[applause] about free speech issues on campus. I will give a very brief introduction before introducing my colleagues i will then ask them some questions and throw it open to you. There are mic symbol files for that time. First of all just a few introductory marks about free speech on campus when is this issue is not new era its gotten more attention this year than in many years in the past but there are fairly constantly debate over controversial speakers and whatnot at a do think that context has been missing sometimes. Likewise for reasons that are somewhat hard to predict, the press jumped on some incidents much more than others. And so as you look at these issues as they come up, thats important to remember. I also think its very important to remember that when youre talking about controversial speakers on campus, most of them speak relatively without incidents. Even some of the speakers that will be talked about today that it been very controversial have appeared far more times without incident than they had been canceled. Doesnt anyway negate the seriousness of the issue of the cancellations or the disruptions but but i think thats important contacts. Whats happened this year thats made this got more attention . First you had the middlebury incident where you had Charles Murray a very controversial social scientist. Most of the controversy about in concerns a book he wrote, he cowrote many years ago, although some often concerns his more recent writing. At middlebury, students stood and turned their backs and chanted and stomped to prevent him from speaking. When middle barry then took him to another location to speak via live cast, he did that but as he was leaving along with the professor who was a question or of him, not a supporter, they were pretty much attack by a crowd and the crowd attacked the car trying to take him away. At berkeley there been a series of incidents. First involving a very popular campus speaker until he became actually too controversial for the conservatives who are bringing into campus with his comments about underage sex. Then with ann coulter who was scheduled to appear and then called off her appearance amid exchanges of charges over who was responsible for that. A few other key bits of context of what is the First Amendment which we all know about as journalist. It is important to note the First Amendment is legally enforceable at public institutions. At private institutions is also worth noting that many claim or say that they follow First Amendment principles. So with covering this disputes at private institutions, it may be more endorsement of principles rather than the letter of the law. Thereve also been several instances this year and it came up of both middlebury and a berkeley where outside groups or parody of said groups because you dont really know because they wore masks, were involved in disruptive protests trying to prevent speakers from appearing. This is important because i think theres been a lot of journalistic miss coverage stating for instance, Berkeley Students engage in activities of vandalism and disruption that were actually the work of the outside groups. There are some who believe there were Berkeley Students wearing masks. I dont know but there hasnt been much evidence of that. This is added an issue of safety that has come up in several of these incidents that complicates things up a little if youre a Public University that says you recognize right of all to speak but then all of a sudden youre facing a safety issue. Issues whether you plan adequate, made the right call, that has complicated things in much of the discussion. We are jointer today and for my left by Greg Lukianoff for the foundation for individual rights in education or fire. If you are writing about these issues, quite likely fire will get involved and issue statements or lawsuits. A good person to know and fire people in my experience are almost always eminently quotable. [laughing] so regardless of whether you agree with them or not, thats an important journalistic quality. Also eminently quotable is to his left judith shapiro. Judith is president of the Teagle Foundation which is an interesting organization to know when your writing for teaching and putting issues all sorts very important issues that may e may be less sexy than freespeech debate, but go to the core of Higher Education. Previous issues the president of Barnard College social openers as these issues from the perspective of a college president. She has said anything shes going to say some contrary things about the way colleges respond when students say they may be feeling hurt. Shes also raise important issues about the educational experience created by certain speakers and trends in speaking. And then to her left, on my side, we have Pranav Jandhyala who is a berkeley student, we have a real life student, is involved with a group in the chest shocking mission of trying to help students who might disagree politically talk civilly to one another. So this is just earth shattering too many, and i think its important to note that there are a lot of students who are not trying to shut down speech but actually trying to encourage speech. So first we are going to go from my left down and up going to ask each of them to just outline their views on these issues briefly. Im going to ask them a few questions and then well get you involved as well. Greg. For my name is Greg Lukianoff. Ive been doing this since about 2001. Im the first an employee. I joined fire when it is a very small organization, legal director of fire. My lifelong passion has been First Amendment law. I teach first and middle classes sometimes, its i write the most about. The thing i would most like to say to people who cover these issues on campus is pretty much exactly what scott said to begin is this is been going on for a long time. Since 2001 i worked at the aclu in northern california. I studied the history of freedom of speech going back literally hundreds of years and i was on the less