The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Greg Lukianoff: how to fix higher education

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Claudine Gay, the first black female president of Harvard, faced intense scrutiny since her widely criticized congressional testimony on campus antisemitism in early December. Last week, President Gay resigned from her post after mounting allegations of plagiarism in her published articles.  In an op-ed in the New York Times, Gay argued that she was a victim of a right-wing political attack on academia and the diversity initiatives that she both championed and represented. On this Munk Dialogue were joined by Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE is America’s leading defender of fundamental rights on college campuses and it should come as no surprise that these past few years have been the organizations busiest on record. Greg talks to us about how universities can - and must - turn things around to save higher education and our children’s futures. The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, access to our Friday Focus podcast, a free Munk Debates book, and ticketing privileges at our live events.This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You don't help the poor by making everybody poorer. The media has a frame, and the frame is Israel is the oppressor, and the Palestinians are the oppressed. I shouldn't be forced to acknowledge my privilege unless I desire for that to be part of my interaction with somebody else. What I know to be true and what all of my fellow Gen Z know to be true is that this is the most talented generation yet. With respect to every indicia of disadvantage, there is still a racial hierarchy. And though I am, of course, in Anglo, I'm certainly not a Frizzan. Hello, Monk listeners. Roger Griffiths here, your host and moderator.

Welcome to this, our continuing conversations called the Monk Dialogues. On each and every monk dialogue, we bring you the insights and analysis of some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. On each monk dialogue, we go deep into the questions and ideas that are driving the public conversation. Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does Congress? Calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no? It can be depending on the context. What's the context? Targeted as an individual.

Targeted at an individual. It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Claudine Gay, the first black president of Harvard, has faced intense scrutiny since her widely criticized congressional testimony on anti-Semitism. In early December, last week, President Gay finally resigned from her post after mounting allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly publications. In a recent op-in-the New York Times, Gaye argued that she was a victim of a right-wing political attack on academia and the diversity initiatives that she had championed as president of Harvard University. On this monk dialogue, I'm joined by Greg Lukianov, the president and CEO of Fire.

Fire stands for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It's one of America's leading defenders of fundamental rights on college campuses, specifically the right to free speech for both students and faculty. It should come as no surprise that these past few years, and indeed the past few weeks have been an intense period for fire, an intense period for a larger debate about the future of free speech on college campuses. Today we're joined by Greg to talk. about cloning gay's resignation, the factors and forces behind it, and how universities today

are dealing with issues of free speech or not on their campuses. And finally, what can be done possibly to enlarge the room, the area for meaningful public debate in higher education? Greg, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thanks. Looking forward to this conversation, so many different things to talk about, but I want to begin with the big news of the last few days. resignation now of Harvard's president, Claudine Gay. What is your takeaway on this, Greg? What should we learn from the events of the last few weeks and the culmination in this, for some, surprise, resignation?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. So I wrote a book called Cancelling of the American Mind that came out on October 17th, so right in the middle of a lot of the response to the attacks in Israel. and things got so much worse on campus after October 7th. Now, to be clear, in counseling of the American mind, I got depressed while writing it because it makes the case that things have been very bad on campuses for a long time using not just examples, but a lot of data. And one thing that is kind of shocking that a lot of people might be surprised to hear

is that there are more professors being fired in 2020 and 2021 than we're, than we saw in 2023, even though there was absolutely clamped down on pro-Palestinian speech after October 7th. So we had this increase of awareness of cancel culture after October 7th, but at the same time, you know, a lot of sort of historical amnesia to forget that the problem for free speech and academic freedom had been bad for a long time. And I'd say, I think it's fair to say crisis level for several years before that. Then you had the anti-Semitism hearings. And the anti-Semitism hearings were a combination of somewhat unfair questions coming from

Stefanic, you know, for example, as for, you know, to give one example, generally in First Amendment law, things don't have a yes or no answer. The answer that context applies is pretty much always true. And that even means if you're taking something that is found to be as deeply offensive as someone shouting intifada or someone saying, you know, from the river to the sea, for example. So I thought that technically all three of the witnesses were correct by pointing to context. None of them answered it all that well or with deep or profound understanding of the philosophy that undergirds it.

