was wearing that day. you can still see the bloodstains that remain on that suit from that horrible morning. next on american history tv, historians and university leaders discuss free speech and college freedom on campuses and the responsibilities of administrators, faculties, and students in sharing ideas. they also talk about how social media has changed the nature of discourse in university settings. this is about an hour and a half recorded at the annual meeting held this year in washington, d.c. >> i am sanford unger, director of the free speech project at georgetown university. among other things, former president of goucher college in baltimore. we have an excellent panel. we have actually, appropriately enough two leaders of liberal , arts colleges and two leaders of universities, all of whom

share a lot of similar concerns and issues. are you -- i'm sorry? louder. ok. do i need to start again? ok. everyone has heard it so far. so that means everyone has to speak directly into these microphones. and pulled i want to introduce him toward them, everyone up. our panelists. 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. so he came east 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. carol: 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. that as institutions, that eight 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. clara, 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 ajudicate 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 inside issue, as clara and the 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. since you raise the issue of my

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 clara and 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 are we creating, and what kind of public fear we wish to create? can we make the distinction between an argument and an epithet? i say to my kids, if it is not

refutable, it is not an argument. i use the old saturday night live example -- jane, you ignorant slut. 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 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 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 let people say what kind of questions to let , -- do you 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. other things we would say, it is 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. >> yes, that's the same thing. 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 -- that anything goes. i am suggesting that academics that are trained in these disciplines and are training their students in these disciplines 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 are the rules of the discipline. michael: maybe another way to clarify that is who would adjudicate? think it depends on the context

within a campus. what we said earlier about the differences between public and private universities is true, 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? 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 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? 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. i don't think that we, in the state of california at a public university, could apply the post doctrine successfully in a legal sense. sanford: 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. it does not 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 -- are often expressed in 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. this is incredibly asymmetric. individuals have incredible freedom to do whatever they want to do, continue to do, especially on blogs and tweets and whatnot. violating my responsibility to protect the faculty is miserable. anybody who says it isn't, has lied. i am beginning to get this experience at northwestern because i have only been there 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. if it's the latter, okay, that makes my life really painful, because i have to accept it. if they keep it outside of their classroom, then they are abiding by the responsibilities as an instructor and they can be as crazy as they want outside. it may make us look terrible, it may make the trustees completely lose their minds. reasonably. i think. but that's just the fact of it. the world of social media has changed the terms this pain is felt.

the scale of it is much larger than it used to be, the complexity has been stripped away and the silence that administrators have toconscience maintain has become more difficult to do so. >> michael, you've raised the question, one of the that obviously the general public has extremely withoutiews about necessarily knowing very much about what happens on is thisty campuses notion that by and large, onlynt and faculty want to hear one point of view or views from one that othernd orple get censored interrupted and you have talked about the need for of someive action sort for a broader range of campuses.n that's something that i was very concerned with when i was a college president as

well, but i wonder how's that going over? [laughs] >> well, i have actually called for affirmative action for conservative not forswers speakers. i think there's an issue around speakers about entertainment. like who do you have for commencement? what band did you invite for party?duation you know, when william f. fromey was disinvited ser, things happen. you book the wrong band. speakers have much to do with inquiry and at some schools because good ore laws are bad in different states, university are in the entertainment business and therefore, they're in the control business and at really big schools like northwestern and berkeley, with crowd control all the time, usually, around athletics and that's the part of

administrators' nightmarish responsibilities, i guess. having athink broader range of ideas on the faculty, especially and social sciences would probably be a good thing. i'm agreeing with what carol said before about having a perspectives. again, it's going to be managed, i don't think it's a free market of hiring, is that people hire -- i used to do a lot of interviewing at the aha, got my first job at the aha in washington in 1982 and i got job because the guy who interviewed me, thank swimmer. was a and i swam. at least i claimed to have swum. and that led to me getting an interview and, you know, it's not -- a marketplace through which the best chosen, there are various filters and i thought by raising the issue theolitical bias in

