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"Are Universities Too Woke?" with Lee Jussim · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  We are an amazing species, an amazing culture, an amazing civilization. Whenever you feel down, just spare a tiny thought for the fact that at any other time, and in almost any other place, people lived lives of more hardship, more danger, more hunger, the new.
• 0:24
  That doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel blue, you are. It just means that there are a lot of things that you don't have to feel blue about, that most humans who ever lived did.
• 0:34
  And what has generated this bounty that we currently enjoy? We didn't steal it, despite the ills of colonialism, we didn't. From whom did we steal space rockets and marriage equality and in vitro fertilization?
• 0:51
  We didn't get it because we were uniquely violent, many more violent cultures, litter history. To the extent that we are free and plump and equal, it's because of one thing above all others.
• 1:09
  It's because we started listening to each other, arguing with each other, enlightening each other, what made the Enlightenment different, what unleashed the ferocious creativity of the modern age was that we stopped respecting witch hunts and dogmas, dark age thinking and judgmentalism and sensoriousness.
• 1:30
  And as we started having conversations that were mind-expanding, that were generous and above all, conversations that were uncomfortable.
• 1:39
  Today on the show, the American university professor who doesn't take any shit from anybody, including universities and his bosses.
• 1:57
  Lee Jussam is an American social psychologist, he leads the social perception lab at Rutgers University. And he's from New York, he basically feels that something weird has happened on campuses lately, and he wants to do something about it.
• 2:15
  He feels academic freedom is being threatened by sensorious social norms. He feels that university administrators make big, they talk a big game about supporting academic freedom, but when the chips are down, when they're faced with threats to their agendas, when they're faced with unhappy students, university administrators abandon their proclaimed value for academic freedom.
• 2:43
  I wanted to understand why he thinks this is happening, and what can be done about it?
• 2:50
  This is one of those wonderful conversations that's facilitated by the University of Technology Sydney, where I'm a visiting scholar, and this is called the Permission to Think series.
• 3:03
  I hope you enjoy this wander through the brambles of academic unfreedom with Lee Jussam.
• 3:14
  Let's just get straight into it. I want to start by talking about what free speech is.
• 3:26
  Is it good for you?
• 3:28
  Sure.
• 3:30
  I'll just ask, I don't want to stump you by asking something so broad and so blunt, but I think it'll be useful.
• 3:39
  So I'll just say, Lee, thank you so much for being on the show.
• 3:45
  Can we start with a big question, what is free speech?
• 3:50
  Free speech is the freedom, the absence of sanctions for people to express themselves.
• 4:02
  Does that mean the sanctions of one's peers and one's friends as well?
• 4:10
  I mean, they're all in there. They're not the same sanctions from the government and sanctions from one's peers or co-workers or bosses or whatever, but they're all that's all all of those play into the people's ability to speak and express themselves freely.
• 4:34
  How does that relate to consequences for a person's speech?
• 4:37
  Because I think part of what we're going through at the moment is a battle between people who want to see greater or harsher consequences against speech that is intolerable and those who have a, I suppose, a more boisterous view about what should be able to be said.
• 4:54
  So if I say that Jews are inferior or that women are no good at science, that, you know, a lot of people will take offense at that and they will sanction me in certain social ways.
• 5:04
  I might not be invited to cocktail parties and so on. Is that appropriate or inappropriate? What about my free speech?
• 5:11
  I mean, you started with what is it? Sort of a different question is what are the appropriate limits to free speech?
• 5:22
  And exactly as your question implies, there is certainly in the States, possibly across the Democratic West, this is a hot topic of conversation where people are trying to renegotiate in some sense what constitutes appropriate limits and boundaries on free speech.
• 5:43
  There are people who say they're absolutists, I don't really believe them, like I think they haven't thought it through. I don't think anybody can be an absolutist because even absolutists, I think, would, you know, stop at, you know, someone holding a gun or an axe to your head saying, give me your money or I'm going to, you know, I'm going to blow your head off.
• 6:04
  Maybe there are people who think that's okay, but, but, but not very many. And so, so once you accept that, you're accepting there are some limits to speech. And then the question is under what conditions and when?
• 6:22
  Let's answer that question. What's your opinion on that? What are the appropriate limits to free speech, thinking specifically, I suppose, about the denigration of minorities, which is the one that is coming up at the moment in the in at this cultural time.
• 6:37
  Well, so there are different, like there's a moral perspective and a legal perspective and they're different. And so.
• 6:46
  And it's often good to start from one and then move into the other. So from a legal perspective in that, at least in the States, you know, hate speech is completely legal.
• 6:57
  I mean, there's just no prohibition anywhere against hate speech. So that's from a legal standpoint, but at the same time, what that means is there's no prohibition against denouncing those who use hate speech.
• 7:12
  And this goes on and on in that well, okay, if hate speech is legal, then anything short of hate speech is legal.
• 7:24
  And but denouncing anything short of hate speech is also legal. So there's denouncing, right? So there's denouncing may create social pressure for people to maybe walk back or not be so brazen and have a express themselves.
• 7:39
  But that's still, you know, it's curtailing free speech, whether that's a different question, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I think sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not good.