They didn't, a lot of them didn't take the time to really say that, you know, anti-Semitism is morally repugnant or any of these other things that could have helped them come off better than they did. Now, I thought the MIT president did the best. I thought that both Claudine Gay and McGill from University of Pennsylvania did pretty poorly, which is surprising given that they were trained. They were prepped by Wilmer Hale, which is a very respected law firm. And when McGill stepped down, there was some pushback that this is a terrible development for freedom of speech at Penn. When it comes to gay, we thought that her stepping down, just in the light of the anti-Semitism hearings, would have given the message to a lot of schools that what they needed to do was actually clamped down more on protected speech, not just unprotected speech. But when the plagiarism allegations started coming out, and they seemed to get worse almost daily for a couple of weeks there, when you reached the point where of her 11 publications about 60 percent of,

them had plagiarized material and our dissertation had plagiarized material. There was about half a page that I think was about basically almost verbatim from someone else's writing. Of course you can fire not just a university president for that, you can fire a professor for that. And it's been very honestly unsurprising to me, given how Americans like to think of themselves as being somewhat anti-elitist. But I'd say in the last 20 years, that's

gone completely on its head. And the extent to which people are rallying around, you know, this unfairness done to our richest mega corporation and most influential, you know, a place that has $60 billion to one side in its rainy day fund, has been kind of mind-blowing. Because in any of their circumstance, it'd be like, well, of course. I mean, when the Stanford president stepped down earlier this year, because he was not guilty of academic misconduct himself, but he'd been on a paper that involved someone who actually had fabricated data and he just didn't catch it. That was kind of almost like a non, like a non-story.

People were like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. In this case, you're talking about clearly lots of intentional plagiarism. And so, yeah, the reaction coming to the defense of Harvard as if it's the underdog has been bizarre. Has it ever? When you think back, though, to the part of this controversy around Harvard and Gay that was directly related to how speech should happen on the campus, what was your interpretation of the testimony that she provided Congress? Because some might say, some might argue that that testimony, as legalistic as it was, as formalistic as it was, in fact, did contain, if it was, in fact, implemented on campus, and that's a whole other conversation could in fact create a zone and a place for free speech to be exercised to a more

fuller extent than it let's say had been previously at Harvard so but that's certainly how that's certainly not how that conversation was portrayed as as having happened and in terms of what came out of it so I'm help help me try to understand the confusion about the confusion yeah sure well when it comes to the anti-semitism hearings people kept on going kind of like is is supporting genocide, you know, like, is that okay on your campus? But really what they're talking about was primarily people saying intifada and people chanting from the river to the sea. Now, I get why those are profoundly offensive. I don't question that. At the same time, I think a lot of students who are saying these things, think they're more or less just saying,

you know, resist. And when you when actually polled, there was an interesting Wall Street Journal article where they showed students, you know, where they're the. river was and where the sea was. And most of them didn't actually know that implied, you know, get rid of these people. And once they knew that, they were actually a lot less supportive of the saying. So the framing was a little frustrating because, like, if you get to, if you take the temperature down a little bit and just ask the question, are the phrases intifada or from the river to the sea protected speech? The answer is absolutely clearly yes. However, what they, what I think gay should have said, for example, was, you know, condemn anti-Semitism as being, you know, morally repugnant.

And then explain with some greater level, not just falling back on the word context, which is this awfully overused word in higher ed that means almost nothing at this point and just be a little more precise about it. Can from the river to the sea or shouting intifada be a threat under certain circumstances? You bet it can be. Can it be part of a discriminatory harassment environment? Yes, it can be. But just mechanically and sort of, you know, of course, McGill's kind of smirking as she's responding to it with just this sort of brush off of context didn't really endear people. So was the answer that context matters in this case? Correct?

Yes, it was. Was it well presented? Was it skillfully, was it sympathetically explained? No. From a free speech perspective, vocalizing statements, again, which may be abhorrent to people, people may find psychologically harmful to hear, like chance from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Do those run against your thoughts, your interpretations of what should and shouldn't be allowed on campuses?

