The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 218. Free Speech and Cambridge | James Orr and Arif Ahmed

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

As an alternative for those who would rather listen ad-free, sign up for a premium subscription to receive the following:• All JBP Podcast episodes are ad-free.• Monthly Ask Me Anything episodes (and the ability to ask questions).• Presale access to events.• Premium, detailed show notes for future episodes.Sign up here: https://jordanbpeterson.supercast.com/This episode was recorded on October 11th, 2021.Dr. Arif Ahmed and Dr. James Orr come on to discuss what led to the University of Cambridge rescinding my invitation to speak there. We get into the difficulty of change in universities, anonymous reporting, the dangers of limiting free speech, microaggressions, the importance of humor, and more.Arif Ahmed MBE is a philosopher, lecturer at Cambridge, and author of “Saul Kripke”. His interests include decision theory and religion from an atheist and libertarian point of view. In the aftermath of the Cambridge incident, Dr. Ahmed remained a vocal advocate for political diversity. Dr. James Orr is a university lecturer in philosophy of religion at Cambridge and author of “The Mind of God and the Works of Nature.” He is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and The Critic.Dr. Ahmed’s profile:https://phil.cam.ac.uk/people/teaching-research-pages/ahmed“Saul Kripke”:https://amazon.com/Kripke-Bloomsbury-Contemporary-American-Thinkers/dp/0826492622Dr. Orr’s profile:https://divinity.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-james-orr“The Mind of God and Works of Nature”:https://amazon.co.uk/Mind-God-Works-Nature-Philosophical/dp/9042937629_______________Timestamps _______________[00:00] Intro [01:13] The Cambridge repeal[09:41] A case for the repealers, their potential fears[10:19] Photos “don’t imply a position—that was one of the most outrageous things, ‘endorsement by association…’ As if standing next to someone implies [you’re in agreement]" - Dr. Ahmed[14:11] Changes in free speech policy [19:54] Speaking Up: Consequences[25:28] The difficulty of change in university[27:36] “You become what you practice” - Jordan Peterson[27:45] “If you put off fights, they don't usually get better” - Jordan Peterson[35:53] Being Silent: Perils[36:04] “In general, with any coercive principle, think what might happen in the hands of someone wicked and tyrannical. That's how we should think about these things” - Dr. Ahmed[41:46] "The idea that you should remove everything that could threaten someone's identity and you should make that a university-wide policy is actually, exactly the opposite of what you should do, speaking clinically if you're trying to help people become more resilient" - Dr. Peterson[44:32] Microaggressions and the importance of humor[44:33] "There’s no such thing as a joke that isn't a microaggression. Jokes aren't funny unless they're microaggressions–especially witty ones" - Dr. Peterson[47:19] Anonymous voting & reporting[49:52] "Politics is downstream from culture [and, for better or worse,] culture is generated in universities" - Dr. Peterson[49:59] “What happens on campus doesn't stay on campus" - Dr. Orr[50:50] "The point about anonymous reporting is that... you can't come back to them to check their evidence. The person who has been accused can't face their accuser. There’s no possibility of due process” - Dr. Ahmed[54:51] Anonymous reports circumventing due process[57:55] Tyranny & Free Speech[59:17] Details about the vote; university bureaucracy[01:05:56] UK legislation post-Cambridge  [01:13:06] Anti-education & ideological purity tests at university[01:15:36] "I've heard students say ‘Well, I just write what the professor wants...’ It's like no – writing is thinking and if you don't think, that becomes part of you – those words become part of you [and] that's not bad education, it's anti-education" - Dr. Peterson

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Thank you very much for your attention. Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast season four episode 75. I'm Michaela Peterson. In this episode, Dr. Arif Ahmed and Dr. James O'er came on the podcast to talk about the Cambridge incident and the events that led to Cambridge rescinding Dad's invitation to speak there in 2018. After that, they spoke about anonymous reporting and the dangers of silencing free speech in general and how change can be difficult with an academia. They talk about writing, bad education, microaggressions, the latest UK legislation, which is really important, inspired by the Cambridge incident, and the importance of humor. Arif Ahmed is a philosopher and lecturer at the

University of Cambridge. As a vocal defender of political diversity, he strongly reacted to the Cambridge cancellation of Dad's talk and was instrumental in getting him back there. Dr. Ahmed is the author of two books linked in show notes titled Saul Kripke and Evidence Decision and Cousality. Dr. James Orr is an assistant in the faculty of divinity at the University of Cambridge. He teaches philosophy religion and ethics at Cambridge. James is also the author of The Mind of God and the Works of Nature and a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the Critic magazine. I hope you enjoy this episode. Also, there are a few tickets left to an in-person Q&A I'm doing in Nashville. If any of you good folks want to come by to Zane's on Thursday, January 20th,

type in Zane's and Michaela Petersen and that event will pop up. Hello everybody. I'm speaking today with Dr. James Orr and Dr. Erif Ahmed, both professors at Cambridge University. Dr. Orr is in the Faculty of Divinity and specializes in the philosophy of religion. Dr. Ahmed is in the Faculty of Philosophy and specializes in the philosophy of religion. Dr. Ahmed is in the faculty of philosophy and specializes in the study of decision-making in the face of uncertainty, which is a particular interest of mine, and is a leading expert on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work, including his writing on religions. I recently released a discussion with Dr. Orr and Dr. Nigel Bigger, which was well received and about religious issues and philosophical issues in general, so more academic discussion. But we decided to follow that up with a talk about some events that occurred in March 2019

when I was disinvited to Cambridge after being invited. We're going to talk about what happened since I'm returning. I'm going to be going to Cambridge and to Oxford for the last two weeks of November. So we're going to talk about how that came about, about the state of free speech at the Academy in general and other general issues. So I'll start by telling the story of the disinvitation as I experienced it.

So I was invited to Cambridge by some professors in the faculty of divinity to conduct a seminar or to take part in the seminar on Exodus, which was to be a follow-up to my lectures on Genesis, which proved to be somewhat surprisingly popular on YouTube. And so I thought I would delve into Exodus with some of the world's leading authorities to sharpen myself up and then maybe dive into Exodus as a lecture series. Anyways, we had that planned and then it got canceled because a photograph of me emerged that was taken

with this guy in New Zealand. And now that was taken during a meet and greet after my tour lecture. So I went to 130 cities in 2018. And afterwards, at all of them, I had my picture taken with about 100 people, one by one or two by two, sometimes with families. So about maybe 15,000 pictures, photographs, of which this was one. And so I remember this, actually, at New Zealand. So this guy came walking up to me and he sort of stopped and he had

this t-shirt on and he looked at me sort of questioningly and it was a t-shirt outlining his criticisms of Islam, of radical Islam, as he saw it. And I looked at it and I looked at him and again he kind of looked questioning and apologetic. And then I thought, well, you know, that's your t-shirt, mate. And that's up to you to wear that. And so, you know, I motioned him forward and we had our picture taken. And I really didn't think anything of it after that. But apparently, many people did.

And so I was disinvited because of my repugnant views, which were hypothetically indicated by the fact that I took one picture out of 15,000 with this gentleman wearing a opinionated t-shirt. And so that was apparently justification for canceling an intense academic endeavor aimed at bringing the work in Exodus to, as broad a public population as possible in the most rigorous manner possible. And so that was quite a shock, I would say.

And, you know, it wasn't particularly enjoyable to go through all that. So well, that's turned around. And now I'm invited back and I'm going in November. And so, how did James, maybe you could start? How did that all come about, do you think? Like, why did that happen? And why has it been reversed? Well, thank you, Jordan.

