>> i am sanford unger, director of the free speech project at georgetown university. we have an excellent panel, two leaders of liberal arts colleges and two leaders of universities, all of whom share a lot of similar concerns and issues. i'm sorry? louder. ok. do i need to start again?

so that means everyone has to speak directly into these microphones. i want to introduce our panelists. we have the president of davidson college. she is a long accomplished administrator, and has spent much of her career in houston, where she was a vice president of international disciplinary initiatives. to her left is the provost of northwestern university. until he moved to northwestern last year, he was the dean of yale college, and the edmund s. morgan professor of african american history and studies at yale. he is working on many interesting projects, and has

written an introduction for the new addition of dubbois' epic "souls of black folk," still used in many universities to address the issues of our time. we have the executive dean of letters and sciences at the university of california, berkeley. she is a professor of history and a prize-winning scholar with 20 years of experience teaching at berkeley. to her right is the president of wesleyan university in connecticut. he was previously president of the california college of the art and of the getty research institute in los angeles. he came to make trouble at wesleyan.

one of the most notable things about this panel is that three out of the four got their doctorates at princeton, everybody but jonathan and me. i don't have a doctorate. this is just a sort of side issue, whether princeton training reveals itself in the course of our conversations. many people are more affected by their undergraduate institutions than graduate ones. we will dispense with opening statements. one of the things i want us to talk about, because i believe since many people will be in attendance this morning and are watching this, our faculty members work at places where there have been quite a few

controversies over speech by members of the faculty. our first topic that we might discuss is the question of the distinction between free speech and academic freedom, whether they are in fact identical or subtley different or very different matters to be concerned with at our institutions of higher education. carol, i wonder if you would like to take that on first. caroline: the question you are asking is about the relationship between the commitment to free speech and the speech of faculty members -- the way this issue has been framed in public debate focuses on free speech.

i am not the most qualified person to speak about the distinction between free speech and academic freedom. but i will say that academic freedom is largely about inquiry and the freedom to pursue even wildly unpopular lines of research in the interests of arriving at deep insight, with the recognition that many of the most important areas of research today were at one time wildly unpopular and dismissed as outrageous or not even academic. when i talk about this issue, i tend to talk about the ways in which we as institutions of education are committed to trading environment that fosters free thinking by everyone, and that free inquiry actually benefits from inclusion and diversity, the ways in which we can pursue knowledge and create insight benefits significantly

from heterogeneity from people asking the questions. rather than thinking about free speech and academic freedom, there is a way to frame this so that inclusion is actually a prerequisite for an expanded notion of free inquiry, if we focus on the kinds of questions and issues we want our college students to be able to ask and pursue. i would frame the academic dimension of your question in that way. eights institutions, that commitment to diversity and inclusion precisely because the more heterogeneous the population of people asking the questions, the broader the lines of inquiry will be.

sanford: i think that is very helpful. carla, at a large university, berkeley for example, the a lot of the public, not just in california, but in the country generally seems to react quickly and forcefully to anything that happens at berkeley. does it help clarify some of the controversies you had to deal with to draw distinction between free speech and academic freedom? carla: this is a cherished part of our tradition. as the home of the student free speech movement, berkeley is always in the public eye. it is a beacon for that conversation. i think academic freedom in general has been more faculty

focused, rather than a student focused conversation. we think about the genesis of these concepts, academic freedom is a concept that emerged in the early 20th century around 1919, to defend the right and autonomy of the faculty as a space of free inquiry in relationship to political interference by the part of administrations. that idea of self-regulation of the faculty seems to be the thing at the core of academic freedom conversation connected to the whole history of tenure in this country and the protection of faculty rights. free speech is the student version of academic freedom. it is the moment at which, and mario was quite eloquent on this -- sanford: the founder of this free speech movement in 1964.

clara: freedom of speech comes with responsibility to self-governance of the students, of their public conversations. there is a connection, that is where they touch each other, academic freedom in some ways engages students, in a kind of responsibility for the curation of their own public conversation and the rights to have that conversation in the same way be faculty had enjoyed it in the -- the faculty had enjoyed it in the earlier part of the 20th century. they come back together pointedly in an article written by the dean of yale law school, and it has been his question

that there should be a defense of freedom of speech on any college campus, academic freedom is the higher principle on the college campus. the faculty and the administration do have the right to limit and to judge and i judicate and i don't happen to share that view, i happen to be on the berkeley side of this debate, with the dean of our law school. but to what extent does the faculty and the administration have the right to limit the kind of speech to exercise professional discretion about what kind of speech should be on the campus? it has been brought back into the conversation. i think it can be clearly separated. sanford: jonathan, are there helpful distinctions to be drawn here? academic freedom is sort of an clara and theas

some people describe. is free speech more the outside issue would be the interface of the college or the university with the public at large. is that a helpful distinction? jonathan: i have not thought much about it. it wouldn't take much to persuade me that is an effective way of thinking about it. this point does address your question, about public and private and social good. the fact is, we have various types of schools on this panel and one of the most important distinctions is public versus private. free speech as a constitutional ideal does not apply to the private, which most people don't realize. any private that i know about embraces the idea of freedom of expression. that would be the more accurate way of talking about it in a private university or college.

