eastern. kellyanne conway is on c-span2. moving over here to c-span starting at 12:50 eastern, speeches by betsy devos, white house chief of staff reince priebus, and senior advisor steve bannon. more on friday morning as president trump will speak to the gathering live on c-span as well come expected to start at about 10:10 eastern. watch c-span as president donald trump delivers his first address to a joint session of congress. >> this congress is going to be the busiest congress we have had in decades. announcer: live tuesday at 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span and www.c-span.org and listen live on the free c-span radio app. announcer: a look now at academic freedom and diversity on college campuses. featuring a documentary filmmaker, plus authors and professors from yale university

and the universities of michigan and chicago. this is 90 minutes. dean guterman: ok, good evening everyone. i guess it is evening time now. the sun is setting so early. for those who don't know me, i'm neil guterman, dean here at the university of chicago. i want to thank you for joining us for this evening's events. american universities have long been unique institutions that generate novel, sometimes controversial and even iconoclastic ideas that challenge or sometimes press popular wisdom bring to bear more rigorous evidence. such ideas can at times fuel advances or even breakthroughs on most vexing questions and problems of our day.

one of the most indispensable pillars in higher education is the cardinal principal and practice of academic freedom, the protection of and unfettered pursuit of ideas, concepts, evidence and knowledge, and the passing on of such in our education of students. while the principal of academic freedom is an essential feature of american higher education, the university of chicago has deeplyr distinctive and held approach to academic freedom which i'm sure you will be hearing more about this evening from some of our panelists. the school of social service administration as professional school of social work benefits from and contribute to academic freedom in the unfettered pursuit of ideas, that address the concerns of those vulnerable and marginalized.

into ssa address and dive contentiouse most social problems like poverty and violence and we do so in search for real solution and so educate -- to rigorously educate social equity and justice. the ideas we discuss don't just stay among the scholars but they are developed and delivered to have real tangible benefit to people and their lives. this scholarship and education are connected to real-world people and problem solving. ssa is oftentimes a crucible of ideas and implications in the best sense of the word who are constantly searching to forge greater insight and light and enduring solutions out of what is oftentimes the heat of

oversimplified, or not well tested ideas or strategies. a second pillar found broadly in is diversity,tion value on bringing to the university community individuals from different backgrounds, life experiences and statuses, especially those from underrepresented or marginalized that grounds. of course, part of the importance of diversity stems from a value on social equity and societal inclusion, as universities are arguably the most institutions in our society which fosters entering into sben -- into the mainstream. and indispensable component of diversity is in bringing together diverse members to the university community, all its members are enriched by the

toal -- mutual exposure divergent experience, backgrounds and view points. our cardinal value on diversity is closely intertwined in a complement three branch from the same tree as academic freedom. o universities t the experience and viewpoints brings with it the assumption of the points and challenge of prevailing ideas. at the university of chicago, particularly at ssa, the value is distinctive because we are at our core concerned with questions of inclusion, access, and reaching grounded understanding of and in service to those who are most marginalized. ofause of our core values the ideas served complementary

values of academic freedom and diversity, and is for the very reasons i'm delighted that ssa hosting this evening's on this topic. for this, i especially want to thank ssa professors for their vision and initiative in working with my office to putting together this evening's panel. as well as to thank the ssa committee for sponsoring this evening's event. professor samuels we joining us up here in a few moments to into drew's deep analysts to you this evening and will moderate the event. but before she does that i also want to take this opportunity to thank university of chicago president bob zimmer who has provided his sage vision and leadership on this issue here at the university of chicago and nationally. and for that i would like to offer him up here right now for some comments. bob?

[applause] president zimmer: thank you very much. let me say how much i appreciate ssa is hosting this panel and hosting this discussion on this topic. the joint topics, i should say, academic freedom and its companion, free expression and diversity, which i like thinking about a bit more broadly and areversity and inclusion, two core issues for any university, particularly so for the university of chicago. neil described very beautifully why these are so important. i might just offer my own take

on this, which is, to start, universities are not just a random collection of people who are here doing what they feel like doing. universities are institutions with very clear vision. that mission is a mission of education. it is a mission of research and it is a mission of finding vehicles for the impact of that education and research. if we are going to do our students justice, do them well by the education that we provide them, if we are going to have an environment in which our faculty can, in fact, explore their ideas the fullest -- to the fullest and prepare themselves to have the greatest impact in of freedom and free expression is critical. it is core to the functioning of the university in for filling its core missions. ofa similar way, the issue

diversity inclusion becomes central for two reasons neil alluded to. first, if one is going to be engaged, having a bunch of people all from the same background and similar perspectives sitting around fundamentally agreeing with each other arguing only at the margins is not the way to advance,make serious and it is not the way to create an environment of intellectual challenge for our students and to fulfill their education. a diversity of perspectives, backgrounds, the lease so wants becomes crucial for creating the kind of environment for the kind of rigorous analysis that underlies the success of the university. there is another reason diversity inclusion is so important. that goes beyond the university that university does not exist in isolation. it exits in a societal context

and it exists in history. it's no surprise to anyone that the history of really all countries, but the very particularly this country, has an enormous amount of exclusionary behavior built into its history. we have therefore a dual obligation, an obligation as fulfilling our own mission and bringing those diverse perspectives to bear in a non-exclusionary way, but we also have an obligation as an important member of society to deal with the particular history of this country and the exclusionary aspects that have been involved in it. i think neil articulated the meaning of ssa very nicely in

terms of doing that from the point of view of ssa's concrete mission, but the university as a whole itself has an obligation in that direction. now, some people have argued that these two issues are in conflict to some extent, that academic freedom and free expression on one hand and diversity and inclusion on the other hand are in conflict. saying that there's no tension between them would be disingenuous. saying that there is a fundamental underlying conflict between them is something i actually do not believe. i believe they are mutually reinforcing but that one needs to recognize that there are in fact tensions, and they are tensions that need to be worked out. but anything less than an aspiration to fully embrace both of these values is failing ourselves as an institution.

