Tangle - Ilana Redstone discusses higher education and politics

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

On today's podcast, we sit down with Ilana Redstone. She is a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne and the co-author of Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education. She also serves as a faculty fellow at Heterodox Academy, a non-profit advocacy group working to counteract a lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses.In our conversation, we talk about whether there is a free speech problem on college campuses, how to address a lack of political diversity, and Redstone's thoughts on the Critical Race Theory debate.If you enjoy the discussion, please rate us five stars wherever you rate podcasts. You can subscribe to Tangle here. And you can read more about Heterodox Academy here.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some reasonable debate, and independent thinking without the hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's show, we are sitting down with Alana Redstone. She is a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

More importantly, she is a faculty fellow at Heterodox Academy and the co-author of Unassailable Ideas, How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education. Alana, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here, Isaac. So I just recently stumbled across some of your work and Heterodox Academy, and I was just thrilled. I mean, it's very much in the ethos of my newsletter, which I like to think is a space for safe debate and open inquiry. And I'd love to hear maybe if you could just tell our audience a little bit about Heterodox Academy, what you guys do and why it's needed in this moment right now. Yeah, I mean, so I've been involved with Heterodox Academy for about

three years, I guess. I mean, they've been around for a couple years longer than that. But I mean, the organization broadly is, I mean, they started out with a focus on higher education and sort of advocating for a diversity of perspectives in higher education. And I think they've last, I think it was probably about a year ago, they expanded to the K through 12 part of education. So really trying to think carefully about what a diversity of perspectives looks like in education, from K through 12 up through post-secondary education and all that that entails. Yeah. One of the interesting debates and conversations that's happening in the country right now is about this diversity of opinion in K-12 education and secondary education. And I'm curious for your perspective about sort of, you know, the baseline assumption there. I mean, do we not have diversity amongst faculty and staff at universities across the country? What's your view on that and

what the state of play is right now, I suppose? Yeah. I mean, so for now, are you mostly asking about higher education? Yeah. I think secondary education is an interesting place to start with that question. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, so, you know, people kind of think about this in different ways. I mean, you know, pre-COVID, one of the things that people would talk about would be, and I mean, FIRE has the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. They've done, you know, significant data collection in this. They have their disinvitation database. I don't know if you've ever looked at it, but basically, so they track that.

So some people will focus on that as a metric. There are campus, Heterodox Academy does campus expression surveys, which looks at, you know, different questions of self-censorship and where you, for students, where they fall on the political spectrum and then to the extent to which they feel they have to self-censor and on what topics. And those surveys do show, they do show self-censorship and largely along the lines that you would, you know, perhaps expect in the sense that conservative students are more likely to feel like they're self-censoring than others. conservative students are more likely to feel like they're self-censoring than others. My own perspective, just speaking for myself, not for the organization, is I think those metrics,

I mean, the disinvitation stuff, you know, no one's been on campus in a while, so it becomes less relevant. But my sense is that those are important. But if you only focus on those metrics, I think they tell really just a very small piece of the story in the sense that my approach to this work and this topic is really that this is about how we think and talk and communicate and teach on all kinds of sensitive and controversial topics that touch race, identity, fairness, and intent. topics that touch race, identity, fairness, and intent. And what I've seen, and in my sort of position on this, is that you can have a classroom, and I'm in a sociology department where all of these topics come up all the time. So you can have a classroom where, I mean, the self-censorship is clearly a problem. I mean, some self-censorship is good, right? We don't want everybody just sort of spitting out the first idea, that first thing that comes into their head. No one wants to hear that from me nor anybody else. But the extent and on the particular topics that you're seeing, that is a problem. But I guess my sense is that even in a classroom where there's no self-censorship, there's still, more often than not, on those topics,

