Talking Out of School: Academic Freedom and Extramural Speech

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04/01/2019 Added

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The lecture “Talking Out of School: Academic Freedom and Extramural Speech” by Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Penn State. March 29, 2019. Union auditorium.

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[00:00:04.360]Welcome.
[00:00:05.899]I am thrilled to have you all here.
[00:00:08.560]And on behalf of the College of Arts and Sciences,
[00:00:11.700]we are so pleased that you could join us this afternoon
[00:00:14.950]to hear, what I am sure is going to be,
[00:00:18.290]an enlightening and informative talk
[00:00:20.690]on the topic of academic freedom and extramural speech.
[00:00:24.730]It is obviously a hot topic on campuses
[00:00:27.920]around the whole United States,
[00:00:29.840]and we're just thrilled today to have our guest speaker.
[00:00:33.640]I am Interim Dean Elizabeth Theiss-Morse,
[00:00:37.737]and I picked the lucky straw
[00:00:41.100]to be able to introduce our speaker for today.
[00:00:44.380]Dr. Michael (laughing).
[00:00:46.820]I was just talking to him about it...
[00:00:48.867]Michael is fine.
[00:00:49.700]No, no, no. (audience laughing)
[00:00:51.680]Michael Berube is the Edwin Erle Sparks
[00:00:56.060]Professor of Literature,
[00:00:57.750]and Chair of the University Faculty Senate
[00:01:00.140]at Pennsylvania State University.
[00:01:03.993]He is an accomplished scholar and public intellectual.
[00:01:06.698]He is the author of 10 books.
[00:01:08.560]10 books, that's a lot of books to write.
[00:01:10.590]He's the author of 10 books,
[00:01:12.340]including such works as,
[00:01:15.080]Life as We Know it: A Father, a Family,
[00:01:17.850]and an Exceptional Child,
[00:01:20.120]The Humanities, Higher Education,
[00:01:22.320]and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments,
[00:01:25.230]co-authored with Jennifer Ruth,
[00:01:27.560]The Left at War,
[00:01:29.550]and What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?
[00:01:32.370]Classroom Politics and Bias in Higher Education.
[00:01:37.590]He has written for Harper's Magazine,
[00:01:40.040]the New Yorker, the Nation, and the New York Times,
[00:01:43.230]and he has been a contributor
[00:01:45.460]to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
[00:01:48.187]In his spare time (chuckling),
[00:01:50.590]however much there is after all of that,
[00:01:53.220]in his spare time he is also a very active person
[00:01:59.860]in terms of service to higher education
[00:02:03.360]and service to his profession.
[00:02:05.430]He has been on such things
[00:02:08.040]as the American Association of University Professor's
[00:02:12.050]Committee A, on academic freedom and tenure.
[00:02:15.460]He has been on the International Advisory Board
[00:02:18.480]of the Consortium of Humanity Centers and Institutes,
[00:02:22.050]and he has been the President
[00:02:23.820]of the Modern Language Association.
[00:02:26.070]All of these are very, very highly renowned positions.
[00:02:30.550]So please help me welcome Dr. Berube to the stage.
[00:02:35.413](Elizabeth applauding) (audience applauding)
[00:02:41.728]Thank you so much.
[00:02:42.561]Thanks Beth.
[00:02:43.394]And thank you to, really, all of you,
[00:02:45.950]for coming out on a really crappy day.
[00:02:49.090]Especially to the students.
[00:02:50.510]I'm seeing a good number of students here,
[00:02:52.590]which is great.
[00:02:53.423]A lot of my lectures these days are to faculty,
[00:02:56.350]to my colleagues.
[00:02:57.650]And since these issues clearly also affect students,
[00:03:01.060]I'm really gratified that you took the time.
[00:03:03.970]Especially, honestly, on a really rainy, nasty, cold Friday,
[00:03:07.890]I would go see the movie Us,
[00:03:09.670]and I'm glad you came here instead.
[00:03:12.880]But you can still see it,
[00:03:13.870]I'm sure it's showing tonight.
[00:03:16.010]So, two words of introduction (clearing throat).
[00:03:19.450]One, is that I've put up
[00:03:21.810]the American Association of University Professors
[00:03:25.310]1940 statement on academic freedom and tenure.
[00:03:28.060]And I will have occasion to refer to it.
[00:03:33.647]It would help if I turned on a mic.
[00:03:36.530]I was a drummer.
[00:03:38.191]I do know how to do a sound check.
[00:03:41.420]So, is that better?
[00:03:42.649]Yeah.
[00:03:43.820]Thanks.
[00:03:45.825]I'll have occasion to refer to this throughout the talk.
[00:03:49.530]Mainly I'm focusing on thing three,
[00:03:52.080]speech as citizens.
[00:03:53.990]But I noticed,
[00:03:54.980]and I was telling people I should have done this weeks ago,
[00:03:57.640]and I'm doing it just now,
[00:03:59.210]I want to check your own bylaws, your own faculty handbook,
[00:04:04.580]and we'll get to this, I hope, in the Q&A,
[00:04:06.380]but you all gotta fix this.
[00:04:08.099]This is leaving some holes open
[00:04:09.900]that I think some day,
[00:04:11.870]somebody's gonna drive a truck through.
[00:04:13.950]That's one thing.
[00:04:15.850]So I hadn't prepared that part, this is all ad lib.
[00:04:18.490]The other is a little announcement I have to make,
[00:04:20.175]I think for the first time in my 30 years
[00:04:23.060]of being a professor.
[00:04:24.640]I don't know how many people in the room this pertains to,
[00:04:27.190]but I know that some people here received an email
[00:04:29.770]from a person calling him or herself Danic Carson,
[00:04:32.830]and accusing me of pretty serious racist and sexist
[00:04:36.170]and other bad things.
[00:04:38.020]The good news is that these charges are not true,
[00:04:39.990]the bad news is that someone is making them,
[00:04:42.041]and I do, in fact,
[00:04:44.303]I have known about this cyber stalker for about five years;
[00:04:47.550]this is the first time they have tried anything like this.
[00:04:50.840]Actually, looking up people at Nebraska,
[00:04:53.200]and targeting them with this email.
[00:04:55.060]Again, I don't know how widespread it was,
[00:04:56.500]or whether people forwarded it.
[00:04:58.610]Again, if you Google the name Danic Carson,
[00:05:00.530]you'll come up empty, it's not a name.
[00:05:02.550]And the email itself is a dummy address,
[00:05:05.810]so if you try to reply to it,
[00:05:07.471]it'll go into the ether.
[00:05:10.100]But weirdly enough,
[00:05:10.933]this is actually kind of relevant to the talk,
[00:05:14.300]because we are talking about extramural speech.
[00:05:16.700]How many people are even familiar with the term?
[00:05:20.620]Okay, not a subset of all the people in the room.
[00:05:23.540]Basically, whoops, let me go back to the AAUP.
[00:05:29.252]Ah!
[00:05:33.810]Okay.
[00:05:34.643]I'll quote this later,
[00:05:35.770]but it's the third thing.
[00:05:39.320]So, about the first two,
[00:05:41.220]I'm gonna say very, very little,
[00:05:42.480]because especially number one,
[00:05:44.880]is not terribly controversial.
[00:05:47.270]You very rarely find
[00:05:48.990]abrogations of academic freedom in publishing.
[00:05:53.340]I have an example,
[00:05:54.820]it happened about three, four years ago,
[00:05:57.080]where a journal,
[00:05:58.720]it wasn't even an academic journal,
[00:05:59.930]it was a quasi-academic journal,
[00:06:01.480]it was kind of a popular journal,
[00:06:02.590]it was more like a magazine,
[00:06:04.010]published by Northwestern University,
[00:06:09.759]it was a special issued called Bad Girls,
[00:06:10.940]and in it, a man who has since become paraplegic
[00:06:14.580]narrated the story of when he became ill,
[00:06:18.070]and became paraplegic.
[00:06:20.594]And in the course of this,
[00:06:21.970]a nurse performed oral sex to remind him
[00:06:26.500]that his sex life was not over.
[00:06:29.020]Northwestern insisted they pull the essay,
[00:06:32.340]because it was not consistent with the brand
[00:06:35.150]of Northwestern University's College of Medicine;
[00:06:38.720]unclear on the concept.
[00:06:40.120]Again, dicey subject, you know,
[00:06:42.140]you don't just throw that out in casual conversation,
[00:06:45.780]or in mixed company,
[00:06:46.840]but the idea that you could publish it in a magazine,
[00:06:49.650]and in fact, the person publishing it
[00:06:50.830]was the person to whom this happened.
[00:06:55.120]So the editor, Alice Dreger, resigned;
[00:06:57.830]good for her.
[00:06:58.870]You can Google her,
[00:07:01.419]she's whip-smart and a very, very interesting person.
[00:07:02.980]That's the only example I can think of,
[00:07:04.900]in an academic freedom issue
[00:07:08.530]involving research and publication.
[00:07:11.300]More difficult are the cases where, let's say,
[00:07:15.880]you get a grant from Monsanto to do a study,
[00:07:19.630]and the study you come up with
[00:07:22.490]does not please Monsanto in the least,
[00:07:24.730]and they want you not to publish it.
[00:07:26.280]That happens.
[00:07:28.740]And that's, the AAUP has a 300 page book
[00:07:33.040]on academic industry partnerships
[00:07:34.680]that covers this sort of thing.
[00:07:36.410]But it almost never happens in the humanities.
[00:07:38.560]Most of the cases, including your own here from last year,
[00:07:41.050]from Courtney Lawton,
[00:07:42.220]most of them tend to involve the humanities,
[00:07:45.580]sometimes my own home discipline, English,
[00:07:47.630]we lead with the chin.
[00:07:50.190]But also, think of the fields in Women's Studies,
[00:07:53.010]or Gender and Sexuality Studies, African-American Studies,
[00:07:55.680]Ethnic Studies, Middle Eastern Studies,
[00:07:57.590]these are flash points (fingers snapping)
[00:07:58.910]these days,
[00:08:00.475]and have been for quite some time.
[00:08:01.690]So I like to say, like I say,
[00:08:03.710]one is not terribly controversial.
[00:08:06.230]Now, not everybody believes in academic freedom,
[00:08:08.410]and not everyone, like in every State legislature,
[00:08:11.230]believes in it.
[00:08:12.520]I like to say that if you understand
[00:08:14.270]why academic freedom is important for things one and two,
[00:08:17.220]you probably own more than one NPR tote bag.
[00:08:20.483](audience laughing)
[00:08:21.484]Right?
[00:08:22.483]It's that constituency.
[00:08:23.316]It's like the ACLU folks, yeah.
[00:08:24.727]And I am actually a card-carrying member of the ACLU.
[00:08:28.710]Two is a little more tricky
[00:08:30.570]because you get into the situation
[00:08:32.850]where a professor might be so opinionated
[00:08:35.650]and so passionate about a thing
[00:08:37.320]that they seem like they brook no disagreement about,
[00:08:40.870]say, gay marriage, or about immigration,
[00:08:43.920]or about head scarves, whatever, right?
[00:08:47.840]And so, that's the principle of the AAUP,
[00:08:55.163]you have freedom in class from discussing your subject,
[00:08:58.021]but don't introduce controversial matter
[00:08:59.685]which has no relation to their subject.
[00:09:00.560]Then there's this other clause
[00:09:02.651]which is not relevant to Nebraska or to Penn State,
[00:09:04.020]or any secular institution,
[00:09:06.450]limits of academic freedom because of religious
[00:09:07.950]or other aims of the institution
[00:09:09.838]should be clearly stated in writing
[00:09:10.671]at the time of the appointment,
[00:09:11.580]which basically is our way of saying,
[00:09:13.407]"Yeah, Brigham Young gets to impose
[00:09:15.107]"whatever the Mormons want to impose on you."
[00:09:17.970]And this is a really tricky problem
[00:09:19.810]for any of you who might be pluralists.
[00:09:22.350]I hope there are some pluralists in the room.
[00:09:24.200]Because the pluralists always have to deal with,
[00:09:25.710]what do we do with the people who aren't pluralists,
[00:09:27.220]and kind of hate pluralists.
[00:09:29.560]They get a seat too.
[00:09:30.700]They get the anti-pluralist seat
[00:09:32.330]at the pluralist table,
[00:09:34.160]and that's the way the AAUP accommodates them.
[00:09:35.370]If you're a religious institution
[00:09:37.100]for whom obedience to either a sacred text
[00:09:41.300]or a sacred body of elders supersedes academic freedom,
[00:09:46.350]you get to do that.
[00:09:47.637]And one last thing about thing two,
[00:09:51.150]if I get this mouse to work,
[00:09:52.160]I'm gonna click on the footnote.
[00:09:55.290]Okay.
[00:09:57.120]I have been trying to get this
[00:09:58.930]into our own statement at Penn State,
[00:10:00.540]I'll show you what we have at Penn State,
[00:10:02.640]it's very, very, very good.
[00:10:04.660]I'm gonna suggest you just copy and paste it
[00:10:07.054]into your policies.
[00:10:09.550]Seriously, and I'll get to what the holes,
[00:10:11.594]and the truck you can drive through the holes through,
[00:10:14.070]I'll get to that too.
[00:10:16.037]But (sharply exhaling),
[00:10:19.560]up top.
[00:10:20.773]And look at these dates, 1970.
[00:10:23.430]What had just been going on?
[00:10:25.424]A nation actually, probably even more at war with itself
[00:10:28.810]than it is now, right?
[00:10:30.740]Campus riots everywhere.
[00:10:32.870]And so they went back,
[00:10:34.190]and revisited this and said,
[00:10:35.247]"Look, the intent of the statement
[00:10:36.457]"is not to discourage what is controversial."
[00:10:38.970]All right, introducing controversial material
[00:10:40.380]that has no relation to the classroom.
[00:10:42.440]Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry,
[00:10:44.420]which the entire statement is designed to foster.
[00:10:46.370]The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers
[00:10:48.480]to avoid persistently intruding material
[00:10:52.720]which has no relation to their subject.
[00:10:55.456]We don't have the word persistently in ours.
[00:10:58.520]And that means,
[00:11:00.060]that let's say on November 10, 2016
[00:11:04.000]I come into class and I just go WTF.
[00:11:07.430]As some people did, and students did to.
[00:11:09.580]Or, they were like, some students were like,
[00:11:11.580]yeah, MAGA.
[00:11:14.170]But it was actually an event.
[00:11:15.480]Or let's say you come into school after an earthquake,
[00:11:18.680]a tsunami, massive flooding throughout your State,
[00:11:21.220]and you're just like,
[00:11:22.437]"I'm gonna suspend things for a while,
[00:11:23.537]"we just gotta talk about climate change,"
[00:11:24.970]or whatever, right?
[00:11:27.520]This edit says, basically, you're allowed a one-off.
[00:11:30.630]You know, if there's a cataclysm of some kind.
[00:11:33.450]Especially, now, if you students are in bits,
[00:11:36.830]as the Irish say, and they want to talk about stuff,
[00:11:39.190]they can bring it up;
[00:11:40.630]they can bring up anything they want in a classroom.
[00:11:43.210]But this is the question of the professor intruding it.
[00:11:46.341]So we have, in our clause,
[00:11:48.710]that you can't introduce irrelevant material.
[00:11:51.750]And a lot of people had this question after the election.
[00:11:54.640]Was it okay for me to stop and do a class,
[00:11:57.440]or just a section, on whatever,
[00:11:59.973]any aspect of the election?
[00:12:02.430]And my answer is, yeah, it is.
[00:12:04.386]Don't keep doing it,
[00:12:06.200]unless your class is somehow related to the subject matter.
[00:12:09.570]So, you have to get back to calculus pretty quickly.
[00:12:13.530]But what does persistent mean?
[00:12:14.880]So when I brought this up to my own Provost,
[00:12:16.480]my own Chief Academic Officer,
[00:12:18.310]he was like, "Okay, define persistently."
[00:12:21.660]I said, "Sure, I'll take a stab.
[00:12:23.977]"Let's use the rule of Freud in folk tales.
[00:12:26.517]"Three is a pattern, all right?"
