Keith: Not only should we be worried about
to what degree are political views are being
truncated on the faculty, but we also ought
to worry about to what degree are political
views being truncated among 
the students.
Nat: Keith Whittington, professor of politics
from Princeton.
Thanks for coming to AEI.
Keith: Thank you.
Nat: So you've written a timely new book,
"Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend
Free Speech."
This is timely and in the air.
One of the central theses of your book is
that free speech is central to the mission
of a modern university.
Why is that, first of all, just pin down the
basics, and where are we going awry?
Keith: So I think it's important famility
[SP] because universities are, at heart, truth-seeking
institutions.
They're places where we're trying to advance
the state of human knowledge and then communicate
what we've learned about that: communicate
it to students, communicate it to other academics,
communicate it ultimately to the general public.
And that means the universities need to be
places where you can examine unconventional
ideas.
You can challenge, receive wisdom, and you
can really play out arguments and see how
they lead.
And that requires giving people a fair amount
of space to be able to explore ideas.
Sometimes, they make mistakes, to do things
that seem extraordinarily controversial, and
we learn things from people engaging in those
controversies and exploring ideas, including
mistaken ideas.
So if universities are going to be ultimately
committed to that core mission of trying to
improve human understanding, then they need
to be places where people have a lot of freedom
to experiment a lot of ideas.
Nat: Well, how are we doing?
I mean, we hear lots of things about, you
know, conflict on college campuses.
What's acceptable and what's not?
I have a bunch of questions here, but how
would you describe the state of free speech
in campus today?
Keith: I think on the whole, we're doing reasonably
well, actually.
So I think it's easy to panic a little bit,
in part because we see some very high-profile
examples of things going badly.
We should take those problems seriously.
But at the same time, we don't want to overreact.
So it's hard to know, for example, whether
there's some of the things that we're seeing
in the press, that show up on YouTube, is
the examples of students being particularly
intolerant, universities behaving badly, whether
those are indicative of increasing incidents
of problems on campuses or they're just more
visible than they used to be.
It's also true, I think that we should not
lose sight of what is true about liberal democracy
more generally.
It is not only true of the current students
on current college campuses, but it's been
true in American society for a long time,
which is Americans in general say they life
free speech, and they've long said they like
free speech.
So if you ask Americans in the 1940s, they
would have told you, "We're very committed
to free speech."
If you ask them now, they'll tell you, "We're
very committed to free speech."
But if you start confronting them with specific
examples of speech that they find offensive
or controversial or dangerous, they start
qualifying, they start backing away, they
start making exceptions.
And the students now are not that different.
They may have particular things they're objecting
to, but in general, they have the same problems
we all have, which is it's easy to say you're
tolerant, it's much harder to be tolerant.
Nat: Yeah, it's hard to find opponents of
liberty and free speech until you get down
to brass tacks, right?
Give me some examples here of how, you know,
reasonable desires to curb hate speech or,
you know, something that really should, in
many's view, be excluded from public dialog,
how does this play out in campuses and what's
getting carved out?
Keith: So I think there's two kinds of things
we all worry about and think through.
One is thinking about campus policy.
So what kind of things do we want to restrict
and say, "You're completely outside of bounds,"
if anything.
And I think in general, campus policies ought
to be very open.
We don't want to draw very much in the way
of saying things are completely out of bounds.
I mean, we don't want that talked about on
our campus.
On the other hand, we ought to think about,
sort of within those sets of rules and policies,
what's most productive to talk about?
Who ought we to bring to campus to have a
conversation with?
What kinds of debates should we be engaged
in?
Because there're important decisions to be
made about where can we best advance knowledge
or the most productive sense of use to engage
with?
It doesn't make sense to be spending a lot
of our time trying to elevate things that
are very marginal and ultimately extreme and
not very important and get them outsized importance
by spending a lot of time talking about them
on college campuses, and sometimes we create
something to do that.
So we want the right kind of policies but
we also want to be thinking about what it
is we're doing more carefully as well.
Nat: Well, you know, there are things that
get a lot of attention.
Whether Ann Coulter should be able to come
to campus, or Milo or these other characters.
These are sort of fringe activities.
They seem like they're not central to most
students.
So my question is what...in all these things
that we see in the newspaper are sort of clown
shows that we shouldn't really pay a whole
lot of attention to, and then if that's the
case, where should we be concerned, where
the rubber really is hitting the road?
Keith: Right.
I think a lot of those things are relatively
marginal, to what we think of as really the
core things that universities are supposed
to be doing.
The basics is what's happening in the classrooms,
what kind of teaching's occurring, what kind
of research is occurring, what kind of scholarship
are being produced.
Those are the thing that really matter a lot.
Some of the things that are high profile and
visible often are not as important.
So what kind of outside speakers or campus
groups are invited to campus and what their
reception looks like.
What kind of commencement speakers we have?
It can be embarrassing for a university if
a commencement speaker creates a protest or
gets disinvited.
In and of itself, it's not that important
who the commencement speaker is and what they're
doing on campus.
That's not the heart of what the institutional
mission is.
What you worry about though is what that says
about the campus culture and so what's happening
on a day-to-day basis that this is exposing.
So the fact that people can't tolerate hearing
Ann Coulter, that they can't tolerate hearing
a Republican politician as a commencement
speaker, that is suggestive that there may
be deeper problems there that's affecting
the way classroom conversations go, what kind
of research gets conducted, what more the
general student conversations look like.
Nat: Yeah, let's dig down on that, because
that's interesting.
How does the convolutions around free speech
and whatever the restrictions are influence
who's in the academy, what they are allowed
to pursue?
I mean, certainly, there are folks on the
right who are going to say, "Well, you know,
there are conservative views that are not
allowed to be explored empirically because
they're controversial."
And there are some, you know, more tangential
things that become a whole field of study.
Keith: Right.
And there are hard empirical questions about
what drives that.
One thing I think that is...they cannot be
reasonably disputed is that the academy leans
very left.
Most professors are on the left.
They become more left-leaning over time.
So the academy is much more liberal than it
was 20 years ago or 30 years ago, when it
still tilted left but not as dramatically
as it does now.
And it tilts left really across the board.
Sometimes people try to say, "Well, the Economics
Department doesn't really tilt left and Business
School doesn't tilt left."
That's not true either.
It turns out those are pretty left-leaning
as well.
So there's no question I think that university
faculty, university administrators tend to
lean to the left.
And then the concern is what's driving that?
What are the consequences of that?
And so I think we'd all be really worried
if they had big consequences about what kind
of classroom conversations can occur, what's
being taught in the classroom.
And we'd all be concerned if it affects scholarship
in significant ways such that some kinds of
hypotheses about being tested adequately,
if people aren't adequately skeptical of that
sets of ideas, and there's certainly evidence
that both those things happen.
That sometimes people behave badly in the
classroom and the scholarship wasn't as cheerful,
as it might otherwise be.
Nat: Can you give a specific example on that
that illuminates it?
Keith: Sure.
So I think, well, so for example, one place
I think about this is in law schools.
And law schools are interesting in part because
they're all about arguments, and about trying
to marshal arguments, and they have a direct
connection to the outside world.
And so law schools have to worry about training
lawyers who can be practicing professionals,
who can go out and argue in front of judges
in the real world, and a lot of those judges
are conservative.
So it's particularly disturbing then, if in
the context of law schools, students aren't
being exposed to conservative arguments, don't
know how to analyze them, don't really...can't
really think through what those conservative
arguments look like, because they're just
not being well-prepared then to go out and
engage the wide range of arguments they're
gonna see in the broader world.
I think a lot of left-leaning law faculty
try very hard to represent conservative arguments
in their classrooms because they know it's
important for students to understand those,
but we might worry that they can't be represented
as well, the students won't hear them as often
enough, and the faculty as well as students
will be taken by surprise by sets of arguments
that those faculty simply don't think about
or don't think very deeply about because they
don't fundamentally believe them.
So it's more useful to actually have some
conservative voices on their campus advocating
those views, developing those arguments, so
that people can see them playing about.
Nat: This sounds, in the campus context, a
lot like what we hear about free speech in
the broader country.
And there are tensions between different folks
as to how they think about those things.
What's specific about the academic context
that folks need to understand?
Keith: I think there's a lot of overlap between
what we ought to be worried about in the general
society and what we ought to be worried about
specifically in college campuses, in part
because of that problem of polarization, information
bubbles that we need worry about in other
context also matter in the college campus
context.
One of the things is this distinction about
university settings though is we are trying
to advance the frontiers of human knowledge
and part of why we ought to value diverse
views is because it's helpful in that project,
that you want to be able to challenge your
ideas and bring new ideas to the table, and
if everybody's thinking is the same, it's
gonna be less likely that's gonna happen.
It's easier for bad ideas to skate through
because people aren't thinking about all the
problems with them, because they reinforce
their prior expectations and the like.
So I think in the university context, we should
worry about these issues for that kind of
particular reason.
It's important, more generally, in society
that people learn to live together peacefully,
learn to be able to settle their arguments
through conversation rather than through violence
and the like, and that's true on college campuses
as well.
But we have a particular interest in being
able to hear wide range of views, just because
it helps us advance the truth.
That's something that maybe society as a whole
grapples with less often than we grapple with
it on university campuses but it's crucial
to what we do.
Nat: Yeah.
You know, you write in your book that your
political inclinations might charitably be
called outside the mainstream of university
faculty, particularly as a political scientist.
So as a somewhat heterodox academic, have
you had experiences with pushing back, and
we don't need to tell tales about Princeton,
but I'm just interested, what does this feel
like on the ground as a faculty member?
Keith: I think it varies a lot to where you
are, actually.
So Princeton's reasonably good about this,
so I've been sort of fortunate, I think, in
most of my work.
So it's a routine feature of being an academic
in the United States that you walk into a
room, and if you're a conservative, you can
expect that you're in a minority, maybe the
extreme minority.
And so it's routine that everybody assumes
everybody in the room is on the same page,
they basically agree with each other about
lots of politics and values and the like.
And that shapes conversations as well as sort
of academic discourse, per se.
But I think I've been much more fortunate
in my circumstances than faculty elsewhere
have been, as I talk to people in other institutions
where they feel very uncomfortable talking
about political things on campus.
They feel like there's no go zones, the things
that they just can't explore in the classroom
as well as in the research as well as in informal
conversations because it wouldn't be received
well by some students or by the other faculty
members.
And so there's a lot of self-censorship by
faculty that worry about what other faculty
are gonna think, what other students for sure.
Nat: And that self-censorship can really be
an issue, it seems to me.
I'm curious, there's lots of links between
free speech and hate speech and the desire
to have diverse campuses, all those things
are laudable when done well.
What about the concern for viewpoint diversity?
I mean, we have a diverse set of viewpoints
fueling American politics right now.
They're very different.
I'm not sure that they always get a fair hearing
from both sides on campuses.
So what's the status of viewpoint diversity
on campuses and how does it fare in this era
of free speech concerns?
Keith: Yeah, so I worry that we're not getting
a fair range of views expressed on college
campuses.
It's very disconcerting if we find that college
campuses are less tolerant of the kind of
political debate that you can find on cable
talk shows.
Campuses ought to be places where anything
goes, wide-ranging conversations can be had,
your ideas are taken very seriously.
And I do worry that on a lot of campuses,
we are in a place where universities are less
willing to take ideas seriously or less willing
to tolerate things that at least are unconventional
on their own campus, even if they're quite
conversional in American societies more generally.
So I think universities have to be very cautious
about not drawing those boundaries so narrowly
that they cut themselves off from basic American
political discourse, let alone this wide range
of ideas they ought to be thinking about more
carefully in general.
And that plays out both in terms of what kind
of faculty do you have on campus and so what
kind of scholars you engage with, what kind
of teachers you engage with.
It also affects things like what student groups
are doing and what students are doing on campus.
So some of the controversies we see on campus
are a function of the fact that American universities
have traditionally allowed students a lot
of flexibility and freedom to bring controversial
speakers to campus, to hold their own events.
We try to give students a lot of space to
carve out their own political and intellectual
debates on college campuses.
And it's good for the intellectual freedom
on a campus that students have a lot of opportunity
to do that.
So not only should we be worried about to
what degree are political views are being
truncated on the faculty, but we also ought
to worry about to what degree are political
views being truncated among the students,
such that the students themselves can't learn
new ideas, explore the range of ideas, engage
in ideas seriously, as a point where, in their
lives, they're trying to make up their mind
about what they think about the world.
Nat: So let's say as we are working with college
campuses to get free speech right, what are
the valid concerns of folks who seek to constrain
freedom of speech, to make sure that there
are safe spaces?
They have some valid concerns.
What's their best argument?
Keith: So I think there are genuine concerns
that some of the things to provoke controversy
are very marginal to the truth-seeking function
of universities, that some individual figures
that might be brought to the campus, some
mode of expression that we might worry about
don't do very much to advance ideas in a serious
way.
And we spend a lot of time then worrying about
those kind of episodes and they get an outsized
amount of attention given their relative importance
in the  intellectual environment.
Nat: Particularly in the mainstream media.
Keith: Especially in mainstream media, but
even on college campuses, they wind up absorbing
a lot of attention and effort just trying
to work through those things when they aren't
as fundamental as to what we're trying to
do at the heart of universities on the whole.
And so I think it's important for those who
are off-campus to not get overly excited when
they see these sort of visible incidents of
embarrassing things happening on campus, whether
it's the function of a particular speaker
getting shouted down or it's a professor saying
something stupid on social media, that those
things happen, but that those are also isolated
incidents, generally speaking.
We don't want to re-shape the academic landscape
in order to try to address those things that
are in fact exceptional and unusual.
What we ought to be more focused on is trying
to think about how the university's classrooms
operate, how is the faculty constituted, is
student speech in general adequately protected.
Some of that's about what kind of policies
campuses adopt.
Some of it's about the culture that's in place on college campuses.
Nat: Let's talk about those policies.
I mean, if we want to get this right, moving
forward, either the dean of a college all
the way up to the president of the university
or board of trustees, what kind of policies
will secure viewpoint diversity, free speech
on campus and reasonable protection?
Keith: So on the one hand, I think universities
have an important concern when thinking about
what they want to prevent students threatening
each other.
They want to prevent people on the campus
community harassing each other.
And so they need policies that are designed
to minimize violence, minimize threats of
violence, minimize intimidation, minimize
harassment.
And the problem with a lot of those policy
is you don't want those to be so sweeping
that they actually undermine our ability to
engage in serious argument and discuss serious
ideas.
And often, those policies do wind up written
in that kind of way and get deployed in that
kind of way, by campus administrators or by
students who are seeking to shut down debates
they find discomforting and they use those
kind of policies as leverage to do it.
So we need to be careful about how we write
those kinds codes of conduct for not only
student behavior, but faculty administrator
behavior as well on campus.
So they're focused on the kinds of behavior
that we would really do want to restrict while
leaving as much freedom as possible for a
robust discussion of idea.
Nat: So let me push on that.
What do we want to restrict?
Keith: Well, I think we want to certainly
restrict actual threats against other people.
We want to restrict ongoing harassment against
other people.
Students as well as faculty should be comfortable
on campus and not think that they're being
threatened by other members of the campus
community.
And there's no reason why university shouldn't
crack down on that kind of behavior.
On the other hand, students and faculty alike
will sometimes say they feel threatened by
things that are in fact not threats.
Instead, they are discussion ideas they don't
like.
And university should be deeply committed
to protecting the ability of people to talk
about ideas that some people don't like, that
some people find disturbing, that they think
those ideas have dangerous tendencies.
But nonetheless, those ideas ought to be discussed
on campus, and so we all draw a very firm
distinction between actual threats and intimidation
and threats of violence against individuals
and the discussion of ideas more and more
generally.
Nat: Particularly on the conservative side
of the fence, there's a bunch of people who
are very concerned with all the upheaval that's
been going on over the past year or two.
It's been some while.
A couple of questions, is it more important
to have this discussion now?
Is this more of a concern now?
Or is this just the current wave of the discussion
that we've been having for decades?
Keith: I think in some ways, it's a current
wave of the discussion we've been having for
decades.
It does come in a bit of waves.
So I think we can take...I find myself, for
example, on campuses taking things for granted
for a while, where I assume that people are
generally committed to free speech, and I
assume that these cultures of skeptical inquiry
are recently well protected and valued.
My worry now is that there are a lot of students
and faculty and administrators, but also lots
people off campus, they're not so committed
to those ideas and so it's important then
to re-articulate and re-affirm why are these
ideas actually important, what are universities
actually about.
Students should know what they're signing
up for, when they come to a university campus.
They should know what they're gonna encounter
when they get there and shouldn't be taken
by surprise.
And we spend all our time talking about how
wonderful the food in the cafeteria is and
how there's gonna be climbing walls for students
to enjoy.
They're gonna expect the Starbucks experience
rather than an academic experience.
They all recognize when they get there that
while they may enjoy nice food in the cafeteria,
and the dorms might be a lot nicer than they
were when I was a student on campus, that
at heart, universities are about discussing
difficult ideas.
And they wind up encountering people who disagree
with them, disagree with them deeply, and
people who are going to be in challenging
deeply cherished beliefs.
And if they're not willing to do that, then
maybe the college experience is not right
for them.
But they all recognize that's part of what
it means to go to college.
Nat: So you're saying that there's, to a degree,
an increasing sort of consumer culture for
students and that's at the root of some of
these problems.
Keith: I think it is at the root of some of
these problems.
I think there's certainly an ideological element
to some of the concerns.
There are people on campus who have a political
mission that they're trying to advance on
college campuses and as a consequence are
quite hostile to a set of ideas they see as
challenging that.
But I think it's often much more common that
the problem is one of a consumerist mentality
among students and parents, for example, but
also among administrators, where administrators
scramble if they think something's gonna be
controversial, that's gonna give the university
a black eye in the general public.
And from that perspective, it's anything that
sort of calls attention to a set of ideas
that a lot of people are gonna object to.
And that's just a deeply problematic view
about what it is you ought to be expecting
on a college campus.
And so when you find university presidents
denouncing faculty for saying things that
are controversial, you fundamentally
then have a campus leader who doesn't understand
what their own campus is for and what you
ought to be doing.
But that's driven by this consumerist mentality
that, "Well, we don't want to do anything
that's gonna make the parents nervous.
We don't wanna do anything that might make
the politicians nervous.
So best to keep our heads down, best not to
do anything that's gonna be publicly controversial."
And that's subversive of what these universities
are all about.
Nat: If there is one area, one key point,
one lever that you thought was the most near-term
to watch on these issues, which would it be?
Keith: So I think one starting point actually
is for university faculty to reaffirm these
principles.
You need leadership on campuses.
You need it from senior administrators like
college presidents.
I think faculty have an important role to
play.
And I think often, faculty have tended to
want to sit back, take things for granted,
assume things are going fine, leave a lot
of things to campus administrators.
They don't have to worry about it.
I think it's important for faculty to come
forward, emphasize those scholarly
values, the heart of university, to not let
the university be defined by consumerist division,
but be defined by the things I think the faculty
tend to care the most about, which is the
academic features of the university campus.
And then to become good role models for what
it means to engage ideas seriously and productively
and be tolerant of ideas that you disagree
with.