it helps to understand why public and private have had very different times with interlopers acting in bad faith trying to test free speech on campus. the reason i raise this in light of the question is it talks about the public contract of service, which is what private and public are engaged with. that way, i think the free speech expression of being a public good kind of phenomenon is a nice way of thinking about it. i think that is constructive. of myyou raise the issue former colleague and his notion of who can adjudicate speech, it is worth thinking about. universities and colleges are

supposed to be marketplace of ideas and academic freedom, and we should be testing all kinds of ideas, comfortable and uncomfortable especially. i don't think -- academics, we shouldn't be ceding our ability to say that is wrong. that is the point of airing out ideas in the first place. this is where notions of public safety need to be taken into account, and also, frankly calling beat phenomenon what it is, acts of bad faith, by people not understanding free expression on colleges and university campuses. the public-private phenomenon is a real thing. inward and outward -- i understand that. i haven't thought about it. they all revolve around the fact that we need to be talking about

our commitment to improving the quality of the public discourse around us everywhere. that happens inside and outside. carol: just from what claire and clara andaid, -- jonathan said, it seems like we need to make some distinctions, there is a kind of category that takes place in the public debate, which makes it hard to articulate with clarity what it is colleges and universities are trying to do. i do think there is a difference between talking about this in terms of freedom of inquiry and the pursuit of ideas and the constitutional right to free speech. there is a deep commitment to freedom of inquiry on college and university campuses that is distinctive and special and builds on this notion of

constitutional free-speech. you talk about inquiry in that way, but inquiry and speech are different. self-governance and the demand for autonomy brings with it a responsibility for the public sphere that you are creating on your campus. how do we have a conversation about what that means and invite the students and faculty and everyone into helping us figure that out? what kind of public fear or be -- are we creating, and what kind of public feared we wish to create? can we make the distinction between an argument and an epithet? i say to my kids, if it is not reputable, it is not an argument. it's name calling. sanford: michael, you have done a lot of thinking and writing on these issues.

i appreciate you weighing in on the nexus between academic freedom and free speech. michael: i think, as has been said, academic freedom is an idea that protects faculty, before the free speech movement of berkeley, there were loyalty oaths to protect the faculty from being fired if they belonged to the communist party. -- party or its affiliates. whether that was a proper use of academic freedom are not, people have debated. the idea was certainly that faculty as citizens should have rights to participate in a many in many variety of activities without a detriment to their professional life as academics. i do think the marketplace of ideas metaphor is as faulty for expression as it is for

economics. that is, it works a lot of the time and fails as well. that is because we always have managed freedom of expression. no university has unfettered inquiry. it would be disastrous. we don't have unfettered inquiry in history. there were plenty of topics that would not be appropriate for the orange county chapter of the john birch society that won't be on the docket for the american circles association. we manage the freedom of inquiry. the questions for administrators and professors is what kind of things do you what people say, what kind of questions to let people ask, and what kind of questions do you say are off-limits? there is always something off-limits. asking ourselves what kind of

freedom for faculty we think should be protected and what kind of freedom for faculty we think should not be protected, not just speech, expression, which becomes harassment, which becomes many things that we have an easy time saying today is inappropriate or a fireable offense or is inappropriate. iser things we would say, it less clear. if you say something offensive politically as a faculty member, we want to protect your rights to do that. some things we refuse to protect. on the inquiry side, there are kinds of questions we foster. we actually facilitate certain kinds of questions. and there are other questions we may not outlaw, because we don't have to, because the culture of

academia is extraordinarily conservative and in many classes students know there are kinds of questions they are not allowed to ask. our job is masters of inquiry. we decide what kind of inquiry we want to see fostered. i think all of these schools represented here have admission policies. none of these schools believe in unfettered diversity. we all have extremely selective admission policies, which allows us to say some things we want to pursue and other things we don't. i think if you approach this with the thought that everyone can come to the marketplace, that is a fantasy of american democracy and academia. carol: of course disciplines , have rules. there is analytical rigor.

there are better questions than worse questions. i don't think anyone would take the position you have outlined. michael: i think you said unfettered inquiry and diversity is essential for the pursuit of research. -- or inquiry. sure, but it's also essential you limit them. i think you just called me an "ignorant slut." carol: i said what you was was a caricature. carol: i cop to the fact that i am not clear. there a lot of ways that inquiry takes place. there are good and bad historical questions. what governs whether it is a good question are the rules of history. michael: so where do they come from?

carol: so in some sense i am not suggesting that academics that are trained in these disciplines and our training their students in these disciplines the able to -- be able to pursue, without a litmus test of the appropriateness of the field or topic, the questions they pursue. the foundation of the questions we pursue our the rules of the -- are the rules of the discipline. michael: maybe another way to clarify that is who would adjudicate? context depends on the within a campus. what we said earlier about the differences between public and is true,niversities although in california, the law compels private and public universities to extend the same kind of freedoms that public universities are mandated to do.

