Ivan Marinovic:
I am Ivan Marinovic. I am a professor of accounting at the business school here at Stanford, and I will be the moderator of the panel, The State of Higher Education. This is an international panel. We want to talk about the state of academic freedom in the US, the UK, and Canada. We have here three distinguished scholars. We have John Ellis, a professor emeritus of German literature, the University of California, Santa Cruz, also the author of The Breakdown of Higher Education. We have Gad Saad, a professor of marketing at Concordia University, and the author of a bestselling book, The Parasitic Mind, you may have read. And then we have Eric Kauffman, who’s a professor of politics, the University of London, and the author of many reports on academic freedom. The first speaker today will be John Ellis. He’s joining us from Zoom. He’s going to be speaking from Zoom, so without further ado, welcome, John.
John Ellis:
Back in the 1950s and ’60s, academic freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape. In a small town somewhere in the heartland, there’d be a college campus in which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters, mostly political, but also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs, and that would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople. Someone like the local mayor would lean on the college president, who was probably a personal friend, and the president would lean on the department chair, and the young man was soon gone. Then the American Association of University Professors would intervene, and the individual will soon be reinstated, because the AUP would threaten blacklisting. Now, reports of cases like this were seen reasonably often then. The AAUP’s verdict would always insist that college campuses must be the one place where there was unfettered freedom to discuss and analyze issues of all kinds, no matter who might be offended.
The analytical function of academia must never be shut down by a shallow local moralism, and that was then the universal consensus of academic life. Now, if we fast-forward to the present day, one feature of what’s happening on the campuses look similar, that critical analytical function is still getting shut down, whenever it offends an equally shallow local moralism. But there’s a startling difference. The actors have changed places, so it’s now the professors who do what the small-minded small-town worthies used to do, shutting down analysis whenever it offends them, which is often. In fact, they do it on a vastly increased scale. Those old AAUP cases were aberrations affecting a tiny minority of campuses, and they were soon corrected. But today, the stifling of debate and analysis happens almost everywhere. The guilty parties, which include professors and administrators, represent a controlling majority of the campuses, and the scope of what now gets shut down is far more extensive.
In the ’60s, all that was persecuted was some occasional countercultural flamboyance. But at present, virtually any serious discussion of social and political matters is shut down, because to be serious, it would have to include left of center, and right of center opinion, and the campuses don’t want that. We’ve gone from the campus as the only place where discussion must have no limits to the campus as the only place where free discussion isn’t possible. But even that isn’t the worst of it. The way the issues are pursued has also changed radically on contentious issues such as the actual effects of welfare, or racial preferences. The older academic way of approaching that was by empirical investigation that looked at real-world results to determine whether welfare increased or decreased poverty, whether preferences helped or hurt minority students. Now, contrast that methodology with one that doesn’t investigate, but instead sees both preferences and welfare as quite naturally splendid, and therefore, the only people who would oppose them are the greedy, and racist rich who don’t want to give up their money or their privilege.
Well, we’ll call this the smears instead of investigation approach. Now, 50 to 60 years ago, academia was naturally the home of the investigative approach, the social questions. My academic colleagues at that time left, and right, all felt that the other approach was simply beneath them. That was what shyster politicians did. But today, the smears instead of investigation approach is common, and accepted throughout academia, of all places, while the investigative approach can get you into real trouble, if you venture into areas where there’s a radical left orthodoxy, say colonialism. Now, if we juxtapose typical professors of these two eras, in light of all these differences, it’s obvious that they’re completely different kinds of people. They have nothing in common. This almost reminds me of those horror movies in which some sinister force manages to abduct a group of people and replace them with clones who look identical, but are really an alien species. The difference is that one kind of replacement happens overnight, while the other took 50 years for the radical left to make the switch.
In 1969, a survey by my friend, Martin Trow, found that college faculties were politically fairly evenly split with about three left of center, every two right of center. But by the end of the 20th century, 30 years later, that had slowly become a five to one ratio. That was sufficient to give the left the power to ensure that virtually all new professorial appointments were of leftists. Accordingly, the left to right ratio began to rise sharply, at that time. It went from five to one to eight to one in just five or six years, a really startling change in so short a time. It’s now probably something like 15 to one, but still rising rapidly. Now, when recruiting is focused so heavily on political ideology, you don’t simply wind up with academic scholars who happen to be all politically left.
What you really get is not academic scholars at all, but instead, political activists. Scholars are defined by intellectual curiosity. That’s the last thing you’ll find in these political activists. On the college campus, they might just as well be aliens, because these two kinds of people, scholars, and activists couldn’t be further apart. The proof of this is that the criteria for success of the one are actually the very same as the criteria for failure of the other. Political activists succeed to the extent they manage to stamp out opposing political views, but that would mean the end of rational analysis and debate, which is the core of higher education. If things go the other way and the academic teacher succeeds, then the political activist has failed. This is the core of the problem we face, universities overrun by the wrong kind of people, political zealots who don’t understand academia, have no aptitude for it, and use it to achieve ends that are incompatible with it. While that condition remains, no real improvement is possible.