• 7:47
  That's each case is so different. You in my opinion, you need to actually consider specific cases on their merits, whether it's a sort of good thing or a bad thing. So maybe I'll just stop there.
• 8:02
  I'm glad you used the word denunciation because you make a distinction in your work between criticism and denunciation. What is that distinction?
• 8:10
  Oh, well, so are you or I or anybody may propose some idea? I mean, in my, you know, regular life, it's an ice, some academic presenting evidence that bears on some issue in the talk might be a series of studies or theory or something like that.
• 8:25
  It doesn't have to be academics talking about science. It could be a political idea, a policy idea, and really could be anything. And so criticism is some version of no, that's a bad idea or no, you're saying this is true, but the basis on which you're saying this is true is so flawed. No one should believe that it's actually true.
• 8:50
  Or you're proposing a certain policy and you think this is a net good. I believe this policy is horrendously immoral. And here's why I think it's immoral.
• 9:02
  So that's criticism. That's like, you know, a reasonably functional way for a group of people or a society to figure out which way to go.
• 9:13
  Denunciation is, you know, it's some version of anyone who promotes an idea such as yours is so revolting what we should do is punish them to the fullest extent that we're able to do.
• 9:30
  And what that means is, who knows what it means, right? It could mean getting you fired from your job, right? That's not criticism. That is punishment. So there is now people absolutely from from a legal standpoint, people have every right to call for your job or to call for my job.
• 9:49
  That's from a legal standpoint. That's part of free speech. They have the right to say you should be fired. I should be fired.
• 9:55
  Well, neither one of us should ever work in this town again. Like they have the right to say all those things.
• 10:02
  But typically for most of us, we're hired by somebody. Somebody is paying our salary. I think that unless we're independent entrepreneurs, that's different.
• 10:11
  But if you have a job, the punishment can actually only come from your employer from whoever holds power. So regardless of what the mob says, it's really the person, maybe it's my dean or my provost, maybe it's your boss, you know, head of the company, CEO of the company or whoever it might be.
• 10:31
  Those are the people making the decisions to inflict the punishment. The mob, they may be doing it in response to a mob. The mob cannot get you or me fired unless they win the relevant authority over to their side to distinguish between all of those.
• 10:48
  But the mob has the right to call for you or my head. And they have the right to call for your head or my head for what you or I might think are the stupidest reasons. They have the mob has the right to demand that I get fired because I'm wearing a brown cap at this at this object.
• 11:03
  I was going to say, I was going to say something, but I thought I'd just write a sternly worded letter to your boss after the interview.
• 11:11
  Is the mob getting more powerful and our boss is giving into it more?
• 11:17
  That's a great question.
• 11:22
  I think so. I think the answers to that are yes. And I think the main reason the answers to that are yes is because social media has made two things much more easy for to come into the public eye.
• 11:40
  So, so that's that's one part of it. And the other part is social media has made it easier for denunciation, denunciation mobs form.
• 11:50
  The range of things that people get sanctioned for regarding speech and expression range from in my opinion range from nothing at all things that are just like completely legitimate like somebody is an academic opposing affirmative action or opposing diversity equity and inclusion programs.
• 12:09
  I think that should be a completely legitimate thing to discuss. I'm not saying I agree with those positions necessarily. You'd have to go into the specifics of the position to figure out for me to figure out what I agree with it.
• 12:19
  But it should be able to be discussed. This is not like a spousing genocide or you know, race superiority. It's not doing any of those things.
• 12:28
  So, but so people have been denounced and called to sanctioned and sometimes actually sanctioned for things that range from completely legitimate to minor faux pas.
• 12:40
  But there was a guy I think at the University of Michigan who showed, I think it was a version of a fellow with, I think it was so large Olivier playing a fellow in blackface.
• 12:52
  Now, this is a 1960s movie. There was some theater, create some relevant class and you know this created a firestorm and he was removed, I believe you the option was to remove from teaching that class.
• 13:08
  Now, that is at worst of faux pas. It's debatable when that's even a faux pas. But, but at worst, I mean, you can use a racial slur. He wasn't unprofessional with his students. He showed a movie from the 1960s.
• 13:23
  So, but we can call that okay, kind of made a mistake, but he sanctioned for that up until things that well, you know, people have said things that are, you know, by most people can be considered deeply insulting and and either are or at least border on things like racial or ethnic slurs, which really for the most part.
• 13:48
  Well, again, there's a difference between use and reference. So again, this is a hot issue that seems to be resolved on the wrong side in my opinion. And that is in academia, as in the case with the professor who showed old movie with actor playing in blackface.
• 14:09
  You know, if you have a book or a source that now uses racial slurs or ethnic slurs or gender based slurs, you can, you're routinely now sanctioned. I don't know if you're always sanctioned, but you're routinely sanctioned.
• 14:27
  So, which means, you know, if I was tempted to teach Huckleberry Finn, I would not be allowed to do that. I wouldn't do it because there are racial slur in there.
• 14:39
  So, but up to and including the use of these sort of slurs. So, people can and have been punished.
• 14:51
  So that, you know, I mean, that's the state of play. And so this happens in part because social media spreads this kind of stuff in a, you know, like a wildfire kind of way that was never the case before social media.
