washington, d.c. friday night, 8:00 p.m. ed in a green medford on abraham lincoln's friends and enemies. coming up on american history tv, historians and university leaders discuss free speech on college campuses. part of the conversation includes how social media has changed the nature of discourse in university settings, and the role that political protests have played. from the american historical association's annual meeting held earlier, this is 90 minutes. i'm sanford yungar, former president of goucher college in

baltimore. we have an excellent panel. we have, actually, appropriately enough, to leaders of liberal arts colleges and two leaders of large universities, all of whom share a lot of similar concerns and issues. are you -- i'm sorry? >> louder. >> louder, okay, sorry. do i need to start again? okay, everyone's heard us so far. so that means everyone has to speak directly into these microphones, and pull them toward them, everyone up here. i want to introduce our four panelists briefly. carol quillen, to my immediate left, president of davidson college. she is a long accomplished administrator, spent much of her career at rice university in houston. to her left is jonathan

holloway, provost of northwestern university. and until he moved to northwestern last year, he was the dean of yale college and edmund s. morgan professor of african-american studies, history and american studies at yale. jonathan is working on many interesting projects, including he's written an introduction for a new edition of w.e.b.dubois souls of black -- to my immediate right is carla hesse, who is executive dean of the college of letters and science. and dean of the social sciences division at the university of california in berkeley. she is a professor of history. and prize-winning scholar with 20 years of experience teaching at berkeley. she was previously at rutgers.

and to her right is michael roth, the president of wesleyan university in connecticut, previously president of the college of the arts and associate director of the getty research institute in los angeles, director of european studies at claremont graduate university. he came east to make trouble at wesleyan instead of california. one of the most notable things about this panel is that three of the four got their doctorates at princeton. everybody but jonathan and me. i don't have a doctorate at all. so i don't know -- sort of a side issue whether princeton training reveals itself in any way in the course of our conversation this morning. many people are more affected by their undergraduate institution than their graduate one.

we're just going to dispense with opening statements and plunge right in. one of the things i want us to talk about, because i believe since many of the people who will be in attendance this morning and/or are watching this later on with the help of c-span, are faculty members, and work at places where there have been quite a few controversies over speech by members of the faculty. and so i thought 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 quite subtly 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. >> as i understand it -- >> i think you need to use the multiplex microphones, thanks. >> the question you're asking is about the relationship between a commitment to free speech and the speech of faculty members, and how the -- the ways in which this issue has been framed in public debate focuses on free speech. i'm not the most qualified person up here to speak about the distinctions 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 interest of arriving at deep insights. and with the recognition that many of the most important areas of research today were at one time wildly unpopular, frowned upon, and dismissed as

outrageous or not actually even academic. so when i talk about this issue, i tend to talk about the ways in which we as institutions of education are committed to creating an environment that fosters absolutely unfettered free inquiry by everyone, by students, by faculty, everyone. and that free inquiry actually benefits from inclusion and diversity. that the kinds of questions we ask and the ways in which we can pursue knowledge and create insights benefits significantly from the people asking the questions and diversity. rather than thinking about free speech or academic freedom and inclusion as being at odds with one another, 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 that we want our colleagues and students to be able to ask and pursue. so i think i would frame the

academic freedom dimension of your question in that way, that as institutions committed to free inquiry we're obligated to protect unpopular lines of inquiry, and we see as a part of that a commitment to diversity and inclusion precisely because the more heterogenous the population of people asking the questions, the broader the lines of inquiry will be. >> thank you. i think that's -- i think that's actually very helpful. carla, at a large university, berkeley, for example, 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. and does it help clarify some of the controversies you've had to deal with to draw a distinction between free speech and academic

freedom? >> well, i mean, at berkeley, academic freedom, of course, is also, you know, something that is a cherished part of our tradition. as the home of the "student free speech" movement, berkeley is always in the public's eye as a kind of touchstone, beacon for that conversation. i think academic freedom in general has been a more faculty-focused conversation rather than a student-focused conversation. if we think about the genesis of these two concepts. academic freedom is a concept that emerged in the early 20th century, around 1919 the aau formed to defend the right and the autonomy of the faculty to define a space in inquiry in relation to what was perceived to be potential political interference on the part of administrations. the idea of the self-regulation of the faculty of its professional life seems to me to be the thing at the core of the

academic freedom conversation connected to the whole history of tenure in the country and the protection of faculty rights. free speech, in some sense you could see as the student version of academic freedom. it's the moment at which, and i mean -- mario salvo was -- >> he was the founder in 1964. >> or its most vocal and eloquent, i think, advocate. said that freedom of speech comes with responsibility, a responsibility to self-govern. and so the students of their public conversation. there is a sort of connection, i think, that's where they touch each other. that academic freedom, in some ways, the free speech movement gave students the same kind of responsibility for the cue ration of their own public conversation, and the right to

c curate that conversation in the way the faculty enjoyed it at least the earliest part of the 20th century. they touch each other there. where they differ and come back together, and i think most pointedly in an article written by robert post, the dean of yale law school and vox, has been -- his question about whether there is -- should be a defense of freedom of speech on any college campus, that academic freedom is the higher principle on any college campus and that the faculty and the administration do have the right to limit and to judge and to adjudicate. i don't happen to share that view. i happen to be on the berkeley side of this debate, the side taken by our -- the dean of our law school, irwin gemerinski. it has come back to the conversation. to what extent does the faculty and the administration have the right to sort of limit the kind