Reform means, in one way or another, replacing the wrong kind of people in higher education with the right kind, and nothing short of that will have much effect. In the last few years, critical race theory has suddenly overrun our public schools. The medical profession has begun to grow woke, as has the military, the law, museums, journalism. Left radicalism has really been making enormous progress by using the campuses, but that is exactly what the radicals promised us back in the ’60s with their Port Huron Statement. They admitted then that, in America, they could never succeed at the ballot box, and so intended to seize control of the universities, and use them to promote their ideology. They easily conquered the humanities, and social sciences. Now that stem fields have been brought to heal by means of DEI, their control of the campuses is virtually complete, and they’ve begun to use them just as they all said they were.
Well, what can we do? First of all, it’s as well to remember that the left to right ratio of campus faculty is still rising fast, which means that however bad things are now, there’ll be worse next year, and still worse the year after that. But if you find that hard to imagine, all you have to do is think about what’s happened in these last two years. One whole generation of college students has already been indoctrinated, so that about a half of young people now favor socialism. But just think about where we will be after two generations have had the same treatment. That also means two generations knowing nothing about the constitution. Some well-meaning colleagues think we should keep trying to persuade the campuses to be more academically minded, but you can’t really persuade people whose values have nothing in common with yours. In any case, this suggestion has a fatal flaw. It leaves the wrong people still in place.
Other colleagues are suggesting that we should constrain the radicals with new rules on even laws concerning free speech, or the use of the classroom for political purposes. This again has that fatal flaw. The wrong people will still be left in place in the classrooms, and they’d ignore any new rules, just as they’ve been ignoring plenty of relevant existing ones. Racial quotas have always been banned, they use them anyway. Use of the university for political purposes has always been banned, they do it anyway. The radicals know they’re safe, because they control all the campus enforcement mechanisms, both faculty committees and administrations.
This corrupted version of higher education is doing immense damage to our society. Our children are not getting a college education. The colleges are spreading a destructive ideology, and the professions are being corrupted one after another. The public pays for this through taxation, tuition payments, and donations. While the flow of that money continues, nothing will change. It now supports people who are hired to do one job, but actually do a completely different one of their own choosing. Reform will come only when public attitudes catch up with the reality of what’s going on, and that’s where the efforts of reforms ought to be directed.
Most parents still think they’re sending their children to college, not to bootcamp for radical activists. They’ll only stop doing this when they come to understand the difference. If and when the flow of public money dwindles, these irretrievably corrupted institutions would begin to fail for want of enrollment. At that point, some empty campus buildings would be available for building serious universities from scratch, rather like the new University of Austin. Competition from places like that might begin to put some alien-infested campuses out of business. Now, some good news is that the public is already beginning to vote with its feet. For every five undergraduates who enrolled in the fall of 2011, there were only four enrolled 10 years later in 2021, that’s a drop of about 3.6 million out of some 20 million. Adjusting those numbers either for an aging population or for COVID, has yet very little difference. Millions of parents and students have already figured out that college is no longer worth the cost in lost years and money. Let’s hope that more do so soon. Thank you.
Ivan Marinovic:
Gad.
Gad Saad:
The title of my talk is The Deontological Pursuit of Truth, and I will talk about that. But I also ad lib. I’m going to add lib a few things as I thought about them, as I was sitting down. As the, I guess, resident Canadian here, I was tasked with reporting on what’s going on in Canada, and we can argue whether Sweden, or Canada is the top woke place in the world. Some will say Sweden, some will say Canada. I happen to be at one of the wokest of Canadian universities, and so many people have come up to me today and said, “How is it that you can say all the things that you do, and yet survive in that world?” Well, maybe that’s what we’ll talk about a bit today. Having the intellectual courage to just say what you wish to say, unencumbered by some of these shackles.
For those of you who think, oh, but tenure protects you, I will send you the death threats that I receive, and then we can discuss whether tenure protects you in every possible way. In any case, let me just contextualize how it is in Canada. This is a study that came out a few years ago from the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, ranked 60 universities, Canadian universities in grades, along four metrics in terms of how much freedom they have. Do university policies promote freedom, university practices, student union policies, and student union practices? It turns out that out of 240 possible grades, 60 universities times four, there were only six As. Roughly 2.5% of all possible grades are As in Canada, so we certainly are not doing a very good job promoting the freedoms that we’re all concerned about. Just to give you a few examples, not unlike the event that you got, that we are holding here today.