it is correct we have an obligation to keep the campuses open to any student organization and the public at large. you are hearing something of a cultural difference, here, but it is limited by law. in the classroom, it is perfectly clear that the professor adjudicates. sanford: a particular professor only? klara: up to a point. clara: up to a point. we do have a policy on academic freedom. for the purposes that michael described, there is a distinction between a professors -- professor's public and private activities. in order to protect the right of professors and the freedom of professors to be politically engaged outside of the classroom. of course, the rubber hits the

road when the professor is teaching politics. those are the places where we see the most challenge in these environments. a professor of the middle east to has a particular position on the middle east might cross the line between instruction and advocacy. that is not a simple line to navigate. many of the controversies we have seen at berkeley, whether it is one side of the political spectrum or the other, are students who are concerned about or disapprove of the positions that professors may profess in those particular kinds of settings. and i think that is one area where we have seen the most stress, and it has come from both the left and the right and request him settings at berkeley. we had just had, as some people may know, this is a very big controversy where a group of

students called a very radical professor a white supremacist because he is white and is teaching a class about struggles of the immigrants on the border. sanford: so that gets to the question of, who is entitled to speak about what? claire: -- clara: correct. he said he would speak to the students out of the class. he said he would speak out of the class. in the theory they were , harassing him. in theory, students could file a complaint for harassment. i think those are where we start to see these tensions between who adjudicates in the classroom. what i was saying about the article is that i don't think outside of the classroom, that is quite clear. it is very clear at berkeley that i think recognize student

organizations have the right to invite speakers. we, in thenk that state of california at a public university, could apply the post doctrine successfully in a legal sense. this conversation has been directed at how important the distinction might be between what faculty members say in the performance of their teaching and research duties and faculty members and beyond that social , media has complicated this tremendously. jonathan, i wanted to ask you whether you think it is appropriate. some people think it is necessary to take into account faculty members' so-called extracurricular utterances, what they say online, in various

formats that get picked up and , the distinction may not be drawn by the public or the donors or by various authorities between what is in the classroom and what is outside. there are a couple of notorious cases, oberlin and trinity were two places where there were some very difficult controversies. jonathan: this is enormously complicated. part of it is quite simple. what a professor does in his private time -- they have the right to be citizens. what i will say on behalf of individuals involved with social media -- we are in a whole new world right now.

the social media veto is far more dangerous and pernicious and life-threatening. i am not able to sit here and give you an answer except for my first response what a professor is does outside of the classroom as a citizen is that person's own business. it may become a public nightmare for the college. it may be a board of trustees nightmare, but those are what administrators are paid to deal with frankly, and usually there is no winning side. it is all terrible. but there are a couple of situations where an administrator can fairly ask, and this is not me passing judgment at what happened at those schools, will this professor of the able to do his or her job?

i think they can go ahead and do the research, but teaching becomes a whole different thing. i think this is something i would have to weigh if i were involved in that situation. one of the real challenges of social media is things that are significantly more complex, all the nuance is washed away. it goes down to the most visceral kind of spots. injustice everyone involved in the process. i don't have an answer for you beyond that, except that social media has done some transformative and positive things, and it has destroyed things along the way. sanford: you're new at northwestern. it is a complex institution. there are some ongoing controversies about some things the faculty of northwestern has said that have drawn a great

deal of attention. you have people on the outside saying how can you allow these , people to poison children's minds with their vitriol and their hatred? jonathan: when i see that kind of language i don't think they , know what's happening. it's a good question, but indicative of what the terms are. a lot of the angry emails that we get our optimists expressing those kind of terms. when you talk of things happening at northwestern, and this is the conundrum, i can't comment. that leads to exactly what makes the problem worse. now we are protecting the rights of the individuals involved. it is a complex metric. individuals have incredible freedom to do whatever they want

to do, continue to do, tweetslly on blogs and and whatnot. violating my responsibility to protect the faculty is miserable. anybody who says it isn't, has lied. get thisnning to experience at northwestern because i have only been there at -- for six months. but i was a senior administrator at yale. i go back to what i said before -- this pertains to some people at northwestern -- when these issues come up, we take the time to find out what is happening in the classroom. is this hyper-politicized, deeply troubling, strange,

whatever you want to call it? is this part of their pedagogy? or is this what they think as john public? if it's the latter, i have to accept it. if they are keeping that outside of the classroom, they are abiding by their response -- responsibilities as an instructor. it may make us look terrible and it may make the board of trustees completely lose their minds. that is the fact of it. back. wrap up by going the world of social media has changed the terms in which this pain is felt. the complexity has been stripped away. the silence that administrators in good conscious have to maintain has become more difficult to do so. michael, your phrase

the question -- one of the things the general public has extremely strong views about without necessarily knowing very much about what happens on university campuses is this notion that students and faculty only want to hear one point of view, or views from one direction, and that other people get censored or interrupted. you have talked about the need for affirmative action of some sort for a broader range of speakers on campuses. that is something i was concerned with when i was a college president as well. i wonder how is that going over? michael: i have called for affirmative action for conservative thinkers, not speakers. the issue around speakers is the issue about entertainment -- who do you have for commencement?

what band did you invite for your graduation party? william s buckley was disinvited from vassar 30 years ago. you book the wrong band, these things happen. it's the party. i don't think speakers have much to do with inquiry. at some schools, because maybe laws are good or bad in some states universities are in the , entertainment business and therefore in the crowd control business. at really big schools like northwestern and berkeley, they deal with crowd control all the time, usually around athletics. that is part of the administrative nightmarish responsibilities.

