worry about being viewed as a heretic. i'm not assigning yourself to a certain orthodoxy. because it couldn't be the case that our universities aren't just inculcating young people it a certain world view. they could be reflecting something that is going on and that can be unhealthy if we have got ton this point we don't i believe in differences of opinion and we think thatso forh parochialism is bad. professor john zimmerman the author of campus politics and is going to present to us on there is -- his new book and the conture of's what is happening right now, what is gone on actually on university campuses. a lot of of talk, some signals,, some noise and give us a sense why that matters. after that he'll probably talk for 15-20 minutes, give hem leeway. it's good book.

then i will come back up here with david french and greg to have a conversation about this. we'll bat around handful of ideas.you ly you probably know david who has lit gifted on these issues. he has been in the trenches. hes. ... fire which is probably the leading organization for working on campuses and free-speech issues and i'm a fan of his because he cowrote what i think was the best article of 2015 in the atlantic, the coddling of the american mind. it's fascinating, one of the parts of john's book is that there's an increased emphasis among folks on campus thing the safe spaces, it's good for

mental health. there is this alternative >> we just have a couple rules. one, please make sure that you raise your hand and we get at microphone to you. we just want to make sure everyone can hear you are. make sure to you introduce yourself. we'd like to know who the conversation is happening between, so name and organization. and then last but not least, please, please, please actually ask a question during the question-and-answer phase. [laughter] we are trying to model good behavior here. this is a conversation about discussion, it's a conversation about difference of opinion. as my army friends would say, it's about being on receive, not just being on transmit. and so we're going to try to do that.

so if you get the microphone and you get 5, 10, 15 seconds into your statement and i just see exclamation points or semicolons on the horizon and no question marks, i may insert myself andnd figuratively pass the mic to someone else.ta now, for those friends who are watching live stream -- and this is being live streamed -- you can use the hashtag, or anyone in the audience here, campuse # politics if you want to use twitter, facebook, instagram, i'm 40, so there are other things i probably don't even know about. you can tweet @aei or @aeieducation. and we have this news little feature -- neat little feature now, you can submit a question if you'd like, and i even have a device in realtime to keep up with this. so if you go to sly.do --

sli.do, all you've got to do is enter your name and a question, and i will get a copy of it. and then sometime during our discussion or the q and 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. order of operations, i hush up,r dr. zimmerman talks about his d book, moderated discussion, qof and a, and i promise to get you out of here and on your day by 10:15. sound good? thanks so much, guys. so please join me in welcoming our valued guest, dr. jon zimmerman. [applause] >> thank you very much. >> sure. >> thanks to andy and kelsey and the aei for welcoming me to this just gorgeous new home. i mean, i -- this is how god would have made the whole world if he had the money. [laughter] and it's just beautiful.e and thanks, thanks to andy for his lovely comments in praise of my book. he may be, actually, the first

person who's not a blood relative to read my book. [laughter] i'm not sure about that. you know, the very first book i wrote when i was a nave, a much younger man, somebody gave me this 800 number that you could call and allegedly it would talk about how your book was doing.um and, again, being a naif, i actually called it and put inac the 800 number, and i got the i ubiquitous robo voice, and it said, good morninging. you have sold zero books today. [laughter] that wasn't getting me any closer to god, so i haven't done it since. but i, my brief message here is that, first of all, nobody is being silenced. okay? we've got to be really careful in the words we 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 reallybl

careful about the terms we use to describe it. there are 4,000 places to get a ba in the united states, and at most of them trigger warnings, microaggressions, safe spaces, say what? i mean, it's not an issue at all. people haven't even heard those words. m if you saw the times last week,s they ran a great story about laguardia community college. in the wake of the, of the elections. and all of the trauma and all of the safe space discussion that you see at campuses like mine, it was totally absent from laguardia. people were just trying to getet through their day. okay, take care of their kids, pay their tuition. i have extraordinary freedom. nobody has silenced me, okay? as a historian especially, to call what's happening mccarthyism, i find offensive, okay? and actually an insult to the very real suffering that happened under mccarthy. however, okay, there has been a narrowing of debate and

discussion on our campuses,ing f especially our elite ones. and there's very good survey literature that documents this. so they do studies where they, you know, they ask students is it, is it safe to hold unpopular opinions on this campus. and at the elite schools, a declining fraction of kids say yes new college. through college. that can't be good, okay? so as you go through college, fewer and fewer students say, yes, it's safe to hold unpopular opinions. and when i was researching thisa book, frankly, i was surprised at the wide range of opinions that people hold but don't express. for example, it turnsous -- and this was astonishing to me -- that 40% of full-time faculty in the united states oppose the use of race in college admissions. 40%. i was hugely surprised to hear it was that much.pr i should tell you, for the sake of honesty, that i'm in the 60%.

but i was ashamed to learn this, because what it means is that the people who disagree with me aren't actually speaking up very much, and i don't think that can be good for affirmative action or for the university.y. is there such a problem as political correctness? there absolutely is. but i think there again we have to be very, very careful in the words that we use and especially in the ways that they define them or we dine them. define them. so i have argued there's actually two kinds of.c., one that i support and one that i despise.that i d the first kind of p.c. 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. i really don't, okay? but i think there should be strong social prohibitions and taboos on that. and if that's p.c., count me in.

again, i don't want to ban it, okay? but if we as a community want to be a community, we've got to have certain community standards. and i think not calling women pigs should be part of those standards.mm i don't think calling women pigs adds anything to our discussion, okay? i think, again, there should be strong social, not legal taboos on it. and if that's p.c., count me in. the problem is the second kind of p.c. that doesn't taboo words which add nothing to our discussion, but taboos ideas, right? if 40% of the faculty so opposed to race-based affirmative action and we're not hearing from them, that means there's a serious p.c. problem. not the p.c. problem that prevents you from calling women pigs, but what prevents you from actually engaging in one of the most critical and important debates in our society. that kind of p.c. we all have to to oppose, because that inhibits

us as educators, as learners, as human beings. now, why? how did all of this develop? very briefly, because i don't want to talk too much, what i've argued in my book is that -- and this is picking up on work that greg and john and others have done -- the real problem is the rise of psychological language idioms and metaphors. for discussing politics. or fromg politics. to be very clear, i'm an advocate of psychology and i will be very honest with you, there are mental health problems in my family. we have been a beneficiary of mental health services. i'm not opposed to psychology, but i am opposed to the use of psychological idioms for dick discussing politics. one of the things i try to argue in my book is that psychology

and politics don't play well together. if you say you are hurt or injured or traumatized by something i said, i think that's a conversation stopper. i don't have a lot to say to you in response. i wouldn't say to you that you weren't i can't look into years old. i don't know what you are feeling. i would never deny it. what i do question is the use of feeling as a barometer or playing field for discussion because i think it inhibits it. i do think it's very much a function of our own time. if you look for example of the term micro- aggression, it's fascinating.

