Thank you for being here at this event. This is our grand opening week and we are thrilled you got to be part of this new site. We want to be a hub for activity, for the best thinking, ideas and consumer consumer information. We hope you come back more in the future. I work primarily on k12 education and as i think about the foundational issues undergirding policy and decentralization and nonprofit groups and pluralism and so forth. That is why this conversation we are having is so important to me and i hope important to you as well because on one level, this conversation about campus politics is about institution of Higher Education spirit is about campuses and hundreds of billions of dollars flow through them and students and faculty and the temperament and disposition thats created by that environment. Thats all true, but, it also reflects and influences something much deeper which is, do we actually still believe in democratic pluralism. Do we think that its great that people have different cultures and histories and viewpoints and that they live them out and they can come into spaces like universities that are about the Free Exchange of idea and mix things up, and most importantly, never have to worry about bei viewed as a heretic, that is, not assigning yourself to a certain orthodox. It could be the case that are universities could be reflecting something thats going on, and that could be unhealthy if we have gotten to this point where we dont believe in difference of opinion where we think parochialism is always bad and so forth. There could be no better core for this discussion than this brandnew book, and we are so fortunate, John Zimmerman is the author of campus politics and he is going it signals and some of us noise and give us a sense of why that matters. After that hell talk for 15 or 20 minutes and will give him a whole lot of leeway and then i will come back up here to have a conversation about this. We will bat around a handful of ideas. Indsprobably know f issues for quite some time. He has been in the trenches. Greg is the president ceo of fire which is probably the leading organization for working on campuses and freespeech issues and im a fan of his because he cowrote what i think was the best article of 2015 in the atlantic, the coddling of the American Mind. Its fascinating, one of the parts of johns book is that theres an increased emphasis among folks on campus thing the safe spaces, its good for Mental Health. There is this alternative argument that could actually be the exact opposite, that what were doing may actually inhibit peoples intellectual growth and may increase anxiety, depression and other things. Its deftly worth diving into. After our moderated discussion, depending on how forward leaning you folks are, if i can tell youre eager to get into the conversation i will move to q a pretty quickly. We just have a couple rules. Please make sure you raise your hand and we get a microphone to you. We want to make sure everyone can hear you. Make sure you introduce yourself, we would like to know who the conversation is happening between, and last but not least, please ask a question during the questionandanswer phase. We are trying to model Good Behavior here. This is a conversation about discussion and difference of opinion, its about being on receive and not just transmit so we are going to try to do that. If you get the microphone and you get five or ten seconds into your statements and i just see or semicolons on the horizon and no . , i may insert myself and pass the mic to someone else. Now to those friends who we have who are watching live stream, this is being lifestream, you can use , or anyone in the audience, if you want to use twitter or facebook or instagram its campus politics. You can tweet at me or at aei or at aei education and we will try to keep up on all that stuff. We even have this feature, so those people watching at home or from their offices, you can submit a question and i even have a device in realtime to keep up with this. If you go to slide. Doe and enter the code aei event, all you have to do is enter your name and the question and i will get a copy of it and sometimes during the discussion i will try to put those into the bloodstream so everyone can be heard. Sorry for the long throat clearing, im almost done talking. Order of operations, i hash up, dr. Zimmerman comes up and talks about the book, q a and then i promise to get you out of here by 1015. Please join me in welcoming our valued guests doctor John Zimmerman. [applause] thank you andy and kelsey and aei for welcoming me to this gorgeous new home. This is how god wouldve made the whole world if he had the money [laughter] its just beautiful. Thanks to andy for his lovely comments. He may be actually the first person who is not a blood relative to praise my book. Im not sure of that. The very first book i wrote when i was in nice, someone gave me this 800 number that you could call and allegedly it was described how your book is doing. I actually called it and put in the 800 number and i got the ubiquitous robot voice that said good morning, you have sold zero books today. That wasnt getting me any closer to god so i havent done it since, but by a brief message here is, first of all, nobody is being silenced. We have to be really careful in the words we use to describe the free speech problem. We have a very good sense of what the problem is and it is real. But we have to be really careful about the terms we use to describe it. There are 4000 places and most of them trigger warnings, microaggression, safe spaces, say what . Its say what . Its not an issue at all, people havent even heard those words at all. If you saw the times last week they will win great story about Laguardia College in the wake of the elections and all of the trauma in a safe space discussion that you see at campuses like mine, it was totally absent at laguardia. People were just trying to get through the day, pay their tuition, i have extraordinary freedom, nobody silenced me. As a historian, to call whats happening mccarthyism i find offensive and in insult to the very real suffering that happened under mccartney. However, there has been a narrowing of debate and discussion on our campuses, especially our elite ones. Theres a fairly good survey in literature that documents this. So they do studies where they asked students, is it safe to hold unpopular opinions on this campus. At the elite school, a declining fraction of kids say yes. That can be good. So as you you go through college, fewer and fewer students say yes its safe to hold unpopular opinions. When i was researching this book, frankly, i was surprised at the wide range of opinions that people hold but dont express. For example, it turns out, this was astonishing to me, that 40 of fulltime faculty in the United States oppose the use of race in college admission. 