on every campus I can find an example, but I happen to be at Stanford.
One year ago, the Stanford Law School Federalist Society filed a complaint with the law school administration against another law student who posted a satirical announcement for a Fed Soc event that was going to feature Ted Cruz and some other conservative, Ken Paxton from Texas, giving a lecture on the original intent justification for insurrection. Now, some of us found that satirical and funny and I hope all of us would see that as a protected exercise of free speech under the First Amendment, under the Leonard Law, under Stanford’s own free speech principles. And yet the administration, at the behest of a complaint from an anonymous, they were not anonymous when they filed the complaint, but the school protected the identity, members of the Fed Soc society. The school started an investigation shortly before graduation and threatened that the student who wrote this would not be eligible to graduate on time.
Fortunately, with a lot of protest, including protest from Federal Society members, from conservatives, from FIRE, among many others, Stanford withdrew. But I thought that was particularly unfortunate because Fed Soc itself has come under so many unjustified attacks. I speak for them all over the country and it’s been very sad for me to see that they are being boycotted by guilt by association and violation of their First Amendment free speech rights. I can tell another story, Greg and I were at the Duke Law Fed Soc in 2021. We were the only two speakers, and we were talking about free speech. How progressive can you get? Sorry, how conservative can you get? I’m losing track of it now, because that event was boycotted by every single other student organization including the campus chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization of which I was the national president.
But somehow I felt that it was undermining the solid ground that Fed Soc would have to complain against that kind of free speech violation through what had happened here. I also want to say that, looking at another example of a word in our topic, what is it for? I really like the word for. We have to be positive. We have to be affirmative. And this is one of the things that I really appreciate about Heterodox Academy and John Haidt, we should be much less about being anti-woke and much more about being for academic freedom. That said, and one of the things that Heterodox Academy does is to constantly emphasize that we love universities, I say we because I’m active in that organization as well, we love universities. We’re supporting them, trying to help them to become the best that they can be. Now, I totally also support the University of Austin. I’m also involved there, but I see it as a complement and a spur and a prod to assist existing universities in becoming the best that they can be.
I’m running out of time, so I guess I’ll say in my closing remarks, please, in the spirit of solidarity and making [inaudible 00:40:28], everybody who’s not yet a member, please sign up to join the Academic Freedom Alliance, whose motto really gets to a point I’m making. An attack on academic freedom anywhere is an attack on academic freedom everywhere. I’ve got brochures here and a little bit of swag. Those who get here first get T-shirts and other goodies.
So, in closing, every single one of us who cares about individual liberty has to constantly raise our voices every time academic freedom is attacked, no matter who is speaking, no matter what their ideas are. And we have to constantly raise our voices proactively to inform people about these values. I think ultimately education and information and advocacy is the answer more than government regulation and the crackdown of Big Brother. As is the case for all speech that we dislike, we dislike the canceling expression, we don’t call for government to censor it, we exercise our own counter speech. Thank you.
Speaker 5:
When there’s a professor attacked, they often issue a statement denouncing the person, and sometimes, as in the case of Joshua Katz, they issue a statement saying, “I support their academic freedom in theory, but this is a [inaudible 00:42:09],” … has the same effect. And the third is one of the main threats to academic freedom from within the institution is the DEI bureaucracies, which are appointed and enabled by the administrators.
Hollis Robbins:
So, thank you, and I will say, I’m not going to speak for all deans. Coming into a leadership position, it’s an organization. When you belong to the organization, there’s going to be rules of that organization. Some of those rules, like trainings, deans have to take the trainings too. I’ve had to take more trainings in various things than I know. I had to take a lot of heat stroke training in case somebody had a heat stroke, this was something when I was in California that was mandated by law that anybody who was in any position had to learn what to do when somebody gets heat stroke training. Now, that’s legislative, sometimes in state schools there are legislative questions and legislative orders that we have to work within that authorizing environment. I wish it were the case, I was thinking about the tweet after the queen died and there was a tweet by a member of the faculty at Case Western that caused a lot of a brouhaha, and that the university then made a statement again.
So, again, I don’t know, I didn’t look closely enough to understand whether it was an academic freedom or a free speech, and these are two different kinds of issues. I regretted that the university did that. I was talking to Steven Pinker last night, yesterday, about one of the things that I would like to do, and I think deans should do, is a little bit of war gaming, a little bit of practicing. What are you going to do in this issue? What if somebody says this? What if the scholarship goes in that direction? How do we actually come to an agreement and create a culture where we would agree, any academic unit, whether it’s a department, whether it’s a college, whether it’s the whole university, we all agree that there are some things that are beyond the pale and that there are a lot of things that we could have healthy disagreements about. And I don’t see, I haven’t seen that, I haven’t participated in that. I would like to participate in that and I’d like to have conversations about that.