of speech to exercise professional discretion about what kind of speech should be on the campus? so it has been brought back into the conversation. but i think they can be clearly separated. >> jonathan, i wonder if there are helpful distinctions to be drawn here. it occurs to me that maybe academic freedom is sort of an inside issue as carla -- or some people describes, as carla describes, some people are describing it, and free speech more the outside issue, the interface of the college or the university with the public at large. is that a helpful distinction? >> i've not thought of it that way, but it wouldn't take much to persuade me that that is an effective way of thinking about it. what it does highlight for me though, this inner outer aligns with a point i want to make that does address your question, about public and private and social good. the fact is, you've got very

different types of universities and schools on this panel. one of the most important distinctions is public versus private. free speech as a constitutional ideal doesn't apply to the privates. which most people don't realize. now, any private that i certainly know about embraces the idea of free expression would be the more accurate way of talking about it in the situation of a private university or college. but the -- i mean, that may be, you know -- it helps to understand why publics and privates having very different times with these -- what i think are outside interlopers acting in bad faith, trying to test free speech on campus. but the reason i raise this, in light of your question is, it talks about what i think is like the public contract of service that colleges and universities, private or public, are engaged with. and so that way, i think, the free speech, free expression, aspect of being an outward

facing public good kind of phenomenon is a nice way of thinking about it. that's constructive. i do think -- since you raised the issue of my former colleague bob post and his notion of who can adjudicate speech, i think it is worthwhile thinking about it. i mean, the universities and colleges are supposed to be marketplaces of ideas, and absolutely believe in the idea of academic freedom, and we should be testing all kinds of ideas, comfortable, and especially uncomfortable. but we -- i don't think academics, our job is to think, we shouldn't be seeding the -- our ability to say that is actually wrong. that's the point of airing out the idea in the first place. and i do think -- i'm probably getting ahead a little bit here, this is where notions of public safety need to be taken into account. and also, frankly, calling it --

the phenomenon what it is, acts of bad faith by people not interested in free expression trying to cloud the waters on our college and university campuses. so public/private phenomenon is a real thing, inner and outward. i understand that. i hadn't thought about it in that sort of way. but i think they all re invol r around improving -- >> can i say something? >> just from what carla and jonathan have said, it seems like we need to make some distinctions that get -- there's a kind of category or definitional confusion that takes place in the public debate about this, which makes it hard to articulate with clarity what

it is colleges and universities are trying to do. and so, i mean, i do think there's a difference between talking about this in terms of freedom of inquiry, and the pursuit of ideas, and pursuit o constitutional right to free speech. that there's a deep commitment to freedom of inquiry on college and university campuses that yes builds on this notion but is distinguishable from it. and if you talk about inquiry in that way so inquiry and free speech is different and different than epithet. it brings with it a responsibility for the public sphere that you are creating on your campus. and so how do we have a conversation about that means and invite the students and faculty and everyone else into helping us figure that out?

what kind of public sphere are we creating? what kind of public sphere do we wish to create? can we make a distinction between an argument or idea or epithet? i say to my kids if i can't refute it, it's not an argument. i and i use the old "saturday night live" example, gene, you cup, if you can't make an argument -- >> i appreciate you weighing on the nexus between academic freedom and free speech. >> i think it can be said academic freedom that really is to protect faculty. and before the free speech movement of berkeley there were loyalty oaths for protecting faculty from being fired from belonging to a party or its affiliates. but the idea was certainly that

faculty as citizens should have the right to participate in any variety of political activities without detriment to their professional life. but i do think the marketplace metaphor is about as faulty for expression as it is for economics. that is it works a lot of time but fails as well. and that's because we always have managed freedom of expression. no university has unfettered inquiry. it would be disastrous if you asked the brief rush to define an inquiry. we have plenty of topics that would be appropriate for the

orange county society that won't be on the docket for the american historical association, and a good thing, too. we manage the freedom of inquiry. so the question for administrators and for professors is what kinds of things do you let people say, what kind of questions do you let people ask, and what kind of questions do you say are off-limits? there's always something off-limits. so i think asking ourselves what kind of freedom for fack alty we think should be protected and what kind of freedom for faculty we think shouldn't be protected -- not just speech, expression, which oof course becomes intimidation, which becomes harassment, which becomes many things that we would today have an easy time saying is a fireable offense or isn't appropriate. and other things we would say that's less clear, if you say

something offensive politically and you're a faculty member, we want to prec your right to do that. some things we protect. 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 may not have to. because the culture of academia is incredibly conservative and in certain classes students know there are questions they're just not allowed to ask. and our job is or should i call it masters of inquiry, is that we decide what kind of inquiry we want to see fostered. i think all of the schools represented here have admissions policies. none of these schools believe in unfettered diversity. we all have an extremely

selective admission policies, which allows us to say some things we want to pursue and other things we don't. so i think if you approach this with the marketplace metaphor anybody can come to the table and say whatever the heck they want, i think that's a fantasy of american democracy and a fantasy of academia. >> of course disciplines have rules. there's analytical rigor. there's better questions and worse questions. i don't think anyone would take the position that you've outlined. >> i think you said unfettered inquiry and diversity is essential for the pursuit of a searcher inquiry, i think that's sure, but it's also essential that you limit them. i think you just called me an ignora

ignora ignorant slut. >> i think there's lots of rules for the ways in which inquiry takes place, and there are good historical questions and bad historical questions. but what governs whether or not something is a good question are the rules of the disciplines of history, not -- >> and where do they come from? >> so in some sense i'm not suggesting -- and perhaps i misspoke -- that anything goes. i'm suggesting that academics who are trained in these disciplines and are training their students in these disciplines be able to pursue without a litmus test of the appropriateness of the field or the topic, the questions that they pursue, that the bound on the questions they pursue are the rules on the discipline. maybe that's another way to say