classroom, that i would create more of a about people making affirmative steps to areg in ideas that underrepresented in their history department or their department and at wesleyan, the diversity of ideas sometimes means you have trotskyites and leninists in the english and not just one kind of perspective. i do think there's a need a broader range of ideas taken seriously for research and teaching. i don't really care so much ofit's a broader range speakers invited. that seems to me, that's not about the ongoing mission of the university. it's going over okay, i guess. the conservatives said we

don't need affirmative action, our ideas are better so they should be hired and the left said that i had sullied the words affirmative action by toaching them conservatives. these are words that very friends on the left have been using, they prefer inclusion and equity. i think the conversation be salutory. important most things about bias is when you talk about it, you have a better chance of recognizing your own doingices and something about it so there's no quota system, there's no litmus test. i thought that the soft censorship of prejudice was working very strongly in my my friends'in classes and that there were things we ought to do about that. relying on the

marketplace of ideas. >> i'm tempted to ask you about how one implement such and how you test where someone is on the spectrum and how you avoid getting into some offensive questions in some areas there. >> same thing with admissions, right? it's very hard, sometimes, it's really hard to know if a person belongs to a person group, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything at all. >> i admissions, right? accept the concept, i just think the implementation must be very difficult and what happens if someone who seems to be conservative when hired her mindis or dramatically? >> it happens. it happens. and from my perspective, politicalbout the affiliation of the person you hire, although it seems to be that's what we're doing right now since almost hire has an

agreeable political affiliation to the hiring committee. byt just happens accident, i guess. but we make sure that our curriculum takes seriously a broad range of conservative ideas and many people said already does, and that's -- i'm sure it does in many places already in respects. >> kyle, you're smiling as if you have something to say. >> of course. an administrator at this table that doesn't think group think is the enemy of academics. any group of people who get together tend to think that they think well and that people who think like them well. and it is in some sense the andof administrators academic leaders to be trying to keep

that pot stirring so that not missing the opportunity to make new discoveries and open up new vistas and inquiries. so that to me seems to be a problem,pple pie whether we're department chairs, whether we're hiring of faculty committees and so forth. berkeley is a little different in that we don't have affirmative action. are bound by the law not to have affirmative action itselfoesn't present in that way exactly to us. if anything we have the opposite challenge, which is ourto make sure that student body reflects the givenof california, how competitive it is to get into any four-year college of california. and, you know, that's an issue that our chancellor very helpful attention to, there just aren't enough four year college slots in california made it extremely

competitive to get in. and that combined with proposition 209 creates really special challenges for us. you know, the question of political correctness at berkeley i think is slightly than in a small liberal arts college. at large public university like northwestern or berkeley, the campus is just too diverse, the scale is too large. and the student body, you could see it as more of a getting people to play in each other's neighborhoods than it is the there's only one neighborhood to play in. we have more greek societies do ethnoracial student groups. andave more spiritual religious student groups than we do ethnoracial groups. the process of saying things that conflict with the public image of berkeley. the letterok at

that was quoted in the new york times about -- that that more than 100 berkeley faculty signed a chancellorng the ban him from the campus. not quite true, true if you include nonsenate faculty retired faculty, but that's only 3% of our faculty. have 1,600 we faculty and at least as many faculty. ranked so 100 can seem like a lot of faculty if you're davidson or your wesleyan. a berkeley it's a drop in bucket. i do think there's a scale question and where the media always go for the most extreme voices. i always think, you know, that some of this crisis of election hasp again created a political that ournt

chancellors like to say a shadow world that lies the university distorted has what actually goes on in the campus. if we take ben shapiro. shapiro came to berkeley of 2017. the trumphs after election. he was invited by the college republicans, exactly college republicans showed up to hear him speak, and he left campus and no one noticed. months later, after the milo episode, ben shapiro comes to campus. costs us $600,000 in security. upusands of people show to see him give exactly the same speech. so this has so much more to do with the external environment, this world of media that you're talking about, than it does environment of

the campus. many, many conservative speakers, that spring that milo came, elliott abrahams was on the campus, ben the campus, i mean, i could run a list of were on the campus. so intellectual diversity i healthier than many people suspect. now, that doesn't mean that isn't an issue where certain students' views and have feltoups that they have received less active attention from the faculty and the administration and i include conservative students in that group. they have received less public attention, and i to meet those students where they are and to help them to develop a place in our public conversation where they feel included. >> an anecdote in that connection. seminara freshman

