John Cochrane:
Welcome everyone to the Academic Freedom Conference. I’m John Cochran. I’m one of the co-organizers of this event. Let’s start with some thanks. Most of all, we want to thank the Stanford GSB and in particular the Dean, John Levin, who sponsored this conference and has stuck with us through, let’s call it some turbulence. We also want to thank the institutions listed for their sponsorship and a few generous donors.
I want to thank the organizing committee. They helped us to identify and recruit speakers, and there was a lot of consultation on how to run this conference. Of course, we thank all of the speakers and all of you, especially many friends who have traveled a long way to be here today. Most of all, we got to thank Yvonne Marinovich, who won’t admit it, but he did all the work of putting this conference together. Yvonne, where are you?
It’s easy to lob emails, oh, we ought to do X, and then Yvonne goes and spends the day doing X. So thank you very much, Yvonne. This being a free speech conference, I’m not going to tell you what to say and not to say, but any conversation’s more productive if we focus and try to keep to the point. So let me make some remarks about the purpose here.
We gather as a group that believes academic freedom is important and believes that it is under threat, but we don’t fully understand the problem or what to do about it. So we are here to share experiences in our different universities, our different fields, a diversity of viewpoints to understand, to define the problem, and together to find practical solutions. We’re not really here to have a philosophical discussion on whether academic freedom is important and whether it’s threatened.
We here start from the premise that the core mission of the university and the scholarly community is to uncover new knowledge to debate and refine that knowledge, to pass on that knowledge to the next generation, and more importantly, to pass on the habits of critical inquiry, scholarly debate that produce true knowledge. We hear start from the premise that we’re losing academic freedom and that threatens the core scholarly mission.
If those of you listening on Zoom or some of the critics at this conference want to debate those issues, go ahead, run a different conference. Every biology conference doesn’t start with an evolution versus creationism debate. Our time is short and focus will make us more productive. This is a conference on academic freedom and has a lesser emphasis on free speech of political opinions.
Now, cancellation ostracism, disciplinary action for political opinions, the canceling of outside popular speakers. Those are all big in the news, but our core question is limitations on the scholarly enterprise. Research, teaching, publication, fact finding, logical analysis and criticism. This DAM enterprise is damaged when scholars are canceled for their political opinions or opinions on matters like university hiring and admissions like Dorian Abbott, who’s with us today.
But our focus goes beyond that to emphasize the less visible, but perhaps more insidious restrictions on academic activity, including direct institutional actions, self-censorship and fear or good people being driven out of the academic enterprise altogether. This is a conference on academic freedom and not free speech and censorship in the media, on Twitter and in the general society. Those are important political problems for our democracy, but they’re not the focus of this conference.
This is a conference on academic freedom and not centrally on the substance of contentious issues. We have some noted speakers who have been criticized for their views, to put it mildly. But we’re primarily here to learn from their experience of censorship and not to debate the merits of particular views and research findings that got them into trouble. Academic freedom is a problem of institutions. Twitter mobs of students are visible, but the key restrictions on academic freedom lie with university leaders, university bureaucracies, hiring and promotion procedures and beyond universities to funding agencies, professional organizations and journals. And I hope we can discuss and remedy dysfunction in all these institutions.
The nexus between politics and academic freedom is a deep and troublesome question. We designed this conference to be nonpartisan. We felt truth knows no politics. It’s likely to unsettle verities on all sides, and we know many self-identified leftists as well as rightists and libertarians who are concerned about academic freedom. We don’t know, and we didn’t ask what any of your politics are. We did, however, make a special effort to invite people who self-identify as politically left progressive Democrat or whatever, and who are concerned with academic freedom.
We also made a special effort to reach out to many of the people who criticized some of our speakers among others, Stanford faculty who publicly denounced Jay Bhattacharya and Scott Atlas. The non-response and refusals to attend from this group was astounding and surprising to us, but if this group does not seem balanced to you, it’s by refusal to participate, not by lack of invitation.