there's still a problem in the sense that, I'll just give you an example. If you ask students, what is the benefit of race-based college admissions, for example, like using race as a determining factor in college admissions, and they can talk about sort of, you know, the historical disadvantage and members, you know, diversification and members of underrepresented groups, and if you ask them questions about sort of, you know, the historical disadvantage and members, you know, diversification and members of underrepresented groups. And if you ask them questions about sort of why might somebody object to this, or, I mean, even if you wanted to phrase it less strongly, you could say, you know, have concerns about this or something. And they largely can't, largely cannot do it. They can, what they'll come up with is they'll say, well, you know,

because they're sort of, you know, it has to do with the denial of racism and sort of, they don't see the racism, you know, the way racism functions is, you know, a barrier in today's society. And they can't go further than that. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's not a self-censorship issue. That's a, how are we talking about sensitive and controversial topics as really sort of morally complicated issues? To me, that's the far more pervasive problem and that won't be picked up in metrics. Yeah. I'm interested to dig in on that a little bit, but you mentioned something before too about FIRE, which for people who aren't familiar with it, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. And they, as you said, they sort of track, basically, they call it, I think you mentioned the disinvitation list, people who have like, you know, been rejected for campus visits.

It's often conservative speakers or far right speakers. Not always, but yeah. Not always, right. And so, well, I guess related to that, I'm interested. I mean, I see those metrics and FIRE often frames that as being sort of a representative empirical evidence of serious free speech issues on campus. And I'm wondering, you know, what you make of that and those disinvitations. I mean, is that an issue that from your perspective we need to address or course correct for? Yeah. I mean, again, like, so those numbers, I don't think I could quote chapter and verse on sort of where exactly the Y axis is on the trend line. But from what I remember before COVID, those were trending downward anyway. And there's always a question when they trend downward,

you know, is it because, is it because something's changed and people aren't getting shouted down or, you know, the other, right, social science are always alternate explanations. The other explanation would be something like the people who would have invited the controversial speakers are no longer inviting them because of the shout downs and they just don't bother. Right. And you wouldn't, you wouldn't know that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference if all you see is a downward trend. I think that largely those are a problem. I mean, I think there are certain, it is sort of specific to the context. Like, I think there are reasonable questions to ask about whether the speaker, I mean, it is, you know, we are talking about college

campuses. I think sometimes there are questions to be raised about whether the person is making an intellectual contribution or whether they're just strictly tossing grenades metaphorically that would be very person specific but overall I do think it's a problem I mean I think but again I would say just to bring it back to what I was saying before I think that the shout downs and the disinvitations and the self-censorship and the concerns about free speech are downstream effects of this problem that sort of sits at the mouth of the river, if you will, which is this, what I was talking about earlier, this sort of how are moral standpoint on these issues that touch all of these questions around identity and fairness and equality and equity and all this stuff. I mean, I think that what you see with the disinvitations and the free speech concerns, particularly when they come, when they're targeting people on the right, I think it stems largely from, I mean, but again,

I don't want to generalize too much because there are, it is really, it can be very, very specific to, you know, well, who's the person and what are they talking about? What intellectual, you know, heft are they bringing to a college campus? And is there any, maybe none, in which case, why are they coming? But I think those are, I do see those as important, but downstream consequences of a broader problem. So I'm curious, I mean, to speak to that broader problem and the ways that we're discussing some of these sensitive issues. And can you make that tangible? I mean, how does it look right now? And how would it look in your perfect world? I mean, what are some of the changes that you think we need to make? I mean, I don't know that there's

any magic here. I mean, I can just tell you sort of what I do with students and that I found to be useful would be when you and I were talking beforehand about, you know, a question like race-based college admissions. So, for example, if you take a question like that with students and you say, why might somebody oppose race-based college admissions, using race as a factor in college admissions. And, you know, you'll usually get something like, well, racism, right, which is obviously a possible reason why somebody would oppose that. And then, so, you know, you can imagine a white board or whatever, and sort of like racism gets written up there. And then you can say, well,