on free speech and one of my students this past fall, i students, one of them raised the question people who not only were sympathetic to donald trump, but were public about forfact that they voted donald trump, how they were andg treated at harvard whether they were being discriminated against or persecuted or in some way of innly disapproved a public manner and this particular student quoted -- not an -- it's impressive percentage, but the harvardf community had been determined had voted for donald trump. that 8%?t about what do we do to make them feel comfortable? and is that a legitimate be asked?o i don't know who wants -- >> i'll just point out, can out, and then

i'll -- because i just said a lot. berkeley, it is about seven to 8% of our students voted for donald trump, i the facultyhat count would be. but only 3% of our students african-american. so you know, if we're talking about thinkalization, i again we need to be careful about how this conversation is playing out in the public media. that said, you know, and the college republicans theirtfully have booth on the plaza and it never been attacked. that faculty members are sometimes dismissive of students with views and i think that is unfortunate, and i think that that is something we do need to have conversation about. >> i mean, i have a question guys who know more

about this than i do. is it helpful, the conflation of party affiliation or voting behavior with -- with range?ctual i mean, in other words, is it -- is it right to assume that people who are affiliated with the same political party or vote for the same presidential candidate share someone intellectual and pedagogical materials to the that they teach? >> it's a great question. is fair.hink it and so i try to in my sandy say that it's not about litmus tests for when you hire someone for, but what they teach and what's in the and clearly, people who may identify outside of the classroom as teachon the left courses that involve conservative thinkers, traditions.

and so i've tried to be careful about that to say not just -- check someone's voting record or beliefs butcal adding to the curriculum a focus on issues that are identifiable with this broad range of conservative thinking. and it came partly out of just talking with colleagues in the humanities at wesleyan and looking at the courses we have. in some departments, it caricature, but that doesn't mean we have to someone let's say who is a believer in a certain religious tradition, but we that wemake sure think that tradition is important, let's say, that we have courses that deal it, with seriousness. and i don't think it really matters what the percentage whotudents are subscribe or belong in the group. it used to be that when were 3% of the student body was african-american or have you,what

that there were many faculty members who felt empowered dismissive of them because of their belonging to a group. that happensre much less for those groups, happenhink it should not at all for people who with groups that we do take seriously, mean to take seriously intellectually and socially. just seems like there's so many important questions that we could ask a ask questions in somewhat different way than we're currently asking them that would be -- faculty? hiring of >> no just in general on this issue. not in the hiring. that question -- what should the curriculum look like? what range of topics should faculty in a this institution?

that feels like such safe and.rounds to me students sometimes assume a particular identity whom they should read or where they should find the intellectual from which to construct arguments for themselves and somehow to insist no this is all yours to appropriate as you please. that word advisedly because my students and i have such a different view that means. intellectual smorgasbord is available to you for thinking through and crafting your own position. it seems like the questions you're posing would be more productive than the ones that we're compelle compelled to address given the public debate which centers on these other censorship and all these

other issues. >> jonathan, you were about howick up the issue of conservative leaning, conservative voting publicly identified supporters of donald trump may be treated now.iversity campuses >> well, i mean, i was taking it up in a way that's already been taken up in the these individuals who consider themselves marginalized and therefore, ofneed of some sort protection or literally asking for safe spaces have short memories. and i mean, we as americans have shockingly short memories and when we think about marginalization, coming from -- i spent the years at yale, women weren't undergraduates at until 40rsity years ago. abilitys beyond the for an undergraduate to grasp that, i understand, but their moms are beginning be the age where they

could have been students at yale. history ofong people whose identity, however, that's being religiously, racially, along gender been, have really marginalized and experienced, had experiences people now -- in this case, trump voting students, feeling some of that same discomfort. this is not to say i am not sympathetic to the think i agree with michael completely. we should be embracing all that we'veents admitted to our universities and colleges and say you are ours and we are part of a community and we're going to support one another, even when we disagree, particularly when we disagree. i think that's fundamental to actually who we are as an academic community. but we need to be -- speaking as an historian, we need to be good historians about this as well, that for peopleople, some

