Jennifer Burns:
My name is Jennifer Burns. I’m an associate professor of history at Stanford. I’m also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution where I direct the Library and Archives Workshop in Political Economy. I’ve just finished writing a biography of Milton Friedman, so I’m delighted to come out of my study and see some real life results. Thank you. We have a really interesting panel today, which is quite diverse in terms of academic experience and focus. We have tenured professors, those who focus on teaching, a recent doctoral graduate. In terms of intellectual approach we have, we’ll call them maybe an experimental social scientist, a classist, a student of theology. We’re going to proceed as listed in the program, which is also the alphabetical order, and I will give a brief introduction of each panelist. I also want to say, the question of the panel, Are the Humanities Liberal? May have yielded a bit at Yvonne’s suggestion to the practical solutions of the various dilemmas we have been discussing.
So bear with us, it may sound theoretical, it may turn out to be less so. Our first panelist, and I’ll introduce them all and then we’ll move on, is Solveig Gold. She’s currently the Thomas W. Smith post-doctoral research associate at Princeton. I learned that she has recently defended a dissertation on Plato’s theology and political theory at Cambridge University. We also are joined by Joseph Manson, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, who researches the social behavior of non-human primates and humans. And finally, John Rose, who’s an instructor at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He’s known for his course entitled, How to Think in an Era of Political Polarization, which gets rave reviews from students and hopefully he’ll share a bit about that teaching with us today. So with no further ado, I’m going to turn to Solveig Gold.
Solveig Gold:
Thank you. Did Socrates deserve to die? Until recently, I was under the impression that we, as a civilization, had come to a consensus on that one. Socrates’ trial was a miscarriage of justice. No, he did not deserve to die. Ah, but not according to the current crop of professional classicists. In June, a professor of ancient history at the University of West Georgia, Nadya Williams, published an article in Inside Higher Ed comparing my husband, former Princeton Professor Joshua Katz to Socrates. A compliment you might think, but you’d be wrong. You see Socrates, Williams writes, was a groomer, not a gadfly. He claimed to be punished for his speech, but really he was punished for his, quote, unethical behavior. Just as the Athenians correctly judged Socrates’ character, so Williams argues we should judge the character of our public intellectuals.
Though she stops short of recommending that my husband be sentenced to drink hemlock, the message is clear. So Socrates deserved to die and Joshua Katz deserves a similar fate. I will not dwell on my husband’s story since you’ll be hearing from him tomorrow, but this article was widely celebrated on #classics Twitter, the little corner of Twitter dedicated to the field of classics. It was even tweeted approvingly by the Society for Classical Studies, the main professional organization of classicists in North America.
If ever you were under the illusion that studying great books makes you a good or even just more liberal person, one look at classics Twitter would quickly disabuse you of your folly. An army of so-called scholars spends its days sucking up to a handful of powerful figures in the field who preside over a steady stream of bullying, name-calling and petty disputes. But these people aren’t studying great books, not really. They’re studying themselves, or rather, whatever small facet of their identity earns them the most clout in this political climate. The program for the 2022 annual meeting of the Society of Classical Studies is instructive. There were endless panels on gender, gender and violence in Latin poetry, gender and power, gender power and the body in late antiquity, epigraphy and gender in the Greco-Roman world, exploring ancient definitions of womanhood beyond the binary, a round table on trans in classics and queer representations and receptions of the Amazons. And likewise of course panels on race and activism with such papers as the Liberation of Black Earth, what Indigenous and Black agricultural movements can teach us about Solon.
I’ve always thought the joy of studying the humanities generally and the classics in particular was studying cultures at once familiar and far removed from my own, indeed familiar and far removed from all contemporary cultures and peoples. This is not to say that our own culture does not infiltrate our study of classics. How could we not view classical civilization through a certain contemporary lens? But our goal, at least, should be to see past that lens, to interpret the texts as objectively as possible through the painstaking and humbling work of philology. Nowadays though, this goal of objectivity is branded racist. To quote Professors Daniel Padilla Peralta and Sasha May Eccleston In a recent issue of the American Journal of Philology, it is, quote, a mode or metonym of exclusionary elitism throughout the field. Padilla once famously declared that he’d like the traditional field of classics to die, “As swiftly as possible,” and indeed his ongoing attacks on philology are successfully ripping away the very foundation of the discipline.
Classicists study many things, literature, philosophy, history, linguistics, art and archeology. Each of these sub-disciplines demands a different methodology. The historians could be in history departments, the philosophers could be in philosophy departments, but one thing has held the sub-disciplines together, knowledge of Greek and Latin. Without this, the field of classics has no guiding principle, no raison d’etre. In 2021 however, in a move that received a great deal of media attention, the Princeton Classics Department eliminated its language requirement for undergraduates. Students can now graduate with a degree in classics from the number one ranked university in the nation without ever taking a single course in Greek or Latin.
A student who purported to understand say, Japanese culture without speaking a word of Japanese, would be rightly skewered for his hubris. But this kind of hubris is now the name of the game in the Princeton Classics Department. We’re not supposed to care what the texts actually say. As a recent hire said in her job talk, I’m paraphrasing, “It doesn’t matter whether Thucydides ever talked about race, we should read race into Thucydides all the same.” In a sense though, there is still a required language for Princeton classicists. Instead of Greek and Latin, their schooled in the language of theory, they learn to speak like Professor Brooke Holmes, who’s been known to discuss, for instance, “The ever fuzzier boundary between human and non-human actants in the various new materialisms and the causal traffic between human and non-human communities and networks.”
