that the american dream is very much alive for those willing to work for it. >> all c-span programs are available@c-span.org i did on our home page or by searching the video library. >> the university of chicago school of social service administration hosted a discussion recently on academic freedom and diversity on college campuses. panelists include a documentary filmmaker, authors and professors from yale university and the university of michigan and chicago. this is just over 90 minutes. >> okay, good evening, everyone. i guess it's feeding time now. the sun is setting so early. for those of you who don't know me i'm neil guterman, the dean of the school of social service administration here at the university of chicago and i want to thank you for joining us for this evenings event.

american universities have long been unique institutions that generate novel sometimes controversial and even classic ideas that will challenge and sometimes press popular wisdom bringing to bear deeper more rigorous analyses of evidence. such ideas can at times you'll advances or even breakthroughs of the most vexing questions and problems of our day. one of the most indispensable pillars in higher education, which makes such advanced wholly possible, is a cardinal principle and practice of academic freedom, the protection and the unfettered pursuit of ideas, concepts, evidence and knowledge, and the passing on of such in our education students. while the principle of academic freedom is a central freedom of american education, the university of chicago has a rather distinctive and deeply

held approach to academic freedom, a which i'm sure you'll be hearing more about this evening from some of our panelists. the school of social service administration has a a professional school of social work, particularly benefits from and contributes to academic freedom and unfettered pursuit of ideas. ideas that address the concerns of those who are most vulnerable and marginalized. we dive into and it is the most complicated multilayered and sometimes contentious of social problems like poverty or violence, and we do so in a tireless search for a real solution and to rigorously educate for social equity and justice. the ideas that we develop and discuss don't just stay among the scholars and students here at the university of course but they develop and deliver to have real tangible benefit to people and their lives.

because our scholarship and education at ssa are intimately connected to real people and real world problem solving. ssa is oftentimes sort of a crucible of ideas and implications in the best sense of the word but we are constantly searching to forage for your insight and light and enduring solutions out of what is oftentimes the heat of polarized, oversimplified or not well tested ideas and strategies. the second pillar found broad in american higher education is a cardinal value on diversity. that is, our value on bringing to the university community individuals from different backgrounds, life experiences and statuses. and especially so for those from underrepresented or marginalized backgrounds. of course, part of the importance of diversity stems from a value on social equity

and societal inclusion. as universities are arguably the most important institution in our society, which foster entry into and integration in the mainstream. an additional indispensable component of diversity is that by bringing together diverse members to the university community, all of its members are enriched by the mutual exposure to divergent experiences, backgrounds, and viewpoints. in this way our cardinal value on diversity is closely intertwined in a complementary branch from the same tree as academic freedom. as bringing to university of diverting expenses and viewpoints, brings with it the questioning of assumptions and the challenging of conventional or prevailing ideas. and again, at the university of chicago and in particular at ssa, these values are

distinctive, given that we are as a professional school in social work at core concern with such questions as conclusion and access, and reaching grounded understandings of an effective service to those who are most marginalized. because of our core values on ideas that serve, ssa is very much at a nexus point on conversations about the complementary values of academic freedom and diversity, edits for the very reasons i am especially delighted that ssa is hosting this panel of four distinct thought leaders on this topic. for this i especially want to thank ssa professors gina samuels and marcy for their vision and initiative of working with my office phone together this evenings panel. as well as to thank ss a's committee on inclusion of equity and diversity for cosponsoring this evenings event. professor samuels will be joining us up at the micro in a

few moments to edit is the panels to you this evening, and will moderate the event. before she does that tell i also want to take this opportunity to thank university chicago president bob zimmer does provide his safe vision and leadership on this issue here at the university of chicago and, indeed, nationally, and for that i'd like to invite him up now to offer some welcome comments for this evenings event. bob? [applause] >> thank you very much, neil. let me say how much i appreciate the idea that ssa's posting this panel and hosting this discussion -- hosting -- on this topic. that topic, joint topics i should say, academic freedom which i like thinking about a bit more generally as academic freedom and its companion free expression and diversity which also like thinking about a bit

more broadly than diversity and inclusion are two core issues for any university, and particularly so for the university of chicago. neil described i think very beautifully why these are so important. i might just offer my own take on this, which is to start by universities are not just a random collection of people who are here doing what they feel like doing. universities are institutions with very clear mission. that mission is a mission of education. it's a mission of research, and it's a mission of finding vehicles for the impact of that education and research. if we are going to do our students justice, do them well by the education that we provide them. if we are going to have an

environment in which our faculty can, in fact, explore the ideas to the fullest and prepare themselves to have the greatest impact in an environment of academic freedom and free expression is critical. it is simply our core to the functioning ofthe university in fulfilling its core missions. in a similar way the issue of diversity inclusion becomes absolutely central to university for two reasons that neil alluded to. first of all, if one is going to be engaged in rigorous analysis and inquiry, having a bunch of people all from the same background, similar perspectives sitting around, fundamentally agree with each other but arguing only at the margins is not the way to actually make a serious advance and it's not the way to create an environment of intellectual challenge for our students and to fill their

education. so diversity of perspectives of backgrounds, beliefs and so on becomes crucial to creating the environment for the kind of rigorous analysis that underlies the success of the university. there is another reason that diversity inclusion is so important, and that goes beyond the university itself, which is that universities does not exist in isolation to exist in a societal context and it exists in history. it's no surprise to anyone that the history of really all countries but the very, particularly this country, has an enormous amount of exclusionary behavior built into its history. we have, therefore, a dual obligation, an obligation as fulfilling our own mission and bringing those diverse perspectives to bear in a

nondisclosure and a. but we also have an obligation as an important member of society to deal with the particular history of this country and the exclusionary aspects that a been involved in it. and i think neil articulated the meaning of ssa very nicely in terms of doing that, from the point of view of ssa's concrete mission, but i think the university as a whole itself has an obligation in that direction. now, some people have argued that these two issues are in conflict to some extent, that academic freedom and free expression on one hand, and diversity inclusion on the other hand, are in conflict. saying that there's no tension between them would be disingenuous.

saying that there's a fundamental underlying conflict between them is something i actually do not believe. i believe they are mutually reinforcing, but that one needs to recognize that our tensions and tensions that need to be worked out. but anything less than an aspiration to fully embrace both of these values is failing ourselves as an institution. the discussant tonight i'm sure we'll look at these issues and -- in considerably more detail and then a quick loss both neil and i have given them. i think the reason that we are able to have such a discussion goes back to exactly what neil was saying. it's an example of the power and importance of an open discourse and rigorous analysis. and free expression. so i just want to again thank

neil, thank the faculty here at ssa for organizing this, and i'm sure you are going to have a fascinating evening. so thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, president. so my name is gina samuels and i will be the moderator this evening and i will take several roles that i will explain in just a moment. i would also like to welcome all of you here this evening, this afternoon, and extend a special thanks to my faculty and staff colleagues for their support and work there and i had to say i'm quite humbled to see that we are at standing room only. so thank you for coming. special thanks to dean neil guterman for being so supporti supportive, for the cosponsors of any particular to my colleague marcy who couldn't have done it without you, marcy.

finally i extend a special gratitude to the ssa community and others of you in attendance here tonight. the success of this dialogue and are exemplary practice of free expression tonight deeply rests with the juju, and i will explain that a little bit more in a moment. we will proceed by my getting a brief introduction to this panel, and then i will introduce each of the panelists will each talk for about 10 minutes. i will then pose a question to them. we probably won't come i forgive them for question i think that's a bit ambitious and we will probably get through one or two, and then i transition us to the evening informal event which will involve an informal dialogue amongst all of us. so bit of a social experiment is to come. so in 1915 the american association of university professors advanced a declaration of principles that laid the foundation for much of

today's legal and tacit understanding of academic freedom and tenure within institutions of higher education. however, the university of chicago as president zimmer and neil guterman above-mentioned represent a unique brand of academic freedom. and we were deeply and publicly shaping and advancing these ideas long before the 1915 statement. most recently in 2014 president zimmer and then provost isaacs formed a special committee on freedom of expression. chaired by one of our panelists, professor geoff stone, it reached its universities enduring commitment to the free exchange of ideas and a resolute core principle and value at this institution. president zimmer has already referenced this history in his opening remarks and i'm sure provostprovost professors boyerd stumble likely discuss this and the leadership in our universe is contemporary practice of this value into individual remarks.

for the content or university, however, debates do persist around the very meaning and limits of academic freedom in the context of growing diversity on campus and the two met to a campus climate that is not only inclusive of a diverse set of ideas, but also of a demographically diverse student, staff and faculty body. this year the university of chicago's dean of students in the college alison issued a walking statement to first-year students reaffirming our universities long-standing institution of commitment to academic freedom, and as such are institutional rejection of silencing or avoiding uncomfortable or disagreeable ideas and perspectives. this was paired with the idea that faculty are not required to create safe bases or issue trigger warnings. this statement was met with a vigorous national and local response both affirming and contesting these views and more

deeply position university chicago itself as an iconic symbol and offender of the unfettered practice of academic freedom. this afternoon as a type of us a universe community to engage with each other and fully practice this freedom. it is my hope that we all deepen our understanding of and ability to critically consider the diversity of ways in which this value is interpreted and practiced. now i would like to just briefly introduce expert panel. we are deeply honored and excited to have each one of you here. each of our panelists you should do it is a distinguished scholar in the own right, and time does not permit me to go over all of their media conference so i apologize in advance so we'll stick to names and affiliations so we have time to hear the thoughts. to my far left is professor john boyer, dean university of chicago college, distinguished service professor in history. next, the professor geoff stone,

distinguished professor, service professor university of chicago's law school. next, professor zareena grewal, associate professor, department of american studies and religious studies in the program of ethnicity race migration from yale university. and last but not least, professor lorraine gutierrez, professor of social work and university of michigan school of social work, professor of psychology, college of literature, science and arts and the inaugural director of university of michigan school soldier works diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. and with that i would love for us to begin. professor boyer, with you. >> thank you very much. i thought i would just talk a little bit about two subjects that are of some interest to me. i became interested in the subject of academic freedom as an academic administered

perspective. about 14, 15 years ago i published this -- i came to write that but because of there were a number of current abroad indolent as a were involving the backlash or reaction to some significant changes we have made in our core curriculum at the time. there were some lobbying, petitions being formed coming from a rather different ideological directions, but all of which were attending to influence in some ways pressure the faculty to reverse the changes or to modify the changes. and also to change the content of new courses that had been developed in the context of these changes. i became concerned about this as kind of an episode, small but not insignificant episode in the kind of long history of academic freedom. i began, began to take a look at

the broader history several this book which is not available online pixels going there been other episodes and all too many in regards of faculty being criticized for things that the right, students being criticized for things they would say. this is a life issue. i want to say two things about it. first of all from the point of view of the history of the university i published last year a family size history of the university of chicago which i'm not going to talk about that. it's available in the bookstore. that's a plot by the way. last night by do what to draw from that, stress something that is unique about chicago come not totally unique but relative unique and that is impact of the european context, the ending context of european higher education and its influence on the university of chicago. i think this is important because the idea of academic

freedom what the germans would call -- is representing a bunde of concepts that were practiced vigorously contested, vigorously fought over and defended and criticize within the larger context of the modern german research university, the university of berlin, munich, the big foreign german higher education. many of the founding faculty at this university were trained at the university or had studied at them. if only for a short time, at least enough time to be able to draw from inspiration and values and ideals on the practice of economic freedom within the senior faculty of his great german and austrian universities. these were ideas that were rather strange for the americans to comprehend because these are state universities. they were paid in some ways to do the states bidding but the

state or the states decided the bidding they were to do had to do with the advanced, creation of original research as a national cultural project. in some ways there was an unusual -- a tendency to great at homogeneous culture of thought because this was for the good of the state. bubut on the other in order to create this ambient culture of new knowledge one had to allow, admit the fact it had the freedom to do this. it was probably built into the whole assumption of academic freedom at paradox that in order to be perfectly conformist, in order to be perfectly as a were supporting the states project of cultural renewal, one had to be perfectly free. so this tension was really embedded in the very beginning, and this model that these young americans observed partook of nyc cop and bring over to the

united states. they did this at a very powerful way. many of our most distinguished faculty were trained in germany, and they really self-consciously thought to model themselves as german professors or senior associate professors, not only in the pursuit of knowledge and research but also in the way that they understood their rights, responsibilities, the esteem, the pride that the work would carry with it. and central concept of this professional maturity, this professional pride was the idea of being free. not only free within the classroom but also free within a broader civic realm. not simply a private citizen confined to being free within one's class but also a private citizen who could speak one's opinion broadly within the broader civic university. within chicago, the idea of

academic freedom then became part of a bundle of concepts that harper and the founding faculty used to reimagine what he university was an cease to be a training institution. it became a site for the advancement of scholarship, and not only to the faculty embrace this in thei in the own realm oe also been began to understand their mission as teachers using the same concept. because if they were scholars, then their primary job, all due respect for undergraduate education, was really to train future scholars. the students became involved in the same discourse involving economic freedom. these ideas not emerge uncontested. within our university there was the ross case at the stanford, when it was content in which faculty by the actions within university or in the broader civic realm tested the actual

willingness of the universities themselves and their patrons, their philanthropists in the case of a public university state government, to actually power the kind of academic freedom the faculty have taken upon themselves. one finds very similar controversies in germany. i've written extensively about one of the most famous controversial occurred in the unit, not in berlin in which a classic case of everyone publicly agreeing on the purchase of economic agreement and one disagreement with the limits were and just how much political capital the political parties and state and church at warming to put an place to set the professors were claiming that freedom. i also want to mention that within the history of higher education in europe, during this period, 1890-1914, one begins to find powerful voices emerging among -- articulating what this

meant, what these ideas meant not only for the individual faculty member, universities, his essays and letters and commenters on academic freedom emerged in this. and which universities are struggling both with the wealth that they had assembled and the cultural power and the mission they had assembled and have been given to them by the state, but also been the desire of the faculty to go back in to say no, we are not the states agents. we are not the churches agents. we are not agents of political parties. we are our own persons, and yet we are being paid for by the state. how does one assess those boundaries? the second part i want to make, the argument i want to make in the first instance is i think probably more that any of the other great american universities, certainly the new

universities, chicago was very much the faculty culture was a culture that emerged and became mature and independent, feeling itself as almost a bear of these great european ideas, and the absence of a kind of philanthropy, mr. rockefeller i found was -- he didn't metal has happened with other universities so is a very easy for the faculty to come steal themselves not want to be theoretically free but practically free. and the practice of these values and these identities over time really within 20-30 years, and it was this culture that robert hutchins who is probably our most eloquent defender of academic freedom decided several of the things he has written, hutchins was able to do what he did and to defend the cause of academic freedom because he had a faculty culture that could back them up and sustain it.

it makes no sense at all to me in the context except in the context of a faculty culture that was already shaped and fully dedicated and assimilate the ideas in a very powerful way and internalize them for their own purposes. i want to make a second set of comets, and thus impact on the community. -- and that's the impact on the committee. i argued that the practice of economic freedom has become a signpost or we find signs of it throughout this university but it gels and becomes particularly intense i would say between 1900-1920. this has profound effect on the student culture we have come to love as well. that is to say that if one sees students, even young students, 17, 18 year olds, undergraduate students, as provost scholars, as people who are joining a

dialogue and not only join a dialogue but joining a process by which they are expected to require the skills of a scholar, just as he will practice the skills of the scholar, then over the generations one begins to nurture a certain kind of student culture, not only the way which faculty relate to students and students relate to faculty but the students relate to each other. and leaving aside the issue a a formal legal right or formal rules, one finds emerging within chicago a culture of their intensive and interactive pedagogy, dominated practice of our classrooms in the college, and i think elsewhere in the graduate professional school as well. this is a something to be taken for granted. it was not typical. think of our student culture was not typical. further, i think it's important to remember that this culture was also not only going to, in essence confused by these ideals of academic freedom but also

infused by parallel ideas of merit and a lack of scripted privilege or inherited wealth. a variety of conflicts and reason i don't want to go into here but are discussed in my book, the only student body at chicago is relative for many of the eastern universities. first of all it was male and female. both genders were represented very strong numbers. but also there was a rather broad socioeconomic spectrum of students, students from really all walks of life, all socioeconomic classes. the merger of this highly pluralistic student body for the time very pluralistic including a very large component of jewish students both from chicago and from the east dave the faculty and even greater reason, a great opportunity to practice this kind of diversity of opinion, practice these ideals of academic freedom stressing both

the power of the liberal arts but also the need to serve a broad swath of students from all walks of life. they saw this teaching of the students as being integral to the missions university. i think it's very important to remember that undergraduate education was a sum was always the hardest test of the values, about the importance of teaching any currency or any reality principle there at all. teaching undergraduates in chicago as voicing to be not a trivial service but also really one that goes to the heart of the broader practice that inform the identity of the faculty. someone has a faculty culture that is very early set and can gel around his ideas of academic freedom, and then brings the student culture into that

culture of economic freedom. the student culture that comes into it is itself relatively for the time diverse in terms of socioeconomic and gender perspectives. the result is we have i think much of the broader and more fundamental identity of users in chicago is a link to practice of economic freedom, those practice as great a resilient intellectual culture also culture of intellectual science among both faculty and students that it's really there already by 1920-1930 and it's remarkable how it's been able to sustain itself over the generations to create and re-create itself down to the very present-day. thank you. [applause] >> so i want to talk a bit about free expression part of academic freedom. it's important to know that these are not necessarily completely overlapping. there are aspects of academic freedom that are different from the concept of free expression

in university. and i want to start by emphasizing that the issuance of free expression in university communities is not something to be taken for granted, that it is, in fact, vulnerable. that it is tenuous, and that it is always been so. and that any threat to the commitment of free expression poses a serious risk to the core functioning of universities as we now have come to understand them. so to appreciate that i think it's important to go back in time with it and understand how colleges and universities over time have evolved in this respect pics if you go back to the early years of the 19th century, for example, there was no such thing as an assumption of freedom of expression in colleges in the united states. the basic assumption of how those institutions operated was under a principle of moralism,

which basically meant that ideas could be put forth by faculty or by students only insofar as they were consistent with the judgments of the leaders of the institution about what ideas were moral and appropriate. and anyone who departed from those clear assumptions could be suspended, expelled, fired, whatever, without anybody looking twice. so what did that mean? it made him an in the united states one could not challenge the proposition that africans were inherently inferior, that women's place was in the home and the functional simply to reproduce children. that homosexuality was immoral and sought a mystic and sinful. any host of other valleys and judgments that were taken larger for granted as a given pic and it's true. anyone who challenge those ideas with not just be argued with.