Back in 2017, Jordan Peterson, and I were supposed to speak at a event titled The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campus. Of course, what ended up happening to that event? It was canceled. And then it was eventually held, a few months later, at a much larger forum. But if you saw the number of private security, and Toronto security that had to be there, Jordan, and I were looking at each other and thinking, “How could it be that two Canadian professors are going to talk about something as innocuous as the importance of freedom of speech require 50 bodyguards?” But that’s the kind of zeitgeist that we have today. This is me, at a heavier weight, appearing in front of the Canadian Senate in 2017. At the time, Bill C-16 was not yet passed. Bill C-16 refers to incorporating gender identity, and gender expression under the rubric of hate crimes.
Of course, most reasonable people would say, “Yeah, of course, sign me up for that. I support transgender rights.” But I was asked to come as a evolutionary psychologist to talk about things like evolved sex differences, something that Jerry Coyne very briefly mentioned earlier today, there is such a thing as male and female, and sexual selection, Darwin’s sexual selection is a real thing, and so on. And then this luminary senator at the end of my testimony accused me of being a pro-genocide guy. This is the person who escaped execution in Lebanon as a Lebanese Jew. This is the kind of discourse that you have in the Canadian Senate.
I won’t mention, I won’t spend much time on this, but the DIE religion, diversity inclusion, equity, now is everywhere at Canadian universities, whether you get a grant, whether you get a chaired professorship, everything is driven by DIE. We also have in Canada, something that I don’t think you quite have in the United States. We have the indigenization of the university, and that can mean many things. It could mean land acknowledgements, but it can mean something actually a lot more nefarious. It can argue that the scientific method is not the sole epistemology for adjudicating across hypotheses, but there are other ways of knowing. There is an indigenous astronomy? No, there isn’t. Okay? There is only the scientific method. There isn’t a Lebanese Jewish way of doing evolutionary psychology. There is evolutionary psychology. Okay?
Some people ask me, “How come I get away with that, being able to say that?” I’m not sure, maybe it’s my radiant smile. But the reality is, everybody has to be able to speak with this kind of boldness, and I think that the problem would go away pretty quickly. This is at UBC a few years ago, and shortly, I will stop with the Canadian examples. This professor argued that she wasn’t granted tenure, not because she hadn’t published much, but rather because she’s indigenous, and therefore her culture promotes the oral tradition, so having things like writing things was considered to be a form of violence against her oral tradition. That wasn’t laughed out of the place, rather that it was actually heard. That’s the kind of lunacy you face. Now, let’s move on very quickly. I’ll skip this.
I want to talk briefly about this. This is a few days ago, I posted this, and his name is up only because it was on a public forum. This is a pretty prominent professor of marketing, and head of a department at a major university. I was sarcastically saying, “Now that Elon Musk has taken over, here are some things that we won’t be banned for, men don’t menstruate and can’t bear children, that would not get us.” He writes back sarcastically, “Yes, truly an exciting day. Now, uninformed, under-researched, thoughtless, hurtful, and offensive ideas have the same and equal global platform as those other foolish thoughts that advocate caring for others. Free speech reigns, humanity will finally triumph.” And then I responded, and then he didn’t respond to that. “I escaped execution in Lebanon, because I’m Jewish, and yet I support the right of Holocaust deniers to spew their grotesque, and offensive nonsense. You have zero understanding of what freedom of speech means. Freedom of speech is a right guaranteed equally to all people, and not solely those who hold our enlightened views.” Right?
What he was saying, basically, in a typical elitist smug way, the rubes, the plebs, the great unwashed, surely we can’t be promoting their ideas. We are the holders of the truth. That leads me to my next point, which is the difference between consequentialist ethics, and the ontological ethics. The ontological ethics is, if I say it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement. A consequentialist statement would be, it’s okay to lie, for example, if you’re trying to spare someone’s feelings. If you wish to remain married and your spouse says, “Do I look fat in those jeans?” Then you say, “Of course, you don’t. You look beautiful.” That’s a consequentialist bent, right? On many things we are consequentialist. But when it comes to academic freedom, when it comes to freedom of inquiry, when it comes to freedom of speech, that has to be enshrined as a deontological principle. Regrettably, many professors, maybe not here today with us completely abide by a consequentialist ethos. That’s wrong.
Let me skip here. Just to prove this point, using a very dramatic example. In 1960, Mossad had located Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, and they faced one of two possibilities. They could either execute him there and disappear into the night, and nobody would know anything about it, or at great personal cost, and great diplomatic cost, they would try to whisk him out of Argentina, return him to Israel, where he would stand trial. Well, there they abided by the deontological principle that everyone deserves their due date in court. If Adolf Eichmann can be afforded that right, then the imbeciles who will say things like, “But surely we can’t allow Donald Trump to speak, because that just makes no sense.” They are succumbing to a consequentialist ethos. You either believe in these principles and you don’t violate them, or you don’t. Now, the next one I want to talk about just very briefly, and this is the part that I want to ad lib.