shock of the kind of things you could get in trouble for on the College Campus in 2001. And all throughout my career. For most of that time the main perpetrators, the main people punishing people for the speech were administrators. For some reason this is not considered that sexy by a lot of journalists and it didnt get in my opinion the coverage it deserves. Then there was, so thats most of my tree. There was a moment around 2011, 2013 when the issue became more with the department of education was giving advice to universities to give a big part of the problem but its amazing to watch how much more interest in this issue popped up when in 2013 2014 the people who are demanding the speech codes were increasingly students. I want to stress prior to that. The most support constituency for free speech on campus was not professors. It was not administrators. It was the students themselves. I do find it interesting to some degree, interest from the press increase when issues on campus looked more like existing conservative stereotypes of what free speech on campus issues look like. So for example, last year a case of the most upset it was Case University of Northern Michigan where students who took advantage of the Counseling Services were then sent scary letter saint listen, if you talk to your friends about thoughts of self harm you will be punished. This is insane. This is some people are either depressed or anxious, they are a burden on the friends and they should isolate themselves. , that does not get the same coverage. I will say when it comes to issue the last couple of months i did it for this. This is scarier. When Allison Stanger wizard at middlebury there were students who were hit in the face with metal flagpoles. I watched a lot of dictates. The berkeley rights were a lot worse than even i thought and they were really lucky nobody got killed. I understand the intense interest but it does come from things that have nothing to do with politics at all on campus. Id like there to be some more coverage of issues that are not necessarily as sexy as quoteunquote pc run amok. Thank you. Judith. Well, first of all i want to appreciate how scott opened in this defensive student because we are about how some of them are behaving badly but more of them are behaving well and we have one such person on our very panel. I strongly believe student should be exposed to a diversity of views including those based on the disagree with. Ive also written sort of condemning these codes, safe spaces, trigger warnings. Some of these writings even approached the level of screen. But at the same time though i want to introduce a new issue that may be difficult to do with, and that is that i believe the clear and present danger is less an absence of freedom of speech and more an absence of quality of speech, or rather what we might call for solid dont think censorship is that easy to achieve in the communication ecology which would lift. But it think were seeing a kind of aggressions lot of speech in which bad speech is driving a good speech. And here then we get into the issue of quality. Both institutions of Higher Education and journalists, enter listen, have professional standards. And im interested in how those professional standards might possibly be applied when we think of the speakers that were going to have on campus. We certainly dont, we dont say standards are professional standard art and mutable and perfect. There are people who burst beyond them in created in wonderful ways, but we also cant do without them. And to that extent i call myself a conservative, a conservative as in someone who cares about tradition, history, values and the institutions that support those values. And whats interesting is the word conservatism has been subjected to its own transgressions of law and they have been thrown around for people have no notion of the tradition of conservatism and probably could recognized either edmund burke or William Buckley and a twoperson lineup. Leave that for the moment. Now, the other issue then is that caring about quality and prioritizing also touches upon the issue of resource allocati allocation. Lets say some controversial speaker is going to involve a lot of money to make a safe and reasonable venue. In my college which was a liberal arts college the major moving parts of the budget Financial Aid and compensation for faculty and staff are financially based on need. Where from will come resources you might need to do with a speaker. And particularly is state legislators are going to lean particularly on institutions while not giving them the money they need to support their basic work, this could be a problem. Now, the first and im not going to get into because there are real experts around the baby during the discussion we can talk about that. What could be a process then for achieving some reasonable way of prioritizing ones speakers . We could think of a Representative Group involving, a Representative Democracy involving students, faculty and administrators who receive request for speakers and actually get together and agree that they want a diversity of views, but that they prioritize them in some evidencebased lets have an interesting conversation about this way. That gets us into a final point and then i will stop, as whether we mainly see our colleges and universities as like marketplaces, a free market place of ideas. The problem being often the invisible left and does not know what the invisible writing is doing and vice versa. Or whether we see them as able to function as democratic participatory community. Thank you. Pranav . I want to thank you all for coming at a just want to say before i get into some of the point is im very excited to be her sitting amongst professionals respective fields of protecting individual rights and youre in a mere college student. Its exciting its exciting for me to be here. So again im the founder of bridge count which is an organization at berkeley that seeks to create spaces where all of views and