As an undergraduate, I was impressed by this kind of language. Now thankfully I can recognize it as superficial sophistic fluff. Much of what I’ve been describing of course, is hardly unique to classics, but classics is a good case study because the collapse of the discipline has come about so quickly in just about six years. I often think back to 2015 when I spent the summer at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. There was a great deal of political unrest that summer, Grexit in Greece, Obergefell decision in America, and I was taken aback by my professors’ and fellow students’ seeming apathy towards current events. I wanted to talk politics. Our conversation centered on Bronze Age oxide trade in the Aegean.
Be careful what you wish for. A year later, when Trump was elected president, a new figure rose to prominence in the field. Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Donna Zuckerberg, who had earned a PhD in classics from Princeton and started an online classics journal called Eidolon. In it, she published a piece called How to Be a Good Classist Under a Bad Emperor, a “Call to Arms for classist to step out of the ivory tower and fight the Trump supporters who build themselves as the inheritors of western civilization.” And step out of the ivory tower most of them did, seemingly never to return. Can we return? Return, that is, to a discipline predicated on love of and deference to ancient sources, one that prized Socratic humility, the knowledge that, in the grand scheme of things, we know nothing and that because we know nothing, liberal truth seeking, Trump’s ideological conformity.
One reason for optimism, the activists are very, very tired of their emotional labor. In 2020, Donna Zuckerberg closed down Eidolon, which had become an invalidly intersectional feminist publication, with the following explanation, “How can I spend my energy reading Greek and Latin when a pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans? How can I write coherent sentences when I think about the growing danger of an autocratic coup by the Trump administration? How does anyone have time for anything aside from self-care, activism and treading water?” Daniel Padilla Peralta meanwhile, suggested in the New York Times that after destroying the discipline of classics, he’d move on to politics.
Another reason for optimism. There are scholars with growing platforms like Roosevelt Montas and Anika Prather, who continue to celebrate the study of great books as liberatory for racial minorities rather than oppressive. We need to give these gadflies a louder megaphone. And a third reason, despite professional classicists best efforts, normal people of all stripes are still interested in the classics. When Eidolon came to an end, I was a part of a group of dissident classicists who got together to found a new online journal, Antigone, with hundreds of articles that, “Dust down the ancient Greeks and Romans and bring them into fresh conversation with modern day readers of all ages.” By all metrics, the site has been a massive success.
When Socrates was killed, his disciple Plato, imagined new ways to restructure society through new forms of philosophical expression and with a new forum for learning and conversation, The Academy. Now our own academy is facing execution at the hands of the people Socrates warned us about, zealous, unreflective sophists. I’d love to see justice prevail, but if it does not, let us take a page from Plato’s book and start building. Thank you.
Joseph Manson:
First a disclaimer, I don’t do humanities scholarship. I’m a social scientist and what’s more, an evolutionary social scientist? So my research is in the overlap zone between the social sciences and the life sciences. However, my PhD is in anthropology and I spent 28 years as faculty in an anthropology department. I’m a biological anthropologist, but the largest by far subfield or branch of anthropology is sociocultural anthropology. And for the past few decades, most sociocultural anthropologists have regarded themselves as humanities scholars rather than a social scientist. So I’ve had a close spectator’s view of one branch of humanity scholarship. So I will take as the question being posed to me, is sociocultural anthropology liberal? Well, we don’t need to speculate or extrapolate trend lines or any such things to answer that question because the dominant voices in sociocultural anthropology are very explicit about this.
For them, liberal has become a swear word. From about the turn of the century until just a few years ago, the equivalent fashionable swear word was neoliberal, a rather vague term but if you take the neoliberalism to mean the belief that all human values can and should be placed on the market, get bought and sold as commodities, then it could be possible to be a liberal and yet opposed to neoliberalism. But in the past few years, sociocultural anthropologists, in pronouncing their anathemas, have dropped the neo prefix and liberalism bashing by sociocultural anthropologists is intimately connected with the discipline’s currently dominant stance of renouncing and reviling its own past practitioners, its intellectual ancestors, as having been complicit in colonialism, essentializing the other and various other crimes. So here’s one example from a paper published in 2020 and already cited 127 times that appeared in the American anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.
The author is Ryan Jobson, a professor at the University of Chicago, and the title of the paper is, wait for it, the Case for Letting Anthropology Burn. And here’s a quote from the abstract, “The case for letting anthropology burn and entails a call to abandon its liberal suppositions. As a discourse of moral perfectibility founded in histories of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, liberal humanism and as anthropological register of ethnographic sentimentalism proved insufficient to confront the existential threats of climate catastrophe and authoritarian retrenchment in 2019.” There’s another example from a 2022 paper, also an American anthropologist by Zachary Mondesire complaining about the supposed inadequacy of efforts to increase racial diversity among graduate students, “Irrespective of how much scholars revise syllabi and core curricula,” and he’s referring here to so-called decolonization, “There will be no liberation if the professional benchmarks and liberal logics that infuse our departments continue to grind marginalized students into polarized ends of racialized hyperbole, fast rising meteors on the one hand and forgotten students who may or may not complete the PhD at all on the other.”