the discussion tonight i am sure we will look at these issues and consider -- in considerably more detail. reason that we are able to have such a discussion goes back to exactly what neil was saying, it is an example of open discourse and rigorous analysis and free expression. so i just want to again thank neil, think the faculty here at ssa for organizing this and i'm sure you are going to have a fascinating evening. thank you very much. [applause] prof. samuels: thank you,

president zimmer. my name is gina samuels. i will be the moderator this evening. i will take several roles that i will explain in a moment. i would like to welcome all of you here this evening and i would like to extend a special thanks to my faculty and staff. i have to say i'm quite humbled to see we are at stranding room only. thank you for coming. special thanks for dean guterman for being so supportive. for their cosponsors it, and particularly to my colleague darcy. finally, i extend a special community and ssa others of you in attendance tonight. the success in this dialogue and our exemplary practice of free expressions might deeply rests with each of you, and i will explain that more in a moment. we will proceed by my giving a brief introduction to this panel. then i will introduce each of

the panelists. they will each talk for about ten minutes. i will then pose a question to them. we probably won't -- i have given them four questions. i think that is a bit ambitious, we will probably get through one or two. then i will us to this evening's informal event which will involve an informal dialogue amongst all of us. so, a bit of a social experiment is to come. so in 1915, the american association of university of professors advanced a declaration of principles that laid the foundation for much of today's legal and tacit understanding of academic freedom and tenure within institutions of higher education. however, the university of chicago, as president zimmer and dean guterman both mentioned, represented a unique brand of academic freedom, and we were deeply and publically shaping and advancing these ideas long before the 1915 statement. most recently in 2014, president zimmer and then-provost isaacs

formed a special committee on freedom of expression chaired by one of our panelists, professor jeff stone, that restates the university's enduring commitment and a resolute core principal and value here at this institution. president zimmer has already referenced this history in his opening remarks and i'm sure the professors will likely discuss this and their leadership in our university's contemporary practice of this value in their individual remarks. for the contemporary university, however, debates do persist around the very meaning and limits of academic freedom in the context of growing diversity on campus and attunement to a campus climate that is not only inclusive of a diverse set of ideas, but also of a demographically diverse student, staff and faculty body. this year, the university of

chicago's dean of students issued a welcome statement to first year students reaffirming our university's longstanding institutional commitment to academic freedom and as such, our constitutional rejection of silencing or avoiding uncomfortable or disagreeable ideas and perspectives. this was paired with the idea that faculty are not required to create safe spaces nor issue trigger warnings. this statement was met with vigorous national and local response, both affirming and attesting these views, and more deeply positioning university of chicago itself as an iconic symbol of a defender of academic freedom. this afternoon is a time for us as a university community to engage with each other and fully practice this freedom. it is my hope that we all deepen our understanding of and ability to critically consider the diversity of ways with which this value is interpreted and practiced. now i would like to briefly

introduce our expert panel. we are deeply honored and excited to have each one of you here. each of our panelists is a distinguished scholar in their own right. time does not permit me to go over all their accomplishments, so i apologize in advance. we'll stick to names and

ms. samuels: with, i would love for us to begin. thank you very much. i became interested in the from an academic and administrative perspective at the same time. , i publisheds ago a small idea of the freedom of economic interactions. i wrote that book because there were a number of currents of the backlash or reaction to some significant changes within our core curriculum design.

there were some lobbying groups, petitions being formed, coming from different ideological directions of attempting to influence and pressure the faculty to modify the changes and modify the content. i became concerned about this as an episode, and the long history of economic freedom. book, which is now available online. there were other episodes of faculty and students being criticize come so this is a live issue. i want to say to bring things about it.

from the point of view of the istory of the university, published a family history of the university of chicago. it is available in the bookstore. that is a plug, by the way. relativelyhat is unique about chicago, and that is the european context, the ambient context of european education and to some extent the university of chicago. freedom is academic represented by a bundle of concepts practiced, vigorously andht over and defended criticized within the larger context of the larger german universities. faculty at founding

this university were trained or studied at these universities, at least for a short time, enough to draw inspiration, values, and ideals on economic freedom. ideas that were strange for americans to comprehend because these were state universities. civil servants, paid in some way to do the states bidding. they decided it had to do at the advancement of knowledge and the creation of original research as a national cultural project. initially there was a 10 to see to create a homogeneous culture because this was

good for the state. one had to allow and permit the faculty the freedom to do it, so there was built in to whole assumption of economic freedom a paradox, in order to be perfectly conformist and supporting the states project of cultural renewal, one had to be free, so this tension was embedded from the very beginning. these young americans observed and wanted to copy and bring over to the united states. they did this in a very powerful way. many of our distinguished staff were trained in germany and sought consciously to model themselves not only in the pursuit of knowledge and research, but also in the way they understood their rights, responsibilities, the esteem,

the pride that their work would carry with it and the central concept of this professional pride was the idea of being free , not only free within the classroom, but the broader civic realm. one was not just a private citizen can find it to being class, but a citizen who could speak one's opinion broadly within the broader civic universe. history, theo's idea of academic freedom became part of a bundle of concepts .hat the founding faculty use it ceased to be a preparatory school. a site for theh academic advancement of scholarship. they also understood their mission as teachers using the same concept.