i am agreeing with what carroll said before about having a broad range of perspective it's. i don't think it is a free market of hiring. a's to do a lot of interviewing at my first job in washington in 1982. i got the job because the guy who interviewed me and was a swimmer. i swam, at least i claimed to. that led to me getting an interview. it is not like a marketplace through which the best people get chosen. there are various filters. i thought by raising the issue of political bias in the classroom, i thought i would create more of a conversation about people making affirmative steps to bring ideas that were underrepresented in their history or english departments -- at weslyan, diversity of ideas sometimes means you have

leninists in the english department, and not just one kind of perspective. i do think there is a need for a broader range of ideas taken seriously through research and teaching. -- for research and teaching. i don't care about the broader range of speakers invited. that is not so much about the ongoing mission of universities. it is going over ok, i guess. in other words, the conservative say, we don't need affirmative action, are ideas -- our ideas are better. my friends on the left have sullied the words "affirmative action," by attaching them to conservatives. these are words that very few of my friends in the left have been

using in the last 15 years. they prefer inclusion and equity. i think the conversation seems to be salutary. one of the most important things about bias is that when you talk about it, you have a better chance of recognizing your own prejudices and therefore doing something about it. there is no litmus test. i just thought the censorship of prejudice was working very strongly in my classes and in the classes of my friends, and there are things we ought to do about that in an affirmative way, not just relying on the marketplace of ideas. sanford: i am tempted to ask you questions about how one implements such policies and how you test where someone is on the political spectrum, and how you avoid getting into some quite offensive questions in some areas there.

michael: sometimes it is really hard to know if a person belongs to a certain group. that doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything at all. >> i accept the concept, but the implementation must be difficult. what happens if someone who seems to be conservative when hired changes his or her mind dramatically? michael: it happens. from my perspective it is not , about the political affiliation of the person who -- you hired, although it seems to do -- seems to be what we are doing right now. it happens by accident. we make sure our curriculum take s seriously a broad range of conservative ideas. i am sure it does in some

respects. sanford: you are smiling as if you have something to say. carol: there isn't an administrator as this table who doesn't think that groupthink is the enemy of academics. academia tends toward groups because any group of people who get together tend to think that they think well and that people who think like them think well. [laughter] carol: and it is in some sense the job of administrators and academic leaders to confidently be trying to keep that pot stirring. we don't want to miss the opportunity to make new discoveries and open up inquiries. that seems to be a mom and apple pie problem, how we exercise

leadership whether we are department chairs or members of faculty hiring committees? berkeley is a little different in that we do not have affirmative action. we are bound by the law not to have affirmative action. it presents itself in that way. we have the opposite challenge, to make sure our student body reflects the state of california, given how competitive it is to get into any four-year college in the state of california. that is an issue the chancellor has drawn helpful attention to. there just aren't enough for-your college spots in california and that has made it extremely competitive to get in and this creates special challenges for us. the question of political correctness at berkeley is slightly different than at a small liberal arts college. we are a large public university

like northwestern. the campus is too diverse. the scale is too large. the student body is more of a challenge of getting people to play in each other's neighborhoods. we have more spiritual and religious student groups than we do ethnoracial student groups. we have more spiritual and sanford: you are saying things that conflict with the public image at berkeley. claire: -- clara: we look at the letter that was quoted in "the new york times," that stated more than 100 students signed a -- berkeley students signed a letter that urged a ban one mile from the campus. at berkeley, we almost have 1600

faculty and at least as many non-ladder ranked faculty. 100 can seem like a lot at davidson or wesleyan. at berkeley, it is a drop in the bucket. it is a scale question, and the media will always go for the most extreme voices. of thethink that some crisis of the post-trump election has created a political environment, our chancellor likes to say this "shadow world" that lies outside of the world -- university world that has distorted what goes on the campus. if we take ben shapiro. ben shapiro came to berkeley in

april of 2016. april of 2017, forgive me. three months after the trump election he was invited by the , college republicans. exactly 77 college republicans showed up to hear him speak and he left campus and no one noticed. three months later, ben shapiro comes to campus, and cost us $600,000 in security. thousands of people show up to see him. he gave exactly the same speech. this has so much more to do with the external environment, this world of social media you are talking about, then it does the internal environment of the campus. many conservative speakers, the spring that milo came, elliott abrams was on the campus, i can -- been shapiro was on the campus, i can run a list of people who were on the campus.

so intellectual diversity is healthier than many people suspect. that doesn't mean there is not an issue where certain student'' views and groups felt they have received less active attention from the faculty and administration, and i include conservative students. they have received less public attention. we need to meet those students where they are and help them develop a place in our public conversation where they feel more included. sanford: i teach a freshman seminar at harvard on free speech. one of my students this past fall, one of them raised the question of how people who not only were sympathetic to donald trump, but were public about the fact they voted for him, how

they were being treated at harvard, and whether they were being discriminated against were persecuted, or in some way certainly disapproved of in a public manner. this particular student said 8% of the harvard community had been determined had voted for donald trump. what about that 8%? what do we do to make them feel comfortable? is that a legitimate question to be asked? clara: at berkeley, it is about 7%-8% of the students who voted for donald trump. i don't know the faculty count. only 3% are african-american. if we're talking about

marginalization, we need to be careful about how this conversation is playing out in the public media. that said, college republicans respectfully have their booth on the plaza, and it has never been attacked. i do think that faculty members are sometimes dismissive of students with conservative views. i think that is unfortunate and that is something we need to have a conversation about. andl: i have a question, you guys know more about this than i do. is it helpful, the conflation of party affiliation or voting behavior with intellectual range? in other words, is it right to assume that people who are

affiliated with the same political party or vote for the same presidential candidate share common intellectual and pedagogical approaches to the material they teach? michael: i don't think it is fair. in my response, it is not about the litmus test. it is not about what their views are when you hire them, but what they teach. clearly, people who may identify outside of the classroom as being on the left in the classroom teach courses that involve certain thinkers and religious traditions. i try to be careful about that, to say it is not just checking someone's voting record, but adding to the curriculum, focusing on issues that are identifiable with this broad range of conservative thinking. it came partly out of talking