nobody knew anything about him or it until the 2000's when it was revived this term. i haven't really read his work before i got into his project. it's been hugely influential. what he has done is he's written these books on micro- aggression and they take various kinds, one of them is the kind that highlights your difference in an allegedly different way, where you from, if you grew up in oregon and your parents are asian americans, you might be offended by that. it's like dude, i'm from i'm from oregon. yes i'm asian, but i'm american so that's one kind of micro- aggression, the one that highlights your difference, but there there is another time that erases it. when i look at you i don't see race. that can be a micro- aggression

too. allegedly it denies your difference rather than highlighting it, or the one that spend most controversial, anyone who works hard enough in america can make it. this to 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, as a university and especially university administrator, in a way, declaring that these statements are somehow taboo. that's evil. for university administrator to make a statement about social mobility which is really what were talking about with respect to the last micro- aggression, anyone who works hard enough to

make it, that's one of the most controversial questions. a university administrator should not be lying laying down a rule about that, but that's the other crucial context for understanding this. the rise of psychological idioms is one of them and the other is the rise of the administrative university. friends, here's an ax. for talking about race and race controversy and race culture that has a certain kind of meaning like malcolm x. but i want you to think about another time. this is the full-time faculty, this is a full-time administration, and starting in the 90s, they cross. when when i was a kid, there were more faculty members and now there are more administrators than faculty. that is a hugely important context for understanding all of

this. just be clear, i'm not against university administrators. in fact, i was one. we need them. secondly, there there are often some very good reasons for the rise of administrators, and going back to mental health, the whole mental health apparatus, when i was a kid in the 70s, it's now 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 is directive surrounding highly controversial questions. that can't be good. can't be good for any of us. thanks to greg and others, one

of the things we discovered, 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've seen the rise of these things called bias response incident teams, these are all managerial solutions and they also have an incredibly weak academic base so take diversity, i'm not opposed to the idea about helping people address their differences, but when we look at and we tried to study the managerial efforts to improve or change people's attitudes on the question of

race, the academic research timing is important. he would take thousands of freshmen and follow them through college, interviewing them and testing them and what he found was the intervention on the part of the university, these universities, he couldn't show they had any effect. it's expensive, as parents of two young adults of i'm rather sensitive to that question. what's does seem to improve people's racial attitudes and their likelihood to have friends and lovers across races, having

a roommate of a different race. to my mind, western civilization began to decline when freshmen were allowed to choose their roommate. i think that's the worst thing that happened in western civilization below and the behold, doug, if you're going to facebook and you can choose your roommate you will choose someone who looks just like you. we went to summer camp together or we had friends in common so you're not leveraging the benefits of diversity. i believe in diversity. if we allow kids to choose their freshman roommates we are not leveraging those benefits

>> there should be a trigger warning if a professor shows a clip of downton abbey.

there was actually a situation where a student asked for a trigger warning in a horror films class about blood. [laughter] and i'm like, dude, this is an elective. and it's an elective called a horror films class. maybe you shouldn't have elected this course. but, you know, to be clear here, just like all of this stuff there are times and places where it may be totally appropriate. so one of the courses, the big undergraduate courses i teach is about the culture wars in the united states, something i've written about. and i do a segment about pornography and anti-pornography in which in the past i've shown a anti-pornography movie called "the price of pleasure." and one of the things that makes it so compelling is it includes some porn clips because it's trying to show how nasty, violent and misogynyst a lot of porn is.

so i always say to the students, listen, this is what you're going to see in this movie, and if you don't want to watch it, you don't have to. i don't call that a trigger warning. but for all practical purposes, it is. and it strikes me as entirely legitimate, right? just when you start to stretch this to cover any possibly upsetting incident. so, you know, i won't bore you with the examples because you can find them in my work and also 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 about 30 years about something called feeling rules. this goes back to the work of orlie hots child who wrote this

book in the early '70s about stewardesses and the focus of the book was how social groups and social situations teach us to feel a certain way. okay? we're all subjective beings, okay? and we all feel differently. but at the same time, the feeling rules that surround us can bias us to feel in certain ways. not determine it, it never determines it, but bias our feelings in certain ways. and that's when i -- what i fear this languageover psychology is doing. the more we talk about the trauma we've experienced from, you know, a trump sign -- which is what happened at emory -- the more likely we are to feel that. so a great episode that i think highlighted this problem and a great response to it, you may recall that up at harvard maybe a year and a half ago there was this act of vandalism at the law school where somebody broke into the law school and put black tape over the mouths of the

portraits of the faculty of color. and this led to a huge contra temps, and randall kennedy, who teaches at harvard law school, an african-american, he wrote a really good op ed that made two points that i think are very salient to this discussion. the first one was we don't know this was a racist act. it 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, right? or bring more attention to the issue. maybe. or maybe it was like an awful, terrible david duke-type person, right, that really was a bigot, okay? but then kennedy says, and if it was, come on. how traumatized are we really?

we're at harvard law school amidst all this talk about racial privilege, how about a little talk about harvard privilege. [laughter] i mean, could somebody who was, quote, traumatized by this piece of theater or this piece of awfuls racist vandalism -- awful racist vanneddism, 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? you know? >> students and administrators were at loggerheads. the history of the american university is actually a

profoundly conflictual and sometimes violent one. you go back to the 19th century, okay, and there were duels on american campuses. and most of all, there were food fights. the students loved to do that, okay? at oberlin, sylvester graham instituted a bran and water diet, only bran and only water, that led to massive riots and protests against the administration. you've probably heard of sylvester graham because he, of course, is the guy that started the graham cracker. that's where it comes from. this was a very, by the way, barbaric and primitive time before there were marshmallows and s'mores. [laughter] into the '60s and '70s, there's tension between student protesters and administrators. so if you look at, say, the free speech movement, right, and at berkeley starting in the early

