The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Nadine Strossen: Academic Freedom in Higher Education

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

60 years ago, university students were leading the protest in defense of free speech. The 1960’s Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley has been credited with paving the way for the civil liberties movement of the 1960’s and widespread social and political change. These days, however, free speech has taken on a new meaning. University students are being criticized for shutting down speech that doesn’t align with their progressive and left leaning principles. So how do free speech laws play into the current free speech debate? Where do we draw the line between speech that offends and speech that causes harm? For this conversation, we’re joined by one of the most important free speech advocates in America. Nadine Strossen served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008, and is now a senior fellow at FIRE - the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.    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 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, 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 GurwitzEditor: 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.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracies. Hi, Monk listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our continuing conversations called the Monk Dialogues. These are in-depth questions with some of the world's

sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. On each monk dialogue, we go deep into the big issues that are transforming our world and shaping our future. And I'd like to say, at this time, I'm confident, I'm confident that the students and the faculty, the University of California, will exercise their freedom with the same responsibility they've shown in winning their freedom. Well, that was the voice of civil liberties icon Mario Savio from the 1960s, a flashback to the past, the free speech movement that shaped that decade and shaped many of the rights that we enjoy today. the rights to express our mind, express our opinions, be heard in our democracy? Well, what is the state of free speech now? Almost 60 years later. Many are worried that the ambit, the space for free speech in our society, is shrinking,

everywhere from university campuses to social media to the mainstream media. Is free speech under threat? If so, why? What can we do about it? And how can we defend our free speech rights? How do we balance the need for free expression with some of the legitimate concerns in our society about diversity and inclusion? For this all-important conversation, we're joined by one of America's most influential free speech advocates. She is Nadine Strausson, and she served as the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first woman to hold this role from 1991 to 2008.

She continues her work as a free speech advocate, now a senior fellow. at fire the foundation for individual rights and expression. She joins us from New York. Nadine, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. I am so happy to be here. Likewise, you know, at the Monk debates, we really care about issues related to free speech. It's a cornerstone of our democracy.

It's a large part of what we try to do as an organization, which has kind of increased the scope, the range of ideas that we can discuss and debate with kind of civility and substance. So to have a far-reaching conversation with you about the state of free speech in our society today is a privilege indeed. And maybe, Nadine, that's where I'd like to begin.

Just as someone who's been immersed in this issue now for really decades and thinking deeply about free speech, where are we at this moment? Is this a moment of contraction where free speech is under threat? Is there maybe a different view to look at this? A kind of resurgence of interest in free speech, the assertion of free speech rights. Where do you think we're at today right now when it comes to free speech in, let's go big.

Let's say the advanced Western democracies around the world. Thank you so much, Reddard. These are really important questions that I think about all the time. And I have been asked to address them as you, indicate not only around the United States and Canada, but also many, many other countries, most recently New Zealand, but really countries in Asia, countries in Latin America, all over Europe, we are really facing similar crises of concern, let's put it that way. And I use the term crisis in the ancient Chinese sense of it presents an opportunity.

as your question itself indicated, the very fact that I have been given the opportunity to discuss these important issues on your significant platform and many others certainly shows that really large numbers and diverse cross-sections of members of our societies are concerned about the state of free speech. We hear it discussed and debated on college campuses in the corporate sector, certainly in the political sphere, not to mention in traditional and mainstream media. And I think along with the famous opening line of Charles Dickens' great novel, A Tale of Two Cities, in some ways it's the best of times and other ways it's the worst of times. It's the best of time here in the United States in terms of an unprecedentedly robust First Amendment body of law. The First Amendment, of course, has contained a guarantee of free speech since it was ratified in 1791. But for most of American history, it was honored in the breach. Government officials ignored it. The United States Supreme Court did not robustly enforce it.