So if any of you are hoping that appealing to liberal principles could persuade sociocultural anthropologists to respect the academic freedom of those they disagree with, sorry you’re out of luck. And this helps us understand why many sociocultural anthropologists openly call for restricting academic freedom. As an example, one of my UCLA anthropology colleagues, Jeff Brantingham, was subjected to a campaign of intimidation and ostracism launched by the department’s graduate students for the sin of creating a crime prediction machine learning program and marketing it to police departments. A resolution adopted by the graduate student association of my department called for forming a departmental committee to, “Consider referring Professor Brantingham’s research to the vice chancellor for research and to develop a statement on research ethics, intellectual property and academic freedom for the department.” That is to say, academic freedom was to be redefined such that it no longer protects academics who deviate from woke orthodoxy.
Okay, onto the second question that we on this panel are charged with addressing, how to liberate the humanities, although my remarks concern not just the humanities but academia more generally. We’ve reached a point in this conference now where more and more of the stuff that gets said is similar to stuff that’s already been said. The organizers of this conference want to, “Focus on the organizational structures leading to censorship and stifling debate and how to repair them.” Now, I want to challenge that premise somewhat because although of course organizational structures play a role in facilitating censorship, and I’ll say more about that in a minute. The primary culprit lies elsewhere, in the rapid spread of what various authors, including James Lindsay and John McWhorter have called the religion of wokeism with its Manichean worldview and its themes of sin and redemption and apocalypse.
This is a young incendiary religion, a religion of fanatics like 16th century Protestantism. You can’t expect to talk people out of such beliefs or to change their behavior by tweaking the incentive structures or the chains of command, the organizational charts under which they work. This conference is being generously and graciously hosted by a business school, but the problem here, in my opinion, is not primarily a business problem, it’s a philosophy problem. It’s an ideology problem. As for the organizational structures that are at play in the decline of academic freedom, they’re so entrenched that they make repair from within existing institutions close to impossible, and these include: first, the graduate school apprenticeship model. Applicants are admitted to graduate programs on the basis of their adherence to the worldviews of their prospective faculty mentors, which means there’s no mechanism to challenge the prevailing worldviews from within.
Second is tenure, but abolishing tenure, as some Republican controlled state legislatures have considered doing for state universities, would make things even worse because then the decisions about which faculty to retain and which ones to fire would still be made by the same woke faculty and administrators who currently decide who does and doesn’t get tenure. In fact, the effect of abolishing tenure would probably be to end the careers of the handful of openly dissonant academics, some of whom are here in this room. Third, the corporatization of the university which has produced an unprincipled mercenary administrative class. When they are not woke true believers, administrators tend to be empty suits whose only concerns are to raise money and avoid bad publicity.
And fourth, the deference toward their dear old alma mater, even of donors and politicians who say they want to reform these institutions. We saw this in the astonishing story, it was written up earlier this year by Richard Lowry, who’s here, of the collapse of the attempt to form, at the University of Texas, an independent academic unit that would’ve hired and hosted scholars whose research and teaching are sympathetic to limited government, equality before the law and other classical liberal principles.
Far left administrators and faculties sought to sabotage the project. That’s no surprise, but conservative donors and legislators simply acquiesce to the sabotage. That’s very surprising and also very illuminating. So rather than try to repair existing organizational structures, the way forward, I think, is to build new ones, new universities like the University of Austin, maybe. Actually I heard something disturbing about the University of Austin from one of you this morning. New scholarly societies with new journals like the one founded by Lee Jussim that he talked about at lunch, The Society for Open Inquiry and Behavioral Science. The obstacles to this approach are formidable, how to fund these new institutions, how to successfully claim legitimacy for them so that young people will be willing to take the gamble of participating in them, and how to prevent them from being infiltrated by people who want to gain enough influence within them to turn them into copies of the established institutions with all their restrictions.
That last challenge I think is going to prove to be morally rather thorny. It might require that the leaders of the alternative institutions practice a certain amount of exclusivity or even exclusion, keeping some people out, which on the surface would seem to run directly contrary to the principles that these institutions are promoting. Nevertheless, in spite of all these challenges, I think the prospects are better for building new institutions dedicated to academic freedom than for repairing existing ones. It makes me queasy to talk about market forces in higher education. I don’t think that students should be treated as customers and faculty as service providers, but I am a firm believer in the power of natural selection, which acts on ideas and institutions as well as on genes. Although of course there are differences between cultural and genetic evolution.
Alternative institutions that have genuine academic freedom and other liberal educational values written into their charters and are zealously guarded against illiberal infiltration will, we can hope. And I agree with Lee Jussim that forecasting the future is a dangerous business, but we can hope that the alternative institutions will draw better students, produce better research, and maybe even receive more donors’ money than the established institutions. The ongoing decline in higher education enrollment numbers, driven by financial and demographic factors, is a great help to our cause because it increases, it intensifies the selection pressure on institutions. Eventually, maybe, some of the established schools and scholarly societies will face a choice between closing their doors or changing direction and embracing liberal values themselves. Thank you.