with colleagues in the humanities at wesleyan and looking at the range of courses we have. in some departments, it seems like a caricature. that doesn't mean we have to hire someone, let's say, who is a believer in certain religious tradition, but we think that tradition is important, then we have courses that deal with it with seriousness. i don't think the percentage of students who subscribe to the or belong in the group -- it used to be when 3% of the student body was african-american or jewish, there were many faculty members who felt empowered to be dismissive of them because they belonged to a group. i am pretty sure that happens much less for those groups, and i think it should happen for

people who identify with groups that we want to take seriously intellectually and socially. sool: it seems there are many important questions that we could ask different way and the way we are asking them. what should the curriculum look like? what range of topics should we cover as an institution? -- as a in this institution? how are we ensuring that the students have the range of educational opportunities we think they ought to have? that feels like such safe ground to me. us to asklows questions of students who sometimes seem to assume that a dictates whoentity they should read or where they

should find intellectual material from which to construct arguments for themselves. this is all yours to appropriate as you please. i use that word advisedly because my students and i have such a different view of what that word means. this entire intellectual range smorgasbord -- intellectual smorgasbord is available to you for thinking through and crafting your own position. it seems like the questions you are posing, michael, seems much for censorship and all these other issues. you werejonathan, about to pick up the issue of voting,ing conservative publicly identifiable voters of donald trump may be treated on

university campuses. jonathan: i was taken up in a way that this has already been taken up in the sense that individuals are marginalized and need some sort of protection or literally asking for safe spaces have shockingly short memories. we, as americans, have shockingly short memories. when we think about marginalization, women were not undergraduates at the university until four years ago. and now it is beyond the ability to remember that, i understand. they are just beginning the age that they could have actually been students at yale. we need to understand there is a long history of people whose identity, however that is being constructed, religiously, racially, people being

marginalized have such experiences -- in this case, trump-voting students are now feeling that seem discomfort. that is not to say i am not sympathetic to the discomfort. i agree with michael completely that we should be embracing students at universities and colleges and saying, you are part of a community, even when we disagree. i think that is fundamental to who we are as and academic community -- an academic community. we need to be good historians as well. for some people, they cannot leave their "marginalized" body. it is literally their body. four -- for folks that feel outrage that they are not being supported because of a particular ideology, which one cannot see, makes me flexible as

bit as anch a little african-american male teaching a field that was dismissed under 25 years ago. there is a way in which i am sympathetic to the idea, but sympathy can't mean absolute agreement all the time. sympathy means i am here what you are saying and we do need to fix this, but you need to understand that you are part of a long history of people who don't feel they can speak up. when you are feeling that you are feeling that you cannot have your voice or if your voice is not being heard, i want to make sure you have a chance and support your speaker. but when you do that, i expect you, it as an ethical citizen, to be very respectful when someone else says, my voice isn't being heard. and i expect you to run to their defense also. that is about supporting a community that recognizes the

history of people not having voices. this is not a new problem, is new in terms of social media, but it is not a new problem. how do we address this in a way consistent with our past and try to get better? michael: on the social media side, i agree it changes the intensity and scale. but i was wondering, in terms of faculty members' extra-curricular behavior, utterances, is the issue of social media that before that we just would not know? no harm, no foul? or is that the issue because people, i assume, had political believes that were way out of the mainstream or deeply offensive court whenever words you want to use, but they talked to friends who probably kept that in confidence and is that

-- the issue? or is the issue that for us administrators, we have a barrage of activity? i agree with everything you said about what a faculty member does ly should belar his or her business, up to a point. there are legal issues, of course. i wondered if the social media part that there is no privacy, or something else? jonathan: good question. i absolutely believe that people have been having these curious to repugnant ideas forever on whatever the issue happens to be. i fail to understand on why people feel the need to hit "send." [laughter] jonathan: i don't understand. have your idea and piece together that idea. i cannot conjugate this

over-sharing culture. it is a way in which i am out of step and thrilled to be out of step. i don't think this is anything new, i think that the ways in which we are now forced to deal with things is new, not to take us in a whole different direction, but the simple example is, state-enacted violence against minority communities is not new. we know this, now we know in a different way because everyone has a camera. that is a heavy mallet kind of example. i guess i would just hope our with -- as anng administrator, i hope our act would be with common sense.

the social media has changed things so much. standpoint of the writing, we all know it is difficult and it is hard. the social media world makes it an uneditedend out and unfiltered non-reflective pieces get people in trouble. there something good about writing slowly. sanford: yes. jonathan: by the time you finish, you get that out of your system and you are done. it is too easy now. that is the problem or one of the main factors in the problem. sanford: and yet if those ideas are there and playing a role beneath the surface in our political culture, it is good to

get them out, isn't it? jonathan: i don't know how you even intervene there. people have always been animated by their private angels and demons. they always have been. we can act upon what they are doing in the classroom, as peer reviewers, act in what they are doing in publications. beyond that, i think that is hopeless when we get beyond it. us in a reallyes terrible space of almost like predicting behavior. i don't want to be in that industry. clara: i think you raise an interesting question about whether light is the best disinfectant. the risk is the volume keeps going up and up. i think it is an interesting question about whether we are at

the moment where the uses of social media are going to be re-regulated by changes in social norms, for example, senior administrators not sending emails on weekends, creating a quieter and more delienated set of zones of speech. or whether it will require greater regulation on the part of the public sector, say the government, of what are i think, relatively under regulated new technologies of communication. i think the jury is out about where that will end up with facebook and twitter. we are getting into the zone of fake news and the ability to distort communication. i think it is going to be interesting to see how that unfolds. we have been swept into this

larger national problem, conversation that is not unique to campuses, but i think it is in some ways a zoning question, not a content question. i think you are right able -- right. people share extreme views and get into boxes and public squares. you can say a professor is wacky, but the ability of that to amplify and go viral -- and our students are reacting with a set of ideas that are troubling to us. and that is to say speech is harmful, speech is an act. speech in itself can be violent and that is leading to what we do see, a shift in student opinion toward more regulation of speech.