[00:12:30.180]He says, "Well why don't you write that in?"
[00:12:31.380]I said, "I'm not gonna write in 'three.'"
[00:12:33.460](audience chuckling)
[00:12:34.840]He was kind of goading me.
[00:12:36.620]But, I mean, it raises the question, right?
[00:12:38.050]What constitutes a persistent intrusion
[00:12:39.860]that really does derail the class altogether?
[00:12:42.140]So that's the one part of the second principle
[00:12:45.170]that is potentially problematic.
[00:12:52.553]I just can't.
[00:12:53.573]Let's see, I think we go back.
[00:12:55.710]And then we'll get to thing three,
[00:12:58.630]which is the subject of the talk.
[00:13:01.256](papers hitting table)
[00:13:02.260]Most of these things,
[00:13:04.159]if you've been to them before,
[00:13:05.695]usually run close to an hour.
[00:13:06.847]I know we have 'til 3:30.
[00:13:07.871]I deliberately kept this short,
[00:13:08.704]because I assumed there were going to be questions.
[00:13:11.071]So please think of them,
[00:13:13.500]or bring them already pre-formed,
[00:13:15.820]and I'll do my best to answer everything.
[00:13:18.130]So this is the written part.
[00:13:20.910]It will have escaped no one's notice
[00:13:23.170]that the vast majority of controversies
[00:13:24.930]over academic freedom and professorial speech
[00:13:27.700]over the past decade have involved extramural speech,
[00:13:30.640]rather than research or teaching.
[00:13:32.740]Doubtless this is because social media,
[00:13:35.060]now purveyed practically every aspect of human interaction,
[00:13:38.330]such that we are only belatedly beginning to realize
[00:13:40.540]that Facebook and Twitter are exceptionally useful devices
[00:13:43.340]for stirring up primal antagonisms
[00:13:45.030]and generating instantaneous mass festivals of outrage.
[00:13:48.770]And again, I wrote this
[00:13:49.603]before I knew of cyber stalker writing to Nebraska,
[00:13:53.780]but that's the way this happened;
[00:13:55.844]that's how five years ago
[00:13:57.172]people attacked my Wikipedia page,
[00:13:58.324]which I thought was the weirdest thing
[00:13:59.838]I'd ever seen (coughing).
[00:14:01.140]I can't even go into the mindset
[00:14:03.640]of people who want to deface a Wikipedia page,
[00:14:06.920]but it taught me a lot about Wikipedia.
[00:14:09.750]Moreover, recent years have seen
[00:14:12.220]renewed right-wing initiatives to harass and intimidate
[00:14:14.890]controversial left-leaning faculty members,
[00:14:17.110]usually with the object
[00:14:18.050]of pressuring university administrators to fire them.
[00:14:20.425]It is therefore urgently necessary
[00:14:22.910]to understand how the principles of academic freedom
[00:14:25.350]apply to extramural expression,
[00:14:27.600]not least to disentangle academic freedom
[00:14:30.610]from first amendment rights to freedom of expression
[00:14:32.760]in the United States.
[00:14:33.750]That's one of the things I mainly came to say,
[00:14:37.300]that I think a lot of the controversy
[00:14:39.810]about Courtney Lawton and all these similar cases
[00:14:43.100]tend to speak generally about freedom of speech.
[00:14:46.200]And I'm sure you must have had some forums
[00:14:47.870]and whatever debates about free speech;
[00:14:50.600]academic freedom's not the same thing.
[00:14:52.670]I'll get into that now.
[00:14:54.810]Because the relation between academic freedom
[00:14:56.950]and extramural speech is really not well understood,
[00:15:00.080]I'll start by trying to clear up some possible confusion.
[00:15:03.510]Last year in May 2018,
[00:15:05.360]the Chronicle of Higher Education
[00:15:06.660]published an essay by Judith Butler.
[00:15:09.280]Renowned scholar it the humanities,
[00:15:10.950]the author of Gender Trouble,
[00:15:12.070]really one of the most important intellectuals
[00:15:13.790]in the English speaking world,
[00:15:15.100]and her talk was called The Criminalization of Knowledge:
[00:15:17.750]Why the Struggle for Academic Freedom
[00:15:20.201]is the Struggle for Democracy.
[00:15:22.050]It is an eloquent essay,
[00:15:23.450]the original context,
[00:15:24.360]it was excepted from her keynote address
[00:15:25.920]at the 2018 Scholars at Risk Global Congress in Berlin,
[00:15:29.910]which was the ideal occasion for her argument.
[00:15:32.600]And its subtitle is exactly right,
[00:15:34.030]but it's also a very curious essay,
[00:15:36.880]because its passionate defense of academic freedom,
[00:15:39.380]and freedom of expression,
[00:15:41.050]runs directly counter to American traditions
[00:15:44.580]of academic freedom,
[00:15:45.810]as enunciated and elaborated by the AAUP.
[00:15:49.407]Now, Butler was not purporting to speak
[00:15:51.760]on behalf of the AAUP,
[00:15:53.120]so it's not like the misstated anything,
[00:15:54.930]and, in fact, that essay got published
[00:15:57.780]just as I was at my last meeting of Committee A
[00:16:01.080]on Academic Freedom and Tenure with the AAUP.
[00:16:03.250]I served on that body for nine years,
[00:16:05.090]and in fact, this talk is just saturated
[00:16:07.400]with my service on that committee.
[00:16:09.731]Not only that debate last June,
[00:16:13.060]but in the meeting before that,
[00:16:14.880]the previous November 2017,
[00:16:16.720]we just had a free-for-all for two hours
[00:16:18.390]about extramural speech,
[00:16:19.420]and you'll see why,
[00:16:20.460]the contours of it are, I hope, pretty interesting.
[00:16:24.960]And, in fact, one of the people around the table,
[00:16:28.142]I'm about to mention her, Joan Scott,
[00:16:31.810]said that I shouldn't reply to Butler's argument
[00:16:34.830]in the Chronicle of Higher Ed,
[00:16:36.110]because she wasn't speaking for the AAUP,
[00:16:37.730]she was just forwarding her own opinion of academic freedom.
[00:16:40.540]So I said, "Okay,"
[00:16:41.470]so I wrote this instead.
[00:16:44.610]Again, she wasn't misstating anything,
[00:16:46.190]she was offering her own interpretation
[00:16:48.140]of the relation between academic freedom
[00:16:50.244]and extramural professorial speech.
[00:16:51.950]Spoiler alert!
[00:16:52.783]Short version, there is no relation for Butler;
[00:16:55.740]two things are completely separate.
[00:16:57.560]Her defenses of both are robust and necessary,
[00:17:00.050]but her absolute distinction between the two is problematic,
[00:17:02.450]and I'm gonna try to show you.
[00:17:04.320]So she was drawing on the work of Joan Wallach Scott,
[00:17:07.170]who's book on this just came out, like, two months ago,
[00:17:10.350]and I'm the lead blurb on it,
[00:17:12.440]so I'm kind of implicated here,
[00:17:15.360]because I love Joan Scott's argument.
[00:17:18.030]So she's drawing on Scott's work,
[00:17:19.808]and Butler distinguishes academic freedom
[00:17:21.750]from freedom of expression,
[00:17:24.014]which is an entirely necessary move,
[00:17:25.200]made more urgent by recent debates over free speech.
[00:17:28.942]And by the reemergence of the white nationalist right,
[00:17:31.480]and it's campus acolytes.
[00:17:33.557]"Academic freedom," writes Butler,
[00:17:35.172]"belongs to faculty members within universities
[00:17:37.817]"who have been appointed for the purpose
[00:17:40.036]"of teaching and pursuing knowledge.
[00:17:41.157]"Political expression is the right of citizens
[00:17:43.027]"to expound on political viewpoints as they please."
[00:17:45.630]That's the distinction she's drawing.
[00:17:47.407]"They converge when academics who speak extramurally
[00:17:49.828]"suffer retaliation or punishment within the university,
[00:17:52.987]"or are threatened with the loss of their positions.
[00:17:55.487]"Thus, the rights of academic freedom
[00:17:57.107]"and extramural political expression
[00:17:59.397]"require institutional structures and support
[00:18:01.427]"within the university,
[00:18:02.817]"and they require an explicit and enduring commitment
[00:18:04.897]"from universities.
[00:18:06.187]"Indeed, the task of the university is undermined
[00:18:08.207]"when either of those freedoms is in peril."
[00:18:10.530]Okay, I have nothing to quibble with there.
[00:18:12.430]Like, every single letter is right.
[00:18:15.000]But later in the essay,
[00:18:15.910]the rigidity of this distinction becomes more troublesome,
[00:18:19.353]as Butler takes Scott's distinction and runs with it.
[00:18:22.787]"Academic freedom and freedom of expression
[00:18:24.237]"are not the same."
[00:18:25.623]Again, true.
[00:18:27.457]"The professional activities
[00:18:28.697]"pertaining to one's academic position
[00:18:30.468]"should be protected by academic freedom.
[00:18:33.017]"The extramural utterances any of us make
[00:18:35.127]"about the world we inhabit,
[00:18:36.827]"the institutions in which we work,
[00:18:38.537]"or any matter of public concern,
[00:18:40.157]"should be protected by rights of free expression."
[00:18:42.732]Okay, two different things, all right?
[00:18:46.360]So Butler derives from Scott's distinction
[00:18:48.610]between academic freedom and freedom of expression
[00:18:50.734]the conclusion that the former, academic freedom,
[00:18:53.670]pertains only to activities
[00:18:55.030]within the scope of one's academic position,
[00:18:57.580]and, presumably, to one's academic expertise.
[00:18:59.972]And that is a really thorny question that I'll return to,
[00:19:03.340]it's gonna be like the bulk of the talk.
[00:19:05.270]Whereas the latter, freedom of expression,
[00:19:07.410]should be protected by the State,
[00:19:09.480]by which I mean the government,
[00:19:10.740]as it is the US by the first amendment.
[00:19:13.160]Okay, now,
[00:19:15.000]this is a reasonable account of academic freedom,
[00:19:16.750]and it's one that would be recognizable in many countries,
[00:19:19.172]including, notably, the countries to which Butler
[00:19:21.560]is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly talking,
[00:19:23.840]as when she names in her talk, Turkey, Brazil, and Iran.
[00:19:28.448]Where, basically, both academic freedom
[00:19:31.440]and freedom of expression are deeply imperiled,
[00:19:34.790]countries that do not have form,
[00:19:36.540]strong protections, for freedom of expression.
[00:19:39.360]But her account is at odds with the American elaboration
[00:19:41.670]of academic freedom,
[00:19:42.980]which, since 1940, has included extramural speech,
[00:19:46.390]as an aspect of academic freedom specifically,
[00:19:49.300]quite apart from any first amendment considerations, right?
[00:19:52.950]So (clearing throat) it's,
[00:19:54.650]and so in some cases you would think,
[00:19:56.340]well what does it matter.
[00:19:57.610]In a case like Courtney Lawton's,
[00:19:59.070]does it matter whether she's protected by academic freedom,
[00:20:01.030]or by the first amendment,
[00:20:02.770]as long as any umbrella will do, right,
[00:20:06.710]is a thing for today.
[00:20:09.500]Well, it does actually matter.
[00:20:11.360]Stay with me on that.
[00:20:13.120]So here's the actual clause,
[00:20:15.450]now I get to number three. (hands clapping together)
[00:20:16.970]College and university teachers are citizens,
[00:20:18.840]members of a learned profession,
[00:20:20.530]and officers of a educational institution.
[00:20:22.840]When they speak or write as citizens,
[00:20:24.160]they should be free
[00:20:25.938]from institutional censorship or discipline,
[00:20:26.771]but their special position in the community
[00:20:28.660]imposes special obligations;
[00:20:30.010]hold onto that.
[00:20:31.350]As scholars and educational officers,
[00:20:32.890]they should remember
[00:20:34.407]that the public may judge their profession
[00:20:35.240]and their institution by their utterances.
[00:20:36.980]Hence, they should at all times be accurate,
[00:20:38.940]should exercise appropriate restraint,
[00:20:40.573]should show respect for the opinions of others,
[00:20:42.920]and should make every effort to indicate
[00:20:44.830]that they're not speaking for the institution.
[00:20:46.870]Okay.
[00:20:48.000]There's some problematic language in there,
[00:20:49.490]I'll return to it.
[00:20:50.830]But the general point is clear.
[00:20:52.190]Extramural speech is one of three aspects
[00:20:54.620]of academic freedom.
[00:20:56.270]The other two pertain to research and teaching,
[00:20:57.790]and I like to say,
[00:20:58.860]it's like the holy spirit in the Christian trinity,
[00:21:00.830]extramural speech is the most mysterious
[00:21:02.650]and the most illusive of the three.
[00:21:04.658]Now, one reason it is worth trying to clear up
[00:21:09.050]this potential confusion about extramural speech,
[00:21:11.830]is that the AAUP did and does lay claim to academic freedom
[00:21:16.250]for utterances that Butler would leave
[00:21:18.200]to protection from the State.
[00:21:20.220]Another reason is that the AAUP definition
[00:21:22.290]of academic freedom
[00:21:23.470]has profound implications for what it means
[00:21:26.730]when someone is or isn't speaking from a position
[00:21:29.710]of credentialed, intellectual expertise.
[00:21:33.040]And that's Scott's distinction, Joan Scott,
[00:21:35.940]between academic freedom and freedom of expression.
[00:21:37.700]It rests on the claim that the former,
[00:21:39.950]academic freedom, is tied to some form
[00:21:42.540]of credentialed, scholarly expertise.
[00:21:47.110]A PhD in something.
[00:21:49.800]A degree in something.
[00:21:51.250]Not just staying at Holiday Inn Express last night.
[00:21:54.250]In this, she is aligned with theorists such as Robert Post,
[00:21:57.020]who argues that academic freedom and tenure
[00:21:58.690]are based on a social contract,
[00:22:00.600]whereby the legitimation of free scholarly inquiry
[00:22:03.090]by specialists in a discipline
[00:22:04.670]ultimately serves the common good in an open society.
[00:22:08.426]And some of you might say,
[00:22:09.640]okay, well, sure,
[00:22:11.060]you want the researcher who's doing a thing on Monsanto
[00:22:14.050]to be able to speak freely about agribusiness, right?
[00:22:17.560]That's ultimately good in an open society.
[00:22:20.560]Why does it matter that the French medievalist
[00:22:22.780]have academic freedom and tenure?
[00:22:24.190]And the answer to it is, we don't know.
[00:22:26.050]We'll work it out.
[00:22:27.070]Eventually where knowledge goes,
[00:22:29.330]and how it goes,
[00:22:30.210]whether it's a person playing the trumpet,
[00:22:31.830]or a person studying Yvain, which is French medieval text,
[00:22:35.450]we just leave that to itself,
[00:22:37.160]and we hope and expect that the accumulation of knowledge,
[00:22:41.150]and the exchange of knowledge,
[00:22:42.890]will not only be good in itself,
[00:22:44.570]it will be part of a hallmark of civilization
[00:22:46.590]in the open society,
[00:22:47.630]but it actually will, ultimately,
[00:22:49.850]benefit society as a whole.
[00:22:52.906]Okay (coughing).
[00:22:54.700]Excuse me.
[00:22:55.533]Scott's reliance on the idea
[00:22:57.150]of interdisciplinary specialty and expertise
[00:22:59.390]is complex.
[00:23:01.000]Again, I hope some of you are already thinking,
[00:23:03.100]does this mean that Berube
[00:23:04.080]only gets to talk about literature?
[00:23:05.950]That's what my expertise is in, right?
[00:23:10.100]I got news for you,
[00:23:10.940]literature is also about a lot of other things.
[00:23:13.500]So if it were just about literature, yeah,
[00:23:16.000]but also in the course of learning about literature,
[00:23:18.420]I also had to learn a great deal about history,
[00:23:20.920]psychology, sociology, et cetera,
[00:23:23.065]wherever this literature leads me.
[00:23:26.480]But then also, well,
[00:23:28.510]I'll get to it in a moment.
[00:23:30.260]Scott takes a very generous approach
[00:23:32.090]to scholars who challenge disciplinary norms,
[00:23:34.740]and that's really key.