It's why, as recently as the 1960s, such a legendary human rights crusader as Martin Luther King wrote his epic letter from a Birmingham jail. You may well ask, why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth, is a negotiation a better path? You're quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. What was he in jail for? For trying to exercise what we now consider to be the core First Amendment right,

the right of a member of the public, to protest, to dissent, to peacefully demonstrate against government policies that are viewed as unjust, and yet that could be punished as a crime until my lifetime. So, you know, fast forward to where we are now, and despite all of the other differences on the U.S. Supreme Court, which is famously very ideologically split on many constitutional law issues, on First Amendment free speech issues, the court is remarkably unanimous or sometimes there might be one dissent at most too, but they are all from left to right committed to what the court has called the bedrock principle of free speech, viewpoint neutrality or content neutrality.

The government must remain neutral with respect to the content, the viewpoint, the idea, the message, of this speech, no matter how disfavored, disliked, disputed, despised, the message might be that's never alone a justification for suppressing it. And so the court upholds free speech rights to engage in all kinds of controversial speech that significant percentages of the public would like to suppress, such as disinformation and extremist speech and coronagery. and hate speech. So that brings me to the other part of Dickens' observation, Rudyard, and the other part of your excellent question, it is the worst of times in many ways in terms of public hostility toward free speech. I mean, there's always been a large percentage

of the public who do not understand free speech principles, think that if they disagree, you know, it's often, the public attitude has often been summarized quite accurately as believing in free speech for me or people who think like me, but not for thee or people who disagree with me. Why I say that it is worse now, the public attitude than it has been in the past, is this reason, Rudyard, that now we are seeing institutions that traditionally had been very supportive of free speech becoming much less so. And by those institutions, I mean academia, journalism, publishing, entertainment, light variancehip, cultural institutions, educational institutions. Never have we seen the hostility from faculty

members from students, from members of your profession, deans of journalism schools, leaders of library schools who are questioning the viewpoint neutrality principle and saying, yeah, maybe we ought to have more restrictions on hate speech, disinformation, and so forth. Thank you, indeed. Great summary. I want to go with you to a place I'm sure you're familiar with. that's, I guess, part of the conversation, the public conversation at this moment.

And it's the notion of competing rights that, while they're well understood rights to free expression, to the positing of different issues, debates, and ideas across the Western world in a variety of different courts and judicial bodies, less than the United States, but certainly here in Canada and Europe, there is an increasing focus on the potential risk of harm that befalls to certain groups that are singled out for discrimination or hate speech. And there has, as we know, been the growth of laws and public policy and government intervention that is increasingly stressing, you know, those sets of competing rights around, in a sense,

an individual's personal security and their democratic right to be able to go out into society and interact with fellow citizens and not be subject to the threat of harm. Where do you see that debate today? And the extent to which, especially amongst younger people, Nadine, these arguments seem to have taken hold. They seem to have a real real. resonance with how a lot of younger people would want to rank or place the rights that they would like to have in a hierarchy. They seem more concerned about, you know, protection against discrimination

and hate speech than maybe they are interested in their own free speech rights. This is a concept that really has been resonant Rudyard for quite a few decades going back at least to the 1980s, when we saw in this country and then rapidly spreading to other countries as well, the idea of having so-called hate speech codes on college campuses advocated on precisely the important rationale that you set out, that if we truly want to have egalitarian, inclusive educational institutions, it's not enough to simply lower the pre-existing barriers to admitting certain historically marginalized groups. But we want them to be fully equally belonging as participants, and that is inconsistent

with allowing certain hateful ideas to be expressed. And really a way of summarizing this issue is, and I will pose it as a question, is there an inherent tension between liberty on the one hand, in particular freedom of speech and equality? On the other hand, do we have to choose between robust freedom of speech and robust equal protection under the laws? And that's a really important question that I have been wrestling with for decades. I really believe in John Stewart Mills' edict that every idea has to be subject to question, to criticism, to debate. So I'm going to phrase my analysis very deliberately when I say, I continue to believe, open to dissuasion.

But so far, I continue to believe based on evidence, including evidence from your country as well as mine, that no matter how well intended, hate speech laws are at best ineffective in promoting equality. quality and belonging and inclusivity and at worst counterproductive. They give power, a discretionary power to the enforcers to select which ideas are going to be deemed hateful and subject to suppression. And not surprisingly, disproportionately, the ideas that are targeted are those that express dissenting viewpoints or that are voiced on behalf of minority and marginalized communities. Let me put it more affirmatively rather. The goal is to increase equality and belonging and equal participation in our society.

