TRIGGERnometry - New Report: Political Discrimination Rife at Universities - Eric Kaufmann

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

Eric Kaufmann is a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and a board member at Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/​ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq​ https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger...​ https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod​ Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. And a brilliant guest we have for you today. He's returning to the show for the third time a professor of politics at Birkbeck College University of London. Eric Kavan, welcome back. Delighted to be here, you guys. This is great. And I'm very impressed, by the way, with how you guys are rising in the world with this studio. That's very kind of you to say, as I said to you before, this is what happens when you criticize BLM in public, your life just gets better and better.

Apart from the fact you've got no friends, but we don't talk about that. I never had any friends in the first place. But Eric, listen, it's great to have you back. We wanted to get you back because you've just been involved with a couple of reports, one in particular, looking academic freedom, something we've talked about, plenty in the past. So tell us what's going on. What's the situation? How free are we?

Well, I think it's important because universities are where kind of cancel culture and wokeness emanated from. So I think it's very important to start there and see what's been happening. So really there have been three reports, two on the UK, and one now that I did on the U.S. Canada and the UK, which was much larger in scope. It's worth mentioning that the sort of 2020-August U.K. report on academic freedom was the one which five of our seven recommendations went into the UK government's white paper. So we're very pleased with that take-up of a lot of the ideas. And I think it sort of gets to the notion that part of the practical aspect of trying to take on cancel culture is forming these policy networks, think tanks, academics, government, where you can get some of these policies enacted. But before I go into that detail, I've just put out a more recent report for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, which is a new think tank based in California, very small.

but what they're trying to do is get out a sort of unconventional social science research into the policy space and broadly into the domain because so many of these questions are not being asked in universities because you can't ask them or no one's interested in them for ideological reasons. So for example,

studying wokeness. You know, that's not something that's going to attract a lot of funding. So what this report does is it's based on a lot of original research eight surveys, taking the UK surveys that we did for the Policy Exchange 2020 report, adding on to that surveys in Canada and Britain, and some surveys of post-graduates, so PhD students. And what do we find?

Well, basically what we find is we confirm a lot of previous research, which shows that social science and humanities academia is extremely left, as you might imagine. So the numbers we were getting were about 14 to 1 left to right. in Canada and the U.S. and about 9 to 1 in Britain. Other studies using sort of voter registration data, which are more of a complete sample, find something similar, 12, roughly 12, 13 to 1 in the top 100, say, U.S. institutions.

I also looked at the top 40 Canadian institutions. So what you've got now is more or less a monoculture. You have a very small number of conservatives, a small number of centrists. The conservatives are more or less in the closet, for the most part. that atmosphere is one in which essentially it's not a free idea space where all ideas are challenged equally.

Good ideas have an equal shot at getting into journals or getting grant funding. What I wanted to do with the surveys is to actually look at academics themselves as well as graduate students and find out not only their political beliefs, but also their support for cancel culture because we didn't really have any proper studies on that.

And then willingness to politically discriminate and then number three, how much are political minorities, i.e. conservatives, to some extent, centrist, but also gender-critical feminists, how much are they essentially feeling unfree? Because so often you'll get this retort from the academic establishment and particularly the progressive left that, well, it's a few no-platforming incidents which make the news. These are blown out of proportion. There was only 65 incidents. It's only 0.01% of all academics that encounter this. And that's true. So I want to say that is actually true. If we just want to focus on no platformings as the problem, it is kind of a small problem.

But it's a symptom what we argue in the report, what I argue in the report, is a symptom of a much larger threat to academic freedom, which is chilling effects. All right. For every one person who gets no platform, they're 10 people who don't allow themselves to be no platform because they don't speak up in the first place. Yeah, but more than that, I wanted to get at the everyday academic in their teaching. do they feel free to raise issues? In their research, are they researching what they really want to research and saying what they really want to say in conversation, in public commentary? Well, lo and behold, the answer is no.

I mean, if you take conservative academics in the U.S. and Canada, who are in the social sciences and humanities, it's about three quarters who say their department is a hostile climate for their beliefs. It's about between six and seven out of ten who say they self-censor in their research and teaching. If you look at Trump supporting academics, there are a very small number. You know, one out of ten would let that slip to a colleague,

whereas Biden supporters, it's about nine out of ten, right? So you're talking about a major difference in who feels free to speak and who feels free within academia. So it's really a problem that's concentrated heavily on political minorities, which is why a lot of academics who tend to be center-left, they don't see this because it's not affecting what they do. They can just do their research, do their teaching. What's the problem?

It's like in China, you know, if you just have a nice life, you go to parties, you drink, you do whatever. What's the problem here? I don't feel unfree. It's only once you cross the ideological regime that exists. And it's similar in a university. It's only when you cross a boundary, which is it could be around hot-button issues,

race, gender sexuality, not having the right, opinions. So a Kathleen Stark, for example, on gender-critical feminism, boom, all of a sudden you're in trouble, you're getting no platforms, you're getting hauled into disciplinary tribunals. But as long as you told the line, you're fine. And so it's something similar in academia. The other thing is being a conservative is, it's not technically crossing one of these hot-button issues, but it is more or less associated with being on the wrong team. And therefore, you also kind of endanger yourself if you're identified as such. And therefore, very much this small group of maybe three to five percent of academia,

just the gender-critical feminists, the conservatives in the social sciences and humanities. That's who are really feeling this heat, this loss of liberty. So I kind of concentrate a lot on them. But also, it's not as if the vast rump of academia is off the hook because it's their complicit in this system. So it's not as though the Trump supporters and the conservatives and the gender-critical feminists are just being paranoid. that actually everybody would love them and be open to their ideas.

