The book will be signed into your open for a little bit longer. Weve got the book fare. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone. Welcome. Tonight we are going to discuss a joint event from the foundation of individual rights and education and we are excited to have you all here and for those watching the live stream podcast, welcome. Im the director of the academy and professor at New York University school of business where we are now. They have a very strong relationship in two ways. One is the mission from fire is to defend universities and the leading defender of free speech. To improve the quality of research by increasing viewpoint and constructive disagreements. Both organizations are devoted to achieve their essential missions of education. Our organizations also have a more informal serendipitous crazy idea that turned out to be one of the most important ideas the last five years to see strange stuff happening on campuses and students requesting protection from speech. They learned to not do wild things this therapy and we submitted to the atlantic published in august of 2015. If provoked a lot of discussion and a lot of fun and then we thought okay now we can go back to our day jobs. And a couple of weeks later, all hell broke loose. First dale and then everywhere around the country. So, that is one strand of the events that brought us here. Buy a complete coincidence, we founded the academy in september of 2015 around the same time and it had nothing to do with anything else. We thought it was just as an early member weird stuff is happening because we are losing a lot of political diversity comes out the research doesnt work right. We were not thinking about the campus life. This was a purely professor sort of project and so we launched in september of 2015 and a week or two later. So theyve come together to share a lot of concern love of d Work Together in a lot of ways. Now lets see, an important point about the events of 2015 is that there was no violence. There was some implementation. There was some implementation but there was no real violence in the fall of 2015. 2015. But things have gotten worse since then. Along with the rest of the nation, the academy is going for the kind of polarization cycle with no end in sight. The extraordinary election of 2016, the emergence of the right and even the neonazi right has certainly increased cash in on the left. Increased passions on the left led it to support for Political Violence at times and this has increased passion on the right so in 2017 we are seeing more cases of actual physical violence used in response to words on campus, and we are seeing more agreement among the College Students that words are violence and therefore it is an appropriate response to the possibility that someone might say certain words on campus. So this is where we are now in the academic world and what please come here tonight to talk about. What on earth is going on . How did this happen and how did we get here . What can we do to break the cycle and reduce the fear and help american universities returned to the mission of education and research . We assembled a panel of experts to span the political spectrum. Each of them has been writing brilliantly about these issues about how we got here. In just a moment im going to turn the microphone over to run the event, the first i want to end with a word from my favorite philosopher. Since all this stuff starts on campus nowadays john stuart mills if we can bring one person back to help us today it would be john stuart mills. At the academthe academy is puta beautifully illustrated edition of liberty just chapter to which contains the most brilliant thoughts and arguments ever made for the importance of the free speech. And in working on the text, i am co editing it i have the pleasure of savoring his metaphors and insight that are all still there today. So here is one of my favorite quotes. He says it isnt the mind of heretics that have deteriorated most by the band placed on the inquiry which does not end in the orthodox conclusions. The greatest is to those that are not heretics and whose whole Mental Development is cramped and the reason by the fear of heresy. Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with ten metacharacters who dare not follow out any vigorous independent train of thought to land them in something that would admit to being considered religious or immoral. There are no timid characters on the panel to my left. We have only promising intellectintellects whose devoto their career to bold vigorous and independent trains of thought and he will now introduce them to you. Thank you. [applause] thank you professor and to the cosponsors to date the foundation for individual rights in education at the academy. Thank you for making this conversation possible. I want to welcome our video and podcast audience to the first ever live edition of the freespeech podcast. I am your host and for those not familiar with the podcast come every other week we take a look at the world of Free Expression through personal stories and candid conversations. This week we are taking a small step away from the freespeech issues to look at a related issue of profound importance and that is of course Viewpoint Diversity and in particular we will be looking at the Viewpoint Diversity on campus. We are of course on a College Campus today we are at New York University in manhattan and we will be exploring some fundamental questions such as our College Campuses experiencing a decline in Viewpoint Diversity. Do american universities prepare students for life in the politically divided democracy and does political orthodoxy reduce the quality of research, scholarship and education helping to guide us as we try to answer these questions