theiry were scholars, primary job, with all due respect for the undergraduate was to train future scholars, so they became proto-scholars involved in the same universe of economic freedom. they did not emerge contested. and there were cases, like the case out of stanford, wisconsin, in which faculty by their actions within the university or the broader civic realm tested the willingness of the universities themselves, patrons, philanthropists, university government, to tolerate the claims to economic freedom the faculty word taking upon themselves. one find a similar controversies in germany. i've written about the most famous controversy in the end, a vienna, ase -- in

classic case of everyone agreeing about where the limits were and how much political capital the political parties, the state, and the churches were willing to put into play to defend that freedom. mention thato within the history of higher education in europe, 1890-19 14, 1 finds powerful voices emerging , articulating what this meant, what these ideas meant, not only for individual faculties or , inersities or corporations a. in which the universities are struggling with the well, cultural power, and mission they have assembled and given to them

by the state, but the desire of faculty to step back and say we are not the states agents. we are not the churches agents. we are not agents of political parties. we are our own persons, and yet we are being paid for by the state, and how does one assess those boundaries. part, the argument i want to make, more than any of the other great american universities, certainly the other new universities, chicago was very much, the faculty culture was a culture that emerged in became mature and , feeling itself as a bearer of these great european german ideas, and the absence of a kind of philanthropy. , it was easy for

the faculty to feel themselves not only theoretically free, but practically free, and the practice of these families and identities over time within 20-30 years had set and gerald, and it is this culture that was able to do what he did, to defend the values of economic freedom because he had a faculty culture to back him up and sustain it. it was a faculty culture already shaped and fully dedicated and had assimilated these ideas and internalize them for their own purposes. i want to make a second set of comments, and that is the impact on the community.

i have argued that the practice of economic freedom has become a signpost, or you find signs of that, throughout the history of the university, but it becomes the ticket he intends between 1920. this has a profound effect on the student culture we come to have as well. that is to say if one students as proto-scholars, as people who are joining a dialogue, and not only joining a dialogue, but joining a process by which they are expected to acquire the skills of the scholar just as the faculty will practice the skills of the scholar, then over time one begins to nurture a certain kind of student culture, not only a way and which faculty relate to students and students relate to faculty, but the way students relate to each other.

leaving aside the issue a formal legal rights or rules, one finds a culture merging of an interactive pedagogy dominated in the classrooms and elsewhere in the graduate and professional school as well, and this is not something to be taken for granted. this was not typical, because our student culture was not typical. further, it is important to remember this culture was not in a sense in fused by these ideals, but also infused by parallel ideas of merit and a lack of privilege or inherited wealth. student body of chicago is different from many of the eastern universities. first of all, it was male and female, both genders were represented, but also there was

a broad social-economic spectrum of students from all walks of this and then merger of ,igh pluralistic student body including a large component of jewish students from chicago and the east, gave the faculty and even greater reason and better opportunity to practice this kind of diversity of opinion and ideals of economic freedom. the faculty created an extraordinary learning community stressing the power of the liberal arts, but also the need swath ofa broad students from all walks of life. theseold the teaching of students as integral to the mission of the university. it is important to remember that undergraduate education, which is the hardest test of one's values about the importance of

, teaching undergraduate seenicago has always been as not a trivial service, but one that goes to the heart of idea of scholarlyo practice, so one has a faculty culture that is very early set and gels around these ideas of economic freedom and brings the student culture into the culture of economic freedom, and the student culture is itself diverse in terms of socioeconomic and gender perspectives, and the result is identity ofbroader chicago owing to our practices of economic freedom, and creating a resilient intellectual culture, and a culture of resilience among

faculty and students that is there already by 1920 and 1930, and it is remarkable how it has been able to sustain itself down to the present day. thank you. [applause] aboutone: i want to talk the free expression part of academic freedom. they are aspects of academic freedom that are different from the concept of free expression. i want to start by emphasizing the assurance of free expression in university communities is not something to be taken for granted. it is in fact vulnerable, tenuous, and has always been so. any threat to the commitment of free expression poses a serious

risk to the core functioning of universities as we have now come to understand them. to appreciate that, it is important to go back in time of bid and understand how colleges and universities over time have default, safe you go back to the early years of the 19th century, there was no such thing as the assumption of freedom of expression in colleges in the united states. the basic assumption of how those institutions operated meant that ideas could the put forth by faculty or by students only in so far as they were consistent with the judgments of the leaders of the institution about what ideas were moral and appropriate, and anyone who departed from those clear assumptions could be suspended, expelled, fired, whatever,

without anybody looking twice, and so would did that mean? it meant many colleges of the united states could not challenge the proposition that africans were inherently inferior, that the women's place was in the home and their function was simply to reproduce children, that homosexuality was a host and sinful, and of other values and judgments that were taken largely for granted as a given, and it is true. anybody who challenges those ideas would not just be argued you, but thrown out, and if move into the 1830's and 1840's, one of the most contentious issues in the nation of course was slavery. ates were drawn very clearly universities and colleges in the north, anyone who defended slavery could find themselves thrown out of the institution,

and in the south and major colleges, anyone who challenged the moral legitimacy of slavery would find themselves on their year and out of the institutions, and nobody questioned it. this is the authority of the college to make judgments about what is right and what is wrong, and if you did not speak in accord with those judgments, you were out here at think about general motors. general motors can decide among its employees what views they express, and if somebody says some things that they don't want to hear, they would just be fired. that is the way colleges and universities operated. this came to a head after the civil war when the mainstream views at universities were committed to creationism, and the idea of evolution was not only seen as sacrilegious but , but flawed and

inappropriate, and there were institutions that expelled the students who advocated this revolutionary, radical, and ridiculous idea of evolution. it was a battle that for the first time the idea of free expression as a value of universities and the idea of academic freedom of universities began to crystallize. there had to be places where people could challenge the accepted wisdom. where the accepted wisdom may not be right, it may not be true that africans are inherently inferior and the woman's place is in the home, and that homosexuality is inherently moral and creationism is true. the idea that universities existed for the purpose of allowing intellectual inquiry and challenge came over those years to the much more accepted.