40 . I was hugely surprised to hear was that much. I can tell you for the sake of honesty that i am in the 60 , but, but i was ashamed to learn this because what it means is that the people who disagree with me arent actually speaking up very much, and i dont think that can be good for affirmative action or for the university. Think there is a problem with Political Correctness, but there again, we had to have to be very careful in the words that we use, and especially in the ways that they define, or we do find. I have argued there actually two kinds of pc, 11 that i support and one that i despise. Okay, the first kind of pc is one that creates very Strong Social, although not legal taboos on the use of highly offensive terms. I do not think it should be illegal for donald trump to call women pigs. I really dont. But, i think there should be Strong Social prohibitions and taboos on that. If that is pc, count me in. Again, i dont want to ban it, but if we as a Community Want to be a community, we have to have Certain Community standards. I think not calling women pigs adds anything to our discussion. I think again there should be Strong Social, not legal taboo. The second is the other kind of taboo which doesnt taboo words but taboos ideas. 40 of the faculty as opposed to racebased affirmative action, we are not hearing from them. That means theres a serious pc problem. Not the pc problem that prevents you from calling women pigs, but the kind that prevents you from engaging in whats one of the most important critical and important debates in our society about the use of race in a admissions. That kind of pc we all have to oppose because that inhibits us as educators, as learners, as human beings how did all this develop . Real problem is the rise of psychological language, idioms and metaphor from discussing politics. To be very clear, im an advocate of psychology and i will be very honest with you, there are Mental Health problems in my family. We have been a beneficiary of Mental Health services. Im not opposed to psychology, but i am opposed to the use of psychological idioms for dick discussing politics. One of the things i try to argue in my book is that psychology and politics dont play well together. If you say you are hurt or injured or traumatized by something i said, i think thats a conversation stopper. I dont have a lot to say to you in response. I wouldnt say to you that you werent i cant look into years old. I dont know what you are feeling. I would never deny it. What i do question is the use of feeling as a barometer or Playing Field for discussion because i think it inhibits it. I do think its very much a function of our own time. If you look for example of the term micro aggression, its fascinating. Nobody knew anything about him or it until the 2000s when it was revived this term. I havent really read his work before i got into his project. Its been hugely influential. What he has done is hes written these books on micro aggression and they take various kinds, one of them is the kind that highlights your difference in an allegedly different way, where you from, if you grew up in oregon and your parents are asian americans, you might be offended by that. Its like dude, im from im from oregon. Yes im asian, but im american so thats one kind of micro aggression, the one that highlights your difference, but there there is another time that erases it. When i look at you i dont see race. That can be a micro aggression too. Allegedly it denies your difference rather than highlighting it, or the one that spend most controversial, anyone who works hard enough in america can make it. This to is offensive. I can frankly imagine context in which all these statements could be offensive, definitely. In fact, given the right context or the wrong one, i might be offended too. What i question, as a university and especially University Administrator, in a way, declaring that these statements are somehow taboo. Thats evil. For University Administrator to make a statement about social mobility which is really what were talking about with respect to the last micro aggression, anyone who works hard enough to make it, thats one of the most controversial questions. A University Administrator should not be lying laying down a rule about that, but thats the other crucial context for understanding this. The rise of psychological idioms is one of them and the other is the rise of the administrative university. Friends, heres an ax. For talking about race and race controversy and race culture that has a certain kind of meaning like malcolm x. But i want you to think about another time. This is the fulltime faculty, this is a fulltime administration, and starting in the 90s, they cross. When when i was a kid, there were more faculty members and now there are more administrators than faculty. That is a hugely important context for understanding all of this. Just be clear, im not against University Administrators. In fact, i was one. We need them. Secondly, there there are often some very good reasons for the rise of administrators, and going back to Mental Health, the