A number of journalists and academics took part in a discussion on free speech and due process on college and university campuses. The event, from the National Press conference is about an hour and 10 minutes. Minutes. Welcome to our presentation on the on social network. This is organized by the lafayette group, campus reform and by organization, foundation for individual rights and expression. Counsel, a little bit about where you come from, free speech and due process and Higher Education for the past 25 years and expanded our mission to move beyond free speech on College Campus issues but in the years weve been addressing these questions, as a common theme and one thing we found campus freedom has declined direct proportion of the penetrative class. Thomas jefferson wrote men are endowed. Among these are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. It seems odd campuses are where these principles go to die particularly pursuit of happiness. One example in my book, a mentioning only because my publisher told me never to pass an opportunity so in the eye of the beholder, what i mentioned in passing in 2017 at the university were the school did a fundraiser imposed by fertility and title that been and was pop song for administrators claim it was insensitive appropriation and as the assistant director, i went to continue to encourage a culture of controversy among great loops and suggested staying away from anything that involved gender, culture or sexuality. Apparently feeling empowered, they cant the event. These are the kinds of things we are on. University campuses and that is the theme we are going to explore, the rise of bureaucracy campuses tends to be the values of expression, due process and fun so this morning we have a terrific panel of speakers to address those issues that will fit into it. 2022 Stanford University and former reporter for the review currently either of the magazine where she wrote an article in conversation called war on social life. 2022 graduate University Associate podcast editor. She is a reporter for the des moines register. Her article on these issues stanfords war against its own students. Well talk about these issues in general but also focus on these panelists at stanford. Next, we have doctor marshall, Professor University of kentucky as well as editor in chief campus reform. The Higher Education academically speaking. Radical ideas originating in academia affect americans daily lives. Doctor mcguire fellow and campus reform of the American Council alumni where he writes podcast speaks on Academic Freedom of contemporary campus issues. And initiatives and the director of the ryan center for preinstitutions and associate teaching professor in the program and university. I do want to take this in three parts and then will get to questions from the audience. First, the general atmosphere on campus and Higher Education experience we can explore a little bit. What challenges in terms of due process are students facing these days . One thing that motivated me to write the article on how the administration was destroying, i noticed how a lot of were internalizing failure of College Experience so it is very Diverse School we have kids coming in from all over the country, its more than the traditional schools going different ways and theres this patchwork of social groups that covers each who comes on campus so Sorority Life you have coop experience, theme houses that cover different groups and the result is every student would find a subgroup third find their identity on campus and they were rich and meaningful and what was happening was the administration was slowly chipping away so you have for chernihiv of the incident of a party, no place in the house that served as Cultural Center for a certain kind of person with a generic house by students who have nothing in common and when you do this again and again, you go 30 to 50 like ten and everyone else in these groups that push into this category of not being able to find connections on campus, isolated campuses around school so instead of recognizing this as an administrative issue, being suppressed by the administration for you have a social group being destroyed, kids would come in and struggle because the group had been created had been destroyed and blame it on a failure like im having a bad experience. Im lonely, these are objective experiences, you dont have anywhere to go at night or community you feel safe. And then kids would come lonely and depressed you can see in the mannerism and body language, is a weird thing, they are not spending a lot of time at school so when they have freedom of expression, and has devastating selfesteem issues where they feel of the american college, when you inhibit them to find people like themselves, it inhibits that identity formation because they dont learn where i fit, i dont fit in anywhere there is always this on and what we are seeing with the administrative state, is inhibiting the ability to express themselves in terms of hiding i didnt see and thats what i said light on and you cut down the number of parties and campuses and not produce these areas and the student body. High levels of depression among students currently college age so you are talking of the restrictions on the. Has that been your experience . When campus was fun how would you describe this today . s detailing what happened at stanford, my look was more the perspective of due process and through the own process and the think has a profound impact so i wrote a story on stanford students and he is the president of virginity for a party and the university investigated for allegedly serving alcohol to at least one person under the age of 21. The university hired outside counsel to conduct the investigation but the student who is in my place so we working on fraternitys defense. He was really struggling about life in college and his work was finishing and had to drop out as a result. There was a huge impact