'60s you find clarke kerr, himself a very mainstream liberal democrat, calling the leader of that movement a university hater. that was kerr's position about savio. that's very different from today. if you look at the most recent round of protests, what you find is the administrators embracing the protesters. oh, yes, yes, you were right. i know you were traumatized. we failed you, right? that's what peter salaway said up at yale. yes, we'll have training, yes, we'll find the culprit in every single sexual assault case, okay, and dole out exactly the right penalty, because that's what we do, okay? we can do anything, okay? so more rules, more offices, more trainings. it's, it's important to ask how people can grow up on those terms. seriously. we're not the angry, like, biblical parent of the -- days.

we're like the helicopter mom or dad, okay? we run the place, okay? the students are constantly asking for more administration, and we give it to them. and that, i think, is what really differentiates this generation of protests from earlier ones, you know? tom hayden died recently, and i wrote a column about him. very complicated figure. and if you look at the statement which is kind of the classic early statement of student protest which, of course, hayden drafted, it has a really interesting language. it says we need to wrest control from the administrative bureaucracy. and that seems like it's from another era because it is, okay? now it's can we have more administration, please? can we have another statement from you?

there was an awful racist incident that happened on my campus recently involving terrible e-mails sent to african-american students, right? and everyone is asking the president to say the right words. oh, president gutman, please say these mystical words, say the right incantation. and in closing, if you really want to see how different things are, go ahead and google the wellesley college graduation of 1969. because at that graduation, that was the first one that a student spoke, which is kind of interesting, okay? and you already know her name. it was hillary diane rodham, later to be hillary rodham clinton. and if you look at the speech, it's really interesting because she says we need fewer curricular requirements, we need a pass/fail system, and most of all we need students to direct their own education.

and she, she writes -- hillary -- we're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating moods of living. we're all exploring a world that none of us understands. it's such a great add venture. i think -- adventure. i think it is, actually, i think it is still a great adventure. none of us know where it's going. but at our universities, we will narrow that adventure if we continue to think of it in narrow psychological terms that restrict what we say and what we think. most of all, we'll narrow the adventure if our students and our faculty invest ever more power in the people who run these institutions instead of in themselves. thanks a lot. [applause] >> so i have lots of questions,

and i want to get david and greg to be able to weigh in with their thoughts initially, but i just have to ask all of you, if you don't mind just responding to this, the administrative question is the thing that stood out to me in your book. it wasn't always this way, that administrators -- like, there's even a quote in your book along the lines of in every single instance, it seems like the administrators bend over backwards to say, yes, yes, you were right, we were wrong. how did that happen? is it a different type of administrator who now is going into the office? is it different with fundraising? there seems to be, like, a change in type. >> definitely. and i want to hear the other two gentleman talk about this, but let me say a couple of things historically. i think 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. i mean, think about the whole title ix revolution. again, none of this is necessarily bad.

sometimes it's very good, right? but if the federal government is more deeply involved in the university, by definition you're going to need more administrators to figure out how to comply with the federal government, right? i think, i think though more broadly there's also been a huge change in the sensibility of the students who see themselves as consumers very often rather than necessarily as learners. so one of the things that i've been struck by in debates i've had with students on my own campus about my book is a lot of them say, look, we're paying the billses. if we want trigger warnings -- >> yep. >> -- 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 a certain kind of awful sense. >> very interesting. dave? >> well, first, i really enjoyed reading your book. it was very reasonably written, and i couldn't help but think am i reading this in 2016, because i haven't read anything reasonable -- [laughter] >> that's a ridiculous remark. [laughter] >> you know, i think that on the question you ask about the rise of the administrative pure rock city -- bureaucracy, look, i was in law school from '91-'94 which was sort of the crest of this first wave of political correctness, and all of the pressure from the students was to the administrators saying gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. and to a greater or lesser degree, it's been doing, students have been doing that ever since. there's just this constant push towards the administrators. but what i would say, to be very clear about, is that when we're talking about in loco parentis or in loco helicopteris -- [laughter]

the helicopter administration is not, therefore, students. t not. it's not. if you are a conservative christian, member of a pro-life club, christian organization, you have views that are outside the mainstream on 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 your psychological well being is taken care of? what you will find is the administration is going to go out of its way to make sure that all your other classmates' psychological wellbeing is being taken care of as a result of the trauma you inflict upon them. and you'll see this, and it's not necessarily censorship, although that does occur, and i've sued quite a few universities who have censored religious student organizations. censorship, out and out censorship is less common than

sort of just two sets of reality. and one of the things that i would say if you're talking about free speech on college campuses, here's the question that you would need to ask yourself. before i speak or say something, how much intestinal 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 glide path to expression. you're going to be encouraged by your professors. you're going to be encouraged by your administration. if your chosen political candidate loses, you're going to get an opportunity to go to a play doe room. you're going to have the opportunity to vent your spleen. and we're not talking about just radical fringe communication

here, we're talking about extremely mainstream points of view expressed by millions of americans. now, that's not an excuse, and i say this all the time to, when i speak to conservative students. the opposite of political correctness is not, and pardon my language, assholery. [laughter] there's a lot of people who believe i'm going to strike a blow of political correctness by being the extreme worst person that i can think of. and you said there's kind of a benign form of political correctness and one that isn't. and i would say there's manners -- >> yeah. >> -- as a son of the south, there's manners. [laughter] and then there's political correctness. and manners is a, when you have manners, you're seeking to treat another person the way you'd like to be treated. and to the extent that you know the other person you're interacting with has particular sensitivities or a particular background which would lead you

to be sensitive and compassionate in your communication with them, be sensitive and compassionate in your communication with them. if, however, you know you're talking to someone as tough as nails and take anything you dish at 'em, maybe you're going to feel a little bit more free. it's common sense. one last thing that i would say, you know, this language of trauma and this language of victimization and the -- and this conversation stopper that says that if you continue to speak, you're harming me, again, it's just not evenly applied. if it was evenly applied, speech would just shut down on campus. i'll give you an example. i was at penn late last year, and i was speaking about free speech on campus, and i was addressing this very issue. and a student spoke up, and they were from, they were from the inner city, latino student, and they were talking about -- because i touched on issues of race and affirmative action and things like this.