today is a distinguished panel of the Academy Members but before i introduced the Panel Members i want to encourage those in todays audience and watching live online to participate. Some questions will be used during the q a portion. Now the closest to me is the professor of politics and social sciences at the Sarah Lawrence college and a Research Fellow at Stanford UniversitysHoover Institution and a fellow at the center for advanced social Science Research here at nyu and also a visiting fellow at American Enterprise institute and member of the council on foreign relations. Im toli am told you are also an amateur watchmaker. I am wearing a piece from the region in germany. I mention that from switzerland they do wonderful work. In germany and london it always works. And then to your right is the professor of law at new York Law School and from 1991 to 2008, she served as president of the American Civil Liberties union. Interestingly when she stepped down as president of Supreme Court justices ruth bader ginsburg, antonin tilia and david souter participated in the tribute. The forthcoming book hate why we should resist wit resist wite speech not censorship will be published by punished [laughter] not punished but it will be published by Oxford University press. [laughter] in addition to transcending partisanship on the Supreme Court i understand you also bring people together as an actor and cabaret performer. If i had an have any real tai would be a singer. Just pay 100 for something called a learnin the learning ee and get up on stage. But i thini think the audience d it a lot. We have the professor of humanities at Columbia University where he specializes in intellectual history with a particular focus on western political and religious thought and he is a prolific writer. The more recent book that came out in august with quite a bit discussion is entitled to once and future liberal after identity politics. If im not mistaken he also has the roots of similar to the wrapper eminem. Yes, we grew up a few miles away. And last but certainly not least, sitting next to the professor is professor eighth goal kelly, professor of Political Science and chair of the department of politics philosophy and legal studies at Elizabethtown College and director of the masters and Public Policy program. You are busy. Her Research Explores the intersection of politics in Higher Education and in 2011, she joined two other writers in the buck called the still divided academy, how competing visions of power politics and diversity complicates the mission of Higher Education. Does your book feel more relevant today than it did when it came out in 2011 . I wish i could say that it was all wrong but it might have been the first time in my life i was right about something. And so, whatever is wrong in the book we say that is my husbands part. [laughter] im hoping we can discuss a little bit more on the book but before we begin i want to do a bit of scene setting. Its one thing to talk in the abstract or another to talk about the cases i dont think i need to remind anyone in the audience at the base over the campus Viewpoint Diversity and what constitutes appropriate speech and scholarship on a College Campus have been headline news. I want to use these controversies to inform todays discussion and in one such controversy from earlier this year that grabbed headlines, the assistant professor sparked outrage with the publication of this piece some of you might have heard called the trans racialism by the philosophy journal and the article explored the case who in 2015 as im sure many of you will recall despite the claims she explored the controversy through the lens of their rights are giving us since we should accept transgendered individuals, and im quoting her, since we should accept the individual decisions to change we should also accept the individual decisions to change race and the goal was to promote questions and she certainly did that she might have gotten a little bit more than she bargained for. There was backlash from individuals inside and outside the academy many of whom called for the firing and retraction of the articl article and the backh prompted a public apology on facebook for many followed by a rebuttal from those who defended the piece arguing that if they went through the proper process, but of course just yesterday inside Higher Education ran the headline a dangerous withdrawal and we are looking at the article here. It was about another article this time called the case for colonialism and it was revoked by its publisher but not because of poor scholarship for publication irregularities. Rather because of the threats over the publishing and of course theres the adjunct professor at the ethics county college for defending a black wives matter event on the Tucker Carlson show on fox news and theres also the university of professor or excuse me, the pennsylvania law professor, evergreen state professors Brett Weinstein and the researcher, and the list goes on. All these individuals faced controversies this year alone and in some cases faced the demand for their jobs not necessarily because of bad scholarship but presenting the ideas inside and outside of the academy that some didnt agree with. I want to begin this conversation with you and encourage others to jump in at any point tonight if you have something to add or most importantly something to disagree with. I just provided a couple of anecdotes which on their own me or may not be concerning to the panel but as some say do we have any data to demonstrate that there is something to these anecdotes that there is a trend for certain topics or research were discussions or taboo in the company or is that what weve seen the last three to four years and social media or hyper partisan