cannot leave their quote marginalized, literally it their body, right? up so for folks to stand and feel outraged that they are not being supported particulara ideology, which one cannot flinch a little bit, as an african-american male teaching in a field dismissed until 25 years ago. which i's a way in am sympathetic to the idea, sympathy can't mean absolute agreement all the time. sympathy means i hear what to're saying, we do need fix this, but you need to also understand you are now oft of a long history people who don't feel they can speak up and so when you are feeling that you can't voice, if your voice is not being heard, i want to make sure you do have yournce to voice being heard and i'll support your speakers and whatever that means, but i expectdo that,

for you as an ethical citizen, to be very respectful which someone else says hey, my voice isn't being heard on campus run toxpect you to their defense, also. that's what i mean about a supporting community that historyes its own of people not having voices. this is not a new problem. new in terms of the social media landscape. i mean, but it's not a new problem. >> not at all. >> it's how we are going to address it in a way that's ethically consistent with and try to be better by it. >> can i ask you a question media side?cial i agree that it changes the scaleity and obviously, but i guess i was theering in terms of 'aculty members extracurricular behavior or utterances, is it issue of that before we just wouldn't know, no harm no foul kind of thing? the issue?

because people i assume, you beliefsd political that were way out of the mainstream let's say or deeply offensive or whatever use, but want to they talked to friends who probably kept that in confidence. and now -- is that the issue usis the issue that for administrators we just more of a barrage of activity? because i agreed with everything you said about what a faculty member does extracurricularly should be her business, his business. up to probably i would guess, up to a point. i mean, legal issues, of course. i just wonder if the social media part is just there's or is ity something else? question.good i absolutely believe that people have been having curious ideas forever, forever. on whatever the issue happens to be. fail to understand still

why people feel the need to send. i just -- i don't understand. andan, have your idea be at peace with that idea. i cannot conjugate this culture in which we all are living or forced to live because someone else oversharing. so there's a way in, which i'm out of step and i am thrilled to be out of step and proud to be out of step in that regard. think this is anything new. i just think that the ways in which we are now forced to deal with things is new ad not to take us in whole different direction, example ise state enacted violence against minority communities is not new. but now, we, know it in a different way because everybody has a camera, right? mallet kindvy of example, but it's a real example.

so in terms of -- i mean, i just hope our faculty would act with common sense but people can deficity that's in .n university campuses the social media thing is changed- it has things so much and it's not just from the standpoint of to people feel the need hit send. i think that we all know writing is difficult and it and it is hard, but mediated world makes it so easy all of a sudden to send out an unfiltered, non-reflective piece that they will find themselves in trouble. there's something good about writing slowly. by the time you've finished long hand,out, got that out of my system, i'm done. it's too easy now. that's the problem i think.

or one of the main factors in the problem. >> and yet if those ideas are there, and they were playing a role underneath the surface in our political i suppose it's good to get them out, isn't it? animated bye their private demons and angels always. they always have been. can act upon what they're doing in the classroom. we can act, not we as administrators, but as peer reviewers, act on what they're doing in publications. beyond that, i mean, i think that's hopeless to get beyond that. and i think it lead us to a terrible space of like predictive

behavior. i don't want to be in that industry, frankly. >> i think you do raise an question about whether light is the best like disinfectant. there are these pieties we about speeche and the risk is the volume upt keeps going up and and up, and i think it's an interesting question about in a momente where these uses of social media are going to be reregulated by changes in social norms, for example, senior administrators not sending e-mails on weekends and creating a quieter and a delineated set of zones speech. or whether it's actually require some greater regulation on the public sector, that is to government, of what are i think, myself and i'm on record saying this in print, relatively underregulated new technologies of communication. jury's about