Where do you draw the line in terms of the limits on behavior? as seen through the lens of people exercising their free speech rights? Yeah. Well, we've seen it crossed all the times since October 7th. You've seen actual death threats at Cornell for which a student was rightfully arrested. You've seen actual assault at Harvard, you know, where students are, and that's grabbing people's assault. And you see, you know, situations like at the Cooper Union where Jewish students, you know, are trapped in the library with students banging on the, banging on the door. all of these, you know, like, could that be discriminatory harassment? Could that be intimidation? Could that be menacing? It could be any number of crimes. So certainly I think there's been some really clear incidents where it does cross the line. But one of the things that distinguishes the U.S. among countries in the world is we have something called the bedrock principle, a First Amendment law, which is he can't ban something just because it's offensive. And interestingly, by the way, this comes out of a 1989

decision called Texas v. Johnson. That's about whether or not it's protected to burn an American flag. And the answer is, well, yes, it is. Now, of course, not if you're doing in a place that doesn't allow you to burn anything because that's a fire hazard. But, like, as an expressive act, yes, absolutely, you can burn an American flag. And I've always thought that I'm a first-generation American. My dad is Russian by way of Yugoslavia. My mom is Irish by way of England. And I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. And I always thought that this was a great idea for a multicultural society, particularly when what my dad thought was offensive, what my mom thought was offensive, what Danny Nguyen's parents thought were offensive, what Nelson Bolitos, you know,

parents thought were offensive. Like, the kids on my street were all from different, or either they themselves or their parents were all from different countries. So we all had different ideas of what offensiveness was. So I think that the bedrock principle that you can't ban something merely because it's offensive is correct. But when you start getting into patterns of behavior, that's an entirely different issue. So, for example, using words to threaten someone's life, that's just considered the words are just an incidental part of the commission of a crime. You know, it's kind of like, it's no defense

to mugging somebody that you use words to say your money or your life, you know, for example, or that I'm going to kill you, you know, in a way that sounds credible. And when it comes to a lot of what we're seeing here, discriminatory harassment, the definition is it's discriminatory, it's severe, persistent, and pervasive, but it's also directed. And so if you're marching across campus and you're saying intifada, not directed at anyone in particular, or you're saying Black Lives Matter, not directed at anyone in particular, or you're saying, you know, there were some chance about, you know, pegies, you know, back during BLM, that's all protected because it's just the only problem that people have with it is it's offensive. You're surrounding students saying stuff like that.

You're targeting Jewish students and banging on their doors and that kind of stuff. That's an entirely different issue. So I actually think that the parameters of First Amendment law actually provide a lot of wisdom and guidance on how you should handle this. And as soon as it actually is boiled down to something's offensive is enough, the biases of the existing administrative class take entirely over. That's fascinating, Greg. A great answer. You know, here in Canada, we have slightly different laws. We've decided to create some limits on speech and where we've drawn those lines. And again, courts have been quite reluctant to enforce these laws only in the worst, in a sense, circumstances. And there's only really been a handful since

they've been in effect for the last few decades is around the idea of, you know, the incitement of violence towards a particular group or people. So as you say, it's targeted. But then in addition to being targeted, it has embedded in it in the speech some kind of mendacity, that it is focused on inciting others to create harm and violence towards a specific group. Is that part of the challenge of this debate around what's happening in college campuses right now is a portion of American society and maybe a portion of college administrators who might be more comfortable. in a Canadian-type framework of free speech versus one that is more maximal. And what do you think about that?

What do you think about that Canadian model, which is also, to a certain degree, replicated in Europe around issues of the Holocaust and the denial of the genocide of the Jews. So there are some real parallels here between what is going on on college campuses right now and say other countries like Germany, which have taken hard lines against denialism. Yeah, I'm a bad American in the sense that the polite thing to do for people who went to fancy law schools like me when you go abroad is to say to Europeans or Canadians for that matter, we're silly. Your laws are correct. We're savages over here in the United States and Europe is enlightened. And I don't do that.