And just listening to you recount your experiences of beginning of March 2019. Was it beginning of 2019 is, well, it's pretty moving to watch and difficult to hear, but I just wanna stress that with all that in the background, it's incredibly gracious of you to have accepted my invitation to come over to Cambridge. I'm thrilled about it. I'm thrilled about it. So it's not a favor in any sense. It's a great

university and I think it's an unbelievable privilege to go there and to go to Oxford. So I'm absolutely thrilled about it. Well, if I may say so, I think it's a testament to your character and to your resilience and capacity for parents and forgiveness that you've accepted the invitation. And just by way of encouragement, I want to say that the reaction to the news of your visit from colleagues and from students in the university, beyond the university, from members of the general public, has been overwhelmingly positive. I, it's been difficult to respond

to all the supportive messages I've received and the wake of the announcement. And I just think it's obvious from, just from the reaction to the kinds of questions that we were exploring on your podcast a few weeks ago that there's a huge appetite among people for the kinds of questions that we're exploring in that conversation and that we're planning to explore in research seminars and talks with colleagues and students here in November. who I think are excited about your visit. I've had almost no word of criticism at all from colleagues in the faculty or from students in the faculty.

I think there's a recognition that you would be, you're gonna be a perfect interlocutor for all sorts of people here, particularly on quest for those of us who work in theology and religion, you've encouraged lots of young people to take sacred texts seriously, to think about how you read, to read ancient and difficult texts about the meaning of value of religion and society today.

So I know that was a difficult time for you. And I'd not actually been appointed to my post back then, or think maybe I had been appointed just a few weeks before all that happened, but so I wasn't privy to the kind of inner workings, the decision making, and so on. And I think what I can say is that it was a relative, a very, very small number of people who were concerned or showing strong resistance to your coming. I think this is

something that we can talk about later, the way in which in these big universities, a relatively small number of determined ideologically driven students, it's often students, but also students, it's often students, but also colleagues who will, who will buckle in the face of student resistance. The capacity they have to project the idea that their view is a dominant orthodoxy. And I think the mechanics of how that happens is a very interesting one. And the gap between, sort of asymmetry between those two positions, what seems, what is actually a a minority view and then this impression that it's a very, that it's an orthodox, as I said, was laid there in the in the events that that followed, which really were prompted by what Arif decided to do in response to the university announcing that it was going to set out a...

Yeah, well, it's very interesting and strange that I could be sufficiently reprehensible to be banned from the university three years ago, and I haven't changed, I don't think. And yet when I'm re-invited that the overwhelming response that you've received so far as positive, that's very peculiar. And so, and worth delving into, I think. And, and, and, and Dr. Ahmed, you were, you played a role in, now, as I understand it, the policies of the university with regards to inviting speakers have actually been changed.

And the mechanics of that are worth delving into too, just so maybe you could tell us the story about how that happened and why and how you got involved. Yeah, thank you. Before I start on that, Jordan, I just want to say that first of all, really positive and looking forward to your visit and like James, I've had a lot of positive comments about it.

But also that we as a university should be very grateful to James all because he was the one who had the vision and the initiative to re-extend the invitation. And it's great that he's done that. Now in terms of what happened, as you say, there was this one I regard as an outrageous disinputation of you in the spring of 2019.

So as you know what happened was you were invited, you accepted the invitation, and you were then disinvited, and as I recall, not even told, that you've been disinvited. You found out... Yeah, that was one of the funny things. You found out on Twitter, they didn't even have a... I mean, it was not only discourteous, but worse than discourteous. It was, it was cowardly, I thought. Well, if you had to make a case for the people who disinvited me, like, what is it, what

do you think it was that they were trying to stop exactly? I mean, it's worth investigating the motives and the belief, as well as then we can talk about, to some degree, the fact that it seems to be a minority view Well, my my feeling is that it's it's related to the things that James was saying that the university authorities or those who are responsible for this decision Have been frightened by by a group of highly committed ideologues We gave the impression that this was a general university view that there was outrage about your position. In fact, I don't think that's true. And in any case, being photographed next to someone doesn't invite anything about your position at all. And that was one of the most outrageous things with the statement by the university at the time, which they called as are called endorsement by association as though simply standing next to someone who's who's wearing clothes that expresses views implies that you have those views yourself. That was so bad, it must have been a

pretext and I think it was a pretext. It was a pretext for a kind of a kind of fear of a model. So what do you think they were afraid of? So let's say it wasn't the fact that I got to have my picture taken with this character who was wearing this t-shirt, it was something else that they didn't want me to do, I suppose, or be. What do you think that was exactly? Do you have any sense of that? Yeah, I think ultimately they probably failed protests, they failed reputational damage, they failed a sense that all the students would think that Cambridge was enabling someone who these people regard as as unacceptable. Those are the things they fear, but frankly, if you're an academic, the one thing, the one thing that is your job is not to care what the mob thinks is not

to care, you know, who's going to be upset or frightened about the people you're right. You probably invite people because they can speak the truth and you can have a discussion which leads to mutual understanding and advancement in knowledge. So I think it was that- Yes, Colin. We should hope, we should all devoutly hope that an institution as august and as remarkable as Cambridge would be a model for courage in such matters, instead of being cowed by a loud ideologically possessed minority, because you might think, well, if Cambridge University can't withstand this, then who the hell can? That's a serious question. And these things have to be examined seriously. But seriously, I mean, we need institutions that we can respect and that hold up the standards that have made them what they are. And if they fold, well, how can you expect normal people say not to be cowed and intimidated

by the same tactics? Absolutely. Actually, there were two other episodes on my mind, one of which sort of confirmed my theory about what was happening in your case, the other of which suggested different sorts of motivations. So one of them was a case that occurred around the same time as yours, which was a case of a research fellow at St. Edmund's

College here in Cambridge. Who was doing research in the sociologist, well, then respectable sociologist, he had worked, worked profiling the economist in top journals. He was fired because there was, again, there was a more protesting about his association's conferences he'd been to, journals that he published

in which other people that they found his taste for published in, so on. Again, Donald said nothing illegal. That was one case, which again, I think illustrates the sorts of pressures that I think will be brought to bear. So what were the topics for that? The topics of race and intelligence.

Yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes. Well, the intelligence literature is rough. The whole, I mean, the whole thing was so chilling, Jordan, because it was, it was decided by an inquiry that was kept secret. Nobody's going to know what the evidence was in this inquiry. So the whole thing was, was terrifying. The other case was slightly different. So there was another case that concerned me, which was a case

where it was a it was an event for the Palestinian society where there was a chair from that society, which the university threatened to shut down because they thought they were worried that the chair might be an extremist or something. She wasn't at all. She was a respectful, respectable academic from so ass. And the university imposed its own chair on that. Now that was slightly different because that was responding to another threat of free speech, which is the government's legislation on prevent

and anti-terrorism. But those three events were sort of coalescing in my mind around the time that I tried to change the universities free speech policy. Okay, so let's talk about the change in the free speech policy. What changes did you propose? And then it took a couple of years as I understand to really get this through.

And I also understand from James that it wasn't that easy to get people to speak in favor of your proposal, but that it was passed. And when we need to go into that, by an overwhelming majority of the people who were concerned and able to legislate such things, so to speak for the university. Yeah, so I can take you through that. What happened was it was this was around actually March 2020, so about a year after your

case. And the university had decided that it was going to put through a new freedom of speech policy. This was obviously at a time when everyone had had other things on their mind at least in Britain in March 2020. They didn't offer a vote on it, they just wanted to put it straight through. And it was a policy which I found concerning, especially in life of these incidents. One part of it was that it mandate said that we have right to free speech, but we must always exercise respect for other people's identities and opinions. Now that might seem not curious.