• 15:08
  Lots of people know about it. They hear about it. They see about it. And social media makes it way easier for a mob to form.
• 15:14
  You know, and in the space of two days, you have a thousand people calling for somebody to be fired or suspended or punished in some way, which again, there was very rare to have such rapidly developing outrage moms 30 or 40 years ago.
• 15:33
  So the technology is enabling a kind of a cultural ups well. And then the cultural ups well reinforces the technology in the sense that everybody knows that these things happen.
• 15:43
  Like we're familiar with this script now, right? We're familiar with the track, right?
• 15:46
  The person in at a university or a college or a newspaper or a celebrity or someone on the today show or whatever it might be saying something that, you know, they trigger a trip wire.
• 15:58
  And then we see the process unfolds almost like you're watching the same movie over again. The Twitter mob comes for the, you know, the corporation or the university tries to figure out what to do about it.
• 16:08
  They put on a suspension, you know, pending investigation, who knows what the investigation is, you know, and then ultimately either the mob wins or it doesn't win.
• 16:18
  You see this in as predominantly a technological phenomenon or predominantly a cultural phenomenon like how should we think about this.
• 16:27
  And particularly let's start talking about universities and colleges and where we're sort of getting our ideas from, because I suppose that's the most relevant place where we learn how to think.
• 16:37
  There is a controversial social science issue.
• 16:44
  Not hotly debated, but like in which the social sciences unclear is the extent to which universities and I'm talking about American universities.
• 16:55
  I don't have enough knowledge about, you know, the Netherlands or Nigeria to have a serious opinion about what university life is like in any of those places.
• 17:05
  Our hotbeds of political indoctrination.
• 17:09
  And certainly the faculty are way, way left. I mean, that's and which, you know, I mean, I feel like it's going to make me sound like.
• 17:15
  Of course, I know something like that, but just the data are overwhelming that the faculty are overwhelmed with left. And when I say overwhelming, I've talked about the social sciences and humanities.
• 17:25
  It's less in physics and chemistry, but it's pretty skewed there. Also, we're talking 90, 95, 99% of people who will identify us on the left of, you know, on the left of the American political spectrum.
• 17:37
  And just matter how this is done, it could be done with party identification, self-reported ideology, so it's, you know, now 90 to 99% of people in anthropology, sociology, philosophy are on the left.
• 17:49
  It's a substantial minority self-identified as far left radicals activists, Marxists.
• 17:55
  So this is not some delusion of, you know, of right wing ex grinders. That's literally literally the state of the university here.
• 18:04
  It's not every university, but it's on average in general. That's what it's all.
• 18:08
  So, but that's a different question than whether they gave an engaging indoctrination.
• 18:14
  And there were a series of studies over the last 20, 25 years or so that have found that it's even though it's unclear whether faculty try to indoctrinate students.
• 18:30
  And that's kind of mixed. They basically fail that students are not heavily influenced or at least their political ideology, not heavily influenced by the ideology of other students.
• 18:43
  But that's a sort of a pure group type of fact in that sort of teenagers and younger adults being heavily affected by the peer groups that's the longest established common phenomena.
• 18:54
  But paper just came out from, and I have to admit, I'm still digesting it, but it just came out finding that what you do get at universities is the faculty experience at universities increases students moral absolutism.
• 19:24
  So whichever side they're on, and you know, they skew left to start with.
• 19:31
  You're getting this, this paper, it's only one paper. It only just came out typically.
• 19:38
  You know, on general principles, most of these sort of new hot findings in my opinion need five to 10 years before anyone figures out what they really mean until other people try and look at the same thing.
• 19:50
  But this walk, you know, to the if this holds, it suggests a way in which universities may be sort of exacerbated some of the polarization and political divides by leading 20 year olds, 21 year olds to be way more certain of the truth of their political beliefs than they have any right to be.
• 20:14
  You have a couple of hypotheses about radicalization in academia. What are they?
• 20:23
  You know, to some extent, it's just very, very simple. Going back forever, there's a very small minority of far left and far right people in any like national survey in the States. It's typically, but 10% more left are on the far left and for right.
• 20:41
  Any given survey might like 6% or 8% or 12% but I ballpark it as around 10% on the fringes. Okay, fine.
• 20:53
  At 10% it's 10% can still do a lot of damage. You know, my understanding, for example, is the Bolsheviks never had more more support than about 20% of the Russian population.
• 21:05
  So a highly organized small minority can do a lot of damage. I mean, you have small examples of that here. I mean, the capital riot was not typical of American Republicans, but it was a very bad thing.
• 21:20
  The sustained violence that we had in the name of social justice and the places like Seattle and Portland was also a very bad thing. But again, I don't think that was, that certainly wasn't most of the social justice protests and it's not the most most of the people who supported Black Lives Matter.
• 21:38
  So you don't, so the radical fringes can do a lot of damage on their own, but within academia, just remember, if academia is, we can ballpark it as entirely left. I mean, at the point that you're 90, 95, 98, 99%, it's like the other two or three or five percent of hard matter. So it's just ballparking it, you know, if it's all left.