by 1892 when the university of chicago was created, the first president of the university could proclaim that for a university to be a university, it had to be committed to the idea of free expression. that was the idea of the notion that free expression was central , but the reality is it has been contested and contingent ever since, so even at the time he was saying this, universities began to be supported by a generous philanthropists, and of yourically said any faculties or students who criticize the way we make our money or conduct our business is unacceptable. if you want our money, shut them up. things.'t say those and the universities found themselves in this dilemma where they wanted the philanthropy but the condition of the phone amp philanthropy was to get

rid of the freedom of expression. positionrsity took the that no one can question the legality, morality, and wisdom of the united states entering the war, because that would undermine patriotism, make it difficult to fight the war successfully, any of that had to be silenced and universities found themselves collapsing in the face of the social and legal demands. in theduring mccarthyism 1940's and 1950's, universities found themselves faced with in norm is pressure to silence, expelled, and fire anybody who had taken positions that was sympathetic to communism, and the pushback was about academic freedom and the freedom of expression, and the university of chicago stallone in standing up against that.

at one point, the students of of chicagoity invited william foster to speak on the campus, and this produced -- across the nation, and legislators demand it this be saidled, and john hutchins up and said no. at this university our students are allowed to hear what ever ideas they want to hear, and we censor that, and we were not silence it. it epitomized the notion of the freedom of expression in the community, and this has continued to be under a salt because there were always be people who say, i don't like those ideas, they are wrong, immoral, it offensive, and they may be right. sometimes they are right, and sometimes they are wrong. aat makes a university

university is it does not a seed to those demands. aboutks about it, learns it, thinks about it, and by doing so it creates students and citizens who are capable of having those fights in the future, capable of dealing with ideas they find offensive, problematic, and to fight it out and when those battles, and that is the core what of this institution is about, what academic freedom is about, what academic expression of the university is about, and it is imperative that we resist the 10 tatian to do what our forebears did and silence everyone who thinks differently than we do. that is not the way to achieve knowledge. it is not the way to achieve democracy and it is not the way to have intellectual or academic institutions. thank you.

[applause] can you hear me? ok. i like a podium. sorry i have developed a habit i guess. i have some slides, and i did not work to get them up for you, but i will read them off. that is why i need some space. one of them was a picture of the letter that when out to the incoming students from the dean .hat have this sentence our commitment to academic freedom at the university of chicago means we do not support trigger warnings. we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas or perspectives at

odds with their own. what i am about to say is not a trigger warning. a spoiler alert, ok? and we will talk about the difference between spoiler alert, trigger warning, and content notes. so the title of my remarks today whose free speech, the manufactured crisis over trigger warnings and safe spaces. that is the spoiler alert. a manufactured crisis. it is not simply my opinion that much of the anxiety about campus cultures and free speech on campuses is in fact a manufactured crisis. it is important to think about it, and i'm happy we are doing that today because i think it in fact alerts us to a number of things happening in our political culture. like my esteemed colleagues, i will put that into context,

although i want go very far back. i would just go to the 1990's, when there was a lot of media hysteria about campuses and multiculturalism's evil twin, political correctness, and diversity, and what that was doing to the intellectual culture of campuses must so we will talk about all those things. so i want to read first from the report that came out from penn, which is of course an organization devoted to free speech. called and campus for all, diversity, inclusion, and free speech at universities. it goes into a couple of cases of campus controversies, yale university being one of them. read some of the summary statements. ok. it says, "while free speech is alive and well campus, it is not free from threat.

it must be vigilantly guarded? second point, "while current campus controversies merit attention these do not represent for freeve crisis speech on campus." the next point, "the dialogues, debates taking place on many campuses have the potential to root out biases that impeded participation of marginalized groups. code " these controversies have the potential to unleash new and important voices there by expanding for everybody's benefits. next point, at times they are treated as if they are on free speech, when in fact they are manifestations of free speech. free expression should be

recognized as a principal that will not exclude minority voices but rather to amplify them. ok, so that is the report, and i will talk about that in a bit, but i must say it like my colleagues, the edge of learning should be an uncomfortable place. i have never put a trigger warning on any of my syllabi because frankly this syllabus is the trigger warning, actually, it is not. we have a real misconception about what a trigger warning is. the idea is that a trigger warning is going to tell you if you will be triggered, if you will be traumatized by the content, so the presumption is that whoever is reading it suffers from ptsd. i do not assume that all of my students suffer from ptsd. that's different from a content warning. content warning is letting someone know this content, you might not realize it but it might trouble you in ways -- like a book on lynching, you know it will be a book on

lynching, but if you look at myself as, you can figure out what my class will be about. let me give you an example for our semester. campus, suicide on our one of the track athletes killed himself. that day i was going to show a film called hell house. evangelical about christians who put on these morality plays where they do a number of things, make a number of controversial statements, things i thought might upset my students, including an act of suicide, where the person who commitments suicide goes to hell and is sort of taunted by the devil. so i sent an email to my students saying, just you know, we are going to watch the film this afternoon, because two of the people were on the same track team as the person who just commitmented suicide. i also said i understand if you don't want to watch this today , but i hope that our seminar is a place were we can talk about

misconceptions of suicide, mental health, and actually they all came. is that a trigger warning? i guess that's the closest thing i have ever done to a trigger warning. the question of trigger warnings has this like pervasive exercise that professors are engaging in is actually an empirical question. because of hysteria, i actually went through and looked for any syllabi at yale that have a trigger warning on them. i couldn't find one. so my question when i read about the statement, the letter that went out to students, is i wonder how many syllabi at the university of chicago have a trigger warning on them that elicited this letter. is this in fact a problem that so many syllabi have these warnings for these students? so who is this sort of imagined student body that's being warned? so i guess i think that, you

know -- what i want us to think about, i guess, is what's really going on here. who are these students? ann of course i thought of toay, where it cautions us students who seem oversensitive. i wholeheartedly agree with the way she translates that. the students, and usually students of color, are being demonized and building on generations of student activism traction change our universities to become more inclusive. too sensitiveare relates to a wider public discourse that describes a form of moral weakness much .