But of course the word respect being so vague. It doesn't seem innocuous to me. Indeed. I mean, it seems terrible because it just it just removes the first part of protection for free speech. I mean, if you have to be cautious about other people's opinions, much less their identity, while we should reverse that. Their identity, much less their opinions, is well, who decides when that's respectful? Yeah, yeah, it's just weasel words that. Exactly. And the bit about identities, I bet they had you in mind, when they were saying that. But whenever anyone says, I believe in free speech, but that's a good

sign to me that they don't believe in speech. And that was the impression that this policy gave off. Other parts of the policy, which may not have been directly explicitly new, but which certainly brought you in those other cases, for instance, the Palestinian society to mind, were rules which said that the university could stop to speak or events if they thought they were threatened

the welfare of students, and that their welfare is to be defined and could be interpreted broadly. And indeed, allow the university to stop events under pretty much any circumstances that they like, speaker events, for instance. So that was the proposed policy in March 2020. So why did that bother you so much? I mean, you're pretty young and starting your academic career in many ways. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but you know, it's a hell of a thing to take on, and it's not without its risks. And I'm always curious about people's motives. It's like, there's lots of professors at

Cambridge. Why do you think this was your problem? Well, you flatter me, but I will say that I guess there were two things. One of them was philosophical, and one of them is more to do with the nature of the job. So, philosophically speaking, my basic philosophical position is what you might call classical liberal. So, my basic value is individuality. And, you know, in terms of what I do, my political engagement, even my professional engagement, to some extent, you know, that's the ultimate and most important value. So for me, it really touched in there. It touched something that was the core of my identity if you want to use that, that

important word. The other aspect, which I said was professional, was simply to do something I alluded to earlier, which was, what is this job for? It's part of your duty as an academic, I would have thought, you know, academics are normally cautious as they should be, but the one thing that they shouldn't be cautious about is defending the ultimate purpose of the academy. And that cannot be pursued without free speech. And without the ability to question freely, believes that the hell by majority,

also believes that the hell by minorities, and without worrying about who you're going to defend, who's going to be hurt by your words, especially in a subject like philosophy and I dare say in a subject like yours and certainly in a subject like James's, you can't have free discussion. If every time you talk about something,

you'll frighten that you're going to offend the other person and then the other might report to you and you might get in trouble. I can't do my job. I don't expect James can, I think it's that you can. If discussion is curtailed in that way. So, no scientists can because that freedom of inquiry and the freedom to upset traditional truths, let's say, well, in some in a more really fundamental sense, that's what science is all about and as a, let's say a creative scientist, you're always working against what's established, because otherwise what you discovered wouldn't be new. And you're always going to be facing people

who are upset for one reason or another by your hypothesis and your research. So it's not a side issue here. It's crucial to the academy as such. Yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely. But that still doesn't explain why you made your problem say when so many people were perfectly willing to remain silent.

Well, one thing I would say is that I was slightly surprised. When I wrote, so after the university's policy came out, there was a discussion. What's called a discussion in Cambridge University really means that you write a paper, and it's published in the University magazine. And so I sent a short paper off proposing some changes to these policies and stating my objections. And I had expected this being Cambridge University that many other people would do the same, because I didn't think I was

alone and being concerned about this. Nobody else did. So that was the first point which I realized. So there was no real braver on markup because I'd expected of that point that a lot of other people would be jumping in. Nobody did. So that was the point which I realized that I was perhaps more isolated than I'd expected. To go back to your question about motivations,

I mean, I don't know what more I can tell you. I mean, these are things that matter to me. I don't really care if anyone else is doing it. And did you face any trouble? So, you voiced your opinion and you wanted to modify this document, which had, let's say, politically correct underpinnings. And did it cause grief for you? Were people outraged by what you said, or did things proceed as a matter of course? When it was interesting. So, some people, some people wrote to me, in fact, by a few people wrote to me at the time,

saying that they agreed with my concerns, which sort of made it even more surprising that nobody had actually said so in public. Some people wrote to me saying they agreed with my cousins that weren't willing to say anything in public. James was, as always, was really helpful. James has always been really supportive, and James has been publicly supportive throughout this process, but it's because there have been

a few courageous people like James and a few others, you know, in Cambridge at that stage. That was definitely a big, a big help. So there was some support. I also had people warning, so I had people saying, you know, you might get, you know, you might get some kind of disciplinary procedure, you might get some kind of investigation. I didn't expect anything at that stage. That indeed nothing happened to me at that stage. And I'm pleased to say that we know investigations are anything that have made me sense. So that's really interesting in two ways, isn't it?

Because it shows you how low people are to do this because they're afraid. And we shouldn't make light of that, because this is actually no fun. If you do something like this and it explodes in your face, it probably took me a long time to recover from the disinvitation, especially the way it was handled. And my health and my wife's health were extremely compromised at the time. And so it came at a particularly bad time. We had just received news that she probably had

terminal cancer. And so this came on top of that. Now, luckily, she survived, thank God. But it was a harrowing time. And so I see why people can be cowed like this. Because you don't know when this is going to explode. And when it's going to tangle you up so deeply that, well, your job's gone. That's what happened to the Weinstein's, for example, it evergreen.

And I mean, that was really, that did them a tremendous amount of damage. They're unbelievably resourceful and they got back on their feet. And they were a husband and wife team, so they had each other and that was good. But not everybody can do that. And you can get seriously taken out if something like this goes wrong. So, but then that ties into this issue we discussed a bit earlier, which is how a small minority of, you know, people who, whose wrath knows no bounds in some sense can be so dominant. Yep. So it was, it was in some ways a calculated risk. I can't imagine how difficult that must have been for you, Jordan.

It was, you know, it must have been horrific. I mean, one thing I saw happening in Cambridge, not quite then, but a little bit later, was the treatment that was meted out to not an academic, to a member of the university star. So we have college porters in Cambridge. And these are these people who work at the colleges, often they're there sort of, you know,

retirement, or military or something, really helpful. They do all kinds of jobs around the college, students rely on them, the academics rely on them, the ones of my college, brilliant. There was one at a college in Cambridge who was also a Labour counsellor, who resigned on political grounds, which was to do with his view about trans issues.

So he thought there was an emotion about trans issues that he thought, you know, threatened women safety. And so he resigned on a point of principle. And that's his political activity. That's his right. I could understand his grounds of doing that. The students at his college, so these are typically much more privileged people than him. Students at his college formed a mob to try to get this man sacked. And this was, you know, this is a much more

privileged people. They didn't care about, you know, the consequences for him. They just thought because he diverted from their line of ideological purity. Do you remember this case, James? And James may know all about me, but yeah. I do. And it was thanks to a very brave female undergraduate. I think she was in her, even a second year, she spoke out, wrote a public article about it, a great courage, I thought to herself. And she, there was an awful lot of resistance to her doing that, but it was remarkable. She got in touch with us. I seem to remember.

I can't remember how the case was remarkable. She got in touch with us, I seem to remember. I can't remember how the case was resolved. Well, I think the case in the end was resolved positively, but that's right, she was sure to say what, since she was brilliant. She actually wrote an article in which she said, and I thought this is very telling, she described the state of the academy. She said, when I came to Cambridge, I was expecting, she said, the motto of the Royal Society is, don't take anyone's word for it. And she said, that's what she was expecting when I come to Cambridge. I was expecting to engage in rigorous discussion where all of my charitable beliefs would be challenged,

you know, and I'd come away shaken and uncomfortable, and I would think for myself, and I would be forced to rethink everything with the most important things in my life. I think she was actually studying psychology. And then she said, when I got here, it wasn't like that. When I got here, I felt that I was being coddled and there was certain things that you couldn't question.

Certain things that you would just make a feel outside it. It was a brilliant article and really telling because it was her own experience of what it's like for a student now compared to what it was like when I was an undergraduate many years ago. So that's an illustration of how things can go wrong and the sorts of things we were seeing around us in the summer and then the autumn of 2020.

Jay, did you want to say anything more about that point we can talk more about that? No, I mean, I think it was then, wasn't it June, July 2020? I remember you came round for lunch, round here, and we started talking about who might be willing to sign in public a support, which was required by the mechanisms of the all the kind of procedural mechanisms.