I show up and say, listen, I actually think that America gets a lot of the stuff right. And I think it's, I think that one of the things that I see in my mother's country, Britain, is that there's still an idea that there's a modal Brit. You know, essentially there's a John Bull out there who has an opinion and it can be generalized to the larger population. And therefore, if it violates John Bull's sense of decency, then it can be banned. And I think that this is something you see in a lot of the nation states of Europe. America's never had that idea, even though we have our image of Uncle Sam, that was a creation and a myth. We always understood that people from Georgia, people from Richmond, people from Boston, people from Maine are very different people.

So there's never been consensus on what is or should be offensive. I do think there's lots of sympathy on campus for the idea of hate speech. Indeed, in the United States, hate speech theory came from campus. It came from campuses in the 60s and 70s, believe it or now, like the year after the free speech movement in Berkeley, 1965, was the was the publication of repressive tolerance, which was an argument for repressing the regressive, which in this case, Herbert Marcos was very clear he meant the right wing. Like essentially, like liberals should get free speech. The right wing should not.

My vision, my rationalization for free speech, my defense of free speech that's idiosyncratic, is something that I call the Lab and the Looking Glass theory. And it's essentially, or just or less fancy sounding, pure information. theory. If the goal of the humanist project, if the goal of the project of human knowledge is to know the world as it is, it is absolutely essential. You know what people really think. Not even if it's bad, actually especially if it's bad or concerning. And if you create an environment where people are actually not saying what they think, even if it's troubling, you're not actually safer. And actually there's very, we talk about this in canceling the American mind quite a bit. polarization theory that essentially when you get people who agree with each other only talking to people they agree with, it tends to make them much more radicalized in the direction of the group. And I pointed this out, for example, in France, where the anti-Semitism is skyrocketed since

the laws banning anti-Semitic speech in France was passed, that part of the reason why I believe this happened is because you basically created incentives for anti-Semites to only talk to other anti-Semites, which ends up not having that, that moderating force. So I think that the, we forget that there's a, you know, as my mentor, Harvey Silverglades says, there's a value in knowing who the Nazis in the room are. And that means that you don't let them speak because, because you think what they're saying is nice or good. You let them speech because otherwise you're not going to understand your neighbors. You're not going to understand the world you really live in. And you might not see threats when they're right in front of your face.

So what is your advice to university administrators today that are struggling with, creating an environment that's conductive to learning, which at the end of the day does require a certain amount of respect, reciprocity, mutualism, and then these, you know, waves of debate and division and anger that contemporary events and contemporary culture, like a Gale Force wind, you know, sweeps across the, you know, the college quads of higher. learning. What, Greg, you know, is it a question of balance for you or is it is, is that the wrong way to look at it? Oh, it is a question of balance in the sense of that I think that universities are failing dramatically on not just what they're not teaching, but what they are teaching. And this is

what I mean by that. And I just published all of chapter three of coddling in the American mind on his substack called After Babbled because we think it explains why we think the current DEI infrastructure is going to almost always end up being anti-Semitic. It's because if you look at society only from the intersectional kind of standpoint, it's more or less a story of good guys versus bad guys. And that essentially, you know, white Jewish people are just considered the oppressor flat out. And unless you actually get away from that model, you're always going to have this oversimplified, highly moralistic way of looking at the world, which in my opinion, frankly, is not a very scholarly or sophisticated way to look at the world. I think it's much more,

I think reality is much more complicated than any ideology we put onto it. So I think step one is is stop teaching, you know, people when they show up on campus this oversimplified way of looking at the world, step two is try to replace that with a sense of curiosity, you know, essentially just like you, none of us know all that much. And this has to be modeled by the administrators and professors themselves, which is that in the grand scheme of things, the greatest revelation, you know, in human knowledge was essentially realizing how little in the grand scheme of things, even the smartest one of us knows. And I think instead, we're giving people who show up on campus this sort of unscholarly adamant kind of ideology that leads to shouting matches, not actual discussions.