okay, yep, racism is on the list. Is there any other reason anyone might oppose race-based or whatever and sort of like racism gets written up there and then you can say well okay yep racism is on the list is there is there any other reason anyone might oppose race-based college admissions um we've got racism we've got that covered is there anything else and usually people will come up with you know i don't know a couple two three whatever i've never had anyone i've never had any group never come up with anything else and so usually they'll come up with two or three other reasons when pressed. Then you can say, well, okay, if all I know about someone, or if all we know about someone is that they oppose race-based college admissions, can we tell which, what reason is driving their position? Like what's going on? Like what their motivation is? Is it this racism or is it one of these other, you know,

two or three, whatever things. And of course you can't, I mean, in the absence of other information, if all you know is their position, you don't know, you have, you can't tell. And so then the question is, well, what is, what does it mean if we get it wrong? What if we assume it's racism and it's not? And what does it mean if you get it wrong a lot? I don't know if we get it wrong a lot, but let's just think about it. What does it mean to get it wrong a lot? And so asking, but let's just think about it. What does it mean to get it wrong a lot? And so asking, so sort of walking, and you can do that kind of exercise with a lot of different issues. I think there are ways to engage on these topics that are not about trying to convince somebody that race based college admissions are right or wrong, but it's just how can we understand that how people,

how reasonable people might come to different conclusions about this? Does that make sense? the classroom, because I think one of the debates that I've seen is there's sort of the conservative side, often more right-wing commentators basically saying, look at all these professors we have at every major college, you know, 90% are liberal or they vote democratic or whatever. And then increasingly now I'm seeing this response from the progressive left, especially in the wake of, you know, news about Nicole Hannah-Jones and stuff that, oh, actually it's the, it's the administrators who are conservative and they're the ones that are running the schools and they're the ones that are, you know, executing all these things. And colleges are actually, you know, not really left-wing safe spaces like everybody makes it out to be. I mean, you teach at a well-known university, you do this work. I mean, who is in control? What's your

read on this about, you know, who's sort of dictating how these conversations happen? Well, I mean, you know, so, I mean, just really quick about the Nicole Hannah-Jones thing. I mean, you know, that was, yeah, you should not have a board of trustees meddling in, you know, tenure decisions. So, and I think it sounds like that was, that has been reversed. The original denial has been reversed as far as I understand it. You know, I think that largely... Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book,

Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. One of the nice things about being in academia, I mean, there are some, you know, there are some benefits. And one of them is that you have a lot of autonomy. are some, you know, there are some benefits. And one

of them is that you have a lot of autonomy. And so, you know, in the classroom, and so faculty and instructors, tenured and non-tenured instructors have generally a lot of autonomy in the classroom. And so, you know, I think it falls on us. I don't think, in other words, I don't think it's, in higher education, it's not the case, at least as far as I know, it's not the case that you have an administrator, a department head, or a dean, or something like that, who's coming in and telling you what you should and shouldn't do in your classroom. You know, as far as I know, that's, I'm not aware of that happening in any case. But so it really is instructors, and you have, you know, so you have instructors who

have, you know, really sort of gotten into a place where that's how they're talking about this material. And there are reasons for that. I mean, there are reasons, you know, the concerns about harm towards members of underrepresented groups and, you know, but at the end of the day, you know, people will try and say, I mean, higher education is, I think, spent a lot of time trying unsuccessfully to sort of be all things to all people in the sense that, you know, we can care about sort of the free, we can address the free speech concerns and we can also, you know, sort of protect people, protect members of underrepresented groups, et cetera. But it's always going to be the case that these things are going to bump up against

each other. I'll just give you an example. You know, if somebody says, you know, I'm just going to channel an opinion without endorsing it. But, you know, I think that trans women should not be allowed to compete in women's category sports, right? Is that an opinion or is that a threat to members of the trans community? And, you know, maybe it's both, but that's, those things are going to come up. Those issues are going to, those questions are going to come up, you know, the same thing about, you know, you say the same thing about certain types of affirmative action or whatever, like, and, and so it's not clear. I don't think higher education has done a very good job of kind of thinking through the implications of not dealing with that particularly