Well, not really. Because if you look at, I did something called a list experiment, which allows you to get at people's true views in a way that a direct question doesn't. And what I found was essentially four out of ten U.S. Social Science, Humanities, academics would not hire a Trump supporter. And 45% of Canadian academics, and in Britain it's about one in three who wouldn't hire a known leave support. So you've got pretty high political prejudice operating.

If you think about going up for promotion or trying to get something in a journal, you know, if you've got four referees and, well, 40% of them are going to be politically biased, the chances are one or two of those people are going to be against you if they can smell your politics. That means you're going to keep that politics in the closet in your work, right? So this is the dynamic that's going on is it's not so much fear. I mean, it is fear of losing your job. I want to come to that cancel culture point in a minute. But the biggest problem is political discrimination.

Political discrimination is a huge topic, which is, it seems to me not receiving anywhere near the attention it needs to get. It is massive. And it's not only academia. Actually, if you take people of, say, whether left or right, they both. discriminate relatively equally inside and outside academia. It's just much more acceptable for people to say, I don't like this person because he's a Tory or he voted for Corbyn or whatever, and that's going to influence my decision. That's actually not allowed in a hiring decision

or a firing decision, but there seems to be a tolerance for it. So anytime you get an institution that's, say, 10 to 1 or 14 to 1 of one group, say, in the university's case, it might be left to right, all of a sudden you're in a climate where there is massive political discrimination. Because in a situation where it was 50-50, everyone's equally prejudiced. The prejudice will cut both ways. Yeah, you might annoy one person, but someone else might favor you for your views. So it comes out a bit more in the wash, but once you get a situation that's highly tilted, yeah, that one person may be equally prejudiced as these 10, but 10 to 1 means the effect

hits the political minorities just that much more. And that's kind of what we're seeing in academia. And what that then means is you get, with political discrimination, you get two things. One is self-censorship and people concealing their views, but also you get people being repelled from going down the academic track. And one of the surveys I did, which was on graduate students, showed that conservative graduate students, particularly at the master's level, knew that academia was not a place that was friendly to their political ideas. and that that was significantly linked with not wanting to pursue an academic career. So what you're now into is a sort of self-fulfilling feedback loop where you've got a hostile climate

for conservative or gender-critical beliefs that keeps people with those beliefs from coming into the profession, which keeps the sort of impurities out and keeps it a monoculture. And so it's reproducing itself. And the big question is whether that dynamic is going to migrate to other spheres like publishing like, I don't know, motion pictures or whatever, which may not be quite as advanced as universities. Oh, they are. Oh, maybe they are.

I'm writing my first book at the moment. Believe me, they are. Yeah, yeah. So that's the issue is, and if you go back to like 1965, 1970, in the social sciences and humanities, you can see it's about three to one left to right, and it's now about 12, 13 or thereabouts. So it's gotten worse. It's not the case, yes, academia, particularly social, science as humanities has leaned left for a long time. But it's not leaned left to the same extent

it has now. Things have gotten much worse. And I think part of the explanation is the spiral, where you get a monoculture, which is then hostile, which then deters people, and that just drives this cycle more and more. So yeah, that's pretty much the message of my report on academic freedom recently. There weren't specific policy recommendations in this one the way they were the way they were in the British one. The British one had a series of policy recommendations, which I would also largely endorse for the U.S. case. It's just that CSPI didn't want to go into the policy side of it,

and so I said, fine, we won't do that. Because we had some disagreements among some of the other fellows, and I thought, okay, we'll just, yeah, we'll keep it out of this, we'll keep it empirical. But I wrote up some of the policy stuff for City Journal, which is the Manhattan Institute's in-house organ, and sort of laid out some of my policy thoughts in that piece, which largely kind of follow from what's been done here in Britain.

And it also gets into a wider conversation. Eric, maybe you should remind people what they were. Yeah, so for your viewers, particularly not from Britain, back in February, the government basically committed to, well, in a policy white paper, they set out some reforms that were going to be made to, to, to, universities here. Now, this is still to pass through and become law, but it's almost certainly likely to go through. It's just a question of whether it goes through in its present form or whether

there's some amendments that are made. But basically what this legislation does and policy guidance does, almost all of it is about enforcing current law, but it's about doing it proactively, right? So instead of, for example, your academic freedom rights being violated because the university says, what you're saying, it puts our university in a bad light. We've had some complaints from students, aka kind of, you know, Twitter mob. We've had these complaints, and therefore we would like you to, you know, stop writing what you're writing, or whatever. Or we haul you in and we punish you in some way. We take you off, take you from this position, you're no longer on this committee, or you're no longer able to teach that. So there's a punishment that's involved.

