america chartered by congress to disseminate information about the u.s. constitution on a nonpartisan basis and the centerpiece of our inspiring educational mission is a partnership with two great lawyers organizations the federalist society and the american constitutional society. the national constitution center has brought these two great organizations together to sponsor a series of traveling constitutional debates across america. this is our third time here at the beautiful chicago cultural center and we hosted debates from washington d.c. to dallas to san francisco illuminating about the central constitutional issues in the news. this phenomenal collaboration has a great on-line component and i want you all to know if you don't already about this spectacular interactive constitution that we have launched with the federal society and the american constitutional society. you can click on any and see the leading score are hars in america. with a thousand words about what they agree the provision means and statements about what they disagree so when you click on the first amendment that's the sub topic this evening you can find jeffery stone from university of chicago and from the school of law and then areas of disagreement. have this remarkable on-line tool that's lump negotiating citizens across america. this an exciting debate tonight because we're here to discuss question which has riveted campuses and citizens across the country. should public universitieses have the right to define hate speech on campus. we have emphasized public universitieses because those are bound by the first amendment to the constitution and in the course of tonight's important debate i want you to separate your political from constitutional views. that's the central for all of these educational efforts you might conclude that hate speech is terrible but the first amendment protects it or you might think hate speech is not bad but the first amendment allows it so when you vote on that do public universities have the right to ban that. i have to add something else. this is a remarkable topic which the federal society often agree and we're going to start that with jeff stone and the federal society that will tell you the su preechl court has prevented the banning of hate speech. they may disagree where the doctrine should go and when you cast your vote you might conclude the first amendment doctrine be changed to allow for the banning of hate speech but you will see them say so far the court has protected hate speech and then we'll broaden it to include three other remarkable scholars and susan nominated by others and they have positions you'll hear and then at the end you will vote again. keep your mind open. you will vote at the beginning and then hear the arguments and vote at the end and the winning team has changed most opinions so that's why it's a hard question. people are debating it and approaching it with open minds. the other thing before starting today's debate is produced as part of a great series of free speech debates and they are helping us take this across the country. it's now time for us to vote and i'll say we'll talk with eric and jeff so start thinking of the questions you'll ask and hand them out as the conversation begins and the question is resolved public universities should be able to ban hate speech on campus you can vote anonymously and we'll ask you to vote again after the motion so using your device please answer that question. do you agree with the resolution that public universities should be able to define and ban hate speech on campus if you support press yes if appose press no and then hit send. if there's only a yes that would be a bad debate. scroll down and then you'll find every option. it's an incredible hospitality we have toward all of you. press the downward clicker and then send now you're about to hear from two of the leading first amendment scholars both here at the university of chicago that just passed some important principals that we'll talk on and it's my pleasure to introduce them now. jeffery stone and his most recent book is sex and the constitution from america's origins from the 21st century and contributed to the board that principals about free speech. eric posen er a scholar of international and constitutional law is the author of the twilight of international human writes and ladies and gentlemen, join me in welcoming them both. [applause] jeff? you wrote these university of chicagos and one of the leading defenders of the first amendment. let us know why the supreme court has done this. >> the supreme court has taken ten position that in the realm of restrictions on speech the most problematic are those that forbid the expression of a particular point of view. for the government to decide certain viewpoints are impermissible puts such a that restrictions on the ability to convey a particular point of view are basically per se unconstitutional and perhaps they create a clear and present danger of truly grave harm and that's a general proposition but the court has stated and is a the case in other the public discourse at public university and therefore in the same way cannot for bid and advocates gay rights or apposed abortion it cannot restrict speech that advocates what is regard as hate speech. it doesn't have any acceptable or understandable definition butter there's instances of what we recognize as hate speech like nazi flags for instance. and yet institutions can not prohibit faculty and staff from expressing views from others regarded haight full. not the the court thinks those are good, bad or indifferent but the court said it's not for the government to decide if they can or cannot be expressed. >> thank you for that summary. you said they only essentially and likely to cause lawless action and we can be confident that the views are accepted by our friends at the federalist society on the interactive constitution endorse the excellent summary you've given. do you believe the first amendment should be construed differently. does the supreme court have it right and in addition do you believe private universities not form early bound should have that power? >> let me answer the question this way. i'll try to put aside the doctrine and talk about what happens on campuses and what should happen on campus as jeff mentioned it's hard to know what hate speech is and sort of occurs in all kinds of different context and depending on the context regulation may be appropriate. the classroom first of all. in the classroom, students don't have any free speech rights or shouldn't and the students speak only if the professor allows them too. i teach financial regulation and in that class i would they will them to stop and if they didn't i could kick them out. it's simply not relevant to the mission. another context is the living conditions of the students so students are not like the rest of us that can withdrawal from homes when we feel battered by the political discourse going on and i'm quite sympathetic that if in that context a black student is constantly hearing racist comments from his white roommate that the university should step in rather than saying this is opportunity for some educational benefit or some useful give and take. students debating out of class and i think that those are very complicated settings for which a range of approachs can be taken appropriately. i'm sympathetic that the university can say we have limited resources and we want students to hear from somebody with something valuable to say so if you want to invite someone that's going to call people names you cannot use university facilities. you can do it on-line or outside of campus and other universities might take other approaches and they're free to experiment. norms are different and as long as different ones are experimenting then students can select among the universities that they attend then overtime maybe we'll get a better since of the appropriate way to regulate speech so for that reason i'm not willing to take the position that hate speech should be allowed but my personal view is i like what's happened thanks to jeff at the university of chicago but i wanted to say that what's right for the university is necessary right for yale or burkley or the university of texas. >> so jeff, do you respond there. first of all tell us what the chicago principals are and would they