[00:23:36.120]So in this book she just published,
[00:23:37.730]she cites a 1986 Committee A statement,
[00:23:40.450]that suggests, quote,
[00:23:42.007]"In many instances,
[00:23:43.317]"a show of disrespect for a discipline
[00:23:45.637]"is at the very same time an expression of descent
[00:23:48.607]"from the prevailing doctrines of that discipline."
[00:23:51.770]Got me on that?
[00:23:53.622]In other words,
[00:23:54.855]you don't have to just follow what your discipline says.
[00:23:57.110]If you challenge it's parameters,
[00:23:58.934]that to might be valuable,
[00:24:02.600]it might change the shape of the discipline.
[00:24:04.250]And I have to say,
[00:24:06.030]Scott quoting this is a little bit coy.
[00:24:07.530]I think she wrote those words 30 years ago.
[00:24:10.060]She was on Committee A then.
[00:24:11.710]And those of you who don't know Joan Wallach Scott
[00:24:13.700]or her career,
[00:24:15.821]well, I'm about to allude to something.
[00:24:19.478](coughing) (clearing throat)
[00:24:22.410]Excuse me.
[00:24:23.410]I'll explain in a moment.
[00:24:25.557]"Too reverent a conception of disciplinary expertise,
[00:24:27.957]"according to this statement,
[00:24:29.467]"may end by barring those most likely
[00:24:31.887]"to have remade their field."
[00:24:33.620]Close quote.
[00:24:35.370]So the immediate context for this statement
[00:24:37.020]had to do with critical legal studies,
[00:24:38.840]which got a lot of shit at the time,
[00:24:40.170]I know that's a technical term.
[00:24:42.090]But it was a branch of legal studies that said,
[00:24:44.620]actually, law favors the powerful,
[00:24:46.360]it is inevitably tied to notions of white supremacy
[00:24:51.510]and racial and gender hierarchies,
[00:24:53.780]and a lot of legal scholars said this is nonsense,
[00:24:56.870]this is politics.
[00:24:59.410]30 years later,
[00:25:00.438]it's looking pretty good, actually.
[00:25:02.630]Those arguments are holding up pretty well.
[00:25:04.760]And, in fact, one of those arguments
[00:25:06.320]was articulated by a woman named Kimberle Crenshaw,
[00:25:08.590]who coined the term intersectionality,
[00:25:10.657]which now, basically, defines the world we live in.
[00:25:15.630]So, like I said, there's a lot to like about this statement.
[00:25:19.979](clearing throat)
[00:25:21.620]So it was about critical legal studies,
[00:25:23.734]but anyone familiar with Scott's career
[00:25:26.260]knows such a principle would resonate for someone
[00:25:28.470]who had to argue forcefully for many years
[00:25:31.200]against disciplinary norms in history,
[00:25:33.163]in which gender was not generally regarded
[00:25:35.740]as a useful category of historical analysis.
[00:25:40.040]Here's what I'm alluding to. (clearing throat)
[00:25:43.080]About 30 or so years ago,
[00:25:45.160]Joan Scott wrote an essay called,
[00:25:46.920]Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.
[00:25:49.450]And you would think, why?
[00:25:51.770]Why is that even necessary,
[00:25:52.900]of course gender is a part of history, right?
[00:25:55.680]It should go without saying.
[00:25:56.930]Well, I'm here to say I am old enough now to know,
[00:26:00.100]and to remember,
[00:26:01.280]a case at the University of Illinois,
[00:26:04.150]where the history department was considering hiring a woman,
[00:26:07.315]and some of the people in the history department
[00:26:09.950]didn't think her work was really history.
[00:26:12.410]Her work was on the history of abortion.
[00:26:14.920]I am not making this up, all right?
[00:26:18.030]And one of the people who was most skeptical of her
[00:26:22.300]was a guy who's history was on the history of dredging.
[00:26:25.430]Also important, especially if you're flooded.
[00:26:27.905]Certainly important to the history of Amsterdam,
[00:26:30.380]and to much of Europe,
[00:26:31.840]but c'mon man!
[00:26:33.210]Why is dredging okay history,
[00:26:34.980]and abortion is not?
[00:26:36.870]Now, the story ends mostly well.
[00:26:39.400]They did hire her at Illinois.
[00:26:41.110]You can look her up.
[00:26:41.943]Her name is Leslie Reagan.
[00:26:43.435]Her book was called When Abortion Was a Crime,
[00:26:45.800]and it won two awards.
[00:26:48.240]She barely got tenure.
[00:26:49.410]She still had to make that fight all the way through.
[00:26:51.960]Again, it ends well,
[00:26:52.950]but I do remember a day when the old boys,
[00:26:55.810]and they were old, and they were boys,
[00:26:58.317]had that litmus test.
[00:27:00.971]I don't know if this gender history
[00:27:01.804]is really history, right?
[00:27:04.390]So yeah,
[00:27:05.473]here's someone challenging a disciplinary norm,
[00:27:08.600]and saying, "No, the history of abortion
[00:27:09.977]"actually is a history."
[00:27:11.620]And if you have two narrow a conception
[00:27:14.070]of disciplinary expertise,
[00:27:15.280]she is not covered by academic freedom.
[00:27:17.360]Joan Scott helped to change that.
[00:27:19.460]So, you can see the relation between disciplinary expertise
[00:27:22.497]and academic freedom is therefore unstable.
[00:27:25.540]In my own life,
[00:27:26.610]I mentioned, okay, I do literature.
[00:27:28.796]I got my PhD in literature.
[00:27:29.927]You know what I do now, mostly?
[00:27:30.760]A thing called disability studies.
[00:27:32.710]If you do take a look at one of the books outside,
[00:27:35.900]the book Life As We Know It:
[00:27:37.060]A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child,
[00:27:38.800]that was published in 1996.
[00:27:40.710]I didn't know I was contributing
[00:27:41.930]to something called disability studies in the humanities,
[00:27:43.860]'cause it didn't kind of really exist yet,
[00:27:45.510]it was very, very new.
[00:27:47.950]And now, you can actually minor in it in some places,
[00:27:50.552]there are disability studies programs,
[00:27:53.180]and more and more people are understanding
[00:27:55.280]the history of disability, philosophy behind disability,
[00:27:57.987]social policy and disability,
[00:28:00.370]and this was not a field 30 years ago.
[00:28:01.890]Now, I don't have my degree in disability studies,
[00:28:04.130]'cause there wasn't a degree back then.
[00:28:06.270]Nevertheless, my area of expertise changed,
[00:28:08.390]and grew, and expanded, as I went on.
[00:28:11.710]And that, too, should be accommodated by academic freedom.
[00:28:15.790]In other words, if you tie it to disciplinary expertise,
[00:28:18.460]which you should,
[00:28:20.124]because a person is credentialed to be an expert in,
[00:28:21.860]say, climate change,
[00:28:23.490]and they get to speak with authority on their work.
[00:28:28.060]But that's not the only thing, right?
[00:28:29.850]If their work also takes them also, then,
[00:28:32.711]into other aspects of (coughing),
[00:28:34.950]environmental history,
[00:28:36.610]then that, too, is covered by academic freedom,
[00:28:39.660]and that too becomes an area of their expertise.
[00:28:42.720]But matters are rendered still more complex
[00:28:45.800]by the fact that the meaning of extramural speech
[00:28:48.760]and the AAUP's understanding
[00:28:51.350]of the relationship between extramural speech
[00:28:53.450]and disciplinary expertise
[00:28:55.030]has changed considerably over time.
[00:28:57.021]I'm gonna stop here for a moment,
[00:28:57.854]because now I got a couple balls, or chainsaws,
[00:28:59.670]juggling in the air at one time, all right?
[00:29:01.700]Freedom of speech is one thing,
[00:29:02.900]academic freedom is another.
[00:29:04.100]Academic freedom is different,
[00:29:05.080]because it's based on scholarly expertise,
[00:29:06.720]but as scholarly expertise can change over time as well,
[00:29:08.810]and they all have an interesting relation
[00:29:10.930]to extramural speech.
[00:29:14.670]To simplify the issue somewhat,
[00:29:15.900]over the years
[00:29:17.544]the AAUP has tended to de-emphasize the notion
[00:29:19.420]that a professor should exercise appropriate restraint
[00:29:23.600]and show respect for the opinions of others
[00:29:26.100]in his or her public remarks,
[00:29:28.110]on the grounds that those norms come dangerously close
[00:29:31.080]to upholding a standard of civility
[00:29:33.550]that the AAUP otherwise rejects
[00:29:35.500]as a precondition for academic freedom.
[00:29:38.130]So one of the complaints about that stuff
[00:29:39.910]is that, again, in 1940,
[00:29:41.070]this is very gentlemanly stuff;
[00:29:42.420]and I do mean that in the gendered sense.
[00:29:44.190]Like, well yes, of course,
[00:29:46.493]we should exercise appropriate restraint,
[00:29:48.320]and show our respect for the opinions of others,
[00:29:49.910]and some people come out and said, basically,
[00:29:52.125]eff that, right?
[00:29:54.450]I'm not showing respect for the opinions of racists.
[00:29:56.940]I'm not showing respect
[00:29:57.950]for the opinion of climate change deniers.
[00:29:59.700]I'm not showing respect for the claims of Holocaust deniers,
[00:30:03.610]genocide deniers;
[00:30:04.910]they can all just go take a jump.
[00:30:08.730]As for every effort to indicate
[00:30:10.070]they're not speaking for the institution,
[00:30:11.430]that too is tricky.
[00:30:13.608]Feel free to ask me more about that,
[00:30:15.530]but I'll leave it for now.
[00:30:17.510]Furthermore, as John Wilson argued
[00:30:19.500]in the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom,
[00:30:22.080]the 1960 Leo Cooke Case at the University of Illinois,
[00:30:25.150]represented a turning point
[00:30:26.400]in the AAUP's understanding of extramural speech.
[00:30:29.120]Now, when I wrote this,
[00:30:30.140]I wasn't sure whether anyone would have heard of this case,
[00:30:32.440]so I left a little note to myself,
[00:30:33.853]do a brief (speaking in foreign language).
[00:30:35.600]It's a good one.
[00:30:38.205]Leo Cooke was a scientist at the University of Illinois.
[00:30:42.080]He was on the tenure track.
[00:30:43.270]He was an assistant professor, but he was not tenured.
[00:30:46.020]One day,
[00:30:47.485]well, he became increasingly incensed at what he regarded
[00:30:51.440]as the hypocritical sexual morays of the day;
[00:30:53.610]again, 1960.
[00:30:55.310]And he was especially incensed
[00:30:58.322]by things like single sex dorms, curfews,
[00:31:00.500]and other restrictions
[00:31:01.710]on the free movement of undergraduates.
[00:31:03.510]Am I taking you back?
[00:31:05.576]I don't think this would be even remotely recognizable
[00:31:07.320]on any campus other than that of like Brigham Young,
[00:31:09.440]or Liberty, or what have you.
[00:31:11.390]And so he wrote, perhaps unwisely,
[00:31:14.960]a really long letter to the school paper,
[00:31:17.290]the Daily Illini.
[00:31:18.210]I mean, by really long, 2,500 words.
[00:31:21.170]It's like, 10 pages.
[00:31:23.370]Arguing, basically,
[00:31:24.600]for free love and sexual experimentation.
[00:31:28.540]I see a few people going hmm.
[00:31:30.330]You know, if he'd waited eight years,
[00:31:31.570]no one would have given a shit, right?
[00:31:33.965]But 1960, he was fired the next day.
[00:31:37.260]The next day.
[00:31:40.732]And the administration argued
[00:31:42.205]that his words carried extra weight,
[00:31:45.780]this is the expertise issue,
[00:31:47.453]because he was a scientist, all right.
[00:31:49.394]He was a scientist saying people come,
[00:31:51.320]they leave their parents' homes,
[00:31:52.370]they come to campus,
[00:31:53.680]they should experiment sexually.
[00:31:55.180]If a scientist says that, you know.
[00:31:56.710]And, in fact, he was a biologist on top of everything.
[00:32:00.210]Wait for it.
[00:32:01.981]You know what his specialty actually was?
[00:32:03.340]Moss. (audience laughing)
[00:32:05.770]You can't make this up.
[00:32:07.890]That story does not end well.
[00:32:08.850]He never got his position back,
[00:32:10.230]he never taught again.
[00:32:11.640]But, it precipitated this crisis, right?
[00:32:15.186]Why is this not protected speech?
[00:32:17.890]Regardless of whether, you know,
[00:32:19.430]he's talking about moss, or people doing it like mammals,
[00:32:21.640]you know, right?
[00:32:23.101]So, the AAUP went back and said,
[00:32:26.740]and this is now the really crucial statement,
[00:32:29.270]and this also applies to the Courtney Lawton case.
[00:32:31.880]So in 1964, the AAUP decided
[00:32:33.650]that a faculty member's expression of opinion as a citizen
[00:32:36.670]cannot constitute grounds for dismissal
[00:32:39.350]unless it clearly demonstrates
[00:32:40.980]the faculty member's unfitness to serve.
[00:32:43.602]All right.
[00:32:45.620]It has to be open and shut.
[00:32:47.330]The thing this person said
[00:32:48.920]means that they are obviously unfit to be a professor.
[00:32:53.290]And believing that late adolescence,
[00:32:55.357]and people in their early 20s should experiment sexually
[00:32:57.800]hardly counts as anything terribly demonstrative
[00:33:01.170]of someone's unfitness to serve.
[00:33:02.490]Again, you can question his judgment at the time,
[00:33:04.910]but not the actual argument.
[00:33:07.350]So this principle, in turn,
[00:33:08.730]was challenged by a former AAUP President, Cary Nelson,
[00:33:11.750]in the Steven Salaita case,
[00:33:13.110]which also, weirdly, involved the University of Illinois.
[00:33:15.270]And again, I'm not sure how many people remember this,
[00:33:17.570]but in 2014,
[00:33:20.060]Israel, let's just say, made an incursion into Gaza;
[00:33:23.230]it was ugly, there were deaths,
[00:33:25.050]there were (clearing throat),
[00:33:26.674]mistreatments of all kinds of Palestinians.
[00:33:29.970]Salaita is Palestinian.
[00:33:31.200]He's Palestinian-American,
[00:33:33.074]and he tweeted up a firestorm over that summer,
[00:33:35.630]just clearly in agony.
[00:33:36.810]I mean, he was furious and he was grieving,
[00:33:39.010]and he said some really regrettable things,
[00:33:41.330]like a bit about Benjamin Netanyahu
[00:33:44.060]appearing with the teeth of Palestinian children
[00:33:47.120]around his neck,
[00:33:48.636]which kind of evoked antisemitic blood libel
[00:33:52.240]kind of suggestions.
[00:33:53.390]And then the one really way-over tweet
[00:33:56.120]that a lot of people objected to.
[00:33:58.930]I'm going to have to use a bad work,
[00:34:00.230]'cause it was crucial to the tweet (clearing throat).
[00:34:02.300]You may remember that, at some point,
[00:34:04.400]one of the reasons for the incursion was that
[00:34:06.760]somebody had abducted three West Bank settlers,
[00:34:10.130]and killed them;
[00:34:10.963]they had gone missing.
[00:34:13.404]And Salaita's response to that was,
[00:34:16.692]"You may be too refined to say it, but I'm not."
[00:34:19.970]That was part of the tweet.
[00:34:20.857]"I wish all the West Bank settlers
[00:34:22.247]"would go fucking missing.
[00:34:23.957]"Would fucking go missing."
[00:34:26.860]And I found this really fascinating.
[00:34:28.950]First of all, again,
[00:34:30.520]it's deliberately offensive, right?
[00:34:33.020]And he acknowledges it.
[00:34:34.547]"You may be too refined to say it, but I'm not."
[00:34:36.306]It's almost as if he's invoking that standard, right,
[00:34:39.040]to show appropriate restraint.
[00:34:41.160]Like, you may show appropriate restraint, but I'm not gonna.
[00:34:43.140]I wish they would all go missing.
[00:34:45.050]And, you know, I might say my own opinion on the matter is,
[00:34:48.146]"I wish they were negotiated through State settlement."