This is arguably my favorite quote by a scientist of any quote, so bear with me. I actually quoted in one of my earlier books, the Consuming Instinct in the last chapter. This is from J.B.S. Haldane who’s an evolutionary geneticist who was also very known for being very quotable. He had these great quips. He said the following, in reference to the four stages that academics go through before they accept a theory. He said, “The process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages. Number one, this is worthless nonsense. Number two, this is an interesting, but perverse point of view. Number three, this is true, but quite unimportant. Number four, I always said so.” Now, why is this so poignant to me? Because if I were to write an autobiography of my career, I would just have this quote as the entire book, because my entire career has been defined by this, right?
People said, “Evolutionary psychology, that’s quack science. It’s bull shit. Don’t do it. You want to do it in the business school? That’s insane. Don’t do it. You want to start a podcast, what you’re selling out, don’t do it.” You want to go on Joe Rogan? As someone from Stanford told me, when I came in 2017, he said, “Well, we don’t condone that at Stanford.” I said, “You don’t condone what? Going in front of a show with 20 million people to share your ideas?” Right? Basically, the intrusion to academic freedom doesn’t only come from institutional forces. It comes from our frailties whereby we decide to adhere to certain norms, right? Don’t do this type of research, do this type of research. Don’t do this. Don’t say that. Don’t, right?
Well, break free of those. Be a player. What I mean by player is, in my next book, I talk about the good life and how to be happy. I have a chapter called Life as a playground. I live by that ethos. If some of you follow me on social media, or on my podcast, I can act like a complete buffoon. Not because I’m a buffoon, because I can mock, I can satirize, I can joke, I can be very professorial. I’m multifaceted. What we need to do as professors is, put on multiple hats, and that’s how we break free out of the shackles of intrusions to academic freedom. Thank you very much.
Eric Kaufmann:
The last time I was in Silicon Valley, actually, was a family trip in the early ’80s. My dad had just discovered the new Apple II Plus, and was stopping off at every computer shop from Cupertino down here, so it’s great to be back. Essentially, I think we want to situate what’s going on in university campus within what I would say is a cultural Cold War. The economic Cold War, if you like, was between economic socialism, and economic liberalism, the free market. The cultural Cold War we’re in now is between cultural liberalism, and cultural socialism. By cultural liberalism, I’m talking about free speech, scientific reason, equal treatment due process, and so forth. By cultural socialism, I mean, equal outcomes for historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups as the highest value, along with protection from harm for these groups, including emotional harm such as microaggressions.
Though the care/harm and equality, moral foundations, to use Jonathan Haidt’s terminology, trump the more liberal foundations, and this is really a value conflict. I think, really beyond a certain point, these two values are incompatible, fundamentally incompatible. When we go to the university, we see that this is an epicenter of this conflict, and this is the area where cultural socialism has managed to become hegemonic more than anywhere else. What I want to do in this talk is really three things. One is, set out a framework for understanding how we got here. Second, to put some numbers on these things, Neil alluded to some of this in his talk, to show just how big the scale of this problem is. And then lastly, to look at some policy recommendations including from Britain, where I’ve been somewhat involved in a piece of legislation called the Higher Education Freedom Bill. I want to talk about how I think government actually has a very important role to play in this towards the end.
Okay. I think, to understand the model here of how we got here, there’s really two things going on. One is institutional punishment, and this is where activists, whether they be faculty, or students, or administrators, put pressure on the administration to clamp down on speech in terms of censorship, or in terms of canceling academics. That’s a vertical process. But perhaps more important than that is a peer-to-peer process of political discrimination. That political discrimination, I would argue, is an even bigger problem than the pressure on institutions to fire people, and to now platform people. In combination, what I call hard and soft authoritarianism, the vertical process, and the peer-to-peer horizontal process of authoritarianism produce chilling effects on those who don’t conform to the progressive ideology of cultural socialism.
Those chilling effects then lead to self-censorship, creating a hostile climate, which deters prospective dissenters such as gender critical feminists, or conservatives from entering onto an academic track. That then leads to a feedback which leads to a… What that creates is fewer conservatives and other dissenters going into the professorate, which reduces viewpoint diversity. The reduction in that viewpoint diversity makes both hard authoritarianism that is punishment, and the political discrimination worse. John Ellis, in his book, he didn’t get a chance to talk about this, talks about how when you get into a monoculture, the emphasis moves away from trying to find creative synthesis of two opposing positions to exemplifying the common values that are shared by everybody, so you get fundamentalism. It doesn’t matter if it’s religious fundamentalism, or in our case, cultural socialist fundamentalism. On the other hand, we have political discrimination also gets worse, because if you imagine five conservatives, and five on the left in a department, they discriminate against each other equally.