allow regulation to the kind endorseed in the classroom and the dorm and possibly even with the invitation of controversial speakers and do you believe it should be adopted by all or not? >> the amendment is understood to mean as applied to public universities i say in public discourse so i think that eric is completely right. in the classroom, universities clearly determine what subjects can be discussed and what's appropriate on a given day and similarly in grades exams and the way they're defended and justified and that's not part of the basic concept of free speech so it's the public aspect that's directly controlled by the first amendment. the dorm situation is a complicated one. i agree and then talking about the first amendment issue for a moment. the dorm situation is interesting. the argument could be made as eric does make and the captive audience is there and the question is can the resident or some other official decide which messages are permissible and not. the point about what is hate speech? it is hate speech to have a swastika or a nuice or assign that says people of abortions are baby killers and you can go down that line and nobody know where's to end that and to put resident heads in charge of decided which are okay and not. trump should be impeached is that hate speech? what about the trump supporters? so you need content neutral rules saying you can't put signs and that's how the government does to relate this conundrum. i agree that private universities have the right to desite side what speech they will allow and not allow and promote in their own facilities. that's the right of those institutions and they're not restricted or governed by that. so chicago like the university of chicago that's long and pretty extraordinary tradition. the president of the university being a wared of institutions around the country these have begun to percolate 7 faculty members in charge of a statement or principal for the university and the statement that we drafted is committed the robust expression of people's points of view that it should be to encourage and debate to teach people how to deal with ideas in a fearless way. not for the university to decide. what ideas should or should not be permitted. if people don't like ideas they should challenge them and explain why they're wrong and argue with why they should be rejected and develop those skills and that's the center of what the university is about and that our motivations to enter real world where they will not be protected from speech they find haight full to train them to deal with that speech in a powerful and effective way the basic idea is to celebrate that. there's speech that's illegal and those that constitutes and so on but in the realm of ideas the university is not to be intrusive and it's up for the faculty. what i said eric is right. institutions are free legally to decide what they want to do about this issue. and in the same way upon ideas and their viewpoints. we will have our university and only allow people that are dedicated to support donald trump or abortion and not prepared say that. they're allowed to do that and that's their right. my view is that's not a university. that what makes it a university is it's open to challenging all ideas and it should not play the role of censoring in that manner but it's the legal right of them to do that. my own view is when they do that i think they sacrifice a core part to test ideas in fairsiest way possible. >> eric. jeff, basically says that these principals are not only right for chicago but they get to the essence of what universities are about and our audience and debate in voting on this question is deciding how they think the first amendment should be construe and not how the supreme court has done it. can you make a case why you believe if the process was done properly? >> notre dame. byu. their universitys with speech codes and they have theological commitments of the sort that i don't agree but they engage in it's possible to have those that is committed to research and teaching that they don't let people cross. now i find it hard to believe that this approach will do better scholarship but i'd like to have competition. and you can take the view that if we have those debating within their pages and that may be true but it also may be better if we have it across universities and there's also this point that jeff makes about the difficulty of drawing lines and i actually don't think it's that difficult to draw lines. let's take another analogy of the private employers. they have the same problem universities do. all have various rules they use. sometimes they'll say no politics or have extremely vague guidelines and people get upset there will be human resources address it in a way one hopes would be capable and i think they were doing this for a long time until this issue became polarized and i think they were going along fine until all the attention was directed upon them. i'm more sympathetic that public universities should not engage in this because i don't trust state to do this but i do think that the first amendment should be interpreted flexably in the case to allow them to while at the same time the experimentation should be much more allowed to flourish and the last point is jeff says that its important for students to learn how to criticize people and defend idea but i think the important part of what it teaches is stability. you need to defend your ideas in away that doesn't offend other people. when people get angry we see this in lots of institutions the most successful including universities and they encourage stability and they people who get emotional and call people names they're not usually successful scholars and in legislatures it's the same thing. they're strong in norms because it's necessary for people that disagree with each other to cooperate and what the students need to learn is that actually they have to choose words carefully and they learn that well they'll be well prepared after they graduate. >> please respond to the excellent points eric says public universities are not the same and they are capable of drawing the distinctions and in the course of your thoughts the bills proposed that would require public universities to remain neutral and prevent them from imposing penalties for students and others that interfere with speakers. so i emphatically agree with eric about the responsibility to teach their students about mutual respect. one of the themes i forgot to mention. that's part of what a university should do as students and with respect to questions i agree that notre dame and others can define what they want to be. but any student that defends roe v. wade is out of here. that's not my way to define university. i think they should be able to say that and you should argue and that's what university is about. that doesn't mean it's the legal definition but it's the aspiration. with respect to legislation i find it troubling even in the public realm. for the legislature to get too involved with universities and leadership by dictating what the rules should be that worries me because i trust much more the leaders of the universities public universities as well as private to make those judgments because of their experience and the depth of understanding much more than politicians who's motivations are often highly collared by disadvantage and even though the laws that might be imposed are ones on the face that i don't necessarily disagree with as a matter of principle in the absence of a real crisis i prefer legislatures keep their hands off. and the other thing that makes me uncomfortable about it to be honest and this is quite candid is that i think that what you have is an odd distribution of views to traditional liberals and conservatives and liberals are divide now. some see themselves as most committed issues of equality and what they see as justice and feel that should be override and unto there and you see those with the commitment by people in positions of power that do not trust anyone including themselves to have the power to decide what points of view can beest spoused and not. on the conservative side on those in history efforts of suppression of speech have been driven by political conservatives whether in the early 19th century or about religious moralism or opposition to darwinism or turn of the century with world war