In terms of EDI, again, I think that this is a culture issue. A great deal of EDI mandates are mandates that are supported by a majority of an academic unit. And, again, having conversations about that, certainly inclusivity, it seems to be a leitmotif of this conference, is inclusive views and the I in DEI or EDI or whatever your university is calling it, the I is always there, and I think the inclusivity question. I take your point and I will bring it back to some of our next dean discussions because I do think some of these questions of how do we support academic freedom should be higher on the agenda, so thank you.
Greg Lukianoff:
I actually did want to add something there though. I run into this a lot. So, I’ve been at FIRE for 21 years and I’ve run into deans and professors saying, “Well, everything’s fine where I am, so this isn’t really happening. What could FIRE possibly know about it?” And I’m like, so the group that sees what’s happening nationally knows less than the professor who’s in a department? So, it was really interesting to see Professor Noah, I don’t know what his last name was, talk about everything being fine at Stanford when there’s been 21 attempts to get professors fired at Stanford just since 2014. And most of those involve a back and forth with the Hoover Institution, and to Stanford’s credit, only three resulted in people being fired. But three is not great. And people don’t actually look into what’s happening at their own institutions before they say, “Oh, there’s nothing happening here.”
Now, when you take a situation like Stanford, when you look at the lack of viewpoint diversity here to begin with, it gets actually higher ratings because of Hoover, but Hoover has very little effect. I didn’t even know what that tower was in the middle of campus until I graduated from Stanford Law School. It was a dirty secret back then. So, very low viewpoint diversity, there are secret hearings, even our critics agree with this. And I really want to stress, 800 attempts to get professors fired since 2014, the numbers for students of course are way worse. About 60% of them result in some sanction.
And when we looked at the historical comparison, and I got written up on media matters for this, for comparing it to McCarthyism, but the numbers from McCarthyism, as best we can tell, are about 100 to 130 professors fired between 1947 and 1957 for pro-communist sympathies. We see way more than that and we’re not in a national security crisis. So, if people are trying to tell you there’s nothing wrong in higher education, every measure, whether you ask students, they say that they’re afraid to speak, when you ask professors, they say the same thing. And the numbers, like I said, it’s not just a big deal, it’s something we’re going to be studying in 100 years.
Nadine Strossen:
But, Greg, since you mentioned Stanford, I just have to add to the attempts to cancel professors associated with Hoover, which are presumably conservative, there was an effort, including with support from the Stanford review, to retaliate against a progressive professor, I’m sorry, I’m forgetting his name, of comparative literature because he was involved with an Antifa type organization but had expressly disavowed violence. And my source now is Michael McConnell, a respected conservative, who is one of a ideologically diverse group of law professors at Stanford that protested that the efforts were completely inconsistent with the professor’s free speech rights, so even here, even progressive and liberal views, and this was in 2018, we’re not talking ancient history.
Greg Lukianoff:
Yeah, absolutely.
Hollis Robbins:
Well, could just say that given that there are that many hundreds and only three, and not to say that three is too many.
Greg Lukianoff:
At Stanford.
Hollis Robbins:
At Stanford.
Greg Lukianoff:
There are schools that are much worse.
Hollis Robbins:
But the point is somebody, and it’s probably at the administrative level, stops it, adjudicates it from within.
Greg Lukianoff:
Well, a lot of times it’s actually pressure from us.
Hollis Robbins:
Or pressure from us, but what I’m saying is in some ways that seems to be that most of the time it’s working is what I’m trying to say.
Greg Lukianoff:
Most of the time it’s not working because 60% of the time the professors are punished.
Hollis Robbins:
I thought you said it was only three.
Greg Lukianoff:
At Stanford, that there were 21 attempts to get… No, I will say, some credit to Stanford for 21 attempts and only three actual hits, but the overall picture is 60% of those 800 professors are punished in some way, with 40 tenured professors fired since 2014 for teaching, for research, for pedagogy, the thing that tenure was designed to protect. I’ve done this job for 21 years prior to I’d say about 2012, I can think of maybe one tenured professor that I saw get fired and that was for academic misconduct. 40 just since 2014, 2015, for the one thing that tenure is supposed to actually do is nuts.