sanford: i want to get to that. i want to raise the question whether there are people who have questions or comments or brief questions, and maybe i will save a couple of our other topics until we have a chance to take some. >> i want to get to that, but i also want to raise the question whether there are people in the room that have questions or comments. and maybe i will save a couple of our other topics until we've had a chance to take some. i don't know if there is a movable microphone. >> there's one in the center. will that work? >> let's try that. tell us who you are, please. i saw your hand first. >> i teach at the university of missouri and we've had a lot of conflict there the past few years. the last comment about the speech act made me feel about an incident that happened. -- said i'm going to stand my ground and shoot every black person i see. to me, that's a violent speech.

that creates an unsafe situation. but he only got probation. he did not do jail time for that. the argument for that is that he has free speech. he's just saying something. he didn't have a gun or the means to carry this out. this is him making a rhetorical move. what happens if i say i'm going to shoot every black person i see? how do we delineate that line between speech that's a micro-aggression or a subtle form of racism, and a something that is unsafe and creates discord and the consequences for that, you know? that's my question. >> if i may say so, that was not such a subtle moment. >> that's misery for you. >> anybody want to pick up on that?

>> not that i want to pick up on that. nobody else was. it's a really good question. i actually think the law hasn't caught up with this phenomenon. what you describe to me sounds like yelling fire in a crowded theater. does that deserve jail time? i'm not going to get into litigating because i don't know what happens, but the -- i just think the law hasn't caught up. i don't think we adults from a developmental standpoint have slowed down enough to understand how somebody in their right mind can do this and think this is ok. i have daughters about to enter college that and she has grown up with social media and my wife and i recognize on many occasions that there is more than a chasm that is a typical generation chasm, mom and dad

don't know what they are doing chasm now in which we communicate and teach our children, you don't say these things in a public space, which everything electronically is a public space. that's the best i can offer you right now. i think what he did was inexcusable, frankly, and ethically and morally and legally, to be honest. >> for me, it would be an issue for law enforcement, not a university issue. i don't know anything about the identity of the person, but i would just think it would be a law enforcement issue. if it were a faculty member, that would be, with a false name, and you can change the terms to something expressing desire rather than a threat,

then it becomes a university issue as well as a law enforcement issue because it's an employee employer relationship. i have to think hard about how one would deal with that. for me, it would be a law enforcement issue. >> i'm claire potter and i used to work with michael and then i moved to the new school and i found out i was a liberal after all. [laughter] so, i don't want us to get stuck on social media as you race so many things, but i have done a lot of social media in the last 10 years. i thought very seriously about it, i've written about it. one of the things that strikes me is -- and this was true in a panel i went to yesterday -- there are very few senior people grappling with social media as something that is no part of the

university environment that people need to be trained in. when i went to the new school and signed a paper that said i was not allowed to use a university computer to abuse and defaming people and if i did, my privileges would be taken away. that was not accompanied by an orientation in which people talked about, what does it mean to be abusive to people on social media? to the extent that i actually find it very disturbing when people are fired for social media utterances. all of the people who have been are well-known in the academic social media community for being abusive, nasty, trolling, so on and so forth. it's a story that hasn't accompanied these firings, but those of us targeted by these people might say somebody from the university should have acted long before whatever bomb this is an set off that then made the

university the target of public criticism. i guess my question for all of you, particularly since universities are now using social media to promote their faculty, to promote themselves and so on, what kind of changes might you imagine in terms of pedagogy, in terms of what gets taught on your campuses about social media? in terms of how you orient young faculty to function in the current environment, which is not going away? >> i think that's a very good question. >> i think we under train our faculty in general. it's something we've begun to tackle, that i can't say we've gotten to a place i'm satisfied with, but we do have a new teacher training program for all faculties. that is quite new at berkeley. the assumption was the phd process was a process that

actually acculturated you into how to be a professor and, probably because of these media ruptures but partly because of the classroom technology has changed, this is a moment in which we need to do much more in terms of training both for faculty, for graduate students, and even for undergraduate students. we are under invested in what i would call coke regular kinds of -- co-curricular kinds of efforts. that's a well taken point. >> change northwestern's faculty orientation for next year. thank you. >> it's better now. >> it will be better. >> i think one way of describing that would be to encourage self-censorship among the faculty.

be careful about what you say online because we won't -- either we won't protect you, or we will get you. the nice part is, we want to protect you from bad trolls, but the main part is, if you say i think -- i'm not going to say it actually because we are on life c-span. but i might say something that might play well with your friends at the new school, but won't play well elsewhere. the university is going to walk away. i do think when we start talking about training people about how to speak, especially extracurricular speech, that we are engaging in managed speech, which is what we do, but we have to tread lightly about how much we think we know, the best way we admit us traitors know how to use social media is -- it ministers -- administrators know how to use of the media.