Well, that is actually a violation of your academic freedom, even under current. law. But the way the law is set up now is you've got these different obligations. The universities have an obligation to ensure academic freedom, but then they've also got their policy and work and study where you can't be seen to be harassing anybody. And harassment is loosely, subjectively defined. And then you've got our, you know, our reputation of the university and that, well, we can't have that sort of be smirched. That's all used in a way to trump academic freedom. So academic freedom comes last, and it's more or less thrown under the bus. whenever there's a conflict. What this legislation would do was essentially say,

you can't do that, academic freedom is number one, and all these other considerations are two and three. And so if there's ever a situation where you say academic freedom is trumped by these other things, you are actually going to be told to change that decision, and you're going to face fines. So there's a regime that involves a new office. Someone called the Academic Freedom Champion, which sits on the university's regulator called the OFS here in, Britain. And what they would have the power to do is essentially investigate universities and essentially tell them to reverse decisions, issue fines, and so on. This is the only way. And I know there's a discussion around this. I have this discussion with others who say,

no, no, the market will sort it out and people will vote with their feet and good ideas will drive out the bed. No, it's not actually how it works in a system such as the university system where there is, first of all, it's government funded. Secondly, there are huge network effects and legacy effects. You can't just set up new universities left and right because there are tremendous advantages to being established. So you have to work to reform the existing sector,

which means you've got to use the power of government. And that, for some libertarians, is anathema. And I think if you go down the path of being a libertarian on issues around wokeness, whether it's tech firms or universities or whatever, in my view, you're being a useful idiot for the woke. All you're doing is essentially taking away the only lever we have.

to try and roll back this stuff within these institutions. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing,

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Go to avocado green mattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Eric, can I just stop you there just for a second? Because we're using the word woke, and this means different things to different people. Right. Because to some people, they would say,

well, woke means just being socially aware, aware that, you know, black people face racism. Trans people, you know, they're exposed to, you know, their own form of prejudice. What does wholeness actually mean? How would you define it? Okay, very good question. One sentence, sacralization of historically disadvantaged

race, gender, and sexual minorities. That's the one sentence definition. woke. So once you say that these categories of people are sacred, that means then that any kind of criticism of anything that might help or is in the name of helping these groups, right, affirmative action could be one, microaggressions could be in any, or even the government's recent paper inequalities and anti-racism, if you say

structural racism or institutional racism doesn't exist, you know, any criticism of something that is in the name of these sacred groups becomes, in effect, you are putting yourself in the excommunicated box. So, wokeness is really about sacralization of categories of people, and that's

the bedrock behind it all. So that's the definition. Once you have that definition, and once you see certain categories as being sacred and holy, both in terms of their lived experience, in terms of their knowledge, not equal, holier, on the one hand,

higher, on the one hand, lower because they need your protection. You're the parent, they're the child, right? So there's that kind of dynamic in which any kind of criticism of anything that's adjacent in any way to the sacred totems is a blasphemy. And that's kind of what McWhorter is talking about in his religion of anti-racism as well, is there's this very religious, sacred quality to this discussion. So when I talk about wokeness, it is anything that sort of would elevate these categories and any ideas around these categories as beyond reproach, beyond criticism, and any research which might be construed as being insensitive or in some way critical of that to be essentially struck down. So it prevents any kind of rational discussion.

And I think we see this in the recent Race Commission report where, you know, just saying, look, we've got to look at what is the driver of, you know, higher, you know, disparate sentencing between black and white or disparate outcomes in terms of maternal mortality, we actually have to look at not just racism. There is a gap there, but we don't just jump to racism. We actually want to look at, well, what are the other factors that might be going on

like not pleading guilty, for example? How can we address these other drivers of the gap? That is heretical because it questions an explanation, i.e. institutional racism, which is associated with helping the sacred category. But at the core of this is the sacralization of these categories. So, yeah, that's sort of the definition of wokeness. You were talking about how libertarians are useful idiots.

Right, right. So as that is then used as a battering ram to institute policies which violate academic freedom, such as bias response teams, such as diversity training that uses critical race theories, such as decolonizing the curriculum, mandatory decolonizing of the curriculum, In other words, your reading list must be X percent this and that X percent that, which is in some places where we're moving, which is a violation of your freedom to set your own reading list, for example. But essentially you get these policies that are pushed in institutions by quite a small group. So what's interesting in the surveys is only about 10 percent of academics favor firing academics who are doing controversial research across a series of different topics on race. But that's huge.

10 percent. It is huge. One in ten. One in ten. But it's also one in ten amongst non-academics, right? Who are on the left. So it's not about academics, but it is about there is a 10% in the population. Well, 10% of society think, you know, Larry Eldor makes the point.