One prominent Stanford professor active in university academic freedom issues spoke for many, telling us, “Well, I can’t be seen on a program with right wing nut jobs like,” and then named a few of our speakers at an academic freedom conference. Well, there’s half the problem in a nutshell. There are now faculty protest letters demands in the faculty senate that stand for distance itself from this conference.
Critics involve the media. They complained that we are closed for restricting attendance when the room got full, and for restricting media to preserve space for participants. Though these are routine for all academic conferences, the Stanford Global Energy Forum of the last two days is explicitly invitation only without complaint and without Bjorn Lomborg or Steve Koonin. We know because they were highly available when we invited them to come here.
They complain about some of our speaker’s deplorable to them views. People with such views should apparently never be allowed to speak on anything anywhere. They cherry pick one or two hated speakers to declare us unbalanced. But have any of them looked at the other 35 speakers on the program? I guess logic is politically unfashionable these days, but you have to demonstrate it quite so quickly and publicly.
The Chronicle of Higher Education declared this conference a threat to democracy. Even the Hoover Institution declined to support or co-host this conference deeming it too political. Well, the attempt fail. Stanford’s leaders have supported us for which we are grateful, and for that reason, we are still here. But young untenured faculty figured out they shouldn’t be seen here. The age distribution is not what we would like it to be. Several more de-registered from the conference after we decided to stream the proceedings, citing fear of free repercussions.
The irony of trying to center free speech conference has not occurred to them. The hypocrisy of labeling this and only this conference political and demanding that this and only this conference include wider voices, not just the long list of one-sided political events at Stanford, for example, say the gender and equity summit, likewise escapes them. Well, we were naive just in setting up a conference to talk about academic freedom and free speech on campus. We got to experience part of the problem. So I think we can’t avoid the elephant in the room.
The threat to academic freedom is political as it has always been. Free scholarship undermines narratives that sustain or are used to claim political power. Though in the past, this threat has come from both left and right, and though there are some dumb things coming out of Republican state legislatures, the main threats to academic freedom inside the university, professional societies, government agencies predominantly come from a particular far left political ideology and most of the forbidden subjects threaten that political narrative.
Well, I think so. Maybe I’m wrong. We’re having a conference. The point is we should talk about these issues too. Enough, some organizational notes. There’s a free speech conference, you can say what you want, but you can’t talk as long as you want. Please abide by the time limits. Moderators, please be ruthless in enforcing time limits. Please leave ample time for questions and comments from the floor. That discussion among us is the main point of this event. I think there will be far more comments than we can accommodate, so I encourage the moderators take groups of comments at a time, and panelists, please keep your responses to those comments as short as possible.
Each session will start on time and end on time, I guess, except this one. At breaks, it’s lovely to talk to each other, but please return to the room promptly without being nagged too much so we can keep to the schedule. Why? So that everybody gets a chance to be heard. Be aware this conference is being streamed and the video will be archived and available later. We had originally wanted no recording and Chatham House Rules, but various pressures made that impossible. We also realize there’s no way to ensure privacy in the cell phone age, so we accept the loss of spontaneity that a record imposes in return for the transparency that it provides. It proves what was not said here as much as it provides a record of what was said. In that regard, please be aware of the microphone. People listening on Zoom can’t hear you if you’re not talking into a microphone.
Covid still runs among us, and in a group this size, there’s a good probability that someone’s infectious. Let this be a super spreader of ideas, but not of disease. If you’re not feeling well, please do us a favor and watch the livestream from out of the room or hang out in the back. If you have any doubts, please take a test and in this tolerant free speech group, let’s respect people’s individual choices to wear a mask if they wish to do so. Okay, tell us what’s going on in your field, your university, your department, your curriculum committee, your classroom, your professional society, your journals, your funding agencies, and tell us how we can all work together to fix it.