I think we needed 25 names, wasn't it? And I think we could come up between us. We managed to come up with 7 or 8. And then it took us another eight, 10 weeks to get past the 25. I think it was September that we were starting to look promising. And in fact, I think in the end, we got quite a few more

than 25 for the three amendments that Arif was proposing to introduce, to kind of, to take out the respect plan which and replace it with. Okay, so you needed a tolerance. You needed those 25 to put the amendments forward. That's right. Yeah. Okay, so that would indicate that some people were concerned that that requirement for 25

rather than just one person. But it was hard to get 25. Yeah, it was telling. It's telling. There might have been two reasons why. One reason why it might have been because it was a trivial issue and nobody cared about it,

who cares, quibbling about a few words. Another reason, which I suspect was, you know, we've turned out was with a more likely explanation, was that actually a lot of people were afraid to sign something in public. So why do you think it's not trivial? And why do you think that argument's invalid? The reason I thought the argument was invalid because the additional evidence that I got after the vote, because the vote actually had a very high, a lot of people bothered to vote

on this, and they bothered to vote for that change, if it had been a trivial thing nobody would have cared to vote. So that was one bit of evidence. The other bit of evidence was the testimony of the people who wrote to me, who I called up at the time, and James may have got this as well. People who are saying, look, we support this, we can see what you're doing, and we can see why it's concerned. But I just don't want to get involved in this kind of fight right now. Getting involved in this is going to be too difficult for me right now. I'm up for promotion right now.

Yeah. I don't want to face all of these things. Yeah, well, you're practice what you become. We'd be sorry. You become what you practice. And you know, that's, well, and this is something I learned as a psychologist. And I think maybe it was part of my temperament to begin with is like, if you put off fights, they don't get better, not usually. They usually get worse. And maybe you think, well, I'll be in better position later. And you might be, but probably you won't. And so that notion that it's not a good time, fair enough, you know, I hate conflict. I really hate it. I'm not built for it temperamentally. But I've

learned through painful experience, I would say, and not least as a clinician that when you see the elephants trunk under the rug, you, that when you see the elephant's trunk under the rug, you can infer the rest of the elephant. And it's going to get bigger as you feed it with your stupidity and your withdrawal, and you let whatever it's feeding on continue. And it's extremely dangerous. You see this reflected in ancient mythology, actually, quite nicely in many situations. You see that in the Mesopotamian creation myth, where a dragon grows in the background, essentially,

that threatens to swamp everything. And that's eventually defeated by a great, you know, a Mardaque, as it turns out. This is a very old idea that little things left grow in the dark and get big. And so it's not really a very good reason and especially if your conscience is bugging you because It's something that looks into the future and says well, this is kind of small at the moment, but But but That's right. Actually, it's going James Well, I'll just say yeah, I remember reading that, that this is going to Babylonian creation myth, I think, isn't it? But that sense of things, just growing with a kind of gathering

a momentum of their own is something that we've experienced a lot of. I think it's there's been some work on this in sociology. I think they call it the spiral of silence. It's, I can't remember, Elizabeth Neumann or Noelle Neumann. And the basic idea is that fear of isolation, social isolation, autism is a huge, motivating factor in a person's behavior. Yeah, well, there's two great fears, right? That's one is being isolated and thrown out of the group. Because then you die. And the other is biological catastrophe. Those are the two big classes of fears that you see as a clinician.

Right. So that's the animating idea. And then the spiral starts, you know, the monster starts to grow when some people notice that their opinions are spreading fast. And that gives them a kind of confidence to double down and express themselves more confidently. And then on the other hand, people who disagree with those opinions see that their views gaining less traction and they stay silent because of the fear of social isolation.

And then they get weaker. They get weaker. And of course, yeah. A lot of these people, they're gorgeous. Well, I was just going to say, social media and those sorts of things, that obviously all the network effects from that accelerates that. And so, and what happens is that people just get very bad at judging what the real spread of opinion is in a social environment. And then it's a kind of a dynamic process. It's a spiral. And so you get a spiral to the point where what is a confident minority, but minority position

becomes this completely unassailable orthodoxy. And I think that's one reason why in the case of what was started to happen in Cambridge in the summer of 2020 and started to happen in Cambridge in the summer of 2020 and leading up to the vote in December is that what we saw was that although there was deep reluctance among colleagues who struggled to get more than 25 votes to sign in public that are of amendments, when it came to the vote which crucially operated by a secret ballot. So you were allowed to measure opinion with people voting by people voting from within the closet, as it were.

And as soon as that, that mechanism was allowed to operate, you suddenly, the spiral of silence just as it were, the monster explodes. Right. So that's really interesting procedurally as well, because these sorts of positive feedback loop phenomenon, you see those in clinical therapy too. So for example, when people start to get depressed, then they withdraw and they stop socializing say and they stop engaging in their, in the activities that bring them meaning and joy. And so that makes their depression worse. And then they're more likely to withdraw again. And you know, it's probably an example of something like the Pareto principle operating again, right? That things can spiral up very, very

rapidly and dominate. And they can spiral down very, it's nonlinear on both ends. And, and there's some truth to that, that kind of process that underlies all sorts of phenomena. So that secret ballot issue, that's really relevant for bringing something like this to a halt. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah. Elysium health. You've heard me talk about their supplement matter

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That's trybasis.com slash Jordan promo code JBP10 for 10% off. It's a great deal on a groundbreaking supplement. Go ahead, I know it's going to say one, I mean, one, one part of the isolation process also, I think, is certain kinds of social interactions or professional interactions. What I mean is the experience of being in meetings, for instance, departmental meetings or college meetings, where probably a lot of people, there'll be some mad or insane proposal, I've known to say, we're going to remove all pronouns from our policy or we're going to have this change to the syllabus, or whatever. And everybody, or maybe most people in the room,

we're thinking, this is nonsense, but I'm not going to say it's nonsense. And they left the meeting, thinking they were the only person who thought it was nonsense. Because nobody spoke out, and the thing was not decided by a secret ballot. If it had been decided by a secret ballot, as was the case, as James says in December,

suddenly you have thousands of people realizing that they weren't alone. They thought it was also possible that the objections, so imagine those objections manifest themselves in people's imagination, but they're not hooked so tightly to a whole ideological network as the proposal is. And so in some sense, people don't have the right words at hand immediately. You know, the pronoun thing is a good indication because, well, justify your use of he and she. It's like, well, I don't know how to do that.

Exactly. You know, that's what everyone does. We've done that forever. And that's my justification. It's like, well, it's pretty weak compared to that whole ideology that's coming at you. And those people who are so committed, they're often pretty verbal.

They're pretty well able to articulate that ideology and quite forcefully, and they're emotionally committed to it. And so that's also a structural problem. Yeah, and they have devices. So for instance, if you think about the way I found the way these people use terms like not only welfare, but also harm, you know, the idea that words do harm to people, which has a lot of currency now in Britain and is chilling,

is based on an absurdly inflated conception of harm. But when you were in the middle of a discussion, you know, it's also related to another cognitive problem, which is one of the things I often did as a therapist when someone told me they were afraid of something, doing something is I said, well, that's because you're not afraid enough of not doing it. Because the doing produces this harm, let's say. And you can be afraid of that. But the not doing is sort of invisible. And that has something to do with decision making in uncertainty, by the way. And so I used to get people to flesh out what would happen if they didn't do the thing they were afraid of. And then they thought, oh, I see, there's real risk both ways. And now I get to pick my risk. And this harm issue is the same thing because

you could say, well, sometimes words do do harm. There's no doubt about that. And maybe that's, it's unfair to conflate that with something like physical violence, although you could have a discussion about that. But the question that isn't being asked then is, well, what harm does your attempt to shut down what words you regard as harmful? What's that likely to produce for harm? Well, none. It's like, oh, really? So you haven't thought that part of it through at all, and you're going to be the arbiter of what's harmful and what's not. And there's no danger in that either. Is there? So that's a good way to deal with that sort of thing.