where that's going to end up with facebook and twitter. zone getting into the of fake news here and the distort and warp systems of communication, and i think it's going to be very interesting to see how that unfold, but we're swept larger i think national problem, conversation, it's not campuses, but i think it is in some ways a zoning question. time, place and manner question, not a content question. i think you're right, people held extreme views. they not only share them with their friends, they get on soapboxes in public squares. could say there's a is reallywho wacky about subject x., but the ability of that to viral, and io think our students are reacting with a set of ideas us, are troubling to

which is to say speech is harmful, speech is an act. in itself can be violent and that is leading what we do see is a shift of student opinion to wanting more regulation issueech, which is an we didn't get to. >> i want to get to that, thei also want to raise question whether there are people in the room who have questions or comments, brief comments or brief questions. maybe i'll save a couple of until we topics have had a chance to take some. i don't know if there's a movable microphone. >> there's one in the center. >> will that work? let's try that. and tell us who you are, please. hand first. yes. had a lot of conflict over the past few years, but the last comment speech acts, relating

to an incident that happened ofthe university missouri on this app put i'm going to stand my ground and shoot every black person i see. have a case where it's a speech act and to me, that's a violent act, right? that creates an unsafe situation, but he only got probation. he did not do jail time for that and the argument was this is just free speech, just saying something. he didn't have a gun, he carry have a means to this out. this is just him sort of move, a rhetorical like what happens if i say i'm going to shoot every i see?erson and i wonder -- like how do linelineate that between speech that's a microaggression or some racism and of

something that is unsafe and discord and the consequences for that, you know? that's my question. may say so that was not such a subtle moment. missouri for you. >> anyone want to pick up on that? sure.l not that i want to pick up on it. but no one else was. good question. i actually think the law hasn't caught up with this phenomenon, generally speaking. what you described to me sounds like yelling fire in theater, right? and does that deserve jail time? or, you know, i'm not going to get into litigating because i don't know what yi k yak, it sound terrible. but i think the law hasn't caught up. i don't think we adults from mentaloped standpoint have caught up or slowed down enough to inerstand how someone

their right mind could do is okay.think this i have a daughter who's about to enter college and has grown up with social media and my wife and i many occasions that there is more than a chasm that is typical chasm, mom and dad don't know what they're chasm. now in terms of the way in which we communicate and how we teach our children, you things in aese public space, which everything electronically is space.c that's the best i can offer you right now. think what he did was inexcusable, frankly, and ethically, morally and legally, to be honest. >> i would have said for me issue of law enforcement. it wouldn't be a university issue. know anything about the identity of the but i just would

think it would be a law enforcement issue. faculty member, that would be, you know -- on yik yake name term u can change the terms, you know, something desire rather than threat, then is becomes a university issue as well as a law enforcement issue because it's an employee-employer -- i wouldp and have to think hard about how one would deal with that, a student's eye, for me, it would be a law enforcement issue. the nextgo to question. >> hi, i'm claire potter and i used to work at wesleyan with michael where i was a leftist, and then i moved to found out i and was just a liberal, after all. [laughter] but i don't want us to get stuck on social media because you've raised so

many things, but i have done a lot of social media in the last 10 years. very seriously about it, i've written about it and one of the things strikes me is -- and this was true in a panel i went to yesterday, there's few senior people who are actually grappling with social media as something is now part of the university environment that people need to be trained in. so when i went to the new signed a piece of paper that said i was not allowed to use my university and defame abuse people and that if i did my privileges would be taken away. that was not actually accompanied by any kind of in whichation people talked about what does it mean to be abusive on to defame people social media? so to the extent that i verylly find it disturbing when people are fired for social media utterances. all of the people who have been are well known in the mediaic social

community for being abusive, nasty, trolling, and so on forth. so it's a story that has not accompanied these firings but those of us who have targeted by these people might say somebody university should have acted long before whatever bomb this person that then made the university the target of public criticism. so i guess my question for you, particularly since universities are now using social media to their faculty, to promote themselves and so on, what kinds of changes might you imagine in terms pedagogy, in terms of what actually gets taught on your campuses about social youa, in terms of how orient young faculty to function in the current environment, which is not going away? >> i think that's a very question. >> well, i think we faculty inour

general, and it's something that we've begun to tackle, but i can't say, you know, that we've gotten to a place that i think i feel satisfied with, but we do at least now have a new teacher training program for all faculty. quite new at berkeley. wasknow, the assumption that the ph.d. process was a process that actually accultureerated you into what it means to be a professor and i don't think of thesecause ruptures, but partly because of the way social media culture has changed, this is a moment in which we need to do much, much more of onboarding and training both for faculty, for graduate students, and even for undergraduate students. we just -- we are i know at berkeley underinvested in what i would call co-curricular kinds of efforts. i think that's a very well taken point.