10% of society think Elvis is still alive. Right. And if you send him a letter, he'll get it. But I think where you're probably going, Eric, I'm going to guess here, is that there's a very large body of people who, while not supporting it, will not. vocally oppose it. Exactly. That's crucial. So you've got about half, 40 to 50 percent of academics who, you know, they won't support a campaign to get rid of somebody, but they're also not opposed to it. And when I say not opposed, I don't mean they don't stick their head above the parapet. No, I mean, even on a survey, they wouldn't be opposed to firing. So that is a very permissive

atmosphere. And the further left you are, the more permissive you are on this. And conservatives are obviously much more likely to actively oppose. So you've got two problems. One is you've got that 10% that are active, pro-cancel. And then you've got that 40 to 50% intermediate group who kind of sympathize with the aim of protecting disadvantaged groups,

again, partly because they buy into that woke substructure of, you know, these are sacred groups that are, we have to do everything in our power because, you know, so they buy into the kind of progressive aims, but they may be a little bit of, little uneasy with the means of, you know, violating academic freedom. A lot of them have a commitment to academic freedom, but it's in tension with their sympathy with these means. And it's interesting, you can change the question around and get radically different answers. So you might

ask a question, are you in favor of political correctness because it protects minority groups, or do you oppose it because it's a threat to free speech? Among social science, humanities, academics, and Britain, it's like 75% pro-political correctness, 20 against. So massively in favor of political correctness. But then you ask, okay, well, social justice or academic freedom, which one do you, if you had to pick? And then it swings to a majority going for academic freedom, maybe 55 to 35 against for social justice.

So there's this kind of tension, I guess, between these competing values. And it comes out differently depending on how you phrase the question. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Well, if you do, then EasyDNS are the company for you. EasyDNS is the perfect domain name registrar provider and web host for you. They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be council culture, D-platform attacks, or overzealous government agencies.

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which is of course triggered as well, and you will get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, Access of Easy that tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. Eric, let me ask you this, because this is something that I find really interesting. How much of this is about left versus right or how much about this is majority versus minority? And here's what I'm getting at. If the majority of the faculty at universities were conservatives, do you think these attitudes would flip? Or is there something inherent about being on the left that makes you pro-cancel culture or more open to it?

and is there something inherent about being on the right that makes you sort of like we don't care about people's feelings, we're all about the research? Or is it just simply a function of the fact like the left is the majority, therefore we want to dominate and the right is the minority, we want to have some breathing space. How much of that is going on? I think it's mostly what you say that if it were a conservative majority, then you'd get the dynamics moving in the opposite direction. That is, certainly on political discrimination, it would be pretty much the same picture. political discrimination is heavily down to are you a majority or are you a minority? But the difference I think is on support for cancel culture.

And one of the things, by the way, I didn't mention was that amongst younger academics, age 35 and under, twice as supportive of canceling as those 50 and over. Well, that's good news. And graduate students are even more. So, I mean, I asked four hypothetical questions, and it was about 10% of academics back cancellation in any one of those scenarios.

but about 25% if you consider at least people who backed at least one of the four cancel scenarios. Well, that number was over 50% for PhD students in the U.S. So one in two PhDs backs at least one of these four hypothetical cancel campaigns. So people who say that somehow these things come and go, you know, these phases come and go, McCarthyism came and went, this is going to come and go. I mean, really all of the data that we see is that we've got a more intolerant generation coming at us. And we should expect to see these problems get

worse and not better. And why do you think that is, Eric? Why do you think that young people become more censorious than ever? Isn't that when you're moment to be more free, more open? You know, you're more experimental when you're young? The end of corporal punishment. Yeah, yeah. No, Eric, that was a joke.

You're not supposed to go, yeah, yeah, to the joke about how we stopped beating kids. That was a joke. I missed that. It was under your breath. We don't beat kids. kids enough, Eric, yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll be the clip that we use.

I know, I know. That's a Latino coming on. No, you're right. We need to beat our children, yeah. That's right. No, no, no. Well, God, I've kind of lost the thread now. What the hell were you asking? The question was, why young people more... Oh, yeah, young people, yeah.

Yeah, this is interesting, because there's all kinds of other data that we find, you know, there was a survey now by the Fire, the Foundation for the Individual Rights and Education. 20,000, huge sample. It's like 75% of people were opposing, or 65, 75% were opposing having different kinds of controversial speaker on campus, you know, around someone who thinks that all abortion should be illegal or someone who thinks that BLM is a hate group. You know, you'd have only 20, 25% saying such a person should be allowed on campus to speak. Yeah, we are seeing definitely more intolerance. Why is that happening? I think it comes down to this wokeness thing, which I mentioned, which is if you, if you've, if you've, if you've, if you've, if you've, been watching movies and reading books and in your social media feed are, if you're seeing

this narrative in which you've kind of got the bad whites and then you have the good white allies and you have the minorities who are kind of, and typically the storyline will be about, you know, slavery or it'll be about the Nazis or it'll be, you know, this is sort of, I think a lot of it comes down to stories and storytelling and the kinds of effective attachments people form to certain kinds of minority groups. Again, those sacralized, raised gender, sexuality, minority groups. That's now kind of second nature, I think, to a lot of younger people. Although I think there are very interesting divisions within the younger population,

which we can get to later. But I think you have an acceptance of the sacredness of these groups now, which then shuts down the tolerance. So once you accept that you can't criticize, you must be ultra-sensitive around these groups that are sacred because they have a history of being marginalized. Once you accept that logic, then free speech. drops down. So people say yes, yes to free speech in the abstract, but whenever there's a clash with any of the sacred progressive values, free speech drops down. So yeah, I think we're facing

a growing problem. And so I really think this is one of the reasons why I think simply playing the libertarian long game and thinking that, you know, good ideas will drive out the bad. Eventually people will come to their senses. It's just not the case. I think you have to actually enlist government and public sentiment and the law. to actually start to unpick this in the major institutions of society. So one of the things I say is we can't think of society as just government and individuals and the government oppresses individuals, and so we need government off our backs. That's very 1980s, Reaganite libertarianism.