i anyone to criticize the war or the draft can be throne out or during the mccarthy era. it's always been conservatives on the side of restricting speech. and for the most part it's been conservatives much more restrictive so i find it a bit annoy together be honest that all these republican legislatures are suddenly championing free speech in a situation that the people silences are ann colter and others and what it's about for them is not so much the principal of free speech as it is the particular thing being done. it is a matter of principal in terms of what this about. >> one more thought from eric and we'll invite colleagues so jeff has been taking shots against conservatives. what's wrong with these bills that are drafted largely by the goldwater institute a libertarian think tank. would require university to remain neutral and would you support those and you think universitys can define and bend hate speech if you defined hate speech how would you define it? >> i can't help jumping in. lincoln and franklin roosevelt went after father mack coughlin, the right wing populist got the f.c.c. to withdrawal the radio license he was operating under and threatened to do so. this law you know, gosh. these public, you know sometimes i should disinvite people if it's going to cause, if the person should not be speaking in the first place because he has nothing to offer, he's just a pro jobbing provocative person. i see no reason why a university would want someone like that. that person is not advancing the educational mission. much better to find someone with similar moral views willing to make a serious argument. so i don't see any problem. i am also a little weary about this law and what implications it might have so i guess i would be skeptical about it and then finally i think one of the idea about defining hate speech part of the problem is when jeff is thinking of hate speech he's think thinking roe verses wade is wrong. i'm thinki ing of flag issues a things. i am not sure what jeff thinks. i'm sure he thinks the university should allow that as well but i think it should be up to the university to bonn those as apposed to discussing confederate flag and swastikas under certain circumstances it may be appropriate for the university to regulate that but when you get to constitutional law and moral values that doesn't seem like hate speech to me and i don't think that's what the debate is about if there are people that think defending or attacking abortion is hate speech. i don't think that's hate speech. you can make that argument i think in a civil way if you have good reasons even if you're not right that's legitimate speech and universities should allow it. >> great. well ladies and gentlemen, although we recognize that the supreme court has protected you have heard arguments on both sides on where the lines should be drawn and we're now ready to bring in our colleagues. associate professor of law at detroit mercy school of law and currently serves as affiliated faculty with the islamophobia research and documentation project. susan banish faculty at the burke man center at harvard. founded the dangerous speech project to find ways of diminishing inflammatory while protecting freedom of expression and professor of politics at princeton has just written i can say this a wonderful new book which is about to come out called speaking freely, please join me in welcoming our guests. i wonder what you would say to the audience about what you believe that the first amendment should be construeed to allow public and universities for defining and banning hate speech. >> universities and the culture at different universities and colleges is is distinct and diverse along a range of lines. >> first of all, we see emboldening of white supremacy and racism and islamophobia, essentially emboldened by the state, state policy, state rhetoric from the various high offices of the land. also, especially with regard to public universities, currently there is this intersecting moment of eroding affirmative-action. is plummetingc considerably. specifically at his situations where people of color are far and few between, it is an equal because students typically can't burden the responsibility of the collective interest of the community they represent and so on. on the other end, because there between, this few emboldened violence from typically elements from the right make their vulnerability a lot more intense and more pronounced at this converging moment of declining affirmative-action. michigan,me from, affirmative-action has been abolished. this implied animus that has been spurred by the state. conceptualizet to what is going up -- contextualize what is going on politically in the current moment. jeff: thank you for that very important context. thatust reminded us affirmative action may affect the kinds of students who are able to learn and that the political climate may affect the way speech is received. keith, your book makes a passionate and concise and intense -- i would say the best sort of concise distillation i have seen of the argument that the purpose of universities is to disseminate and produce knowledge, and that that withedge is inconsistent any restrictions on speech. can you tell us what? kate -- tell us why? the goal of universities in general is to try to advance knowledge, which means often working on the very edge and most controversial ideas, to disseminate that knowledge, both the people inside the university and outside the university, and try to create a climate on campus in which difficult ideas can be addressed head-on and directly and people can feel have those difficult conversations. part of the concern in this context of hate speech is not necessarily the content of some of the things that might be designated as hate speech or valuable to that, but i am very concerned that it is hard to wew the line and trust that can successfully empower somebody to make determinations as to what ought to count as hate speech and therefore can be driven out of the university aerovironment and what can be allowed -- university environment and what can be allowed. empowering legislators to -- uate content of speech addtimes that means they from a conservative direction and tried to drive a speech from the left. sometimes that means they act from a laughing perspective and try to drive at speech from the right. i am skeptical about empowering administrators with that kind of authority. on the other hand, for professors in the classroom, for example, and other kinds of context, it should be very much be our goal to foster a nurturing environment in which students don't wind up leaning toward speech that is merely provocative, merely hateful, but how do you have conversations that are sometimes difficult sometimes i'm very sensitive topics, but nevertheless be productive. jeff: thanks for that. susan, your dangerous speech project introduces an important distinction between hate speech broadly defined and what you call dangerous speech. and some of it should be restricted online and others not. tell us what dangerous speech is and what dangerous speech online do you think be restricted. susan: and how. jeff: let's put that in there, too. speechi coined dangerous from simple observation in the course of writing some legal scholarship. i don't recommend it, but i spent quite a bit of time looking at the sort of language that has been used by awful civilians, political leaders usually, in the months and years before an irruption of intergroup violence. .t is uncannily similar there are techniques that they all seem to know. you would think there is a school for this. dehumanization is one where we are already familiar. there is a number of other hallmarks are telltale signs of dangerous speech. it is a theory that there is a particular, much smaller category than hate speech that is this rhetoric that gradually breaks down normal social barriers that get silenced. becauseerested in this -- well, for a number of reasons. preventing intergroup violence is a tremendously important goal for me. also, i think one can get a large majority of people to goal.on that at the same time, i am tremendously interested in protecting freedom of expression. first, because it is a fundamental human right. and second, it also must be protected in order to prevent intergroup violence. people need peaceful means to express