[00:34:53.496]That's not gonna get me in too much trouble,
[00:34:54.580]but something like that would.
[00:34:56.290]So what happened to Salaita was a very strange thing,
[00:34:58.350]it's the only times this has happened
[00:34:59.710]in the history of American academia;
[00:35:01.020]he was de-hired.
[00:35:02.910]He had already moved to Champaign;
[00:35:04.500]he had moved his family,
[00:35:06.126]they had assigned him classes for the fall,
[00:35:07.704]and then they un-hired him.
[00:35:11.883]Yeah.
[00:35:12.730]And so it was Cary Nelson who teaches at Illinois,
[00:35:16.900]who was actually in favor of his de-hiring.
[00:35:19.990]There are people, including myself,
[00:35:22.310]Cary was one of my closest friends
[00:35:24.120]and associates in academia,
[00:35:25.590]and we haven't spoken in five years because of this.
[00:35:28.224]He argued that Salaita's tweets
[00:35:31.450]about Israel's incursion into Gaza
[00:35:34.080]did demonstrate his unfitness to serve,
[00:35:36.300]precisely because they were related to his area
[00:35:38.270]of scholarly expertise.
[00:35:40.230]See?
[00:35:41.250]He's a Palestinian-American,
[00:35:42.800]working on Israel/Palestine issues in the Middle East
[00:35:44.920]and so forth,
[00:35:45.753]he was hired to teach that stuff
[00:35:47.590]as well as Native American stuff about settler colonialism,
[00:35:51.040]therefore his tweets are not extramural speech;
[00:35:54.628]they are related to his scholarship.
[00:35:57.020]Okay.
[00:35:59.440]There's actually a little more
[00:36:00.273]to the Cary Nelson story and me,
[00:36:01.640]but that's tangential,
[00:36:02.680]but that was the real argument,
[00:36:04.340]but that's what the argument was about.
[00:36:06.640]Now, Nelson's essay on Salaita
[00:36:08.610]was published in the same issue
[00:36:09.920]of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom
[00:36:12.000]as Wilson's essay about Salaita and Leo Cooke.
[00:36:16.100]And Nelson's essay opens with this essay
[00:36:18.180]from Matthew Finken and Robert Post's book,
[00:36:19.945]For the Common Good: Principles of Academic Freedom.
[00:36:24.490]This is a quote.
[00:36:26.307]"The most theoretically problematic aspect
[00:36:28.047]"of academic freedom is extramural expression.
[00:36:30.687]"This dimension of academic freedom
[00:36:32.057]"does not concern communications
[00:36:33.517]"that are connected to faculty expertise,
[00:36:35.577]"for such expression is encompassed
[00:36:36.997]"within freedom of research,
[00:36:38.797]"a principle that includes both the freedom to inquire,
[00:36:40.827]"and the freedom to disseminate the results of inquiry.
[00:36:43.597]"Nor does extramural expression concern communications
[00:36:45.594]"made by faculty in their role as officers
[00:36:48.497]"of institutions of higher education.
[00:36:50.394]"Freedom of extramural expression refers instead
[00:36:52.967]"to speech made by a faculty in their capacity as citizens
[00:36:55.867]"speech that is typically about matters of public concern,
[00:36:58.127]"and that is unrelated to either scholarly expertise,
[00:37:01.577]"or institutional affiliation."
[00:37:03.322]So for Nelson, Salaita's comments,
[00:37:05.450]even though they were made on Twitter,
[00:37:06.950]did not really constitute extramural speech,
[00:37:09.700]and therefore had implications for his scholarly work,
[00:37:11.910]and his fitness to serve.
[00:37:13.670]Now, that's a different claim.
[00:37:15.110]Other people said that Salaita's tweets
[00:37:17.613]would have a chilling effect on Jewish students
[00:37:20.770]who might enroll in his classes.
[00:37:22.880]There was no evidence, when he moved from Virginia Tech,
[00:37:25.090]all of his evaluations at Virginia Tech were good;
[00:37:27.240]there was no record of him
[00:37:29.135]ever badgering a student in a class, right?
[00:37:30.810]So they couldn't say that.
[00:37:32.090]They couldn't say,
[00:37:33.743]"Well, he's been just demonstrated
[00:37:35.471]"to be unfit to serve in the past,
[00:37:36.304]"'cause the guy just goes off in the classroom
[00:37:37.647]"about Israel."
[00:37:39.162]Instead they made the claim
[00:37:42.127]that now that these tweets are public,
[00:37:42.960]Jewish students would feel a chilly environment
[00:37:45.220]in his classes.
[00:37:47.060]So Nelson's argument was different.
[00:37:48.630]Nelson's argument is that Salaita's tweets
[00:37:50.490]deserved less protection
[00:37:52.350]under principles of academic freedom,
[00:37:54.080]than, say, a series of tweets
[00:37:55.570]suggesting that the Apollo moon landings never happened,
[00:37:59.030]because that would concern a subject
[00:38:01.230]about which Salaita had also written and taught
[00:38:04.540]as a disciplinary expert, all right?
[00:38:06.870]Now, it just so happens that I edited that issue
[00:38:09.850]of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom (chuckling),
[00:38:12.198]and Nelson's and Wilson's essays both appeared.
[00:38:15.560]And in my introduction,
[00:38:17.090]I noted that although this debate about extramural speech
[00:38:19.700]was legitimate and necessary,
[00:38:20.960]there was something disturbing in Nelson's argument.
[00:38:23.860]I acknowledged
[00:38:25.391]that it was unquestionably a plausible argument, right,
[00:38:26.850]'cause Salaita was tweeting about Israel.
[00:38:29.757]"And yet," I said,
[00:38:31.366]"it has a nasty corollary,
[00:38:32.199]"as we have discovered in the wake
[00:38:34.349]"of Garcetti versus Ceballos."
[00:38:36.208]I'll explain in a moment.
[00:38:38.187]"In Pickering versus Board of Education, 1968,
[00:38:40.957]"and again in Connick versus Myers, 1983,
[00:38:43.787]"the US Supreme Court held
[00:38:45.318]"that if an employees public speech
[00:38:47.347]"were a matter of personal grievance
[00:38:48.857]"rather than public concern
[00:38:50.237]"related to his or her employment,
[00:38:51.817]"then that speech is protected by the first amendment."
[00:38:54.270]Stay with me on that, this is a crucial one.
[00:38:55.942]"The Pickering-Connick test therefore turns largely
[00:38:59.927]"on whether an employee is talking about matters
[00:39:02.851]"about which he or she is well informed, and paradoxically,
[00:39:06.136]"affords employees less protection from retaliation
[00:39:10.517]"for statements in their area of expertise
[00:39:12.624]"than for statements about matters unrelated to their work.
[00:39:16.487]"For this reason I call the Pickering-Connick test
[00:39:18.367]"a crank protection plan,
[00:39:20.417]"insofar as an employee who mouths off about matters
[00:39:22.967]"in which he has no credibility
[00:39:24.927]"is granted more of a hearing in the public square
[00:39:28.337]"than an employee who actually knows
[00:39:29.827]"what she is talking about.
[00:39:31.777]"That logic underlies the courts finding in Garcetti,
[00:39:33.897]"and it underlies Nelson's argument here."
[00:39:36.270]See where I'm going with this?
[00:39:37.520]If Salaita had only had the good sense
[00:39:39.080]to say that we never landed on the moon,
[00:39:41.275]he's good, right?
[00:39:42.980]But, he tweets about Israel,
[00:39:44.350]that's too related to his subject matter,
[00:39:46.620]and therefore he's not protected for that.
[00:39:49.020]So yeah, the potential applications of this are troubling.
[00:39:52.930]They establish an inverse relation between academic freedom
[00:39:55.970]and scholarly expertise,
[00:39:57.570]and redefine certain forms of extramural speech
[00:40:01.417]and intramural.
[00:40:04.780]That's not true of the first two, right?
[00:40:06.480]In the first two, the more expertise you have,
[00:40:08.280]the more academic freedom;
[00:40:09.690]it's based on that.
[00:40:10.780]The third one?
[00:40:12.320]The more expertise you have,
[00:40:13.520]the less protection you have.
[00:40:16.330]So, here's the argument in another form.
[00:40:19.906]It is arguably more damaging to one's intellectual
[00:40:22.650]and professional legitimacy
[00:40:24.190]for a historian to deny the Holocaust,
[00:40:26.820]than for a professor of electrical engineering to do so.
[00:40:29.910]And there I'm referring to Arthur Butz
[00:40:31.400]of Northwestern University,
[00:40:32.690]who is a professor of electrical engineering,
[00:40:34.790]emeritus now, I think he's in his mid-70s,
[00:40:36.205]and who totally denies the Holocaust.
[00:40:39.170]Because one expects
[00:40:40.280]that the disciplinary protocols of history departments
[00:40:42.454]would militate far more strenuously against Holocaust denial
[00:40:45.912]than the disciplinary protocols of electrical engineering.
[00:40:50.610]I mean, if you're denying the Holocaust,
[00:40:51.810]that would seem to be
[00:40:53.717](speaking in foreign language) evidence
[00:40:55.000]that you are unfit to be a professional historian.
[00:40:56.850]So by that token,
[00:40:57.850]a series of tweets from Salaita about moon landings
[00:41:00.190]wouldn't be taken as evidence of professional unfitness,
[00:41:02.670]it would merely be evidence
[00:41:03.650]that Salaita subscribed to a belief
[00:41:05.260]associated with a fringe of conspiracy theorists.
[00:41:08.020]And yet, the form of his statements
[00:41:10.250]was undeniably extramural,
[00:41:11.540]because the statements were tweets,
[00:41:13.360]and there are really chilling consequences
[00:41:15.130]to the argument that the more informed
[00:41:16.810]a professor's tweets may be,
[00:41:18.440]the more they involve an area
[00:41:20.020]of his or her scholarly expertise,
[00:41:22.240]the less protection they deserve
[00:41:23.810]as a matter of academic freedom.
[00:41:26.410]Okay, that's mostly what I came to say,
[00:41:27.980]but I have a little bit more.
[00:41:30.310]The relation between scholarly expertise
[00:41:31.900]and extramural speech
[00:41:32.733]was also an issue in a less celebrated
[00:41:34.270]but equally challenging example
[00:41:35.670]from the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
[00:41:37.581]where in 2017 the Assistant Professor, Damon Sajnani,
[00:41:40.930]offered a course called The Problem of Whiteness,
[00:41:43.810]drawing the ire of Republican State legislators,
[00:41:46.850]who demanded his firing.
[00:41:48.890]The course should never have been controversial,
[00:41:51.310]and would not have been,
[00:41:52.350]if not for the fact that the phrase,
[00:41:53.860]the problem of whiteness,
[00:41:55.250]is a problem for some very fragile white people.
[00:41:59.165]Sajnani's webpage for the course.
[00:42:00.480]Actually, I should call that up, if you give me a moment.
[00:42:02.093]Oh, I can't even see this.
[00:42:04.660]I should have had this up.
[00:42:05.800]It's more (keyboard clicking)
[00:42:12.630]demonstrative that way.
[00:42:26.584]♪ Do do do ♪
[00:42:27.417]And there it goes!
[00:42:30.020]Okay, so now the course actually has coverage of the course.
[00:42:34.710]Sort of a, one of the good things
[00:42:36.802]that comes from being the object of a right-wing swarming.
[00:42:42.530]But, here's what I want.
[00:42:45.440]When I first heard of this case.
[00:42:47.720]And, in fact, it had to so with something called
[00:42:50.050]the Academic Leadership Program,
[00:42:51.210]which is actually a Big 10 consortium,
[00:42:55.180]that's trying to diversify upper-level administration;
[00:42:57.960]the higher up you go in the administration in academia,
[00:43:00.010]as in the corporate world,
[00:43:01.762]the whiter and maler it tends to get.
[00:43:03.690]And one of the questions we dealt with was,
[00:43:05.493]what do you do about this case?
[00:43:07.440]Right, this had just happened at Wisconsin.
[00:43:09.800]And there were some people in the room saying,
[00:43:11.967]"Well, maybe he should have cleared the name of the course
[00:43:14.517]"with his Dean."
[00:43:15.970]And I'm like, "No, no!
[00:43:17.897]"Can I just push back on that?
[00:43:19.938]"There is no problem with the title of this course.
[00:43:22.577]"It is a reference to Du Bois' line,
[00:43:24.797]"from The Souls of Black Folk,
[00:43:26.737]"How Does it Feel to be a Problem."
[00:43:28.390]It is also a reference to Richard Wright.
[00:43:30.130]There is no negro problem in the United States,
[00:43:32.160]there is only a white problem.
[00:43:33.100]Now, I think Sajnani added these things later,
[00:43:35.554]but it doesn't matter, they already existed.
[00:43:37.880]We're talking about a century of black critical thought,
[00:43:41.240]that basically says
[00:43:42.954]there's no such thing as a negro problem.
[00:43:44.100]I don't think there are probably too many people in the room
[00:43:46.260]old enough to remember when that was the going term,
[00:43:48.570]the negro problem in the US.
[00:43:50.030]And they're saying, basically no,
[00:43:50.960]there is no negro problem,
[00:43:52.260]there's a white supremacy problem is what it is.
[00:43:54.710]Totally legitimate, right?
[00:43:56.160]And anyone, I said,
[00:43:57.912]the problem of whiteness is not a problem,
[00:44:00.130]the people who think the problem of whiteness is a problem,
[00:44:02.460]they're the problem.
[00:44:03.840]So, the University defended the course,
[00:44:07.500]as well it should have (coughing).
[00:44:11.390]And one could argue,
[00:44:12.223]as did one intrepid white student,
[00:44:14.110]writing for the student paper,
[00:44:15.868]the Badger Herald,
[00:44:16.870]that the backlash against the course
[00:44:17.703]demonstrated nicely why the course was necessary.
[00:44:21.500](audience tittering)
[00:44:23.270]But there was a complicating factor.
[00:44:24.380]The Wisconsin State Representative, Dave Murphy,
[00:44:25.300]who led the campaign against Sajnani,
[00:44:27.340]cited a pair of Sajnani's tweets.
[00:44:29.470]It's always tweets, right?
[00:44:31.720]That's another thing I came to say.
[00:44:32.810]Just don't. (audience laughing)
[00:44:35.290]I do have a Twitter account, but yeah.
[00:44:41.440]These were a couple of tweets from July 2016,
[00:44:43.720]when five Dallas police officers were killed by a sniper.
[00:44:47.093]One of his tweets consisted of a photo of CNNs coverage
[00:44:51.160]of the shootings,
[00:44:52.806]accompanied by the remark,
[00:44:53.639]is the uprising finally starting?
[00:44:55.020]Is this style of protest gonna go viral?
[00:44:58.340]The other read, watching CNN,
[00:44:59.960]this is the song I am currently enjoying in my head,
[00:45:03.040]and linked to the song Officer Down
[00:45:04.810]by UNO The Prophet.
[00:45:07.670]Now, is he cheering it on?
[00:45:10.901]Arguably, right?
[00:45:14.510]But it could be remarked.
[00:45:15.610]I just said, this is a century of black critical thought
[00:45:17.650]about the so-called negro problem,
[00:45:19.530]there is also a long history in popular culture
[00:45:22.390]of black critical thought
[00:45:23.520]on protests against police brutality,
[00:45:25.820]from Ice-T's Cop Killer and NWA's Fuck the Police,
[00:45:28.520]all the way back to this revolutionary West Indian figure
[00:45:30.720]who admitted that he shot the sheriff,
[00:45:33.030]although in self defense,
[00:45:34.710]and did not, in fact, shoot the deputy.
[00:45:37.034](audience laughing)
[00:45:37.867]And yet, there is,
[00:45:38.850]I know, seriously, this is a thing.
[00:45:41.230]You can't go into black popular culture
[00:45:43.180]and not know that there's a tradition of this, right?
[00:45:46.630]And yet there's something arguably discomforting
[00:45:48.300]about the spectacle of a college professor
[00:45:51.840]apparently cheering on the murder of police officers.
