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00:02:41.560 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Season 4, Episode 75.

00:02:47.040 I'm Michaela Peterson.

00:02:48.020 In this episode, Dr. Arif Ahmed and Dr. James Orr came on the podcast to talk about the Cambridge incident

00:02:55.920 and the events that led to Cambridge rescinding Dad's invitation to speak there in 2018.

00:03:02.680 After that, they spoke about anonymous reporting and the dangers of silencing free speech in general

00:03:08.500 and how change can be difficult within academia.

00:03:11.380 They talk about writing, bad education, microaggressions,

00:03:16.000 the latest UK legislation, which is really important, inspired by the Cambridge incident

00:03:22.020 and the importance of humor.

00:03:25.000 Arif Ahmed is a philosopher and lecturer at the University of Cambridge.

00:03:30.000 As a vocal defender of political diversity,

00:03:32.460 he strongly reacted to the Cambridge cancellation of Dad's talk

00:03:35.740 and was instrumental in getting him back there.

00:03:38.400 Dr. Arif Ahmed is the author of two books linked in show notes titled Saul Kripke

00:03:44.180 and Evidence, Decision and Causality.

00:03:47.960 Dr. James Orr is an assistant in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge.

00:03:53.260 He teaches philosophy, religion and ethics at Cambridge.

00:03:57.280 James is also the author of The Mind of God and the Works of Nature

00:04:01.380 and a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and The Critic Magazine.

00:04:07.920 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:04:10.220 Also, there are a few tickets left to an in-person Q&A I'm doing in Nashville.

00:04:15.580 If any of you good folks want to come by to Zany's on Thursday, January 20th,

00:04:20.520 type in Zany's and Michaela Petersen and that event will pop up.

00:04:31.380 Hello, everybody.

00:04:44.440 I'm speaking today with Dr. James Orr and Dr. Arif Ahmed,

00:04:49.440 both professors at Cambridge University.

00:04:52.660 Dr. Orr is in the Faculty of Divinity

00:04:54.620 and specializes in the philosophy of religion.

00:04:58.120 Dr. Ahmed is in the Faculty of Philosophy

00:05:00.980 and specializes in the study of decision-making in the face of uncertainty,

00:05:06.080 which is a particular interest of mine,

00:05:08.320 and is a leading expert on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work,

00:05:12.640 including his writing on religions.

00:05:15.320 I recently released a discussion with Dr. Orr and Dr. Nigel Bigger,

00:05:19.820 which was well-received,

00:05:21.140 and about religious issues and philosophical issues in general,

00:05:24.920 so a more academic discussion.

00:05:26.480 But we decided to follow that up with a talk about some events that occurred in March 2019,

00:05:32.860 when I was disinvited to Cambridge after being invited.

00:05:37.900 We're going to talk about what happened since.

00:05:40.380 Since I'm returning,

00:05:41.960 I'm going to be going to Cambridge and to Oxford for the last two weeks of November.

00:05:47.100 So we're going to talk about how that came about,

00:05:50.140 about the state of free speech at the Academy in general and other general issues.

00:05:56.160 So I'll start by telling the story of the disinvitation as I experienced it.

00:06:00.820 So I was invited to Cambridge by some professors in the Faculty of Divinity

00:06:07.280 to conduct a seminar or to take part in the seminar on Exodus,

00:06:12.320 which was to be a follow-up to my lectures on Genesis,

00:06:15.980 which proved to be somewhat surprisingly popular on YouTube.

00:06:21.100 And so I thought I would delve into Exodus with some of the world's leading authorities

00:06:27.100 to sharpen myself up and then maybe dive into Exodus as a lecture series.

00:06:32.940 Anyways, we had that planned and then it got canceled because a photograph of me emerged

00:06:41.100 that was taken with this guy in New Zealand.

00:06:44.640 And now that was taken during a meet and greet after my tour lecture.

00:06:52.020 So I went to 130 cities in 2018.

00:06:56.440 And afterwards, at all of them, I had my picture taken with about 100 people,

00:07:03.620 one by one or two by two, sometimes with families.

00:07:06.340 So about maybe 15,000 pictures, photographs of which this was one.

00:07:13.200 And so I remember this actually at New Zealand.