I agree. is there? So that's a good way to deal with that sort of thing. I agree. And of course, another thing that a lot of the time people people don't see is they think, you know, we can impose on people's speech, we didn't tell them how to, how to behave various ways, but they don't think that that's an instrument that could be abused in all sorts of ways. So if you mandate speech on one thing, one day, it's going to be mandate on other things the next day. And in general, I think with any form of coercive coercive principle, you need to think what's going to happen in the hands of somebody wicked and tyrannical. That's how we should think about these things, not only in university, but in politics

more generally. Typical right wing clap trap. Well, that's kind of an interesting thing, right? Because one thing that conservative thinking does always is say, yeah, but it's like, well, you're putting this forward for the good and fair enough, you know, and it's based on compassion and that's actually a virtue, although it is by no means the only virtue, and sometimes it's a vice, but why are you so sure that this will only do the thing you think it will do and nothing else, and that you're wise enough to make that change, right? And something that's sort of working already. So, hmm, you put a part of the problem might be that I think it's a sort of a glitch within liberalism. And you think back to to mills, I did the famous No Harm principle, which for many,

many years operated is a very, very good, basic rule for governing social interaction. But you can understand the temptation of trying to fold under the notion of harm or violence. I think it's the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam who calls this concept creep. You can see that you see the sort of the power that comes from leveraging these concepts, particularly when an institution is caught in the headlines

of a Twitter model or whatever it might be, that there's threat to the harm or threats of harm or violence to the person which are. In the end, I think I take your point Jordan, there may well be certain situations in which a views of speech can be thought of as inf as, as, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, and, and, and, and the legislature in that society needs to deliberate upon and, and decide and, and, and, you know, we all accept that freedom of speech is not, is not unqualified right and, and indeed academic freedom has, has, has, proper has proper parameters imposed as well.

So, well, we could also be growing up and say that it's dangerous, but necessary. It's dangerous, but necessary. Yeah, it's dangerous. So I think that the danger comes in when what counts as harm is being subjectively determined. And so this notion that that started to gather steam

at the last few years, this idea of a microaggression, which in effect is an aggression or a claim that harm has been infected on a person that is subjectively determined. That is to say, it's in principle not an offense that could be explored in any kind of forensic context by jury or a judge. That is to say, the only evidence that count of the harm that could possibly count is the subject saying, you've hurt me.

And so the danger of the language that Arif was protesting against, the identityarian respect language, is that it effectively conferred a veto on the most psychologically fragile person in the university and who could simply say, and we would not, there would be no way of establishing whether or not they were sincere with that, they'd have to be just simply taking a face value, But this person, the invitation to this speaker troubles me, upsets me, does me harm. Yeah, well, that's interesting too.

Like, imagine you take that hypothetical, sensitive person, it might not be in their best interests to actually grant them not sort of veto power because one of the things you do with someone who's really depressed or anxious is actually, especially if you're working as a cognitive behaviorist, let's say, is you get them to look at the thoughts that are upsetting them and maybe modify the ones that are making them sensitive beyond what is good for them.

And that's also to some degree judged subjectively by them. And so it isn't necessarily the case that protecting people in that manner and giving them that sort of power is actually in their best interest. So it reminds me of that insight of Jonathan Hyde and Greg Lukianoff in there. I think it's their 2017 Atlantic article that became the coddling of the American mind,

where one of the three principles, I think Jonathan isolates is a sort of inversion of the niche and idea that, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. That is to say, and a thing that, you know, the sort of harm or violence that sort of any kind of threat is it doesn't have, it's not something that can toughen you up. It's not an opportunity to try and strengthen your character or to develop resilience. I know that I think this is something you've touched on. That's also a huge part of what universities are doing for their students, if you think

about it psychologically. So we could talk about people who are hyper sensitive to anxiety and depression, let's say they're higher in neuroticism. Well, one of the things you wanna do when you get educated is arm yourself with defenses, and I mean, practical defenses, both ideational, so the way you think and the way you act, against that kind of onslaught. And education can really do that, right? Because you're quicker on your feet and you know more.

And also, if you're trying to reduce someone's anxiety and depression and they're temperamentally tilted that way, what you actually do is gradually expose them to the things that they're afraid of. You don't protect them more and more and more because that actually makes that positive spiral dissent into depression and anxiety worse. So the fact, the idea that you should remove everything that might threaten someone's identity and you should make that a university-wide policy is actually exactly the opposite of what you should do, speaking clinically, if you're trying to help people become more resilient.

This is a serious issue. And, well, obviously, this is all serious. serious issue. And, and, and, it, well, obviously, this is all serious. But the fact is the universities in the UK are to some extent going in the opposite direction. So they do have, as James point said, this category of what's called microaggressions. And these are things which can even be a matter of a discipline reaction, if you're a moment for it. Where you say some, at NYU, there's posters all over the place, in the bathrooms, for example, encouraging people to report such things to the appropriate well-paid bureaucratic authorities. Cambridge tried to introduce a system where you could report these things anonymously,

so not confidentially anonymously. Nobody knows who made the report. So it's like he's Germany. The report comes in and then somebody could in principle be disciplined for it. No one would ever use that. You know, you could imagine that. So as you say, if making fun of someone's religion, for instance, is something I can't do, that's a kind of challenge which might upset them. And as you say, part of the point of words is to some extent that they do some harm. They're meant to be upsetting.

They're meant to shake your views about things. If the conversations you have at university, you know, never upset you, never make you feel a little bit less confident, never make you, make you perhaps even make you cry sometimes, university isn't doing its job. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And in fact, the anonymous reporting tool mechanism that is accompanied

with these long shopping lists of microaggressions effectively, where, as you said, it's happening at NYU Jordan, the students and staff are encouraged effectively to police each other and to censor each other. It's a very disturbing development. I mean, thankfully, it's a poly, it's absolutely important.

And this is, well, this is part of the good story of good positive developments in Cambridge, is that when the University rolled out this, I think it was called Change the Culture campaign back in May, it spent a couple of years working on it, the backlash I think was intense enough among senior colleagues to, Stephen II, the vice chancellor, to, in the end, take it down and admit that it'd been put up in error and as actually as far as Sorry, as he said as a cool He wasn't aware that it had gone up, but he's wasn't aware of the microaggressions

Component but but this is a problem throughout the UK. I mean it turned out that the company is a sort of tech startup called culture shift Which we which rolled it out in Cambridge, but there are, I think there are 50 or 60 other universities in the UK that have a system of this kind. You know, there's no such thing as a joke that isn't a microaggression, right? Jokes aren't funny unless they're microaggressions, especially witty jokes. And so, you know, that's why I'm so concerned when I see comedians get stopped because they're bellwethers for this sort of thing. And if you can't take a joke, I mean, I was talking with my wife and some friends about the way working class men sort of test each other out.

And a huge part of that is this throwing back and forth of microaggressions. Sometimes they're not so micro, right? It's like, let's see if I can get under your skin. Can you take a joke? Can you lower your ego, you know, or do you get too upset? Are you too narcissistic? Are you too arrogant? Can we rely on you in a crunch, or even a little crunch?

Like, can you cooperate? Can you subordinate your needs to the group now and then? Or are you narcissists? All that's played out with aggressive humor. And putting a clamp on that is a catastrophe. Plus, it's not funny anymore. We need some humor. I think there are different sub-pultures where you get different kind of equi-liberia here.

So there are some cultures, like as you say, in barracks, for instance. Also in Roman times, you know, Hube describes, you know, Roman B, as Hube says, Roman people were very rude to each other from what we know of their conversations, compared to even high high low ranking people. They were not afraid to be rude to each other and make fun of each other compared to how we are in our society now. Other ones, military military environments, I think, are like that. Some environments I was in when I was a child, you know, these are, these are equilibria that societies can end up in. And there are other equilibria, which are much more covelling, and much more timid, and it seems the fear is,

as you say, we're going to end up in one of those. Where... Yeah, those are authoritarian. One of the things I learned as a studying psychoanalytic thought, mostly was the notion of compassion as devouring. An excessive compassion is a vice, and it becomes totalitarian. And no one that I know of yet

has had a serious conversation about female totalitarianism. And that's a conversation long overdue because females are now part and parcel of the general political culture in a way they haven't been in many societies for a very long time. And so this totalitarianism of compassion is no joke.