That is the goal that I is a lifelong human rights and civil liberties champion have always espoused. And that means we have to reduce hateful and discriminatory attitudes, and we certainly have to reduce and hopefully eliminate, at least punish hateful and discriminatory conduct. Targeting expression is not a good proxy for either of those other more important goals, right? You try to suppress a hateful idea through censorship, and we know through the forbidden fruits phenomenon, sometimes called the Streisand effect, the targeted message usually receives much more attention than an otherwise would have

and garners more sympathy than it otherwise would have. It certainly doesn't persuade the person who's othering that idea if you imprison them or prosecute them or even if you shame and shun and ostracize them. So the question is, how do we effectively promote equality and evil participation? And again, I think hate speech coats may make us feel good, but on analysis don't really do good. Interesting. So, yeah, that's a nice way to think of it, that they're dealing with the symptoms in a sense and not the cause. and there are a very public demonstration that the symptoms are being dealt with,

in some cases, here in Canada, with our hate speech laws, our laws against the promotion of anti-Semitism that can carry jail term up to two years of physical confinement on the basis of the breach of those laws. So an important point to think about, Nadine. Let's talk a little bit about what's going on in university campuses,

because this is a very hot area where these issues have come to the fore. And I think, as you say in the United States, let's say compared to Canada and Europe, you have, at least in your Supreme Court, certainly a consensus on a more robust, maximal kind of reading and interpretation of free speech rights. But that doesn't seem to translate Nadine down to what's happening on college campuses. Stanford Law School is facing backlash after administrators failed to start. stop some students from heckling a conservative speaker on campus earlier this month to the point where he had to leave the event. A science lecture by a geophysics professor after activists launched an outrage campaign

against him over his views on diversity. A popular UCLA professor at Los Angeles now filing a formal complaint, a grievance with his union after he claims he was fired because he's conservative and has conservative views. Quite the contrary, you're seeing, some would say, debate being cut off, being shut down, active efforts that are seemingly highly effective at curtailing and limiting people's free speech rights. I don't want to rehash the reasons for that, because in some ways we've talked about some of those. But what are the question of Dina, what do we do about this? If we look at this the other way around, how do you actually enforce free speech rights in a culture and in places like university campuses where those rights are not broadly socialized or accepted? You've put it very well, and I'm going to make in different words, the same point I made in response to your first excellent question.

And let me phrase it this way. having a speech protective legal system is necessary, but not sufficient if we are to meaningfully exercise and enjoy freedom of speech. So yes, here in the U.S. and in Canada, because you really, your hate speech laws have very rarely been enforced. But anyway, the law is very good in both of our countries. but yet that does not translate into a lived experience of actual robust protection for and exercise and enjoyment of free speech rights if we don't have a free speech culture or society that values free speech. So the fact that the Supreme Court upholds our rights really isn't going the distance when we have awful important cultural institutions, including universities, being hostile toward free speech. The term that we often use to describe the very different culture we have is cancel culture.

You know, every term is imprecise, but basically it means going beyond the kind of criticism and peaceful protest, which is part of free speech itself, to disproportionately harsh punishments and retaliation and retribution that not only leads to disruptive protests and literally shouting down and shutting down of would-be speakers and would-be audience members, but also leads to this pall of self-censorship, which survey after survey after survey in this country show that substantial percentages of the general population, as well as faculty. members and students on campuses where free speech should be most robust and most lively, are inappropriately self-censoring, not even addressing important topics because they are so

sensitive. Topics about race, about gender, about police practices, about immigration. In other words, the most controversial and important issues of the day that deserve to be not only as a matter of individual liberty, but as part of our, you know, democratic republics and our, or I should say liberal democracies to be even more inclusive. And so how do we turn that around?