>> i'll just add you just changed northwestern's faculty orientation for next year. so thank you. >> and it's better now. be better. >> i do think, though, that one way of describing that to encourage self-censorship among the faculty. be other words, to say careful about what you say online because we won't -- protect youn't or we will get you. so i mean, the nice part is we want to protect you from meanrolls, but the part is if you say i think -- i'm not going to it actually because we're on a live c-span, say playhing that might well with your friend at the new school, but won't play elsewhere, we're not going to -- the university orgoing to walk away actually undermine you. i think when we start talking about training speak,about how to

especially extracurricular we're engaging in managed speech, which i guess is what we do, but we have to tread very lightly much we think we know what the best way of is.g social media know -- i'm pretty humble around social media. i mean, there are times when words on social effect of the action as the first question suggested and what the implications of that are legally and ethically, i wet -- i don't think completely understand that. include social media, an introduction to social media and using it in faculty and student

orientation. suggestgoing to that it necessarily is the best training, but we importance.s it's interesting to me, too, to think about who should do it. it certainly shouldn't be someone like me who doesn't actually -- isn't a native that environment at all. wonder again how i my disagreement earlier was about the -- how we describe this problem and we use to describe it and what we're trying to do. still haven't figured that out. of us havea lot warned our students that in socialhey say media may come back to haunt them. certainly, some of us have our children.

reason.r good but i don't know about saying it to peers. i mean -- i haven't thought about that. >> i think social shaming is a good idea in the sense calling out bad behavior, i think our chancellor has been very that, which is when faculty or students behave in ways that are inconsistent with our principles as a community had no hesitation in she abhors that and that has been very helpful. towe're seeing a shift what i call the education industrial complex. see full-time professors aren't hired adjunctsultiple are being hired in their place. how do you think this is going to affect free speech? >> i think it is certainly people's minds.

tenure and you take away a very important protection for freedom of speech. so i'm in a small place so at mys not an issue school, but very much an country.oss the there are institutions that through their faculty senates and other rules and have given protection to part-time or adjunct faculty, but those protections are never as forst as they would be people who have kind of full governance relationship with the institution through tenure. >> certainly many cases that public notice where contingent faculty what seems like a plausible claim that they've lost their jobs because of said. they've >> it's a problem. it's obviously a problem and way, ie other

approved a new nonretaliation language for university. i didn't write, i just approved it, which speaks -- it includes this contingent population as well that at our university should enjoy the luxury of aing free from environment. what constitutes retaliation is the debate and that adjunct faculty don't have time to argue their case. i mean, i recognize it, it's structural illogic to the problem, but at least there's an increased recognition. at my university i think and others, that we must do better by adjunct a wholeons, for range of reasons, not the themeof which is the of this panel on free speech on campuses. sir.s,

>> i'm ben alexander, i teach at the new york city inlege of technology brooklyn. i have a couple of quick thoughts. way not to the say social media is a phenomenon is to think of social media as a close equivalent to living a small town, going out to the local pub with a large group of friends, getting a big table, and very loudly in a room where there are lots of other people who can hear. and just about any issue post onses with a social media could be seen with that as the model and thing that i wanted to say that this whole topic opens into a whole other tangent that i be worthld the --ng and that is part of the challenge is getting people with strong listen to each

other and to engage specifically with each view, andints of i think a good step in that bringion would be to into the undergraduate curriculum some of the psychological, sociological on why people get opinions,strong why people some more than packages ofop narratives that they the absolutee truth and feel victimized by any contradiction to it and whole sense of identity wrapped up in it. and there is material to work with to develop a subcurriculum on that getomenon that could people to reflect on why they'rel so certain absolutely right. and this applies all across the spectrum on everything. >> thank you. anyone want to comment on that? >> i want to say something quickly, i've been