You know, it was Freud's primary concern. That's the E. Diplomather fundamentally. It's easy to feel off balance after the holidays. Throw some back to work stress on top of that, and that's a recipe for insomnia that probably won't help the stress. Magnesium supplements, for example, are super easy to integrate into your routine

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and see the effects for yourself. Give a great offer to get you started. Get a 10% discount at magbreakthrough.com slash JBP when using promo code JBP10. If it's not for you, there's a one-year money-back guarantee. Again, that's only at magbreakthrough.com slash JBP using code JBP10 at checkout. The word that the expression I've heard used in a lot of places for this is what people call soft-to-toleritarianism. So it's not, it's not totally totalitarianism. It's not the jackfruit or the prison,

it's the smiley emoji and they're not hurting people's feelings. But the result of the same, when it comes to free speech and argument and the truth and just having rational discourse because so much of a disuppressed. So that's what we're fearing. But as James says, there are reasons for hope. When you compare, so as James was talking about

the microaggressions episode in Cambridge, the backlash against that, I mean, I don't know what you think, but my impression was the backlash against that was much more quick and public than it was against the free speech policy a year and a bit before. So that is a problem. So you might open to door.

The culture to some extent seems to be improving a bit. People seem a bit more more open to speak out James. I didn't know if that's your own. Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. I mean, I think on the one hand, it was it was distressing after the scale of the vote and the the clarity with which the views of the majority of the staff, the majority of those voted. And I can't remember what the margins were. it was about 85% voted for the tolerance language over the respect language. It was depressing that barely six months later, this campaign has rolled out that just seemed

to be antithetical in every conceivable respect to what that, to the views that were expressed at the ballot box in December. But as I have said, the grass roots resistance to it was much faster. I mean, it's true, I think that, and this might have been to some extent, true of the vote itself, that one big difference from two, three years ago

with the rescission of your invitation, Jordan, is the extramural support that we've had outside the university. So the public awareness, public attention, and public concern, tax-back concern, has been much more focused on the problem of the perceived crisis of the university. And so there was quite a lot of press coverage. I remember around about, you know, end of May beginning of June, and this was happening.

And I think that must have put a lot of pressure on and brought about immediate, an immediate and dramatic institutional response that I don't know what Arif thinks, but I think would have been very, very hard to achieve just internally by writing letters and complaining using sort of ordinary procedures. So I think that would have, that that that played a big role.

And I think people are starting to understand to some degree that these obscure goings on in universities moved downstream with incredible rapidity. When I first made that observation, not that I was the first to do it, that you should, that the general public should be concerned about these strange academic ideas, it seemed like I was overreacting, but you know, everyone's learned in some sense, since then, what do they say? Politics is downstream from culture, and cultures generated in the universities for better or worse. And so what happens on campus doesn't stay on campus. Yes, exactly.

Unlike Las Vegas, right? And I wanted to clear something up, because earlier you pointed to the utility of anonymity in a vote, right? But then you criticized anonymous reporting. And so I just want, I want to clear that up. So it's way different because anonymous reporting is one person, and that can easily be someone who's quite malevolent.

And if you don't think people like that exist, it's just because you're naive. They can use that as an unbelievably powerful weapon to take down in a very painful way anyone they want, whereas if it's a vote, and we should talk about the vote, because my understanding is that thousands of people voted on this policy. So who were those thousands of people and how did that come about? Well, it was, I mean, you're quite right about the distinction, first of all.

I mean, the point about anonymous report is that these are reports of the anonymous. You can't come back to the evidence. You know, the person who's been accused can't, you can't even face their accusers. So there's no possibility of deprocess. With the enormous voting, so the turnout was about 1500 people, so it was about 30%, which doesn't seem that I've had actually, it was very high by historical standards. So I've been looking back over the last three or four decades and so I couldn't find one where there was such a high turnout and such a decisive margin actually, so it was a big hit,

it was a big result, especially given that it was taking place during a lockdown, or taking place at the height of the pandemic. So the people who were voting, they were all academics. Cambridge is unusual in British academia and maybe unusual in Western academia more generally, in that it and Oxford are both self-governing. And what that means is that the supreme body that decides what it does is the sort of main body of senior academic. So all lecturers, professors and so on. And there's about 7,000 of those. Those, that's called region house, and that has supreme authority.

Now there is an executive body called the council, which handles most day-to-day business, and the Council often makes proposals on which there is no vote, unless it doesn't propose a vote. And one of the telling things is that the Council put forward this proposal, which was on a matter of fundamental value. I can't think of anything of more importance to a university than its fee-on-free, and a speech. It pulled forward this change.

It did not offer a vote. When I made my objections, It did not offer a vote. When I made my objections, it did not offer a vote. When I made my objections, it didn't negotiate. It didn't say, well, I can see the point of this. Maybe we should have a wider consultation. No attempt at consultation, no attempt to devote it, just trying to push it through. So the difficulty was in getting a vote at the first place. Once we got a vote, as it turned out, things, the things work well, but the difficulty was in getting the vote and the vote was was conducted by by senior academic. So people like me, James, you, if you were being in Cambridge, I can't imagine that Toronto is being

is run like that. I don't know if any American universities or North American universities have run like that, but Cambridge and Oxford are lucky in that they have that system of governance. I received quite a few messages after the vote, and I think probably Arif did too, from colleagues around the country and actually around the world who was sort of expressing a kind of envy that they didn't have that sort of quasi-parliamentary mechanism,

which, you know, it's a clunky tool. It took Arif and those supporting him a very long time to get it all going and to challenge the university's decisions, but it did work. It gives the faculty final say, and not the administration, and that's really something. It's important. It's not quite as simple as that because there are some administrators who can vote as well, but they can't even tentative out the same way I would imagine, but it does give us the say. And I want to say again, you know, none of it would have been possible without James,

as well, he made a massive role in getting the support, you know, in giving it public support and helping with publicity and so on. So he was brilliant. I don't want to add, we got, I mean, I've got message on full James the two, not just from from academics, but from members of the public as well, who was sort of relieved that an important British institution like Cambridge was actually standing

up for for basic values, because this is not an obscure academic matter, and it's not even intellectually very difficult thing to see, you know, the arguments were not intellectually obscure or difficult or required any great intelligence, you know, it was really simple matters of basic principle. So I think it would have been, it would have been a disaster, I think, if Cambridge had, you know, had not supported this. I wanted to point out something else to clarify

something that you just said when we were talking about anonymous reporting and differentiating that from anonymous voting. You said, were talking about anonymous reporting and differentiating that from anonymous voting, you said, well, this anonymous reporting circumvents due process. And you didn't say that very loud and we just went on. It's like, no, no, we're going to say that again. This anonymous reporting circumvents due process. It's like, what the hell's up with you guys?

You're doing an end run around due process. Who the hell do you think you are exactly? Due process. It's like, God, how long has English common law been working out due process? It is a basic principle of English common law, and it's a basic principle of natural justice that you know the identity of your accuser,

and you know the grounds on which he's making accusation. And these mechanisms that are introduced often without any kind of scrutiny at all cut completely against that principle. Yeah, and they're designed to. So because with that sort of thing, I always prefer to presume ignorance and not malevolence. But when something like that happens, there's something damn ugly going on way down at the bottom. So what's worrying is that it's across the universe, as James was saying, it isn't just in Cambridge,

where we managed to stop it. This firm, which appears to be running this platform, this kind of snitching portal or stasie portal, for making anonymous denunciations, has been bought by about 50 or 60 universities across the country. I remember someone saying to me when I was protesting against it in Cambridge, they said, well look, most universities in England have got it. Why you subordered whether we get it, is there a perfectly normal acceptable thing that we should say?