Are you enjoying what you're listening and learning on the Monk Debates podcast? Well, if you are, please consider becoming a one-time donor. For a contribution of $5, 10, $15, or $20, you can make a real difference to our efforts to bring civil and substantive debate and dialogue to tens of thousands of people every month through this podcast. We rely on your support for the resources to make this all happen. Again, become a monk donor right now at triple w monkdebates.com. Simply click on donate in the top right navigation. If you're a Canadian resident, you get a charitable

tax receipt. And regardless, we take care of our donors throughout the year. We'll sending you special perks privileges and offers that only go to our valued monk donors. So thanks in advance for your generous contribution. We really appreciate your support. Now back to our program. Let me ask for your help with just something I've struggled with as someone who is responsible for kind of organizing and moderating debates, debates that are often on controversial topics that in the past have featured speakers that have been controversial.

And one of the things that we've struggled with, and I've struggled with as an organization, is the social kind of acceptance of different points of view in a public space. And interestingly, here in Canada, in some ways because of our hate speech laws, I've often felt that as an organization, we have something valuable to fall back on. to the extent to which we can say to potential critics who would want to shut down or fast debates. We've had protesters, you name it, police on riot horses, if you can believe it. But we were still able to proceed with those events because we could say legitimately to our audiences and to the public that the participants who were engaged in our debates had no history of hate speech or public anti-semit. and that therefore the laws of Canada had kind of set the parameters of acceptable debate versus a situation, let's say, in the United States, where you have more maximal free speech laws, and there aren't those parameters so that critics of forums like the monk debates

can therefore, you know, say to you, well, you know, you're creating a situation, a scenario here where anything goes, where any speaker could say and do anything. So I struggle with this, indeed, because I'm very sympathetic to a more kind of robust, muscular definition of free speech rights, but in my own experience of running the monk debates for a decade now, I often find the Canadian approach to be a helpful tool in my own arguments to try to expand the scope of the topics and attitudes and positions and views that the public is willing to allow to go forward in the public square. You're making an excellent point, and you will be pleasantly surprised to learn that robust

as U.S. free speech law is, your generalization does apply to our law. Most people, including most people in the United States, have a distorted, caricatured stereotype of First Amendment free speech law. That is absolute that it brooks no exceptions that we free speech defenders, including on the Supreme Court, deny that speech can ever do any harm. And the truth is, no, no, and no. The more you examine First Amendment law, the more common sense it makes. And by the way, it overlaps hugely with international human rights law of free speech under the United Nations legal system and with the legal regimes in many countries. So, I mean, this notion of American exceptionalism is really distorted. In a nutshell, Rudyard, our free speech law,

the United States does empower government to outlaw the speech that is the most harmful and the most dangerous. And I can summarize those two basic Yen and Yang principles by telling you one maxim from each side. In terms of the censorship, now let me start with the restrictions that are completely permissible under U.S. law, they are usually summarized or often summarized by the phrase the emergency principle. When speech presents an emergency, because it imminently, directly causes certain specific serious harm, then it can and should be punished. You probably heard that there was a

settlement of this famous defamation lawsuit against Fox News. And it's well known that U.S. defamation law does give more latitude for false and defamatory allegations than the law of other countries. We have some breaking news for you. I'm Jake Tapper. Moments ago, we learned there is a settlement, a settlement in the high-stakes trial between Dominion voting systems and Fox. Dominion was suing Fox for $1.6 billion saying that the network showed complete and utter disregard for truth and facts and accuracy when they allowed guests and hosts to push false conspiracy theories that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump. CNN's Oliver Darcy. There was a consensus that, you know, Fox News had run a bow even of that very speech permissive

standard. And I think that's, it, that was so useful from a free speech perspective for precisely the reason that you cited Rudyard, we could say, look, when, when defamatory speech, even with respect to a public official or public figure goes too far, it can still be punished and should still be punished with big libel damages under U.S. law. However, where we do draw the line and say that here's a kind of a censorship that is the most dangerous is when the government is suppressing the speech solely because of dislike or disagreement with the viewpoint or the message, as I said earlier. That is not for government to do in a democratic society. That is for we the people to decide what ideas we agree with, which ones we disagree with.