well, or dealing with it in a way that sort of always defers to one side. That's kind of a good segue into one of the questions I had here, which is sort of the conversation that's happening around critical race theory right now. And this obviously expands outside of secondary education. I think maybe people who are sort of passing these bills that are quote unquote banning critical race theory teaching, which I don't think all of them necessarily doing, they feel they're protecting, you know, kids from being laden with guilt that they don't deserve and, you know, being indoctrinated in some ways. And then on the other hand, I guess rubbing against this sort of protection of those kids is also this concept of, you know, we shouldn't be banning things in school. We shouldn't be restricting what can be taught or engaged in in the classroom.

I think, you know, states obviously have a legal right to do that, especially in public education. That's not really up for debate. But what's the view from someone like you? I mean, how do you navigate an issue like that? It seems really sticky in terms of the balance that you guys are trying to strike. Yeah. I mean, so again, I want to be, I'm not sure that Heterodox Academy has taken a position on critical race theory in K through 12. If they've taken a public position on it, I'm not aware of it. So I wouldn't want to, I, what I'm going to say, my response comes from me and not from, not from the organization. So I don't, yeah. So again, if they have an organizational position, I'm not aware of what it is. My own view of that is that, you know, critical, and I've, I mean, I've written on this elsewhere, but, you know, critical race theory is, it is a social science

theory, which is different from a, you know, a theory in physics or biology or something. And so, and in social social sciences unless you happen upon, you know, wonderful experimental design. But, you know, this is a theory and it's useful to the extent that it helps us understand the world. It is not above being criticized or being sort of poked at. There's nothing about it that says that it is the only right way to understand the world. So my personal perspective is I think the bans are a terrible idea. I think legislative bans, I mean, they are censorious, they are probably unconstitutional. And more importantly, if you don't care about any of those two things, they're not going to solve anything. So that's my own perspective. I do think that what needs to happen

is teach the critical race theory and do it with the understanding and build in that this is one way of understanding the world. This is one way of thinking about race and identity and fairness and questions of inequality. It does not have a moral monopoly on how to understand the world. And I think that's where things really start to honest about their own views? I mean, we sort of talked at the top about the self-censorship. I imagine just given the raw numbers of it, the reality is you have students who are conservative and some students who are liberal, who are self-censoring because they're worried about what their classmates might think. How do you approach that as a professor? I mean, how do you create an environment where you feel like people are going to be comfortable sharing their views honestly? I mean, it's a great question. I mean,

I think there are probably lots of ways of doing it. I mean, here's, I'll tell you what I do. A couple of things. One is I take a lot of positions in the classroom and I will give them language to use so that they can. I mean, I think part of it is not putting giving students the language that I mean, some students just they're just ready. They're happy to have a place where they can say whatever they want. And, you know, they're just sort of ready to go. I think there's also I think what can also be helpful is giving them language to essentially remove the vulnerability. So to put a little distance between themselves and whatever it is that they're saying. So and that can be a couple of things that can be, you know, literally saying, you know, I think I said it before. And one of the examples, I'm just channeling an argument. Right. I'm channeling this argument or I'm, you know, I'm going to say this.