and to get more insight, there are two types of investigations that can be done. Over 400 students under these two laws. 97 of those investigations were about undercooked or they were cheating investigations. What happens is of the university of six months to conduct an investigation before you decide whether or not to file formal charges after that six month deadline the University Filed 201 formal charges that year. Out of those 201 students who were formally charged, only five were found not guilty. So this process that i investigated, what many of my people told and what this data shows is theres this process stacked against the students pick the university inside and outside counsel risk students to have representation of their own and lest they can afford to go get somebody else to help them through this process. It can take months, they can take so much physical energy, mental energy, focus them away for the classes, wherefrom social experience at college at all. Many of the courses i spoke to both students and alumni are saying they dont want universities to make it easier for students to cheat theyre not trying to create an environment which is easy to cheat and cheating is rapid of the elves whatever process thats fair to students and also whatever process in which students feel like they are respected and appreciated. They are presumed innocent before proven guilty. These basic values after process are completely thrown out the window Distribution System implemented by the University Expert thank you. I want to make this more of a conversation among the panelists so let me bring dr. Marschall and dr. Mcguire into the spirit let me ask each of you, is this discussion of whats going on currently on campus by people who are there e recently that i was consistent with what you have seen . And if so, if or if not, hows it . Yeah, there were, the problem in my opinion this phenomenon we have a cadre of zealous bureaucrats in the deans office, in the offices that come up with every social crisis and demonstration that reads other culture wars can contribute you see that being reflected in the personnel that is being created on College Campuses here in the reason that youre seeing the lack of due process or a kind of marginalization or limitation of violent is because these bureaucrats are the beneficiaries of spending that never goes down even when you have public universities, having to cut back especially post covid. The money and resources they get are far disproportionate to the more poor academic subjects. With those resources and infrastructure, the problem becomes if theyre trying to manage interdiction pick the same thing universities are treating students like their children and through the lowering of academic standards and through positions like chief experience officer which is something that the university of utah is posting for this year, trying to hide what i looked into it. I dont see the difference between that job and a cruise director on the cruise ship. But thenceforth one side of the contradiction with the other side is the also the same time see them as children they require them to be perfected molded adults. You have response teams, speech codes that punish penalize and seek out students if they make the tiniest infraction, the tiniest mistake. The same time youre treating 18yearolds like children you are also not giving them the room in time for them to grow into adulthood which is what college was supposed to be about, and in that messy state experience was the fun sport i agree with zach the entrance of the general picture overall in Higher Education what we see is costs are going up while the quality of education freedom to express yourself and intellectual diversity are all going down. In terms of quality of education just for example, if you look at active, but with project which evaluates the core requirements, stanford get a d. Thats, tickets, many of our elite institution for the donation of the students graduating from the institutions, met with a kind of wellrounded robust education you would want somebody to after entrance of Free Expression on campus i find stories from francesca and ginevra, its shocking but not surprising is how i will put it. The bureaucrats are one of the chief problems in the ratchet goes in one direction. They just keep growing. They multiply. Work for themselves. When you dont have enough of the real work to do things that other things to do. I think of things like the elimination of harmful Language Initiative at stanford where they wanted to outlaw the use of all sorts of language that people deemed offensive. Maybe they should have fewer people on staff who are attending to actual idea issues and that they wont have time to read about the kind of language people using. In terms of the Student Experience that bureaucrats, these are often people who have quite a bit of contact with students your First Contact h students to think about new Student Orientation students are getting their first ascent of what is going to like on campus, whats the culture, what are the expectations. They have these programs that are run by nonstructural staff get a lot of these people are totally in the tank for things like diversity equity and inclusion. They want to control how people think. They are coddling students enter the students pick up on that. I think to some degree they have this influence in students were students themselves start to think in these terms so fire wednesdays campus of research service. We set stanford about 60 of students report censoring themselves at least occasionally. You look at on the other hand, they are also inclined to send to others or to shut down speech that they dont like. Where our Students Learning this behavior . People are not naturally born thinking this way. They pick it up somewhere. I think the bureaucrats are a large problem. They are growing and they really get the hooks in the students. Ive heard them say before at