And if people have hateful ideas, I think it's the least dangerous thing to do is for us to hear those ideas, and including through the kind of debate that you've been having. And in fairness, in my country, and I know it's true in yours as well, people sling around the term hate speech for ideas that we would not think up as conventional hate speech. for example, in my country, you may think that the police have engaged in too many unjustified shootings of unarmed young black men, but you may oppose so-called defund the police as a strategy for dealing with that problem. Well, you would be in danger because of that policy position of being accused of being a racist. But that, to my view, does not mean that you should not debate the pros and cons of defunding the police. Those are important points. Thank you for that. Let's just talk about anti-Semitism, because

you have a personal connection to this. Your father was a Holocaust survivor. Some people have said that anti-Semitism is something different, that when it is allowed to fester in a society, history shows that the consequences of it are some of the very, very worst, to risk some of the very, very worst moments in human history. And that of all forms of speech, this is where we have to kind of leave behind a predilection, a desire to allow for the expression of ideas. Because, again, the harm principle is just so great. You mentioned John Stewart Mill.

Well, that was one of his ideas, that your rights would extend only in so far as they caused harm to someone else. And the Holocaust as the poison fruit of anti-Semitism is the painful, horrific object lesson of the risk of anti-Semitism. And hence, this is where free speech ends. But if harm is not directly or imminently caused by the speech, but you're saying the harm is something that, and the word that you use, Rudyard festeres over time. These ideas enter on individual conscience and start to pervade the culture. Yes, let's counter those ideas every way that we can. But punishing certain speakers is not going to accomplish that goal. And sadly, the best illustration of that is Nazi Germany and pre-Nazi Germany in the Weimar

Republic itself. Many people say, oh, if only they had had hate speech laws when Hitler rose to power, he couldn't have risen to power and the Holocaust wouldn't have happened. not true. The Weimar Republic had very strict anti-hate speech laws that were very strictly enforced, according to the leading Jewish organization in Germany at the time. The laws were very effectively prosecuted, led to the convictions of many hateful speakers, including the vitriolic der Stormer, a Nazi propaganda,

anti-Semitic rag. And guess what? The Nazis loved it. It gave them a propaganda platform from which they were able to gain much more attention than they otherwise would have and received much more sympathy than they otherwise would have. The former head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Alan Borrevoy. He was Jewish himself and, you know, a wonderful progressive, He had a labor organizing background. And when Canada was considering its hate speech laws, he had a wonderful testimony that was then reprinted in a book in which he recounted that history from Nazi Germany and free Nazi Germany and advised that the hate speech laws would be equally futile in your country.

Let's just for a moment talk about an organization that you were. the president of. In fact, it's a storied one, and we know it as the American Civil Liberties Union. The first, you were the first ever woman elected to lead the ACLU. You did that from 1991 to 2008. There, as you know, Nadine, there are criticisms now increasingly of the ACLU, that it's not pursuing its mandate around free speech with the same. kind of clarity of thought that it did in the past.

Other free speech organizations, traditionally free speech organizations like the Canadian Civil Liberties Union and counterparts in other parts of the world are similarly being buffeted by these arguments. We talked about the beginning of the podcast of competing rights and which should be given prominence. What's your take on this? Where do you think that the movement is at and where is the ACLU in particular at today vis-a-vis this debate.

The ACLU has continued to do what it historically has done, which is to implement the viewpoint neutrality principle that's part of American U.S. law. One of the ways of stating it is to paraphrase the statement attributed to Voltaire, but we now know was actually written by his biographer, Evelyn Beatrice. Oh, I disagree with what you say, but I defend the. death, you're right to say it. So the ACLU, I think, most famous case in which we did that, and it really epitomizes American law and the ACLU mission, was in Skokie, Illinois in 1977 to 78. Good evening. If you've been following the curious and disturbing story on the Nazis and

Jews in Skokie, Illinois, the Nazi march appears for the moment to be on again. A federal court in Chicago ruled today that attempts by the village of Skokie to stop the march are unconstitutional. Skokie is a town near Chicago that had a large Jewish population. At the time, many of them were Holocaust survivors, and yet the ACLU came to the defense of the right of a group of neo-Nazis to demonstrate in Skokie, even though the message was clearly antithetical to the ACLU's own human rights agenda, Rodyard. We continue to do that as recently as 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, when the United, the right white supremacist demonstration took place there.