and i'm in the 40% that does not believe in the race-based affirmative action. and he explained with great emotion that it's difficult to hear me talk about these things because he's from a historically disadvantaged area, he's from a 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 this when i didn't -- >> yep. >> and so i respond and i said do you have an opinion about the iraq war? and he said, absolutely, i have an opinion about the iraq war. and i said, well, you know, i'm a veteran of that conflict. i was there during the surge in '07-'08. it was the most traumatic experience of my lifetime. i can't -- it's hard to imagine anything more traumatic. and i've 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 experienced there trump any opinion that anyone has? in my presence, should they keep their opinion completely to themselves lest they trigger me or lest they bring up trauma? and you could see the sort of, wait a minute, but i'm really anti-war. [laughter] i really want, i mean, that's really what i want to say. so these things are not, are not evenly applied. not all trauma is the same. and so, you know, we do not have, we do not have a environment where what's good for the goose is good for the gander, so to speak. if i may use gender terms like "goose" and "gander." [laughter] so that's why to a lot of conservative students this notion that the university is taking care of its students just

flatly rings hollow. it's just seen as absurd. >> thank you. greg? >> i don't even know where to bin, that's so much -- to begin, there's so much to cover. obviously, since you cited my work quite a bit, i agree with jonathan on quite a bit about the situation on campus. i've seen three major phases on campus, and the first sort of age of political correctness was, frankly, before my time. and i was at a school that was not affected by it, and that was towards the tail end anyway. i didn't realize when i started at stanford, at law school, that only two years before they had lost a court case in which their speech code was defeated even at a private school because the state government passed a law called the leonard law saying even non-sectarian schools -- they met stanford -- can't have speech codes. [laughter] so for most of my career, i

would want to be talking about to conservatives, for example, when they had this really kind of the sense of the really motional student who desperately wanted censorship and was obsessed with identity politics, i was sure that person existed, but it just wasn't what i was dealing with for most of my career. those seemed like tall tales from the late '80s, early '90s which was kind of before my time. so most of my career has been fighting administrators who sometimes are engaged in political correctness. but i do get a little frustrated with the political correctness, people being so fix sainted on it, partially because -- fixated, partially because they're just abuses of power. one of the worst cases, period, that i've seen dealt with a university president at a georgia college who decided to kick out, without due process, a student because he was critical of a parking garage project. [laughter] >> yeah. i referenced that in the book. >> it's a crazy case. but then again there are hour frying political correctness --

horrifying political correctness like i talk about in "up learning liberty -- unlearning liberty" where it was administrators engaging in this incredibly aggressive indoctrination program that went beyond anything i'd ever seen. so i feel like my career's had three faces. one primarily administrators run amok, because someone always has to be running amok, of course. [laughter] the next is the federal government run amok, coming up with standards, for example, for harassment that are literally impossible to comply with, at least if you want to be keeping with the constitution, the standard enunciated about harassment in a 2013 letter is laughably unconstitutional and impossible to comply with and necessarily, as dawfd points out -- david points occupant, has to be applied with deep double standards or nobody would be allowed to say a thing on a college campus. but the third phase which is distressing to me, but it's relatively recent, is seeing what looks like all these stories i heard about which is this very strong, usually got a

strong element of identity politics but a lot of times also, or you know, white liberals saying i don't want this person speaking on my campus. and then, of course, people say, well, it's their special day, so commencement. and i always point out, okay, first of all, that's not a very persuasive argument to me. second of all, this also includes speakers being -- they're not even probably going to go to charles murray's speech, but they still don't want him speaking at that school because it offends their very sensibility that he even steps foot on campus. i want to get back to the way you introduced the section. and i thought it was great that you started talking about pluralism. i think anytime 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 is this harvard campus culture is superior, and meanwhile i was a hellion at stanford because i was always pointing out, wow, it's weird.

all these views tend to sound like the views of white, liberal, bay-area rich people. [laughter] and they hated me for pointing this out. so class has fallen out of discussion. and i think it's one of the reasons why you don't see trigger -- >> at laguardia. >> and a lot of other places because these tends to be signs of class stratification. and i just finished robert putnam's "our kids." definitely read it. for the elite colleges, it's a 14 to 1 ratio of whether you're going to go to one of the elite schools as a poor kid. and i think universities have become so lopsided in their ideology they can't see -- in some cases administrators can't distinguish what they think a good person should say from absolute truth. and i always refer back to my father. my father was russian. my mother is british. you can't have two people of more different cultures and still remain within europe. but my father would always teach me that the first rule of

dealing with other cultures or people not like you is to try to figure out where they're coming from and what their norms are, not to impose your norms immediately on them. and as my father would explain in non-p.c. terms, if you don't, you're acting like hick. [laughter] and what i see going on today is this -- it does, i nearly called unlearning liberty new victorians because i see a lot of parallels between the victorian era and this very self-confident idea that, well, conservatives, you know, they're backwards. evangelicals are completely wrongheaded. other religious minorities have similar beliefs as do evangelicals, but that's okay, because that's multiculturalism. we know the end of truth, and we know the way people should talk. and it is getting away from this pluralistic model where it's okay to have, quote-unquote, wrong beliefs, where we actually value that, where it's becoming much more this is what all right-thinking people think. that's only possible due to sort

of the heterogeneity of the student, the prof sor yacht. >> yeah, let me just say i've 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 yiddish don't know how to say good-bye. [laughter] you know, to go, to go to what david was saying earlier, you know, i actually think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes what we say might hurt people's feelings, you know? but at the same time, say that that can't be the playing field, and that can't be the barometer. >> right. >> it should be possible to act knowledge those feelings instead of willing them away, but make an argument for why they shouldn't rule the day. so when the question of race-based affirmative action, i can well understand how if you were a member of a minority group, you might be offended about an argument against race-based affirmative action. i get it, right? but i don't think your offense should prevent us from

discussing the question. rather than say don't be offended, 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 how we speak. >> right. >> that seems to me just a fundamental distinction. and i'm afraid that we have lost it. and i should tell you quite frankly, i've been very distressed at my own campus that when i make pleas for including more people in the discussion including people that voted for donald trump, i'm met with comments like it's just too soon. people are too hurt. they need time to heal. >> wow. >> yep. >> i mean, just a purely psychological response. and i can tell you again just for total sake of transparency, i am appalled by donald trump. i mean, i yield to nobody in my outrage at the things he -- >> did you almost run for president? [laughter]