it. >> another bound to clarify is who adjudicates. and it depends on the context even within a context. and i think what was said earlier about public and private universities is true, although in california the law actually compels private universities to extend the same kind of public freedoms that public universities are mandated to do. but it's correct that we have an obligation to -- to keep the campuses open to any student organization and the public at large. we have a particular public mandate that you can at your universities limit. so i think you're hearing something of a cultural difference here, that in fact is limited by the law. but what a faculty -- i mean in the classroom it's perfectly clear who would adjudicate. the professor would. >> the particular professor

or -- >> up to a point. with the university of california, we do have a religious policy on academic freedom. and what that does is to draw a line for the purposes that michael i think just described between a professors private activities and their professional activities. so that in order to protect the right of professors and freedom of professors to be politically engaged outside of the crass ro room. of course the rubber really hits the road there when the professor is teaching politics. for example, a professor of the middle east who has a particular position on the middle east, that might cross the line between instruction and advocacy. that's not a simple line to navigate. and many of the controversies we've seen at berkeley whether it's on one side of the political spectrum or the other

are students that are concerned about or disapprove of the positions that professors may profess in those particular kinds of settings. and i think that's one of the arenas where we've seen the most stress, and it's come from both the left and the right in different classroom settings at berkeley. so we just had as some people may know a very big controversy where a group of students disrupted a course on the southern borderlands and quoted him as a white supremest because he's white and talking about undocumented immigrants on the border. >> so that goes to the question about who has a right to speak about what. >> correct. and very clear -- and he walked the students out of the class. in theory they were harassing him, and in theory he might if

it were severe and pervasive enough, that's the legal standard might have been able to file a complaint against them for harassment. i think that's where they start to see these tensions between who adjudicates in the classroom. what it's saying about robert's article is i don't think outside of the classroom that is quite as clear. i think it's very clear at berkeley that recognizes student organizes have a right to invite speakers. and we have a constitutional duty to protect that right. 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. >> this conversation i think it leads directly to this question of how important it distinction might be between what faculty

members say in the performance of their teaching and research duties as faculty members and beyond that, and social media has complicated that tremendously. i want to ask you whether you think it's appropriate, some meme think it's necessary, to take into account faculty members' so-called ext extracurricular utterances. something they say online and the distinction may not be drawn by donors, state legislators, various authorities between what's in the classroom and what's outside. there are a couple rather notorious and not very good cases but over lenin and trennen were two places where there were differences over some of this.

>> this is enormously complicated -- i mean quite of it is quite simple is what a profeteser is doing in his or her private time is what they're doing in their private time. they have a right to be citizens after all. but it's involved with social media -- i mean we're in a whole new world right now as far as the ways in which -- i mean the social media ego is far more dangerous and pernicious and as we've seen is actually life threatening. so i honestly, i am not able to sit here and give you an answer. except for my first response is what a professor is doing outside the classroom as a citizen is that person's own business. and it may become a public relations nightmare for the university or college. it may be a board of trusties

nightmare. those are the things administrators are paid to deal with, frankly. it's all terrible. you mentioned a couple of situations where one i think an administrator can fairly ask -- and this is not me passing judgment at what happened at this particular schools, but a administrator can fairly ask will this professor be able to do his or her job? teaching becomes a whole different thing. and i think that's something i would have to weigh if i were involved in that situation. one of the real challenges, of course, with social media is that things that are significantly more complex or nuanced all the complexities and nuance are washed away, and it goes down to the more simpler kind of visceral response. it does an injustice to everyone involved in the process,

frankly. so i don't have an answer beyond that, except this is horrible social media has done some wonderful and positive things and has destroyed things along the way. >> i realize you're new at northwestern and it's a very complex institution, but there are some ongoing controversies there as well involving some things that members of the faculty at northwestern have said that have drawn a great deal of attention. and i think you have people on the outside saying, well, how can you allow these people to poison our children's minds with their vitriol and their hatred, et cetera. that's a good question i will i said that. >> no, it's still a good question, but it's indicative of what the terms are. because a lot of angry e-mails

we all get are indicative of those terms. this comes to the conundrum of i can't comment. now administrators are doing nothing when actually we're protecting the rights of the individuals involved. and this is incredibly asymmetric. so what i'll simply call the offending individuals, that could be faculty or students or whatnot, they have the freedom to continue what they want to do especially on blogs and tweets and whatnot. and as an administrator i have to sit on my hands in every public way or i think violate my own responsibility to protect the faculty. and it's miserable. well, it is. and anybody who says it isn't, well, i'd like to meet that person. i'm beginning to get this experience, but i've lived the experience at yale as a senior

administrator as well. there's no good side to it. and i go back to what i said before, and this does pertain to some people at northwestern is when these issues come up, we take the time to find out what's happening in the classroom. and this goes back to the earlier statement. the sis hyperpoliticized, deeply troubling, strange whatever you want to call it ideas is this part of your pedagogy or what they just think about. if it's the latter, i just have to accept it. if they're keeping it in their classroom, they're just doing what they're doing as an instructor. it may make us look terrible and may make the board lose their

minds, but that's just the fact of it. the world of social media has changed the terms upon which 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 in good conscious have to maintain, it's become more difficult to do so. >> michael, you've raised the question, one of the things that obviously the general public has extremely strong views about without necessarily knowing very much about what happens on university campuses is this notion that by and large students and faculty only want to hear one point of view or views from one direction and that other people get sensored or interrupted. and you have talked about the need for affirmative action of

some sort for a broader range of speakers on campuses. that's something i was a little concerned with when i was a college president as well. but i wonder how's that going over? >> well, i've actually called for affirmative action for conservative thinkers. not for speakers. i think the issue around speakers is an issue about entertainment. it's like who do you have for commencement. it's like what band did you invite for your graduation party. i i think william buckley was disinvited from baser 20 years ago. i mean these things happen. you book the wrong band. it's a party. i don't think speakers usually have much to do about inquiry. and some schools maybe the rules are good or bad in different states, universities are in the entertainment business, and therefore they're in the crowd control business.