That might be the case for the economy, but it is the wrong model for what's going on now. What we actually have now is three layers. We've got government, the institutions, such as universities, tech firms, or other kinds of charities, media, less so media, which is, I think, a little bit more free market, but I can talk about that in the minute. And then you've got individuals.

And so these institutions in the middle are actually where a lot of the threats to liberty are coming out of. Whereas elected government, you know, they can enable that oppression to go on in the middle, but if you're going to find a solution to the oppression that's happening,

you actually have to use government in the law. And a good example might be, if you think of Southern universities in the U.S. 1960s, they didn't allow black students. The federal government actually had to come in and say to these universities, you have to desegregate in order to give these students their rights.

So the government actually had to curb the autonomy of the institutions to give autonomy to the individuals. And that's sort of the situation we're in. The government actually has to lean on institutions like universities or tech firms that are monopolistic in order to free up society. And that's very hard for a lot of traditional libertarians who are just anti-government to get.

But we have to get past that kind of 1980-style regioning and start to use government effectively to protect liberty. And it's actually not that hard a concept. If you imagine a gang of people out there who want to lynch you for hosting trigonometry. I mean, they're all. There's more than one of them, right. Especially in this part of London.

Thankfully, they're very weak physically. But the only way you could get you... Says the mine who also has soy milk, by the way. Listen, I have dietary requirements. He's got intolerances of the worst kind. But yeah, so you imagine a gang of people out there wanting to lynch us? So you need the police to come in and evict them to get your freedom back. So you need the state actually to intervene when you have these intermediate level forces.

And that's the kind of world we're increasingly living in. And the problem is not that everyone in these institutions is illiberal. In fact, it's only a minority who are. But that minority, by playing these sacred values, is able to exert much, much more pressure on people's consciences and their fear of their reputations and everything. The small group is allowed to essentially force-multiplify itself by leveraging these taboos. And the only way you get at that is by making it so the institutions have no wiggle room. So if an institution like a university sort of, is told you're going to be fine if you abrogate academic freedom as defined here,

and that has to take precedence over any kind of subjective definitions of emotional safety and harassment in your policies. Then when the activists come knocking and breathing down their necks on Twitter in committees and so on, the administrators in the universities can say, well, yes, we're with you, but we can't do it. Our hands are tied. And that's the response we're looking for is to say, you know, we don't want the administrators to declare loyalty necessarily to free speech. What we want them to be able to do is to say no to the activists. And once the activists are unable to push the administrations in their direction, they've lost their power. And that's the whole point is to use the law and government to try and take away the levers of power that connect these activist campaigns to these

institutions. If you can break that link, then all of a sudden you massively increase the freedom of the people working in these institutions, and it's not enough to allow people to sue. Yes, that is important. The free speech union and fire and all of these groups are doing hugely important work and counterweight as well, which is Helen Pluckroes' organization.

That's hugely important that people actually have someone to go to if they come under attack. But it's not really enough because still, for people actually engage in a lawsuit, that's a lot of money, that's time, emotional distress. you're just going to take the easy route. So in order to get rid of that chilling effect that says, I don't want to touch this subject

because I could be in trouble. I don't want to say this because I could be in trouble. In order to really address that, you need a proactive government that is actively looking at hearing whistleblower complaints that is acting in real time to shut down attempts to discipline people whose ideas contravene dogma, for example. And it's that proactive application of the law, which is what I think we need to move to if we really want to address the chilling effects.

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Yeah, you listened to that one because it's all about food, didn't you? Yeah, I knew it. Who else have they interviewed then? I don't know, I only listened to the food ones. Joking aside, though, they've talked to the founders of pioneering startups like Brewdog, Monzo and Joe Malone. My favourite episode actually was with Alex Stephanie, the CEO of Bean, who spoke about how business could solve huge societal problems like homelessness. Oh wow, that sounds great. Where do I go to listen to Secret Leaders? Just download it right now from wherever you get your podcast.

All you need to do is search for secret leaders. Easy. Isn't one of the challenges going to be? So you've used the examples of university in the 1960s being overtly racist. but that was very easy to prove. Very, very, very easy to prove. This is far more difficult, isn't it, Eric? Well, it's not hard to prove.

I mean, my surveys which are by no means the only ones that have been done, show that there is a very substantial body of people willing to politically discriminate. So that's fact, right? We know that the universities have become more and more and more ideologically skewed, losing their viewpoint diversity. Again, that's established fact. So we've got these two things Now let's imagine that the university

had very few black or non-white academics in there or even students but let's just take academics and we had surveys that were showing that 30 or 40% of academics would discriminate against a black applicant there's just no way that would stand

nor should it stand right so that would be sufficient evidence for radical change and action to happen we've got the evidence But the problem, and also the European courts and other courts have essentially said you cannot politically discriminate. You can't just fire somebody because they're a Labor Party supporter. Your political beliefs are protected.