other institutions they really think of themselves as the primary educators of the students but let me ask you about that because its been true for a number of years on many campuses the number of administrators outnumber faculty. On some campuses there are as many administrators as to our students or more. Whats your sense of the numbers of those kinds of questions . I mean, at stanford they have a bureaucrat for every two students. Thats double the average of other r1 institutions where they have a bureaucrat for every four students the average across higher ed is at one bureaucrat for every ten students. Which is already insanely high, in my view. Then you look at these elite institutions they are even worse than stanford is at the very top. Compared to faculty where you maybe have one faculty member for every 16, 20, 30 students. So this way my bureaucrats oncampus than our faculty members did you hear people say things like its almost like theres a personal butler for every student on campus. Its not far from true. Wouldnt be bad to have a personal butler. Let me ask you, is that true in your experience as well . Who are the worst offenders in this regard . The worst offenders as far as the bureaucrats are the, what i see its like if you want to look at the offices or any other type of bureaucrat that couldve been it was done in a more responsible economical and institution, Human Resources division pick you almost have to justify your own paid by the number of students you persecutor we see a number of students get in trouble for things that dont warrant that kind of infraction that could be from how fraternities might advertise their parties before covid there was a frat that use politically incorrect language that wasnt exactly respectful but it wasnt illegal. It wasnt harmful. They were all suspended until someone in the Bureaucratic Administration found out that it was constitutionally protected speech, that we have no standing to the subject think about the man hours that go into these almost like rabbit holes when you look for students who maybe dont always act the way they should if they were fully informed adults, think about how much time is wasted on track to persecute them rather than trying to help them or make sure theyre having a formative experience. You mention the response to covert. Let me ask for and what an francesca about of you two attended college during the covert years which is for the rest of us almost impossible to imagine going to college during that kind of experience. How did it affect you and how does it tie into these issues . So its actually, covid was a wakeup call and transiting significant event experience in my time at stanford. One of the reason i was inspired to write this piece isnt doingg covid a lot of good start like living together in houses offcampus and i was living in a group house with a bunch of kids who were like two or three years older and they had friends who were alumni and the alumni committee. Previous id only known kids in my own grades like most kids at stanford are there asking e questions like so do you do exotic erotic . Like is a seminaked party stanford used to do. Do do full nude on the quad . You have particular nouns, all these things . No, no, no there really reframed my College Experience being very abnormal witches everyone thinks the College Experience is normal, 18 go to a new school you have no sense of the moors and i think that something these schools take advantage of a lot is the kids took over so fast that as long as you can like make a change and implement it to be clean before freshman class they will have the idea this is what college is. This is what stanford princeton whatever school youre going to is like. That was a lick of cult and also the experience of living offcampus by myself being able to go to my own social events. That felt much ironically for your even under lockdown than the sort of very restrictive experience on campus to what they did at stanford is while students were offcampus for covid and going to get this completely clean slate of people coming back with little institutional experience, the use that as an opportunity to make very, very unpopular changes at stanford the houses monopoly pretty controversial 50 of the class rushed but it was not lightly discussed and only 20 of the class was in greek life because there were not that many greek houses the they had these theme houses that were like french italian german slavic cows and they would host sort of fancy dinner party type events for upperclassman that was very like aboveboard and respectful and the kind of engagement you would like on the College Campus to universally popular, number one right College Housing not have gone over locally to try to get rid of these. When the kids were offcampus with a slash of those and rename those to the addresses. They also got rid of outdoor house on i think the quote was that was upholding harmful standards of outdoor kids in america which is one of the finest sentences ive ever read. Which have been the second Stanford Institution very representative, particular types of stanford students the valves of the university. They got rid of that. I think, for a lot of these schools was an opportunity for them to show their true colors where when they have a blank slate to experiment with the new group of students who were not going to complain because significant expectations of living in french house, whatever they did and what does work, were able to come back and if interesting for me as a freshman i had been getting the sort of side comments and lectures from underclassmen when i would be like im going to party at 550 may be like thats not 550, thats a fraternity. With distant distantt thats what they told me, shut up. I found myself in a position of giving those in talks to younger students were i would be like that house used to be the italian house and it was so fun every pizza night in the south who used to do,