much contemporary racism works by positioning the others as being a fender bull. and of course, when we think about the right to offend crowd, who are those guys? they are usually guys. who are those people? right? you know, i don't know how many of you caught this in the news , but there is a poster boy for that movement right now. it's milo. he got a $250,000 book deal. i think he is going to get a chance to get his say. you know, it's pretty hard to get banned from twitter. it if that doesn't explain it, i don't know what does. the point being this popular students of color in particular, that they are super fragile, oversensitive, can't handle exchange of ideas. that everything is a personal slight -- i'm running out of time.

politically correct, powder millennials that just need to grow up. i will say that much of what happened to yield, luckily we'll have a chance to expand into other things as we go into the other questions. i would just say this, i think part of what happened with the controversy at yale is people saw that tiny viral version of this debate that happened on my campus is that there's two sides. right? there is the good intellectual side that believes in free speech and nurtures resilience, and then there is the bad identity politics side of quasi-intellectuals who want .heir hurt feelings indulged and i think that image of a young black woman, you know, which is a tiny slice of -- you know, it's not representative of the much more complex series of events and debates that

happened on our campus, but that tiny viral image of a couple of seconds of young girl, the reason it caught fire and caught the imagination of the american public is because it fuses to two pre-existing stereotypes together, the coddled millennial and the angry black woman. that is why everyone thinks they are already know what's happening in all of our classrooms, they already know what is happening in our classrooms, what is on our syllabi without having to look. i think what we needed to think about are the instructor bull and predictable patterns. there are patterns in the types of folks that hold systems accountable to respectful practices. we have to make time to and we have to think about the right to offend, and who those people are. there are also other questions we might ask.

to say diversity is not in an conflict with academic freedom, might be in jin u.s.. doesn't that compromise academic freedom when professors feel like their jobs are in jeopardy? ways of framing academic freedom on campuses other than we have students of color now, what do we do? so that's really what i want us to think about, how are we this whole debate about free speech? is this even about free speech? or is this a diversion? and so, i fully commitmentedted am to making campuses more diverse. tom also fully committed academic freedom, and i want us to try to move the conversation in a direction where we can make about thesethink things together, but also think about why are we talking about certain things together, but not other things together.

[applause] thank you. is this song? what am i supposed to do? ? what am i supposed to do here? is this on? i want to thank this figures who preceded me. i think in all of the presentations, they were able to lay out a lot of the issues that we are here to discuss, and i want to set up by saying about my standpoint, who i am, than talk about the focus of my are around the role of professional education and professional schools in the academy and how that complicates our discussion of diversity and academic freedom. so as is the case with our other

speakers on this panel, my perspective is unique. it reflects who i am. my standpoint is that of a woman babylor, a latina, a boomer, somebody who has attended and worked as highly selective universities. i am a direct beneficiary of the inirmative action program all three institutions that i was fortunate to attend, stanford university, university of chicago, school of social services, and the university of michigan. in addition to those taught ins, i graduate social work programs in addition to the teaching i do in the liberal arts, and in that case, i teach in the department of psychology and the latino study program at the university of michigan. so i had the expense of teaching both liberal arts as well as professional school. to leave my full-time career as a social worker to return to school and

get a phd because the cap i saw at that time regarding our need to prepare professionals to work more effectively with women in communities of color. , i can sayte of ssa there was very little attention to that in 1976-1970 eight when i sat in the lobby and drank my call the during the break -- my coffee during the break and attended seminars here. i know things have changed i . i know things have changed in education in general, but we could all be doing a lot more in terms of agenda and that's the agenda that motivated me to go phd to school and get u a and enter social work education as a career and motivated much of my scholarship at yale. i wanted to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem in our field and in our society. i think our previous panelists have done an excellent job

describing the meanings of academic freedom and it significance in higher education scholarship. we all and academia need the right to choose the questions in the way we are going to explore them without the heavy hand of our institutions dictating that. when i was at earlier in my career at the university of michigan, i had the privilege to work with a psychologist who is currently the chancellor of rutgers newark campus. at that time, she was the provost of the university of michigan. in her inaugural address she describes contemporary universities as analogous to cities, which have an array of neighborhoods within them. she could see how students can see this "environment as exciting, confusing, challenging, sometimes frustrating, and often complex." and that these communities can

be experienced as a place where challenges, rules and obligations and policies and procedures they may not fully understand or fully recognize in their experience. and as an educator and scholar, i find this to be a useful framework, to really try to think about how it is that students experience the university environment. this description of the university as the city relates both to their experiences within courses that we teach and their tutorials, but it is also relevant to their experiences outside courses surrounding their time as students at universities. one could argue that academic freedom is most relevant to that aspect of the university of students experience in their formal education, in their courses, tutorials, and projects

they do for credit, and may be seen less significant when we think about the co-curricular, when we think about the activities that occur outside of a significantre part of what educational scholars referred to as the university experience, or the hidden or explicit curriculum, those things we learned in institutions of higher education that are not part of the formal curriculum, that are not in our course outlines, are part of the lived experiences about how students experience their time in the university. so why should we care about diversity? diversity in our society, and our world, plays a huge role in what's going on currently. diversity is a huge part of both the hidden and the formula curricula that students experience. when i look back at my years at stanford

university during the 1970's, the majority of the faculty and students i interacted with were white, were upper-middle-class to upper class. any were very comfortable in environment which invited upper-middle-class norms and expectations and a european-american type of culture. the expectation at that time was that i, as a lower middle class, third-generation, mexican-american student there on affirmative action scholarship would learn to conform, and if i did not conform, i would struggle and it was no one's responsibility but my own to figure out how to deal with that struggle. it was not and is still not easy to be a woman of color in a highly selective university, whether it is students, staff, member of faculty, or named professor, as i am at the university of michigan.