So what I'd be thrilled with would be a long orientation period that introduces ideas like intellectual humility, where there are not just debates but listening projects where people come from different backgrounds, and they just talk about what it's like to come from from where they come from with the goal of understanding where they're coming from not changing their mind because that's a scholarly way of looking at the world. And I actually think colleges doing their job better would actually prevent a lot of the shouting match we're seeing. And that's one of the reasons, I believe, by the way, Dartmouth has handled this comparatively well. Dartmouth actually has programs like this. And they started very, very intelligently.

They started doing these cross-dialogue, Israeli-Palestinian discussions last year, like well before October 7th. And that's really, you have to, you have to begin. in this project before the calamity starts, or else it's just not going to work. And that's one of the reasons why you haven't seen a lot of these sort of disturbing scenes at Dartmouth. So I think that actually the balancing in a lot of ways comes to recommitting to search for truth, genuine curiosity, you know, what I refer to as epistemic humility, like humility about not just what is known, but what can be known.

And I think, unfortunately, we're teaching an unscholarly certainty too often on American campuses, particularly to elite campuses, instead of the actual great intellectual habits of openness and curiosity. Sign up now for a complimentary monk membership. As a free monk member, you get all kinds of great perks and privileges, including streaming of select debates, dialogues and podcasts on our website. a 24-hour advanced ticketing window to access seats to our in-person debates before the general public, written transcripts of all of our content, and email updates on special offers and promotions. You can grab your complimentary monk membership right now at Triple W Monk Debates. That's MUNK, DebateswithanS.com. Simply click on the membership tab in the top right of our now. Navigation. Grab your monk membership and open your mind to a world of great debate. Greg, do you feel that part of the problem is universities seemingly, over the last period of time,

becoming more and more comfortable pronouncing on major social, cultural, and international events? And I sense you would share that concern. If so, where did this come from? Why did universities start doing this? can they stop? Should they stop? Will they stop? In a sense, being something different than the university that I thought maybe I went to in the 1990s, which was a place that at times, not perfectly, but at times really did expose a view that it was a neutral place. It was a public square. And that as a important piece of the public square, it needed to maintain some neutrality in how it taught and thought about the world around it.

Yeah, and this is an interesting thing that I've come to understand about my own field that I didn't fully when I started in 2001, is that certainly the free speech movement in 1964 had some real true believers in everyone deserves free speech. And the best versions of these were the activists who even when someone they hated would show up on campus, would go and listen and then maybe ask hard questions. There are true believers among it. There are also people among it who, what they were actually battling was this idea that university should be more politically neutral, that they should be places where, that are radically

open-minded. And that's one of the reasons why you didn't want politics intruding quite as much, because this should be the place where you're still making up your mind all the time when you're in this special space. That's very ambitious. It goes very much against human nature. And it's a, it's kind of a, it's a beautiful ideal. And certainly, unfortunately, there were people in the free speech movement who wanted campuses to be turned much more into activist institutions.

Entire departments turned into activist institutions. And they pushed for the university itself, taking lots, and departments as well, taking lots of political positions. Now, in 1967, in response to a lot of this, University of Chicago, comes out with something called the Calvin statement, which is beautiful. And I think every school should adopt it, which is we are the host to the critics. We are not the critics ourselves. We are the forum for students and faculty to figure out their opinions and express them. It's not our job to establish orthodoxies to tell them what we think there should be. Now, this push to politicize higher ed kind of ebbed and flowed, unfortunately, and I say this is someone who is left of center myself.

But the lack of political diversity on campus, particularly in certain departments, has gotten worse decade by decade. So I think that the group think that you see among administrators is part of the problem as well. But I do think that a number of schools have come around to the idea that we should not be opining on every geopolitical incident that's going on. We can talk about, are our students okay? Are things affecting our students? Great. That's fine. But as far as, you know, having an opinion about the Hamas War, that's something that they should reconsider.

