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tv   Washington Journal Nathan Harden  CSPAN  December 19, 2020 11:46am-12:29pm EST

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heather taylor from bread for the world for coming on with us this morning and talking about u.s. hunger and food insecurity during the pandemic. thank you so much for>> washing. we are back with the education editor. he is here to talk with us about the recent college free-speech rankings. did morning. guest: thanks for having me on the program. free-speechs what means. on campus aspeech we know it is a hot political topic. we see it in the news. protesthether it's a tile on campus or a controversial speaker that might
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corrupt in controversy, we want to put some bones to the issue. with a couple of other organizations conducted on thegest ever survey topic of free speech ever conducted. 20,000 students across 55 universities. we asked them a series of questions in the survey. openness.eir how open were they or how to have awas it conversation on things like abortion or affirmative-action or gun control. we asked them about tolerance. how willing would they be to speaker onr allow a campus who had a controversial point of view. we went to the issue of self-expression.
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ever had to at the censor themselves in the classroom. we asked them about their sense of the support for free speech. did the people in charge on campus foster an environment conducive to open discussion. we looked at the actual speech policies that were in place, were there restrictive policies and the written student handbook. created a scale between zero and 100. we wereese responses, able to rank these 55 schools in the area of free speech. host: you identified the number. i was going to ask you, how may schools did you look at and how did you decide which schools to
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look at? guest: we would have loved to have surveyed every school in the country. that wasn't feasible. this is a cross-section. there are some of the elite schools, the brand name schools. we also included a cross-section geographically. schools,your big state we weren't able to do the liberal arts colleges and some of the smaller schools. in this round, we focused on these large big conference schools across the country. young student applying to college, there is a good chance that the schools you are interested in be included on the survey. we have plans to expand in future versions. cross-section in
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terms of elite schools, big state schools, we've got a good picture of how the history of free-speech stacked up across these institutions. host: walk us through some of the findings. who turned out to be the best school when it comes to free speech for college students? guest: this was no surprise for us. the university of chicago came in number one. they've become known for this issue. their president has been very thattive establishing school as a place where academic freedom is protected and free-speech will be promoted. i think that's a difference. academia, anybody in
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they will say of course i support free speech on campus. what we found is the institutes that take a proactive view and cultivate a climate of open inquiry, those made a real difference. the university of chicago is famous for the chicago statement. students across the political spectrum, this is key, whether liberal or conservative, they ranked chicago very highly. host: what school was at the bottom? unfortunately, this went to depaul university. they were the opposite case. they were ranked very lowly by both liberals and conservatives. they were the lowest ranked among conservative students who took our survey.
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they were the fourth lowest among liberals. something is not clicking there. there were some bigger schools that surprised us. they came up near the bottom, including university of texas at austin, lsu. reigning championship of football. they did not do well in the free-speech competition. the top 10 of our rankings 10 that seven out of were large public institutions. flip the coin over, seven out of 10 of the lowest were private universities, typically more elite schools, including dartmouth. we did find a little bit of a distinction there. free-speechit less
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according to these students on some of the more elite campuses. host: let's let our viewers join in. we are going to open up special lines. one group we want to hear from our actual college students and their parents. we want to know what you think about free-speech on college campuses. college students and parents, your number is (202) 748-8000. another important troop is college educators. if you are a college educator and you want to talk about free-speech, your line is (202) 748-8001. aboutll want to hear from free-speech on college campuses. everyone else, call (202) 748-8002.
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keep in mind, you can always text us. nathan, you just mentioned this. there was a little bit at the end of your statement. i was there a big difference publc universities when it came to these rankings? guest: i think it helps if we look at some of the individual questions to get a sense of this. university, one of the most prestigious in the country, the number is 42% of students said it was ok in some circumstances to shout down a speaker that you disagreed with.
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was only 13% at kansas state. that's a little bit of a glimpse into this public versus private distinction. things.ther at columbia, 10% said they saw violence as an acceptable response to offensive speech in some circumstances. there seems to be a more intense a raw speech climate. that broadly speaking, most students said they felt that their administration protected speech.