You’re just as likely, as a conservative, to benefit from discrimination as to suffer from discrimination. But when it gets to 10 to one, even if people are discriminating at exactly the same rate, the impact of discrimination on the minority is dramatically higher, and that is most of what is going on. We’ve been in this doom loop for about 50 years, as John says. Let’s look at some of the figures, based on survey research that I’ve done and others have done. For hard authoritarianism, Neil mentioned, roughly one in five academics, let’s say in the US, but also in Britain would favor at least one of four hypothetical cancellation scenarios of wanting to fire professors for doing controversial research. That increases to two in five for academics under age 30. This is a common pattern we see in Britain, the US, and Canada. Academics under 30 who are far left are twice as intolerant as academics over 50 who are far left. This is an age generational thing, and it holds equally off-campus as it does on-campus.
Soft authoritarianism. In terms of political discrimination, Neil mentioned, in Britain, a third of academics we surveyed, using YouGov survey, would not hire a known Brexit supporter. In the US, 40% wouldn’t hire a known Trump supporter. In Canada, it’s 45% based on the data that I have. Likewise in data which hasn’t been released, about seven out of 10 conservative academics in the US say that they are discriminated against, or would be discriminated against by colleagues, at least occasionally. We have this atmosphere then of punishment, and political discrimination. That produces chilling effects. Seven in 10 conservative academics say that their departments are hostile climates for their beliefs, and seven in 10 say they self-censor. We’ve got a massive effect here of self-censorship, and this is really the giant effect. It’s not a few no-platforming, it’s not a few academics getting canceled. It’s the hundreds of thousands of academics affected by chilling effects in self-censorship, and the millions of students affected by this. That is what’s really going on, and that’s distorting the entire academic enterprise away from the pursuit of truth.
I’ve got data also on if we ask about whether you would want to pursue an academic career, conservative masters and PhD students, roughly half of them say that one of the reasons that they would not pursue this is, their political beliefs wouldn’t fit. You’re getting this repulsion effect. Political minorities are being deterred from going down the academic track, and that’s produced what John just recently talked about, which is a shift in academia. Britain, and the United States, it’s gone from about one and a half on the left, one on the right in the mid-sixties to between five and six to one today. If we take the soft social sciences, it’s gone from something like three to one to 12, 13, 14 to one. That feedback effect and loop has been operating for about 50 years, and has gotten us to where we are now. Okay. What can we do about this?
Okay. I want to start with the problem of institutional punishment, no-platforming. We’ve heard about the Chicago principles, and I think the Chicago principles are a great idea. I’m Canadian, by the way. I’ve lived in the UK for 25 years, but in Canada there are two provinces, Alberta, and Ontario, which are more likely to have conservative governments, especially Alberta. They’ve both brought in a requirement for universities to have these statements. Absolutely useless, no difference at all. Just having these high-minded statements does essentially nothing. But I do want to talk about what’s happening in Britain. There is a academic freedom bill, which has passed through the House of Commons. It’s on its third reading in the House of Lords. It will go into effect next calendar year. I’ve been somewhat involved with this legislation, and I think it could mark a change. It’s going to be very interesting to see how this operates.
I’m going to tell you a little bit about the higher education free speech bill. Unlike the Canadian bills, yes, it requires universities to adopt these statements. But in addition to that, it creates a-10 person directorate, an academic freedom directorate on the sector regulator, the office for students. This directorate has the power to find universities for breaches of its duty to not just protect, but to promote academic freedom. It creates a statutory tort, so that students can sue their universities for violation of their right to academic freedom. It allows the academic freedom director to issue guidance about best practice, and therefore to hold universities to ask them to amend their policies, so that they are compliant with the law. We’ve gone the legislative route in Britain, and it’s going to be interesting to see. I think this is going to be a lot more effective already, by the way, already it’s been having an effect.
University of Essex tried to essentially persecute a number of gender-critical feminists. It backed off in the wake of this legislation. I think that chilling effect on universities, and their ability to censor is really the aim of this legislation. It’s also important that it’s proactive, and real-time. Students or staff are going to be able to appeal around their universities to an ombudsman in the academic freedom directorate. That’s very crucial that academics and students have an immediate recourse around their universities. It’s very important. We’ve talked a lot about law and suing, and I think that’s very important. But the problem is it’s costly. It’s uncertain what the outcome is going to be, and the problem there is it takes time. Therefore, in a way, the punishment comes from the process, that is, the process of having to jump through all these hoops is a deterrent, and so people would rather self-censor.
When you have a proactive directorate that is actually breathing down the necks of universities in real-time, this is being leaked into the media, and reported. That creates a much more powerful chilling effect on universities. I think that will really help us solve this problem of hard authoritarianism. But what it won’t do, is get at the problem of peer-to-peer political discrimination, which I think is actually a bigger issue. What can we do about that? We heard about the Calvin report. I think the trustees of the University of North Carolina have adopted that. That’s fantastic. We need to be able to say that universities cannot be taking political positions, academics in official roles all the way down to department heads should not be making political statements either. Also, I think a crucial element is, we have to start to define things which are presented as moral, such as decolonizing the curriculum.