whole Mental Health apparatus, when i was a kid in the 70s, its now huge. You dont get that by snapping your fingers. You have to hire counselors and staffers and psychiatrists and all that. Im not against that. But, what i am against is trying to create Administrative Solutions is directive surrounding highly controversial questions. That cant be good. Cant be good for any of us. Thanks to greg and others, one of the things we discovered, even in the face of court decisions, rendering them unconstitutional, so do diversity trainings, if you look at the demands of students in the last round of protests, you see that two thirds of them focus on this thing called diversity training. Youve seen the rise of these things called bias response incident teams, these are all Managerial Solutions and they also have an incredibly weak academic base so take diversity, im not opposed to the idea about helping people address their differences, but when we look at and we tried to study the managerial efforts to improve or change peoples attitudes on the question of race, the Academic Research timing is important. He would take thousands of freshmen and follow them through college, interviewing them and testing them and what he found was the intervention on the part of the university, these universities, he couldnt show they had any effect. Its expensive, as parents of two young adults of im rather sensitive to that question. Whats does seem to improve peoples Racial Attitudes and their likelihood to have friends and lovers across races, having a roommate of a different race. To my mind, western civilization began to decline when freshmen were allowed to choose their roommate. I think thats the worst thing that happened in western civilization below and the behold, doug, if youre going to facebook and you can choose your roommate you will choose someone who looks just like you. We went to summer camp together or we had friends in common so youre not leveraging the benefits of diversity. I believe in diversity. If we allow kids to choose their freshman roommates we are not seriously, were not the angry, like, biblical parent of the in loco parentis days, you know . Were like the helicopter mom or dad, okay . We, we run the place, okay . The students are constantly asking for more administration, and we give it to them. And that, i think, is what really differentiates this generation of protests from earlier ones, you know . Tom hayden died recently, and i wrote a column about him. Very complicated figure. And if you look at the port huron statement which is kind of the classic early statement of student protest which, of course, hayden drafted, it has a really interesting language. It says we need to wrest control from the administrative bureaucracy. And that seems like its from another era because it is. Okay . Now its can we have more administration, please . Can we have another statement from you . There was an awful racist incident that happened on my campus recently involving terrible emails sent to africanamerican students, right . And everyone is asking the president to say the right words. Oh, president guttman, please, say these mystical words, say the right incantation. And in closing, if you really want to see how Different Things are, go ahead and google the Wellesley College graduation of 1969. Because at that graduation, that was a first one that a student spoke, which is kind of interesting, okay . And you already know her name, it was Hillary Diane rodham, later to be Hillary Rodham clinton. And if you look at the speech, its really interesting because she says we need fewer curricular requirements, we need a pass fail system, and most of all we need students to direct their own education. And she, she writes, hillary were searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating moods of living. Were all exploring a world that none of us understands. Its such a great adventure. I think it is, actually, i think it is still a great adventure. None of us know where its going. But at our universities, we will narrow that adventure if we continue to think of to it in narrow psychological terms that restrict what we say and what we think. Most of all, well narrow the adventure if our students and our faculty invest ever more power in the people that run these institutions instead of in themselves. Thanks a lot. [applause] all right. Were about to all take our seats up here. Im going to walk very carefully up here, so i dont slip. [laughter] so i have lots of questions. And i want to get david and greg to be able to weigh in with their thoughts initially. But i just have to ask all of you, if you dont mind just responding to, the administrative question is the thing that stood out to me in your book. It wasnt always this way, that administrators seemed theres even a quote in your book along the lines of in every single instance it seems like the administrators bend over backwards to say, yes, yes, you were right, we were wrong. How did that happen . Is it a different type of administrator who now is going into the office . Is it a difference with fundraising . This seems to be a change in type. Definitely. And i want to hear the other two gentlemen talk about this, but i think one thing you have to think about is you have to think about the expanding role of the federal government in education, right . And what that does to the university is it just requires it to hire more administrators. I mean, think about the whole title ix revolution. Again, none of this is necessarily bad. Sometimes its very good, right . But if the federal government is more deeply involved in the university, by definition youre going to need more administrators to figure out how to comply with the federal government, right . I think, i think though more broadly theres also been a huge change in the sensibility of the students who see themselves as consumers very often rather than necessarily as learners. So one of the things that ive been struck by in debates ive