• 21:57
  Then just off the bat, you can double the fringe number. I mean, if the fringe number is 10 and academia is otherwise representative of the left, there should be about 20%. Now, once you get 20% you're having a, you know, sort of almost a critical mass of activists, you know, people activists and extremists.
• 22:16
  But the evidence is it's actually considerably higher, at least in the social sciences and humanities, they've approached us 40% and I suspect that what's going on there is a lot of self selection. People learn that these fields, you know, hold certain values.
• 22:36
  Far left values and worldviews. And if that appeals to you, it's like, oh, wow, here's a bunch of people who think just like I do, I want to go into, you know, philosophy or anthropology or sociology or whatever it might be.
• 22:48
  So you have a powerful self selection effect. And then you have a critical mask, this then produces scholarship that seems to vindicate a sort of far left worldview.
• 23:04
  And then whether it's other scholars or mass media or anybody else can then point to the scholarship as vindicating this worldview when, in fact, it has elements of a punsy scheme.
• 23:20
  That self selection hypothesis lead that, you know, academia starts out being a little bit more left wing, therefore more left wing people are attracted to it, they feel comfortable around their peers, they feel comfortable around the sorts of ideas that are being discussed so it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
• 23:37
  Something just doesn't quite smell right about the sort of arbitraryness of that about the idea that if you you roll the dice on history, it could easily have gone the other way and you might have academic institutions that are overwhelmingly conservative.
• 23:53
  It reminds me a little bit of the question about why isn't there as much good right wing comedy as there is left wing subversive comedy, you know, people often ask this and the simple answer is, I don't really know, but I don't think it's an accident.
• 24:07
  And I wonder whether or not there's something about the left that is what more curious, more interested in the kinds of things that social scientists talk about, more willing to subvert dominant power structures and to ask critical questions and things like that.
• 24:24
  Like what else is going, what else could be going on that could explain the policy of social science?
• 24:30
  Yeah, no, I mean, that's all of that is completely fair and there's it is probably true to some degree and the degree to which is currently not completely clear.
• 24:43
  So they're, I'm hesitating because I have reservations about the work, but some work shows, for example, that people on the left are more score higher on the personality dimensions, no politics involved hypothetically on openness to experience.
• 25:04
  And so the idea is people are more open to experience are more intellectually curious and more likely to be drawn into, you know, fields that promote the life of the mind like academia or science or social science.
• 25:17
  So there may well be some so I've reservations about that because sometimes I suspect that perhaps unintentionally politics are embedded in some of those measures.
• 25:31
  So in some versions of the openness to experience questionnaire, one question goes something like I like to spend time visiting art museums or something like that.
• 25:46
  Some I like to visit the museums and exhibits or concerts or museums.
• 25:51
  Okay, so what does that have to do with politics? Well, in the states it does because in the states, the, the sort of Democrat Republican sort of a huge demarker of Republican and sort of whether you are, whether you live in a rural or urban area.
• 26:19
  So the American cities are overwhelmingly democratic, even when they're in heavily Republican states, the cities are overwhelmingly democratic.
• 26:29
  The rural areas, even in very democratic states are overwhelmingly Republican. Now none of this is absolute always, but it's like I really a lot.
• 26:38
  Now, if you live out on the farm, you don't have lots of opportunities to go to museums.
• 26:43
  They need to ask about your openness to NASCAR and the museum down on the bio.
• 26:51
  Right, so that's my reservation of the measure, but let's put my reservations aside and say, okay, we can just taking it face down the liberals people on the left actually are on average more open to experience than our conservatives.
• 27:09
  Those difference are still not gigantic, small to moderate and that they might, they might play to some degree into differential self selection into fields like academia or science.
• 27:25
  But those differences are so small, they can't possibly explain a skew of like 95% to, you know, 3% apolitical and 2% conservative.
• 27:37
  It can't possibly explain a skew of 20 or 30 to work. It just, it can't do that work.
• 27:44
  Okay, so let's assume that maybe those factors of openness and curiosity give the left an initial leg up in the humanities at universities and there and thereafter your phenomenon of self selection comes into play and it becomes a snowballing a snowballing effect where conservative would just feel so alienated and would just find the ideas to be so closed minded or repugnant that I want to go into that into that field in the first place.
• 28:11
  Yeah, now, you know, what's not clear though is if you go back far enough, you know, there's some data going back 100 years on the political skew of academia.
• 28:22
  And you would think then that if they, if there's something about people who happen to be on the left that differentiates them from people who happen to be on the right that would somehow make academia more appealing to people on the left, you should have a big split 100 years ago.
• 28:42
  And you don't have that sort of exploit 100 years ago. So it kind of, you know, we don't really know also the measures of left right that are available from 100 years ago, probably not as good as they are now.
• 28:55
  So let's just talk about the consequence of this, though, as well, because one thing that you say that I think is interesting is that that this imbalance in academic institutions means that there is a bias towards the way that particular ideas sound or can be labeled in the sense that if something is perceived or can count itself in the garb of social justice or issues that adhere to the left's heart.
• 29:19
  Then it receives less scrutiny. And if something can be taught or tarnished with the label of being in opposition to social justice, it will be pilloried regardless of the credibility of the ideas therein. Can you elaborate on that? How does that work?