>> it made me want to -- >> i think you might be standing next to someone who -- [laughter] >> nobody -- >> he gets a lot of deference. >> yeah, yeah, yeah. but not a majority, but close to a majority of the voters did vote for him. there are a small number of people at penn who vote toed for him. some of them have appeared in my office and have told me that they don't feel like they can say that. >> oh, yeah? >> and, friends, that i cannot tolerate. if somebody wants to disagree with something i've said or written, i'm fine with that. because that's about me, and i'm a tenured, full professor. i'll be fine. you can say whatever you want. [laughter] the things i'd have to do to get fired, i can't even say. i mean, that's how bad they are, okay? [laughter] >> that could be read two ways, by the way. >> yeah. [laughter] i've got no problems and no complaints. >> right. >> but if i hear from a student that he or she feels like they can't awhat they're thinking -- say what they're thinking, that's war to me, okay?

because that cuts to my fundamental beliefs about what a university is or should be. >> yep. >> and what i'm doing, i don't know if this will work, but i've been in contact with a couple of bible colleges near philadelphia to try to create a few seminars involving people from penn and people from the bible colleges next semester just talking about the election. because i don't feel at penn internally, well, we would be able to have what i call a conversation. most of what's happened recently is not a conversation, it's a mourning session, right? >> yeah. >> it's just different analyses of what went wrong. and i'm a part of that too. i mean, i think things went terribly wrong with, to be honest. i'd engage in that conversation. but i'm ashamed how few trump voters i've had discussions with. and i don't think i can have those discussions internally at my university. >> well, and one thing that -- i haven't said this publicly before, but john and i have just signed with penguin press to do a book that's sort of using, taking the american mind as a starting point and getting

deeper into this because we thought we'd said everything we needed to say on it, and then the universities went much crazier in the year after we wrote it than we ever saw coming. and, you know, we're very serious about this, the idea that this is based on a bad psychological model, not one that isn't in keeping with the actual current research, but actually is 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, very fragile, and if you hear things that bother you, you're going to be done forever -- [laughter] that psychologist would be fired. but to a agree, i feel like we're creating this self-fulfilling prophesy of fragile students, and it's empirically demonstrable that we are seeing upticks in rates of anxiety among college kids and students increasingly going to seek psychological help for oppression. now, i say this because i also take psychology very seriously. but i don't want it to be abused into something that -- and this is the tentative title of the

book, it almost certainly won't end up being the actual title, but it disempowers students. making them feel fatal listic, like think no -- fatalistic, like they have no choice. but what i refer to as the exquisite technologies, and what i mean by that is it used to be, you know, back in our day in college and law school that you just -- the way to dismiss someone's opinion was to call them a conservative, and if you could figure out a way they were conservative, you were off the hook for having to listen to them. >> right. >> now we have, it's exquisite how many different arguments we have for not having to listen to each oh other. 100% of the entire human race is privileged. you don't have to listen to a single person you disagree with. there is punching up and punching down, there is victim blaming, there's argument after argument after argument that doesn't actually get you to the argument. and we've tolerated all of these things. and that's the motional

reasoning -- emotional reasoning, saying i'm offended. it's not a substantive argument. and i think this is happening, you know, across political lines as well, that we're figuring out ways to not talk about the actual issue. but i do think particularly the elite campuses, they're becoming experts at the way to never actually get to the substance of the argument. and i think that's inherently really destructive. >> do you mind if i -- >> oh, yeah, yeah. i was just going to say one quick thing since his name came up -- [laughter] you know, so i don't know if anyone else, i don't know if you guys have ever done this, but i've actually conducted diversity training before. >> oh, goodness. [laughter] >> when i -- yes. >> how did that make you feel? [laughter] >> i felt oppressive. [laughter] so as a jag officer when the military changed, repealed don't ask/don't tell, we were all -- there was a mandatory standdown across the military, and we were going to train our troops about

same-sex marriage and lgbt issues. so can you imagine me? i'm being asked -- [laughter] to run through this power point that is all of this sensitivity training and all of this diversity training, and i had to do it. it was orders. and the typical military diversity training, it begins with a general looking in the camera, you will listen to this -- [laughter] and you will behave in accordance. but here's what happens -- >> they can order people. i mean, they desegregated before the rest of us. >> yeah. >> so here's what happens when you deliver diversity training. and i tried to be as engaging as i possibly could be, and the whole crowd is like this. [laughter] the whole crowd. >> very dramatic. >> yeah. [laughter] just they cannot wait for it to be over. [laughter] they just hate every second of it. >> please, get me back to the war. [laughter] >> yeah, exactly. and this is what happens on college campuses. a whole lot of people sitting through these trainings, and the only thing they're getting from it is this view that you're telling me is the approved view,

it's not the view that i necessarily have, and it's not necessarily the view that i'm going to adopt. and so, you know, one thing that we've learned in this election is people cannot be hectored out of their beliefs. they will sometimes send their beliefs underground, and then they'll share them in the anonymity of the voting booth. i live in a, i live in a precinct 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 hellhole, but it was an awful lot of people who just were really sick and tired of being told what to think and what to do and were actually voting as a sheer act of rebellion, just 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 effects. and one thing that was interesting about your book is you showed through actual data

that colleges aren't quite indoctrinating quite as much as people tend to think they are. >> that's the biggest myth, by the way. >> yeah. of. >> you know, first of all, it's a myth that the faculty is just full of, like, radical marxists, right? we are overwhelmingly liberal, like myself, but not very radical. that's number one. but the students don't agree with us on a whole bunch of different issues, right? if we're trying to indoctrinate them, we're doing a really crappy job, you know? it's just not working. and in part it's because some of us aren't invested enough in teaching, right? the whole indoctrination model implies a lot more investment in teaching of learning than either the faculty or a lot of the students exhibit. >> okay, one -- i want to make sure we do this housekeeping thing. if you're in on line audience, remember, you can submit questions going to sli.do and using the code aei event, and i'll get to those in a second. a bunch of you have raised issues related to a question that i wanted to ask which is