John Rose:
Thank you. We’ve heard a lot of pessimistic remarks today and I’m going to do my best to offer a message of hope. I’m not ready to give up on the humanities and I’m in favor of fixing the existing institutions. Why am I hopeful? In my experience teaching at Duke over the last four years, I’ve discovered that the vast majority of students actually want more open inquiry in the classroom. Most of my students self censor, I know this because I poll them anonymously. It’s about two thirds consistently. Obviously that’s all of the conservatives but many liberals and they don’t like the fact that they feel the need to self-censor. They resent it, and that’s important. I also know that they want greater viewpoint diversity in class discussions, guest speakers and syllabi. I teach a lot of students, I taught 200 last year and I meet with nearly all of them over coffee, so I have a sense of what’s going on in these students’ minds.
All of these observations have led me to believe that if you want to create a culture of free speech on campus, it needs to start with the students in the classroom, not with faculty or administrators. If there is a movement afoot, that’s where the energy is. Top-down changes like adopting the Chicago Principles or the Calvin Report mentioned are helpful, I’m in favor of them, but it’s the bottom up changes brewing in student culture that are even more important. Students aren’t the problem in my view, they’re the solution. To do my part to help, I teach classes at Duke on political polarization and conservatism that requires students to discuss hot button topics in a civil manner. We cover everything, and I mean everything, critical race theory, pronouns, transgender athletes, Israel, Palestine, you name it. I ask students in polls, what do you self-censor on? Those are the things we talk about.
And the classes have been a real success. They work, and it’s not because I’m a special teacher, it’s because there’s an unmet enormous student demand for classes like these, for atmospheres like these. And that’s why I’m hopeful. Here’s some strategies that I use in my classes. First, students are required to assume goodwill on the part of authors and classmates. The evidence of bad will can’t be the position itself. Can’t say JK Rowling’s a transphobe. Why? Well, because of her view. No attributing phobias that people don’t claim to have. I spend the whole semester working on this with students. It’s hard for them, and I suppose it’s hard for all of us. We practice Chatham House Rules, this is important for students who fear cancellation. Before class enrollments even start, I actively recruit students into my class who I think will bring viewpoint diversity. So this is the conservative students or students who are deeply religious.
This intellectual diversity helps make possible a culture of free speech. I’ve seen this in practice. The conservatives run interference for the moderates in the room. This is a bit of an aside, but more attention needs to be paid to college admissions. Something that briefly came up in John Chisholm’s remarks, half of America is missing from the college classes at elite universities. I teach from a politically neutral position. I try to teach my students to see that not everything is political or should be political. Much of human experience, arguably the best of it, is non-political or pre political. I try to show my students how to put politics in its proper place. This makes it easier to disagree about politics when we have the conversations. I motivate my students by challenging their sense of toughness.
The political strategist Van Jones, once told students, “I don’t want you to be safe or comfortable. I want you to be strong. I’m not going to take the weights out of the gym. That’s the point of the gym.” And that’s what I tell my students. I ask them, “Are you strong enough to have these conversations?” And I get them to try to think about themselves as intellectual athletes. The metaphor keeps working when you consider that, those of you who do work out, you know that if you train hard and you work on your flexibility you’re actually less likely to get injured when you engage in competition. I also get my students to question whether or not they’re free or their views are their own. And if there’s one thing we all know about this younger generation, they place a real value on autonomy in the sense that they are making their own decisions. And so I ask them rhetorically, if you’re all so free, then why do you all agree about everything in your world views?
And I sometimes quote Abigail Schier and her remarks to the Princeton students telling them, take back your freedom. It’s yours to demand. And I’ll add to my students, in taking it back, you will give it to others. I’ve seen this in the room. Somebody will offer a courageous remark and lo and behold, somebody else raises a hand and then they join in too. So it’s a gift you give to each other. So I can create the right conditions, but they have to take back their freedom. I employ a lenient free speech policy in my class. I require certain academic norms like you have to give reasons for your views. You have to hear reasons, no bullying in your speech. And I require that comments be made in a spirit of humility. Behave as though you don’t know everything. I’m willing to hear your arguments and change my views, and charity which, among other things, means being sincere. Don’t troll each other and a willingness to hear each other’s remarks and what seems to you the most reasonable possible way.
And that’s all. I don’t rule any positions out of bounds and using this method, I’ve never had an issue, but my approach is normative, which perhaps makes me a little different than some of the enlightenment liberals in this room. I don’t know. I preach virtues. My training is in theology and ethics. I think we all know what intellectual cowardice looks like, just as we all admire intellectual courage when we see it. The virtues are universal, that’s my wager in my class. Indeed. I’ll tell my students, you’re getting the hang of the class if you can recognize and admire intellectual virtues in people with whom you disagree. I already mentioned humility, the other virtue I focus on is curiosity. I ask my students to be willing to think in real time. This is a problem. Students at elite college campuses today, they enter a classroom, they’ll often come with what they think is the correct view, the socially acceptable view in mind, and that’s the view they have to get to in conversation.