because most university faculty and staff still expect conformity from our students. this is part of the hidden curriculum. our institutions and society around them are growing in many different types of diversity, in terms of who is working in the universities and who is creating the knowledge that we are developing in the universities. and so this diversity will continue to grow in our society and our world, and our universities will also grow and change as well as our students live in and will continue to live in a very different reality from the one that i grew up in, the one that my children, who are now adults, grew up in, and the one in which we are living currently. so we need our curricula, we need to be attentive to how our curricula and how they support or stifle the voices within them, including the voices of those who have traditional been

outsiders to the academy. as somebody who teaches both in the liberal arts and a professional school, i can say that the tensions and dynamics that exist between academic freedom and diversity take a different form when working in teaching and a professional school. professional schools are interdisciplinary spaces within colleges and universities where faculty and students come together bound by a mission to prepare students to learn to practice particular fields that will benefit our society. in professional schools, we do build upon a liberal arts base, but we also have a role to prepare students to work towards a particular professional mission. it is the case -- this is the case in all professional , schools, whether were talking medical, or

other work. and therefore faculties must focus on how well they are being prepared to work on an in increasingly diverse world. so i am now going to give the example of social work as a professional school because that is obviously the one with which i am more familiar, but i think we can think of parallels with other professionals as well. in respect to diversity, the mission of social work and the mission of social work education, must be woven into our formal and informal curricula. both the implicit and explicit curricula. the national association of social workers, which is the organization for the united states, describes social workers work in the following ways as promoting social justice and social change with and on behalf of clients. and when they speak of clients, they are inclusive of of officials, families, groups, organizations and communities. in order to do this work, it

describes that social workers must be sensitive to cultural and ethical diversity and strive to end other forms of social injustice. this mission is woven into our code of ethics, which includes a principle that states that social workers should challenge in justice, and that social workers should act and prevent elimination of domination, exploitation of and discrimination against any person, group, or class on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity of age, marital status, religion, immigration status or mental or physical disability. so when those of us who are engaged in this profession who have chosen to become a social worker or chosen to teach social work education or to work as a faculty member in a social work

, need to have awareness of the mission of the profession and the profession we are preparing students to engage in. in the nine states, the council on social work education accredit schools and confers degrees -- oops. i killed my mic. where do these ethics and accreditation standards come from? they come from the members. i have the provision of being on in committee with jean marsh creating the educational policy in the early 2000s. so our standards for accreditation also reflect our social work values and ethics.

our accreditation policy in the united states parallels are similar to the other policies that exist in social work around the globe. in fact, other schools and other countries are more explicit about our mission. i will say a little bit about some backlash this has received. it has not been without controversy, although the work done, including the work i have done, have found that we for the most part approved of this mission and endorse this focus of our educational programs. but we have received and have been the target of those attacks from outside our profession, particular the national association of scholars, which describes it self as a network of scholars and citizens united for academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and

excellence in higher education. they engaged on a report called of social work education which accuse social work education of brainwashing students, who did not share the belief of the social work field and to in fact in many ways torment and marginalize people who were not working for social justice as defined in a particular way. they also at that time, this is almost ten years ago, filed a complaint with the secretary of the department of health and human services asking the schools of social work no longer be required to be accredited by the council on social work education because of their objection to our accreditation standards. the n.a.s. was not successful in bring down social education. hhs found no basis for their complaint, which stated that we were violating students' first amendment rights. and as expected of course our national organizations responded

by providing a context for our ethical and educational standards, and framed our use of the concept of social justice. for example, some rather conservative institutions of higher learning such as baylor and brigham young have accredited social work programs. so clearly there's a range in which schools of social work are interpreting and offering courses that meet the accreditation standards. i only suspect that these kinds of attacks and critiques directed towards universities and social work programs and perhaps other professional programs which have similar kinds of values will only become more common in the near and perhaps distant future. i just want to say one more thing regarding the need -- what social work schools and social work programs can offer higher education in terms of teaching this kind of content and addressing what may be seen as a conflict the between diversity

and academic freedom. we've been doing this kind of work for decades, for quite a long time. we struggle with it. we haven't arrived. we may never arrive. this is an ongoing lifelong activity. but we do have skills. we have programs. we have evidence-based educational practices, and we have a lot of experience of -- for thinking of ways to create what we call brave spaces and contrast with safe spaces in our classrooms to develop ways to call people in who may be expressing different views rather than calling them out and shaming them in the classroom. to recognize what larry schulman refers to as the hidden group in the classroom and the group dynamics that can create very difficult and challenging discussions. and also the differing needs for faculty support and training that can exist within a faculty so that all of us can be helpful in terms of meeting both the

goals of diversity and academic freedom. thank you. [applause] >> so now in the interest of time i'm going to transition right into our questions. and i think we have -- ok. so this is an abbreviated version of what i'm going to read to all of you as the first question. so academic freedom extends to students, as many articulated in their comments, and to its practice in the classroom. last summer following a student-led petition the task force for radical transformation , a staff, student, and faculty-led committee specifically called for instructors to enhance their abilities to facilitate robust and critical discussion of topics such as social justice, oppression, disenfranchisement, white privilege and a host of other concepts and ideas that