00:07:16.240 So this guy came walking up to me and he sort of stopped and he had this T-shirt on

00:07:21.760 and he looked at me sort of questioningly.

00:07:23.660 And it was a T-shirt outlining his criticisms of Islam, of radical Islam, as he saw it.

00:07:32.040 And I looked at it and I looked at him.

00:07:34.080 And again, he kind of looked questioning and apologetic.

00:07:37.120 And then I thought, well, you know, that's your T-shirt, mate.

00:07:40.060 And that's up to you to wear that.

00:07:42.000 And so, you know, I motioned him forward.

00:07:44.980 We had our picture taken.

00:07:47.000 And I really didn't think anything of it after that.

00:07:49.840 But apparently many people did.

00:07:51.840 And so I was disinvited because of my repugnant views, which were hypothetically indicated

00:07:59.060 by the fact that I took one picture out of 15,000 with this gentleman wearing a opinionated

00:08:07.200 T-shirt.

00:08:08.240 And so that was apparently justification for canceling an intense academic endeavor aimed

00:08:15.640 at bringing the work in Exodus to as broad a public population as possible in the most

00:08:22.320 rigorous manner possible.

00:08:23.860 And so that was quite a shock, I would say.

00:08:27.980 And, you know, it wasn't particularly enjoyable to go through all that.

00:08:32.640 So, well, that's turned around and now I'm invited back and I'm going in November.

00:08:39.860 And so how did, James, maybe you could start.

00:08:44.020 How did that all come about, do you think?

00:08:46.220 Like, why did that happen?

00:08:47.340 And why has it been reversed?

00:08:50.600 Well, thank you, Jordan.

00:08:54.440 And just listening to you recount your experiences of beginning of March 2019, was it beginning

00:09:00.800 of 2019 is, well, it's pretty moving to watch and difficult to hear.

00:09:09.320 But I just want to stress that with all that in the background, it's incredibly gracious of

00:09:15.200 you to have accepted my invitation to come over to Cambridge.

00:09:20.840 I'm thrilled about it.

00:09:22.240 I'm thrilled about it.

00:09:23.460 So it's not a favor in any sense.

00:09:25.460 It's a great university and I think it's an unbelievable privilege to go there and to

00:09:30.280 go to Oxford.

00:09:31.080 So I'm absolutely thrilled about it.

00:09:34.520 Well, if I may say so, I think it's a testament to your character and to your resilience and

00:09:40.140 capacity for forbearance and forgiveness that you've accepted the invitation.

00:09:45.200 And just by way of encouragement, I want to say that the reaction to the news of of your

00:09:50.840 visit from colleagues and from students in the university, beyond the university, from

00:09:56.020 members of the general public has been overwhelmingly positive.

00:10:00.840 It's been difficult to respond to all the supportive messages I've received in the wake of the

00:10:06.820 announcement.

00:10:08.080 And I just think it's obvious just from the reaction to the kinds of questions that we were

00:10:13.280 exploring on on your podcast a few weeks ago, that there's a huge appetite among people

00:10:19.260 for the kinds of questions that that we're going that we were exploring in that conversation

00:10:23.100 and that we're planning to explore in research seminars and talks with with colleagues and

00:10:28.840 students here in November.

00:10:31.280 And as I said to my colleagues, who I think are excited about your visit, I've had almost

00:10:38.100 no no word of criticism at all from colleagues in the faculty or from students in the faculty.

00:10:43.920 I think there's a recognition that you would be you're going to be a perfect interlocutor

00:10:49.260 for for all sorts of people here, particularly on quest for those of us who work in for those

00:10:54.340 of us who work in theology and and religion.

00:10:57.580 You've encouraged lots of young people to take sacred texts seriously, to think about

00:11:03.460 how you read to read ancient and difficult texts about the the meaning of value of religion

00:11:09.460 and society today.

00:11:10.700 So, you know, I know that was a difficult time for you.

00:11:14.320 And I'd not actually been appointed to my post back then or think I maybe I had been appointed

00:11:19.740 just a few weeks before that happened.

00:11:21.900 But so I wasn't privy to the kind of inner workings of the decision making and so on.

00:11:27.280 And I think what I can say is that it was a relative, a very, very small number of people

00:11:34.480 who were concerned or showing strong resistance to your coming.