news environment strike . In terms of data are there topics that are offlimits, ive never seen anyone try to quantify that in a meaningful way. There are certainly numerous topics but ive been told. We dont do it, its not a good idea. For some of those folks at the Convention Place in the im not so sure why they would if they were not tenured. They know there is a consequence. People know that youre career is on the line and im surprised some of them would do it. One of the nations most progressive leftleaning in new york but whats interesting is this time it would never happen. Not just because of the topic but quite frankly, they would say that theres n there is no y on the panel for other reasons. So, for better or worse i would say right now quite frankly the discussion shutdown. I was attacked by a board of the member and i used the term from one of my education advisers. Too high here the members i realized very quickly i may be right the answer is no i did with some of our colleagues have been writing about. Im very shocked and disappointed by how many faculty members are squandering that privilege by not being courageous enough. Thats one of the things i love about everyone on is whether we agree or not we have this platform is a privilege and an honor in this country to be able to have that especially if we look at other places going on. We dont have that privilege, so i find it frustrating when the refuse or choose. I want to turn over to you to reflect the data. You have gone quite a bit of research on political tolerance which you find through empirical analysis to be political intolerance, excuse me, which defined but there is more political tolerance today than there has been in past generations. What effect, if any, do you believe that the political pass on this discussion because when i think about some of the controversies they do not necessarily fit into nice neat political buckets. That is everything that we are talking about. So when we talk about the political tolerance isnt whether or not you like somebody comes there is some confusion about that. They ran an article about a year ago that said people are more tolerant than ever because they like all these people that we used to not like. That isnt what we mean by tolerance, what we mean is how you treat the people that you most fundamentally dislike. And so it is whether or not you allow people to view most fundamentally disagree with even if you think are dangerous to society to have a public protest, to have a book published and one of the common questions to teach the University Courses and that consistently is the lowest level of tolerance of all of the measures whether somebody speaks in your community or publish a book. The one about the College Professors always has the lowest level of acceptance. And so i think what we are seeing has everything to do with political tolerance. They find the more educated you are, the more tolerant you are supposed to be coming is that correct . That is correct. One of the things i repeatedly point out is i dont think that institutions are causing this problem because it is still a case that people do go to the colleges or universities are more tolerant than people that do not receive the trends in society where for the first time sincsince we started measuring political tolerance, the youngest generation is no longer a more politically tolerant than their parents. That always used to be the case since the 1950s when we started studying it so the trend has reversed. That is a big change. There is an ideological imbalance when it does rise up. There is a relationship between exposure and intellectual diversity. Its whether they would attempt to talk by someone that they found offensive and other measures of tolerance and their relationship so we got done playing with the national data. The trend the more diverse the major the level of tolerance. He said it is authoritarianism and trust for the system has there ever been to data released this morning this is the first generation that theres actually more authoritarianism than what weve seen in the last three or four generations, which is very troubling. Let me ask you the question that i always get. What is so good around toleran tolerance. What does research on political tolerance is shown for 60 years is that a there are consequences beyond silencing the group that you targeted and so, for example when we look at tolerance towards different groups it is correlated, so people who dont want racists to speak also dont want the muslims were communists to speak they are all positively correlated because wha that haps i think is that people of private fairness principles if you offend me somebody else may offend somebody, so what happens is the conclusions that researchers have made for 60 years is that it threatens democratic vitality that everyone pretty the environment when tolerance starts to decline. I want to talk about your book because correct me if im wrong but you said it isnt entirely the campuses driving these intolerances, correct . It is pretty intolerant already. In your book you discuss the role that the politics plays in shaping the modern discourse particularly on the left and you said it places a special emphasis on universities and you write in your book in the 60s and 70s they were treated to the university is both politically and ideologically from other senses. You talk about the 1962 statement which identified the universities as an overlooked influenza and the shift to the university was largely successful and you go on to talk about how retreating turned over the university to a serial political staging of melodrama is. And you are a member of the left as you made clear in your buck. Perhaps on the policy more broadly, it may be the cause or is it more