and at really big schools like northwestern and berkeley, they deal with crowd control all the time. usually around athletics, and that's just part of the administrative's nightmarish responsibilities, i guess. but i do think having a broader range of ideas on the faculty would probably be a good thing. i'm agreeing to what carroll said before about having a broad range of perspectives. again, it's going to be managed. i don't think it's a free market of hiring. i used to do a lot of interviewing at aha. got my first job in washington in 1982. and i got my first job because the guy who interviewed me, thank goodness whereby was, was. at least i claimed to have swum, and that led to get an

interview. it's not a marketplace through which the best people get chosen, but there are various filters. and i thought of raising the issue of political bias in the classroom, that i would create more of a conversation about people making affirmative steps to bring in ideas that are underrepresented in their history department or their english department. and the diversity of ideas sometimes mean you have not just one kind of perspective. i do think there's a need for a broader range of ideas taken seriously for research in teaching. i don't really care so much if there is a broader range of speakers invited. again, that seems to me, that's not so much about the ongoing

mission of the university. so it's gone over, okay, i guess. in other words the other conservatives are like we don't need affirmative action, and we should just do it better. and my friends on the other line said i had sullied the word affirmative action by attaching it to conservatives. these are the words that very few friends on it left had been using for 15 years. they prefer inclusion and equity. but i think the conversation seems to be salatory. there's no potis system. there's no litmus test. i just thought the censorship of

prejudice were working very strongly, and i think there were things we could do about this in an affirmative way. >> i'm tempted to ask you how to implement such a policy and where you test where someone is on the political spectrum and how you avoid getting into some quite offensive questions in some areas there. >> same thing with admissions with affirmative actions, it's very hard. sometimes it's really hard to know if a person belongs to a certain group. but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything at all. >> sure. i accept the concept. i just think the implementation must be very difficult. and what happens if someone who seems to be conservative when hired changes his or her mind dramatically. >> it happens.

and from my perspective, again it's not about the political affiliation the person you hire, although it seems to be that's what we're doing right now since almost everyone we hire has an agreeable political affiliation to hiring committee. that just happens by accident, i guess. but we make sure that our curriculum take seriously a broad range of conservative ideas. and many people said to me it already does. i'm sure it does in some places already in many respects. >> you're smiling as if you have something to say. >> no, i -- i think there isn't an administrator certainly at this table who doesn't think group think is the enemy of academic excellence. i think academy tends towards group thinking. because any people that get together tend to think that they think well and people who think like them think well.

i don't think that's -- and it is in some sense the job of administrators and academic leaders to constantly be trying to keep that pot stirring so that we're not missing the opportunity to make -- to make new discoveries and open up new vistas of inquiry. so when it comes to how we exercise it, berkeley is a little bit different in that we don't have affirmative action. it doesn't present itself in that way to us. if anything, we have the opposite challenge which is 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. and that's an issue our chancellor i think has drawn helpful attention to. there just aren't enough four-year college slots in california, and that's made it extremely competitive to get in. and that creates really special challenges for us. but the question of political correctness at berkeley i think is slightly different than a small liberal arts college. the campus is just too diverse, the scale is too large, and the student body, you could see it as mamore of a challenge to get people to play in each other's neighborhoods than it is the fact there's only one neighborhood to play in. we have more greek societies -- we have more spearial and religious student groups. >> you're in the process of saying things that conflict with

the public image at berkeley. >> i think berkeley is very poorly represented in the media. in that sense our students are poorly represented and our faculty or poorly represented. if we look at the letter that was quoted "the new york times" that stated more than 100 berkeley faculty signed a letter urging the chancellor to ban -- from the campus, not true. at berkeley we have almost 1,600 latter ranked faculty and at least as many nonlatter ranked faculty. so a hundred can seem like a lot. if you're at berkeley it's a drop in the bucket. so i do think it's a scale question and where the media will always go for the most extreme voices. i also think that some of this

crisis of the post-trump election has, again, created a political environment that it, you know -- our chancellor likes to say it's a shadow world that lies outside the university world that has distorted what actually goes on on the campus. if we take bent shipiro. he came to berkeley in april of 2016. 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 after am milo episode ben shipiro comes to campus, cost us $6,000 in campus security and thousands show up

to give the exact same speech. so this has so much to do with the external damage, this world of the social media than it is the internal environment of the campus. many, many conservative speakers in that spring that milo came, miles awas on the campus, ben shipiro was on the campus. that doesn't mean there isn't an issue where certain students views and certain groups have felt 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 think we need to meet those students where they are and to help them to develop a place in our public

conversation where they feel more included. so -- >> an antidote in that connection. i teach a freshman seminar in harvard in the fall on free speech. and one of my students this past fall -- i only have 13 students. one of them raised the question of how people who were not only sympathetic to donald trump but were public about the fact they voted for donald trump, how they were being treated at harvard and whether they were being discriminated against or persecuted or in some way certainly disapproved of in a public manner. and this particular student quoted -- it's not an impressive percentage, but he said 8%, what do we do to make them feel