grievances or the result of violence. hate speech by contrast is a large, highly subjectively , overbroad come vague category in almost every case. overbroad, vague category in almost every case. how strong, how serious is hate? the only common thread among most definitions is to denigrate a member of another group because of that group identity or group membership. you, asns to say i hate so many teenagers do to their parents, for example, is not hate speech. then one more distinction and i will stop causing so much trouble. whose hate is it when we say hate speech? is that hate in the mind of the theker, in which case question is a mens rea problem. speech referred to expression that can make someone else hate or make them hate more? or a third possibility, is hate speech expression that make people feel hated in practical application? if you look at discourse about hate speech, it is often the unexaminedmpletely assumption. insufficient -- on the contrary, overbroad and ineffective regulation, which is one of the reasons why i am very skeptical of regulation of hate speech in general and even of danger speech in practice. i think that social norms, informal norms are remarkably speechl at prohibiting and therefore indirectly prohibiting behavior. they certainly can change frequently. we have lots of examples for that. you for your distractions and your work. you have defined dangerous speech. theseid five of indicators must be true. a speaker with a high degree of influence over the audience. the audience has fears the speaker can cultivate. a social or historical context that is propitious for violence. and the means of dissemination, influential in itself because it sourcesole or relevant for the audience. i think we should put a concrete example on the table. we should start with one of the most controversial at the university of oklahoma. a number of students were videotaped on abbas engaging in some extraordinarily offensive engaging in a bus some extra nearly offensive speech. what were the circumstances of the case and why do you think the university was wrong for expelling the students? he didn't tell me he was went to as with us. to be clear. a group of students in a fraternity had rented a bus and were going in this primary goal -- private vehicle to a party, i think. chante fraternity had a that basically said no african-americans, using the and word, were welcome in the n-word,ty -- using the were welcome in the fraternity. it was videotaped on cell phone and it went viral. the university president, who was the former governor of the state, expelled the students. is that,bout that first of all, this was not intended to be imposed upon anyone that wasn't voluntarily in this particular place. second of all, it was words that were particularly offensive. on the disagree offensiveness of it. speech. is just free the supreme court held, for example, you could not punish theone for saying fuck draft on a jacket in a public place because it offended people and it was profanity. it is protected by the first amendment. it is committed to the argument. you cannot take words and make them illegal. the supreme court was right in that case. the university of oklahoma was wrong in this case. that doesn't mean i don't think that the use of epithets like that could be punished. they could be punished if they are on a face-to-face encounter and using it as a direct personal insult, in a dormitory, for example. but this was not that. these words were not being hurled at an individual as an epithet. whether it was meant to be funny or not to be funny, that's not my problem. it seems to me this was within their rights. jeff: i think i would like everyone's use on the university of oklahoma case. now i think geoff and i are in agreement. if we alter it with students on campus with black students. let's say they are not yelling it at black students, but they are in a fraternity ritual. i think they should be punished. i don't -- i'm not sure expulsion should be the right punishment. they are not making an argument. they are not advancing research. they are not educating people. they are not resizing roe v. wade. is an action that demoralizes other students for no reason whatsoever. i think that is an easy case for some kind of punishment. if i am right about that, that is hate speech regulation. i echo eric. what value are these racist slurs adding to the vibrancy of the institution? very little. you can protect speech as speech generally, but it's not an enriching exchange on campus. second, it raises another report in point. we caricature as hate coming from the fringe right or the fringe left. but this fraternity illustrates that it also arises from spaces and gradients along the political spectrum that are not on the fringe right and the fringe left. i wonder what kind of role these fringe actors on both sides of the extreme are actually activating fraternities, other organizations on campus to partake in racist activity or spew these racial slurs on campus. it might have some sort of process where they are inspiring or endangering some organizations on campus, especially in a place like oklahoma -- i didn't look at the demographics -- but the black student population may not be that significant. keith: i think it is totally right that this is a difficult example in the sense that this is not speech that is particularly valuable. it is not part of the core mission to worry about fraternity chance on buses on field trips. there's no significant intellectual content. the university is not concerned with setting up an environment and speech they are concerned with protecting. i go back to the point that concerns me about these cases that is empowering administrators to go after students who they find have done something offensive. it's questions about how clear were the rules ahead of time and is expulsion to dramatic? i think this case highlights one of the dangers, which is the only reason the students wound up leaving campus was because the video haven't -- happened to go viral. it was embarrassing to the university and he had to step in in order to establish the university's public reputation or generally. case, it is speech that is not valuable. faculty cases, it is sending a distressing tweets and damaging to the university reputation and we have to find a way to fire you. what really is motivating them is often not the larger educational mission of the university, but instead improving the brand of the university. kahled: susan, you studied this. and it went viral. according to the present pose, is there a case for restricting videos that go viral because they are more likely to lead to imminent violence? should that university of oklahoma video have been restricted or punished? about the whole gamut of possibilities for both whichment and regulation, are not the same, after all. when a video or speech, but more often ava to like that surfaces, what is the most effective way of dissuading other students from doing the same thing? that should be the question. after all, we don't have prior restraint for such content. we certainly don't want it. incidentally, it is impossible online anyway. fortunately, we don't have to think about it. if i remember correctly, after the oklahoma case, at least one of the students apologized. i think perhaps the parents also apologized. undoubtedly, there were other denunciations from many people other than the family members and those who had been recorded making this chant. university had not dismissed to those students, they would have been punished, believe me. had they stayed on campus. and others who sympathized with their views and the practice of chanting in that way would have been keenly aware of it. i'm thinking of another case even further back of a young woman at ucla who recorded herself making a disgusting, despicable rant against asian students in the library specifically. it was met with a whole series -- an anonymous amount of criticism on that campus and around it, and also a series of that, let me just say, very effectively quashed her arguments -- that's a very polite way of putting it. one of the parody videos in particular was viewed more than a million times, many more times than the original video. i don't want to be pollyanna-ish about the possibilities of counter speech in the marketplace, but we do observe effective responses that i