bring emotionally charged conversations into the classroom. reflective of the very hallmark of the university of chicago's brand of free exchange and ideas, students are calling not but deepe exchange, dives into open and authentic dialogue that help to foster their own abilities to engage out in the world as effective social workers and agents of change. they are often looking to their professors to model this critical engagement. students across the united states have also called for similar improvements in their educational training and classroom experience. how should universities balance a student's desire and in the case of ssa and elsewhere their demand for this educational experience against the right of a faculty to teach to their own expertise? and then of course i have to have subquestions. [laughter] >> also, which is why it's here and in your seats. what actions can or should institutions take if any to ensure members of the community have the capacity to facilitate

and meaningfully engage in sometimes highly contentious and deeply personal dialogue on issues that are tied to diversity, equality and privilege, subject matters that are typically not the substantive or theoretical areas of expertise for most faculty, and any of the four of you can have at it. [laughter] >> this was not on our sheet, by the way. [laughter] one.'s the first >> oh, not the whole thing. ok. just the last part of the question. you know, i guess i've heard versions of this question posed. i find it puzzling to think that there are faculty in schools of social work who have not thought about these things. some people may have thought about them, they aren't quite sure how to articulate them.

some people have thought about them and they're not sure how to teach them. some people have thought about them and maybe they're just not very good, effective facilitators of difficult discussions, because many of us are not. so there are a lot of reasons why someone may not engage in these discussions in their classrooms. but i would suspect that when mosthink of a bell curve, of the people in the bell curve of a faculty in the school of social work would have considered these things, are doing research related to issues such as health disparities, educational -- problems with educational opportunity, workplace, stress issues, all of which are things that relate to this. and i think then the question is how can faculty perhaps develop more of the skills and the perspectives for feeling comfortable engaging in difficult discussions with others.

and so i think it is often less a question of what people know and care about and what they are passionate about and more a question about how can we offer faculty supportive growth experiences and environments to be able to think about how to may be address some of the concerns students are bringing to the class. when i think of the faculty at my old school, there's a range of people who are good at leading these discussions, but i can't think of one person who doesn't care about issues of diversity, equity, or inclusion. i mean, i think faculty members have a high degree of academic freedom in deciding how to approach the education process. i think there are limits to that obviously. you can't decide to teach a course and not have it meet unless there's a good reason educationally for that. and there are boundaries on what

courses you teach and so on, but i think for the most part there's a strong presumption in favor of faculty freedom to decide how best to deal with students and how best to deal with particular subjects. at the same time, i think it's the responsibility of the institutions to ensure that faculty are doing their jobs well and are teaching effectively and to offer guidance and help to encourage that that. but i think to insist upon these things to individual faculty members is very difficult. it doesn't mean it is impossible. if someone is being a lousy teacher, then the institution has an obligation to intervene. but i think the right way of dealing with this is by encouragement, persuasion, and by saying to faculty you'll be better at your job by doing these, whatever these things happen to be. >> one of the things that's come up for us at yale is that we really have been having this conversation with the foundational values of a liberal arts education. is this not working? can you hear me now?

did i turn it off? >> the other thing. my free speech is being suppressed. [laughter] >> ok. >> i think that one of the things that's come up for us on our campus is just the idea that a liberal arts education has to be an anti-racist education. that's a foundational value. and so that would permeate, you know, across disciplines. i think one of the things you said is what can the institution actually do? i think we need to think critically about the ways in which we organize knowledge and the ways in which we assign prestige and resources to certain things, faculty lines. i wrote an op-ed in the "washington post" after the crisis at yale basically saying this is not about free speech, my -- anti-racist activists, student activists at yale are not -- i understand that this is

not a conflict with free speech. and i got a lot of hate mail. and one of the things someone bio, me said, look at your that is like a politically correct joe. i remember when they had things --e anthropology and history it's just like -- i think part of it is this notion that the kinds of work we do is not serious, not really intellectual, not really rigorous if we talk about racial inequality or sexism or homophobia. this goes back to what i didn't get to say in my remarks. but in 1991, there was this really interesting article written by a conservative thinker. oh, god, who was it? i don't remember now. but he basically makes his

argument, will, it was george will. he wrote in "newsweek" that lynne cheney has equally as important a job as dick cheney. she's the secretary of domestic defense. less dangerous in the long run. the domestic forces that she must deal with at the n.e.h. basically it goes on to talk radicals, and, these in the 1990's, it was conceived as a problem around curriculum. now it is trigger warnings and safe spaces. the conversation has not changed that much. i we a lot to teach what we want to teach? yes, but we also must address larger issues. we have to address a wider set of concerns and questions. that should be expanding our

conversation, we should not be constrained to that. it is an exciting direction that we are moving in. jeff and i both lived through trying to reform our curriculum. i will never do it again. thought -- i'm not familiar with the specific issues preoccupying the community, but it seems like if one is dealing with the subject nationalism, or ethnic discrimination, or the holocaust -- large and big spread acrosse the 19th and 20th centuries. competent,ho is

hopefully more than competent, should be able to take out of the diversity of scholarly views. you will have a number of different powerful scholarly views, and fashion a curriculum or syllabus when you are conducting the class in which a couple of things happen. first, students become aware of the diversity of opinions about these controversial issues. -- also, learn how to manage not manage, but had to come to their own view. you do not have to spoonfeed people. you want the students to have their own viewpoints and their own intellectual personalities. it have to come as much from the students as us from the teachers . how does one use the construction of the syllabus and the ways in which one can present different viewpoints to get the students to take

and come to a view that is their own view and not my view, or his view, or her view. that is what every scholars should be able to do. that is part of the job description of being a professor, it seems to me. then one has to go back to what are we doing in graduate schools now in terms of how are we preparing people to be scholars? that is a whole other panel. [laughter] nurturingtoring and we are too young faculty. we have a core curriculum like columbia. we regularly ask young people, they seem young to me, young faculty do -- i still remember we were having a clinical psychologist as part of our curriculum we teach roy -- freud