• 29:37
  Well, I mean, it works, it works in all sorts of ways. So, so one of my favorite, I mean, I was just listening to a podcast that there's a book that just came out called the genetic lottery by Paige Harden.
• 29:55
  And she's a, you know, psychological geneticist, you know, studies have had a bit of an irritability and intelligence and also to other traits.
• 30:05
  And and in the book she argues that people in general, but the left in a particular, and academia in particular, really needs to take seriously the fact that all sorts of like really valued and important life outcomes have a genetic component.
• 30:22
  It doesn't mean they're only determined by genetics doesn't mean other things don't matter. And she kind of frames it as the genetic lottery because she positions, she explicitly positions herself and the demeanor of the book on the left.
• 30:39
  That is, you know, winners of the genetic lottery, you know, you can view that as sort of, in some sense, the ultimate form of privilege is what you didn't choose your genes, I didn't choose my genes.
• 30:52
  And so it is the sort of the height of an unearned advantage.
• 30:58
  She was on Jesse singles, block reported podcast and there's maybe a two to three minute segment where she said, she says, and I'm paraphrasing because she was very sensitive appropriately for people misquoting her and mischaracterizing her.
• 31:19
  Because she is sort of on thin ice to some degree because the academic left hates this genetic stuff. And she's like, well, you know, this is the science and you kind of, you know, you're going to be way better off accepting the world as the science shows it to be and just being in denial about the stuff.
• 31:36
  The views have often been mischaracterized. And so she, you know, as many of us who have had our views mischaracterized feel, you know, we pisses us off to have people say we said things or anything we haven't said.
• 31:50
  She makes a point and over about a two or three minute segment of saying she purposely positioned this as, you know, and and and and flagged herself as on the left as part of team left.
• 32:05
  Because she was, she wanted the book to get a hearing and that if she didn't do that, people would have just turned it off. And now to me, and I think she's right about it. I think her analysis there is dead on the book has been I think overall very well received.
• 32:20
  But that's not my point is that she had very good intuitive intent as to how the political biases in the field works. So you can't just come out and say, you know, intelligence really has a very large genetic component.
• 32:36
  If you do that, you're going to be denounced as a geneticist and a Nazi. But if you say, look, you know, I'm an anti racist. I think we need a policy for, you know, wealth redistribution. There's too much inequality.
• 32:51
  People who've come from privilege backgrounds have taken over the, you know, everything that counts. And that's why you need to pay attention to my book. Well, then you can get some people to listen. And I think she's right about that. But that, but that tells you how academia works.
• 33:07
  Well, I mean, look, the progressive might say academia works that way because the right wing in many Western democracies has gone corining off the rails. And what used to be grandfathers, you know, right wing party of Eisenhower or, or, or even George W. Bush or something is now a bunch of crazy people who deny climate science, who are skeptical of vaccines, who are, you know, who don't believe in the institutions of democracy, who were just as soon steamroll an election as a look at it.
• 33:37
  You know, and so of course, yes, we're going to give more intellectual credibility to things that, that seem like they're from the same side of politics. Talk to us in 50 years when, when we've got Eisenhower back and, you know, and the left is all other ones trying to steal elections.
• 33:53
  So this is the thing for me.
• 33:57
  And this is, I realize this is both not really that effective and, and very unsatisfying for most people.
• 34:05
  When you're talking about the science.
• 34:11
  You should be taught, I believe, you should be talking about and should be able to talk about the science without having to worry about, you know, whose political acts is it sharpening?
• 34:25
  You shouldn't have to worry about that because if something is true, it's true because it's true.
• 34:31
  It's not true because you like or dislike Trump. It's true on grounds that establish whatever the thing is as actually being true.
• 34:40
  And we should, and I think I will just never, I will go to my grave dying on this.
• 34:45
  We should be able to have conversations about the evidence on its own merits without wonder, without worrying about, well, this is going to give, you know, sucker to people who are really evil.
• 34:59
  However, there is another great paper that is not yet published, but is posted on like one of the public archives that examined a lot of the dynamic that your question asks about.
• 35:18
  And so one of the things it shows, which is consistent with lots of other stuff, is that people exaggerate the beliefs of their ideological or tribal opponents.
• 35:35
  So that's a problem in and of itself. So when people think, well, you know, if we just talk about this, it's going to give support to, you know, the horrible people over there.
• 35:45
  They are thinking about horrible people over there. And there are horrible people over there. They're just not most of the people who are over there.
• 35:53
  But one of the reasons for that dynamic as per this paper, and I think this is probably right, is that even though extremists are relatively small minorities on each side, people are very reluctant to call out or condemn or distance themselves from the extremists on their own side.
• 36:20
  So there's probably two reasons for that. One is they're afraid of being ostracized themselves. I mean, as you saw that with all the Republicans who said, no, the election was completely reasonable, you know, have all been like driven from the party frequently.
• 36:34
  And I see that on the on the right. And you know, on the left, you see, you know, academics who say the left has gone too far, this cancel culture, this is like, yeah, this is bad, you know, get themselves into trouble.
• 36:46
  So, you know, you see this on both sides. So there's fear of the extremists on one side, but probably even more powerful is fear of giving unintentional support to the other side.