And it's neither an endorsement nor a condemnation. Right. And so you can give them this language just so they can use it and sort of put it puts a little bit of distance in there, which both removes some of the vulnerability and also can help of help avoid sort of pitting students against each other. Like, Johnny, what do you think? Oh, well, Maria said this. And, you know, I mean, you don't want that's not good for anybody. So and then the other thing is you can talk about so that that's concretely those are a couple of ideas but then the other thing I would say is you know you can um present issues in the abstract I mean like so and what I mean by that is you can give rather than saying you know what do you think about this whatever let's have a conversation about what different people think about this you can give a scenario and there's,

I mean, I've done these, there's short, you know, there are tools you can use like short vignettes. Like, you know, I mean,

there's one I've used, which is actually borrowed from the Scott Alexander, the slate star codex, which he's, you know, one of his old posts. And it's, you know,

Bob is the mayor. His is from his stuff. Bob is the mayor of exampleville. And I think is what he called it. You know, and Bob has to, for budgetary reasons, Bob has to cut a bus route and the lowest performing bus route or the least revenue generating bus route happens to go through one of the most large, the largest black communities in Exampleville or whatever it's called, whatever the town is called, you know, and Bob decides to cut this bus route. And so the question is, is Bob racist? That's a discussion that you can have that's not like, let's, it puts a little bit of distance, which I think can be more comfortable.

I mean, you can do, I mean, there are other examples as well. I'm just trying to think of, you know, there's an example I've used of Pete Buttigieg's comments from 2011 about low-income and minority communities needing role models with respect to education. There was a fair amount of blowback. It was from 2011, but I Is it a problem that he said it? Is it a problem because he's a white guy saying it? And so there's a little bit of distance there to talk about scenarios or vignettes and things like that. I'm curious. I mean, a lot of people I think are not in the classroom and are also trying to engage in these ideas more thoughtfully. I mean, my newsletter gives explicit opinions from the

right and the left every day on the news of the day. And so I get a lot of readers who are, you know, they're interested regardless of their political views, they're interested in countering views that they don't agree with. I mean, what would you say to people who are sort of, you know, potentially in these information silos about practical ways they can approach something, you know, with a more open or inquisitive mind, I guess, because that seems to be a really big challenge right now. Yeah, I mean, I think that particularly, I mean, I don't know if you saw the series of videos that I did. There's a, it's on, I mean, just on YouTube, but there's a series of short videos I did called Beyond Bigots and Snowflakes,

which is sort of tied to the class that I teach called Bigots and Snowflakes. Those videos are, I mean, I think if you literally binge watch them, binge watch them, they're like less than 40 minutes or something. And those I think can be a really good starting place. They're short, not more than five minutes each,

or maybe there's one, anyway, right around there. And they talk about issues like questions that have non-factual answers that people treat as though they have factual answers. And, you know, what role does, what does it mean to tell someone to stay in their lane? And why is that a problem? And how should we think about social penalties? And sort of what the role of social penalties are and what the, what it means when they're used too broadly and sort of how that can shape climate and discourse. So I think that those can be, not that that, not that they're the end all be all, but I mean, they are a resource that I think can be helpful for, for starting a conversation. You know, I, and then other than that, I mean,

I think it sounds like probably reading your sub stack, you know, and just reading, listening broadly, reading broadly. Yeah. If people are interested in keeping up with some of your work or Heterodox Academy, or I guess more generally, you know, getting into spaces where they might inquire and embrace a more sort of inquisitive outlook on some of this stuff? I mean, how do you, where do you typically point people? Where should people go to follow that kind of stuff? Yeah. I mean, so Heterodox Academy, I mean, there's lots of information on their website and then my own work, most of my work is on, it's either diverseperspectivescons diverse perspectives consulting.com which is sort of a private oriented consulting company for this work and then also the mill center for the advancement

of critical thinking which is really trying to take some of this approach that i've been talking about and bring it into k through 12 so it's diverse perspectives consulting.com and the mill center.org um in addition to the heterodox Academy website. Awesome. Alana Redstone, thank you so much for the time and for coming on and hopefully we'll be in touch. Yeah. Thanks Isaac. Today's podcast was produced by Tangle Media in partnership with our friends over at Impostor Radio. If you enjoyed the podcast,

be sure to give it a five-star rating, share it with your friends and go check out retangle.com for more you Thanks for watching! Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.