Now, what's interesting about it, though, is that schools that had opined on everything else that on October 7th suddenly started arguing for neutrality. And if they've never argued it before, were rightfully called out by people like Larry Summers and Sam Abrams as being like, okay, wait, you comment on everything before. But now that even these individual university presidents who oftentimes were very sympathetic to Israel and very horrified by the Hamas attacks were afraid to say that, partially, you know, because they were afraid of their own activist students, administrators, and faculty, which is really like as far as something that should really give some people some pause, these are extremely powerful people hesitating to say what they really think of or something genuinely horrible going on in the world. So being called out for being inconsistent on that is something that I think is fair. But I think if it from this point forward, basically schools are like, listen, we don't, we don't opine on every political issue that's going on out there, nor should we. Because that's sending a signal that there's an orthodoxy at this university that should not exist. So you mentioned Chicago. Are there any other universities that you think are getting this right?

maybe in different ways that have different tactics or strategies, approaches to modeling, you know, freer, more open, but also, you know, more civil and substantive, you know, debate and discourse who are somehow reconciling what seem often increasingly to be two antithetical goals, on one hand, free and open, vigorous discourse. And on the other hand, the congeniality, again, the respect, the mutualism that you hope to have an every kind of community of learning and reflection and ideation? I think you really can have both, and I think they can be complementary, but you have to teach that from day one, and currently I don't believe campuses are.

Now, not, but some campuses are trying to, and like I said, Dartmouth has some great programming that is great at fostering dialogue. University of Chicago has great programming beginning on day one, explaining the philosophy of freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry and the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, nature of the scholarly mind. Also, Purdue has this, but one thing that might surprise, you know, some listeners is that very few schools actually emphasize freedom inquiry discussion across lines of dialogue in their orientation programs. They're much more likely to have things like my co-author of canceling the American mind is this brilliant 23-year-old named Ricky Schlaught.

And when she got to NYU, you know, she found on the back of her ID, you know, the number for the police, the number for the fire department, and the bias-related hotline, which was where you could literally anonymously report your professors or even fellow students for saying offensive things. And it's like, no, that's priming them for an environment where they already, they're already, you know, they know enough to actually decide, you know, who should be punished on that campus, which is not the attitude that you want to, you want people to begin with. You want them to be curious and try to understand why people even think dumb things.

So I think that there are some really basic things that schools should do that they're not doing and beginning with orientation. They could do this. And surprisingly few are. I see some hope for Stanford. Stanford actually started trying to address the problems before October 7th as well. Jenny Martinez, a former dean of the law school has since been promoted, which I find a good sign, decided to adopt something very much like the Calvin Report. and she's trying to set up programming at every level that actually has listening projects, for example. So I think that there are common sense things schools can do.

At the same time, I do think that it's something fundamentally, to use a very scholarly term, messed up about American society, that we do disproportionately rely on a relatively small handful of extremely wealthy, extremely influential schools. And to a larger extent than we should, I think a lot if that some of these billionaires decide to spend their money on smaller, cheaper experiments, or for that matter, on lesser known schools, that would be money much better spent than giving, you know, these mega corporations another drop in the bucket. Here, here. Just as we spend our last minutes together, I just want to push a bit further on this idea of potential solutions. Right now, there is an incredible amount of public attention and focus on these elite schools. Do you think this is sustainable? Do you think this creates some kind of movement and a groundswell? Let's ask it in two ways. Inside these institutions, are the reformers? Is there a catalyst for reform? And then outside the institutions, many, especially here in Canada, are not private in the way that a Harvard is. They are public institutions that rely significantly on public subsidies. Is there a role for kind of public policy and for government to try to nudge these institutions in a better direction?

Well, there certainly is, but partially because, you know, step one is the government has to stop. nudging them in the wrong direction. And what I mean by this is basically, like, just from an economic standpoint, you have more or less like two sensible options when it comes to how to fund higher ed or how to pay for it. One, you do keep it entirely within market forces and let market forces take over. Or you subsidize it to make sure that people can attend, but you also keep costs under control. The idea that in America we followed the model of we're going to subsidize it with nothing stopping the constant increase in the bureaucracy, constant increase in the pure student cost of educating a single student, that's the worst of both worlds put together. So right now at some of these schools, the claim is that it's something like $170,000 to educate a single student for a single year.