Oh good. So now we have an automated system in place in 60 universities in the UK to circumvent due process. I'm really proud to be fair. I think some of the number ones where you could only, the only thing you can submit anonymously as a report on which no formal action is taken. So you just take some boxes and nothing happens. But there are some where it goes further. So it's terrifying that we're at that state in universities in all places. Yeah, I think there was a report done last December by Civitas, which is a sort of right-leaning think tank, but very, very good report on the state of academic freedom in the UK. And I think they found we have a look, 83 out of 140 UK universities were found to have some kind of

anonymous reporting system. So it's very, very widespread. And yeah, and it's a huge issue, very, very concerning. And I think that, as Arif says, I mean, a lot of it may well be well-intentioned, but I think the point is that it starts off processes and procedures, disciplinary procedures, where the end result may not be anything at all. It may just be a few weeks of having to go and see the share of your faculty. You'll go to see some committee or you'll have to pay trips to HR. But as a colleague of ours says, you know, if the process is the punishment, yeah, exactly.

There's nothing trivial about any of that. That's awful. It that happens to someone. It's so awful. It just does the meal. You get this told. Yeah. And it puts a shadow on them.

Right, right. And it has a chilling effect as well. When you see it happen to one person in your department or in your university, you know, you just watch yourself and you don't say things like that, you know, again, or yourself, you know, what you publish, what you say in meetings, what you say to students, you just become more and more careful.

And another thing I think is that, is that, I mean, Topfel talks about, it's quite well, which is that one way to terrorize people is not to, not to control them in big things, but to control them in little things, so that tyranny becomes a habit, conformity becomes a habit. Every time you say something literal, you know, some small interactions, you constantly

looking at the way you're showing them, whether you're worrying whether to say this or not, that topfel said is the most efficient way to turn people into sheep. Oh, it's also, sort of, in some sense, the ultimate reach of totalitarianism, because your life is made out of small things. You know, big things are rare and seldom. And so having to watch that, well, I have to say to watch your sense of humor, for example, you know, and fair enough, you can cross the line, and a stoop person reads the crowd properly. But you see great comedians, man, they're right on

that edge, right? They're right at the point where they shouldn't be saying what they're saying, well, some of them far past that line on purpose, you know, but everyone knows. But to chill that is, to take almost all the fun, the dynamic fun out of social interactions, that spirit, that's a free spirit, and that makes all that partly what makes life worth living. It's terrible that these things are happening, and it's more terrible that the universities are doing it. How shameful. So, okay, so about how many of the 7,000 eligible people voted, do you know?

So, it was about 30% of them. That was a high turnout, historically, very high turnout. And of those, it was as James says, about 85% was in favor of my amendments. Very depending on the amendments. So, one of the amendments was, that was the one which which is most popular was in favor of replacing the language with respect with a much more neutral and I think liberal language of tolerance. The other amendments were essentially saying that the university couldn't stop speaker events unless they were illegal. That's a good rule. And then another amendment was incorporating some of the language of the Chicago Principles, which I think is a good example, a good standard, to replace this language, which was saying

the University could stop things whenever it wanted and it would pay attention to the well-pour of students and the public when people were giving talks. So now we've got a policy where if you've been invited, you can't be disinvited. And it doesn't matter, unless you're doing something illegal, you can't be disenfied. So it's been a change, and indeed, it was actually the people who first celebrated it, were the radical feminists. So it was actually surprisingly up amongst my allies, you know, there were Christians and there were also radical feminists,

you know, because there's a both different sides who felt for various reasons and hard scientists as well. They too. It was the hard scientists, radical feminists, lawyers, Christians. They were all for various reasons felt that their speech had been curtailed or was being limited, and it was the feminists who celebrated it first. So, so basically that very brave student that we talked about organized what she called re-platforming events, where she invited a number of very controversial speakers, capping stock for instance, and others to come and give talks in Cambridge about top of the...

Is that girl still around? That young woman, is she still around Cambridge? I'm not in touch with her, but if she graduated for the first class degree last summer, be fun to invite her to the talk. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure we get that out of the possible. But so there were some very brave people amongst the feminist and amongst these other groups. And that was that was the first thing that happened afterwards. And then

now if I had another thing which is your invitation and we're hoping to do that other other college speakers. And not only that, I think it's somewhere more importantly, the culture is a hope changing. Day-to-day interactions are changing. People are more willing to speak out at meetings. I want to try and get through changes whereby there is, you know, secret voting happens at all meetings at all levels, not just at these big levels. Yeah, well, one of the things we're facing all of us as a potential danger is that is that, although in the West, in some ways, we've got our large-scale, uppermost political institutions tilted quite hard against totalitarianism, it seems to be creeping into middle-level bureaucracies

continually, right? And there it's a lot harder to fight. It's harder to get people interested. It's more invisible. All of that. What do you think? I'd be interested to know your view and experience here? It's because my impression has been of the sort of mid and high level bureaucracy in my university,

for instance, is that they're not really ideological. They're not committed to this, there's some sort of mad hard-legged ideology or any of that. Really, they're just, they just, they want to respond to concerns from students and others. They've been given a misleading impression that a lot of people have these concerns. There are also commercial concerns because of course, universities charge fees now and they have to care about attracting students and so on. And so they're just sort of doing what's, you know, they're, they're taking the part of these resistance. Yeah, well, I think part of what's happened is that, well, HR is punching way above its

weight. It was bottom of the totem pole in corporations for years and also in institutions like universities. And it latched on to this diversity, inclusivity, and equity, mantra, and there is power in that, man. And so I would say yes to everything you said, except for that exception. And the watching corporations jump on this is really quite comical in some sense, because what that is all allied with is not something that has capitalism as its central interest.

Let's put it that way. So... Yeah, I think you... I think that's absolutely right. So there are, as Arif says, the sort of mid-level administration is typically not particularly ideologically driven. But as we were discussing earlier, all it takes is sort of two or three dedicated activists to cause a lot of trouble.

And what's happening now in the kind of administrative landscape of a lot of these institutions, corporations, universities, and in other sectors as well is that you've effectively got people whose job it is to deliver on equality, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, that is to say that's their standing job, that's their profession. And so, is it where the revolution can never come to an end? You can never reach the Sunlit Uplands. There's always got to be the next, there's always got to be the next phobia to confront. And so it's kind of, or you lose your job or your job

disappears? Yeah, so you make yourself redundant. And so that, there's kind of structural problems there and kind of ratchet effects that are very, very, very difficult to address. are very, very, very difficult to address. I mean, what do you think, one way to think about addressing that might be to introduce ratchet effects in the other direction so that you know, you can have a sort of free speech bureaucracy and you can have, you know, we have legislation in this country, for instance, which is trying to,

trying to strengthen the duty, or at least strengthen the sort of address for breaking the duty to promote freedom of speech. And it could be that that gives rise to sort of in turn of the York Proseason. People will start thinking, well, people who would have thought I can make a career out of promoting equality and diversity might start thinking, well, I can make a career out of promoting free speech. And there'll be as keen on that as they are as they were in the other direction.

I don't know whether what York's parents in Toronto has been with regards to that, but I wondered. Well, I can't really say because I haven't really been part of the university in any real sense. I would say in any profound sense since 2016, since all this blew up around me. So, you know, I'm out of the loop. I think that's a worthwhile experiment, right? It's like if there is a bureaucracuse. And you know, a lot of things get settled with these opponent process, process is that's how we think, you know, it's almost always one thing against another. And yeah, I think, and you were going to talk about the legislation, the potential proposed legislation in the UK that sort of I understand emerged out of all this. So what's happening on the legislative front?

stand emerged out of all this. So what's happening on the legislative front? Well, should I just say something about that? I mean, just worth giving you, Arif has mentioned it already and it's worth giving you a little bit of background to that. Jordan, it was 2019 that there was roundabout then, I think it was May 2019. There was certainly a lot of talk about what had happened to you that Cambridge in policy circles and government circles and out of those sorts of discussions, I suspect, they're kind of crystallized a manifesto commitment in the Conservative Party manifesto for the December 2019 UK general election,

which had a very strong statement about the importance of the university sector, importance of higher education in a post-pregsate economy, and also signaled some concerns about what was going on there, especially on academic freedom. So that was remarkable to see. I still remember when I saw that manifesto claim, I thought that's absolutely fantastic.