[00:45:53.320]Now, all the more so,
[00:45:54.870]when the statements he makes have a non-trivial relation
[00:45:57.190]to his work as a scholar and a teacher.
[00:45:59.120]So again, the course is not a problem.
[00:46:02.557]The people who tried to make it a problem were the problem.
[00:46:04.770]But the tweets are problematic,
[00:46:06.970]and they might deserve, say,
[00:46:08.500]a formal reprimand by administration,
[00:46:10.760]though certainly not firing or suspension.
[00:46:13.010]This is, again, one of those one-offs,
[00:46:14.180]just don't do this again, right?
[00:46:16.930]And this also, I mean,
[00:46:18.717]I could say something.
[00:46:20.330]Feel free to ask me about Twitter,
[00:46:21.360]that's a whole thing unto itself.
[00:46:22.640]But it sometimes happens that people behave on Twitter
[00:46:25.090]as if they're just talking to a friend or two,
[00:46:26.830]you know, across the table,
[00:46:27.810]and actually, it's the Internet,
[00:46:33.222]it's a big place.
[00:46:35.470]So I wanna call attention to a different kind of murky case
[00:46:37.740]where extramural speech is construed as intramural.
[00:46:41.400]One of them, you might have heard of,
[00:46:42.380]it involves a graduate student named Courtney Lawton.
[00:46:44.970]Now, I'm sure there are people in the room
[00:46:46.950]far more familiar with the grainy details of that case,
[00:46:49.580]and week-by-week how it unfolded,
[00:46:51.670]more familiar than I am.
[00:46:52.900]Happy to talk about it in the Q&A if you'd like.
[00:46:54.557]All I'm gonna remark on for now,
[00:46:57.390]is the fact that really struck me as it was unfolding,
[00:46:59.740]in that firestorm, everything proceeded,
[00:47:02.368]and this was largely, though not entirely,
[00:47:05.990]the doing of three Republican State Senators
[00:47:07.980]who made the incident their cause to live
[00:47:09.530]for the remainder of the academic year.
[00:47:11.560]Everything proceeded as if Ms. Lawton's behavior
[00:47:14.040]was dispositive evidence of how she,
[00:47:16.937]and maybe other instructors who shared her beliefs,
[00:47:19.530]treat conservative students in their classes.
[00:47:22.000]Right?
[00:47:23.336]Am I wrong about that?
[00:47:24.169]There's a lot of that.
[00:47:25.230]As if this was how students were treated in class.
[00:47:28.680]Or as if Katie Mullen was Lawton's student
[00:47:31.350]in some general sense,
[00:47:32.610]insofar as Ms. Mullen was an undergraduate, right here,
[00:47:34.837]even though the incident had nothing to do
[00:47:37.090]with in classroom behavior.
[00:47:38.980]Indeed, Lawton declared that she had undertaken her protest
[00:47:41.590]in the belief that Mullen was not a student,
[00:47:43.140]she was,
[00:47:44.070]and Turning Point USA
[00:47:45.230]was not a registered student organization,
[00:47:46.950]it was not.
[00:47:48.320]Nevertheless, as you well know,
[00:47:49.747]the University spent much of the ensuring year,
[00:47:52.530]and still now,
[00:47:53.500]defending itself against charges
[00:47:55.160]that the campus was not a welcoming place
[00:47:56.880]for conservative students.
[00:47:58.880]Perhaps some commentators operated in bad faith,
[00:48:01.280]treating Lawton's exchange with Mullen
[00:48:03.110]as if it occurred in the classroom,
[00:48:04.670]even though they knew otherwise.
[00:48:06.370]But for the most part the drama unfolded the way it did
[00:48:08.440]because many people on campus and off
[00:48:10.592]are unsure about what policies and expectations
[00:48:14.520]are relevant to a situation
[00:48:15.904]in which a graduate student or a professor,
[00:48:18.250]although Lawton's status as a graduate student
[00:48:20.750]made things more complicated,
[00:48:22.440]interaction with a student who is not her student.
[00:48:25.950]There's only one other case like that in recent history.
[00:48:28.793]It's the case of John McAdams at Marquette,
[00:48:31.250]and I want to do a compare and contrast here, all right?
[00:48:33.120]McAdams was disciplined by his university,
[00:48:34.770]and effectively fired,
[00:48:36.050]after two semesters of suspension without pay,
[00:48:38.560]for having criticized a graduate student by name
[00:48:40.760]on his personal blog.
[00:48:42.630]Professor McAdams made the comment in 2014
[00:48:44.870]in reference to a graduate teaching instructor
[00:48:46.610]in philosophy, Cheryl Abbate,
[00:48:49.020]who had refused to allow one of her students
[00:48:50.860]to debate gay rights in class.
[00:48:52.230]Again, this goes back to that question, right?
[00:48:53.710]If you feel passionately about gay rights,
[00:48:55.592]can you quash a discussion about it?
[00:48:58.420]So for those of you not familiar with the case,
[00:48:59.880]I'm just gonna read a chunk from the AAUP's summary.
[00:49:02.354]I was gonna summarize it myself,
[00:49:04.070]I'm like, no, this is better.
[00:49:06.760]This is from the AAUP's report, Century Marquette.
[00:49:10.320]The blog post was picked up by the national media,
[00:49:12.440]and Miss Abbute received numerous harassing
[00:49:14.670]and offensive emails and other communications.
[00:49:17.000]On December 16, 2014,
[00:49:18.760]Dr. McAdams was suspended with pay and banned from campus.
[00:49:21.720]And, again, that I can see.
[00:49:23.410]I mean, this basically invited a mobbing
[00:49:25.450]of a female graduate student.
[00:49:27.620]On January 30, 2015, Marquette formally notified Dr. McAdams
[00:49:31.150]that it was commencing the process to revoke his tenure
[00:49:33.060]and terminate his employment.
[00:49:34.970]Per Marquette's faculty statutes,
[00:49:36.470]the matter was referred to a faculty hearing committee, FHC.
[00:49:39.005]The FHC concluded that the suspension of Dr. McAdams,
[00:49:42.190]pending the outcome of this proceeding,
[00:49:44.000]imposed by the university with no faculty review,
[00:49:46.420]and in the absence of any viable threat
[00:49:48.250]posed by the continuation of his job duties,
[00:49:50.380]was an abuse of the university's discretion,
[00:49:52.090]granted under the faculty statues.
[00:49:54.100]The FHC further concluded that it was not sufficient cause
[00:49:56.680]for Marquette to terminate Dr. McAdams,
[00:49:58.680]but that he could be suspended
[00:50:01.149]for up to two semesters without pay.
[00:50:02.830]On March 24 of that year, again 2016,
[00:50:04.800]President Michael Lovell advised Dr. McAdams
[00:50:06.880]that he was to be suspended without pay for two semesters
[00:50:09.670]as the FHC had recommended,
[00:50:11.160]but then the President went beyond that recommendation
[00:50:13.032]and demanded that as a condition of his reinstatement
[00:50:16.500]to the faculty,
[00:50:18.172]Dr. McAdams provide him and Mrs. Abbate
[00:50:20.210]with a written statement expressing deep regret,
[00:50:22.397]and admitting that his blog post was reckless
[00:50:25.618]and incompatible with the mission and values
[00:50:27.010]of Marquette University.
[00:50:28.774]I mean, basically they asked him to write an apology letter
[00:50:30.390]that they were gonna write for him, right?
[00:50:32.640]And then a couple of weeks later,
[00:50:34.630]McAdams advised President Lovell
[00:50:36.240]that he would do no such thing;
[00:50:37.400]he would not say what he did not believe to be true,
[00:50:39.430]and that Lovell was exceeding his authority
[00:50:41.310]under the faculty statutes,
[00:50:43.218]by demanding that he do so.
[00:50:44.130]So he was not reinstated after the end of two years,
[00:50:46.640]therefore effectively fired.
[00:50:48.010]Now, that story (hands clapping together)
[00:50:48.843]does end well.
[00:50:50.557]McAdams took his case to the Wisconsin Supreme Court,
[00:50:51.710]and just last summer he won.
[00:50:52.989]And the Court cited AAUP principles.
[00:50:55.460]Yay, whenever that happens,
[00:50:56.470]an angel gets its wings. (audience laughing)
[00:50:57.900]And the AAUP's amicus brief on McAdams' behalf,
[00:51:00.729]ruling that the blog post constituted extramural speech
[00:51:04.500]that did not provide any evidence of his unfitness to teach.
[00:51:07.610]Again, it was, you know, like a nasty thing to do, right?
[00:51:10.280]But not a firing offense.
[00:51:12.440]So the contrast for me with the Lawton case is striking,
[00:51:14.620]because no one apparently operated under the misapprehension
[00:51:17.050]that McAdams had mistreated his own student.
[00:51:19.450]And the court explicitly ruled
[00:51:21.180]that his blog post constituted an extramural comment.
[00:51:24.380]But still, you know, it was an extramural comment
[00:51:26.640]in a gray area,
[00:51:27.663]insofar as it involved a student at his own institution,
[00:51:30.152]rather than a stray speculation about moon landings.
[00:51:34.270]So, in closing, how are we doing?
[00:51:37.597]I don't have any handy advice for my colleagues.
[00:51:39.910]Well, I wrote that I didn't,
[00:51:41.340]then I pulled up your statutes,
[00:51:42.750]and yes I do.
[00:51:44.464]You gotta fix this.
[00:51:45.520]There is no telling what will become the occasion
[00:51:47.860]for tomorrow's outrage fest.
[00:51:49.222]Even the most innocuous utterance in which one points out,
[00:51:52.870]for example,
[00:51:54.322]that the ancient Greeks painted their statues,
[00:51:55.810]can bring the fury of the mob,
[00:51:57.460]harassment, and death threats.
[00:52:00.020]That was Sarah Bond at the University of Iowa,
[00:52:02.160]and I brought this to the attention of my own administration
[00:52:04.434]because, as I was telling some people at dinner last night,
[00:52:07.980]Iowa responded by putting out this really admirable booklet
[00:52:11.010]called Faculty Support and Safety Guidance.
[00:52:13.590]It is basically 14 pages on what to do
[00:52:15.550]when the trolls come for one of your professors, okay?
[00:52:18.740]And it is not,
[00:52:20.413]it wasn't written by risk management,
[00:52:22.710]which means it wasn't how to throw your faculty member
[00:52:24.710]under the bus,
[00:52:25.890]it was how to protect them, and how to defend them.
[00:52:28.950]Oh, by the way, news flash:
[00:52:30.546]the Greeks painted their statues.
[00:52:32.020]All right, just get over it. (audience laughing)
[00:52:34.670]And why.
[00:52:35.870]I mean, first of all, I used to joke,
[00:52:37.360]well, who knew that the Nazis really cared about art?
[00:52:41.410]But they do.
[00:52:43.350]And in fact, there's a lot of iceberg under this water.
[00:52:45.580]It reminded me that one of the really interesting findings
[00:52:49.740]of Martin Bernal's 1989 book, I think, Black Athena,
[00:52:55.530]that raised, oh boy,
[00:52:57.180]that was a thing back in the day,
[00:52:59.173]that was one of the major items in the PC wars.
[00:53:01.480]Black Athena.
[00:53:02.490]Are you telling me the Greeks were black?
[00:53:05.140]No!
[00:53:06.424]He's telling you that the Greek civilization
[00:53:07.930]drew a lot on Egyptian civilization,
[00:53:10.120]is what he's telling you,
[00:53:11.865]and other Mediterranean,
[00:53:13.357]eastern Mediterranean, civilizations.
[00:53:15.023]And that's kind of indisputable.
[00:53:16.239]It's almost like the painting statues bit,
[00:53:17.072]except that there was an entire branch
[00:53:18.840]of 19th century German historiography
[00:53:21.390]devoted to purging that connection,
[00:53:23.800]and showing fallaciously the Greeks had no relation
[00:53:26.795]to these darker peoples, to their east and south.
[00:53:30.230]So there's a long history there too.
[00:53:32.060]And what I say to my administration is,
[00:53:33.760]you think it's gonna be
[00:53:34.870]Women's Gender and Sexuality Department that's gonna get,
[00:53:37.020]or Middle Eastern Studies,
[00:53:38.260]it could be Classics;
[00:53:39.700]who knew, right?
[00:53:41.440]Person says, "Oh yeah, Greeks, painted their statutes,"
[00:53:43.077]and the next thing you know,
[00:53:45.012]you are surrounded by Breitbart and, you know,
[00:53:46.150]and the lost boys.
[00:53:49.330]It is usually customary, and I'll do it now,
[00:53:51.400]to remind professors that when they speak extramurally,
[00:53:53.524]especially on social media,
[00:53:56.270]they should try to make it clear
[00:53:57.220]that they're not speaking for their institution.
[00:53:58.860]Now this is particularly a challenge on Twitter,
[00:54:01.100]so I am gonna say this,
[00:54:02.490]where one cannot plausibly preface every damn tweet
[00:54:05.770]with a disclaimer that one is not speaking
[00:54:07.520]for one's institution.
[00:54:08.940]I do have a Twitter account.
[00:54:09.930]I use it, maybe once every sun spot cycle.
[00:54:12.590]And it contains, on the sidebar, the notice:
[00:54:15.490]Opinions here are mine alone.
[00:54:17.470]Mine, I say.
[00:54:19.720]And yet, as many of you now know,
[00:54:21.150]in the course of my journeys online,
[00:54:22.570]I have managed to pick up a few stalkers of my own.
[00:54:25.320]It literally can happen to anyone.
[00:54:26.960]And analog, in online, and as in analog space,
[00:54:30.010]the climate for women and racial and sexual minorities
[00:54:32.270]can be dangerously toxic.
[00:54:34.080]Now, in these cases,
[00:54:35.500]I'm sure we'll see many more of them in coming years,
[00:54:37.930]I don't think we're actually seeing a full-blown crisis
[00:54:40.130]for academic freedom;
[00:54:41.150]I'm not alarmist about that.
[00:54:43.160]But I do think the real crisis (chuckling) is,
[00:54:45.160]or broader and national crisis,
[00:54:46.980]and, of course, it's not just us anymore,
[00:54:48.600]it's also Brazil, Poland, Turkey.
[00:54:51.011]The crisis precipitated by the ascendancy of a fascist,
[00:54:54.370]and white supremacist, to the highest office in the land,
[00:54:56.600]and the erosion of the fragile norms of democracy.
[00:55:00.119]Bu I do believe we need to realize
[00:55:01.670]that the foundations for academic freedom,
[00:55:03.660]with regard to extramural speech,
[00:55:05.150]and the very definition of extramural speech itself,
[00:55:07.630]are shifting beneath our feet.
[00:55:09.960]That they are doing so
[00:55:10.793]in the midst of this crisis of liberal democracy
[00:55:12.520]is all the more reason for faculty and students
[00:55:14.560]to immerse themselves in the intellectual legacy of debates
[00:55:17.210]over the parameters of academic freedom,
[00:55:19.260]because the stakes really could not be higher.
[00:55:21.720]Conservatives support for, and trust in,
[00:55:23.840]American universities,
[00:55:24.790]has eroded significantly in recent years.
[00:55:26.890]It was never very strong at any point in my lifetime,
[00:55:29.060]but in the last five years it has just cratered.
[00:55:31.260]And then you have Donald Trump's ascendancy,
[00:55:33.300]enabled by so many members of his party,
[00:55:35.710]bringing the nation's most reactionary impulses
[00:55:37.670]to the forefront,
[00:55:38.503]working them into the threads of the social fabric,
[00:55:41.400]so deeply that openly racist
[00:55:43.440]and antisemitic speech and violence are,
[00:55:45.380]once again, a daily fact of life in these United States,
[00:55:48.850]this time, with swastikas.
[00:55:51.250]Now is not the time to leave the protection
[00:55:53.660]of extramural speech solely to the State,
[00:55:56.800]which is why I was arguing with Judith Butler
[00:55:58.820]45 minutes ago.