talking a lot and i apologize for that. town point i think is enlightening, but in a way that maybe you didn't intend. i do take your point, but small town situation, will people say rumors fly, did you hear somebody say this, but people know each other already. context of shared experience and that's the thing that disturbs me about social media is that shared experience, the context is stripped away and this is where language matters so powerfully, that and we've all seen the situations where an e-mail that we've sent did did-- the e-mail voice not reflect our actual voice. and if we used the wrong lord.good there's a way in which the stripping away of context is one of the great challenges of this so that i know from my experiences at yale that students in 2015 were up in host of a whole reasons, they were getting outraged not about something that happened at yale, there things that happened

there as well, but things that were happening at things that were happening to some other country.the and they don't know the actual context. it may have been horrible. not so bad.been but it didn't happen on our yet it became viserally as real as if it had at our campus and that's a whole phenomenon i don't understand. i know that it's a real thing, but the context and in role of context language and protecting and understanding speech is a phenomenon we haven't really talked about, think it's critical to any real conversation, issue of with the free speech and free expression. would also add just to what jonathan said, i

bigk there's a difference between a small ofn where a small group people can be mobilized and a post on social media which can instantly mobilize thousands of people to act in a particular way and a very simple example of this is when my daughter was in high school, somebody had a somebody posted it on i don't know facebook or and there were immediately thousands of people at this house in houston. of, there's no way word mouth or a small town or anything -- that phenomenon is really new and it made me realize that, you know, we had to educate our at that point high school kids to think differently about where they were going. suddenly what would have been simply an act of by a teenager, having a party in a house where their mother wasn't ame or something becomes

potentially dangerous event. and that's what happens on campuses. something that could have campusntained on the suddenly becomes potentially dangerous and threatening and we are charged with managing that in a way that literally -- i mean, protects the physical safety of people whom we're protect and also honors the values that we think our institutions stand hard.d that's and another just another quick point is there's a lot issues that -- that i think get conflated again focus on discussing free speech versus managed speech or whatever we're doing. of other lot questions. do we manage speech and if learn, can students to discuss and argue if they are being educated in echo where everyone's politics are the same, is the curriculum biased by the professorsost

apparently skew politically these questions all get conflated into single ones that swirl around free speech, and i reallye would benefit public debate if we could separate them out. i don't know what the right way to phrase those questions is, but they're not one thing. you-- and, you know, also -- the question also revolved around how do we teach students to argue or discuss or be comfortable with ideas that are ones theythan the themselves hold. that's a very different question from the question of speech. the keynk that is question today is how to young people that it's not just all right to other,e with each but essential to hear each other out. and it's hard sometimes in a pressured environment to and do that. i think there must be some ways we could all find to do

it. we're very close to our deadline for finishing and i'm torn between taking one last very quick comment or perhaps and then asking each of the panelists lastave us with their thoughts. >> i'll be very, very brief. >> and you are? a gradd walsh, i'm student at princeton. building on the social media point, you know, it strikes me that all social media outrage isn't created equal is -- social media outrage that doesn't necessarily translate to the campaigns that we've seen against faculty and graduate students and other students at universities across the united states, and i think that we can't have this conversation without thinking about other media factors. so and i'm thinking in general the presence and power of right wing media when it comes to these campaigns, and it's something that hasn't been part of the conversation that much, but i think it's an important part because social media -- i could post

twitter today and most people would ignore, but if somebody from brietbart picked it up, it very differently for me. >> some last thoughts before we meet our deadline to finish? >> well, as carol said, there are lots of questions that get conflated around free speech, and i think part of the reason they get conflated onund free speech campuses is because we expect our campuses to be experimentation and inquiry and especially are wellle who beyond their college years and haven't been on campuses in a long time look at campuses today, they don't see the kind of inquiryntation and that they remember being part of themselves. of thehink a lot criticism of the culture of uniformity on college campuses comes from the strange nostalgia about the