But thinking in real time means not knowing exactly where the arguments are going. It’s a playful thing, but it’s also a risky thing. Being curious means asking questions like, “I just really want to know why you think that.” It’s the sincere probing question that does wonders to relieve tension in a room because it’s innocent. It shows that what you really want is better understanding. But the virtue, I think most important for creating civil, open discourse in the classroom is charity. Earlier, Professor Arcidiacono, my colleague at Duke, spoke of compassion. I didn’t know he was going to say that. And so I realize now that the two guys from Duke are going to sound like the lovey-dovey types here. There it is. I do ask my students to love their enemies, but I define love as willing the good of the other. It’s Thomas Aquinas’ definition. It doesn’t mean you like them. We all know you can love a person in that way without liking them. Think of a family member right now. I’m sure you all can.
It means you’re not trying to own the other side or embarrass them. I have a friend who likes to use the phrase, “Friend, come up higher.” It means that there’s correction that can and sometimes should take place, but it’s a form of correction that allows the other side to save face. And indeed, there’s a bit of a compliment in it because what you’re saying is, “I actually want you on my side. I think you’re made for better. Come join me.” I assign Martin Luther King Jr’s sermon on Loving Your Enemies in my class. He gives many reasons why we should love our enemies. But the most important one to him is that love has within it a redemptive power. Love is a power that eventually transforms individuals. King said that to change someone, you must first love them and they must know that you love them, they must know that you love them. And they will know, this is me speaking now, among other ways, by the way you engage in dialogue with them.
If you want to change the mind of your fellow classmates or your fellow professors, don’t shame them or silence them, first you must love them. And I’m proud to say that my students have answered this call. They’ve practiced real discourse. Given the right conditions, they can do it, they will do it, I assure you. That’s why I’m hopeful. That’s why I’m not giving up.
Jennifer Burns:
Thank you everyone. I’m sure you have questions. I’m going to exercise a bit of moderator’s privilege just to add a few thoughts and comments. One is, I think sometimes conferences have like a secret theme that emerges. And this brings to mind A.O. Hirschman’s, Voice, Exit or Loyalty, the schemata of the choices available to an individual discontented in their situation. And I think that’s come up in almost every panel. So I’m going to put a thumb on the scale for voice and add a few thoughts to it. One is from the social sciences more than the humanities. And this comes out of my own research in the history of economics, which in the United States across the 20th century was characterized by discrete schools that were methodological, and also they often had a political or a policy teint, and they were nested within specific institutions, which often had their names.
Nobody knows of the Ames school, but at Iowa State there was an Ames school. The Wisconsin school was quite influential. The Wisconsin school was an institutional economics approach. Over time, those scholars became more interested in policy interventions, less in replicating themselves and creating the new professors. And the Wisconsin school was one of the reasons for its decline. I’ve looked a lot at the Chicago School, which was heterodox current for most of the 20th century, was well poised as economic and social conditions change to become far more influential and to shape the field as a whole. So this is an example of diversity within a field, but clustered in discrete institutional settings. And there was interchange and flow. These schools were distinct, but they were not isolated. They argued with each other. They hired, occasionally, across each other, they respected each other and they rose and fell in competition.
The second thought I’d like to say that does relate more to the humanities is that in this moment in history, there are lots of places to play with ideas, lots of places to play with humanistic ideas. And it similarly to there having once been three large media companies that controlled the public square and then fragmented into today’s social media environment. There are lots of places you can go to think about the big ideas, to read the big books, to find other people interested in them. I think Solveig’s comments really touched on that. And so I think the academy and those of us in it have to really think about and articulate, and this may be particularly keen for humanists, what is different about what we do? What is our advantage in this environment where you have so many choices?
I would come back to peer review, evidentiary standards, time to go deep and wide in a way that’s difficult in other places. And I think we really have to articulate what is lost in human and social terms when we don’t have these things available to us. It’s also really important to my mind, the flow of ideas in and around the academy as an essential part of it. So even though I’ve talked in the context of the social science about what you might think of as a monoculture or a distinct school, for an entire field or for an entire set of institutions to have a monoculture is profoundly damaging. And finally, one thing I just want to kind of put out for our consideration, there has not been much discussion, perhaps because there’s no Marxists in the room, of the conditions of academic labor and how these have shifted and changed.
And I think that’s important to attend to because if we’re looking now at a professoriate that, over the course of the 20th century, there was a increase in tenure, became increasingly normative, and we’ve now dwindled down, I think it’s something like 20%, 25% of those teaching in the academy actually have tenure. We shouldn’t be surprised, I don’t think, that as job security has changed, conformity has increased. And this palpable fear of students, it reflects in some ways a more precarious position that scholars have within the academy. And I also know that some of the older organizations dedicated to academic professional organizations, especially I think AUP came out of an academic freedom case here at Stanford in the early 20th, late 19th century led to the establishment of tenure.
I wonder how these new organizations are thinking about conditions of academic employment, tenure, all of that. So I’m sure there are great minds on it. We haven’t heard about it. Maybe it’ll happen in the other conversations. So I’m really happy now to invite questions or comments. I wonder, do the panelists want to have any inter-dialogue or should we just turn to the audience? Audience, all right.
John Rose:
Says the audience.
Jennifer Burns:
Let’s see. I’m going to go first over here.