the influence of this, whatever we want to call this, this atmosphere, this environment both on students and on the faculty. so i've read a couple times recently that there is -- it's anecdotal, but a sense that too many students now and the term is can't answer the second question. they are so unaccustomed, they're so accustomed now to shutting down debate with a whole lot of different techniques that when you get to these tough questions about what is inside and outside of pluralism, what is good for democracy and what is not, they just have not been pressure tested in the discussion. >> yes. >> so we've actually inhibited their growth. but now the faculty part is even more interesting. i just read this article in city journal, a guy named john tierney wrote it's called the real war on science. the case that he makes is that, actually, the orthodoxy on campuses is affecting faculty in such a way that it is very clear that there are certain questions

you can and you cannot ask, there's certain conclusions you absolutely cannot reach, and that is having an influence on the research that's being done and on the faculty that is willing to go on the campuses to work. so the environment, i kind of worried what is that going to do 20 years from now. now i'm starting to wonder what is it doing to the research and the students at the moment? do you guys have any thoughts on that? >> absolutely. my co-author for the book i'm writing and then the article, he wrote this incredible article along with people like big names in psychology including ho -- jose duarte talking about how badly the skew, the political skew of social psychology was actually hurting the field of physical psychology. and he gave an example that basically just treated conservativism as necessarily a mental disorder. and it gave different -- and it was so loaded because it gave sort of like -- it showed examples of the questions, and they're all kind of like do you

think it's this kind of mental disorder or this kind of mental disorder? is there any auspice under which conservativism isn't a mental disorder, is the question. and it's one of the reasons i think why people listen to him, is he's talking -- he's not saying that you need to have, you know, perfect parity. he's not talking -- but he does think that the lack of disconfirmation, the lack of someone to call bs on when you're in a polarization spiral or, basically, your confirmation bias -- i've talked to 20 smart people, they all agree with me, and i'll go even farther. just having one person to just confirm seriously can make a big difference. but i've noticed this 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 a political liberal, but i'm shocked at how bad they are defending because they've never been challenged. >> that's a remarkable thing. that's nontrivial if we're talking serious about debate on campus and what their supposed

to do, critical thinking. have you noticed that as a teacher? >> i have. , again, i also think we just need to be a little bit more tempered, right? one of the great things about teaching in most environments is when you close the door, you can do whatever you want. [laughter] you know? most jobs respect like that. and there's -- aren't like that. and there's a problem with that, too, right, because some people aren't doing much or doing something that's quite bad, right? but you have an extraordinary amount of independence, you know? and when i was a k-12 teacher, i would often say you know what the best sound is? i would just close the door. [laughter] you know? and so, you know, i've found in the recent round of debates at penn that, frankly, the only students and fact i allty members -- faculty members who have been highly critical of me are people that don't know me, that aren't in my classes, you know, to whom i'm really just a cartoon just like some white guy

whose side burns are going gray, right? i mean, rather than an actual human being. because i've been able to conduct in my own 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 strictures and developments that people might be less able to do it. and as far as the war on science goes, i mean, that's real and it's bipartisan. how many liberals in boulder, colorado, who scoff appropriately at climate change denial don't vaccinate their kids? a lot. [laughter] a lot. you know? and so, you know, the war on science is real. it is bipartisan. okay? and the prejudice against conservatives is real, right? i mean, one of the things i found so interesting about reactions to things i've written is how i get labeled a conservative. [laughter] and this i just find hilarious. friends, i was in the peace corps. my dad was in the peace corps. he knew jfk, like, i'm jewish, i

have a ph.d., i'm the most predictable -- [laughter] in the world democrat ever. like ever that's ever existed. you know? so it's kind of hilarious. but it's depressing too, and here's why. let me just try an analogy on you. it's not perfect because no analogy is. one of the most upsetting things to me as a citizen and educator that has been the outburst of anti-muslim sentiment in this country. and sometimes directed at the president, right? after, you know, the birtherrism thing was exposed for what it was, suddenly he became a closet muslim, right? and what's really sad to me about that episode is what, so far as i knew, the president was never able to do which is the following: he was never able to get in front of a microphone, so far as i know, and say, look, even though my middle name's hussein, it turns out i'm not a muslim, okay? but what if i was? >> yeah. >> i don't think he's ever said that, all right? and that tells you something really huge and upsetting about

the degree of prejudice in this cub, right? that he can't -- in this country. that he can't. i'm sure he's thought it a million times. so what i've started to do, it turns out i was in the peace corps, my dad was in the peace corps, i'm the least conservative person in the world. what if i wasn't, right? why would that be such a terrible thing, you know? >> yep. >> the very accusation bespeaks prejudice in the same way -- again, i'm not equating, i'm not saying the prejudice against conservatives on campuses is as bad as anti-muslim prejudice, it isn't. but i do think there's a parallel there. >> it's a way to delay folks to listen to you. it's been funny since the argument came out, you know, the critics of the article, the one written in "the new york times," conservative greg -- and i'm like, that's cute, you know? ..

if you want to really know how seasoning a campus is, you're going to have to ask about social conservative. or people who believe mat major is a union of man and woman and that caitlyn jenner is still a man. what is the acceptance of that point of view on a college campus? can you say that? without triggering the kind of reaction that might even be worse than the -- received at yale? >> we have a real case like that. at marquette.

a case i bring up all the time. there's a professor adams who for years had been writing this blog says, i'm a conservative, keep i teach at marquette which is a catholic institution but i can't caulk talk about catholicism. audiotape discussion with a junior faculty member in training.whether or not this debate class they would debate same-sex marriage. this student is told he can't because it would be homophobic to discuss so it he blacks the tape to professor adams and he writes what he always writes. can't previous you can even into it's speak about same-sex

marriage but it's a catholic institution. what the university does is they fire -- trying to -- mcadams is suing the excuse bull they're trying to fewer a tenured profession but a he reported something was true and they're trying to firing home. >> i'm come fused. that'sing argue. -- argue. >> they're always shifting. they're basically settled -- the were shift. >> he didn't fulfill his duties as a profession to agree with somebody else? >> bloging, his professional duty to the younger professor issue guess, is kind of the argument. >> right. remember that. let be clear, would too cute about nat.