• 37:02
  And I say, you know, if I admit that the that there was a, you know, a lot of sort of damage and some deaths that resulted from a minority, relatively small minority of Black Lives Matter protests that can undercut support from Black Lives Matter.
• 37:20
  We're going to go back to 1950 and, you know, the country's going to reinstitute Jim Crow.
• 37:26
  So people because of that dynamic, right, unwilling to condemn even when they're just kind of reasonable, you know, kind of moderate or reasonable on the left, reasonable reasoned on the right.
• 37:41
  They're uncomfortable with their extremists. They are very, they rarely say so.
• 37:46
  So that does a seed, it seeds the rhetorical space to the extremists.
• 37:53
  So when people on the other side think about their opponents, what they see disproportionately are the extremists. So you can't really blame them for exaggerating the other side's views because most of the sort of public discourse is taking place on the extremes.
• 38:10
  As someone who spends a much of my career nitpicking my own side and pointing out the flaws in my own allies opinions.
• 38:17
  I do think that that just on a psychological level that worldview is deeply mistaken because, you know, nothing gives greater credibility to your opponents than pretending that there are no problems on your own side.
• 38:28
  Nothing is likely to build a bridge to your opponents and to make them more reasonable than by acknowledging your own sides for us.
• 38:35
  I just had David from on my podcast and during the migrant crisis after the during the Syrian Syrian war and the refugees pouring into Europe.
• 38:47
  I was asked about far right parties in Europe and he was, he made the point, you know, they're terrifying. But if, if the only people who talk about securing the borders are fascists, then fascists are going to win elections.
• 39:03
  So the left has to figure out a way to have have difficult conversations about the things that it hasn't necessarily gotten perfectly perfectly right.
• 39:12
  Where does this, where does this leave us all leave me?
• 39:17
  Because I'm interested one thing that I always feel when I talk, you know, when we talk about things like this is, are we really just upset because I guess for one of a better word cultural progress is moving faster than we'd like.
• 39:34
  Like, you know, you talk about the norms around what you can and can't say and let's set aside for a moment a question of just pure science, right. So let's say that if there's just a study that says something perfectly impartial and about, you know, genetics or IQ or something like that, then we can tolerate those.
• 39:53
  I'll know that there are lots of spheres where the science is a little bit more culturally influenced. There are all kinds of interpretations in the 1950s or the 1920s. I mean, just just open a newspaper from that era.
• 40:04
  And you are your eyes pop open at the casual racism and sexism that was understood just to be truth, right. Women aren't, you know, women are good at work.
• 40:13
  You know, black people are lazy or Mexicans are lazy or whatever it is. And people just thought, well, these are just, these are just impartial facts. I mean, these are not judgeables. These are now they're incredibly offensive things to say.
• 40:24
  Similarly, there are things that we say today that we regard as being true that will be regarded as horrendous in 50 years.
• 40:31
  You know, is the quibbling about what you can and can't say just us being old Commuggians?
• 40:38
  I mean, my answer to the simple questions, no, I don't think it's just us being old Commuggians. I do think, look, I'm an academic and in academia deals with ideas.
• 40:51
  So deals with evidence. And so the only way that I know of to vet the meaning and implication of ideas and evidence is to have robust, almost, you know, short of personally threatening people.
• 41:16
  I have some other limitations, but almost unfettered ability to discuss the meaning of those ideas and that evidence.
• 41:26
  And so, you know, I used to, I used to believe that science.
• 41:39
  But I don't believe that anymore.
• 41:54
  I was very heavily influenced by Alice Drager. I was Drager. I had this famous book from about 10 years ago, and Regis, the valley, Galileo's middle finger.
• 42:02
  We had her on this on this podcast if people want to look back to her previous episode. She's wonderful.
• 42:08
  Yeah, she's great. She's completely great. And she argued that the search for truth actually has to be based on justice.
• 42:17
  And what she means by that, or at least what I took away from my discussions with her on that is that you need, you know, bedrock protection of individual human rights, free speech, free association, free inquiry, academic freedom.
• 42:35
  Because if you don't have those, you don't have the ability to truth seek it when the truth, when the truth lies in avenues that some groups for political reasons consider forbidden.
• 42:59
  You end up with forbidden truths. And so, so that because of that, in that sense, the search for truth, you know, which science is one, you know, one avenue. It's not the only way to search for truth. But presumably most scientists think that they don't.
• 43:21
  But that has to be built on that sort of bedrock protection of free speech, free inquiry, open inquiry, and academic freedom. Because if it's not, you can't pursue the truth.
• 43:35
  The truth, if it fits the, you know, the dominant ideological genders, but if it doesn't, if it doesn't, then you're at risk of all sorts of personal consequences, which is what you're saying.
• 43:47
  Yes. And what kind of a truth is that that's not a truth worth pursuing if it has to be hemmed in by some Stalinists, some presets, Stalinists.
• 43:55
  Yeah.
• 43:56
  I want to, I want to leave this then brings us back to the conversation, you know, earlier about denunciation versus criticism, that, that maybe what's unique about this moment that isn't just old Commuggians sitting on their porch railing at the kids these days, having different more a than they do.