Dean Hollis Robbins:
Hi, this was a great panel. So thank you. And as Dean Hollis Robbins, Dean of Humanities, I was very interested in hearing the humanities’ viewpoint. I want to actually start by disputing something you said, John, you started out by saying you don’t think you are an exceptional teacher. Well, I dispute that after hearing you, because clearly you’re a most exceptional teacher. And from the dean’s perspective, it’s certainly true that academic disputes over academic freedom often co-vary with unpleasantness. And there’s a lot to be said for pleasantness. There’s a lot to be said for virtues and charity and grace in the classroom, in departments, among any academic unit. And I think modeling that for students and your emphasis on wanting to change the culture as one of the mechanisms that we have to actually have a broader and deeper understanding and conversation about academic freedom is really laudable. So that’s all. Actually, I don’t have a question. I just wanted to dispute that. Say you’re wrong. You are exceptional.
Peter:
So I’ve actually got to see John do his work, and it is absolutely incredible to watch the way the students interact. And he is a real reason why I have hope in that regard, witnessing his class. But what it really is actually a stunning rebuke of professors because he’s actually not paid at all by Duke. He doesn’t have tenure, they could get rid of him at any point. But I wanted to ask John, in particular about how you’ve seen changes over the four years to see is it just a transitory thing or do you feel like there’s patterns to suggest that its taking hold?
John Rose:
I think it’s taking hold. I keep up with my students after I teach them, and anymore, it means meeting with some of these students at least once a semester after they leave my class. And I’ve noticed that they tell other students, and those students tell other students. I can’t begin to teach all the students who want to take my class. And now we have a discussion group that meets every other week to discuss hot button topics. I don’t even know some of these students, they just come and they say, “I’ve heard these are the rules, I want in.” I’m hopeful that this is going to create a wider cultural change in the students. I guess it remains to be seen how big that gets, Peter. I think for that, we need more people. That becomes an issue of fundraising and getting support from the administration. So perhaps there are limits to how much you can do bottom up. Eventually you need support from the top.
Solveig Gold:
John, when you talk about the unmet demand, how many students are we talking about? How many students want to be taking your class and can’t take your class?
John Rose:
Last semester, I set the enrollment cap at a hundred and enrollment was full before many seniors could finish enrolling.
Solveig Gold:
That’s great.
John Rose:
Honestly, I think 500 students might take the class or more. Wow. Yeah, it’s huge demand for it. But I will say this too, I’ve tried to convince other faculty to teach the class, and I don’t get any takers. They look at this syllabus and they say, “What, are you crazy? I’m not going to do this.” This is the problem. Faculty need to know that the senior administrators have their backs and they don’t. So we have a general statement on free speech or academic freedom, all these things. But we also know that when that conflicts with DEI, there’s no assurance that you’re safe. And if you don’t know, you’re going to err on the side of not assigning Glen Lowry or defending JK Rowling or having that discussion at all. That’s the logical thing to do. And the students know that too.
Joseph Manson:
Yeah, I mean, I think what you’re doing is just magnificent, but I worry a little that classrooms like yours will be to the intellectually ecology, what wildlife reserves are to the biological [inaudible 00:41:53]. Almost all the land is farmland or cities or suburbs, but we maintain this tiny percentage. This is kind of a facsimile of the way things used to be.
John Rose:
I don’t know how to respond to that, [inaudible 00:42:06].
Jennifer Burns:
And can you identify yourself.
Greg Salmieri:
Greg Salmieri, Salem Center, University of Texas. So this is also just to John first. The class sounds wonderful. I want to ask a question about it, but just a bit of confirming evidence on something you said. When I was teaching at Rutgers and teaching a critical thinking course, I had the idea that you’re not really doing critical thinking unless it’s about something you might get upset about. So I did something similar of polling people finding the issues they most disagreed on, and then had all the examples be from those issues. I found it was hard to get good examples so the class didn’t work perfectly for that reason, but I was surprised to find it went perfectly well from the students getting along with one another. And we had people saying things that you’re supposed to get canceled for, so to speak. So maybe I was just lucky, but it sounds like your story is proof not. So you talked about selecting to get ideological diversity in the classroom. Could you say something about what the range of kind of students you have, how does it generally break down in the semester?
John Rose:
So if I take a random cross section of Duke students, and we know this now from our student newspaper does polling on this too. It’s about 80% identify as conservative, I think 20% as religious. Now in America, I think it’s 80% who say I believe in God, or I consider myself. So it’s the flip. This is the missing piece too. The most underrepresented demographic at schools like Duke are lower middle class whites. And if you bring this up, it’s kind of so what? Right? And then when we do have geographical diversity, this is anecdotal but I teach a lot of students, it’s amazing how often these students, they’re the one from northern Arkansas, are political refugees. It’s always the story of the narrow escape. I alone have escape to tell you.
So they don’t actually have the views of the people. So I manipulate things, I’m on camera here, I shouldn’t admit this, but I hand out permission numbers in my class to students I know who are conservative or are religious to try to tilt, tilting. And it’s in everybody’s interest because when I teach classes and it’s skewed, I’ll ask the students who are less religious or more liberal, do you want more students who are conservative? “Yes. That actually makes it better. I want more of those students.” Right. It’s like I’ve been telling this to our admissions department too.