there are terrible cases in which tenured prognoses have their job security thenned and i feel incredibly lucky we have people like agreeing to greg to help us. the real chrysler criss is not the tenured professors. thissed a adjunct teacher. an old geezer like the retires they hire four part-timers. that's the big enscandal, not trigger warnings. >> i want to open this up to the audience, microphones come here. yes, please. >> my name is jo freeman, an alum muss of the berkeley free speech movement and lurking in the brun background of temperature constant flex with the admission would con atlantic between the administration and at the legislature.

some the commit year on unamerican -- well knew none of this at the time. we just saw the administration as the enemy. i'm written a book since then so i know more. it makes me wonder if there's not something similar going on behind the political correctness in today's universities. what is the state legislature doing in this? is there some equivalent to that? the politic winds behind the politics. >> the role of government is a secret engine why these get crazy but because of the federal department of education setting standards that are impossible to comply with, and even universities like tufts university that scoured everything it was supposed to do accord to go at the department of education, did basically a

text bergs version and got investigated anyway and they said there's no amount of reform that can make this department happy. but that only lasted a week before at the professor was scared back into the -- however, stately u legislatures play a recall -- role, and the grand-standee kind of cases a student at the university of maryland who wanted so to the a important porno and the stay legislature got involved and we wrote in saying they not tell the students what that shy watch. the is a an interesting okay in oklahoma where richard dawkin spoke. the tried to pass a measure saying that evolution is unpop already theory. the university of tennessee tried to get rid of funding after a university of tess tennessee had section -- sex

people on campus. >> let's keep in indo-i deep lited that gill is here because i've read your work. the -- something i actually take a little bit of -- not pride but happiness in is the fact that when david horowitz went to the state lug legislature tuesday trying to pass laws saying we have to have ideology balance. we dent walt the state legislatures man man dating that. the didn't get anywhere which is a good thing. >> we have a bunch of questions i knock get to all the ones online, but several are fallingg into two categories. the first is a number of conservative either faculty members, young faculty member odd students worry beside coming

out on the campus. they're looking for at individual, what to do, what not too toe do the other -- several questions are flasher gifted they're allowing sometimes to act like consumers. >> you're safer out of the closet. i have debt with faculty members concerned about -- so concerned about tenure and people know they're conservative that they would call me and is whether per on the phone. over ore conservative and you an outstanding record of scholarship and service to your university, and you are an excellent teacher and you're

denied tenure and people know you're conserve if the. that like raising and waving a red flag. if nobody knows that you're conservative and you're just another faculty member who you don't get tenure, number one, where is your discrimination claim? number two, it's inincredibly difficult to make a claim. i independent think students are safer expressing their point of view. but you have to have intel nat fortitude. they're safer from administrationtive sanctions but not peer sanctions and very few student goes to college thinking i cannot wait to get too harvard and be hated. and so that is the -- on the

issue of being out of the closet, i'm presuming as protecting you from official sanctions. peer group sanction is a whole -- and peer shaming and peer attacks, a whole other thing. you have to be able to be -- to withstand that. and that is, i think, greater free speech threat threat right now because people don't want to con front peer rejection. >> we had a question in front and we have to wrap up quarterbackly. >> steve heyward, turnly an inmate at berkeley. an awful lot of the ratcheting up under titlal 9 tame came gays guidens from the gordon -- game as guidance for the federal government. so if president trump asked you to read the department of

education. >> up in are us would be selected for that. but certainly david, neither of us -- i like my day job. but i have plenty of suggestions one is put your money where your mouth it on the guidance idea. this is rulemaking we're engaged in. it was amazes that someone at the depth of ed -- department of education was testifying testife said, we're. >> engage fog guidance, not rulemaking, but what happens the universities don't follow? they lose their funding. that rule making. we need to heave guidance and comment. i think that should repeal the 2011 letter. i think they should leave it up to universities to decide what standard of evidence they want to use, and i think that should

adopt the davis standard for harassment. you can read about it -- in the atlantic article but the definition of harass. that is more like aprocess of drape discriminatory action as opposed to a single wrong thing. so those three things. >> i would say get rid of the 2011 letter. that it just due process 101. initiate rulemaking. however, i would also say that the rulemaking should remove universities from adjudicating sexual assault entirely. i think that is a criminal matter. i don't think universitied-qualified. they do not have the staff, the means. let let the criminal justice -- and then if you adopt want to bring a criminal complaint, you can bring a civil complaint. you can do a civil action. and then let the university get

involved when that's an adjudication that occurs. >> if could take a respectful dissent here and just keep in mind i'm not a lawyer, these two gentlemen are. in fact, except for marrying my wife and joining the peace corp, not being a lawyer is the best decision i made. let me just say something about a small point i try to make in book. it would be great if universities could wash their handed adjudication in the way that david is saying. don't thing they can and here's why. a lot of victims don't want to enlist the criminal justice system in what happened to them. that's just a fact. and it doesn't mean they're not victims. that's opinion number one. and point number, for good ropes the wheels of criminal justice spin too slowly. as much as i'd like to say the universities can't be in the

business of judging these things, i sympathize with the university administrators, an episode on cam put and the two did are setting next to each, you can't say to both of them, this is a criminal matter, four years from now some court will decide your case and until then you have to have the two of you in class next to each eye. don't know what they should do. but they can do that. i sympathize with them. >> you can no contact and separation orders which is very common in the military while actual criminal due process up folds. you can separate people -- and judges can craft orders that provide actual sanction if you violate orders. so, there are work-arounds to that very real concern.

if i i've claimed that greg has attacked me issue don't would to be a panel with them. there are work-arounds. >> i did a bad job managing time. i would want to give each of the panelists one last sense. what is one think folks in the audience should look to in the next year or one thing you ought to be done on a campus to make a big difference. >> i've been saying this, we have to change expectations. they're a lot 0 pointing students and saying who is telling you to be sew anxious and censorship action. i think we are and k through 12 and administratorrors are. and until we chang at the orientation process to say thing mook be going will of you're uncomfortable. if we have say that to student they can be offended.