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at the same time, a majority said i am self censoring in some circumstances. due to peer may be pressure. even if a university broadly speaking is trying to promote free speech on campus or professor in his or her classroom, a lot of students expressed fear about what their peers might think if they held a political view that was unpopular. from your report, 60% of students can recall at least one time during their college experience where they did not share their perspective for fear of how others would respond. one of the biggest problems is not the administration, it is students on students.
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is that what you see? guest: i think so. you know, it is both. we know that there are some students who say that they weren't comfortable expressing a difference of opinion with their professors, but i think we have to look at this issue in a broader context than what is going on in the classroom. we live in an era when social media is a soda the primary means, in some cases, where people live out their social lives. that can be a polarizing landscape. and, you know, we know from politicalies that the landscape is getting more polarized. conservatives are getting more conservative, liberals are getting more liberal, and there seems to be less willingness to discuss differences across controversial issues.
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even if the university does everything right, and i think this is important to note, at the university of chicago, we praised them for all they are doing on this issue, but they still only scored a 64 out of 100 on our survey, the average being 52. 64 is still a failing grade if you take a final exam in most classes, but i think we need to grade on a curve here because culturally, and where we are in our political landscape, students are bringing a lot of this into the classroom with them. and we believe that when a college or university takes a proactive approach, like the university of chicago, they can make a measurable difference in the climate on campus. but they will not be able to solve this problem on their own. host: the report shows just like -- or the overall groups, the
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university of chicago was number one best overall and number one ranked by liberals. texasth conservatives, a&m university jumps to the top. what are the differences there? guest: students naturally feel more comfortable expressing themselves when everyone agrees with them. texas a&m university is one of the more conservative schools in terms of how students self identify. naturally, there is more of a sense of comfort from conservatives there. but i think it is important to note that conservatives also ranked the university of chicago highly, even though it is one of the most liberal schools in our survey. and on the other hand, you can wheret schools like lsu, there was a significant amount
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therey of conservatives and they did not do so well overall. at think that there are -- any time there is a place where everybody agrees with you, yes, you will feel more comfortable. bu thatt is only part of the story because clearly some liberal institutions are doing well, even among conservatives. so we want to highlight that that a distinction there -- data distinction. host: we will start with mark calling from new jersey. what's the name of the city? caller: hi, can you hear me? host: go ahead. parsippany, new jersey. host: i got it. go ahead. caller: i want to say that you
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do a great job, i love everyone at c-span. please bring steve scully back. for the gues is, i want to challenge him a little bit because i think this way of presenting free speech is a little myopic or a little one-sided. the goal of the university is to create an atmosphere conducive to the education of everyone. is in the world, there discrimination. in the world, there is hate. and the free speech issue has been weaponized in certain ways in this country. i want to bring to your attention the westborough baptist church, which won a supreme court case and they would have hateful slogans outside of funerals for u.s.
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veterans. and i will not say what they said, but essentially that go had hates -- then they would thw in a hateful term. they even did this when mr. rogers died, who had the show for children. and they said it was free speech . that kind of rhetoric is not conducive to education. heere's a need to control t dialogue on a campus. and i would like to know what the speaker thinks about that. guest: thank you for the comment. course you aref right, in some cases speech can be, you know, so outside the bounds that it compromises the purpose of the classroom itself or, you know, there is the famous example, you cannot shout fire in a crowded building.
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when we look at the other issues, especially what i think you are getting at racial topics, sexual politics, things like that that are real hot that's where, um, the rubber meets the road in free speech. everybody is for free speech until it comes to speech that is offensive to you. are there are some bounds that are sort of outside? yeah, you could come up with a few. i do not think that you could dedicate a week of lectures to the westborough baptist church and invite them to come and force all of your students to go. we could come up with examples. but i think what we should aim for is the widest possible platform for speech.
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and i think if we use the most extreme example, for instance, like the caller did, we are not getting at the heart of the issue because often times what we are finding is that it's views that are within mainstream of political discourse are the ones being silenced or the speaker thinks, shouted down. there was a petition going on at hadard to ban anyone who served in the trump administration from visiting or teaching or guest lecturing at the school. that's the kind of thing we are getting at in the survey, is thosean openness, even views you find offensive, and if not, are we so limiting the worldview that students would encounter in the classroom?