Speaker 9:
All right, [inaudible 00:44:39], MIT, I’d like to follow up on your comment about labor and ask the panel to reflect on the problem of the gross over production of PhDs we’re suffering from and its impact on both anxiety, fear, and self-censorship and in addition, if you consider the views of Polybius on how democracies destroy themselves through elite competition, maybe you can take it to a larger level.
Solveig Gold:
Sure. Well, I can certainly speak about the proliferation of PhDs. I know a good number of PhD students who have decided not to go into academia for obvious reasons in this climate. That’s a real pity. I count myself sort of among them. I mean, I am currently a postdoc, but I’m not sure I’m going to stay in the academy. And I want to make a specific point, which is that while I have spent my life in classics departments, in order to continue doing the work I do, I’ve now moved to a politics department because I think there is funding out there for conservative students to be in the social sciences much more than in the humanities. It’s almost non-existent in the humanities if you are a heterodox humanist. So I’ve had to move away from the department I love in order to continue the work I want to do.
Yeah, it’s a huge problem. There are groups that have been founded to address this problem. Places like the Madison Program where I am now housed at Princeton are a great example of what you can do to try to get these PhDs jobs, give them postdocs. But again, that’s the politics department. My husband’s been very involved in a new scholarship that sends students to Oxford, the Barry Scholarship. This is actually contributing to the proliferation of PhDs, but it is trying to fund heterodox students to go into the field so that there will be more people out there with the degrees and the knowledge to try to diversify the profession somewhat. And that’s been proving very successful. As for the end of democracy, yeah, I think we’re headed there.
Jennifer Burns:
So do you want to respond quickly?
Joseph Manson:
The overproduction of PhDs in the sciences, including the social sciences, it is just baked in because the graduate students are your co-authors. And so by having more graduate students, you increase your own research output and that’s a lot of what you’re getting rewarded for. So it’s almost like an intractable problem.
Jennifer Burns:
I have an eager questioner.
Ivo Welch:
Hi, Ivo Welch from UCLA. The litmus test to this conference or your class or anything is that if there’s another scandal, there’ll be a lot of students willing to stand up for what’s right and be able to speak up on defense of positions that they don’t necessarily share either. Has Duke had a scandal or are there any scandals where we’ve actually seen that?
John Rose:
No scandals in my class.
Jennifer Burns:
I can maybe bundle a few together. I see a range of hands. So the mic is on its way. Oh, in the center. Yeah. Nathan, why don’t we start with Nathan and then I’ll bundle.
Nathan Pinkoski:
Thank you. Sorry. Nathan Pinkoski, The academic director at the Zephyr Institute, which was kindly mentioned by one of the earlier speakers. So my question actually bears a little bit on the last one, but not about overproduction, but the problem of underproduction, let’s call it heterodox qualified scholars who hold to the kinds of ideals that you’re talking about. I worry that some of the initiatives that we have, whether it’s in the university or outside the university, we are going to run into a shortage of good candidates very, very quickly.
Because while the undergraduates may be great, I’m terrified of the graduate students in most cohorts. I think those are, in many cases, the fanatics who keep pushing things further and further and further. So two questions come out of that, which I’d love to hear the panel’s thoughts on. First of all, what can we do more within the university to ensure the transmission, whether it’s training graduate students or getting them jobs, what your thoughts are on that? And then secondly, for those who are in the position whereby they’re looking for things outside the university, what can we build that might be attractive to perhaps someone in your state who’s thinking which direction do I go in? What kind of institutions might be attractive?
Solveig Gold:
Beyond the academy?
Nathan Pinkoski:
Beyond the Academy,
Solveig Gold:
Beyond the academy, I think a lot of us just want to keep doing our research and teaching. I personally would love to end up at a think tank if anyone wants to hire me.
Jennifer Burns:
Well, one thing I can just say is that trying to encourage faster degree completion times, and it’s been hard recently. Obviously the pandemic has slowed everyone down, but I feel like the seven, eight to nine year PhD is not really in anyone’s interest. And I think we can just think more specifically about how to get students in and out and then they can be on their way and figure out what is the next step.
John Rose:
Just one little thing about age, I’m concerned about the fact that when I look for allies, the old-school liberals are old. So you think about people at this conference, the younger faculty, much more progressive. And I do worry about this. No offense.
Solveig Gold:
I would say also the University of Austin is a great initiative. It is not, as far as I have seen thus far, going to be very focused on the humanities. An alternative is the new Ralston College in Savannah, which is more focused on the humanities. So I think it’s good to have both kinds of institutions popping up. But yeah, the humanities, as I keep trying to stress, gets lost along the way in a lot of these more heterodox initiatives because people are much more focused in on the social sciences than they are on the humanities.
Jennifer Burns:
I think I’ll maybe just bundle the last three comments as one starting with you with the microphone.
Carlos Carvalho:
Carlos Carvalho, again from the University of Texas at Austin. Joseph, you mentioned something in regards to this comment about University of Austin that’s very important, the notion that you might need to make sure that some people stay out. You said when you’re talking about new institutions are hiring people, and John also mentioned the fact that you tried to essentially do affirmative action in views in order to populate your class. But I think in this crowd here, when I talked to lots of you, when I proposed the notion that, “Well, we should have affirmative action for hiring diversity of conservative academics in some places,” I think Greg Lukianoff suggested that’s one way out would be to have programs that are dedicated to higher conservative academics.