think may indeed be more effective than kicking somebody out. the same thing is true in many cases. white supremacist, they appeared in charlottesville in public. that is when it became impossible for a living, breathing americans not to know what they were saying. but it wasn't that they started saying those things at charlottesville. it's that that is when we first on heard them. jeff: do you want the last word on the university of oklahoma? kahled: with these two cases, the oklahoma case in the ucla case come in both instances, the video went viral. is the school taking punitive action to protect its brand of the students? if it didn't go viral, with a have been punished at all to protect the black students in the case of the oklahoma situation, asian students in the case of usually. i think not. it makes me think what the interest is in taking action. typically, the interest is predicting brand and appearances to the public, not to protect prospective harm to students who are targeted by the hate speech. jeff: great. this question of video going viral is now the table. where most people speak is not in the classroom, who are in the dorm, but online and they speak on facebook and google. by facebook and google are not --nd by the first amendment but facebook and google are not bound by the first amendment. if they do allow the banning of hate speech. on youtube, you cannot say that you hate a religious group. although you can say that you hate a particular religious leader. should facebook and google voluntarily embrace a first amended standard? do you believe it would be good expression?of and what do you say to those who say that videos are more likely to go viral but they are more likely to cause harm, incite violence or misunderstanding than speech that is not online? geoff: in the world of social media, the fact that anything can go viral, it gives it much good of potential, power than otherwise would be the case in a small town where someone handed out a leaflet. whathe question about institutions or facebook -- institutions like facebook should be doing, on the one hand, if they don't in some ways police what goes on on their websites, than the speech we don't like becomes potentially quite pervasive. on the other hand, for them to be policing it is very dangerous. there's never been, in society as a whole, entities with the power to control and to influence what we hear, what we see, what we read at the level that something like facebook has or twitter has or whatever. for them to start getting involved in picking and choosing what will be allowed and not and powers them in a way that is almost as scary as the government doing it. what is interesting is, when these social media entities came into existence, the government treated them differently from newspapers or magazines. or that is a threat or invasion of privacy -- congress and active legislation provide entities like facebook and twitter could not be held legally responsible for what was put on their website. the idea was to make them completely open forum so the individual could say what they wanted to say and facebook and twitter would not consider. -- censor. the person who puts it up may be held responsible, but you will not be held responsible. now they are moving more into this realm of getting involved and picking and choosing and censoring. that is worrisome, particularly in realms that do not involve illegal speech. i think that is a real threat to democracy. i do not know what the answer is to it, but it is not something i am comfortable with at all. jeffrey: eric, you have argued that speech should be regulated. wouldrstand your argument allow the restriction of morse each in the first amendment currently allows. the firsteech in amendment -- then the current first amendment allows. eric: facebook is a private institution. .ts users are using the service congress cannot regulate faced look period. it may be the case that congress should not regulate facebook in the end. i think it is a dangerous way to think because this is a new world we are in. ,f facebook has the monopoly other forums and platforms kind of fell away. zuckerberg decides. of thel the problems political process, i would rather have the political process race on the democratic principles. decide what we can say on facebook, not mark zuckerberg. what the rules should be, i think it is too soon to impose rules. it is too hard to know how this will be working out. we can observe what is going on in europe where there has been some effort to regulate internet platforms. that might be a disaster, it might work you do not know. we will see what happens. the thing that you are mentioning, it is a matter of principle. we should discuss the .ossibility in the old days, we would feel it is protected by the first amendment. it is not a big deal is people send letters to each other or talk in the street about it. it can change completely when you have youtube videos that millions of people's the -- people see. we need to think about the proper contours of these rules. i'm more about trying to prevent people from shouting first amendment and closing off the conversation. that is what i want to stop from happening. if there should be any regulations at all, i am not sure. jeffrey: eric just mentioned regulations in europe. engaged the right to be forgotten online. if we were in europe and someone was reading that jeff is doing a terrible job as a moderator, after the show was over, i could do google and yahoo! and demand the removal of this appalling, if perhaps true tweet. google would have to decide if i was a public figure and if it was in the public interest. google is viable up to 2% of its annual income, which last year was $60 billion. google has received -- it includes removing articles about the right to be forgotten if the. you have studied online speech more deeply than anyone else on the panel. is the european right to be forgotten a good policy, and should it be embraced in america? no.n: you have already beautifully part of it. it does not work very well. the right to be forgotten is a complete misnomer. rise to the right to be forgotten -- it is better known all around the world. even though that is not what he was dreaming, if you write about , that article is easily searchable and discoverable online areas he is a great demonstration of the fact that it simply does not work. he was not asking for the right to be forgotten. it is the right to curate your own reputation. ,hat is what the european including others are seeking. it is a fascinating idea. to be discussed on another panel. i think the key point is it the blade of not work. for regulation of the internet are coming out of a forms ofut various content online, including hate speech. july and hasd in put into effect on october 1 a network enforcement law, which requires internet platforms, including the ones you just mentioned, essentially any platform that is operating on a reasonably big scale. that includes youtube, twitter and facebook. think -- within 24 hours. the timing is very key. if not, they face a fine of 50 million euros, which is a number not in the billions, but i can still catch the attention of facebook. that law specifies 22 provisions of the german penal code, insult andn full -- a long list of other speech crimes. that facebook, like the other platforms is not relying on mark zuckerberg or any other human to make these decisions but is automating them. that should terrify us. it is the only way to get content down within 24 hours. that would be completely secret, not only to all of us, but it is ofding to an enormous system secret, automatic censorship. not even properly understood by the people at facebook. it will be -- it is already being driven by artificial intelligence methods in which algorithms train themselves. it gets a little complicated. there are very serious threats to freedom of expression, jordan by good intentions, but caused by the separation of the intentions from likely successful outcomes. automaticecret censorship is a powerful phrase. want to put this on the table on whether the platforms are right to allow the banning of denounces athat religious group. iu cannot on facebook say hate muslims. i hate the that prophet mohammed. when google was asked to remove the innocence of the muslims video, couple years ago, which criticized the profit and not the profit and not a religion, they left it up. if it denounced the religion, they would have taken it down. and powerfult about the distinctive aspect about the university and its purposes. deeply facebook -- do you believe facebook should ban hate speech against religious groups? crucialt serves really functions. we need to recognize the value they bring to the table, while recognizing at the same time that there are lots of -- i recently joined twitter. i think it is telling and useful. if government intervenes and forces the hand of facebook or google to start trying to purge certain kinds of speech, that is very heavy-handed. it would likely lead to lots of errors and be influenced by regimes. also apply a wide range of platforms which i find disconcerting. one of the advantages have now is that while face book, google or others seem extraordinarily and influential, it is also true that it is the free market. people can come off and on these platforms. if one decided they wanted to a purging of disturbing feelnt so that everybody family-friendly, lots of people would you -- leave that site and --somewhere else for you somewhere else. lots of people will leave those as well. we want that ability to move across these kinds of platforms area we have seen platforms come and go. jeffrey: so much of your work is focused on anti-hate speech. khaled: they are exclusively committed to defaming religious groups. and josh there is -- there is an economic aspect. thatis happening is obviously facebook operates on a global scale. many muslims that are seeing this when they scroll through facebook are choosing to quit facebook and go on to other spaces, where the presence of these kinds of hateful depictions are scarcer or not as visible. it is more economic that they want to maximize the number of users they have. less so of making a moral judgment of if it is right or wrong thing. i think it is a good thing in the short term because of the current impact we find ourselves that. long-term, i would rather that these private platforms not police this kind of speech. i think it is driven more by economic considerations on the part of facebook and their competitors. jeffrey: back to the really hard questions on campus. the charlottesville protest included really hateful chance hants and ultimately led to violence. should they be able to ban the ?rotests we are talking about a public university first amendment. is theey figured out principal of retail. the principal is basically that if you allow government to restrict the right of someone to speak because others threatened to be violent or disruptive, if they are allowed to week, he basically turn over their right to free speech to people who do not like what someone is saying. this came to a head for the court during the civil rights movement. in that era, there were white southerners who were becoming violent in the face of peaceful civil rights marches. the supreme court not context said if you allow this coming you are giving up on the principle of priests each and turning over individuals right. court has accepted the proposition that government cannot pervade beach -- forbid orech unless the university a city has exhausted all reasonable staff can take to avoid violence. that does not mean they have to theally fall down and let violence occurred. speech,hey stop the they have to demonstrate that they have exhausted all reasonable's that available to them to protect this feature, rather than to yield to the obstructionist. the reason for that, if you do not do that, you are in writing people. it could be gay rights, women's rights, white supremacists. it is the basic visible. jeffrey: thank you for putting on the table the principle. eric, rather than asking you whether you think the principle is to arduous, i will ask a question from the audience for you. if the speaker, without logical arguments, simply sunni to be provocative -- being provocative, like a black lives matter activist -- eric: this goes back to criticism of a number of people about the notion that the university administrator should in an arbitrary way. i do not think we should assume that about the administrators. sometimes they might come and we should criticize them if they are arbitrary about it. to make a concrete, let's suppose this person is a known -- known asor provocative who gets people fory and does it basically selfish purposes. the university should make a judgment whether the presence of the person on the campus advances the mission of the university or is against the mission of the university. it will depend. it could be for some people that it is good or it may not have any value. the university's resources may be better used inviting another person. as i said before, partly what is driving this is there are several thousand universities with different administrations with different views on these matters. they will have a ideological .iases as long as there is a diversity across universities, that is fine. people are going to make mistakes and be biased. outside the first amendment, that is not a reason for not having rules or giving people discretionary authority. my position is, that is fine. i am sure there will be errors. i think the university have to be able to do that if it wants to function as a university. keith, do i take it from your book that you disagree that administrator should not be in the business of deciding what speech of high-value and what is not? they would emphasize one element of air point. choices about who comes to campus. has to beeffort setting up a system where you are going to extend invitations for various purposes to bring people to the campus. what is the best system that will result in the most productive way. if you set up a system where only department chairs can invite speakers into campus, lots of evidence will be dissatisfied. the department chair of science gets to decide who comes to campus to give talks relating to politics. lots of students will find that less than interesting. it is important that they bring some figures to campus because faculty will find that important. may authorize student groups to make their own invitations. invited have long speakers to campus is that they find interesting. from the perspective of the faculty, many of those figures are not only interesting but full of hot air or provocative and not contributing usefully to the college campus. that does not mean we want the faculty to be able to veto those decisions, if the students they are valuable for their own purposes. university should ultimately be willing to engage with people. at the same time, you want to even givenents, their interests, who would be productive and who would be less productive to bring to campus. isfrey: this question significant. are you with eric on if administrators should discern which speakers should be invited? khaled: i would lean towards eric's position that there are certain circumstances where universities assess which speakers -- it comes during moments of crisis. amhard spencer, for instance a coming onto campus will not bring intellectual value. with the lower scale value that he brings with the peril he might incite. you might want to diss invite beaker of this character. nominatede have two acres disagreeing. i want you to adjudicate. -- why do you believe that is the case? geoff: i think it is more subtle than that. i cannot imagine a scenario in which a university decides that we have limited space, then the time -- limited time and we only one speakers who can contribute in a useful way. to the extent that they are able to do that without making judgments about whether they like or dislike the points of view of the speakers but making judgments about the quality of the intellect and quality of the ideas, i think that is ok. we do that all the time when we decide who to hire and what students to admit. it is much more complicated. the conflation of quality and viewpoint is risky. principle, i think eric is right. if you can only have so many speakers on campus, i think it is not inappropriate to decide which ones add and which ones do not. what makes me uncomfortable is i do not trust us to do that. if you are talking about people making judgments about political values and ideas that are highly controversial amongst students, citizens and faculty come i do not trust us to do that in a neutral way. in theory, eric is right. much diversity on the panel. susan, many analysts observe a breakdown of norms in our political system. if they are falling by the wayside, how can we trust the norms will be effective in regulating hateful speech? susan: that is a tough question. they are and they are not. we have so many different real and virtual spaces and communities. each of which is regulated by a set of norms. his zuckerberg and colleagues talk about facebook's community standard, implying that all, i cannot remember how people one billion or so now on facebook, implying that they constitute a community. they do not, of course. however, usually the people who live in a dorm on a college campus could be said to constitute a community. the people who take a course , afterr at a university the first class or two, also begin to constitute a community and come into that classroom with a large and detailed set of norms, to which they are already conforming because of their previous training. well do operate remarkably in some context and communities. very poorly because there are bad norms or poorly enforced. in other situations and other communities. speaking, there are lots of cesspools online. there are also places online in which norms operate quite successfully, either because they have emerged from a community or they have been enforced from above. reddit, operated by thousands of voluntary moderators. enforcementve, but of and compliance with their rules. there been some very interesting platformts, like a by a few kylied aboutas -- colleagues controversial topics with people who disagreed with each other. the explicit norm of stability. in order to join, you were required to read the rules, which is something none of us have done regarding facebook, twitter or youtube. how many of you have read the rules? you do not even know where to find them. in totalaw operating ignorance of law, in which case it is quite difficult to consider that law as an effective set of norms. coming back to other experiments, although we cannot see them or talk about them much, there are increasing experiments to form communities online and off-line in which norms are explicitly and clearly declared and enforce , not necessarily by means of formal law. nonetheless, they work. ,ven on university campuses they are not homogenous places. they include places where students live, they include classrooms and other spaces others have called professional spaces on campuses. there are also fully public spaces on campus where one would expect norms to operate less effectively and free speech to run rampant for good and for ill. that is not necessarily so bad. refuge incan take some places where they know the norms and expect them to be in force, in various ways they can withstand existing and in other places, where the norms are not as effective. jeffrey: we have about 15 more minutes. you have to be thinking hard because you have to vote again. they want a theory for why that should be. the next question gets to that one theory that speech can cause emotional injury, and therefore rather than only being banned if it is intended to cause imminent violence, it should be expanded to include emotional harm. there have been ready is that have shown that hate speech can have negative effects on events health and academic performance. health and academic performance. do you believe that universities should be able to ban speech that cause injury? >> that question reminds me of an article written, words that wound, that theorize that specific forms of hate speech might spur emotional harm. but it should be policed, to an extent, right? claims tied to emotional distress claims, i think about the tension between free speech, hate speech, and free speech excercise. muslim students might not want to express their emotional identity conspicuously for fear of backlash. there is also a detrimental effect on free exercise as well. there are political dimensions as well. so, protecting free speech, specific groups, which partake in hateful language and activity might also silence the political views and organizing of other groups. we think about vlm, which was blackated by the fbi as a identity extremist group. have onecond you campuses pro-palestinian organizations as well. speechre tensions where can diminish the free exercise right, and the tension between specific kind of speech and other forms of speech. >> thanks for that. a reminder, the forms of injury of speech might also affect religion and give rise to toward claims as well. this question is important enough that i'll ask, eric, do you think speech should be banned if it causes emotional injury? >> i don't know if it does. maybe it does in very narrow conditions. i have no idea. at least in principle, if i know inay something to the person front of me that it will cause the person to have a nervous breakdown and i do it knowing that in the person has a nervous breakdown, it does not seem to be that different from punching a person in the chin -- a deliberate infliction of injury. i do think that is a bit of a dodge. a lot of people believe in the harm principle and the traditional liberal ideas that regulation should only kick in to prevent harm. what people are really talking mannors being translated into emotional harm to get some rhetorical power to these. complaints as i said before, in private and public universities, they don't need emotional harm to regulate hate speech. if there's some other good reason. for example, if it interferes with education. you could articulate that as emotional harm, but you could just say, the chance we were going tobout, is it disrupt the class if people have to walk through a gauntlet before they sit down? yeah, it's going to disrupt the class and the university is within its rights to restrictive speech of the people being provocative. and even if the students are tough enough that they don't suffer any emotional distress whatsoever, there is a reasonable case for speech regulation. >> that is a powerful argument for the restriction of speech on campus that could cause emotional harm. picketsgree that tak outside of an african-american class could cause harm and therefore, be restricted? >> i think the starting point is correct, which is we ought to be concerned with treating an environment in which everyone can gain an education. universities want to be open to a broad range of people. they need to craig and diamonds in which that is possible to do. to createed environments in which that is possible to do. that would certainly be a reason to move the protests. in fact, i do that, moving loud enough away from classrooms and resident halls, so they don't interfere. but if you have to walk through, as you characterize it, a scarlet, and it is disturbing of people are saying, we should not be allowed to have a protest outside of a controversial speaker. ,f i want to hear richard speak should not have to run through a gauntlet to get to him because i would find that disturbing and emotionally damaging. yellingto hear people criticism of me as i go through. we need to be reluctant when authorizing demonstrators to intervene. i think a narrow claim of interfence is, we want to keep that sphere as narrow as possible. >> great. i'm hesitating. but closing statements, we have three more minutes. and more questions. ask more'm going to questions. fighting wocept of rk when distinguishing hate speech? fightinge doctrine of words, which the court recognized, basically holds that one individual hursls an epithet at another person in circumstances in which the person who hurls the seventh the person will respond with reasonable violence. that was a concept that existed in common law. the supreme court in 1940 said it was consistent with the first amendment. it has never upheld that since then. you could imagine a scenario in a bar when one person calls another hateful names, and the person responsible violence that you might want to punish the person who did that -- i don't make it takes it that far. >> great, the reason i'm not asking for closing statements is that think the speaker's positions are nuanced enough they will not have to do it quickly, but you will have to vote in one moment. that's not a luxury you have. i think this is the last question. it's back to the question of dis-invitation. what should be the role of students on campus with speakers ?hey disagree