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this is a place where students should be able to openly debate and exchange ideas, be exposed to ideas and that may they were not exposed to growing up. if we do not allow a broad section of views in the classroom, not only allowed but encouraged that, students will not come away prepared to deal with diversity that exists in the real world. this is part of the reason why we see such destructive polarized nation in our political discourse today, almost an inability to have political discourse. an inability to even agree on the facts, in some cases, because on both sides we are finding that people are less and less used to encountering views they disagree with and more likely to sort of create a strawman in their minds or demonize those who oppose them politically or ideologically or
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religiously. so, the classroom is a great place to break the barriers down, if it is functioning correctly. host: nathan, who had most concerns about free speech? was it liberals or conservatives? in washington, we hear talk about the liberal ivory tower at universities, but who is the most concerned about it on college campuses, the liberals or conservatives or is it equal? guest: it does q1 way. -- does scale a little bit -- skew a little bit one way. it does seem to be a liberal because, because conservatives seem to be in the minority on college campuses, right? in our survey, they were a handful of schools that had a slight majority of conservative students. but there were a lot of schools where the liberals outnumbered
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the conservatives by even 8 or 10 to 1. whichever group was in the minority would feel like the issue is more important to them. and we did find conservatives were more likely to say that they had self-centered. that number was 72% versus 55% for the liberals. that's a lot for liberal students, also, but it is -- i think that we, unfortunately the issue can -- we can miss the point somewhat. if you are on the political left, you can start to feel defensive because you do not want to really think of the university as a place where people are being indoctrinated. and that is not a fair assessment either. i think what we are looking at on the balance, do students
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of all political persuasions feel comfortable? if you go to byu for example, liberal students do not necessarily feel very good about the free speech culture there, according to our survey. so, yes, it can go both ways, but because of the landscape and because conservatives are in the minority at most of these schools, it does tend to be more of a concern to those students, but i think it is a concern broadly speaking for all students, regardless of their political ideology. host: let's go back to the phones and talk with richard in idaho. good morning. caller: good morning. merry christmas and happy hanukkah. this is a very good subject. one thing i think you can do, if you are going to expand your study, is maybe look at the difference between free speech, but also lying.
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if you can do that, i think that is part of the problem. that we listen to all of the lies, especially in politics. and then they can say it and go on. i think that something has to be studied on people lying. thank you. you guys do a great job at c-span. host: go ahead and respond. guest: thank you. all theseering at difficult to pronounce cities we are getting this morning. i mentioned before, can we even agree on the facts sometimes? the big topic this year has been facebook and twitter, many on the right feeling that the platforms sort of unfairly censored their views with the election. and those on the left felt they
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did not do enough of the, you know, countering the misinformation and so forth. so, again, this is in the air, the sense of can we agree on what is true or not? and i think the more itemized we are in our political discourse, the less likely we are to be able to recognize a common set of truth and facts. inquiry,oint of open starting with our college campuses, but extending into our political discourse writ large, is so important. the fact is all of us have blind spots, no matter who we are. and we have our own limited set of experiences. group -- i grew up in a certain kind of household, a certain kind of economic bracket, a certain religious context, and whoever you are out there, you grew up in your own set.
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you have a unique set of views and experiences of that i do not have. so, if we cannot come together and really listen to one another and learn to respect opposing views that we do not agree with, even those we find abhorrent in some cases, we do not have to respect the view, but we have to respect one's right to have that view, we will find our view of the world is or has fewer places where it overlaps with those that we disagree with. so getting to the question of seeh and the facts that we eroding right now, i think we can trace it back, to a large degree, to what is happening in our universities. host: one of our social media followers wants to know how deeply you dug into the data and did your study find any regional preference for free speech.