Assuming that there’s a pipeline, which might be zero chance of accomplishing that, how would you put the litmus test, let’s not say conservative, not political. What is the litmus test that you might have in mind to say, “You know what, we need to leave some people out.” Who are the people? I mean, I think I know, but I know I would like to hear your thoughts on it.
John Rose:
Are we going to bundle some questions?
Jennifer Burns:
Yeah, I think we’re going to take the last two just to keep us on track.
Cole:
[inaudible 00:52:31] institution. I have a quick question for Solveig, You seem to be talking about the state of the field of classics in the United States-
Solveig Gold:
Yeah.
Cole:
… If I’m not mistaken. Since you had experience studying classics in the United Kingdom, I wonder if it’s completely different there, sort of the same, how much better or how much worse? Thanks.
Amy Wax:
Yeah. Amy Wax, University of Pennsylvania Law School. I teach a course in conservative political and legal thought at Penn Law and what I have found over the years that I’ve taught it is that the social justice warrior types, the left-leaning students and even the normies just are reluctant to engage with or learn about conservative ideas. It’s hard for me to get students who are left of center, and that’s the overwhelming majority of the students, to even want to take a course like that. I mean, part of it might be that I’m radioactive, but even before I became super radioactive, most of the students I got were the fairly few right of center students. So that is a problem.
The second point is that I find that a few simple rules really go very far in my classes to introduce a sort of discipline. One is kind of Chatham House rules that we don’t tattle outside of class about what other students say. What happens in class stays in class, and if you don’t agree to that rule, you shouldn’t take the class. I’m quite firm about that. The second is that I forbid these stupid labels like racist, sexist, xenophobic, ist labels. I call them, oboist. Anything like that about a person living or dead, you may not use that term. So it’s not a free speech zone in that sense. Finally, I say, “I do not want to hear the phrase, I am offended.” I said, you can be offended, be my guest. But we just don’t want to hear about it. If you don’t like what someone says, say why and give the reasons. And the students adhere to these rules and it works really well.
Jennifer Burns:
And any final comments?
Joseph Manson:
So if you’re going to keep people out, I think a very simple rule you could use is that the person has to affirm what Jonathan Haidt was saying about that the [inaudible 00:55:03] of this institution is truth, it’s not anything else. And if someone affirms that, then you can let them in.
Solveig Gold:
In response to Cole’s question, I think the UK does a lot of things better still. I always say that the UK is about 10 years behind the US on race issues and about 10 years ahead on trans issues. So do with that what you will. But I think when it comes to the classics department over there, the faculties they’d say, first of all, there’s much more rigor in what’s required of students. So undergraduates have a very set curriculum they have to follow in order to graduate with a degree in classics. That curriculum is changing. There was a big bruhaha at Oxford a couple of years ago when they made Homer and Virgil optional instead of mandatory. But even still, students really have to read the core texts in order to get a degree. And that’s just not true in American universities.
Obviously the trade-off with American universities is that in America we get to have our broad education. You come away with knowledge of subjects other than your own whereas in the UK, you’re really focusing in on one subject for three years. But they know their subject and they know it much better than we do in America. And I think also as a result of that, the faculty in general is a lot less concerned with the day-to-day nonsense. They are much more in their little ivory tower, at least for now. I mean, especially the American graduate students who go over to the UK love to threaten that ivory tower and they show up. And within weeks of matriculating to the UK universities, the American graduate students are already making demands of the faculty members over there.
But for the most part, I think, as I say, things have moved more slowly over there. So the UK gives me a little hope and perhaps can provide some model for what might be done differently here, although it’s a tricky one.
John Rose:
Just briefly on this question about affirmative action for conservative applicants. Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan proposed this and the liberal faculty didn’t like it, obviously. But conservatives don’t like affirmative action, so, “I don’t need that. I just want fair treatment.” So I managed to have a view that nobody liked. I think part of the problem is that the university isn’t attractive to conservatives. So even if they could get the job, do you really want to be the only person in your department who thinks like that? Every flyer on campus, every announcement reminds you that you’re a bigot. The quality of life is low. So I think if conservatives are going to have a place in the university, they need community. They can’t just be one person. You have the Hoover Institute here, that’s an example. You need more things like that. It’s the only way it’s going to happen.
As for the applicants into the schools, I mean, I would almost be in favor of something like affirmative action. Ralph told the story of a conversation he had with a guidance counselor, and the guidance counselor told him, if a student came to me and was going to write an application essay about his or her participation in some pro-life activism, it would be, “Professional malpractice on my part to let that student write that essay.” And we all know this is true. I mean, that’s how the essays work. It incentivizes seeing yourself in a certain way. You’re handed a script from the beginning, you’re playing a part in a play choreographed by others, and it starts early and it discourages one form of thinking about yourself and encourages another.
I guess maybe I would be in favor of something like affirmative action conservatives and then a few would say, well, that’s unconstitutional. My response is, we’ll just use that holistic method that you’ve been using.
Jennifer Burns:
Thank you so much.