opinions are welcomed but are going to be challenged the debate and discussion. Rather than trying to protect free speech for free speech is sake, we feel we are an organization that tries to protect free speech for the driving purpose behind free speech. In my opinion the driving opinion, the driving purpose behind free speech is to create a political environment where people can come together and talk about with the disagree with about having to engage in violence. Where political can be ameliorated when the two opposite sides is basically are able to humanize what another, and i think that its important to understand that free speech is all about creating a political environment. Rather than protecting free speech for the sake of free speech itself. So i think i want to give a a little bit of background about how we came to be at berkeley and can of what weve done this past semester give you a bit of insight on the Political Climate before we jump in. We kind of started our organization when we saw the results of this past election, when we saw people at our university, at my university basically saying i cant even fathom how someone would vote for trump, i cant even fathom whats going on inside the heads of these individuals, and political clarity has been increasing and we are at this point in our country, very crucial breaking point in a country, what we need to decide how were going to proceed forward if were going to exist despite our differences. We created our organization last year, and after the riot that happened when milo was planning to speak, i covered those rights as a journalist and i was beaten during the milo writes. I was very front and center of the issue itself and thats when i started writing for the organizations and getting my Organization Front and center in this issue speaking about it. Nationally. And throughout the semester we have been basically creating spaces of discussion and inviting the republicans and democrats to come out on issuebased discussions. Thats when we tried to do this speaker issue at the end of year on illegal immigration. We had, the republicans give us who they wanted to speak, and colder, the democrats give us who they wanted to speak, and our democratic speaker spoke but then you all know what happened when ann coulter wasnt able to speak because of a lot of issues. What im going to say today is that this whole issue about free speech is lot more nuanced than what it appears to be in a single headline or what appears to be on the surface. Its very, very nuanced. You have the university at one end trying to do all they can but as judith mentioned, when they dont even have the resources to legally protect speakers who want to speak, to the call in the National Guard . From the right, you know, you have people trying to push these limits, to try to test these limits of free speech, to try and invite the most provocative speaker or the next provocative speaker. Thats another issue that will be under discussion today. Theres a lot of moving parts, mostly at the end of the day what i would call what happened was a breakout of logistics combined with just inability to protect a speaker because of resources. So i want to ask the panelists about that, some issues you just raised. We follow lots of campus speakers, and milo and ann coulter are not the only voices from the right to appear on campus. And a prominent controversial politicians like rand paul who notably has made a point of going to historically black campuses where he may not have a fan base, or newt gingrich. They are giving speeches about ideas i dont know if theyre converting anybody but a giving speeches about ideas, whereas ann and milo are pretty much insulting people. Regardless of whether you agree with their politics pics im curious, its hard to think of it as giving speeches of ideas. Does it concern you that they are the ones capturing all the attention in terms of the freespeech issue, also in terms of the educational extremes of students . I mean, they wouldnt have got so much attention to if there had not been riots. These are two people who are spoken on campus after campus over the years if people just designed either to protest outside or something not to attend. When it comes to the logistical issue of inviting someone like ann coulter or absolute bomb throwers, both of them, milo happily calls himself a trump. We were fairly easy on berkeley, initially after the big rights on february 1 because it made sense to us that university could feel overwhelmed when youre 1500s to show up and they claim at least one of 50 of which, 1500 protesters of these 150 of course of the universe to engage in violence. I watched the whole thing. I think its hard to distinguish in some cases houthis Peaceful Protesters are identified once i think the distinction is not that easy to make. What we stop being patient with is berkeley promised to do an investigation. They talk about pressing charges against people who, like i said, couldnt easily killed some people by hitting figure we have hato have this discussion about whether these people are students. One reason why we dont know whether or not these people were students and going to some people talk to them even people in the daily cow who say i was there, we are all part of it. The students themselves in some cases saying this. The reason why we dont know is because they never conducted an investigation. The fact that was assault, lease 100,000 worth of damage, thats something weve want to protect the private for free speech on campus and for controversy speakers there has to be consequences to his sponsor and violet. Now that theyre not and has been you create a situation or youre essentially inviting it back. To get back to the question about the various different kinds of folks that involved, i think its been extremely unfortunate that we go from milo and colder and end up with Charles Wright because i see them as rather Different Cases in terms of the issue of quality, who should you be listenin