unfettered experimentation of yesteryear, which is fantasy. i think this side of it is the expectation that our college campuses should be of inquiry, experimentation, and discovery. and that's so much better than the expectation, which is also quite strong in this bentry, that there places where you train folks to be part of the current industrial scheme. the silver lining for me about all these debates is that a lot of people in this country that are skeptical about college, they're skeptical because they have high expectations that our places ofhould be experimentation, inquiry and discovery and we have to keep them that way. >> i guess i'll say that i think it's going to be so important for us to meet our students where they are and just want to echo a amment that you made just moment ago that creating -- we're going to have to do a to more active work

create an environment that we assumed that we had created on college campuses, which is an environment where students would feel safe enough to be able to get outside of their comfort zones and what we've heard and learned, and i think in to 24 months is they don't. that's felt quite broadly across the entire political spectrum. so that's going to take a lot of work. i think that we should lean it, becausedo it is absolutely core to the enterprise that i think michael just expressed. people expect of us, and i the right expectation of us. that, i welcome continuing conversation, sharing ideas about how to happen, but i know what it means first is not to dismiss it, but to really meet these students and engage them. >> carol? >> i would just agree with said.arla

i do think it's important for us to model aggressive and vigorous discussion for our students and show that a it.on survives at the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are real reasons in the world some groups of our students feel their lives are in a precarious position, that they are not making that up and because they're not making it up, it doesn't do any good to tell them to, you know, pretend as if the world out there in there.e live is not so finding ways to help them feelings of own vulnerability by sharing our vulnerability is important and building from that shared vulnerability some kind of culture of enabling our students to take responsibility for the culture they create and just your cultures to create, what kind of culture on this campus do live in?to and generally speaking, our students want to live in a havere where they can

respectful discussion around issues where they disagree, where they can hold their passionately and where they can as jonathan suggested empathize with who also feels marginalized for clear and compelling reasons. >> jonathan, that was a statementclosing and i agree with everything you just said. will simply -- my contribution is our colleges --s colleges and universities becoming more demographically complex in every way you can understand that term. that is really good -- that's a good thing. what it's going to mean is that the conversations are going to be more complex. are coming from low socioeconomic backgrounds, first-generation college name it.ds, you that's a good thing, too. and it's going to mean hard work. we as administrators and faculty owe it to our own communities and our students we're asure that engaged in that work as we're asking them to be.

the one thing i will -- i will end on is a question think we all need to ask ourselves when it comes to conversations about free speech. so when we look at our speak?s, who gets to and i think we start to answer that question we'll start to learn more about what's really going on on our campus and that means challenging people who claim not havinge the -- they probably are in and also,, exactly to your point that they are walking around our campuses in ways that others simply can't understand. makes itfore, it much more difficult for them to actually speak for food,s that are about clothing and shelter, for example. is io gets to speak think for me the closing should allat we be asking. >> thank you all, thank you all for coming. [applause]

>> raising the fists in the 1968 olympics. does that relate to what we're seeing with the players kneeling today with the national anthem? >> i think it again, you a long history of racism and -- >> you could be featured our next live program. join the conversation on facebook, at facebook.com/cspanhistory and on twitter @cspanhistory. >> c-span, where history daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television

companies and is brought to your cable or satellite provider. >> american history tv is on c-span 3 every weekend, tours,ng museum archival films, and programs civil presidency, the war and more. here's a clip from a recent program. >> so on the one hand we have an admirable story who startedon from nothing and worked his way to the top. but on the other hand we was theerson who wrong person at the time, you know. lincoln was the right person at the right time, you know, for the country, the person who the country through the calamity of war. and then we had johnson who the task ofo leading people through the timeof the peace, the of peace and the time when there could have been a story about race in america.

so it's a president of lost opportunities. the president of lost opportunities because he had takence, but he didn't it because of his character, because of the way he was of his because determination to live by the precepts of white supremacy and what makes it all so aagic. a a a a >> the state department is a qs civilian opened -- six civics pavilion opened -- in the second part of a two-part program we visit the collection storage area. historianr and continue the story beginning with artifacts from the cold war. >> we are in the thick of the cold war now.