So this is not legal. It's not legal to do it. And so part of the problem is, okay, how do we then get to a situation where we can apply the law into these institutions? That's not being discussed now. You don't receive any guidance that you're not allowed to discriminate on political grounds when you're going into a hiring committee, for example. The universities are allowed to be blatantly political. I think they should have to be politically neutral at the administrative level. Not the academic.

Academics should be able to have whatever political views and say them in class. Well, that's fine. They've got their freedom. But I think it's at the departments. Department's saying we are a progressive department and posting political things in their common rooms. again, different if individual academics post stuff on their doors, but for official parts of the university to be pushing a political message, I think should not be permitted in publicly funded institutions. Like schools, they should have to be neutral. So putting that kind of neutrality in would, I think, help to change the atmosphere.

So all I'm saying to you is we've got the proof. I don't think we need more proof. We have pretty strong evidence now. It's just what do you do about it. Well, this is my question, because what you're talking about? about, and I, by the way, like the libertarian position, which I used to be quite sympathetic to, clearly doesn't work in the modern environment. There's no argument about that. You know, this idea, oh, let's just have another Twitter.

Well, we saw what happened to parlor. Right, right. And it doesn't work. It's just, to me, that's just a given. But what it sounds like to me, given the demographic dynamics of a university, particularly with the younger people that you're talking about, being so woke and so pro-council culture and, and-and-and, you're sort of trying to solve a problem from the top down, but the problem is from the bottom up, isn't it?

Right. Well, that's a very good question. So I think we've got two issues here, and this is kind of encapsulated in the sort of Chris Rufo versus IDW debate. You've got a problem. So for anyone who's not familiar with it, you just give us a summary. Yeah, yeah. So this is really a kind of debate between Chris Rufo who's sort of saying, well, you know, intellectual dark web,

You're a talking shop. It's great that you're having these programs, but you're having no effect on day-to-day operation of people's lives in institutions and on politics. Now, my own view is actually, both of these positions have merit that you do need to win the war of ideas. Ultimately, if you lose the war of ideas, even if you get regulation and the law,

that will only keep the wool from the door for so long. So you do have to ultimately win the battle of ideas to get a free speech culture, as Greg Lukianov would put it. Support for free speech as a cultural thing in order to underpin the legal and political framework. However, in the long run, we're all dead and in a way to kind of condemn everybody

to a woke inquisition within these institutions for the foreseeable future for at least a couple of generations or however long it's going to take for this generation to pass through the system and for the next one to a more sensible one. Although I think actually this generation is not as lost as that might sound.

They're actually much more varied and fractious. But still, I think you've got to play the long game on the ideas front, but you also have to play the short game, which is that most of the public are pro-free speech, and so you need to enlist them via the democratic process to penetrate these institutions and push them towards, essentially ensuring expressive and academic freedom and also to work on the viewpoint diversity front

where that is an issue as in, say, the BBC, for example, or as in academia. And I think you need to do both. You've got to fight the battle of ideas. I think the IDW is very important, but I also think what Rufo's doing on critical race theory is extremely important as well. It's just that Rufo is important for the here and now. IDW is very important for the longer term. Although I will say one thing, which is that government policy can shift cultural norms. You know, governments brought in anti-smoking and seatbelt regulations, which then shifted cultural norms around the acceptability of smoking and not wearing a seatbelt. And I think Cass Sunsteen makes this point in his book on conformity. So it's important to do both.

And I certainly don't think government activity weakens the energy behind the battle of ideas, as some people have asserted. I think you've got to go both routes. And Eric, don't you think the part of the problem as well is, well, let's call it old-fashioned backbone. We see institutions. We see head of institutions capitulating to mobs. The latest example is Batley Grammar School, where the head essentially acquiesce to the mob. And they demanded that this teacher be fired, all the rest of it, and he bowed down. Isn't that part of the problem as well? It is, but I'm leery of relying on sort of strong individuals. It's not a sustainable approach. People are going to be rational maximizers, they're going to take whatever decision is the path of least resistance.

I think what we need to do is build in policies and structures that can make it easier for such individuals to act in a different way. So, for example, if the conservative government is saying to Batley Grammar, you know, that was the wrong decision. I don't know quite where the autonomy lies here, but they might, if, for example, this was a violation of the academic freedom of the teacher, for example, then the regulator could simply go to the school and say, you know, you've got to

reverse that decision and they just have to do it. I mean, that would be an example of where if this was happening a lot, and of course you want to give as much institutional autonomy as possible, that is the ideal. But where this is then presenting an opportunity for flash mobs and activists to

push on these levers, and they're pushing in the administrative layer, that middle layer of institutions, then the government has to come in and more or less prescribe and say, no, you can't do that. You've got to reverse this decision. So that would be the model in this case where the government or the regulator would say, sorry, you've got to actually reverse that decision. Simple. Because these are the policies.