That's the sign of a failure of a system. And that was partially the product of poorly thought out public policy when it came to higher ed. When it comes to some of the stuff coming out of the Department of Education, a lot of terrible ideas there that require expanding the bureaucracy, but also that have been interpreted to require schools to clamp down on speech. So when people point out that, oh, these universities are private, no, they are technically private, but they received massive amounts of public funding that, by the way, is already nudging them in the wrong direction when it comes to issues like free speech. So I think the first

thing is to do less harm at minimum, try to rein in the bureaucracy, because an awful lot of what I've seen in my career is, when it comes to clamping down in speech is the problem of the bureaucracy. Get out of the way of the ability to start smaller, cheaper, more rigorous experiments. I think there's a ton of stuff that public policy, both at a federal and state level, could do that could be very positive. But I don't think the current path, is sustainable. And within universities, you try to work with, you know, faculty members, administrators to make them aware of their relative performance vis-a-vis their peers in terms of free

and open, vigorous discourse. Do you sense a pendulum swinging? Do you sense any kind of new energy inside these institutions to begin to reform themselves? the more elite the college, the less energy I see directed towards reform, the more they think they have nothing to change. And here's the thing, one of the reasons why I did get so depressed and anxious writing, canceling in the American mind, was looking at the data that indicates that the younger cohort of professors is even more politically homogenous than the cohort we have today and less

protective of academic freedom and free speech. I mean, when we were looking into attitudes about DEI statements, for example, we did a big survey of professors' attitudes about DEI statements. The thing that I wasn't expecting was to see people who both thought the DEI statements were political litmus tests and that they were appropriate. I didn't think those two would come together. I thought either, like, you had to think it was, you know, not a political and then think it's okay. But the idea that about a quarter of professors said, oh, it's political edmus test, but it's good. It's like, oh, okay, that's a big red flashing warning sign. So I don't think any of these changes are going to be easy.

I definitely see more hope in some cases for some of these smaller state schools. I do, of course, think that there are schools that are already doing a good job like University of Chicago, but I think the problem is much bigger than Americans oftentimes, particularly in academia, are willing to admit. And just finally, what's fire's role in this? What do you want to accomplish with your organization? We provided an introduction to it in the introduction to you today. What role can fire play? So one of the things that I've been proudest of is our newest department at fire, which is our research department.

We always had some handful of researchers at fire, but coddling of the American mind, my book with Jonathan Haidt, was kind of a proof of concept of something I always believed, is that lawyers see everything as about law and litigation. And I'm a constitutional lawyer myself, and I get that. But I also have a profound interest in social science, psychology, for example. And having my feet in a number of different fields really made me realize that we need to look at this problem from a multidisciplinary standpoint. And I'm very proud that now we have statisticians, psychologists, economists working for the fire research department to try to figure out the grand landscape. So I definitely think our campus free speech ranking is going to be a key part. of that. I'd like to get the research department paid for it, you know, because it's still kind of like our newest little baby. I think that we're important in that part of it. We're

also just our most basic function is making sure professors don't lose their jobs for their opinions or their academic freedom. Students don't get expelled for their freedom of speech or their lesser but nonetheless real academic freedom as well. So at the most basic level, we're here to protect the individual professors and students. At a much bigger level, we're here to evaluate the entire field. And me as an individual as well and an author, I have a lot of thoughts on ways we could actually reform the field to make it, you know, everything from more equitable to more rigorous to,

also frankly, cheaper. Well, Greg, it's been so good catching up with you here at the Monk Debates. We kind of feel like fire is a, you know, a sister organization group similarly committed to free and open discourse and debate sometimes on challenging issues and ideas. And it's only through discourse, through engagement, through sustained argument that we're going to come up with more interesting and better ways of thinking about the world around us. So congratulations on all your work. Thank you for this fascinating conversation today. And let's catch up again soon.

Thanks. Real pleasure. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Greg Lukiajana, for a terrific conversation. If you have feedback or reflections, I want you just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK Debateswithn-N-S.com. Thank you for lending your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of civil and substantive public conversation, one dialogue at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk charitable foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you

again for listening.