[00:56:00.120]Now, instead, is the time to insist
[00:56:01.850]that the extramural speech of university professors
[00:56:03.880]is vitally important to the functioning of a free society,
[00:56:07.200]especially when it involves expertise,
[00:56:09.420]academic expertise, in things like climate change,
[00:56:12.230]colonialism, race relations, gender and sexuality,
[00:56:15.090]ethnocentrism, poverty, medicine, technology,
[00:56:18.100]urban planning, ecology, and, among many other things,
[00:56:20.740]you know, theories of justice.
[00:56:22.380]Now is the time to insist that extramural speech
[00:56:24.660]is a vital aspect of academic freedom,
[00:56:27.080]precisely because the struggle for academic freedom
[00:56:29.440]is the struggle for democracy.
[00:56:31.907]Thank you.
[00:56:33.228](audience applauding)
[00:56:44.451]Questions?
[00:56:48.240]If you're afraid to come to the microphone
[00:56:49.650]I'll bring it to you. (all laughing)
[00:56:56.931]Would you please tell me and the audience
[00:56:58.410]what's wrong with the bylaws?
[00:57:02.457]Did everybody hear the question?
[00:57:03.715]I did not plant that question.
[00:57:05.273]Okay.
[00:57:06.910]So here's your bylaws.
[00:57:10.930]We've, hello.
[00:57:13.422]Almost all faculty bylaws in reputable universities
[00:57:17.760]incorporate the AAUP statement in one way or another.
[00:57:20.800]They move the words around and whatever,
[00:57:22.220]but it really is the backbone.
[00:57:24.070]So what you've done, is you've, sorry.
[00:57:30.620]Put it into these two paragraphs,
[00:57:33.554]entitled to freedom and research
[00:57:35.386]and publication of the results;
[00:57:36.946]good so far.
[00:57:38.013]Limited only in the precepts of scholarship,
[00:57:39.362]faithful performance of academic obligations.
[00:57:40.560]You're entitled to freedom in the classroom
[00:57:41.820]in discussing your subjects.
[00:57:43.290]You don't have that bit
[00:57:45.159]about the stuff unrelated to the subject.
[00:57:46.030]You kind of need that.
[00:57:47.500]Again, some people, not many, but they're headaches,
[00:57:51.453]believe that academic freedom means
[00:57:53.010]I can do whatever the hell I want.
[00:57:54.770]And, no it doesn't, no it doesn't.
[00:57:57.420]It's not, again, it's not freedom of expression.
[00:58:00.340]And I don't get to go off
[00:58:02.230]about the foolishness of the multiple universes hypothesis.
[00:58:06.100]Actually, I like it, it's really great for science fiction.
[00:58:09.550]But, not my area of expertise.
[00:58:11.970]I don't get to go off on certain things, right?
[00:58:14.150]So you need that.
[00:58:15.090]Then, you have the extramural speech.
[00:58:17.560]You're entitled to exercise your right
[00:58:19.554]to speak as active citizens of the United States,
[00:58:20.880]and the State of Nebraska.
[00:58:22.711]Members of professional staff shall not suffer sanctions
[00:58:26.940]or be discriminated against.
[00:58:27.880]So far so good.
[00:58:29.130]Pay or other emoluments, da da da,
[00:58:31.020]this is all good, right?
[00:58:33.439]Then, staff members who violate laws
[00:58:35.840]prescribed by civil authorities
[00:58:37.010]may incur penalties attached to such laws (humming).
[00:58:41.645]That's okay, all right.
[00:58:43.700]And also, you don't have to be respectful
[00:58:46.350]and like the opinions of others,
[00:58:48.010]that's good too.
[00:58:49.170]You can be rude.
[00:58:51.240]However,
[00:58:52.900]I mentioned Garcetti versus Ceballos.
[00:58:55.780]And the wonks in the room should be like,
[00:58:57.557]"Oh yeah, yeah, Garcetti."
[00:59:01.310]This is a bad one folks.
[00:59:03.380]It didn't involve higher education.
[00:59:07.380]It's a whistleblower thing.
[00:59:08.930]So Garcetti was an Assistant DA in California,
[00:59:13.010]who got it into his head in about 2005 thereabouts,
[00:59:16.330]that a case was being cooked, right?
[00:59:18.890]That evidence was being fabricated against a defendant.
[00:59:22.220]He took it to his supervisor,
[00:59:23.730]which turned out to be a bad idea,
[00:59:25.060]because his supervisor was the one doing the cooking.
[00:59:28.220]He got retaliated against.
[00:59:30.210]And he's a whistleblower,
[00:59:31.870]he was blowing the whistle on a corrupt case.
[00:59:35.090]And so he got what the DA's office called highway therapy.
[00:59:39.670]He got reassigned to a thing two hours away,
[00:59:41.390]two hours each way each day.
[00:59:43.505]He didn't get fired.
[00:59:44.980]But anyway, he sued,
[00:59:46.110]and I think first he lost,
[00:59:49.200]then he won on appeal.
[00:59:50.380]It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
[00:59:52.640]And the AAUP, by the way their legal staff,
[00:59:55.540]it has to be a very dark and cloudy night
[00:59:57.230]that they miss anything,
[00:59:59.350]they could see this coming and they said,
[01:00:00.707]"You know what?
[01:00:01.907]"This has implications for university professors
[01:00:04.607]"at public institutions."
[01:00:06.310]Because the argument against Garcetti
[01:00:08.540]is that he has no protection under the first amendment
[01:00:11.750]for things he says in the course of his duties.
[01:00:15.200]Let that sink in.
[01:00:16.950]It is so anti-whistleblower.
[01:00:20.130]And the court is even worse now than it was before.
[01:00:23.880]I will go off.
[01:00:25.260]Merrick Garland should be a Justice,
[01:00:28.945]and that too is part of the crisis of liberal democracy.
[01:00:33.520]But back then,
[01:00:35.190]it was almost even money
[01:00:36.450]which way Kennedy was gonna go, right?
[01:00:39.320]We knew the four conservative justices
[01:00:40.680]were gonna rule against Garcetti
[01:00:42.100]before liberal justices were gonna rule in favor of him,
[01:00:44.740]and people trying to read tea leaves,
[01:00:46.500]and Kennedy went the wrong way,
[01:00:48.800]and so Garcetti lost.
[01:00:50.390]Which means, by the way, for the faculty in the room,
[01:00:52.870]anything you say about University of Nebraska policies,
[01:00:57.560]anything you say in a committee,
[01:00:59.430]does not have protection under the first amendment,
[01:01:02.680]because it is related to your duties.
[01:01:05.300]Holy shit! (audience laughing)
[01:01:07.580]Feel free to quote me.
[01:01:08.620]So I was going over stuff in Penn State,
[01:01:12.640]and we, weirdly, our policy leads with the extramural stuff,
[01:01:16.720]it's like, wow, okay, citizen first!
[01:01:18.580]Then, the uncontroversial stuff, research and publication,
[01:01:22.070]and instructional roles.
[01:01:24.860]Again, you see the absence of the word persistently
[01:01:25.968]in that last bit,
[01:01:27.100]I have lost that argument so far.
[01:01:28.460]But then look at this,
[01:01:29.630]the events related to the university.
[01:01:32.305]Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
[01:01:33.250]blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[01:01:34.083]First two sentences.
[01:01:35.050]Faculty members are free
[01:01:35.920]to speak and write on governance issues
[01:01:37.600]of their respective departments, colleges, units, libraries,
[01:01:39.710]and of the university as a whole,
[01:01:40.950]and are free to speak and write on all matters
[01:01:42.870]related to professional duties
[01:01:43.850]without institutional discipline or restraint.
[01:01:46.410]Yes!
[01:01:48.490]And I don't know who got at that,
[01:01:51.050]because that wasn't there 10 years ago.
[01:01:53.340]The Garcetti decision is 2006.
[01:01:55.230]And I made it a point,
[01:01:56.930]if I get to be in the Faculty Senate,
[01:01:58.510]I get to be in any position of power.
[01:02:00.080]First I was the chair of the faculty affairs committee,
[01:02:01.690]now I'm the chair of the whole thing,
[01:02:03.010]I'm gonna make sure that oh, it's already there.
[01:02:05.330]Okay, good.
[01:02:06.910]You need a fourth plank there.
[01:02:08.090]You need something protecting people
[01:02:09.520]from the Garcetti decision.
[01:02:10.860]That's the hole you can drive a truck through.
[01:02:13.250]So the next time you say,
[01:02:14.277]"You know, I really don't want (clearing throat),
[01:02:18.080]fill in the blank, to be our next President,"
[01:02:20.100]or, "I don't like the process
[01:02:21.137]"by which he or she was selected,"
[01:02:24.270]you actually don't have protection for those statements.
[01:02:26.740]They don't fall under your own academic freedom policies,
[01:02:29.470]and they have to, they have to.
[01:02:31.430]And again, you'll notice also that the 1940 statement
[01:02:33.790]didn't say anything about this either,
[01:02:34.930]because it didn't exist then!
[01:02:36.960]The Supreme Court case was only in 2006,
[01:02:39.130]and after that thing dropped,
[01:02:40.860]everybody should have run screaming
[01:02:42.930]to their academic freedom policies
[01:02:44.786]with, you know, spatula and, you know, spackle,
[01:02:49.160]to patch the hole.
[01:02:51.110]That's really what it is.
[01:02:52.100]You could also use the controversial material clause too.
[01:02:56.910]Thank you. You're welcome.
[01:02:58.800]Yeah?
[01:02:59.633]I actually just wanted to encourage you
[01:03:01.710]to talk about the explicit footnote in the Garcetti case,
[01:03:04.600]in which academic freedom at universities
[01:03:06.520]is kind of, like, put to the side,
[01:03:07.910]before we completely freak everybody out, right?
[01:03:10.136]I mean, like, it seems like the law still applies,
[01:03:11.790]but there was at least a kind of a cap to that decision.
[01:03:15.440]And I'm happy to say that we are on the verge
[01:03:18.430]of releasing a statement for the university
[01:03:21.610]on academic freedom that explicitly includes
[01:03:24.670]the material that you just highlighted there,
[01:03:26.960]in part for those reasons--
[01:03:28.717]Great, my work here is done, good.
[01:03:30.110]No, that's really good news.
[01:03:31.240]Thank you for saying that.
[01:03:32.920]And also, thank you for calling attention
[01:03:33.753]to that wonderful footnote, which is...
[01:03:36.280]Well no, there are two things.
[01:03:37.360]So in his descent, David Souter,
[01:03:39.630]which was also, David Souter,
[01:03:40.810]the last time a Republican is going to nominate a guy
[01:03:45.144]who turns out to be a liberal;
[01:03:46.147]that was George Bush,
[01:03:47.150]he gave us Clarence Thomas,
[01:03:48.152]and he gave us David Souter.
[01:03:49.155]And so Souter, almost, I think explicitly
[01:03:51.040]reference the AAUP Amicus Brief.
[01:03:53.610]And he said, you know,
[01:03:54.660]the majority of this decision here
[01:03:56.260]has potentially chilling effects
[01:03:58.540]for university professionals at public universities.
[01:04:02.530]And Rehnquist's response to that was, maybe.
[01:04:06.700]Seriously.
[01:04:07.900]The court need not, and therefore does not,
[01:04:10.270]pass on this decision,
[01:04:12.040]on that aspect of the case today.
[01:04:14.240]And so, we started seeing the AAUP.
[01:04:16.410]Okay, I'm not in the AAUP legal staff,
[01:04:18.220]but again, I was on Committee A.
[01:04:19.520]We started seeing what we called The Children of Garcetti
[01:04:21.780]coming through.
[01:04:22.830]And it was not a left/right thing.
[01:04:25.010]One of the people who fell afoul with it
[01:04:27.867]was a guy at University North Carolina, Greensboro
[01:04:31.610]named Mike Adams,
[01:04:32.780]who's a sort of low level, right wing wannabe pundit,
[01:04:37.780]and who will occasionally write these sort of incendiary,
[01:04:41.739]trollish things for the local paper,
[01:04:45.326]you know, usually about gender and race.
[01:04:48.990]And that actually held him up for promotion,
[01:04:51.890]he got denied a promotion because of this extramural speech,
[01:04:54.286]under Garcetti.
[01:04:56.770]And the AAUP came to his defense,
[01:04:58.630]'cause we are that way,
[01:04:59.610]and we'll even defend a crank
[01:05:01.950]who mouths off about his female students in the newspaper,
[01:05:06.100]on the grounds that that actually doesn't...
[01:05:08.144]Actually, it wasn't his students,
[01:05:08.977]that would have crossed a line.
[01:05:10.450]But yeah, Rehnquist quite clearly left the door open,
[01:05:15.370]said, "You know, we're not gonna pass on this one,
[01:05:17.147]"Souter has brought it up, he's right,
[01:05:18.967]"it could pertain to it,
[01:05:21.093]"and, you know, let the chips fall where they may."
[01:05:22.690]So good to hear you're patching that one.
[01:05:25.170]It's never too late.
[01:05:28.960]So you have these suggestions
[01:05:30.120]on things you might wanna see changed in the bylaws.
[01:05:33.758]Do you have tactical advice on how we might go
[01:05:37.260]about getting these changes implemented in an environment
[01:05:40.140]where not all these ideals may be respected in all quarters?
[01:05:45.110]Sure.
[01:05:48.970]I'm trying to think what my batting average is with admin.
[01:05:51.900]Again, I lost on the persistently thing, right?
[01:05:54.520]And so far, no harm, until...
[01:05:57.816]In fact, I did a presentation in my new capacity
[01:06:01.270]as Senate Chair for the new faculty orientation,
[01:06:04.460]and my new mantra for this thing is don't worry about it,
[01:06:07.190]these policies will never affect you,
[01:06:09.240]until they do, all right?
[01:06:11.900]That's why you should care about them.
[01:06:13.600]So that's one, again,
[01:06:15.740]one of the responses is:
[01:06:16.800]this is not a problem, right?
[01:06:18.820]Thinks are fine, mostly,
[01:06:20.120]except for a graduate student yelling at an undergraduate
[01:06:23.180]at a table.
[01:06:24.830]Or about what I heard yesterday.
[01:06:26.978]Someone wants to take the word Armenian
[01:06:29.060]out of a thing about Armenian genocide.
[01:06:31.500]Again, newsflash, Armenian genocide happened.
[01:06:33.720]Turks did it.
[01:06:34.870]Am I gonna get shit there?
[01:06:37.270]I thought that was pretty obvious.
[01:06:38.560]That's, yeah, okay.
[01:06:41.060]So, one thing is you wanna appeal, I think,
[01:06:43.720]to people's sense of professionalism,
[01:06:45.480]and their sense of working
[01:06:46.870]at a legitimate, major university.
[01:06:50.210]You can't really be a legitimate, major, public university,
[01:06:52.426]if your faculty don't have the freedom
[01:06:55.490]to speak about the operations of the university
[01:06:57.380]in their professional capacities.
[01:06:59.050]You have something else.
[01:07:03.232]You have a quasi-military, or religious,
[01:07:05.990]or whatever, institution,
[01:07:08.770]where certain aspects of the free exchange of ideas
[01:07:11.900]are just not welcome.
[01:07:13.800]And if that's what you want, be careful.
[01:07:18.900]Because that actually could
[01:07:20.030]eventually speak to accreditation,
[01:07:21.490]it could speak to your reputation.
[01:07:24.440]Again, one of the few things the AAUP can do with censure.
[01:07:27.550]What did we do with censure, right?
[01:07:29.600]Did we dock anybody's pay?
[01:07:32.250]Did we shut down a building?
[01:07:34.110]It's all reputational.
[01:07:36.021]How many people have actually looked at the censure list,
[01:07:39.630]now that you're on it,
[01:07:40.580]to see what kind of company you're keeping?
[01:07:43.616]Yeah, there are some,
[01:07:47.270]you're in the dungeon man! (audience laughing)
[01:07:50.190]There are some real serious malefactors there.
[01:07:52.430]The Savannah College of Art and Design,
[01:07:54.130]holy Jesus, it's huge.
[01:07:55.500]And it graduates so many people in art and design.
[01:07:57.720]It is run as a personal family thiefdom.
[01:08:00.960]There is no sense in which
[01:08:01.793]that's a legitimate educational institution.
[01:08:03.060]It still gives degrees and stuff, and people go to it,
[01:08:04.880]but ugh.