This is the way obligation A sits with regard to obligation B. And if obligation A is legally worded in a way that says you have a duty to, as opposed to some other legalistic wording, which suggests that the second obligatory, is like say to safety or something has a lower standing than the one trumps the other. It's all about specifying these things in law. I think the Free Speech Union has some good ideas here. You've actually got to get into the legal nitty-gritty and this is one of the

things about the whole culture war thing is you actually have to have a policy network that gets into the weeds, gets into the way laws are written and the way these things are traded off against each other, where the thresholds are. You have to get like with the BBC for example, and I agree with you, I don't agree with defunding the BBC, but what I would agree with is a more interventionist approach to, for example, a fairness doctrine where you would be able to look at content and look for balance and monitor that through, which we can do through things like

sentiment analysis. The other side needs the sort of anti-woke side has to get into these cultural weeds. They can't just say, oh, we're going to cut this, and we're going to cut that. I don't think we can cut our way out of this problem. It's a cultural issue, and you need to sort of engage it as a cultural issue. Well, you've hinted and teased that there may be a ray of hope when it comes to the new generation coming. Right. So break that down for us a bit.

Because the initial figures you gave us were really scary. Half of PhDs, pro-cancel culture, blah, blah, blah. But you've kept injecting little notes of optimism in there. So what's the breakdown with young people? What's their attitude? Well, I think it depends. I think in Britain we can see something slightly different from the U.S. although we see something that is similar in terms of the way opinion is shaking up,

but in Britain, for example, I would say, to put it crudely, 18-year-olds are a lot more sensible than 22-year-olds now. And if you look at, even politically, support for the Labor Party, for example, or Corbyn or whatever, peaks at around age 22, and then it drops considerably down to age 18. 18-year-olds are kind of similar to 40-year-olds in this country in terms of their political views. Really? Yeah, in many things, on many things, and certainly in political party support, left-right support.

So we're seeing something happening between age 22. Now, part of this could just be they didn't live through Brexit that didn't shape their consciousness. And I think that's sort of my leading hypothesis. But we don't know what is causing this shift to the right, if you like, amongst the very youngest. zoomers coming in in Britain. We don't see anything like that in the US, by the way, so I thought there was some evidence for it, but there actually isn't. Sorry, guys.

Sorry, yeah. The American is all, damn! But, you know, because we keep being told, and sort of anecdotally there's elements of truth to this, that certainly when it comes to comedy, which is our, well, former field. You could say before we removed ourselves from it, involuntarily. But the idea was that, like,

there's this new generation of people who, like, really one edgy comedy and all of that coming. And you're sort of, I mean, possibly hinting that that may be the case here in Britain. It is the case. I mean, I would say, and this was kind of something I was going to say at the end of the show, but I do think there's a very, an emerging, quite shocking gender divide on this. Oh, yeah. So I'm just not sure quite how to approach that.

But, I mean, it's not to get cancelled. Exactly. But, I mean, it's not to say that's the most thing. No, I know. But, you know, it's like 30 or 40 points gap in attitudes to kind of support for political correctness, some of the attitudes around cancel culture between the genders, particularly at the elite institutional level. Sorry, elite university level.

So how is that actually going to pan out? The fairer. The fairer text turns out to be less fair. Is that what you're saying, Eric? It looks that way, but who knows. I think people obviously get married and they, whatever. But I think... But can we just put it in sort of in plain terms?

Women are much more in favor, young women, of political correctness, cancel culture, etc. Is that? Yes, that's right. I mean, what I would say is that your young Zoomer males are not particularly politically correct. Now, again, this is not to say that gender is the only thing that matters. It clearly isn't. But it's part of what looks to be an emerging...

political split that's wider than it's been. And you see that in the U.S. and in Britain. Now, the one thing I would say, however, is in the 2019 academic freedom report, what we saw was that when we presented a paragraph that was, say, pro-academic freedom, people read that before answering a question like,

is free speech more important than emotional safety? You can actually get undergraduates to shift their opinions like 15 points when they read something about the history of the battle for free speech. But you can also shift them 15 points in the sort of emotional safety direction

when they read about historically marginalized groups. So that opinion is up for grabs in a way that the PhD student opinion is not and the academic opinion by and large is not. So any efforts need to be

focused on the sort of people before they become adult. I mean that is really where opinion is more malleable. So I still think there is a lot of that that opinion can be shifted. And of course, the free speech union wants the government to be teaching about free speech in schools.

I think that would be an excellent idea. Also, students, when they come to university, should receive just a standard mailing, informing them of their rights, their free speech rights being protected, why this is important. That should be standard issue as well. So I think we have to make the case

to younger people, because I don't think it figures in their thinking very much. I mean, one of the things on the fire survey, one of the questions was actually about allowing someone on campus who said all whites are racist. Now, that's a central tenet to critical race theory, which is interesting. But there, only 25% of students were in favor of allowing such a person on campus, which I thought was quite ironic given the emphasis on critical race theory. So there is a sort of knee-jerk kind of intolerance that is partly ideological,

but it's just partly because they haven't learned about the importance and the value and the struggle for things like the right to criticize the government in the 18th century in England. Even these sorts of things, the cultural revolution in China, none of those stories they know, whereas they know all about, you know, civil rights movement and the Nazis,

which is great, but they don't know anything about the things Orwell talks about or the battle for the right to criticize and publish against the government. None of that is part of their education from what I can tell. And that needs to change, I think. I love the fact you've been talking about cancel concert, and then it's right there.