, and nobody reads him anymore. i can teach them and you can teach them. me there is a mentoring. , andately they are there once they get tenure, lord help us. that is also a subject for another debate. freud and i'm not so old. the notion that we do not teach the classics anymore. this is the idea in the 90's -- 1990's, a woman from harvard wrote an essay saying she went to four years of harvard and never went best never read a

book by a black woman author. there is this idea at harvard that nobody is reading shakespeare and it is all black lesbians 20 47. that idea is so far from the truth. that is what people think now. this notion of how do we balance the canon that we are inheriting with the new stuff that the kids are asking for? cousin that always been the question? that is like moving through time, you always have to address -- adjust your syllabus. to satisfy the student the band because they are students of color. my problem is getting them to buy a course pack because they on the read everything screen, even though they do not have good memory retention when they read off of a screen. i can convince them to read fr

eud, i just cannot convince them to buy paper. convincing everybody that it is around racial diversity is missing the point. what i am complaining about is a much more pervasive anxiety that professors have across campuses. >> i will squeeze in one last question. of 1967 who is reference this year, emphasized that the university has a responsibility to create as well as apeople community of ideas. in which everyone feels a sense of belonging. what are the contemporary challenges, responsibilities, and opportunities for universities as institutions to create community and the longing that engages all of its members? what is the role of academic freedom in fostering that?

how might the prevailing practice of institutional neutrality on political and social issues as an important context of political and social freedom -- the practice of silence, contributed campus climate for different members differently within our community. >> i will take a stab at this. there are two things i will say. the first is the idea of the safe space which i think is completely misunderstood. i understand it as the classroom as a civil space. for example, i teach a lot about islam and u.s. relations. i get students from a very diverse political perspective coming in my classroom. that is never been a problem for me. what i do see at the beginning of the semester is that when we had discussions, we need to create parameters about the kinds of discussions you can have. this is not your facebook post, so i do not want to hear about

she know -- a food jesus or hillary clinton. you need to present something with intellectual substance, not what they look like. thingsre the kinds of that you direct the discussion as a professor and keep it civil. people are not allowed to make any old comments. that is what i think of as a safe space. the other understanding is it is a place where minority students or people who feel like they are not -- minority students can gather and have resources on campus. i do not think people object to that. the notion -- the other thing i want to say is be got to coulter, everybody is afraid to speak because they do not want to say the wrong thing. the ways in is that which we talk about racism or

classism or homophobia or whatever is that it is an individual defect. in this particular political moment, if we can talk about structural racism, homophobia, misogyny as larger phenomenon, that is a huge failing for us. that is part of it for me. constantly redirecting it to think about these things, not about individual features of a personality that if somebody said the wrong thing, we catch them. we think of these things as macro. >> this is a little off the point. but one of the issues we have to confront as we go forward is the impact of social media on open discussion. it used to be the case that you could have a conversation in a classroom or a dorm or with colleagues in which he said things that were provocative. it could be about thinking

abortion is murder or good. it does not matter what it was. you knew some people in the room would not like it and you would argue about it that it would go away. with social media, we all become vulnerable to those conversations being out there forever. accessible by graduate schools, employers, dates, potential dates i should say. that has serious potential to undermine the willingness of individuals both here and throughout society to speak openly and to challenge things and to talk candidly. that worries me a lot about its impact upon the academic community more generally. i do not know what the answer to that is. it is a reality and the something we have to continue thinking about. the image of the universities as cities, i've always thought

of them more as towns. anonymity.places of most universities -- at least most residentially based university are like townsend it is hard to be anonymous. the notion of engendering community, it has to happen in the classroom and many other places as well. that chicago was late in coming to foreign study programs. the universityto of chicago, you're made it to the world's greatest university, why would you possibly want to leave to visit somewhere else. broad andat we have a rich group of foreign study programs. it is not simply that they make new friends and have people of

their different backgrounds and covering different cultures, it is also the fact that they are one knownof environment and put in a foreign different environment. in some ways, especially with educating young people, we have to engender and strengthen the communities but the work is never over. you cannot just do it with freshman and say it is done for four years. as just like the population of the town, they come and they go. it is like a stream going forward. this community is very important, but it cannot all be done in the classroom. a lot of it has to be done the on the classroom. -- beyond the classroom. >> she goes on to say that the city is made up of neighborhoods. students are mostly experiencing the neighborhood, however that might be defined. they are interacting and

citying within the larger of the large complex research university, which is what you was talking about. i think that is where students often find their community and these larger spaces are places butconvocation, graduation, their major interaction with the institution is in the smaller neighborhoods rather than the larger system. thinking about the hidden curriculum, the implicit curriculum, the co-curricular comedies are all things whether you're talking by graduate students or undergraduate students, these are all components about how they are experiencing the institutions in which we work. to transitionng us to be informal heart of our evening. i will invite you for some dialogue together. as a moderator, i will leave us

with more questions to want to engage each other. we invite you to dialogue with each other around these issues. ask questions, share your reflections, say out loud ideas that are half-baked that you're still struggling to fully form. ask another person what still stands up to them in with a panelist said. whether you left talking -- wanting to talk more about? part of practicing free expression is listening carefully to what another person is saying before forming your own response. it is also being open and humble, and this is hard to practice. it is also allowing your response and your own ideas to be shaped by what another person has just sent to you. practicing this interpersonal attunement is a critical part for our ability as a community to have a dialogue about topics that matter deeply to each of us personally, not just professionally. i look forward to joining the panelist