comfortable? is that a legitimate question to be asked? i don't know who wants to -- >> can i just point out and then i'll -- i just said a lot. you know, at berkeley it is about 7% to 8% of our students voted for donald trump. i don't know what the faculty count would be, but only 3% of our students are african-american. so if we're talking about marginalization, i think we, again, need to be careful about how this conversation is playing out in the public media. that said and, you know, college republicans respectfully have their booth, and it has never been attacked. so i do think that faculty members are sometimes dismissive of students with conservative views and i do think that is

unfortunate, and i think that is something we need to have a conversation about. >> i just have a question f, an you guys will know more about this than i do. is it helpful the party affiliation and 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 that they teach? >> that's a great question. i don't think it is fair. so i try to in my response to sandy say that it's not about litmus test when you hire someone who they voted for and what their views are in the

curriculum. and clearly people who may identify outside the classroom on being on the left teach classrooms that involve conservative thinkers. and try to be cautious about that. it's not just to check someone's voting record or political belief, but adding to curriculum issues that are part of this broad range of thinking. i've been talking with colleagues and looking at the range of courses we have. in some departments it seems like a caricature, but that doesn't mean we have to hire someone, let's say, is a believer in a certainligio reli tradition, but we have courses that deal with it in

seriousness. i don't think it's important the students that subscribe or belong in the group. it used to be when 3% of it body was african-american or jewish or what have you, that there were many faculty members that felt empowered to be dismissive of them of their belonging to a group. i'm pretty sure it happens much less for those belonging in those groups. and i think it should happen not at all for people who identify with groups that we need to take seriously intellectually and socially. >> it just seems there are so many important questions we could ask or ask questions in a somewhat different way than we're currently asking them that would be -- no, no, just in general on this issue. that question, like what should the curriculum look like. what range of topics should be cover as a faculty in this institution? how are we ensuring that -- that

our students have the range of educational opportunities that we think they ought to have? and that feels like such safe ground to me, and it also allows us to ask questions of our students who sometimes seem to assume that a particular identity dictates whom they should read or where they should find the intellectual material of which to construct arguments for themselves. and this is all yours to appropriate as you please, this whole -- my students and i such a different view of what that means. you know, this entire intellectual morg intellectu intellectual smorgasbord is available to you for thinking

through and crafting positions. and it seems the questions are much more ones we'd be compelled to address focusing on censorship and all these other issues. >> jonathan, you were about to pick up the issue of how conservative -- leaning conservative voting publicly identified supporters of donald trump may be treated on university campuses. >> well, i was taking it up in a way that's already been taken up. in a sense that these individuals who consider themselves marginalized and therefore in need of some sort of protection or literally are asking for safe spaces have shockingly short memories. we as americans have shockingly short memory. and when we think about marginalization, i spent the last 20 years at yale, women

weren't undergraduates at the university until 40 years ago. their moms are just beginning to be the age they could have actually been students at yale. so we need to understand there's a long history of people whose identity, however that's being constructed, religiously, racially, gender lines, have really beenmer marginalized andd experiences that people now -- in this case, trump voting students are now feeling some of that same discomfort. it's not to say i am not sympathetic to the discomfort. i think we should be embracing all the students we've admitted to our universities and colleges and say you're ours and you're part of the 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. speaking of historians, we need to be good historians about this as well. for some people, some people cannot leave their, quote, marginalized body. literally it is their body, right? so for folks to stand up and feel outrage they're not being supported because of a particular ideology which one cannot see, makes me flinch a little bit. as an african-american male teaching in a field that was dismissed until 25 years ago. so there are ways in which i am sympathetic to the idea. but sympathy can't mean absolute agreement all the time. sympathy means i agree with what you're saying, but you need to understand you're now part of a long history of people who feel

they can't speak up. i want to make sure you do have a chance for your voice to be heard and i'll support your speakers and whatever that means. but when you do that, i expect for you as an ethical citizen to be very respectful when someone else says, hey, my voice isn't being heard on campus. and i expect you to run to their defense also. that's what i mean about a supporting community that recognizes its own history of people not having voices. this is not a new problem. it's new in terms of social media landscape, but it's how we're going to address it ethically consistent with our past. >> can i ask you about the social media site, because i agree it changes the intensity and scale obviously. i guess i was wondering in terms of faculty members

extracurricular behavior and utterances is the issue of social media is before we wouldn't know, like no harm no foul kind of thing? because people i assume had political believes that were way out of main stream or deeply offensive or whatever you want to use, but they talked to friends who probably kept that in confidence. is that the issue or is the issue for us administrators we get more of a barrage of activity? because i agreed with everything you said about, you know, what a faculty member does extracurricular extracurricularly should be her business, his business up to a point, legal issues of course. but i just wondered if the social media part is just there's no privacy or is it something else? >> that's a good question.

i absolutely believe that people have been having these curious to repugnant ideas forever, i mean forever on whatever the issue happens to be. i fail to understand still why people feel the need to hit send. i just don't understand. i mean have your idea and be at peace with that idea. i cannot conjugate this oversharing culture in which we all are living or forced to live because someone else is over sharing. i'm proud to be out of step in that regard. so i don't think this is anything new. i just think that there are ways in which we are now forced to deal with things is new. and not to take this in a whole different direction. but the simple example is state enacted violence against minority communities is not new. we know this, but now we know it

in a different way because everybody has a camera, right? that's a heavy mallet kind of an example, but it's a real example. so in terms of -- i mean i guess i would just hope, speaking as an administrator, our faculty would act with common sense. the social media thing is really -- it has changed things so much. and it's not just at this standpoint of why people feel the need to hit send. i think we all know writing is difficult and it is a slow and it is hard, but the social media world makes it so easy all of a sudden to send out an unedited, unfiltered nonreflective piece that people find themselves in trouble. i mean there's something good about writing slowly.

>> yes. >> because by the time you finish writing it out, you're like oh, i got that out of my system, i'm done. you know, it's too easy now. that's the problem, i think, or one of the main factors of the problem. >> and yet if those ideas were there and playing a role beneath the surface in that political cultural, i think it's good to know you need to get them out, isn't it? >> i don't know how you would intervene there because people are motivated by their private angels and demons. i think we can act upon what they're doing in the classroom. we can act not only as administrators but peer reviewers in what they're doing in publications. i think it leads us to a really

terrible space of almost like predictive behavior. i don't want to be in that industry, frankly. >> you know, i think you raise a really interesting question about whether light is really the best deisinfectant. the risk is the volume keeps going up and up and up. and i think it's a really interesting question whether these uses of social media are going to be regulated by changes in social norms. for example, senior administrators not sending e-mails on weekends and creating a more linear and delineated freedoms of speech. or it's going to create a sector

of under relatively underregulated new technologies of communication. i think the jury is out where that's going to end up with facebook and twitter. we're getting into the zone of fake news here and the ability to distort and warp systems of communication. and i think it's going to be very interesting to see how that unfolds. but what we're sort of swept into this larger, i think, national problem, conversation it's not unique to campuses. but i think it is in some ways a zoning question. it is a time, place and manner question. not a content question. i think you're right. people held extreme views. they not only share them with themselves, they got on soapboxes on, you know, public squares. and you could say another professor who's really wacky

about subject text, but the ability to amplify -- and i think our students are reacting with a set of ideas that are troubling to us which is to say speech is harmful and speech is an act. that could lead to an environment we do see leading to more regulated speech, which is an issue we didn't really get to. >> i want to get to that, but i also want to raise the question whether there are people in the room who want to make brief comments or brief questions, and maybe i'll save a couple of other topics until we've had a chance to take some -- i don't know if there's a movable microphone. >> there's one in the center. >> i know there's one in the center. will that work? let's try that. and tell us who you are please. i saw your hand first.

yes? >> [ inaudible ] this app put out i'm going to stand my ground and shoot every black person i see. and there we have a case that it's a speech act, and to me that's a violent speech act. 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. he's just saying something. he didn't have a gun. you know, he didn't have a means to carry this out. this is just him sort of making a rhetorical move. like what happens if i say i'm going to shoot every black person i see?

and i wonder what -- like, how do we delineate that line between speech that's a microaggression or a form of racism and something that's unsafe and creates discord and the consequences for that? you know, that's my question. >> that was not such a subtle -- anyone want to pick up on that? >> not that i want to pick up on it, but no one else was. it's a really 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 a crowded theater, right? and now does that deserve jail time or, you know, i'm not going to get into litigating. but i just think the law hasn't

caught up. i don't think we adults from a developmental standpoint have caught up or slowed down enough to understand how someone in their right mind could do this and think this is okay. i have a daughter who's about to enter college 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 typical generational chasm, mom and dad don't know what they're doing chasm now in terms of the way in which we communicate and how we teach our children you don't say these things in a public space. which everything electronic is a public space. i mean that's the best i can offer you right now. i think what he did was inexcusable, frankly. and ethically, morally and legally, to be honest. >> i would have said for me it

would be an issue for law enforcement. it wouldn't be a university issue. ask i don't know anything about the identity of the person. but i just would think it would be a law enforcement issue. if it were a faculty member, that would be, you know, with a false name on yik yak, and you can change the terms, you know something expressing desire rather than a threat, then it becomes a university issue as well as a law enforcement issue because there's an employer-employee relationship. but i'd have to think hard about how one would deal with that. but for the students, i think for me it would be a law enforcement issue. >> hi, i'm claire potter. then i moved to a new school and i found out i was just a liberal

after all. i don't want to see us get stuck on social media because you raised so many things, but i have done a lot of social media in the last ten years. i've fought very seriously about it. i've written about it. and one of the things that strikes me is, and this is true of a panel i went to yesterday, that there's now a university environment that people need to be trained in. when i went to new school i signed a piece of paper that said i was not allowed to use my university commuter to abuse or defame people. and if i did, my privileges would be taken away. that was not actually accompanied by any kind of orientation in which people talked about what does it mean to be abusive or defend people on social media?

so to the extint i actually find it disturbing when people are fired for social media utterances, all the people who have been are well-known in the academic social community for being abusive, nasty, trolling and so on and so forth. so it's a story that hawse not accompanied these firings. but those of us who have been targeted by these people might say that somebody from the university should have acted long before whatever bomb this person setoff that then made the university a target of public criticism. so i guess my question for all of you particularly since universities are using social media to promote their faculty and promote themselves and so on, what kinds of changes might you imagine in terms of pedagogy, in terms of what actually gets taught on your campuses on social media, in terms how you orient your

faculty? >> i think that's a great question. >> i think we undertrain our faculty in general. and it's something we've begun to tackle, but it's not something i feel we've gotten to a plates we feel satisfied with. but we do have a new teacher training program for all faculty. that's something new at berkeley. i don't -- i think partly because of these media ruptures but partly because of the way classroom technology also has changed, this is moment in which we need to do much, much more in terms of onboarding and training forphic lty and graduate students.

and we are at berkeley underinvested in what i would call cocurricular 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. >> it'll be better. >> i do think, though, that one way of describing that would be to encourage self-censorship among the faculty. in other words, to say be careful about what you say online because we won't -- either we won't protect you or we will get you. so i mean the nice part is we want to protect you from bad trolls. but the mean part is if you say i think -- i'm not going to say it actually because we're on c-span. say something that might play well with your friends at a new school but won't play well elsewhere, we're not going to --

you know, the university is going to walk away or actually undermine you. i do think when we start talking about training people about how to speak, especially extracurricular speech, that we're engaging in managed speech, which i guess is what we do. but i think we have to tread very lightly about how much we think we know the best way to use social media, we as administrators know the best way of using social media is. >> i don't know. i mean i'm pretty humble around social media. i don't -- i think it has -- i mean there are times when words on social media have the effective action as the first question suggested, and what the implications of that are legally and ethically, i don't think we

completely understand tat. we do include social media, an introduction to social media and using it in faculty and student orientation. i'm not suggesting it's necessarily the best training or we figure out how to do it, but we recognize its importance. it's interesting to me, too, to think about who should do it. it shouldn't be someone like me who isn't native to that environment at all. but i wonder, again, how i think -- the disagreement with michael earlier is really about how we describe this problem and the terms we use to describe it and what we're trying to do. and i think we still haven't figured that out. >> i 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 how we say -- i don't know about saying it to peers. i haven't thought about that. >> i think social training is a good idea in the sense that calling out bad behavior, our chances have been very good at that. which is when faculty or students have behaved in a way in our community, i think she's been very helpful in that. >> i think we're starting to see a paradigm shift for what i call the educational industrial complex. many times we see full time professors aren't hired in

multiple adjuncts. >> i think it erodes tenure, and i think when you erode tenure you take away very important protections for freedom of speech. i'm at a small place, so this is not an issue at my school but very much an issue across the country. there are issues through their faculty sents a faculty senates have given regulations, but those protections would never be with people who have the full relationship through tenure. >> there are certainly many cases that have come to public notice where contention faculty have made of what seems like a

plausible claim they've lost their jobs because of things they've said. >> it's a problem. it's obviously a problem. just the other day i approved a new nonretaliation language for the university. i approved it. i didn't write it. and includes this population as well, that everybody at our university should enjoy the luxury of being free from retaliatory environment. now, of course, what constitutes retaliation is the debate and of course that adjunct faculty don't have the luxury of time to argue their case. i recognize it's a structure to the problem, but these there's an increased recognition at least in my university and i think in many others that we must do better by adjunct

populations for a whole range of issues. >> yes, sir? >> i'm ben alexander. i teach at the new york city college of technology in brooklyn. i just have a couple of quick thoughts. one is that the way not to see 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 just about any issue that arises with a post on social media could be seen with that as a model. and authority thing i wanted to say was this whole topic opens into a whole other tangent that

i think would be worth exploring, and that part of the challenge is getting people with strong opinions to listen to each other and to engage specifically each other's points view, and i think a good step in that direction would be to bring into the undergraduate curricular some of the psychological, sociological research on why people get wedded to strong opinions. why people, some more than others, develop packages of narratives that they consider to be the absolute truth and feel victimized by any contradiction to it and have their whole sense of identity wrapped up in it. and there is -- there is material to work with to develop a subcurriculum on that phenomenon that could get people to reflect on what they feel so certain that they're absolutely

right. and this applies all across the spectrum on everything. >> thank you. anyone want to comment on that? >> i actually want to say something very quickly. i've been talking a lot and i apologize for that. the small town point i think is enlightening but in a way that maybe you didn't intend. i take your point, but the small town situation still people say rumors will fly, did you hear that somebody said this? but people know each other already. there is a context of shared experience, and that's the thing that really disturbs me about social media, is that shared experience is -- the context is stripped away. this is where language matters so powerfully. that something that -- we've all seen the situations where an e-mail that we've sent did not -- the e-mail voice did not reflect our actual voice. if we use the wrong emoji at the end of it, i mean, good lord. so there is a way in which the stripping away of context is, i think, one of the great challenges of this.

i know from my experiences at yale, students in 2015 who were up in arms for a whole host of reasons were getting outraged not something that happened at yale, things were happening there as well, but things happening at mizzou or 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 didn't happen on our campus, and yet it became viscerally as real as if it had happened on our campus. and that's a whole phenomenon i don't understand. i know that it's a real thing. but the context and the role of context and language and protecting language, and an understanding of speech is a phenomenon we haven't really talked about but i think is critical to any real conversation or wrestling with the issue of free speech and free expression. >> can i just add? >> sure. >> i would also add that, just

to echo what jonathan said, i think there is a big difference between the -- a small town where a small group of 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 party and somebody posted it on, i don't know, facebook or something, and there were immediately thousands of people at this house in houston. now, there is no way word of mouth or a small town or anything could -- that phenomenon is really new and it made me realize we had to educate at that point our high school kids to think differently about where they were going. something that simply would have been an act of rebellion in a house where the mother wasn't home or something becomes a

potentially dangerous event. that's what's happens on our campuses. if something that could have been contained on the campus among people who know each other suddenly becomes potentially dangerous and threatening. >> yes. >> and we are charged with managing that in a way that protects literally, i mean protects the physical safety of people whom we're meant to protect and also honors the values that we think our institution stands for. that's hard. and another -- just another quick point is, there is a lot of issues that i think get conflated, again, and we focus on discussing free speech versus managed speech or whatever we're doing. there are a lot of other questions, you know, do we manage speech? if so, how? can students learn to discuss and argue if they're being educated in an echo chamber where everybody's politics are the same. is it biased because professors

skew politically liberal? these questions get conflated into ones that swirl around free speech. i think we would benefit public debate if we separate them out. i don't know what the right way to phrase the questions is, but they're not one thing. and, you know, you also -- the question also revolved around how do we teach kids to argue or discuss or be comfortable with ideas than the ones they themselves hold? that's a very different question than the regulation of speech. >> i think, carol, if i may, 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. 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 question perhaps and then asking each of the panelists to leave us with their last thoughts. >> i'll be very, very brief. >> and you are? >> david walsh, i'm a grad student at princeton. just building on the smaocial media point, it strikes me that all social media outrage isn't created equal and there is lefty social media outrage that doesn't necessarily translate to the kinds of 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 -- i'm thinking in general the presence and amplifying power of right-wing media when it comes to these campaigns. it's just something that hasn't been part of the conversation that much, but i think it's an important part because social media, i mean, i could post something on twitter today and most people would ignore it, but

if somebody from breitbart picked it up, it might go very differently for me. >> yes. >> some last thoughts before we meet our deadline to finish? michael? >> well, i -- as carol said, there are lots of questions that get conflated around the issue of free speech, and i think part of the reason they get conflated around free speech on campuss is we expect our campuses to be places of experimentation and inquiry, especially when people who are well beyond their college years and haven't been on college campuses a long time look at college campuses today, they don't see the kind of experimentation and inquiry that they remember being part of themselves. and i think a lot of the criticism of the culture of uniformity on college campuses comes from a stranges in ta inn.

the expectation is that our college campuses should be places of inquiry, experimentation and discovery. and that's so much better than the expectation, which is also quite strong in this country, that they be places where you train folks to be part of the current industrial scheme. so the good -- the silver lining for me about all of these debates, there are a lot of people in this country who are skeptical about college. they're skeptical because they have high expectations that our campuses should be places of 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 i just want to echo a comment that you were -- made just a moment ago, that creating -- we're going to have to do a lot more active work to 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 the last 18 to 24 months is they don't. and that's felt quite broadly across an entire -- the entire political spectrum. and so that's going to take a lot of work. i think that we should lean into it and do it because it is absolutely core to the enterprise that i think michael just expressed people expect of us, and i think it's the right expectation of us, so how we do that, i welcome continuing conversation and sharing ideas about how to make that happen, but i know what it means for us is not to dismiss it but to really meet these students and engage them. >> i would just agree with what karla said. i do think it's important for us

to model aggressive and vigorous discussion for our students and show that a person survives it. at the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are real reasons in the world why some groups of our students feel their lives are in a precarious situation. 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 which we live is not there. so finding ways to help them manage their own feelings of vulnerability by sharing our feelings of vulnerability is important and 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 on this campus do you want to live in? and generally speaking, our students want to live in a culture where they can have respectful discussion around

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

question that i think we all need to ask ourselves when it comes to conversations about free speech. when we look at our campuses, who gets to speak? and i think if we start to answer that question, we'll start to learn more about who really -- what's really going on on our campus, and that means challenging people who claim that they're not having the opportunity. they probably are in many cases. and also exactly to your point, that they're walking around our campuses in in ways that others simply can't understand. and they -- and therefore it makes it much more difficult for them to actually speak, for reasons that are about food, clothing and shelter, for example. >> daca. >> yeah. so who gets to speak is i think for me the closing question that we should all be asking. >> thank you all. thank you all for coming. >> thank yo

c-span's "washington journal" live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up wednesday morning, the trump organization's business conflicts of interest. we'll talk about it with public citizen president robert weisman. and then we're live from the d.c. convention center for the 2018 washington auto show. we'll discuss the future of automotive technology and raid share services in washington with robert grant of lyft. and senator john thune, the chair of the customers, science and transportation committee, will discuss today's field hearing on automotive technology and the issues facing lawmakers and auto industry regulators.

curt meyers shares his view on the state's approach to driverless vehicles and federal policy. be sure to watch c-span's "washington journal" live at 7:00 eastern wednesday morning. join the discussion. coming up here on c-span 3's "american history tv." a look at how slavery is interpreted and talked about to visitors at historic presidential plantation. then in an hour and a half, a discussion of free speech and academic freedom on college campuses, both events from the american historical association's annual meeting. the house and senate reached an agreement monday to fund the federal government through february 8th. the head of the nonpartisan congressional budget office, keith hall, will testify at an oversight hearing about the federal budget and the affect the recent tax cut bill could have on the federal debt. live coverage from the senate budget committee starts at 10:30

a.m. eastern on c-span. a senate panel looks at innovation in the auto industry, including self-driving cars. that's live from the senate customers, science and transportation committee at 10:00 a.m. eastern here on c-span 3. the u.s. conference of mayors holds a news conference that kicks off their annual winter meeting. we'll hear from new orleans mayor mitch landrieu, who is the current president of the bipartisan group. live coverage beginning at 12:20 p.m. eastern. follow all of these events online at c-span.org or with the free c-span radio app. next on "american history tv," representatives from thomas jefferson's monticello, james monroe's my high-lands and james madison's mont pier kerpelier, talk about slavery and the challenging questions they get from the public. this was -- it's about 90