[01:08:05.870]And then the one that really kills me is SUNY,
[01:08:07.743]State University of New York,
[01:08:10.740]that has been on the censure list since 1976.
[01:08:13.504](scattered laughing)
[01:08:14.450]Who laughed?
[01:08:15.410]It's not funny!
[01:08:17.300]Because, and the reason is,
[01:08:19.980]they have what may be
[01:08:21.180]the worst collective bargaining agreement
[01:08:22.690]in the history of collective bargaining.
[01:08:25.270]The notorious Article 35 allows administration
[01:08:28.040]just to shut down programs.
[01:08:30.400]That's it, no more French or Italian today.
[01:08:32.310]I mention that because SUNY Albany, in 2010,
[01:08:34.690]did shut down French, Italian, Russian,
[01:08:36.520]theater, and classics.
[01:08:37.950]And this caused great outcry.
[01:08:39.930]And the AAUP couldn't do jack about it
[01:08:42.210]because we had already censured them.
[01:08:43.980]There was no double secret censure, right?
[01:08:47.230]And so we don't have any leverage over them any more.
[01:08:49.216]But I can tell you, not too far from here,
[01:08:52.110]University of Northern Iowa,
[01:08:53.290]I led an investigation in 2012,
[01:08:56.160]and you didn't hear about it because it worked.
[01:08:59.240]We didn't censure UNI
[01:09:00.360]because the administration came back to the table
[01:09:01.980]and did not close the 72 programs they were gonna close,
[01:09:05.700]and they did not lay off the faculty
[01:09:06.850]they were gonna lay off,
[01:09:08.220]partly because the general council who just interrupted me,
[01:09:12.240]said, "C'mon, get to the chase!
[01:09:13.857]"What's the worst case scenario here?"
[01:09:14.900]I said, "The worst case scenario here is censure.
[01:09:17.427]"You wanna look at the censure list?
[01:09:18.447]"You wanna see who you join?
[01:09:19.877]"You wanna take that risk with accreditors?
[01:09:21.861]"You wanna take that risk with students?
[01:09:23.141]"That's up to you."
[01:09:25.610]That worked.
[01:09:26.550]There are other places where it does not.
[01:09:27.930]I made the same pitch to the University of Southern Maine,
[01:09:29.940]they told me to go leave Southern Maine
[01:09:31.590]and go someplace else.
[01:09:34.270]So yeah.
[01:09:35.270]This is the way...
[01:09:36.370]And the last thing is.
[01:09:37.990]And as you're watching who your next President might be.
[01:09:40.270]Again, you look across the road at Iowa,
[01:09:43.480]where Bruce Harreld, right?
[01:09:45.480]He comes in with no faculty support whatsoever, right?
[01:09:50.780]And he actually does work, to his credit,
[01:09:52.916]and when I met him last year in this program,
[01:09:55.839]I said, "Thanks for consulting the Faculty Senate
[01:09:58.967]"on whether Richard Spencer gets to speak.
[01:10:01.044]You know, it's an administrative decision in the end, right?
[01:10:04.585]And whereas Spencer did speak at Florida, Gainesville,
[01:10:08.730]I think that cost them, what, $800,000?
[01:10:10.830]Berkeley, from Milo Yiannopoulos, something similar.
[01:10:13.609]And at least he consulted the faculty,
[01:10:15.370]he knew he had some fences to mend, right?
[01:10:18.409]But let's say you have someone
[01:10:19.320]come in from the business world,
[01:10:20.620]who doesn't understand the strange beast that academia is.
[01:10:23.420]This is one of the ways academia is a strange beast.
[01:10:25.480]It has a thing called shared governance.
[01:10:27.680]Most businesses don't.
[01:10:29.090]They don't ask their employees for input on policy, right?
[01:10:32.240]Administration is administration.
[01:10:33.915]We don't work that way.
[01:10:35.814]This is supposed to be a partnership.
[01:10:38.210]Now, it doesn't go everywhere.
[01:10:39.764]I can say anything I want about the Penn State budget,
[01:10:42.330]it has no effect whatsoever.
[01:10:44.180]Senate does not deal with budgetary matters by statute.
[01:10:48.300]But about other things,
[01:10:50.267]especially about the academic mission,
[01:10:51.750]or about the effective governance of the university?
[01:10:53.880]You should be able to say anything at all.
[01:10:57.140]And you know, if some of it's not constructive,
[01:10:59.208]yeah, that happens.
[01:11:01.120]There are cranks.
[01:11:02.600]Some of them are really brave whistleblowers
[01:11:04.650]who are being ostracized
[01:11:05.640]by their colleagues or their departments.
[01:11:07.160]Others are just cranks, right?
[01:11:09.469]But, that's the price you pay for a free society,
[01:11:13.290]is you get a crank protection plan.
[01:11:15.350]I wouldn't lead with that part,
[01:11:16.520]I would lead with the legitimate exchange of ideas part.
[01:11:19.540]But that's what I would say.
[01:11:20.560]Yeah?
[01:11:22.550]Thank you for your comments.
[01:11:23.800]I am a graduate student instructor.
[01:11:26.600]For all intents and purposes, I am Courtney Lawton.
[01:11:29.370]In my experience I have to be a shape shifter,
[01:11:31.510]because I am both a student and a staff member day-to-day.
[01:11:35.212]Yup, yup.
[01:11:36.060]The university designates us as one or the other,
[01:11:39.240]student or staff, for various purposes,
[01:11:41.335]usually whichever is less advantageous to us.
[01:11:45.330]So my question to you is,
[01:11:46.650]if you were in a position to advise UNL
[01:11:49.290]on how this designation should be revisited
[01:11:53.180]for graduate student instructors,
[01:11:55.200]what would you advise them?
[01:11:56.300]How ought we be classified for purposes of academic freedom
[01:11:59.617]and freedom of expression?
[01:12:03.330]I didn't expect the easy questions I guess.
[01:12:05.820]No, this is really, really tough.
[01:12:07.340]Because, and every time I've tried to raise it,
[01:12:09.990]I've actually had a few,
[01:12:11.330]I've posed a few panels, both of the AAUP and MLA,
[01:12:15.483]on graduate students and academic freedom,
[01:12:16.316]and I've gotten no takers,
[01:12:17.520]because no graduate students wanted to go on record,
[01:12:19.835]for precisely the reasons you described.
[01:12:22.693]In fact, that was one of the things at stake
[01:12:24.165]in the Courtney Lawton case, right?
[01:12:25.200]That for some (burping), excuse me,
[01:12:27.301]for some purposes she was treated
[01:12:28.496]as if she were a professor,
[01:12:29.904]and some cases,
[01:12:30.971]in some aspects she was treated as if she were a student.
[01:12:33.808]Here's the complicating thing.
[01:12:37.060]Graduate students.
[01:12:38.672]I'm gonna put this in shorthand first,
[01:12:42.000]gonna sound silly.
[01:12:43.100]But graduate students gradually accrete academic freedom,
[01:12:45.940]like little particles attach it to them as they go.
[01:12:49.120]Because when you first come in, obviously,
[01:12:50.580]you don't have much in the way of academic freedom at all,
[01:12:53.180]you don't have any academic expertise, right?
[01:12:55.750]And obviously you have to meet the requirements
[01:12:57.250]of your program, right?
[01:12:59.100]So no one comes in and says,
[01:13:01.037]"Well, under academic freedom,
[01:13:02.187]"a person doesn't actually
[01:13:03.020]"have to meet the language requirement,
[01:13:04.387]"or doesn't have to have this historical breadth,
[01:13:06.257]"or whatever."
[01:13:07.590]Then, there's the question,
[01:13:08.760]that when you're finished with your coursework,
[01:13:10.030]and you go through comprehensive exams,
[01:13:11.390]or you move on to the dissertation stage,
[01:13:13.019]you are still subject to your committee.
[01:13:16.830]And to refer to another scandal
[01:13:21.296]that has nothing to do with this,
[01:13:22.299]the Avital Ronell scandal from last fall and summer,
[01:13:24.930]you know one of the things that became clear
[01:13:26.459]from that scandal at NYU,
[01:13:28.350]it opened this whole discussion about abusive mentors,
[01:13:31.370]or abusive faculty-graduate student relations.
[01:13:35.660]And I don't know to this moment
[01:13:40.160]what kind of action NYU will or won't take
[01:13:42.390]in regard to Ronell,
[01:13:43.400]and what I think is clearly
[01:13:44.570]a pattern of abuse of this student.
[01:13:48.470]But it's one of the things that limits the academic freedom
[01:13:50.310]of graduate students.
[01:13:51.143]You're still subject to the requirements,
[01:13:53.210]first of the general requirements of the program,
[01:13:55.430]and then whatever your advisor reasonably asks you
[01:13:58.650]or requires you to do.
[01:14:00.380]So that's the hard part.
[01:14:02.090]Otherwise, as you grow in academic expertise,
[01:14:06.910]you should,
[01:14:08.610]the more you can claim to be an authority on,
[01:14:10.620]well, my project actually is on dredging
[01:14:12.879]and Midwestern flooding.
[01:14:16.557]And my attitude toward,
[01:14:17.830]what we'll see over the next couple months,
[01:14:20.550]that they're doing it all wrong,
[01:14:22.110]and if in fact the US Army Corps of Engineers,
[01:14:24.980]or the State of Nebraska doesn't like it,
[01:14:26.500]they can go lump it, I'm an expert.
[01:14:28.510]But you have to establish that expertise.
[01:14:30.060]So it's really tricky.
[01:14:31.330]And that's why I can call up what the AAUP has.
[01:14:38.120]Let's see.
[01:14:43.300]First of all, everyone should join this organization.
[01:14:45.120]I should say that too.
[01:14:46.890]And if you join, you actually do get a copy of the red book,
[01:14:50.670]Policy, Documents, and Reports.
[01:14:53.040]But online, here we go.
[01:14:56.000]Recommended institutional regulation 14.
[01:14:59.800]That's what we got.
[01:15:02.756]That's the best we have so far.
[01:15:07.180]So there too is mostly about appointment
[01:15:11.750]and non-reappointment.
[01:15:15.840]Basically copying and pasting as much of that as possible
[01:15:18.950]into whatever governance document
[01:15:20.610]you have for graduate students.
[01:15:21.900]Even that doesn't fully answer your question,
[01:15:23.840]because of the limitations I just mentioned,
[01:15:26.480]but it's what we have.
[01:15:30.309]We have a question here.
[01:15:31.397]Go ahead. Sure.
[01:15:32.440]Many majors and departments
[01:15:33.950]are criticized for being biased,
[01:15:36.240]especially on the basis of being over politicized.
[01:15:38.780]Sure.
[01:15:39.613]I am taking an upper level economics course
[01:15:42.620]entitled Gender Economics and Social Provisioning.
[01:15:45.870]This course mainly problematizes
[01:15:47.560]the neoclassical economic literature on multiple fronts,
[01:15:50.802]one of which is interpreting (mumbling)
[01:15:53.390]through aggression models as informing of casualties,
[01:15:55.830]not correlations.
[01:15:57.800]I find it troubling, however,
[01:15:59.170]that when non-mainstream economic thought is introduced,
[01:16:02.810]it's not held to the same level of criticism
[01:16:04.972]as is done to the neoclassical model.
[01:16:07.982]In your opinion,
[01:16:09.130]what conditions must be present in any course
[01:16:11.870]that would make it a more open exploration
[01:16:14.090]of various schools of thought,
[01:16:16.160]as compared to a mere political propaganda?
[01:16:18.950]To be clear, I'm not inquiring about any underlying values
[01:16:21.780]which any discipline is advocating,
[01:16:23.750]instead I'm asking about the proper,
[01:16:25.904]or sufficiently unbiased methodology of construction.
[01:16:29.550]Wow.
[01:16:30.610]Thank you.
[01:16:31.740]I hope I can get the right passage on this.
[01:16:41.810]Dang, it's a PDF.
[01:16:43.380]Hang on a sec.
[01:16:46.970]I love the question,
[01:16:48.276]and I love the fact that it comes out of economics,
[01:16:49.705]that's really...
[01:16:51.640]Okay let's see.
[01:16:57.090]Oh, maybe, I hope it's searchable.
[01:17:00.350]Because there's a specific word
[01:17:01.620]that you wouldn't find too many.
[01:17:03.913](computer dinging)
[01:17:08.470]Oh wait.
[01:17:10.930]There we go.
[01:17:18.153]Okay.
[01:17:24.591](grunting)
[01:17:26.350]Okay, thanks for bearing with me.
[01:17:29.930]Okay.
[01:17:34.020]It starts with the university teacher in giving instruction.
[01:17:36.950]But first, to go to your example from economics,
[01:17:38.947]it's funny.
[01:17:40.150]I just heard from an undergraduate, a woman of color,
[01:17:43.320]at my own institution,
[01:17:45.810]that although she's loved her education at Penn State,
[01:17:49.520]she was especially annoyed with economics
[01:17:51.410]not raising precisely the challenges
[01:17:53.670]to the neoclassical model that you described.
[01:17:55.760]Which is usually the case, all right?
[01:17:57.720]And that led me to follow up by saying,
[01:17:59.737]"You know, that's a shame,
[01:18:01.627]"because in economics,
[01:18:03.557]"once you leave Penn State or Nebraska,
[01:18:05.627]"race and gender are gonna be a thing,
[01:18:07.607]"even in economics,
[01:18:08.637]"they're gonna structure the economic world you live in,
[01:18:11.167]"and the markets you negotiate."
[01:18:13.770]And I should say, the markets you navigate,
[01:18:16.940]I don't mean that you, yourself,
[01:18:18.560]would be fiddling with the markets.
[01:18:21.880]And I worry, sometimes,
[01:18:24.430]that in certain disciplines,
[01:18:25.650]we don't have a single faculty member of color.
[01:18:27.960]We have one, tenured, full professor of color,
[01:18:31.810]in political science.
[01:18:34.200]I hope that gets fixed.
[01:18:36.820]We did just do a cluster hire of 10 people
[01:18:39.210]in African-American Studies, which is great,
[01:18:41.410]'cause they'll have affiliations with other departments.
[01:18:44.110]But some departments just still operate
[01:18:47.120]as if they're immune,
[01:18:48.490]or their subject matter doesn't touch on this stuff.
[01:18:50.530]And if it does, that it would be politicized, okay?
[01:18:53.840]So that was a wrinkle I didn't expect from you comment.
[01:18:55.450]Usually when I hear from students in economics,
[01:18:57.820]and psychology is another one,
[01:18:59.644]their complaint is that race, and gender, and sexuality,
[01:19:02.880]and other modes of social being,
[01:19:04.280]are under theorized in their discipline.
[01:19:06.820]And that has the effect in a lot of places,
[01:19:09.220]including my own,
[01:19:10.330]of offloading all the questions about race, gender,
[01:19:12.930]sexuality, et cetera,
[01:19:14.170]to the two departments,
[01:19:15.920]Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies,
[01:19:17.507]and African-American Studies, or Ethnic Studies,
[01:19:19.360]or what have you.
[01:19:20.240]So A, I'm glad to hear that that's not the case,
[01:19:21.953]that they have one course that, you know,
[01:19:24.817]which challenges to the neoclassical model are welcome.
[01:19:30.480]Now, as for the methodology in which they're taught,
[01:19:34.450]and whether they are intrusions
[01:19:36.220]upon the subject matter or what, okay.
[01:19:39.281]So in 1915, the original AAUP statement on academic freedom
[01:19:41.780]is really chatty.
[01:19:42.940]It's nine pages long,
[01:19:44.784]and it's an essay.
[01:19:47.700]And about 10, 12 years ago,
[01:19:51.150]I ran into a series of conservative thinkers,
[01:19:53.530]who kept quoting this passage,
[01:19:55.153]and I didn't know why.
[01:19:57.010]I thought, why are they all on about the 1915 statement?
[01:19:59.770]Well, it's 'cause of things like you're question.
[01:20:02.812]The university teacher, who is like male,
[01:20:05.520]while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion
[01:20:07.970]under a mountain of equivocal verbiage,
[01:20:10.106]should, if he is fit for his position,
[01:20:12.240]be a person of fair a judicial mind.