with how should private institutions decide on a definition of a good or bad argument? ic you have answered his question, but i will give you the last word because jeff does maybe antiregulation case. were using a definition on hate speech, what would it be? >> charles murray is fine. he's an academic that uses academic reasoning. i might disagree with him, but i would want him to be allowed. i'm not sure whether you can articulate a rule. i agree, the impetus traders need discretion. administrators need discretion. i would say something like, if you believe the speaker has nothing of value to say -- you of value tonothing say based on the standards universities use to value education and collegiality. universities make these judgments all the time. they have to. and they should make the same sort of judgments when evaluating speakers. i do agree. the standard should be nothing to do about politics. it should go more to the method the speaker uses. in thee is evidence past. there are procedural standards that could be used to evaluate potential speakers.. >> great. that's an excellent closing argument for your side. you are doing a public universities should be led to restrict speakers if they have nothing of value to say. ladies and gentlemen, it is up to you, having heard this sophisticated and nuanced talk today to cast your vote again. please take up your clickers, and vote again on the same question i asked in the beginning. do you agree with the resolution that public universities should be able to define and ban hate speech on campus. highlight yes or no and hit send . once you have hit send, the answer will be displayed for you, which means it has been recorded. this you cast consequential vote, on which the nation is hanging to hear your response through a friend from c-span -- we are broadcasting this debate -- i will ask you to answer the second question, which is important it encapsulates the national competition center and the society. yes or no, i now better understand the opposing view? hit yes or no and hit send. once you hit send, your answer will be displayed back here. which means it's been recorded. right, you have cast these momentous votes. the crack constitutional center team will now tabulate them, and prepare them in a way that is intelligible for me to read back to you in one moment. as they tally, let me tell you how meaningful it is to be able to convene these debates. isn't it inspiring, ladies and gentlemen, that these two great lawyers have nominated this variety of speakers that have disagreed amongst themselves on where to draw the line, confirming this is not a partisan issue. try to figure out where to draw the first amendment line. it is a difficult question involving flashes of values that divide and unite people with different political perspectives. and modeling this kind of civil discourse about an issue that is shutting down campuses. it is whatever three organizations exist to support. once you are encouraged as citizens to separate your political views from your constitutional views, not to get into the political controversies, but to make a judgment about what you think the first amendment should be construed to protect, you are thinking like a citizen in the highest sencese. i don't even have to vamp anymore. i can spare the quotation from the we brandeis. what the heck, i'm going to say it anyway. i have no views on this because i am a moderator, but i do have great admiration for justice brandeis. he said the following about the principles of free speech. those who want revolution believe that the purposes of government was to make men free to develop their faculties and libertyovernment the should be valued as an end and means. they believe liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. they believe in the freedom to think as you will and speak as you think. without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile. adequatethem, protection against the dissemination of thoughtles sness. political discussion is a little duty and there should be a fundamental principle within the american government. you have by convening here engaged within your public duty of political discussion and i thank you for it. heso want to thank t foundation for supporting this great series of debates. we're looking forward to our next talk asc debate, which will take place in dallas on november 28, again on the question on whether or not hate speech should be protected. that will pair with the national review institute with sean gillis, who believe the emotional injury should allow the restriction of speech. please tune in for that. i have the results. before the debate, 24% of you voted for the motion. you agreed that public universities have a right to define and ban hate speech. and 76% voted against the motion. after the debate, 24% of you voted for the motion. it's the exact same results! e.at means this is a ti congratulations to no one, because none of you changed any minds whatsoever. [laughter] [applause] that.on't knwnow there could have been some strategic vote changing. i'm pleased to share the second result. you voted -- 83% of you said yes, you better understand the opposing view, and only 15% of you said no. thank you for keeping your minds open. please, become involved with the national constitution ce nter. if you want to volunteer with our three groups, let us know and help us spread the light across america to debate this beautiful meeting of the document that -- to debate the meaning of this beautiful document that unites us, the constitution. thank you so much. [applause] ♪ everybody. i have been attacked by the russians, by the trump campaign, by the sanders campaign, and i can answer that with the clinton campaign. brazilay on "q&a", donna talks about her life in politics and her memoir "hacks." >> i was here at 10th and g street. hillary was very excited. she had met this senator who was running. she has roots in eleanor -- in illinois. my friend, we were on the third floor, and she knew barack obama. i did not know barack obama. howlw bobby rush and washington. i knew a lot of people in chicago politics, but i have never heard of a barack obama. we had met them in that spring of 2010, and the rest was history. >> "q&a" on c-span. up new year's weekend p.m.span, saturday at 8:00 eastern, north korean refugees describe life under the kim regime. >> tens of thousands of north korean defectors are leaving and arepapers being physically or sexually exploited. while the u.s. should continuing urging china and russia to support more economic sanctions, it should also do more to stop beijing from sending defectors back to north korea. p.m., james 6:30 clapper on the intelligence community. >> recall that an immaculate collection. morously, buti-hu it makes the point of being so precise, given the global interconnection represented by the internet. that is where everyone communicates, the difficulty of sorting out good and bad people. day,nday on new year's former clinton administration officials on the legacy of president bill clinton. >> he knew who he was fighting for. he knew the people he wanted to help. whengh thick and thin, times were good and bad, all he cared about was could he delivered for the people who needed the government to be on their side? >> watch this new year's weekend on c-span. >> coming up, "washington journal" is next live. and a book look at 2017 celebrity activists, on issues including modern slavery, doping and sports and early childhood education. after that, a trump campaign pollster on how 2016 election polling differ from in the actual result. coming up in an hour, haroon ullah discusses social media and countering violent extremism. it's the subject of his book, "digital world war: islamist, extremist, and the fight for yber supremacy." [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016]] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] host: good morning, it's friday, december 29, 2017, and the final days of 2017 ticking down, we'll begin our program today looking back with the question we ask our viewers every year around this time, who are your political winners and losers over the past 12 months. give us a call and let us know who you think saw the political capitol rise and fall the most. republicans can call in at 202-748-8001. democrats, 202-748-8000, ndependents, 202-748-8002. you can a