>> i would briefly that when universities embrace racial diversity, they have to take pains to embrace ideological diversity at well. the worse thing that happen in our landscape that a concern for racial and ethnic diversity runs perpendicular to free speech. every great warrior has been a tribune for free speech because i knew if they didn't have that they got nothing. so the same breath as we do and should attend to racial and ethnic diversity and the different problems, lea to attend the ideological university at the same time in at the same breath. >> my message would be to conservative students, conservative professors, conservative administratorrors, you have to have some serious intestinal fortitude. you can withstand peer shim

shaming and in fact the more of you who demonstrate the intestinal fortitude, you we seen as lest strange and more part of campus discourse, and there's precedent that you should take joy in it. bible says consider it pure joy when you suffer trials, including the trial of being a harvard student. >> some of my students come out to me in they're persons as conservety. i'm like, just be yourself. it gets betterment don't live a lie. really. we'll all be smarter if you just come out. >> please join me in thanking our panelists. great conversation. thank you. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] the c-span video library is an easy way to search and view c-span programs, and to help through through its use is dr. robert browning, executive director of the c-span archives. >> go to c-span.org, the main site and look on the front page, on he left side or all the hearings and the presidential events of that day, the political campaign events, and then right underneath that on the left side is a link that says, recent events. and they appear in the order that they were on the network. you can search for a person's name, every person, 117,000 people have pages that contain all if the video, and on that page is a link -- search box and you put in a word, so let's say,

you want to -- jackson lee and put in a word and say that's talked about climbed change. >> member offered the congressam black caucus tomorrow will received the public stealth offered those demanding that the bodysport support republican's clean power plant. >> you want ted powe, talked about iraq, in then that will get you to particular small pieces, almost like paragraphs, where they made their rocks jacker the soldiers were members of the their battalion, sixth regiment. the first cavalry division. these americans soldiers were volunteers that swore to protect the united states. >> across the top we have a link that they all are video or clips. you can find all the clips that people make are available for other people to look for.

>> who leaves first, obama or -- >> certainly hope it's assad. >> i do. but i don't think so. >> there's another tab that says mentions and mentions are quotes that are valuable. >> what a bizarre decision by the president of mexico to invite donald trump down there. >> then on the far left side there are breakdowns, much like you find on any other shopping web site, you can say i want to see a particular person's name. want to see a particular senate committee or a tag for a policy. theft side is the very valuable for narrowing down. >> search, click and play on the c-span video library. at c-span.org. >> as 2016 comes to a close many publications offer their books for best book of the year.

this is a amazon. an inside look at social media in chas monkeys. in hero of the empire, look at a young winston churchill. then a history of the general net tick code and future manipulation. the notable books of 2016 includes grunt, by a signs writer who reports on the technology used to improve the effective not and safety of the american military and then an interrogator at abu graham prison. >> i've been out of government service in iraq for over a year. and the narrative about what had gone on in prisons and iraq didn't match up with what i'd seen and what i'd done. and i recognized that as a

soldier, i had an obligation to truth, and as i saw the narrative switch, as i saw people talk as if the -- isolated incident, and was taken care of or in some case simply hadn't happened the way we thought it did, those who were there, again, had a duty to speak out. so the roger op-ed in the post-was to not use the word torture. i still struggle the idea that what call enhanced interrogation. i felt that a discussion that the person needed to have and evolved to the opinion where i recognize now that clear it is torture. torture is an enhance interrogation. what i didn't want to do is write a policy book that suggested where these things cam from. i didn't know those things.

more importantly i had an obligation to tell my story and to explain my role in these things and not to justify them and not even necessarily on some level to condemn them but to be as hon is a could. >> this is a look at some of years notable books. booktv has covered many of these offers. you can wam the full programs on our web site, book tv doral doral. >> this is an unprecedented level of visiblity. speaking to the idea of the explosion of hip-hop and the global expert of that and what dot is men for the images, not necessarily -- all these images being protected to the world, how are we wrestling with the

truth of the artist expression and also recognizes the truth is sometimes born of a form after oppression and stereotyping and flattening of yesterdays it'ses. our to reconcile those at response that's a rick thing to do, to respect one's truth and know that it's influenced by thing outside may not -- systems you may not want to be part of. the tension of that hyper visible, the central american question, because of the necessity that blackness is to the american identity, right? in order for the united states to operate the way it does, it need as bottom, it's a system of hierarchies and the capitalism

is bad. needs exploitative class, and why supremacy gave that bottom class and it's coin you have the bottom class and blackness isotheral and we create groups to exploit. latinos and muslims and at different points, ethnic groups now considered white were also a part of that, like italians and irish were -- germans were all exploited classes of people, but their escape was the fact that whiteness needed to reproduce itself, to form strongholds, political economical strongholds

and demonize they human writ of black people, and the minstrel show, the post cards depict black men being linked lynch ifd and all of these different things are the work of ensure that humanity of black people is visible and we need to be seen in terms of during slavery, owning one of us was a status symbol, and then having us be dokes and servants was a measure of one's worth within society. so, there's always that tension of the actual act of being seen but also being -- having your

humanity denies and that's the con sift of visible is crying to get at. >> you can watch this and other programs online at book tv.org. >> thank you for coming out, great crowd for thursday afternoon. we're very excited about the event, just have a few housekeeping things. as you all know we normally do a signing after area. we won't do that today. but the books are semi signed already. it a beautiful book. we have plenty of copy so please help yourself, great christmas and holiday gifts, and otherwise the event will run as it usually

does. our panel will be up hear to lead the discussion for a while and take questions. owilliam have one mic over here, and we hope you can make it to a mic to ask your question. we have our open video and we also have c-span here and we're also doing this on facebook live as a live stream. so, please try to make it to me ick if youover a question. a couple of other little houston keeping things. for those who are members of politics and prose, our winter member shim says -- if you're a member, everything in store is 20% of so come out of that are and if you are not a member and want to join, we are happy to happy to have you. we know that there's been a lot of news around this block, the 500 block of connecticut avenue, and brad and i -- by the way,

i'm lisa -- the details -- i'm one of the co-oregoners owners of me store with my husband brad. we want to express our really truly heartfelt thanks to our community on behalf of our staff. the outpouring of support and concern in the aftermath of the incident on sunday has been overwhelming, positive, and a sign of us -- a testament to the incredible strength of this community, we're here, proud to be part of this community, we hope we contribute in some small way to the sense of community, as do the other binns on -- businesses on the block but it's about the people who support ore businesses and believe in solidarity in the face of this kind of assault and this commune and we thank you for being here