[01:20:14.320]He should, in dealing with such subjects set forth justly
[01:20:16.480]without suppression or innuendo,
[01:20:20.170]the divergent opinions of other investigators,
[01:20:22.210]he should cause his students to become familiar
[01:20:23.850]with the best published expressions
[01:20:25.888]of the great historic types of doctrine,
[01:20:27.358]et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:20:28.380]And, of course, you still find this in the brochure.
[01:20:30.570]His business is, liberal arts brochures everywhere,
[01:20:33.120]not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions,
[01:20:35.240]but to train them to think for themselves,
[01:20:36.860]and to provide them access with those materials
[01:20:38.610]which they need if they are to think intelligently.
[01:20:40.885]Well, under pressure from various conservative commentators
[01:20:44.760]and people like David Horowitz,
[01:20:46.780]Penn State, for a while, actually had all this language
[01:20:50.200]in its academic freedom policy.
[01:20:52.171]And I wasn't in the Faculty Senate at the time,
[01:20:55.730]but I did contact the Senators I knew and said,
[01:20:57.487]"How about no?
[01:20:59.267]"How about none of this."
[01:21:00.250]Because, if I am fit for my position,
[01:21:03.980]and I am a person of fair and judicial mind,
[01:21:06.040]which I am,
[01:21:07.078]I should always set forth justly
[01:21:09.610]without suppression or innuendo
[01:21:10.860]the divergent opinions of other investigators?
[01:21:14.860]What?
[01:21:16.870]So, look, this is my take on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
[01:21:23.220]How much time do I have to give
[01:21:24.380]to the other 400 interpretations, that are relevant,
[01:21:27.800]of Invisible Man?
[01:21:29.270]Why isn't this my class?
[01:21:31.671]On the other hand,
[01:21:32.730]I'm also not doing people any good service
[01:21:34.710]if I'm not indicating in some way
[01:21:36.160]that there are other takes on this,
[01:21:38.610]or on, in fact, gender disparities in pay,
[01:21:42.600]or, you know, the kinds of protections available
[01:21:46.010]to minoritized populations
[01:21:47.830]in certain kinds of professions, right?
[01:21:50.480]But the idea that it should be an iron law,
[01:21:53.100]that I should set forth without suppression or innuendo.
[01:21:55.780]I just love that phrase.
[01:21:57.400]I'm setting forth Beth's opinion,
[01:21:59.150]but I'm doing it with innuendo.
[01:22:01.368](audience laughing)
[01:22:02.380]Crank!
[01:22:03.660]Or suppression.
[01:22:04.760]It was even weirder
[01:22:07.090]that in the course of making it into Penn State's policy
[01:22:09.480]there was typo,
[01:22:10.490]it was supersession or innuendo.
[01:22:13.313](audience laughing)
[01:22:14.313]Like, I don't know what this means at this point.
[01:22:15.807]But I think this is a relevant question,
[01:22:18.430]not only for challenges
[01:22:21.100]to the neoclassical model of economics,
[01:22:22.640]but for any course
[01:22:24.280]in which there could be another take, right?
[01:22:26.203]And, in fact, that other take might be taught
[01:22:27.990]by another professor right down the hall
[01:22:30.914]in the next class section, right?
[01:22:33.160]And you have to allow for some of that idiosyncrasy, right?
[01:22:36.200]You have to allow...
[01:22:38.260]You're hiring people as experts,
[01:22:40.130]you give them pretty much free reign,
[01:22:42.460]as long as they stay within the parameters of their subject.
[01:22:44.570]So for all the economists who think
[01:22:46.168]there are challenges to the neoclassical model,
[01:22:48.960]but I'm not gonna bother with them, right?
[01:22:51.177]They're sort of not relevant
[01:22:53.040]to the reversion analysis we're doing.
[01:22:58.852]And if an entire discipline gets warped that way,
[01:23:03.290]then that's not even a question of bias,
[01:23:06.470]that's a question of, like,
[01:23:08.241]how narrow are the parameters of that field?
[01:23:10.710]That's the question Joan Scott was asking about history.
[01:23:12.934]Why are we not writing about the history of women
[01:23:16.040]in the French Revolution?
[01:23:16.900]That was a big thing, also, by the way.
[01:23:18.844]When that first was broached,
[01:23:20.800]it was, oh yeah, women in the French Revolution.
[01:23:22.897]Never had before,
[01:23:25.230]even though they were there.
[01:23:27.230]So, no, you want, I mean,
[01:23:29.630]the impulse behind this is not wrong, right?
[01:23:31.430]You don't want someone who's a doctrinaire,
[01:23:34.210]hectorer of students, leading your classroom,
[01:23:37.000]that's not a good way to go.
[01:23:38.700]It also tends not to work.
[01:23:40.430]Indoctrination doesn't usually work by that age.
[01:23:42.890]I've tried.
[01:23:44.166]No, I haven't.
[01:23:45.480]But you want some sense of what the parameters,
[01:23:47.640]the available intellectual options are in a field,
[01:23:49.542]as much as possible,
[01:23:51.220]without turning your classroom into,
[01:23:53.420]I don't know, here's 400 options.
[01:23:54.961]But thanks for the question.
[01:23:56.850]Here's our final question.
[01:23:58.694]Sure.
[01:24:00.790]So I think one of the challenges
[01:24:03.650]with extramural speech, and, I mean,
[01:24:05.590]it can happen in academic freedom in research too,
[01:24:08.680]is that, especially with the way things go viral,
[01:24:14.500]the things that a faculty member says,
[01:24:17.340]which might have no bearing directly on their teaching,
[01:24:21.260]can still create an environment that affects students,
[01:24:25.160]and affects students in their class,
[01:24:26.340]even if in the classroom they say and do nothing related.
[01:24:30.690]You know, the guy you were talking about in North Carolina
[01:24:33.610]publishing Op Eds in the paper,
[01:24:34.930]if those things are incredibly offensive
[01:24:37.760]to certain groups of students,
[01:24:39.110]that can create a really negative educational environment
[01:24:42.860]that may actually make it
[01:24:44.770]so that he is unable to effectively teach.
[01:24:49.680]Except to people who like that stuff, right?
[01:24:51.378]Well it depends Self-selecting audience.
[01:24:53.047]on how you define effective teaching,
[01:24:54.940]but what do you do with that?
[01:24:57.397]This is why I've decided,
[01:24:59.680]even though I've gotten literate in these things,
[01:25:02.070]and I went to the academic leadership program last year,
[01:25:04.530]I'm not moving into administration.
[01:25:07.350]Because that's really a question
[01:25:09.300]for the Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs or your equivalent.
[01:25:11.434]And in fact, one of the things I...
[01:25:15.860]The thing that literally has kept me up at night this year,
[01:25:18.880]in my year as Senate Chair,
[01:25:20.500]is this lingering thing.
[01:25:21.950]It's a task force report that should turn into a committee,
[01:25:25.130]about what to do about faculty
[01:25:27.110]short of revocation of tenure.
[01:25:31.701]I'm not gonna be the Senate Chair who gave admin
[01:25:34.550]more arrows in the quiver to get us with.
[01:25:38.480]But, let's take not only the Mike Adams case,
[01:25:41.917]but we had, this thing went national very briefly,
[01:25:46.750]it was mostly a Twitter phenomenon,
[01:25:48.310]and then it exploded onto blogs,
[01:25:49.706](hands clapping together)
[01:25:51.219]but we had a professor in our own department, in English,
[01:25:52.790]who was arguably transphobic.
[01:25:56.740]And the fact that he was a gay man
[01:25:59.340]made this really difficult,
[01:26:01.330]because, if I can go into it just for a moment.
[01:26:04.234]For those of you not even familiar
[01:26:06.850]with what the stakes are, (hands clapping together)
[01:26:09.020]there's two things.
[01:26:09.853]One is a deep, philosophical and political debate,
[01:26:12.768]disagreement, about surgery, (hands clapping together)
[01:26:18.030]about sexual transition,
[01:26:20.170]where some constituencies basically say,
[01:26:24.067]"Don't do it, don't transition, don't do the surgery,
[01:26:26.647]"just be gay.
[01:26:28.917]"Because if you do the transition,
[01:26:32.157]"you're reifying the idea that gender's biological."
[01:26:36.750]Now, I don't buy that myself,
[01:26:39.200]but that was the argument.
[01:26:42.016]On the trans side,
[01:26:42.849]it's like, you know what?
[01:26:44.240]You fought back the, you know, first there was.
[01:26:48.230]I'm old enough to remember. (hands clapping together)
[01:26:49.063]I used to say, I used to think it was a joke, it's not.
[01:26:51.183]But I'm so old that I remember when there was just G and L.
[01:26:54.750]Right?
[01:26:55.583]I'm so old that I remember
[01:26:56.416]when Michelob was a premium beer, right?
[01:26:59.050]And then Q came along.
[01:27:00.213]And I was in the room for some of those,
[01:27:02.720]the second annual graduate student conference
[01:27:05.860]on gay and lesbian studies was at Urbana-Champaign,
[01:27:08.550]University of Illinois.
[01:27:09.650]A young woman named Judith Butler was the keynote.
[01:27:12.360]She had just published this book, Gender Trouble.
[01:27:15.050]Bliss wasn't (mumbling) that dawn to be alive,
[01:27:16.670]but being Assistant Professor in the Humanities,
[01:27:19.251]very heavenly.
[01:27:20.532]And the older gay and lesbian activists
[01:27:22.610]thought that queer would destroy them all.
[01:27:25.530]Anybody can be queer, right?
[01:27:27.250]You've dissolved all our political movement
[01:27:30.720]into water vapor.
[01:27:31.930]And now I'm seeing the same thing 30 years ago,
[01:27:34.180]where the queer activists of 30 years ago are saying,
[01:27:36.717]"Oh no, now the trans people have come,
[01:27:38.117]"they're gonna undo all the queer work we did,
[01:27:40.437]"and now we're gonna have gender as biological fact again."
[01:27:43.480]So politically and intellectually, that's a debate.
[01:27:46.620]Refusing to call one of your students
[01:27:48.700]by their preferred name,
[01:27:49.900]or by their preferred pronoun?
[01:27:51.290]Which I can't say actually happened, I wasn't there,
[01:27:53.320]it's alleged.
[01:27:54.440]But that's another thing altogether, all right?
[01:27:57.730]So what, in fact, do you do?
[01:27:59.660]And it's not a firing offense, right?
[01:28:03.240]And one of the things,
[01:28:06.463]this gets down to a little, grainy details,
[01:28:07.530]there are some case, (hands clapping together)
[01:28:08.895]I don't know if you've been in meetings like this,
[01:28:10.026]where everyone goes around before the meeting
[01:28:10.859]with their pronouns, he/him/his, right?
[01:28:13.311]There are two objections to this.
[01:28:15.930]One, it puts people on the spot,
[01:28:19.570]if they don't want to identify one way or the other.
[01:28:22.847]So it actually outs people who are queerer than thou,
[01:28:26.510]they're not even gonna go by they, right?
[01:28:30.470]The other thing is that,
[01:28:31.450]I can tell you in 30 years of meetings as a faculty member,
[01:28:34.240]I have never once referred to a person around the table
[01:28:36.240]by their pronoun.
[01:28:37.260]I've always referred to them by name.
[01:28:38.940]I would just never say, "Well, she said..."
[01:28:40.660]I mean, it's kinda rude.
[01:28:42.030]So why are we doing this?
[01:28:43.796]But let's say you refuse to participate
[01:28:45.972]in that pronoun thing before a meeting.
[01:28:48.260]Have you transgressed something?
[01:28:50.120]Have you offended someone, right?
[01:28:51.860]Then you take this all the way up the spectrum
[01:28:53.890]to real serious gender or sexual harassment,
[01:28:57.151]and you've go the need for a policy.
[01:29:00.210]And in fact, let me, one last thing,
[01:29:02.910]I know we're a little over time.
[01:29:04.720]But, like I say, this stuff really does keep me up.
[01:29:08.730]Because I've been using this as an example,
[01:29:10.610]not only because it's timely and totally relevant.
[01:29:16.340]Oh, sorry.
[01:29:18.730]Yup.
[01:29:22.350]The title alone, God damn, you know.
[01:29:26.450]All the horrors.
[01:29:28.310]And I put this up at the last Faculty Senate meeting,
[01:29:35.250]I'm not skipping over the content,
[01:29:37.597]it's a hell of a policy.
[01:29:41.155]But look, sanctions!
[01:29:43.040]It's already in there.
[01:29:45.080]Termination from university, unpaid suspension,
[01:29:46.730]restrictions from all or portions of campus,
[01:29:48.360]change in working facility, mandated education,
[01:29:50.620]written reprimand in personnel file,
[01:29:51.900]that's like the lightest thing, right?
[01:29:54.457]Really, what in fact do you do?
[01:29:56.800]And should there, at the very least,
[01:29:58.330]I thought there should be an appeals process
[01:30:00.070]for people who were accused unjustly.
[01:30:02.030]In our research fraud policy,
[01:30:04.835]there's a clause at the end of it that says,
[01:30:07.317]"If you believe that you have been accused
[01:30:09.207]"of research fraud in bad faith,
[01:30:10.657]"you can turn the tables."
[01:30:13.004]But that's what you do.
[01:30:14.740]You do this, and you make sure those policies are in place,
[01:30:17.010]and there's a reasonable and reliable way of enforcing them
[01:30:21.470]that doesn't turn into a device
[01:30:24.230]for actually retaliating against innocent faculty
[01:30:28.930]who are just raising questions.
[01:30:31.224]But yeah, as far as Penn State is concerned, TBD.
[01:30:33.820]I just charged that committee last week.
[01:30:36.610]And it's among the most politically sensitive things
[01:30:38.680]I've done as Senate Chair,
[01:30:40.459]because a lot of faculty don't want to go this route at all.
[01:30:41.656]But one last thing about things going viral on social media.
[01:30:46.627](coughing) Excuse me.
[01:30:49.699]The part of that email that accused me of racism,
[01:30:52.520]accused me of calling people of color, monkeys.
[01:30:55.880]Okay.
[01:30:56.713]I mentioned the multiple universes hypothesis?
[01:30:58.410]There is no universe in which I would ever do that!
[01:31:00.880]And if I did, I should be fired.
[01:31:03.070]That should be a career ending thing, right?
[01:31:05.470]Here's what I actually said.
[01:31:07.780]Of all the things I've seen on the Internet,
[01:31:10.140]nothing was weirder than having my Wikipedia page attacked
[01:31:13.160]by a band of flying monkeys.
[01:31:15.070]And I kind of assumed
[01:31:15.940]that everyone has seen the Wizard of Oz.
[01:31:20.047]That's, right?
[01:31:22.958]So talk about things.
[01:31:24.195]It had nothing to do with anything in a classroom.
[01:31:25.180]It had to do with a conversation after a conference,
[01:31:27.710]in which people were talking about Internet aggression
[01:31:30.280]and trolling and what have you,
[01:31:31.490]and someone asked me,
[01:31:32.447]"You had a blog, you must have seen weird behavior?"
[01:31:34.360]I said, "Yeah, nothing as weird
[01:31:35.257]"as having your Wikipedia page attacked by flying monkeys."
[01:31:39.340]And maybe I was implying
[01:31:40.870]that there was a Wicked Witch of the West somewhere,
[01:31:42.270]but otherwise, it's really not a racially-tinged comment.
[01:31:46.230]Now, let's say though,
[01:31:48.067]that I did say something racially-tinged.
[01:31:52.526]You know, then what?
[01:31:53.800]Have I chilled the environment for students of color
[01:31:56.200]at Penn State in my own classes, and about the campus?
[01:31:58.220]Yeah, probably.
[01:31:59.560]And something really ought to be done.
[01:32:01.390]What to be done is TBD.
[01:32:05.860]But thanks for the question.
[01:32:07.997]And on that note, thanks.
[01:32:09.250]Let's give our thanks to Dr. Berube.
[01:32:11.491](audience applauding)

Talking Out of School: Academic Freedom and Extramural Speech

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Talking Out of School: Academic Freedom and Extramural Speech

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