We need to start defining those as political, and therefore in violation of the obligation to be impartial, and therefore a violation of the Kalven Report principles. But I would even go further. We talked a bit about affirmative action for conservatives, I don’t think you need to. Obviously, conservatives are allergic to affirmative action, but what I think we can do is something I would call equivalent action, which is anything that you do on EDI for race and gender, you’ve got to match for ideology and politics, right? That then allows you to say, okay, well, if you’re going to monitor race and gender, you’re going to monitor political beliefs. If you’re going to pursue diversity on race and gender, diversity on political beliefs, inclusion, hostile environment for race and gender, you’ll do the same thing for political beliefs. Now, if a university doesn’t want to do anything on EDI, they can cut EDI for race and gender.
They don’t have to do anything on politics. I don’t think it is okay to do one, and not the other. Actually, when you poll on this, as I’ve done repeatedly, there is bipartisan support for paying as much attention to political discrimination and diversity as there is to paying attention to racial diversity and discrimination, or gender diversity and discrimination. I think that’s something else that we can do, is to bring in this equivalent action alongside the Kalven Report. Now, that in combination with an academic freedom directorate, I think is going to really help to lift this hostile climate, which is deterring conservatives and other minorities from entering the professorate, and can help to break that political monoculture that exists now. Now, of course, this is not really going to… There is still a need for new initiatives, because students, let’s say in this country, lean two and a half to one left versus right.
There’s still going to be conformity, particularly at the elite schools, so we do need spaces where conservative intellectualism can thrive. Places like the University of Austin, we need centers such as that at Arizona State University, or the University of Texas, Salem Center, off-campus institutes such as the Abigail Adams Institute, and Hoover Institution, and so forth. These are vital to help preserve that countercultural intellectual tradition. But I do want to warn that I don’t think that’s going to change the system, because academia is not a free market. It has tremendous first-mover advantages. There are network effects, which means that endowments, reputations, alumni, all of these things conspire to preserve the existing order. You don’t get that creative destruction of the new driving out the old, which is why you really need this government… I believe you need this government regulation, intrusive regulation, in order to keep universities from oppressing political minorities, and to force them really to promote academic freedom.
It’s a bit like if we look at the social media firms, you need a Parler, and a Gab to allow certain views, or certain freer debates to exist, but they aren’t going to have the same effect as an Elon Musk purchasing Twitter. Now, I’m not saying that what I’m advocating is a sort of a Musk solution, but it is closer to that in the sense that it’s about attacking the nerve center, and it’s attacking the existing system, and trying to reform it. Not attacking, that’s the wrong word, but trying to reform the existing system, while at the same time, also allowing for a mixed economy, where we have new institutions. But I just don’t think new institutions on their own are going to somehow drive a market-led process of creative destruction. Again, I want to stress, we need these new institutions. I’m hugely supportive. I think the University of Austin is doing a fantastic job. It’s a both-end solution, but we also need the government regulation, very important, I think, to do that in order to try and reform the bulk of the system. All right.
Speaker 5:
I have a question mostly for Kaufmann. What does it look like? Imagine an ideal world, or more ideal world, where we can cajole a university, maybe with a threat of funding, to actually hire political minorities of some kind. They say, “Yeah, okay. We admit we should have it more conservative.” How do you stop, say, imagine this happens. I’ll use an American example, so it strikes at home. You get, say the University of Virginia to say, “Okay, you’re right. We should hire more conservatives, so we’re going to hire Bill Kristol to teach a class.” How do we ensure that the state… This isn’t a skeptical question, right? This is a question about getting the legislation done. Well, how do we ensure that the state actually hires people who are genuine representatives of the political minorities in question?
Eric Kaufmann:
Well, I think, actually the realignments that have occurred, that have matched ideology to partisanship, say in this country since 1980, conservative liberal, which didn’t use to line up with Democrat, Republican. Now, it does. Means that if you’re using a metric such as partisanship or ideology, it’s going to be pretty effective in capturing the population of interest. Now, I’m trying to think of a country where those don’t align well. Right. In a way, this realignment has affected enough countries, and especially the ones that have been hit by this woke wave. Canada, I think, is as polarized now as the United States, if you look at vote switching. I think if you do it on the basis of voting, I think that’s probably sufficient. Yeah.
Speaker 6:
Eric, another question for you. In your cultural, in your equivalent action use, create an equivalence, it seems to me between EDI on the one hand, and politics on the other. But how do you really make those equivalent? Maybe it’s faith,, or economic orientation or geography, or some other dimension rather than politics that should be made equivalent. If I may suggest, what seems to be the approach you might use is to do it empirically, and that is, see how much we’re affecting the population along the student population, or faculty, or whatever, along all of these different dimensions by putting in place these EDI programs. And then there’s a mix of all of these different elements that we’re trying to incorporate to counterbalance them, not just politics.