The ACLU did exactly what it had done. About 50 years earlier in Skokie came to the defense of their recent. speech rights were successful in courts of law, as we always are in these cases, because, again, this is the bedrock principle of free speech law. And in both cases, there was no evidence that there would be actual violence and that if there were, that the police would be able to handle it. Tragically, that turned out not to be the case in Charlottesville, but that's another issue. And the ACLU in the Skokie case back in the 1970s, We lost 15% of our membership who said, you know, we believe in free speech, but this goes too far.

So in that sense, as I said earlier, we've always had challenges in persuading the court of public opinion has been less hospitable to free speech in many ways than the courts of law. I think what's different now, and it pertains not only to the ACLU, but to all of the institutions we've. been talking about, including your profession of journalism, certainly academia, that there is a bit of, and you alluded to it, Reddard, there's a bit of an age issue here, that the younger generation isn't as sold on these traditional free speech principles and positions as the elders like my generation is. And I think that's true, even for those who join human rights organizations or become professors or journalists or join the publishing industry. So there is a real educational opportunity for those of us who think that those values continue to be important. And I welcome the challenge, you know, consistent with John Stewart Mill, nothing is immune or should be immune from criticism, including his own analysis. He would be the first one to say that, right? Absolutely. Well,

Nadine, this has been a far-reaching and fascinating conversation. Just to wrap it all up, where does this debate go from here? As you say, there are times, moments where you sense the pendulum swinging back, I would say, in the direction of a greater appreciation of free speech rights and their importance to our democracy. At the same time, as we've discussed, younger generations, college campuses, corporate environments. There's a lot of self-censorship, you know, that's going on in our society today. Maybe that's something we haven't really talked about, not so much the legal formalistic definitions of legitimate or illegitimate speech,

but how we each individually are operating in a culture where there seems to be a kind of quietism falling over a lot of, the public spaces we inhabit, our workplace, our place of education, maybe amongst our friend groups. What's going on here to Dean? And are you hopeful that this is just a phase, a cultural moment, and we come through the other side? Or are there some bigger issues, some bigger concerns at stake? This is what I alluded to earlier, Roger, when I talked about the inappropriate kind of self-censorship that is casting a pall of orthodoxy in both of our countries, including on campus and other places where one would hope that the debate would be the most robust.

I say inappropriate self-censorship because, of course, we are always editing and trying to be effective communicators and to be courteous communicators, but it becomes inappropriate when we are so fearful of inadvertently saying something that will be perceived or misperceived as insensitive or offensive, that we don't address entire topics at all, right? Psychological, social psychological studies show that we humans are subject to great pressures of conformity. But the positive aspect of that is if one, the center as the courage to speak up, others quite quickly fall in line. And so, you know, those of us who have relatively secure positions, certainly including

those of us who are tenured members of faculties, to have a special responsibility to speak up. But all of us have a responsibility, or let me put it this way, an opportunity to show support for other people who speak up. And I think it's especially important to do it when there is somebody whose views you strongly disagree with. I've come to the defense of the academic freedom rights of a professor in the United States who is having, you know, her tenure is under assault for exercising what I believe to be, you know, fundamental academic freedom rights. I strongly disagree with her political views. we're at opposite ends of the political spectrum. But the principles here are so important.

And I think as somebody who disagrees with her views but supports her rights to express them, I have a special opportunity to help her case, but also just on a personal level to provide support. And hopefully that will encourage others to do likewise. In the United States, one of the relatively new organizations, which I mentioned have been flourishing lately is called the Academic Freedom Alliance. And it's a group of faculty members completely diverse in our views, our disciplines, our institutions, and so forth. But we've pledged that when any faculty member exercises what should be protected free speech or academic freedom,

we will have that person's back, no matter how strongly we might disagree with how they're using those rights, the opinions that they're expressing. Well, thank you, Nadine. Thank you for your kind of principal advocacy on this important issue and sharing your wisdom and insights with us today on behalf of the Monk Debates community. Let's do this again. I've really enjoyed our conversation. While that wraps up today's dialogue, I want to thank our guest, Nadine Strausson. She certainly gave us a lot to think about.

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