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guest: you know, the one regional issue that stood out, and i apologize to the northeastern listeners, but the northeastern schools did struggle more than other areas of the country. and make of that what you will, whether it is cultural or political context that is there, perhaps. i mentioned to some of the more elite schools tended to struggle, so that could be part of the regional breakdown as well, because many of those schools, certainly the ivy league schools, that is where they exist. so, we found some correlation there, but it was not strict one to one. not to sound like a broken record, but bringing up the university of chicago, this was
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a large, urban and very left-leaning city and left-leaning university, but they really bucked the trend and they scored a very highly, again, among conservatives who attend there. we took that as a real message. we hope other university leaders can really use this rankings as a way to see where they stand. not long agoail from a university that scored it the bottom in our rankings. and they said, we support free speech, i am paraphrasing, but we see that our students, they are not getting the message. we will take that as an instructive thing. yes, we are stacking the schools up, giving them a grade, but we want to see this also as a tool, not only that the administrators can see where there's ghost dance and how they might -- their school stands
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and how they might improve, but as a student who may want to apply, you can see where this goes stack up. you can look at our rankings, you can see the numbers for yourself and get information that has never been available before. host: let's go back to the phones and talk with robin in columbus, ohio. robin is a college parent. good morning. caller: thank you for the topic. i have a question for the guest. speechs of ranking free levels across universities, were community colleges considered in your research? studies, itnd my would not be a surprise that the more elite ivory schools would
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not have as high of a level of free speech, if you look at who they have historically enrolled. you would not see the same ratio of ethnic diversity needed for students to be exposed to different perspectives and to be challenged. so i am wondering what your thoughts are on that? thank you for the topic. guest: thank you for the question. unfortunately, we were not able to include any community colleges. total,, we only had 55 which is a small slice of the pie. and i would love it if we could, if we could expand to include more schools in the future versions of this. but we did, we did make sure that we got a good sample of minority voices included in our survey. we found interesting data there.
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instance,topics, for we found black students were more likely to feel that those were difficult for them to discuss on campus. that was, i think the number was 66% of black students felt that that was difficult versus 43% of of the population as a whole. so we can see there, that depending on your ethnic group, again, we have touched on political ideology as well, that there are different hot button issues that are problematic or students feel less comfortable talking about, for whatever reason. host: let's go to mike from akron, ohio. caller: good morning. thank you for c-span. i was a student at kent state in 1971,70's, beginning in one year after the shooting took place.
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at that time, my sister was on campus, my cousin was in the national guard on campus, and we have had many interesting discussions about that day, but the past few years there has been some people from the nra, led by a very attractive young lady, with about 150 people with her, claiming if the students would have been well armed on may 4, 1970, two students would have been better -- the students would have been better off. i said to my cousin, if they had been well armed, you would've had 400 and students and four dead guardsmen. if i may say one more thing, too, my view of the second amendment -- i ticket was well written except for the -- think that it was well written except for the last word. everyone of our rights has some infringements. how do you think a person would
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be accepted at the nra if they said, just change the last word in the second amendment from infringed to abolished. i do not own a gun. i never have. but if somebody owns a gun, that is fine. what do you think about this woman? she comes to campus at least two times a year and all she does is she and her friends claim is that the students would have been better off if they were well armed. and where it kent state rank on this poll, overall, when it comes to free speech? guest: thank you for sharing your personal history. unfortunately, we were not able to include kent state in this ranking. if you go to our website, you --l see that the 55 schools our website, you will see the 55 schools in the survey. we hope to expand in the future.
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first of all, i can tell that this is a very personal issue to you, because you had family, you are close to the situation. and, um, i am not aware of the specific speaker you are talking about, but i think this is a good example of where having that big tent, and even allowing ideas that are offensive to some, may be so important. because if you look at, you know, gun control, that is a polarizing issue. people feel passionate about it. people have a personal connection to gun violence or something like that. this is an issue that we -- it is a 50-50 issue in the country where people feel one way or the other. abortion is another. issues, racial
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issues, black lives matter has been in the news. this is really where free speech on campus becomes so critical, because we have to be able to engage with views we disagree with. in most cases, nobody is forcing students to attend a lecture by a guest like an nra member. they are free to go or not go in the circumstances, but i would say that even if you are an opponent of gun rights, it did not sound like you were, but even if he were strongly opposed, going to a place where you hear the other side, where you hear their point of view, could do nothing but strengthen your own arguments. it might open a window of understanding into why are these people there? why are there millions who look at this issue so differently from me?