Eric Kaufmann:
Yeah. I mean, completely agree. The way I’d like to see it done is, you have maybe 50 different dimensions, run them through a computer somehow, I mean, ideally. Obviously, this is getting very difficult too. You’d have to have a survey that had all those questions on it, and you’d have to have done analysis to know which groups are underrepresented, and which ones are related perhaps to intellectual diversity, however we want to define that. Yeah. Geography class, I mean, if we’re going to do this, we should probably do it empirically, and make it evidence-based, and have as many different dimensions. I totally agree.
Francis Whitson:
Thank you very much. Thanks for your talks. That’s great. My name’s Francis Whitson. I was at Mount Royal University, Canada, Alberta, has the Chicago principles of free speech policy at Mount Royal University. It makes no difference. The enforcement aspect is very, very key. I also acted outside the box, satirical warfare on social media, was fired for satire in Canada, Alberta. That’s another problem. But what I wanted to ask a question about is this reference to the problem as being a left-wing problem, and I wanted to raise this again. I think this is not a correct analysis.
I think the problem is authoritarianism, and you can have left-wing liberals, left-wing authoritarians, right-wing liberals, and right-wing authoritarians. It’s the political compass type of analysis, I think. I think we should be focusing much more on the authoritarianism aspect, which is whether you value free speech rather than the idea of left-wing, which typically has been class politics, and economic equality. That’s generally what’s the left wing. I’m wondering about your thoughts about this political compass, both panelists or all three, liberal in terms of freedom, and then the economic aspects, and thinking about it in terms of that quadrant as opposed to a left, right type of thinking.
Ivan Marinovic:
Do you want answer?
Gad Saad:
Mm-hmm. In The Parasitic Mind, I basically argue that all of the idea pathogens that started from 80 years ago to 40 years ago, depending on which pathogen you’re talking about, cultural relativism, social constructivism, post-modernism, the grandaddy of all idea pathogens, all of these were promulgated by leftist professors, if only by virtue of the fact that the university ecosystem is populated by leftist professors. Now, that doesn’t mean that people on the right cannot also be parasitized by bad ideas. But to the extent that I am focusing on what has gone wrong within the university ecosystem, then I would stand firmly on the position that most of these dreadful ideas, if not all of them, come from leftist professors.
Eric Kaufmann:
Yeah. Just another quick response there. If you ask people where they stand on a five-point scale from very left to very right, or in the US, very liberal to very conservative, that is the strongest correlation with your views on DEI statements on whether someone should be canceled on. What I’m saying in a way is, self-identified political positions, left and right, is the strongest correlate of your support for woke policies, if you like. I think it is correct to call it a left-wing issue. I mean, what I would say is that, in a way that what you talk about was the economic socialism. It’s simply been transposed from class to identity groups, but it’s still an oppressor-oppressed framework pursuing utopia, so I think it’s similar. It is left, I guess, in that sense.
Gad Saad:
John, would you like to comment on that as well?
John Ellis:
Well, look, if you go back to a time when faculties were politically balanced, you did not have these problems. It is the imbalance that produces them. It’s theoretically, possibly you could have an overwhelming right-wing situation of produced intolerance. But the one we have is an overwhelming concentration of left-wing faculty, and that’s what we’re dealing with. It is the change from the ’60s is a change from an evenly balanced political situation to an extreme of one kind. That’s the source of the problem.
Ivan Marinovic:
Give him this mic.
Zachary Patterson:
Okay, great. Yeah. My name is Zachary Patterson. I’m from Concordia University, like Professor Saad, actually, in Canada. There’s lots of interesting conversations today, ideas for different types of policies to help improve academic freedom. One thing that often occurs to me that I didn’t hear at all about today is funding agencies, and the role that they might have in helping to support or not prevent academic freedom. I’d be interested in hearing any of the panelists’ opinions on that.
Eric Kaufmann:
Yeah. I mean, I think they can be brought under the rubric of the legislation as well, because their funding is controlled, well, at least in places where government controls their funding. I should say, one other thing is, it’s very important to get the right people into these directorates, and agencies. The academic freedom director job is currently being advertised. I’m reasonably sure the person who is hired for that job is going to be a believer in this mission. I guess, this is where this connects to politics, because this is a piece of legislation that we managed to get on the conservative manifesto, and so they were going to pass it. I mean, I’m afraid it’s going to be right of center parties that are going to spearhead this legislation. The hope being that if the left opposes that, they pay enough of an electoral price, that the centrist in their ranks are empowered to eventually say, “We’ve got to support this as well.” That’s the end goal. Yeah.