• 44:14
  Maybe what's different is that shift from criticizing ideas to denouncing people who dare to speak those ideas or, you know, criticizing racial slurs to denouncing people who merely refer to the existence of those racial slurs, even if they never used them in anger.
• 44:31
  The targeting of individuals is, is new perhaps and maybe the cowardice, maybe the, as you said earlier, the intensity of the mob is new and thus the cowardice of the people in positions of power to fire.
• 44:45
  People who explore unpopular ideas is, is new, I don't know.
• 44:51
  I do, I do think it's, it's new, what's, what's unclear is whether it's a wave that will receive receipt, not receivable, that'll just calm down and back off and that, you know, society sometimes ebbs and flows in these ways.
• 45:10
  Or it's the new normal and I think it's just too early to tell whether it's the new normal, I am concerned, I don't know that I'm right, but I am concerned that enough young people, you know, sort of teenagers through like graduate students are being socialized into a world where this is the new normal.
• 45:33
  This is like what you do when somebody holds a belief that you oppose, whether it's, you know, visually or any other way, what you do is denounce them, that's what you do.
• 45:46
  And if that is the case, then that's a very dangerous development, I think.
• 45:52
  On the other hand, it may be that there are enough people sort of sick of this and going, you know, and that it's going to eventually, you know, the mobs will be rebuffed and ignored and, you know, that may happen.
• 46:07
  I hope something like that happens, I don't see it happening anytime soon.
• 46:14
  You know, the perfect example for this is Dorian Abbott, so Dorian Abbott is a geophysicist at University of Chicago, who is denounced for opposing diversity equity and inclusion programs.
• 46:26
  You address DI type programs, as far as I can tell overlap about 80 90% with affirmative action, like there are more or less synonyms, they're not completely synonyms, but they're very synonymous, if not identical, at least how they're being implemented.
• 46:44
  And California in November 2020, which is one of the most left states in the United States, and which is majority minority, that is the white people are in a majority, there is no racial ethnic majority in California anymore.
• 47:00
  And that state voted down affirmative action, that is it, you know, whatever, 10, 15 years ago, it voted to ban affirmative action in hiring, remember the words and admissions also, and they brought it up again in this last election, and it lost again.
• 47:18
  The most left or one of the most left states in the country votes against affirmative action, debating the appropriateness and worthwhile and merit of diversity equity and inclusion programs seems like this is like a conversation we should be having rather than threatening somebody with punishment or ostracism.
• 47:42
  So what happened to happen is what happened.
• 47:46
  He's an interesting story because it actually happened to twice once at University of Chicago, where he teaches, and there was a mob, a sort of grad student initiated mob eventually brought some faculty and maybe some alumni into it.
• 48:04
  The University of Chicago is generally regarded as not being one of the institutions that super work, right, as being one of the sort of.
• 48:13
  So Chicago has this statement, you know, that Chicago academic freedom statement that's, you know, just a resounding affirmation of academic freedom, but that doesn't mean the faculty are not heavily woke.
• 48:27
  Right, those are two different things, there's like the institutional policy versus the faculty, or in this case, it was a grassroots.
• 48:37
  But the resolution was, you know, he was in all sorts of hot water, eventually one of the editors at Colette returning, it wasn't clear, but it was one of the people under a Claire organized a counter petition in support of Abbot.
• 48:53
  So within a week at like 8,000 signatures saying this guy should be a lot of it, this is ridiculous.
• 48:58
  And then a day or two after they submitted it, the president of Chicago came out with this, you know, this, this, this again, sort of resounding affirmation of academic freedom, didn't mention Abbot, didn't mention the physics department or just work committed to academic freedom, and then it all died down.
• 49:15
  But then a few months later, he was invited to give this very prestigious talk at MIT, and a mob at MIT formed because in the interim, he had published like an op ed in Newsweek opposing DEI programs.
• 49:31
  So this triggered another mob who announced them called from to be disinvited and the powers that be caved and he was disinvited and what, you know, and to clarify his transgression here, just for people who aren't too in the weeds about what diversity equity and inclusion means and how affirmative action is implemented in American colleges or not, like what is the substance of what he's saying that people found so objectionable.
• 49:58
  Well, so diversity equity and inclusion programs are designed to, well, that's not really.
• 50:12
  The opponents would argue that they are designed to provide representation to groups that are previously underrepresented in the attack.
• 50:25
  Right, so take the truth, race and sexuality and then get background into account and religion, maybe when you're, when you're firing people or letting that's right.
• 50:36
  He's basically saying that that shouldn't happen, so it's less about his, his global is less with these sort of like diversity classes and training where you might have to go and learn about how to be welcoming and inclusive in the workplace to people from different backgrounds and more about who gets a leg up.
• 50:56
  Yeah, I think it's mostly about, I mean, he has some alternative in one of the essays of his two essays that you know, basically argues for merit-based, you know, decisions.
• 51:07
  He also comes out very strongly against bias and taking action against discrimination and you want to hire the best people, but you don't, you know, he would argue that you don't engage, I mean, I don't know if he ever uses the term versus discrimination, but the way you overcome bias is by being unbiased, by evaluating people based on accomplishments, not by purposely taking whether it's race or sex or anything else into account.