It looks like they're going to be serious about this. And indeed, they delivered. They started drafting very important piece of legislation. I think it's really probably one of the first of its kind that is that is that clear and emphatic in the West. I think the UK is leading the way on this. The legislation itself, you know, some people, you know, my own view is that it's just a shame that it's had to come to this. You know, we do not really do not want governments stepping into and regulating the intellectual cultures of the university.

Now, that's not what the legislation does. It just provides a right for academics or visiting speakers who've been disinvited, academics who've been fired on fairly a kind of direct line of appeal to a non-votsman, effectively an act called academic freedom champion. And that's, so there's a kind of quasi-judicial process there, which is going to hold in principle open up universities to significant financial liability through fines

if they were found to have breached their duty to promote academic freedom and protect the rights of visiting speakers and so on. So I think, you and principal may have had a line of appeal to that new post as and when it comes into being. Now, there's still some problems with the legislation. For example, I think, Araf and I agreed that it doesn't go far enough on protecting academics from institutional interference or political disassociation of curricular content. The freedom of, for academics, freedom of speech

means freedom to teach, freedom to select content and freedom to deliver it as they see fit. Of course, to some extent, it's a shared institutional enterprise designing curriculum, so on, but there should be a defesable presumption that academics can teach what they want to teach and how they want to teach it. Nevertheless, I mean, I think it will,

I think I hope shift the culture in some of the ways that the equalities legislation shifted culture 10 years ago. And, and even if it may be imperfect when it gets Royal Assent, nevertheless, I mean, I think that it will make vice-chancellors senior university staff throughout the throughout the country sort of sit up and realize that there are consequences to continuing to allow this this culture to flourishing I think it's really it's really appropriate that that initiative came from the faculty of divinity at Cambridge You know that it can be traced at least to the events perhaps the events that took place there. It's quite, that's quite something when you, you know, step back and think about it. Well, I mean, you know, in its, in its defense, I had a conversation with Roger Scrooeden

around about that time who expressed his deep disappointment at the treatment meted out to you. And he said something quite interesting. He said when he was in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, setting up underground universities in Warsaw, Pat countries, particularly Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, by some kind of strange quirk, although the university of the university of Cambridge wouldn't confer degrees or credentials, it was considered politically too difficult. I think the Divinity Faculty did have some kind of degree conferring power.

It was able to a credit or recognize a diploma in theology, and that's exactly how Roger got his students, their diplomas, as it were, from the Faculty of Divinity at the University. So it was, I think from his point of view, it was especially heartbreaking that things developed as they did in early 2019. But just to reiterate, I've had no criticisms or from colleagues within the faculty, I think there's great excitement that you're coming over and great gratitude to you that you've shown the kind of graciousness and forbearance to, as it were, let bygones be bygones and go ahead with the visit that had been planned back then, which I think you probably wouldn't have been able

to do anyway given all the horrible things that started to happen to you and Tammy Healthwise in 2019. Yeah, well, like I said, I'm absolutely thrilled to be able to do this well because I seem to be able to do it, not something but also that I have the opportunity again. I think you'd have to be a pretentious fool

not to take an opportunity like that and be grateful for it. Like there's mistakes made, you know, and that's that, but who knows, you know, if the upshot of this all is that the protection for freedom of inquiry and speech in the UK is strengthened, and maybe that's a model for the West. It's like, well, that's a pretty small price to pay, even though it was, you know, it was unpleasant. So now, say, Levy, you know?

Well, I think I joked to you the other day, Jordan, in an email. I think that Arif is not going to agree with this, but a Providence Bears strange fruits. And those of us with a kind of theological lens on things, may see something there, but no. You're right.

I think that there's hope on the horizon. There's reason to be much more cheerful than there were two, three years ago. There are still challenges ahead that I know, Araf and I are concerned about. We're especially worried that, you know, for example, our colleague, Kathy Stock, last week has been treated to just appallingly by a group of activists for her views that there should be, as it were, female-only spaces that have been posters have gone

up calling for her dismissal. She's had the police round, she's had to put CCTV up in her Missle, she's had the police round, she's had to put CCTV up in her, around her home. So, you know, it's still a significant problem. And then there are other more kind of structural issues. I think it was St Andrews a couple of weeks ago, up in Scotland, there was news that they would, that incoming undergraduates, incoming students would have to sit, what amounted it from, I'm not sure the details here, but from would have to sit, what amounted from, I don't know, show the details here, but from what I could tell, an ideological purity test that come very close, I think, in fact, cross-line

in coercing speech, that is to say you had to answer certain question. No, do you know that at least 70% of researcher applications for professorships in the UC, you California system now statewide, were rejected on the basis of the diversity statement prior to their research CV being reviewed, more than 70%. That's extraordinary.

Yes, extraordinary. I think you want to kill universities. That's a good way to do it. It's not just California, I think you drew my kill you want to kill universities. That's a good way to do it. It's it's not just California. I I think you drew my attention a few weeks ago to the Newton Trust, which is a very big and distinguished grant making research body. I think now requires almost every application submitted to be accompanied by a statement explaining how the research will have a positive impact on gender equality. So the thought of these poor things have happened to at the grant level federally in Canada.

And that's horrible. It's absolutely unbelievably bad that. So it looks like we're getting to this problem with graduate students and with undergraduates as well that you can't even access the benefits of university education, university research as well, unless you agree with some sort of ideological line. In the case, as James says, in the case of undergraduates, it's close enough to compel speech because you have to answer, you have to pass the test and pass the test means getting enough questions right. I think in some cases it might even mean getting them to the list.

Well, then, the so terrible psychologically, you know, I mean, there's some good psychological experiments. So imagine you do this, you take a group of people and they have an opinion about something, eh? Then you make them write out, you ask them to write out a counter opinion that's quite detailed. And you test their beliefs before they do that, and then a week later, and what you see is a massive shift in the direction of what they've detailed out, partly because they've detailed it out, but also partly to reduce cognitive dissonance, right?

Well, I said this, therefore, well, I'm either a liar, or I must believe it. So these are not trivial issues. Like, you know, when students say, they say things to me, and I've heard them say, well, I just write what the professor wants me to say. It's like, no, you don't just write that,

because writing is thinking. And if you don't think that practice becomes part of you, and those words become part of you, that's just because you don't understand practice or words. And the fact that you have to do that at university, that's like the reverse of education. It's not bad education. It's anti-education. Yeah not bad education, it's anti-education. Yeah, it is, it's anti-education. That's a really excellent point, I mean, I remember William James talks about that as well, the way in which the direction goes the other way.

It's from the things that you do, it defeats into what you think. So the real, well that's like a basic principle of behavioral therapy, it's not all the action, the action, you know, the cognition, so to speak, are secondary and not always, but of course they're secondary, because, well, the prefrontal cortex, gorilla, the motor cortex, and action is everything. And so abstraction follows in the pathway of action. Hopefully, like, I mean, we'd be in real trouble if that wasn't the case. So, but yeah, it's appalling and that universities are doing this.

It makes me ashamed to be part of them. It's so awe. And then I see students are listened to them that have been educated like this. It's just like, it's this grating noise that they're emitting that just hurts my soul. So more work to be done, right? Well, so this is positive. Everything we've been talking about virtually, movement in a positive direction. Thank you to very much for your commitment to, well, I can't thank you, you know, because you did it for all sorts of reasons, but I admire it. It's great and look

what's happened. And so I hope that I hope that my visit is worth all the trouble. I'm going to do what I can to make it that. And I am, like I said, I'm so do what I can to make it that and I am like I said I'm so thrilled that I get to do this It's so ridiculously wonderful that I can come back there and talk to you guys at Cambridge and go to speak at Oxford And and that the basic response from people is positive like if I would wish for something better I couldn't think of anything better. So it's been it's been a terrific response We're so thrilled that you're becoming and I think it'll be really positive. The students here, the staff here, everyone is

going to learn so much from the discussions that we'll be having. So that's excellent. God willing and all that. Well thank you very much gentlemen. I'm very much looking for it to meeting you. Dr. Arckman, thank you for talking to me today. James, it was a pleasure, as always. you