it would be thrown out. and if you move further in time into the 1830s, 1840s of the of the united states move toward civil war come one of the most contentious issues to the nation of course was slavery. in that. lines were drawn very clearly. at university and colleges in the north, anyone who defended slavery could find themselves again thrown out of the institution. and in the south at major colleges, anyone who challenge the moral legitimacy of slavery would find himself out of the institution. nobody questioned it. this was the authority of the college to make judgments about what was right and what was wrong. if you did not speak it in accord with this judgmenyou were out. think of general motors. general motors could decide among its employees what use the express rocket or not, and if somebody says things that jumper so we don't want to enter institution, they would be fired and nobody would say academic freedom.

they would just be fired. that's when colleges and operated. this came to a head after the civil war during the battle over creationism, darwinism, when the mainstream views in universities was committed to creationism. and the idea of evolution was seen as not only sacrilegious but scientifically and logically completely flawed and inappropriate. and there were institutions that excoriated and fired and expelled students who advocated this revolutionary and radical and ridiculous idea of evolution institutions or on tranfifty was in the battle for the first time the idea of free expression is about of universities and academic freedom is about of universities began to crystallize the idea being institutions of higher learning have to be places where people can challenge the accepted wisdom, where the accepted wisdom may not be right.

it may not be true that africans are inherently inferior and women's place is in the home and that homosexuality is inherently immoral, and that creationism is absolutely true. the idea that universities existed for the purpose of allowing intellectual inquiry and challenge and contestation came over those years to be much more accepted and, indeed, by 1892 when the university of chicago was created, the first president, harper, could proclaim that for university to be a university, it has to be committed to the idea of free expression. now, that was the beginning of the notion that free expression was central, but the reality is any commitments that have been contested and contingent ever since her to even at the time harper was saying this, universities began to be supported by generous

philanthropists who had earned their money as industrialists. and that basically said that any of your faculty or students who criticize the way in which we make our money, the way in which we conduct our business is, that's not acceptable. if you want our money, shut him up if they can't say those things. universities found themselves in this dilemma where they wanted the philanthropy, but the condition of the philanthropy was to get rid of free expression by the faculty and by the students. during world war i, again on universities and colleges found himself and a dilemma where the nation took the position that no one can criticize the legality or the morality or the wisdom of the united states entering the war. because that would undermine patriotism. it would make it more difficult to find the were successively. it would strengthen the will of the enemy. in effect had to be silenced and universities again found themselves collapsing in the face of these social and legal demands. i can drink the area of era of mccarthyism in the 1940s and

1950s -- again -- universe found this a space with enormos pressure to basically silence and expelled and fire anyone elected positions at anytime in the lives of was sympathetic to communism. the pushback was about academic freedom at about freedom of expression and university of chicago i'm proud to say really stood pretty much alone in standing up against that. at one point students at university of chicago invited william foster was the head of the calmest part of united states to speak on campus. this produced an outrage across the nation. and alumni and state legislators demanded that this be canceled. and robert hutchins who john mentioned, stood up and said no, at this university our students are allowed to hear whatever ideas they want to hear. we will not since at that and we will not silence them. that characterized, epitomized

the notion of free expression in university community. this has continued to be under assault and always will be under assault because it will always be people who say i don't like those ideas. those ideas are wrong, they are immoral, offensive. and they may be right, pics sometimes the right, sometimes they are wrong. what makes the university of the universe is that it does not secede to those demands of centric him that what it says instead is fight it out, argue, talk about it, learn about it. think about it. and by doing so it creates students and citizens who are capable of having those fights in the future, who are capable of dealing with ideas they do not like they find offensive, they find problematic. and fight it out at the windows battles. and that they core of what this institution is about. it's a core of what academic freedom. it's a core of what freedom of expression at university is about. it is imperative that we resist the temptation to do what our

forebears did and to silence anyone who thinks differently than we do. that is not the way to achieve knowledge. it's not the way to achieve democracy, and is not the way to have intellectual or academic institutions. thank you. [applause] >> can you hear me? okay. i like the podium, sorry, i developed a habit i guess. actually had some slides and i didn't quite work out to get them up for you. i'm going to read and that's what i need a little bit of space. one of them was a picture of the letter that without to the incoming students from the dean

that had this sentence, our commitment to academic freedom at the university of chicago means that we do not support so-called quote-unquote trigger warnings. we do not cancel invited speakers because the topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual quote-unquote safe spaces. rare interviews to retreat from ideas of respect is at their own. what i'm about to say is not a trigger warning. it is a spoiler alert. okay, we'll talk about the difference between spoiler alerts, trigger warnings and content warnings or notes, content notes. so the title of my remarks today is whose free speech the manufactured crisis over trigger warnings? that's a spoiler alert. this is not, the idea that this is a part of a manufactured crisis. this is not simply my opinion

that much of the anxiety about campus cultures and free speech on campuses is, in fact, a manufactured crisis. i think it's important to think about it and i'm happy were doing that today because i think it's in fact alert us a number things and our political culture. like my esteemed colleagues, i'll put in historical context although i won't go very far back. i will just go to the '90s when it is also a lot of media history about campuses and multiculturalism evil twin, political correctness. and diversity and what i was doing to the intellectual culture of campuses. we'll talk about all those things. so i want to just read first from a report that came out from penn, an organization devoted to free speech if the report is called into campus for all, the

version conclusion at u.s. universities and goes through a number of cases of these campus controversies come yale university being one of them. one of my students is a cover girl. you can look at the report. i just want to read from the summaries of, the summary statements. says quote while free speech is alive and well on campus it is not free from threat and must be vigilant guarded. if it is continued strength is to be issued. that's something we can probably all agree on the second point, while current campus controversies merit attention and have been troubling instances of speech curtailed companies do not represent a pervasive crisis end quote for free speech on campus. the next point, the dialogue debate and efforts at greater inclusion, take place in many campuses have the potential to help root out entrenched by c status -- marginalized groups. the next point these conversations and controversies have the potential to unleash an

amplifying new and important voices that can enrich debate on campus in a wider society by expanding free speech for everyone's benefit. .. i just want to say that like my colleagues i personally feel the edge of learning should be an uncomfortable place. i have never put a warning on any of my syllabi because frankly, the syllabus is the trigger warning. actually it's not. we have a conception of what the trigger warning is. the idea that a trigger

warning is going to tell you if you are going to be triggered, you're going to be traumatized by the content. the presumption is whoever's reading it suffers from ptsd. i don't presume that all students suffer from ptsd. that's different from a content warning. the content warning is letting someone know this content, you might not realize it but it might trouble viewing ways. what a lynching, you know that's a book about lynching but when you look at my syllabus, you know what my class is going to be about. however, reading this semester we had a suicide on campus of one of the athletes on the track team killed himself. that day i was going to show a film called hillhouse in my film class and in that film it's about a bunch of christians and a sort of have this, they put on these morality plays where they do a number of things. make a number of different controversial statements, things like that including do

an active suicide where the suicide, the person goes to hell and is taunted by the devil. so i sent an email to my students saying just so you know, were going to watch the film this afternoon because two of the students are on the same track team is this dude who's committed suicide. i said i understand if you don't want to watch this today but i hope our seminar we can talk about conceptions about suicide,mental health and they all came . so is that a trigger warning? i guess that's the closest i've ever done. but the question of trigger warnings as the base of exercise that professors are engaging in is an empirical question. i went through because of hysteria, i went through the syllabi that was public. we went through and looked for any syllabi at yale that have a trigger warning and i couldn't find one. when i read about the letter

that went out to the students in chicago, i wonder how many syllabi have a trigger warning on them that elicited this letter. it is this in fact a problem, that so many syllabi have these warnings for these students? who are these imaginative student bodies that are being warned? so i guess i think that, this is what i want us to think about i guess is what's going on here. who are these students? i thought of some of these scholars, which is a wonderful essay called against students where you cautions us to pay attention to the sweeping statements made against humans who seem quote unquote, oversensitive. i agree wholeheartedly with the way she translates that as oversensitive being sensitive to that which is not over. these students are usually students of color being demonized are building on

generations of student activism to change our university to make them more inclusive. she says things have become a problem because students, the idea that students have become a problem because they are too sensitive relates to a wider discourse that describes up and ability as a form of moral weakness and a restriction on our freedom of speech, much contemporary racism positions others is too easily a bendable which is so how some to assert the right to be offensive. when we think about the right to offend the crowd, who are those guys? usually they are guys.who are those people? right? i don't know how many of you have caught this in the news but there's a poster boy for that movement right now, it's milo. he just got my 250, $250,000 book deal.

you think he's going to get a chance to get his say? it's hard to get that from twitter but if that doesn't explain it ... this popular misconception of policy under academic freedom freedom, students of color, they are super fragile, entitled and they can handle ideas. that everything is a personal slight. that their politically correct, millennial's cry grow up. also i think much of what happened at yale, luckily we will get the chance to do other things as we go into the other questions. i'll say i think part of what happened with the controversy at yale ispeople saw that tiny viral , the viral version of this debate that happened on my campus is that there's two sides. there's a good intellectual side which believes in free speech and nurtures sort of

resilience and then there's this bad identity politics side of qualified intellectuals who want their hurt feelings indulge and campus scrubbed of ideas that might hurt their feelings and i think that image of young, black women which is a tiny slice of, it is not reflective of the much more complex series of events and debates on our campus but that tiny viral image of a couple seconds of a young black girl and her cold white professor, the reason it went viral, the reason it caught fire and caught the imagination of the american public is it because it fuses to pre-existing stereotypes together. of a calm millennial and the angry black woman. that's whyeverybody thinks they already know what's happening at yale, they know what's happening in all our classrooms . they know what's on our syllabi without having to look. so i think what we need to

think about is the instructive and often predictable pattern in who feels they shouldn't have to discuss their topics. just as there are patterns of the type of folds that hold them accountable to respectful practices, who make time as we challenge yourself to attend to those patterns we have to think about the right to offend the crowd and who those people are but there's other questions we might ask. something that came from the preliminary remarks was to say that a person is not somehow in conflict with academic freedom might be disingenuous. we forget about capitalism? we're at more crisis than we've ever been before. doesn't that compromise academic freedom when a professor feels like their jobs are in jeopardy? there's other ways of training the academic freedom on campuses other than we have students of color now, what do we do? that's really what i want us to think about, is how are we blaming this whole debate about free speech? is this about free speech or

is this a divergent? so i'm fully committed to making campuses more diverse and multiply committed to academic freedom and i want us to move the conversation in the direction where we can make some of these, think about these things together but also think about why are we conflating certain things together but not other things together? [applause] >> thank you, is this on? thank you. is this on? okay, it's on. i hear my voice. i want to thank the speakers who preceded me. i think they actually in all three of the presentations perhaps four or five, were able to lay out a lot of the issues that you are here to

discuss and i'll start by saying a little bit about my own standpoint, who i am and talk about the focus of my remarks which are around the role of professional education and professional school in the academy and how that complicates our discussion of diversity and academic freedom. so as is the case with the other speakers on this panel, my perspective is unique. it reflects who i am. i standpoint is that of a woman of color, a latina, a baby boomer and someone who has attended and worked at highly selective universities. i am a direct beneficiary of affirmative action programs of the last 20th century in all three institutions that i was very fortunate to attend, stanford university, university of chicago, pool of social services administration and the university of michigan. in addition to those

standpoint, i also taught over 25 years in graduate social work programs in addition to the teaching i do in the liberal arts and in that case, i teach at the department of psychology and latino studies program at the university of michigan so i have the experience in both the liberal arts as well as a professional school. i also chose to leave my full-time career as a social worker to return to school and get a phd because of the gap i saw in social work education and practice at that time. regarding our need to prepare for professionals to work more effectively with women and people of color. as a graduate of fsa i can say there was little attention to that in 1976 or 78 when i sat in the lobby and drank my coffee during the break. and attended seminars there and i know a six things have changed, things in social

work, education in general but we could all be doing a lot more in terms of that agenda and that is the agenda that motivated me to go back to school, get a phd, and her social work education as a caer and has also motivated much of my scholarship as well. because i wanted to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem in our skills and society. so i think our previous panel has done an excellent job discerning the meanings of academic freedom and specifically in higher education and scholarships. we all in academia need the right to the questions we want to ask and the ways in which we are going to explore them without a heavy-handed of education dictating that. what when i was asked earlier in my career, i had the privilege to work with nancy kant or who's a psychologist and is currently the chancellor at rutgers newark

campus. at that time she was the provost at the university of michigan. in her inaugural address she describes the temporary university as analogous to a city . we have an array of neighborhoods and communities with cities in them and she describes how students in this environment, these are her words, as fighting, confusing, challenging, sometimes frustrating and often complex. and that these communities and pursuit of state cerium is replaced with challenges, opportunities, rules and regulations and policies that they may not fully understand or fully recognize in their experience. and as an educator and scholar i find it to be a useful framework. to really try to think about how students experience the university environment. this description of the university as a city relates both to their experiences within courses, within our seminars and courses we teach, within our tutorials

but it's also relevant to their experiences outside the courses and are co-curricular experiences surrounding their time as students at university. one could argue that academic freedom is most relevant to that aspect of the university that students experience in their formal education, in their courses, in their tutorials and in the projects they do for credit. and maybe seen as less significant when we think about the co-curriculum, when we think about the activities and events that occur outside courses but have a significant part of what educational scholars referred to as the university experience or the hidden or inclusive curriculum. those states that we experience and learn in institutions of higher education that are not part of the formal curriculum. that are not in our course outline but are part of the lived experience of how students experience their

time in the university.so why should we care about diversity? in our society, in our world play a huge role in what's going on in the academy currently and diverse city is a huge part of both the hidden and the formal curriculum to experience. when i look back at my other graduate years, at stanford university during the 1970s, the majority of the faculty of students iinteracted with were white , workable middle-class, middle-class and they were very comfortable in an environment which embodied upper middle-class norms and expectations and a european american type of culture. the expectation at that time was that i as a lower middle-class third generation mexican american students, their own affirmative action scholarship would learn to

conform and if i did not conform, that i would struggle and there was no one's responsibility but my own to figure out how to deal with that struggle. it was not and is still not easy to be a woman of color in a highly selective university, whether as student, staff, members of faculty or named professors as i am at the university of michigan. because most universities and faculty and staff expect conformity from all our students. this is part of the hidden curriculum. but our institutions and the sobriety around it are growing in many different types of diversity.in terms of who's now attending universities, whose working at the university and who is creating the knowledge that we are developing in universities. so this diversity will continue to grow in our society and our world and our universities will grow and change as well as our students live in and will continue to live in a very

different reality from the one i grew up in, the love that my children who are now adults grew up in and the one in which we are living currently. so indeed, our curriculum, we need to be attending to our curriculum and how those and how they support or cycle the voices within them including the voice of those traditionally the outsiders of the academy. as somebody who teaches in the liberal arts and professional school i can say the tensions and dynamics that can exist between university take a different form when working and teaching at a professional school. professional schools are interdisciplinary spaces within colleges and universities where facultyand students come together bound by omission , preparing students to learn the skills and ethics to practice particular skills that will benefit our society.

professional schools we do build upon a liberal arts stage and we engage in the kind of work that other faculty members in terms of knowledge today but we also have a role to prepare work for a particular professional mission. it is the case in all, this is the case of all professional schools whether we are talking about law, edison, education or social work and therefore faculty and professional schools most focus on how well our students are being prepared to work in an increasingly diverse world. i'm going to give the example of social work as a professional school because that's obviously the one with which i am most familiar but i think we can think of parallels with other professional forms in education as well. in respect to diversity, the mission of social work and the mission of a social work education must be woven into both our formal and informal curriculum. both the explicit and

implicit curricula. the national association of social workers which is the membership organization for social workers in the united states described social workers work in the following ways. as promoting justice and social change with and on behalf of clients and when they speak of clients, they include individuals, families, groups, organizations and communities and in order to do this work, the nsa described social workers must be sensitive social and cultural diversity and struggle to end this discrimination and other forms of social injustice. this mention is woven into our code of ethics which includes the principle that states the workers have social justice and social workers should act to prevent and eliminate domination of exploitation of

discrimination against any person, group or class on the basis of race, and the city, national origin, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, political beliefs, religion, immigration status or mental or physical disability. when those of us who are engaged in this profession chosen to become a social worker or chosen to teach so chose towork, education or to work with the fashion faculty members of social work , they need to have awareness of the mission of the profession and the profession we are preparing students to engage in. in the united states, social work education at accredited schools that offer the professional social work degrees which are defined as the vfw and nsw or the equivalent ana or mf offered at the, what's. i killed my mike. what are these ethics and

accreditation standards come from? they come from the members. i had the privilege of being on the committee with dean martin, a former dean here and faculty member in creating the educational policy in the early 2000's. so i my standards for accreditation also reflect our social work values and ethics. our accreditation policy viewed on its face is parallel to the similar other policies that exist building social work around the globe. other schools in other countries are much more explicit about our social justice position and need to work for social change. i'm going to say a little bit then about the backlash of this receipt, this focus is often without controversy although the research has been done on social work faculty including research

i've done with social work faculty have found that we for the most part approve of the decision and endorse the focus of our educational programs. but we have received and been the target of attacks from those outside our profession, particularly the national association of scholars which describes themselves as a network of scholars and citizens united to academic freedom, work scholarship and excellence in higher education. they engaged on a report called the scandal of social work education which accused social work programs as working to brainwash students to include those who did not share the political beliefs of a social work field and to affect in many ways, full meant and marginalized people who did not share, were not working for social justice as defined a particular way. they also at that time, this was almost 10 years ago,

probably complained with the secretary of the department of health and human services asking those social workers should no longer be required to be accredited by social education because of their obsession with our accreditation standards. nas is not susceptible to bringing down social work education. hhs found no basis for their complaint ceded that we were violating students first amendment rights and is expected of course, our national organization responded by providing context for our educational standards and framed our use of the concept of social justice. for example, some rather conservative institutions of higher learning such as baylor and brigham young have accredited social work programs so clearly there's a range in which social workers are interpreting nd offering courses that meet the accreditation standards. i only suspect these kind of attacks take directly to our universities and social work programs which infect other

professionals programs which have similar kinds of values will only become more common in the near future. i want to say one more thing regarding the need, what social work schools and programs can offer. higher education in terms of keeping the kind of content and addressing what may be seen of the conflict between diverse city and academic freedom. we've been doing this kind of work for decades, for quite a long time. we struggle with it. we haven't arrived. we may never arrive. this is a lifelong activity. but we do have skills, we have programs. you have evidence-based educational practices and we have a lot of experience with ways to create what we call brave spaces in contrast to safe spaces in our classroom.

ways to pull people in who may be expressing different views rather than calling them out and shaming them in the classroom. to recognize what larry shulman refused to as the hidden group in the classroom and the group dynamic that can create difficult and challenging discussions and also the differing needs for faculty training that can exist within the faculties to so that all of those can be helpful in terms of meeting the goals of diverse city and academic freedom, thank you. [applause] >> now in the interest of time i'm going to transition into our questions. let me think. we have, okay. so this is an abbreviated version of what i'm going to read for all of you, first question. so academic freedom extends

to students, as many articulated in their comments and to expect in the classroom. that summer following a student led petition as the task force for radical transformation of staff, student and faculty led committees is typically called for investors to advance the ability to facilitate robust and critical discussions of social justice, oppression, disenfranchisement, white privilege. their host of other kinds of ideas that bring emotionally charged conversation into the classroom. reflective of a very hallmark of the university chicago brand of tree exchange of ideas. students are calling not only for free exchange to open on authentic dialogue and help them foster their own abilities to engage in a world of effective social workers and agents of change. they are often looking to their professors to model

this engagement. students across the united states have also called for similar improvements in their educational training and classroom experience. how should universities balance the students desire and in the case of their demand for this educational experience against the right of a faculty to teach to their own expertise? of course, i have to ask a question. >> also, which is why on here and in your seat. what action should institutions take if any to ensure members of the community have the capacity to facilitate and meaningfully engage in the sometimes highly contentious and deeply personal dialogue on issues tied to diversity and the quality and privilege mark subject matters that are typically not the substantive or theoretical areas of expertise for most scholars? can any of you have added? [laughter] >> the first one.

>> not the whole thing, okay. just the last part of it. >> i guess i've heard versions of this question posed. i find it puzzling to think that there are faculty in schools of social work who have not thought about these things. some people have may have thought about them but they are not quite sure how to articulate them. people have thought about them and they're not sure how to express them. people have thought about them and maybethey're not very good ,effective facilitators of difficult judgment . so there are a lot of reasons why someone may not have engaged in these discussions in their classroom, but i would suspect that when you think of a bell curve, most of the people in the bell curve are of the faculty and

school of social work would haveconsidered these things, are doing research related to the issues such as health disparities , educational, problems with educational opportunities, workplace, all of which are things that relate to them. i think then the question is how can faculty perhaps develop more of the skills and perspectives for feeling comfortable to engage in difficult discussions with others? i think it's often less a question of what people know and care about and what they feel passionate about and more questions that happen, we offer faculty support of growth experiences and environments to be able to ink about how to maybe address some of the concerns students are bringing to the class. when i think about my old school, there's a range of people who are good at reading these discussions but i can't think of one person

doesn't care about issues surrounding diversity, equity or inclusion. >> faculty members have a high degree of academic freedom in how to approach the educational process. i think there are limits to that, obviously. on a future course to not let them eat unless there's a good reason for that educationally and there are boundaries on what is, what courses you teach and so on but for the most part there's a strong presumption in favor of faculty freedom to decide how best to deal with students on that particular subject, at the same time i think it's the responsibility of institutions to ensure faculty are doing their jobs well and effectively and to guide and help but i think to insist on these things, for

the individual faculty members is difficult and it is impossible, somebody's being a lousy teacher. in a meaningful and objective way, introducing it as an obligation as a human being but i think the right way of dealing with this is by encouragement and persuasion, explaining the faculty you will be better at your job if you do these things. >> one of the things that is here as, i'm sorry. the foundational values of a liberal arts education. >> oh, the other thing. my free speech is being repressed. [laughter] >> i think one of the things that come up for us on our campuses the idea that a little arts education has to be an antiracist education, that's not a foundational value. that would permeate discipline. i think one of the things,

looking into the institution and what they can do, we have to think critically about the ways in which we organize knowledge and the ways in which we assign presti and resources to certainthings, faculty lines . i wrote an op-ed in the washington post basically saying this is not about free speech by students of antiracist activist and student activists at yale, this is not time for a public debate on free speech and i got a lot of hate mail. one of the things someone wrote me was look at your bio. you teach an american studies and at the next and migration. that's why it's a politically correct joke. i remember when faculty at yale degrees and things like anthropology and history. the funny thing is, i'm teaching anthropology and history. it's just like, part of it is this notion that the kinds of

work that we do is not serious, not intellectual, not rigorous. if we talk about racial inequality or homophobia, so this goes back to what i wanted to say in my remarks but in 1991, there was this interesting article written by a conservative thinker, who was it? i don't remember now but he basically makes his argument, it was george will. wrote in a newspaper that lynn cheney has as equally an important job as president dick cheney. she's the secretary of domestic events, her husband keeps that they are less dangerous in the long run and the domestic forces she must deal with at the neh. and basically goes on to talk about scholars, student radicals and the other people that were opposing group politics and curricular issues on campuses. so in the 90s, it was really

conceived of as the problem around curriculum and now it's this issue of trigger warnings, safe spaces. so in some ways the conversation has not changed that much. it's like, are we allowed what we want to teach? yes but we also have to address these other larger issues. humans are asking us to address why there are these sorts of questions ? that should actually be us expanding our conversation. we shouldn't be so constrained by that. that's i think an exciting direction to move in. >> jeff and i both live for the reform of our curriculum. i think mister wilson says you'd rather move a graveyard than a curriculum and she's right.i'd never do it again. i think the, i've always thought that, i'm not familiar with the specific issues that you are occupying

on the community in the nsa but it seems as if one is dealing with a subject like racism or nationalism or ethnic discrimination or the holocaust or whatever, these large and big issues that are spread across the 19th and 20th centuries, that eight scholar who is competent hopefully, more than competent should be able to take out of the diversity of scholarly views in all of these issues you will have a number of different powerful versions and interviews. and fashion a curriculum or syllabus, conducting the class in which the couple of things happen. first of all, students become aware of the diversity of opinions about these controversial issues but also learn how to manage and formulation, how to come to

their own. when you're talking about how to spoonfeed people, where is this coming from and we want the students to have their own viewpoints and their own intellectual personalities. it has to come as much from the students as from us as teachers. how do we use the construction of the syllabus and in ways in which one can present different viewpoints and encourage them to get the students to take ownership and view their own view, not my view or his view or her view.it seems to me every a lot of people do that. that's part of what we do, part of the job description of being a professor. well, that point has to i think go back, what are we doing in graduate school now in terms of our we confirming people to be scholars? as a whole, we ought to have a whole. and how are we meant touring

or nurturing, pick your word about it, young faculty? we have a core curriculum like columbia. we regularly ask young people , they seem young to me, young faculty to, i still remember the day i'm hiring a clinical psychologist as part of our curriculum, we teach freud and asking this people to shut up. nobody reads freud. excuse me, well i kind of teach freud. i can teach freud, you can teach freud . and it's interesting, there's the presence of, i don't want to use the word training but mentoring. ultimately he's right. they are there, they're the wrong person and once they get tenure, lord help them because that's also a subject

for another debate. >> i teach freud. i'm not so old but i would also say the notion that we are not teaching any classes anymore, this is the idea of the 90s. a young woman from harvard wrote an essay published, the day before the age of morality but it was, i went to four years of harvard and never read a single book by a black author. there was this idea that harvard, everybody's reading more now. it's all like lesbian and 20-year-old divorced women and that was the idea but this is so far from the truth. this is what people think now. this notion of how do we balance canaan that we are inheriting with the new stuff the kids are asking for? hasn't that always been the question? that's like moving through time, we always have to adjust the syllabi. the specific anxieties around just being like, to satisfy

the students demand because they are students of color as opposed to, you know what my problem is? it's not teaching freud. it's getting them to buy a course pack. even if they don't have retention when their reading the screen. this is my issue. i don't have to convince them to read freud, i have to convince them to buy paper. framing everything in terms of the curriculum around racial diversity or students is actually i think missing the point. what i'm complaining about is actually much more pervasive anxiety. >> thank you. we will squeeze in one last question. as an alum of 1967 who is referenced in this year's dreams of education prospect, professor stone and the

university has a responsibility to create communities, our responsibility to create a community of people as well as a community of ideas in which everyone feels that sense of belonging. what are the challenges, responsibilities and opportunities for universities as institutions to create a sense of opportunity or belonging and engages all its members and what is the role of academic freedom in fostering this ? >> how might the prevailing practice of institutional neutrality on political and social issues that an important context for academic freedom and silence contribute to a campus climate and belonging for different members, different within our community. >>. >> let me take a stab at this. two things i would say to this question. the first is this idea of the safe which i think is

completely misunderstood. how i understand it is simply the classroom needs to be a civil space so for example, i teach a lot about islam in the us , so i get students from a very diverse political perspective coming into the classroom and i've never had a problem. but what i do say at the beginning of the semester is that when we have discussions , we need to give parameters in the discussion you can have in this space. it's not your facebook post. i don't want to hear about chito jesus or whether you find the quality of hillary clinton's life. when i say something about the presidential candidates running for office, it needs to be something of intellectual substance, not about what they look like for , that's not common for a student today in the seminar is what we're talking about. >> those are the things that i think we need to direct, we direct the discussion is a professor, we know that you are allowed to make any old comment. >> that what i think is a safe space.the other

understanding is it's a place where minority students are people, minority students can gather and have resources in the campus. i don't see people infected at. there's these notions that the other thing that i would say about this, the gotcha culture, everybody's free to speak if they say the wrong thing, a gotcha and part of this is the ways in which we talk about racism or classism or phobia or whatever is that it's a defect in this particular political moment we are able to talk about structural, homophobia, misogyny as the larger phenomenon. that's a huge deal for us. that's part of it for me is that constantly redirecting it to let's think about these things not as individual cultures of a personality so much as what we're trying to look for . trying to be in faculty.

>> i think this is a little off the point but one of the accused is that we have to confront this going forward is the impact on open discussion. it used to be the case that you would have a conversation , in the classroom or a forum or a college in which the ethics that were provocative. i think abortion is murder, i think abortion is good, doesn't matter what it was. you can have a conversation and some people in the room would like it. you'd argue about it and it would go away. and social media, what's happened is we all become vulnerable to those conversations being out there forever. and accessible by graduate schools, by employers, bike stages, potential stages i should say. and i think that has really serious potential to undermine the willingness of

individuals both here and throughout society to hopefully challenge things and talk candidly and that word is locked about its impact on the state, impact on the community more generally. i don't know what the answer is. i think it's a reality but it's something we have to think about. >> i would say, the image of the universities and cities, i've always thought more because the cities are, i looked at them in places. >> whereas most universities that are potentially big universities are collectivities that are more like towns, it's this phenomenon and therefore this notion of engendering community, it just happened in the classroom but it hasn't happened many other places as well and we found for example the struggle was

light and coming in one study program, there was a view 20 years ago that if you made it to chicago, you are a benefit to the city wide but you want to live by park. from south africa or anyplace else. we find actually we have a very broad and rich society, plus largest fourth program. when you talk tothe students , it's not simply that they make new friends and people have different backgrounds, different racial and religious and so forth and encountering different cultures, it's not just that but it's also the fact that there taken out of one one known environment, that children are born in different environments, what we need it seems especially with educating young people is to engender in these communities but also the work is never over, you can't just say a freshman it's done in four years because like the

population, they come and go, but i think the work of community is important but it can't all be from the classroom. a lot of that has to be from beyond the class. >> and in her remarks, she actually goes on to say that this city is made up of neighborhoods. so students are mostly experiencing the neighborhood area however that might be defined. that they are interacting with and with in the larger city. of the large complex university which is what we're talking about and i think that's where students often find their community, and these larger spaces are places where maybe they are having complications or graduation about their major interactions with the often is in these smaller neighborhoods rather than large neighborhoods and i think , i think thinking about the hidden curriculum, the co-curricular and the

curriculum, these are all things whether you're a graduate student or undergraduate student, these are all components of how they are experiencing the institutions in which we work. >> okay. so now i'm going to transition us to the informal part of our evening. i'm going to invite all of us together so as moderator i am going to wrap this and leave us with more hopefully questions. we invite you to dialogue with each other around these issues and share your questions. they out loud ideas that are half baked or you are still struggling to fully form. simply ask another person what still stands out to them and what a panelist says. what are you left wanting to talk more about? part of practicing free expression i think is

listening carefully to what another person is saying before you form your own response. it also means being humble and open , this practice and maybe i'm speaking about and allowing your response and even your own ideas to be shaped by what another person has said to you. interpersonal attunement is a critical component to our ability as a community to dialogue about different issues and topics that matter to each other personally, not just professionally. and i look forward to joining the panelists as we step from platform up here and separate which also provides a little bit of distance that now becomes covert is been in a dialogue. we hope you enjoy the session so please. [applause] [inaudible conversation] >>. [inaudible conversation]

>> join us later today for a discussion on how african-americans are faring under the trunk administration. new america is the host of the event and you can watch it live at 8:15 eastern on c-span2. later, nasa will host a forum on new discoveries of what's called xo planets, planets existing beyond earth's solar system. see that live at 1 pm eastern on our companion network, c-span3. more of our book tv programming tonight, the focus on veterans and will feature authors as michael anthony as civilian eyes, young veterans memoir. these added other veteran segments beginning at 8 pm eastern here on c-span2. >> watched