>> i'm pretty humble about how to use social media. i think it has -- there are times when words on social media have the effect of the action, of the first question suggested. and what that invocations are legally and ethically. i don't think we completely understand that. we do include social media, and introduction to social media and using it in orientations. i'm not going to suggest it necessarily is the best training or that we have figured out how to do it, but we recognize its importance. it's interesting to think about who should do it. it certainly shouldn't be something like me who doesn't actually -- isn't a native to

that environment at all. but i -- i wonder again, how i think to disagreement with michael earlier, how we describe this problem and the terms we use to describe it and what we are trying to do every -- trying to do. and i still think we haven't figure that out. >> think a lot of us have warned our students that anything they say on social media may come back to haunt them. certainly, some of us have said that to our children. often for good reason. but i don't know about saying it to peers. i haven't thought about that. >> i think social shaming is a good idea in the sense that calling out that behavior, our -- has been very good at that, when faculty or students behave

in ways that are inconsistent with our principles of community. i think that has been very helpful. very helpful. >> yes? >> i decided today, i think we are seeing a paradigm shift in the educational industrial complex. many times we see full-time professors aren't hired and multiple adjuncts are being hired in their place. how will this affect academic freedoms and free speech? >> it's maybe beyond the scope of our panel, but it's certainly on a lot of people's minds. >> i think it you rose 10 when you erode tenure, you take away protections for freedom of speech. i'm at a place where this isn't an issue at my school, but very much an issue across the country.

there are institutions through faculty senate's and other rules and regulations have given protection to part-time or adjunct faculty, but those protections are never as robust as they would be for people who have that full governance relationship with the institution through tenure. >> many cases that have come to public notice, where contingent faculty have made what seems like a possible -- plausible claim they have lost their jobs because of things they said. >> it's obviously a problem. just the other day, i proved a new non-retaliation a language. i didn't write it, i just approved it. it includes this contingent population, as well. that everybody at our university should enjoy the luxury of being free from a retaliatory

environment. of course, what constitutes retaliation is the debate and the adjunct faculty don't have the luxury of time to argue their case. i recognize it's a structural illogic to the problem. at least there is an increased recognition at my university and i think many others, that we must do better by adjunct populations. for a whole range of reasons, not the least of which seeing this address free speech panel on campuses. >> yes, sir. >> i teach at the new york city college of technology in brooklyn. i have a couple of quick thoughts. one is, the weight not to seek social media as a totally new phenomenon is to think of social media as a close equivalent to living in a small town, going

out to a local pub with a large group of friends, getting a big table, and talking very, very loudly in a room where there are lots of other people who can hear. and it just about any issue that arises with a post on social media could be seen with that as the model. the other thing i wanted to say is that this whole topic opens into a whole other tangent i think would be worth exploring, and that is the part of -- part of the challenge of people getting strong opinions is to listen to each other and to engage specifically with each other's point of view and i think a good step in that direction would be to bring into the undergraduate curriculum some of the psychological, sociological research on why people get that it too strong opinions.

why people, some more than others, develop packages of narratives that they considered to be the absolute truth and feel victimized by any contradiction to it that have their whole sense of identity wrapped up in it. there is material to work with to develop a set curriculum on that phenomenon to get people to reflect on why they feel so certain they are absolutely right. this applies all across the spectrum on everything. >> thank you. >> i just want to say something very quickly learned -- quickly. i apologize. i do take your point, but the small-town situation, still people rumors will fly, but people know each other already. that's the thing that disturbs

me about social media is that shared experience. the context is stripped away. this is where language matters so powerfully. we have all been in a situation where our email voice did not reflect our actual voice. if we use the wrong emoji at the end of it, good lord. there is a way that the stripping away of context is, i think one of the great challenges of it. i know from my experience at yale, my students were up in arms getting outraged, not about something that happened at yale, but things happening at mizuho or things happening to some other place in the country. and they don't know the actual context in which something played out. it may have been horrible, it may have been not so bad, but it may not have happened at our campus, and yet it became this

really as real as if it had happened in our campus. that's a hard thing to understand, but the context and the role of contact and language and protecting language and understanding of speech is a phenomenon we haven't talked about, but it's critical to any real conversation wrestling with the issue of free speech and free expression. >> i would also add, just to echo what jonathan said, a small group of people can be mobilized and a post on such a media can instantly mobilize thousands of people to act in a particular way. a very simple example of this is when my daughter was in high school, somebody had a party and it somebody posted on facebook or something and there were

immediately thousands of people at this house in houston. there is no weight word-of-mouth or small town or anything -- that phenomenon is really new and it made a very realize that we had to think differently about where they were going. what would have been an act of rebellion by a teenager, a party in the house with her mother wasn't home, becomes potentially dangerous event. that's what happens on our campuses. it's something that could have been contained on the campus among people who know each other, suddenly becomes potentially dangerous and threatening and we are charged with managing that in a way that protects literally, protects the physical safety of people we are meant to protect, and also honors the values we think our institution stands for and that's hard. another quick point is, there

are a lot of issues that i think get conflated again and we focus on discussing free speech versus managed speech or whatever we are doing. there's a lot of other questions. do we manage speech, and if so, how? can students learn to discuss and argue? can they argued in an echoed chamber? is that curriculum biased? and these questions all get conflated into single ones of that swirl around free speech and i think we benefit of a debate if we separate them out. i don't know the right way to phrase those questions, but they are not one thing. you also, the question also revolved around, how do we teach kids to argue or discuss or be comfortable with ideas different than the ones they hold? that's a different question than the regulation of speech. >> i think that is the key

question today is how to teach young people that it's not just all right to disagree with each other, but essential to hear each other out. and it's hard sometimes in a pressured environment to step back and do that every -- and do that. we are very close to our deadline for finishing and i'm torn between taking one last very quick comment or question perhaps and then asking each of the panelists to leave us with their last thoughts. >> i will be very, very brief. >> you are? >> a grad student at princeton. it strikes me that also shall mediate outrage isn't created -- social media outrage isn't all created equal. it doesn't translate to the

kinds of campaigns we have seen against faculty and graduate students and other students at universities across the united states. we can't have this conversation without thinking about other factors. i'm thinking in general about how right-wing media when it comes to this campaign. it's not something that has been part of the conversation that much, but it's important because i can post something on twitter today and most people would annoy it. what if right part picked it up -- breitbart picked it up, it might be different. >> some less thoughts before meet our deadline, michael? >> lots of questions get conflated about free speech and part of the reason they get conflated around free speech on campuses is because we expect our campuses to be -- and inquiry and especially when people who are well beyond their

college years and haven't been on campuses in a long time look at college campuses today, they don't see the kind of extremities and that they remember being a part of themselves. i think a lot of the criticisms of the culture of uniformity on college campuses comes from strange nostalgia about the unfettered experimentation of yesteryear, which is probably mostly fantasy. the good side of that is the expectation is our college campuses should be places of inquiry extremities and and discovery. and that is so much better than the expectation that is also quite strong when you train folks to be part of the scheme every the silver lining -- schema. the silver lining is that there are people skeptical about college because they have high

expectations campuses should be a place of experimentation and discovery and we have to keep it that way. >> i guess i'll say that i think it will be so important for us to meet our students where they are and i just want to ecco a comment that you may just a moment ago, creating -- we are going to have to be doing more active work to create an environment we assumed we created on college campuses, which is an environment where students feel safe enough to be able to get outside of their comfort zones. what we have heard and learned in the last 18-24 months, is that they don't. that is felt quite broadly across the entire political spectrum. and so that is going to take a lot of work. i think we should lean into it and do it because it's

absolutely quote of the enterprise that i think michael just expressed, people expect of us and it's the right expectation of us. how we do that, i welcome continuing conversations, sharing ideas about how to make that happen, but i know that it's not to dismiss it, but to engage them. >> i would agree with carla said. i think it's important for us to model aggressive and vigorous discussion for our students and show that a person survived it. at the same time, we have to knowledge that there are real reasons in the world why some groups of our students feel that their lives are in precarious position and they are not making that up to read -- making that up. because they are not making that up, it's no good to pretend the world out there is not there. so finding ways to help them

manage their own feelings of vulnerability by sharing our feelings of vulnerability is important in building from that shared vulnerability some kind of culture of empathy and enabling our students to take responsibility for the culture they create and say, this is your culture to create, what kind of culture you want to live in? generally speaking, our students want to live in a culture where they can have civil discussion when they can hold their own views passionately and where they can empathize with someone else who also feels marginalized for clear and compelling reasons. >> jonathan. >> that was a beautiful closing statement and i believe with everything you just said. my contribution is, the nation's colleges and universities are becoming more demographically complex in every way you can understand that term.

that's a good thing. but it's going to mean the conversations are going to be more complex. people coming from socioeconomic backgrounds, first-generation college backgrounds, you name it. that's a good thing, too. it's going to mean hardware. we go into our own communities and students to make sure we are engaged in that work as we are asking them to be. the one thing i will end on is a question that i think we all need to ask ourselves when it comes to free speech. when we look at our campuses, who gets to speak? answer that question, we start to learn more about what is going on our campus, that means challenging people who claim they are not having that opportunity. they probably are in many places -- in many cases and probably walking around our campuses in

ways we can't simply understand. therefore it makes it more difficult for them to actually speak for reasons that are about food, clothing, and shelter, for example. who gets to speak? is for me the biggest quote in question that we should all be asking. >> thank you all. thank you all for coming. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> raising in the fifth in the

1954 olympics, does that equate to what we are seeing at football games today? >> we have a long history of racism. >> you can be featured during our next live program. join the conversation on facebook at facebook.com/ c-span history. and on twitter @c-span history. c-span's q&a, authored and harvard law scope professor noah feldman and his book "the three lives of james madison, gds, partisan and president -- and genius." >> in that way the constitution is all around me when you come to washington, d.c. the way the government interacts, the way people speak to each other, the exercise of free speech, all of that is madison's monument. so, sort of as was the case in st. paul's where christopher arends monday may says if you seek his monument, look around you. if you seek madisons monument in washington, you will see it everywhere.

>> q&a tonight at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> established in 1884, the naval war college is the home of the u.s. navy. join us as we learn more about it in the history of the navy in newport. >> here at the center of american maritime history in newport, rhode island, it is one of the deepest natural in closed ports in the world. for that reason the united states navy chose it as one of its key anchorages during the prime of american naval seapower in the early 20th century. arguably the origins of the naval war college began. the germans were ahead of the game, literally, in techniques of wargaming. during the wars of german