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and, hopefully, they will extend the same to you. there will be another opportunity where an opponent or an opponent of the nra, or somebody who supports stronger gun restrictions, would then be allowed the same platform. that is the ideal, that you get all of these views and a forum to debate. and everybody has the opportunity to gain better understanding of those that differ from them. and i think that can only be a positive for our society. host: let's go to nelson, he was calling from redwood city, california. good morning. caller: good morning. well, i guess that you need to expand in the feature, because i was thinking, how in the world could evergreen college not being number one on the liberal objectiveing the most
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-- objected to a conservative voice. and liberty university on the right, i do not think they are having liberal speakers there. and i am a bible believing christian, but i am african-american, so i am with the lincoln project and a republican against that right-wingism. college, they have lectures on how tyco was not a racist. another university talked about -- even though republicans already apologized for it. and i guess that black woman at the university is getting a lot of flack for sharing those ideas and saying there was not a switch in the south, stuff like that. but i like what you said about e people lectures wher have different views.
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for instance, in charlottesville, i would not have been like those people yelling the next day that the young guy who is in a confederate uniform, with a rifle -- some white lady was yelling at him, she was progressive. i would've said, i appreciate all of your family that part in the wars, but why do you have to identify exclusively with the confederates when so much of the south part in other wars, and know, meleven -- you gibson's think about how the south fought in the revolutionary war. why can't we celebrate that? i like to ask questions like that, instead of just yelling in people's faces. host: go ahead and respond. guest: thank you for that, for that comment and question. this is such a great example
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when it comes to racial politics in this country, in particular. battle nothing that can extremism like open inquiry and free speech, in my opinion. the best weapon against bad speech is more speech, not less. like wetimes we feel are, in some parts of the country maybe, whether it is the northeast, or at elite schools, where we are winning the battle against views we oppose by silencing them. often, it is the opposite. by silencing those views, we shovel them into the corner where maybe that viewpoint grows more extreme. and likewise for ourselves. so engaging across opposing
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views, engaging people of different backgrounds and different racial backgrounds, economic backgrounds, that can only help eliminate the problem of political extremism. when we encounter those opposing views and we see that there is a robe person behind it, we get to know their story, they also have a chance to get to know our story, they get a chance to listen to us, hopefully. the more that we try to eliminate the views that we disagree with, the more likely we are to really give fertile ground to the extreme elements in those views. so i think that we need to look at our universities as ground zero for how we can begin to combat this problem that we are seeing in our political culture. host: we have spent time talking about college students, but there is also college educators and we actually have one on the
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line that wants to talk with us. so we will go to neil, calling from minnesota, a college educator. good morning. caller: good morning. i would like to back up and pick up on the caller, several back, who talked about the notion of truth being optional. guest seems to operate on the assumption that the last four years have not happened, that we could have a give and take. it's not 1990, right? donald trump has changed the republican party fundamentally. truth is optional. truth does not exist. so the notion we can have a give and take, i mean, this is not how it works anymore, right? i mean, you have -- it's acceptable now to say, i do not think that global climate change
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is happening. and that is my view. and all views are equal. it doesn't exist, etc. you have major contradictions. it's 30le framing is -- years old, right? if you want to have a discussion about free speech, you have to start with the world that exists. and the speech that exists. host: go ahead and respond before we run out of time, nathan. guest: thank you for the question. ultimately, who gets to decide what speech is allowed and what isn't, i think that we are in a dangerous place when we give any group the ability to decide ultimately what is acceptable. the reality is we have a 50-50 country here, millions of people voted for donald trump, millions voted against him.
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we need to engage one another to solve the political problems in this country. divide,the cultural more importantly, that we now have. and if we do not embrace free speech, broadly speaking, then we are actually supporting that goal, ultimately. host: we would like to thank nathan harden, the project coordinator for realcleareducation, for coming this morning to talk about the 2020 college free speech rankings. thank you so much for being with break even as they enter next year." once again, we want to know what you think about what is going on on capitol hill right now. let's start with sam calling from georgia on the republican line. good morning. caller: good morning. i love this show. i'm a

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