• 51:32
  That would be his argument, and there's not, you know, my only point is there's an argument to be had that this is like, you know, it's a fairly mainstream American view that's a slew of, um,
• 51:43
  a pure surveys that ask people whether they support affirmative action in college admissions and in hiring and vast majorities of Americans, including black respondents and Latino respondents, huge majorities opposed affirmative action.
• 52:02
  So that this is a forbidden position in academia is just ridiculous, it's just, you know, he may be right or wrong, and I'm not sure I'm not evaluating his position on the merits, that's what I'm doing right now.
• 52:16
  What I am all i'm saying is that it is a position that, you know, should be able to be debated in academia, and if it can't be debated, you know, when people get sanctioned by, in this case, being divided by having to fight off a mob, you know, even though nothing actually happened to him in Chicago.
• 52:34
  So the whole experience of having to fight off a mob is a measurement experience, so anyone else at Chicago, who might have been considering contesting the way in which Chicago is doing DEI, they have probably learned from Abbott's experience, you know what, maybe I just better keep my mouth shut.
• 52:53
  So what I'm hearing you say is that the center of gravity of people who work in academia has has drifted off to the left and with it that has dragged the what are they what are you calling the sort of envelope of acceptable ideas there's some job over to window.
• 53:08
  So the other to the window of ideas that are regarded as being acceptable in polite company has therefore shifted, which means that the whole conversation at university humanities department says has has diverged from what, as you say, a majority of black Americans and Latino Americans think is normal.
• 53:32
  So how could a student who's listening to this or watching this or someone who is, you know, not in a position of power, but is sort of tangentially in the orbit of these conversations and of this culture, what, what would your advice to them be and how can they make themselves useful.
• 53:56
  Boy, that is a that's wickedly good question it's it, you know, it really that's so varies from person to person in position, you know, position to position, you know, for it for a young person who doesn't have, you know, a lot of power status, you know, whatever, an 18 year old or 19 year old early in college, you're happy to just get through college and get your grades.
• 54:24
  Just, you know, I would avoid the mobs just avoid the mobs just, you know, when you see a mob forming don't assume that they're right, don't assume you know that, you know, even your friends are saying things that are actually true.
• 54:43
  There are so many cases where people have been denounced and then the truth has turned out to be way, way more nuanced and complex or even wrong than when the denunciation started and it's just a terrible way to conduct a society, even if they're right.
• 55:01
  So just if that's your position, you know, just don't just don't do that just just don't do that that's so that's if you're not kind of position, if you're at a higher status position.
• 55:17
  You know, it's sort of a mirror image of that.
• 55:23
  Resist the mob, you know, I mean if a person did something that before the mob existed that you would fire them for and you found out about it because of the mob, well that might be different.
• 55:38
  You know, like if if you had an a priori standard that if a person crosses line X, you know, your job is at risk, well, then it doesn't matter that there's a mob, it's that the person crossed X, but if you don't have that, you know, if you don't have standards of professional conduct and you just have a mob calling for somebody's head, like just, just like tell the mob to go fly high.
• 56:00
  I mean, one of the best examples of this is is his David shores, who's now kind of pretty influential voice on the left.
• 56:09
  I mean, he's quite bluntly a democratic party activist. I think he is self described as sort of a socialist or a democratic socialist who's pretty far left is Twitter account self describes as I try to elect Democrats.
• 56:24
  So, and he was fired, you know, this is summer of 2022 and the heat of this social justice Black Lives Matter protests.
• 56:33
  2020, 2020, 2020, 2020.
• 56:37
  Yeah.
• 56:38
  He tweeted out an article and you can't make this up by a black sociologist at Princeton showing that
• 56:48
  peaceful protests win more people over to your side than do violent protests.
• 56:56
  His co-workers were triggered by this that he was denounced.
• 57:03
  They claimed he made them feel unsafe and that is a quote.
• 57:09
  He made them feel unsafe and he was fired and it's like for tweeting a sociology article.
• 57:17
  So, and this is just crazy.
• 57:20
  I mean, we're going to have an entire other hour long conversation about safety couldn't we?
• 57:24
  I mean, the idea that he's making you unsafe because he's insufficiently supportive of anti racist protests that themselves have become violent.
• 57:36
  But, you know, the greater violence is the structural white supremacy of the United States.
• 57:41
  And because he is not expressing sufficient fealty to the idea of overturning the white supremacist structures of American governance policing.
• 57:48
  He is therefore directly making you unsafe like in this room.
• 57:52
  That's right.
• 57:53
  That's right.
• 57:54
  The personal, the general's of like connective tissue between, you know, persons safety and an idea have become remarkably thin.
• 58:03
  But, Lee, there's a lot, there's a lot for us to noodle on there.
• 58:06
  Thank you so much for articulating all that.
• 58:08
  It's lovely to have you on permission to think in collaboration with uncomfortable conversations.
• 58:12
  My, my podcast.
• 58:14
  Thank you.
• 58:15
  Thank you again.
• 58:16
  Thanks for having me.
• 58:17
  Thank you very much.
• 58:18
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• 58:25
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• 58:29
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