Oh, yes. But on a depressing note, Eric, what will happen do you think? Very on brand for you. Yeah, it is. It's what I do. It's what I'm here to bring. What do you think will happen if we don't implement these changes into universities? Well, I think a lot of, essentially things will just continue moving in the direction they are, which is that every year, which with every crisis, whether it's the Everard, Sarah Everard, or whether it is the BLM or whatever,

you get a surge of activism. And more diversity training, more violence response teams, more decolonizing the curriculum, increasingly overt progressive messaging from the university. So each time you get one of these events, the ratchet gets turned up one notch, making things even more hostile for political minorities than it is now skewing the truth-seeking mission of the university

more and more away from what it should be. So, yeah, I just think things are going to get worse unless we do something. And it's worth saying that some of these changes have been in train for a long time. I mean, speech codes came in in the U.S. universities in the late 80s. So we're now talking about our fourth decade of these sorts of speech restrictions being in place. So this is not McCarthyism, something that's going to blow and then go away. It's not going away unless it's sort of something's done about it. Well, if you're watching at home,

make sure you send this in every other Trigonormit to interview to an 18-year-old female. This is how this gets solved. That sounds so creepy. Why? There's nothing creepy about it. We're just trying to change the world. We're trying to make the world a better place, one interview at a time. Eric, thank you so much for coming back.

It's great to have you. I think you're doing important work, and it's really good to get that information out there, and hopefully people in policy-making positions, pay attention as they have done in the past. So with that in mind, what is the one thing that we are still not talking about that we should be? Well, I touched upon it, and that is political discrimination. Should it be acceptable for people in society to be able to discriminate on people's politics,

whether it be for hiring, but not just for hiring and firing, but how about socially? One of the statistics that is remarkable in this fire survey is that only 7% of all female students in the fire survey who did not support Donald Trump, which is the vast majority, right? Sort of over 80%. Only 7% would date a Trump supporter. Now, the reverse is nowhere near, you know, other studies just suggest the reverse is not as bad as that.

But it does raise this question. So Rye Wing-Wingman will happily date a liberal? More so. More so. Yeah. Much more so. To me, that's surprising. Right, right, right. But there is this question about, you know, how acceptable should it be?

We know that we shouldn't be discriminating on the basis of race or on the base of religion, but political belief, which is, in a way, a cousin of religious belief, you know, is it acceptable to be discriminating socially, politically, on the basis of political belief? I don't think it is, and I think we need to begin to really start to go after that and say, it's one thing if someone is an absolute extremist, but just if they are belonging to this broad category, which may in fact be 50% of your population or, you know, Brexiteers, 52%. Actually, that's very pathological and is one of the key sources of friction in society. We need to start talking about that and perhaps addressing it in many ways.

Eric, when you said that, he was talking to... I thought you meant, like, would liberal men go out of a Trump supporting woman? And the question is, that would be following, is, how hot is she? Right. Yeah. Right. He's talking about women, so it's all very different. Well, it does work the other way around.

So a Trump, a sort of someone who opposes Trump, who's male, you know, when they're asked if they would go out with a Trump supporting female, it's maybe like 20% or 22%. It's bad. It's men. I'm sure. And he's only being polite. In reality, it's more like 80%. But, yeah, what Eric is saying is find someone you disagree politically and have sex with them. That is the recommendation of this interview.

Consensually. Obviously. Well, thanks for having that. Now that's creepy. Eric, it's good to have you back. And thank you so much for coming on the show. We look forward to seeing again. All the very best.

Where can people follow you to keep up to date with what you are doing and anything they should check out? Well, you can either follow me on Twitter, which is at EPK-A-U-F-M, or you can go to my website, www.w. dot SNPS, which is S-N-E-P-S dot net, and that sort of lists everything I'm doing. That's actually named sort of a corruption of the surname of a sort of hockey player from Vancouver where I grew up, Harold Snaps, who's sort of a hero of a lot of people, even though he was a plugger and he wasn't actually a big goal score.

So why was he a hero? He was just one of these sort of lunch bucket players who was sort of, you know, tough in games and everyone loved him and chanted his name. That's the story of Harold Snaps, really. Lunchbacker player. What does that mean? Well, it means sort of one of these guys who's not particularly flashy, but who is sort of one of these character players

who in the tough games kind of meets it out to the other players on the ice. That would be like Dennis Wise? Is that like a Dennis Wise? Is he just someone who like fighting, basically, Eric? Well, he's... Yeah, he likes to mix it up, but he's... He's not a complete goon, but he certainly

wouldn't be averse to dropping the gloves, yeah. That's... Sounds like the two of us. Anyway, Eric, thanks for coming back, and thank you for watching. we will see you very soon with another episode like this one or a live stream. All of them go out 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys.