i mean guide. i mean there were placed that are were out of business within a year. some took longer. but day eventually -- in fact it's sad for me to drive through kingman, the part i grew up in, because so much of it is into torn down, desert drugs, where i bought the true west magazine, is a vacant lot, and that's very sad to me. >> there's one message that the book has or hi life has, it is pay attention. we're all looking right at history. i want to reach that nine-year-old guy that i was. want to reach that boy today, and hopefully excite them about the history of our country.

representative tom coll of oklahoma regularly posts his reading list on his web site. in january, congressman coll read destiny and power, john meachem's examination of the life and presidency of george herbert walk-under bush, and he read the account of the bush administration. the book is called "the quiet man." some other books on his reading his are "a park of leadership" by report barbings and the congressman coal represents" the unquite frontier holiday rival countries are tessing the

strength of the united states, and this past year, congress cole read, history of the relations between the united states and american indians. the full list of recommendations is available another cole.house.gov. [inaudible conversations] >> i'm a resident fellow here. thank you for being here for this event and this is our grand opening week here so we're thrilled you got to be part of this new site. we want to be a hub for activity, for the best thinking and idea and people and consumers of information. so, hope you get to come back.

i work primarily on k-12 education, and is a think about it the foundational issues undergirding domestic policy, civil society and decentralization and nongraft groups and pluralism. that's why this conversation today is so important to me and important to you. so on one level this conversation about campus politics is at institutions of higher education, campuses hundreds of bills of dollars flowing through them and students and about faculty and the temperment, the disposition that's created by that environment. also reflects and influences something much deeper, which is do we actually still believe in the pluribus. do we think tate great that people have different cultures and histories and sounds and

they live them out and they can come into spaces like universities that are about the free exchange of idea and mix things up and, motor e most importantly, never haven't to be viewed as being a heretic. i'm not assigning yourself to a certain orthodoxy. because it could be the case our universities aren't just incull indicating young people in a certain world view. they could be reflect can what is going on. if we have gotten into we don't believe in differents of opinion and parochialism is always that. 0 could be know better discussion for this than this bran new book. professor john sim symsick zimmerman is the author of this book. there's a lot 0 of talk, some signals, some noise, and give us

a sense of wife -- of why that matters. he'll probably talk 15-20 minutes. then i will come back up here with david french and dave to have a conversation about this. we'll bat around handful of useds. you probably know david from national review, national review institute. he has litigated on the issues for quite some time and has been in trenches and greg is the president and ceo of fire, which is unquestionably the leading organize for in the weeds, working on campuses and free speech issues, and i'm a fan of his because hecoat wrote -- he cowrote, the cobbling of the american mind but this. it's fascinating. one of parts of john's become

there's an increasing ememphasis among those on campuses, the safe spaces, it's good for mental health. there is this alternative argument that could actually be the exact opposite. what we're doing may actually inhibit people's intellectual growth and increase anxiety and depression. it's worth diving into. our -- after our discussion, we move to q & a. we just have a couple rules one, mess make sure you raise your hand and we get a microphone to you. make sure you introduce yourself, so name and organization. and then last but not least, please, please, please, please, actually ask a question during the question and answer phase. we're trying to model good behavior here. this is a conversation about

discussion, it's a conversation about difference of opinion, as my army friends say but being on receive, not just been on transmit so wore going to try to do that. if you get the microphone and get 5, 10, 15 sects into seconds into your statement and no question marks i may insert myself in figuretily pass the mic to someone else. for those friends we have who are watching live stream -- this is being live-streamed. you can use the hash tag, campus politics on twitter or facebook or instagram, i'm 40, other thing is don't know about nat you could be using. you can tweet,@me, at aei or@aei education wimp -- we have this neat feature, you can submit a question if you would like and i have a device in real-time to

keep up with this. go to sly.do, and then just enter the code aei event, just enter your name and a question, and i will get a copy of it, and then sometime during our discussion or the q & a i will try to put those into the bloodstream so everyone can be heard. sorry for the long throat-clearing. i'm almost done talking. so, order of operations. i hush up. dr. zimmerman talks about his book, discussion, request & a and i promise to get you out of here. please join me in welcoming our valued guest, dr. january zimmerman. >> thanks to andy and kelce and the aei for welcoming me to this gorgeous new home. this is how god would have made the whole world if he had in the

money. and just beautiful, and thanks to andy for his lovely comments in praise of my book. he may be the first person who is not a blood relative to read my book. i'm not sure about that. the first book i wrote when i was a much younger man, somebody gave me an 800 number and it would describe how your book is do, i called and it got the robo voice that said, good morning, you have sold -- zero -- books today. that wasn't getting me any closer to god so i haven't done it since. but my brief message here is that first of all, nobody is being silenced. okay? we've got' be really careful in the word wes use to describe the free speech problem.

thanks to greg and other people, we have a very good sense of what that problem is. and it is real. but we've got to be really careful about the terms wey to describe. there are 4,000 placed to bet a b.a. in the united states and at most of them, trigger warnings, microaggression, safe spates, say what? it's not an issue at all. people have not heard those words. sigh the "times" last week they ran a great story about looguard ya -- la gordon ya community come in the wake of the elections and ill was totally absent from la guardia. people were just trying to get through their day, take care of their kids, pay tuition. i had extraordinary freedom, nobody silenced me. as a historian especially to call what is happening as mccarthyism i find an insult.

there has been a narrowing of debate and discussion on our campuses, especially our elite ones, and there's very good survey literature that documents this. so, they do studies where they ask students, is it safe to hold unpopular opinions on this campus in at the elite schools a declining fraction of kid say yes. that can't be good. so, as you go through college, fewer and fewer students say, yes, it's safe to hold unpopular opinions. when i was researching this book, i was surprised at the wide range of opinions that people hold but don't express. for example, it turns out -- this was astonishing to me -- that 40% of full-time faculty in the united states oppose the use of race in college admissions. 40%.

was humanly surprised to hear it was that much. i could tell you for the sake of honesty i'm in the 60%. but i was ashamed to learn this. because what it means is the people that disagree with me aren't actually speaking up very much, and i don't think that can be good for affirmative action or the university. there is such a problem with political correctness? there is but i think there again we have to be very, very careful in the words that we use, and especially the ways they define them -- we define them. so i've argued there are two kinds of pc, one i support and one i despise. the first kind of pc is the one that creates very strong social -- although not legal -- taboos on the use of highly offensive terms. i do not think it should be illegal for donald trump to call women pigs. really don't.

okay? but i think there should be strong social prohibitions and taboos on that. and if that pc, count me in. again issue don't want to ban it, okay? but if we as a community want to be a community, we got to have certain community standards and i think not calling women pigs should be part of those standards. i don't think calling him pigs adds anything to the discussion. think there should be strong social, not legal, taboos on it and itself that's pc, count me in. the problem this second kind of pc that doesn't taboo words but taboos ideas. right? if 40% of the faculty is opposed to race affirmative action we're not hearing from them. that means there's a serious pc problem. not the pc problem that prevents you from calling women pigs but the problem that prevent you from actually engaging in one of

the most critical and porch -- important debates in to sigh is the use of race in administrations. that consistent of pc we have to oppose. that inhibits us as educators, as learners, as human beings. now, why? how did all this develop? very briefly, because i don't want to talk too much -- what i've argued in my book is that -- this is picking up on work of greg and john and others -- the real problem is the rise of psychological language idioms idioms and metas from discussing politics. to be very clear i'm an advocate of psychology, and i'll be very honest with you, there's mental health problems in my family. my family has been a huge beneficiary of mental health services. i'm not opposed to psychology. but i am opposed to the use of psychologicalled wyomings for

discussing -- idioms for discussing politics. if i argue in my book if sigh college and politics -- psychology and politics don't play well together. if you say you were hurt or injured or traumatized by something i've said, i frankly think that's a conversation stopper. i dope have a lot to say to you in response. i certainly would never say to you weren't, bus unlike the purr -- puritans i can't look into your soul. don't know what you're feeling. i would never deny it and i don't deny it. what i do question, though, is the use of feeling as a barometer of specially as a playing field for political scruggs because i think it inhunt it and i think that's very much a function of -- sorry -- of our own time. if you look, for example, at the history of the term "

"microaggression by it's fascinated. it tomorrow by castro pierce but nobody no anything about it in the 2000s until is was revised bay teacher at teachers college, and it's read his work before i got into this project, and it's been hugely enshrine shall. what hsu husband done is written -- has done is wherein books about microaggression. one is the kind that highlights your difference in an allegedly offensive way. so, where are you from? okay? if, like hsu you grew and unoregon and our patients are asia-americans, you might be offend is. dude, i'm from oregon, right? i'm asia but i'm american. they one kind of microaggression, the one that highlights your difference. but then there's another kind that erases it, according to

hsu. saying to somebody when i look at you i don't see race. that can be a microaggression, too. because allegedly, all right? it denies your difference rather than highlighting it? or the one that's been most controversial, anyone who can make -- anyone who works hard enough in america can make it. this, too hsu said, is offensive. i can frankly imagine context in which all these statements could be offensive. definitely. in fact, given the right context or the wrong one i might be offended, too. what i question is university -- specially university administrator -- in a prima fast a way declaring the statements are somehow taboo. that's context and that's evil. okay? for a university administrator to make a statement about social

mobile, which is what wore talking about with respect to the last microaggression, anyone who works hard enough can make it. that's one of the most controversial questions in american letters. a university administrator should not be laying down a rule about that. but that's the other crucial context or understanding this. the rise of psychological idioms is one of them, and the other one is, the rise of the administrative university. friends, here's an x. and if we're talking about race and race controversy and race culture that as certain meaning, malcolm x. but i want to encurling you to think about another x. which is context of discussion. this is the full-time faculty, the full-time administration, and starting in the '90s they crossed. so, when i was a kid there were more faculty members than administrators and now there are more administrators than

faculty. and that is a hugely important context for understanding all of this. now, just be clear, i'm not against university administrators, in fact i was one. okay? we need them. sectly they're often some very good reasons for the rise of administrators, and going back to mental health this meant health operates is huge you. don't get that by snapping your fingers you have to hire counselors and staffers and psychiatrists and all that? i'm not against that. but what i am against is trying to create administrative solutions and especially administrative directives surrounding highly convoy verted public questions -- controverted public question is. can't be good for any of us.

to thanks to agreeing and -- greg and others, one thing we discovered as administration rises so do speech codes, even in the face of court decisions, rendering them unconstitutional, so do diversity trainings. if you look at the demands of students in the last round of protests, you see that two-thirds of them focus on this thing called diversity training. you see the rise of these things called bias response incident teams. these are all managerial solutions and i could tell you, as an academiation, they also have been incredibly week academic base, so take diversity training imi'm not opposed to the idea of trying to help people converse across their differences and include the racial differences itch don't think any good-heared person would be opposed to it.

but when we look at and try to study the manage managerial efforts to improve people's attitudes the academic research base is tiny. that's guy at ucla and now harvard, spent a another've time studyingy and took thousands of freshman and followed them through college, interviewing them, testing them. what he found this interventions on the part of the universities, he couldn't show that had any effect. this seems to me a highly -- not this managerial response but a -- hire a diversity officer. and this is expensive. as a parent of two young adult kids i'm sensitive to that question.

you know what actually does? to improve people's racial attitude and likely to have friends and loves across races. having a roommate of a different race to my mind, western civilization began to decline when the students were allowed to choose their freshman roommate. that's he the worst thing that happened in western civilization, du, if you go into face book, you chaotic member that looks -- choose the roommate you chaotic somebody you choose somebody that looks lie you. so your know leveraging the benefit of diversity. i believe in certain forms of race-based affirmative action, and if with allow the kids to choose their freshman roommates we are actually not leveraging those benefits. let me say just a couple other things about -- then i'll shut up -- about this question of

psychology. which i think is so central here. the genealogy of trigger warnings is fascinating and very different from the genealogy of microaggressions. microaaggressions a an academic genealogy. trigger warnings came from the feminist blogosphere sphere. right when the internet started to hit, feminist started to argue that content on the internet, sexual violence, should have a trigger warning because if people have been victims of sexual violence they'll be retrauma tiesed. the problem is that it's now come to cover almost anything that might upset you. so, we have demand ford trigger warnings, anything about pregnancy, about addiction, bullying, anything about suicide. my favorite is, there should be

a trigger warning if a professor shows a clip of downton abbey because there's all that stuff. there was actually a situation where a student asked for a trigger warning in a horror films class about blood. and i'm like, dude, this is an elective and it's elective called a horror films class. maybe you shouldn't have elected this course. but to be clear here, just like all of this stuff, there are times and placed where it maybe by totally appropriate. so, one of the courses, a big undergraduate court i teach is about the culture wars in the united states, and i do a segment about pornography and antifor nongagy movie and is makes the movie so compelling is

includes porn clips to show how nsay, violent a lot of porn is. so, before i show that movie i always say the toe students, this is what you're going to see in this movie and if you don't want to watch, you don't have. to i don't call that a trigger warning but for all practical purposes it us and strike mess as entirely legitimate. right? it's just when you start to stretch this to cover any possibly upsetting incident. so, you know, i won't bore you with the examples bus you find them in my work and in greg's work, but here's the real problem to me. these psychological idioms, in addition to not really allowing for discussion, or often stopping it, they also teach us, i think to respond and feel in a certain way. so, sociologists have been talking for 30 areas about

something called feeling rules. that's goes back to the work of -- a book at a stewardess, and the focus of the book was how social groups and social situations teach to us feel a certain way. we're all subjective beings and feel differently but the feeling rules can bias us to feel in certain ways. not to dining room but biases our feelings to and that's when i fear this language of psychology is doing. the more we talk about the trauma we have experienced from a trump sign, which is what happened at enemy at emery, the more likely we to feel that. so, a great episode i think highlighted this problem and a great response it to, you may recall that up at harvard, maybe

a year and a half ago there was an act of vandalism at the law school where somebody broke in and put black tape over the mouths of the portraits of the faculty of color. and this led to a -- people were demonstrating outside of harvard law school and, again, talking about how profoundly upsetting this was to them. and randall kennedy, who teaches there, a black man, and wrote an op-ed. and made two points. we don't know this was a racist act. certainly could have been. you know. but maybe the person who did this was actually doing a piece of street theater in which they were trying to call people's attention to the way that people of color are muzzled, or bring more attention to the issue, maybe, or maybe it was like an awful, terrible david duke type person that really was a bigot.

but then, kennedy says, itself was, come on. how traumatized are we really? we're at harvard law school. amidst all this talk about racial privilege, how about talk about harvard privilege. i mean, could somebody who was, quote, traumatized by this piece of theater or this piece of awful racist vandalism, could they with a straight and unembarrassed face go to a syrian refugee center or go to a battered women's shelter and say, you know, i was traumatized, too. i know where you're coming from. i just -- i just don't think they could. on the administrative side -- then i will shut up -- it's important historically to emphasize that for most of our history on campuses, students

and administrators were at loggerheads. the history of the american university is actually a profoundly conflict to all and sometimes violent one. 19 income century and there were duals on american campuses and food fights. the students loved to do that. at overland, the center of all sorts of important social moves. ... the point is into 1960's and 7

0's, there was tension between protestors. liberal democrats calling mario the leader, that's very different from today. you look at most recent rounded protests, what you find is the administrators embracing protestors, yes, yes, you were right. i knew you were traumatized. we failed you. that's what peter said at yale, yes, we will create speech codes, yes, we will have diversity training. yes, we will find the culprit in every case and dole out exactly the right penalty because that's what we can do. we can do everything. more offices, more trainings,

it's important to ask how people can grow up on those terms. seriously, we are not the angry like biblical parents. we are like the health -- heal -- helicopter mom and dad. the students are asking for more administration and we give it to them. and that, i think, is what really differentiates protests from earlier ones. tom died recently and i wrote about a figure. early statements an has really interesting language. we need to rest control from the administrative bureaucracy and that seems like it's from

another era because it is, okay, now, can we have more administration, please, can we have another statement from you that was an awful incident involving terrible emails sent to african-american students, right, and everyone is asking the president to say the right words, oh, president, please say these mystical words, say the right and in closing if you really want to see how different things are, go ahead and google the wealthy college graduation of 1969, that was the first wasn't that a student spoke, which is kind of interesting, okay, and you already know her name. it was hillary diaane rodham, later to be hillary rodham clinton. it's vest interesting.

we need fewer curricular requirements an we need students to direct their own education. and she writes, hillary, more immediate penetrating modes of living, we are all exploring the world that none of us understand. it's second-grade adventure. i think it is accurately still a great adventure, none of us know where it is going but at our universities, we will narrow that adventure if we continue to think of it in narrow psychological terms that were stripped what we say and what we think. most of us will narrow the adventure if students and faculty invest in power in the people that run institutions instead of with themselves. thanks a lot of. [applause]

>> we are about to all take our seats up here. >> i'm going to walk very carefully so i don't slip. i have lots of questions. i want to get david and greg to weigh in with their thoughts initially, i just to ask all of you if you doasht mine respond to go this, the administrative question is what stood out to me in the book, it wasn't always this way, that administrators seemed like there's even a quote in the book in every single instance. it seems like the administrators bend over backwards to say, yes, you were right. how did that happen, is that a different type of administrator that's going to the office or difference with fundraising, there seems to be a change in type? >> definitely. one thing you have to think about is, you have to think about the expanding role of the federal government in education, right? and what that does to the

university is it just requires it to hire more administrators. think about the whole title 9 revolution. again, none of this is necessarily bad. sometimes good. but if the federal government is more deeply involved in the university, by definition you're phoning to need more administrator to figure out how to comply with the federal government, right. i think the more broadly there's also been a huge change in the sensibility of the students who see themselves as consumers very often rather than a necessarily as learners. so one of the things that i've been struck by, look, we are paying the bills. if we want trigger warnings, why shouldn't we have them and the bills have gone crazy and that's a really important thing. i'm not justifying what they say, i'm trying to explain it

given how much you pay for this product. i understand this consumer sensibility. i do not like it or approve it, but it does make an awful lot of sense. >> first, i really enjoyed reading your book. it was reasonably reading. am i reading this in 2016 because i haven't read anything reasonable. >> that's a ridiculous remark. [laughter] >> on the question you ask about the rise of the m bureaucracy, look, i was in law school from 91 to 94. all the students can give me, give me until later or lessor degrees. there's just this constant push towards the administrators, but what i would say to be clear

about is that when we are talking about in helicopter. it's not therefore all students. it's not. if you are a conservative christian, member of a pro-life club, christian organization, you have user-friendly on the same-sex marriage, for example. you tell me how friendly that administration is to you. how much are they really going out of their way to try to make sure that you -- your psychological well-being is taken care of. part of the administration is going to go out of its way to make sure that all of your classmates is taken care as a result of the trauma you inflict upon them and you'll see this and it's not necessarily censorship although it does

occurred and i have sued quite few universities who censored religion organizations and it's less common than just sort of two sets of reality and one of the things that i would say if you're talking about free speech on college campuses, here is a question that you would need to ask yourself, before i speak or say something, how much fortitude do i need to say the words that are going to come out of my mouth and we have set up particularly in elite universities where an awful lot of speech on one side of the spectrum has sort of a flied path to expression. you will be encouraged by professors, you'll be encouraged by your administration. if your chosen political candidate loses, you're going to get an opportunity to go to a play-doh room. you will have the opportunity to vent your spleen. if you're on the other side, the administration is going to write a statement about how traumatizing you are. the administration is going to

talk about how deeply troubling your speech is and we are not talking about radical fringe communication, we are talking about mainstream points of view expressed by millions of americans. now, that's not an excuse and i say this all of the time to when i speak to conservative students. the opposite of political correctness is not part of -- pardon my language ass-holey. [laughter] >> being the extreme worst person that i can think of. there's a benign form of political correctness and one that isn't and i would say there's manners as a son of the south, there's manners and then there's political correctness and manors -- manners, you're seek to go treat another person the same way you would like to

be treated and to the extent that you know that the other that you're interacting with has sensitivities or particular background that would lead you to be sensitive and comaciónate in communication with them, be sensitive and compassionate with your communication with them. if you're talking to someone who is tough as nails, maybe you will feel free. if you continue to speak, you're harming me. again, it's just not evenly applied. if it was evenly applied, then it would do right here. i was speaking about free speech in the campus and the students spoke up and they were from the

inner city, latino student and they were talking about race based affirmative action and he explained with great emotion that it's difficult to talk about these things because he's from a historically disadvantaged area, low-income part of the country. he knows people who have died on the streets in gang violence and who am i really, to speak about this, how can i have an opinion about and so i respond and say i absolutely have an opinion about the iraq. i'm a veteran of that conflict and i was there during the surge in '07 and '08.

identify seen more death in that one year than i hope to ever see in the whole rest of my life. do you think someone should be entitled to oppose the iraq war in a conversation with me or does my experience and the pain that i experience there trump any opinion that anyone has in my presence should they keep their opinion completely to themselves less they trigger me or less they bring up trauma. wait a minute, but i'm really antiwar. that's really what i want to say. these things are not, are not evenly applied. not all trauma is the same. environment for what's good for

if goose is not for the gander. that's why to a lot of conservative students, the notion that the university is taking care of itself students just flatly rings hollow. it's just seen as absurd. >> i don't even know where to begin. there's so much to cover. obviously there's -- i've said in my work quite a bit that i agree with jonathan quite bit about the situation on campus. i have seen three major phases on campus and the first sort of age of political correctness was frankly before my time and i was at school work that was not affected by those force of hell anyway. i didn't realize when i started at stanford, law school, that they lost two years before, they lost a court case in which their speech was defeated because the state government got to angry

because they passed the law that they meant stanford. you can't have speech codes. so -- so for most of my career, when they had had this really sense of emotional letter of students who desperately wanted censorship and obsessed, i was sure that person existed but it just wasn't what i was dealing with through most of my career. those seemed likal -- tall tales and most of my career has been fighting administrators who sometimes are engaged in political correctness. i do get frustrated with political correctness. people being so fixated part because some aren't cases at all but just abuse of power. some of the cases that i have seen dealt with a university president, a georgia college who decide today kick out without

due process a student because he was critical of a parking garage project. >> yeah, i reference that in the book. >> it's a crazy case. there are horrifying political correctness cases like i talk about a learning liberty, a book i wrote in 2012. university of delaware where it was administrators engaging in this incredibly aggressive indoctrination program that went way before anything i had ever seen but -- so i feel like my careers had three phases, one primarily consumers also have to be running a mock, of course. the next is the federal government run a mock, coming up with standards of harassment. they are literally impossible to comply with at least if you want to keep with the constitution, the standard -- harassment in 2013 letter is laughably

unconstitutional to me. white liberals saying i don't want this perp on -- person on campus and, well, first of all, that's not a persuasive argument but this also includes speakers, they're not probably going to go to charles murray speech but they don't want charles murray speaking at the school because it affects the sensibility that he even steps foot on campus. i watched a lot of the stages and i want to get back to the way you introduce the section and i thought it was great that you started talking about pluralism. i think any time you pass anything like a speech code, you are making a very narrow statement of culture. and i think you're basically saying our culture -- this

harvard campus culture is superior and meanwhile at stanford, i was pointing, while, it's weird, all of the acceptable views, one of the reasons why you don't see micro aggressions, for the elite colleges it's a 14-1 ratio if you're going to one of the elite schools and i think that universities have become so lop-sided in ideology, they can't see, in some cases administrators can't distinguish a good person should say from absolute truth and i always refer back to my father. my father is russian and my

mother is british. my father would always teach me, the first rule of dealing with other cultures or people that aren't like you is try to figure out what their norms are and not impose norms on them. as my father would explain, you're acting like hick. i see a lot of parallels between the victorian era and the confident idea that conservatives, they are backwards. and other religious minorities have other beliefs but that's okay because that's multiculturism. we know the end of truth and we know the way people should talk and it is getting away from the pluralistic model where it's okay to have quote, unquote,

wrong beliefs, where we actually value that, where it's becoming a much more this is what all right-thinking people think. it's only possible sort of the student -- >> let me just say i read about greg's background and it does remind me of the old joke that the british don't know how to say hello and the british say good-bye. [laughter] >> to go to what david was saying earlier, i actually think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes what we say might hurt people's feelings, but at the same time, it couldn't be possible to acknowledge those feelings instead of wheeling them away but make an argument for why they shouldn't rule the day.

i get it, right. i don't think your offense should prevent us from discussing the question. you can be offended. i can understand why you might be offended. all right, but we can't use that as a measure of when and now we speak. including more people in the discussion, including people voting for donald trump. i met with comments like and people -- i mean, that's a psychological response. i can tell you again, i am

appalled by donald trump. >> did you almost run for president? [laughter] >> i think you might be standing next to someone who -- >> i mean, nobody. yeah, yeah. not the majority but close to the majority of the voters did vote for him. there are a small number of people who voted for them and some of them have told me that they don't feel like they can say that. >> oh, yeah. >> friends, that i cannot tolerate. if somebody wants to disagree with somebody i've said or written, i'm fine with that because that's about me and a professor, i will be fine, you can say whatever you want. but the things i have to say to get fired, i can't even say. [laughter] >> i have no problems and no complaints. >> right. >> okay, but if i hear from a

student that she or he can't say what they're thinking, that's more to me. that cuts to my fundamental beliefs about what a university is or should be. >> yeah. >> and what i'm doing, i don't know if this will work, i've been in contact with a couple of bible colleges in newark, philadelphia. i don't feel internally where we would be able to have what i call a conversation. different analysis' of what went wrong. i think things terribly went wrong to be honest. i'm engaged in the conversation. i'm ashamed at how trump voters i had discussions with and i don't think i can have those discussions internally at my university. >> one thing -- i haven't said

that public before but john signed with penguin press to do a book that's sort of -- calling the mesh mind as a starting point and we thought we said everything we need today say in it and then the university is much crazier in the year after we wrote it than we ever saw it coming and, you know, we are very serious about this -- the idea that this is based on a bad psychological model, not one that isn't keeping with the actual current research but precisely the opposite. i put it this way to students, if you were to go to a psychologist and he were to take you by the shoulders and say, you're very fragile and if you hear things that bother you, you're going to be done forever. that psychologist would be fired. we are creating this psychological term, self-fulfilling prophecy. and students increasingly going

to seek psychological help for oppression. i also take psychology seriously but i don't want it to be abused. but ends up disempowering students and they are making them feel like they are fragile, making them feel like they have no choice. but as far as things that really frustrate me that have been generated by the culture on campus is what i refer to exquisite technologies. back in our day in college in law school, the way to dismiss someone's opinion was to call conservative, you didn't -- you're an awful person for listening to them. now you have exquisite arguments we have for not having to listen to each other. when you go into the privilege theory, 100% are privileged. there's punching up and down.

there's victim blaming, argument after argument after argument that doesn't get you to the argument and we have tolerated all of these things and that's the emotional reasoning too. that's emotional state. it's not a substantive argument. that has happened across political lines as well. we are figuring out way toes not talk -- ways to not talk about the issue. they are becoming experts to never actually get to the substance of the argument and i think that's inherently destructive. >> one quick thing because his name came up. [laughter] >> i don't know if you've guys ever done this i've conducted diversity training. >> how did that make you feel? >> oppressive. [laughter] >> repeal of don't ask don't

tell, we were all, a mandatory stand-out across the military and we were going to train our troops about same-sex marriage and lgbt issues. can you imagine me, i'm being asked to run through the powerpoint that's all of the sensitivity training and diversity training and i had to do it. it was orders in the typical military training, you will listen to this and you will behave in accordance. >> they can order people. >> here is what happens when you deliver diversity training. the whole crowd is like this. [laughter] >> the whole crowd -- >> very dramatic. >> they cannot wait for it to be over. [laughter] >> they just hate every second of it. >> get me back. [laughter]

>> this is what happens on college campuses, a whole lot of people through training and what they're getting from it is this view what you're telling me is the approved view, it's not the view that i necessarily have and it's not the view that i'm going to adopt and so one thing that we learned in this election is people cannot be sectored out of their belief. they will sometimes send beliefs under ground and will share them in the voting booth. i live in a -- i live in a precincts that went 72% for donald trump and guess what, guys, it's a great place to raise a family. it's a great place to raise a family. it's not, you know, trump's america is not some sort of hell hole but there's a whole lot of people who were sick and tired of being told what to think and what to do and we were voting as a sheer rebellion, a sheer complete act of rebellion. i cannot tell you how many times i heard that. so a lot of what's happening on

college campuses is not achieving the affects and i think one thing that was interesting about your book as you showed, you show your actual data that colleges are indoctrinating. >> that's the biggest miss, by the way. it's a myth, right. we are overwhelming liberal like myself but not very radical. that's number one. the students don't agree with us on a whole bunch of issues. we are doing a really crappy job. it's just not working and in part because some of us haven't invested in teaching. the whole model implies a lot more investing in teaching and learning. >> i want to make sure we do housekeeping thing. if you're online audience, remember you can submit questions going to slidio.

i will get to those in a minute. a lot raised issues on the questions that i wanted to ask. the influence of this, whatever we want to call, the atmosphere, environment, both on students and faculty, a couple of times i read that it's anecdotal in the sense that too many students can answer the second question, they are so unacos -- accustomed and when you get to tough questions about inside and outside of pluralism, what is good for democracy and what is not. they have not been pressure tested in the discussion. we have inhibited the growth but now the faculty part is even more interesting. i just read the article in city journal. a guy named john, a real world on science. the case that he makes is that

actually the orthodox, uncampuses is affecting faculty in such way that it is very clear that there are certain questions you can ask and you cannot ask. there are certain conclusions that you absolutely cannot reach and that's having research that's being don't and on the faculty that's willing to go on the campuses to work. so the environment is i worry what is it going to be 20 years from now and now wonder what it's doing to students and researchers in the moment. >> john is my coauthor and he wrote this incredible article along with people like big names of psychology. josé duarte, they are talking about how badly the political skew of social psychology was hurting the field of social psychology and she gave the example of a paper that got published that treated

conservatism of necessarily like a mental disorder and it gave -- it was so loaded because it gave -- showed examples of a question and this kind of mental disorder or this kind of mental disorder, and i do think that -- one of the things that john -- one of the reasons why people listen to him, he's talking -- he's not saying that you need to have a perfect parody, he does think that the lack of confirmation, the lack of calling bs when you were in a polarization spiral, your confirmation, i talked to 20 smart people. i will go even farther. just having one person to confirm can make a big difference. i notice in students too. when i go to campus, they don't know the second argument. i might agree with them on political issues. i consider myself political liberal. i'm shocked how they are defending at political.

>> that's a remarkable thing. that's nontrivial. critical thinking. i think i agree with what greg is saying, obviously i wouldn't be here if i was concerned about it but i also think that we need to be a little bit more tempered. one of the great things about teaching in most environments is when you close the door, you can do whatever you want. [laughter] >> most jobs aren't like that. and there's a problem with that too because some people aren't doing very much or doing something that's quite like that. you have independence. i would just say, you know what the best sound is and i would just close the door, you know, and so, you know, i found in the recent round of debates at pen, in that frankly the only students and faculty member that is have been highly critical of

people that don't know me that aren't in my classes, you know, to whom i'm really just a cartoon, rather than an actual human being, you know, because i have been able to conduct in my classroom all kinds of debates, we can do that. that's the freedom that we have. now, i would agree that because of these different structures and developments that people might be less able to do it. as far as -- that's real and bipartisan. how many liberals in bolder, colorado don't vaccinate their kids? a lot, a lot. so the war on science is real and it is bipartisan, okay, and the conservatism is real.

this i just find hilarious. i was in the peace corps. my dad was in the peace corps. he knew jfk. i'm jewish and i have a ph.d, i'm the most predicted democrat ever. like ever, that's ever existed. you know, so it's kind of hilarious but it's depressing too. here is why. let me try an analogy. one of the most upsetting things to me as educator has been antimuslim. a sentiment in this country and sometimes directed at the president. after the birtherrism thing enclosed became like a closet muslim. what really said of the episode, the president was never able to do and never able to get in front of the microphone and say, look, even though my name is hussein, it turns out i'm not a muslim, okay.

but what if i was? i don't think he's ever said that, all right. and that tells you something really huge and upsetting, that dry of prejudice in the country, right? he can't. i'm sure he's thought it a million times. you know, what i'm starting to do it turns out -- i'm the least conservative person in the world. >> why would that be such a terrible thing. i'm not equating, i'm not saying against conservatives, it isn't, okay. but i do think there's a parallel there. >> but it's a way to people to listen to you. it's been funny since the article came out, the critics of the article, immediately the conservative, that's cute, you know, you just want it but in the circle you run that's

basically saying, by the way, you don't have to listen to that. >> yeah, yeah. >> there are degrees of academy can i -- acceptability, what passes are more on the libertarianish. socially liberal and are going to have economic conservative ideas. if you want to really know how accepting a campus is you are going to have to act about social conservatism. what is the acceptance of that point of view on a college campus. can you say that without triggering, without triggering the kind of reaction that might

even be worst, you know, received at yale. >> we have a real case like that and this is a case that i bring up. >> oh-oh. >> i can't actually give catholic opinions at the school. this is ridiculous. audiotape with discussion of faculty member in training about whether or not in debate class they would debate sex marriage and the students is told that he can't because it would be homophobic to discuss that, it was be offensive to discuss it so he brings the tape to professor mcadams and what he does is he write what is he always write.

i can't believe you isn't debate same-sex marriage at a catholic institution. that's ridiculous. it gets to fox news. hate mail which is never helpful and but the -- but what the university i understand up doing is they end up firing. mcadams is suing suing the school but they are trying to fire a tenure professor, they are now trying to fire him. >> i'm confused by that. what's their argument. >> they are always shifting. they don't really know. this is totally normal to my experience. ic they are basically at this point settled on and i do mean settled on. they were shifting among professionalism argument. >> that he just didn't fulfill his duties as a professional to agree with somebody else. >> the blogging brought. what is professional duty, i

think, to the younger professor, is i guess, is the argument. >> i remember that. let's be clear. i was too cute about that. there are terrible cases in which tenure professors have job security threatened and i feel lucky to have people like greg to help the real crisis friends now with the tenure faculty and i try to make the point in my book. >> absolutely. >> they have nothing. >> that's the other part. >> why is the full-time faculty going down. they hire four part-timers. that's the biggest scandal. it's not like trigger warnings and micro aggressions. >> i want to make sure i open it up to the audience. if you have questions, raise your question so i can make sure we get to you. microphones will come here swiftly, yes, please. >> my name is joe freeman, i'm an alumnus, lurking in the

background was a conflict between the administration and the legislature in particular the california senate subcommittee and american activities which was trying to get clerk file for letting diversities in the university. we knew none of this at the time. we just saw the administration as the enemy. i have written the book since then so i know a lot more. it makes me wonder if there's something similar going on behind political correctness of today's universities. you said the administration and students are on the same side. primarily the federal department of education that are setting standards that are impossible to comply with even universities like tusk university that scower

everything that was supposed to do according to department of education did basically a textbook version of every policy but got investigated anyway. however, state legislatures do play a role sometimes too and actually sometimes they sometimes sort of the most embarrass grand-standing cases where there were students at the university of maryland who wanted to show a porn, porno. so the state legislature thought it was a good idea to get involved in that one. [laughter] >> a university of north carolina -- university of

tennessee tried to get rid of funding after university of tennessee had sex week on campus. they are generally social conservative of war issues but no where near in my experience the amount of experience as the federal government. >> first of all i'm delighted. i read your work many times over. the -- something that i take a little bit of just happiness is the fact that you know when david went to state legislature and tried to get them to pass law, saying we had to have logical balance, you don't want the state legislatures mandating that, you won't get anywhere. >> another question, one of my friends -- we have a bunch of questions. i'm sorry i cannot get to all of the ones that came online. several of them are falling into two categories and i just want to put them on the table in case

any of you want to respond. the first is number of conservative either faculty members, young faculty members or students worried about coming out on the campus so they're looking for advice, what to do and what not to do and the other one, several questions are flabbergasted that faculty and administrators are aare allowing students to act as consumers. they want to know how did that happen and how did that put an end to that. >> can i -- let me deal with the first one. in my experience and i've litigated in an awful lot of polices and i would be interest today hear greg's perspective on this. you are safer out of the closet. you are absolutely safer. they would call me and whisper on the phone. if you are conservative and outstanding record of

scholarship and service to your university and you have and you're an excellent teacher and you deny tenure and people know that you're conservative, oh, man, that's raising and waiving red flags all over the place. but if nobody know that is you're conservative and you're just another faculty member and you don't get tenure, where is your discrimination claim. it's just that you're another academic that got frustrated and didn't get what they wanted and they can go to another university. similar with students. students are safer, actually expressing their point of view, however, however, you have to have some intestinal fortitude. safer from official sanction, not safer from pure sanction and that's where it gets really,

really rough and very few students go to college thinking, i cannot wait to get to harvard and be hated. [laughter] >> protecting you from official sanction. >> you have to be able to withstand that and that's, i think, a greater free speech threat right now. people don't want to confront that kind of pure rejection. >> we had a question. >> please. >> we have to wrap up quickly so this might be the last one. >> currently inmate at uc berkeley as we know and as greg mention, an awful not a formal rule-making which would never survive the process. if president trump selected

anyone of you to be assistant secretary of education or hirer education, what friendly guidance you might direct to begin reversing the administrative corruption that you described. >> i think it's pretty safe to say that none of us would be flag today that. certainly david, neither of us. i like my day job. >> i have plenty of suggestions. >> one is put your money where your mouth is. this is rule making we are entbainled in and it was amazing that someone at the department of education was it having in front of senator alexander and managed to say within a couple of minutes of each other, we are just engaging guidance but not recall-making but what happens if universities don't follow. that's rule making.

they should flat out repeal the 2011 letter and should leave it up to the universities and they should adopt the david harassment. you can read about it in the atlanta articles we talk about it all of the time but a definition of harassment that's more like a process of discriminatory action as opposed to a single wrong thing that you would say. those three things right off the bat. >> yeah, i would say get rid of the 2011 letter. i think that's just due process 101. initiate rule-making, however, i would -- i would also say that that rule-making should remove universities from add jud -- add

if you don't want to bring a criminal complaint, you can bring a civil complaint. you can do a civil action and let the university get involved when there's an adjudication. let me just say something about -- about small point i try to make in the book, it would be great if universities could wash their hands of adjudication in the way dave is saying. a lot of the victims don't want to enlist the criminal justice system and what happened to them, it's just a fact, you know, and that doesn't mean they are not victims, okay. that's point number one and point number two, the wheels of

criminal justice just spin way too closely and as much as i would like to say, the business of judging these things, it's a criminal matter and i do sympathize and episode on campus and the two kids are setting next to each other, hey, this is a criminal matter, okay. four years from now some court will decide your case and until then, we have to have the two of you in class next to each other. i don't know what they should do, to be honest about that, but they can't do that. i sympathize. >> you can do no exact and separation orders and things like that that's very common in the military, while actual criminal due process unfolds. you can separate people and you can initiate, judges can craft order that is provide actual sanction if you violate the order that is are far worse than anything the administrator could do.

so there are work arounds to that. very real concern. if someone -- if i have claim that had greg has attacked me, i don't want to be in a panel with him. we don't have to do that. there are work-arounds on that. >> i did a bad job managing time. what is one thing folks in the audience should be looking for, say, a development or one big thing ought to be done in the campus to make a big difference? you want to start? >> we have to change expectations. i think that there's a lot of pointing at students and saying, who is telling you to be so anxious and have the right to be comfortable, well, i think we are. i think parents are. i think k-12 is. until we start fixing orientation process, it's a sign that things may be going well if they make you feel uncomfortable. if you haven't ever said that to

students, you shouldn't be offended. >> thank you. >> i would take a story briefly that when universities embrace racial diversity as they should, they have to take to embrace ideological diversity as well in the same breath. they are not even consistent. the worst thing that's happened in our land escape now is the idea that a concern for racial ethnic diversity runs with free speech. every great warrior for social justice in our history has been tribune for free speech because they knew if they don't have that, they don't have nothing. in the same breath as we do and should attend to racial ethnic diversity and the different problems that come with that, all right, we have to attend ideological diversity, at the same time. >> thank you. my message to conservative students, conservative

professors, conservative administrators, i know you have to have intestinal fortitude, have that intestinal fortitude. you can withstand peer shaming, you can. the more of you who demonstrate intestinal fortitude, the less shaming will be because it'll be less isolated and seen as less strange and more part of campus discourse and, in fact, there's precedent that you should actually take a little bit of joy. the bible should consider pure joy, my brothers when you suffer trials of many kinds including the trial of being a harvard student. [laughter] >> if i may say, you know, some of my students come out to me in their papers, you know, as conservatives and i'm like just be yourself, it gets better. [laughter] >> don't live alive. we will all be smarter if you just come out. >> please join me in thanking

john and josh. great conversation, thank you, everyone. >> as 2016 comes to a close, many publications are offering their picks for best books for the year. here are some of the books the washington post has selected. personal life and personal career of john f kennedy. making of the liberal icon. yale university history professor pamela looks at how guns became part of american culture in the gunning of america. the washington post notable books of 2016 also include the first lady in which patricia bell scott explaining the relationship with cofounder of the national organization of women and first lady eleanor roosevelt and university of

florida professor weighs in on the history of racism in america in national book-award winning title, stamped from the beginning. >> people created racist ideas to justify the slave trade. i found that people created racist ideas to justify slavery. i found that people created racist ideas to justify segregation. i found that people continued to create racist ideas to now justify mass incarceration and so i'm finding that we have these policies in place, we have these disparities in place and then people were creating racist ideas over the course of american history to justify and rationalize them and then it caused you and i having consumed these ideas to look out at america and to see disparities and to see people enslaved or to see 24 billion black people in jail or to see hundreds of thousands of people in chains

coming over to america and view that as normal. and view that as normal. that's the power that racist ideas have had over the course of american history and i try to chronical that in the beginning. these ideas have been powerful enough to make us belief that inequities are normal. >> that's the look at some of notable books according to washington post. book tv has covered many of the authors and you with watch the full programs on our website booktv.org. >> you're the author of fair labor lawyers, remarkable life of new deal attorney and supreme court advocate bessie. >> tell me about ms. marlene. >> i would love to. before there was a notorious rbg

as justice ginsburg is affectionally known. we owe her the fair standards labor act and she championed in 340 years as solicitor at the labor department and she was mentor to me. >> what were some of the significant case that is she was involved in as well the fair laborer act? >> all of the time with the labor department was spent on the fair labor standards act and it was really the whole body of work that caused chief justice earl to say that she had put the flesh in the bare bones of the fair labor standards act and without her work the bare bones would have been wholly inadequate. her most perhaps significant case standing alone was the first case under the equal pay act which establishes the rule

that still exist today that jobs neat not only substantially equal and not warrant equal pay and that's a standard that we still addadhere today. >> in your research, did you go into her personal life? >> i did. i was encouraged to tell the life of a pioneering trail blazing lawyer, women, i needed to do so. when i did so, i found, perhaps not surprisingly, she had affairs. she had affairs with people who would not interfere with her trailblazing career. i think it's important for people to know today that the

choices that an ambitious career woman in the 1930's and the choices she made to pursue her career. >> do you think that because of the climate that it's a little bit difficult to interview or to do research on a woman versus a man in history? >> it's a really good question. i will put it this way, bessie was deceased when i started the research which in some ways freed me than to dig deeper than perhaps i could have if she was alive. the thing that makes it harder to do research on a woman is that there were fewer pieces of documentation, she had never been asked to do an oral history. she never kept a journal or a dairy, perhaps for fear that it could be used against her, so i think that's a particular challenge for people writing about women that isn't often the case with men.

>> how were you able to do research with such little available? >> well, it look a lot of digging. not only was her nephew very generous and allowing me free use of papers to the extent they existed, but i say that i found needles but because she kept a company, justice douglas and justice jackson, i could find in the miscellaneous correspondence file a lot to put together. she kept a bundle of letters and photographs. investation and making sure i kept it to a high level of certainty. >> what is your background?

>> bessie grew up in the jewish orphan home in new orleans. it closed in 1946 and i too was an orphan and became award for an agency that cared for her. when i graduated from the same high school that she went to, 50 years later, my high school guidance counselor introduced us. i got to know her through my years in college, law school and legal career for the state of maryland. so i think she saw in me a little bit of herself, that little girl of new orleans. >> this is book tv on c-span2. television for serious readers. here is prime time line-up. starting shortly look back at 2016 election. at 7:30 photos of abandoned public spaces around the country by matthew christopher and on book tv after words, georgetown philosophy professor weighs in