Speaker 9:
I’m Steven Morris from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. There is a limit to what all these reforms can do in the following sense, and this is the softest form of soft authoritarianism. We have 10 candidates this year for a faculty job, five conservatives, and five people on the left. The conservatives are all not as good. How would you ever show that people are discriminated? This is a prime example of the exercise of academic freedom, deciding who’s good enough to be in the club, and until you find a way to break that, you’re not going to break the monoculture.
Eric Kaufmann:
Okay. Well, yeah, no. I mean, that’s the ideal, right? It’s just to hire the best. The problem, of course, is as we know, people are very good at finding rationales to tip the scales one way or the other. Unfortunately, when you have a monoculture that’s tipping the scales systematically in one direction, I mean, there’s really no other option other than to monitor this and say, “Well, let’s revisit some of these decisions which you made. Why are we winding up with a faculty that looks 100% left?” That’s all I’m saying. Now, it could be that we decide we’re not going to do any EDI, race, gender, politics. Fine, but then what I’m saying is I don’t think it should be okay to do EDI only for the sacred values of one side of the equation.
Speaker 10:
Hello? Yeah. We’re hearing that there’s a tremendous tension between what we’re hearing and the investigations, as an alumnus, that I’ve done for years and months. That is this idea of the 8% that are extreme versus, as John Ellis talked about, that here we also know it’s also 98 to one, or 20 to one left-leaning. We’ve had people like the Heterodox Academy, who I’ve had very in-depth conversations with, who believe that there’s the silent majority of faculty that want to be scholars, and they just have to have the opportunity. Even though they may be left-leaning, they will move in that direction and we can, I guess, save the universities versus others that are saying, basically, there is no silent majority and it’s just totally dominated by extreme thinking on the one side. I’m interested in this group of three panelists. As an alumnus, I’m not at the university. We’re hearing faculty say very different things, and I’m trying to figure out which is really the case.
Gad Saad:
Regarding the silent majority, this is the exact email that I received from thousands of professors. “Dear professor Saad,” they introduce themselves, they say some very sweet things, and then the ending sentences, “and if you decide to read my email on your show, please don’t mention my name.” And then I respond very politely and I say, “Dear professor so-and-so, thank you for your lovely note. Do you not think that maybe the last sentence might be part of the problem?” There is a silent majority. I’m proof that they all contact me, but yet they simply haven’t developed the fortitude to say, “I’m going to speak out.” I am very optimistic in that. I don’t think all professors, even if they’re leftist, believe in all of this woke nonsense, but they’re just completely cowed into silence. If there’s a way to encourage them to speak out in unison, I truly think that this problem can go away pretty quickly.
Eric Kaufmann:
I agree to some degree, but I want to put in a cautionary note that may be a little less optimistic here. If you ask academics in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, whether you favor mandatory diversity statements, or oppose them as political litmus tests, you get about six and 10 in favor and about two, just over two and 10 against. If you ask whether academics in the Canada, UK, US favor mandatory race, and gender quotas on reading lists, it’s about 45% in favor, 33 against, so in the social sciences and humanities. I think, however, if you ask, “Do you favor academic freedom or social justice?” It’s sort of two to one academic freedom over social, depends exactly on the question. But I don’t think we should assume there is a silent majority, unfortunately.
Speaker 10:
Yes.
Ivan Marinovic:
One more question.
Rick Schroeder:
It’s Rick Schroeder at the University of Chicago. It seems to me the Shills report, non-discrimination position, there shall be no consideration of any of the following, including political beliefs and affiliations, is in the service of the free thinking that the classical liberal academia wants. It seems to me an affirmative action program for political conservatives does not serve that purpose. It’ll go exactly the opposite direction. You’re hired for your political beliefs. You’re not free thinking anymore. You’re locked into a position. You are hired as an assistant professor. When you come up for promotion, what if you’ve changed your mind? Is that now a point against you being promoted? I mean, it seems to me it just works against staying on the move between different points of view, being open-minded, taking other people seriously. You’re defined, here’s your political position, that’s why we’ve hired you. This is not the university you want to create.
Eric Kaufmann:
What I would say to that is, I agree with merit-based hiring. I mean, it’s the practical execution. The practical execution of this is that in reality, people, because of motivated reasoning, will tilt the scales, right? I would rather think of this as a way of a better merit-based hiring that corrects for some of those, that system-one type motivated reasoning, right? Because it’s very hard to prove this kind of discrimination. I would just say, look, I mean, this is just a way of monitoring. If the hires are all of one stripe, even though they’re justified as being merit-based, you might want to investigate what’s going on. That’s all it is. But yeah, I agree with you. The ideal principle is totally neutral, merit-based hiring. Yeah.
Ivan Marinovic:
Okay. I think it’s time for dinner. Thank you very much, everyone.