Hollis Robbins:
Jonathan over there. Yes, go ahead, and then Jonathan over there.
Speaker 6:
Hi, I’m Will Fithian from Berkeley Statistics. I appreciated all of your remarks. So, Hollis, related to your point about distinguishing between what is an uncharacteristic episode versus something that should tar an institution, from my perspective, one thing that affects the way I think about an episode like this is whether the institution makes some public attempt to rectify the harm and acknowledge that they were wrong in what they did, and this is something that I think I don’t see often enough.
To take one example, Dorian Abbot wrote this op-ed, and for that reason, his invitation to give a lecture was canceled. I think that it was good that the institution of MIT, the president of MIT, formed a committee, they recommended adopting the Chicago principles. If those Chicago principles are adopted, I think that would be great, but the harm to Dorian is still there and it doesn’t need to be. So, tomorrow, the MIT university president could issue a statement saying, “We apologize as an institution to Dorian Abbot,” and tomorrow he’s probably not going to do that and he probably won’t do it the next day either. So, for that reason, these feel like games that are still going on that we’re still losing, so what do you think are the best ways for administrators to rectify situations that occur?
Hollis Robbins:
First of all, it’s another great question, and I was thinking of something that John Hasnas said yesterday about counsels, general counsel and about the importance of general counsels and lawyers for universities, precluding public apologies, for anything, because you don’t want to admit things. And I think that that’s a really smart question and there ought to be more discussion about the role of the legal infrastructure guiding university speech. Deans and provosts and presidents are often guided by what general counsel would say, and when the lawyers get too powerful, nothing gets said. So, I think that that is one part of the question.
The other is the question of apologizing on university campuses right now is a left question. It’s come up several times about apologizing for past inequities, for eugenics, for racism, for women not being on campus, there’s the question of apologizing and university apologizing is a huge issue right now, which isn’t to say that universities are doing it well at all. A good friend of mine is on a committee at Ohio State University, which, before any conversation as I understand it for renaming buildings, because, again, this is a big conversation going on, deciding the basis on which a building would be renamed, before there was a need to do this, back to the question of war gaming, back to the question of let’s answer a question before the question needs to be raised.
And, again, if I were running the world, that is the kind of question I would be asking. At what point in time does the institution apologize? What form does that apology take? Is it apology for hundreds of years ago or for a couple of months ago or in the middle of the pandemic? I think these are important questions.
Nadine Strossen:
I’m going to make one point and then Greg, which is don’t hold your breath. For all of the injustices during McCarthyism, most universities didn’t apologize till the 1970s. Greg.
Rick Shweder:
Okay, I don’t think apologies are going to be the route to progress here. And it seems to me, however, the issue of the legal office and how it operates at a university is very important. Some people think the legal office basically runs the university, and put together the legal office and HR, and maybe the two of them together now are running the university. But an expectation one might try to develop for the legal office, instead of being risk averse, and as we heard yesterday, doing everything you can to avoid being sued, it seems to me that at least some part of that office ought to be working on how to use the law to further the kind of mission that we would value.
And the IRB is a perfect example of this because universities have gone way beyond what the law requires. The IRB system technically and legally is only required, human subjects review of the type that’s been universalized is only required for grants received from the federal government. And universities, if you’re privately funded, if you’re personally funded, if you’re unfunded, you can do that within the law if the university’s prepared to do that. But the legal group, generally being risk averse, figures, “Well, we have to apply it to everyone equally because if we’re ever sued, someone’s going to say, ‘The government has this standard, why aren’t you following the government standard?'” The government’s not requiring you to follow that standard, it’s internal.
Nadine Strossen:
Rick, we’re getting a red light, with due respect, I promised Greg he could have a minute and then we’ll wrap.
Greg Lukianoff:
Just really quick, one major change throughout my career was that for the first half of it, or even more than first half, we’d have really bad cases like we see today, but a university president would come in, believe it or not, and say, “We are not punishing this professor. We are not punishing this student.” And if they did it fast and they did it clearly, nine times out of 10, even 99 times out of 100, that meant that case, we won, it would go away. They don’t tend to do this anymore. And that’s one of the reasons in my five things that I recommended, and these are the minimal things, and I think everyone in this room should at least try, but one of them is get on the phone to the president of your school or alma mater and say, “Listen, if you say this strong and right now, this will fizzle.”
Nadine Strossen:
And please don’t forget to pick up your AFA brochures. Many thanks to a great panel.
Hollis Robbins:
Thank you.