I think faculty can play a very important
role then for showing students that it's possible
to disagree with vehemently with things and
yet nonetheless, be willing to engage them,
to be able to hear them out, to have productive
conversations around them despite those disagreements.
And if faculty hide away from doing that,
I think it leaves students at sea as to how
they ought to behave.
And it leaves campus administrators with a
freer hand than we'd really prefer.
Nat: So practice what you preach.
Keith: You have to practice what you preach.
That's absolutely right.
And universities ought to be places where
we're practicing that, so it ought to be routinely
the case that faculty are in the public sphere
discussing important ideas and students can
see that, and it ought to be places where
faculty are encouraging difficult conversations
in classrooms and students feel comfortable
having difficult conversations in classrooms.
And they can see it's possible to make mistakes
and be corrected.
It's possible to test out ideas and see how
far they carry you.
And faculty ought to be encouraging students
to be intellectually curious in the classroom
rather than encouraging students to pull up
filters and try to avoid things that might
be challenging.
Nat: Well, the book "Speak Freely," it's short,
it's readable.
I won't ask you to be a spoiler but I will
ask you to speak freely one more time on it,
and when you look out in the future in terms
of the health of free speech on college campuses,
are we headed for a nose dive or are we holding
steady?
Where do you think we're headed?
Keith: I'm optimistic, and I have to be a
little optimistic because that's part of why
you write a book.
You write a book because you think people
are persuadable.
And so I'm hopeful that if you discuss these
ideas, that you can help persuade people,
help people recognize them and take them more
seriously.
I've also been encouraged, I think, that we've
had some very high-profile incidents that
have opened people's eyes to what's happening
on some college campuses, and a lot of people
don't like what they see.
And that includes, not only politicians and
voters and parents, but also includes a lot
of faculty and campus leaders, who now, I
think recognize there were more a problem
than they thought and they're staring to take
active steps, trying to clean up college campuses.
So I'm actually quite optimistic that we're
gonna be in a better place 5 and 10 years
from now than we were a couple years ago.
Nat: I'm gonna break my promise and ask one
more question.
What about when on the student front?
Do you see leadership from students?
Are students dissatisfied with this trajectory
or are they following where they're led?
Keith: I don't think they're following where
they're led.
I think it's a mixed bag with students.
I think a lot of students come to campus not
fully understanding what they're getting into.
And in part, a lot of them have very skeptical
ideas about the idea of free speech, for example,
and robust exchange of views.
The particular examples they've seen of those
controversies are often not very appealing
to them so students look around and say, "Well,
the only people who can possibly care about
free speech are white supremacists," for example,
because they see that as being where the conversation
is and they don't have enough historical perspective
to recognize that, look, there was a time
in which it was the socialists, it was the
communists, it was the civil rights leaders
who were being suppressed and had to latch
hold of free speech.
So it's important to provide students with
a little more perspective so they understand
that it's not always the same targets all
the time.
Everybody has a stake in these issues, not
just one side that has a stake in those issues.
And I think it's also important to try to
wake them up to what it is they're going to
encounter on the campus that...campus if it's
gonna be valuable to them, as college experiences
are gonna be valuable to them.
It should be a place where they're going to
be exposed to interesting and new things they
haven't thought about before, some of which
they will reject, and some of them, they'll
think about for the first time, and they should
be open to those experiences when they're
arriving.
And I think a fair number of students arrive
on campus not expecting that and sometimes,
not wanting that.
They really would prefer not to have to encounter
ideas they find disagreeable.
It's important for universities to try to
lead students to a better appreciation of
what it is they're there for.
Nat: Well, it's a good book.
It's a worthy target of conversation, especially,
as we like to say here, at AEI for a healthy
competition of ideas.
So Keith, thanks for coming by.
Keith: Appreciate it, thank you.
Nat: Hey, everyone.
That's the end of our discussion with Keith
Whittington.
Thanks for watching.
As always, let us know what other topics you'd
like AEI Scholars to cover on Viewpoint.
And to learn more about free speech on campus,
check the links on the description below.