00:11:41.020 I think this is something that we can talk about later, that the way in which in these big

00:11:47.560 universities, a relatively small number of determined, ideological, ideologically driven

00:11:54.140 students, it's often students, but but also colleagues who will, who will buckle in the

00:12:00.840 face of student resistance, the capacity they have to project the idea that their view is

00:12:08.820 a dominant orthodoxy.

00:12:10.740 And I think the mechanics of how that happens is a very interesting one.

00:12:14.500 And the gap between the sort of asymmetry between those two positions, what seems what is actually

00:12:22.120 a minority view, and then this impression that it's a very, that it's an orthodoxy, as I

00:12:30.980 said, was laid bare in the in the events that followed, which really were prompted by what

00:12:39.400 Arif decided to do in response to the university announcing that it was going to set out a

00:12:45.520 Yeah, well, it's very, it's very interesting and strange that I could be sufficiently reprehensible

00:12:53.420 to be banned from the university, you know, three years ago, and I haven't changed, I don't

00:12:58.700 think.

00:12:59.040 And yet, when I'm reinvited that the overwhelming response that you've received so far is positive,

00:13:06.500 that's very peculiar.

00:13:07.660 And so, and worth delving into, I think.

00:13:12.180 And, and, and Dr. Ahmed, you were, you played a role in now, as I understand it, the policies

00:13:18.660 of the university with regards to inviting speakers have actually been changed.

00:13:22.580 And the mechanics of that are worth delving into, too, just so maybe you could tell us

00:13:27.580 the story about how that happened and why and how you got involved.

00:13:31.120 Yeah, thank you.

00:13:31.940 And before I start on that, Jordan, I just want to say that we're, first of all, really

00:13:37.060 positive and looking forward to your, to your visit.

00:13:39.120 And like James, I've had a lot of positive comments about it.

00:13:42.540 But also that we as a university should be very grateful to James Orr, because he was

00:13:46.640 the one who had the vision and the initiative to, to re-extend the invitation.

00:13:51.540 And it's great that he's, that he's done that.

00:13:55.060 Now, in terms of what happened, as you say, there was this, what I regard as an outrageous

00:13:59.900 disinvitation of you in the spring of 2019.

00:14:04.760 So as you know, what happened was, was you were invited, you accepted the invitation and

00:14:09.660 you were then disinvited.

00:14:11.820 And as I recall, not even told that you'd been disinvited.

00:14:14.460 You found out.

00:14:15.120 Yeah, that was one of the funny things.

00:14:16.820 You found out on Twitter.

00:14:18.160 They didn't even have a, I mean, it was not only discourteous, but worse than discourteous.

00:14:22.100 It was, it was cowardly, I thought.

00:14:23.640 Um, well, if you had to make a case for the people who disinvited me, like, what is it?

00:14:29.500 What do you think it was that they were trying to stop exactly?

00:14:32.960 I mean, it's worth investigating the motives and the belief, as well as then we can talk

00:14:37.660 about to some degree, the fact that it seems to be a minority view.

00:14:40.980 Well, my, my feeling is that it's, it's related to the things that James was saying, that the

00:14:46.000 university authorities or those who are responsible for this decision, um, have been frightened by,

00:14:51.460 by, uh, a group of highly committed ideologues, um, who gave the impression that this was a

00:14:56.340 general university view, that there was outrage about, about your position.

00:15:00.580 In fact, I didn't think that's true.

00:15:02.000 And in any case, being photographed next to someone, um, doesn't imply anything about

00:15:06.880 your position at all.

00:15:08.400 And that was one of the most outrageous things was the statement by the university at the

00:15:11.740 time, which they called, as I recall, endorsement by association, as though simply standing

00:15:17.540 next to someone who's, who's wearing clothes that expresses views implies that you

00:15:21.440 have those views yourself.

00:15:22.820 Um, that argument was so bad, it must've been a pretext.

00:15:26.160 And I think it was a pretext.

00:15:27.600 It was a pretext for a kind of, a kind of fear of a mob.

00:15:30.640 Um, so what do you think they were afraid of?

00:15:33.040 So let's say it wasn't the fact that I got, had my picture taken with this character who

00:15:37.440 was wearing this t-shirt.

00:15:38.880 It was something else that they didn't want me to do, I suppose, or be.

00:15:45.120 What do you think that was exactly?

00:15:46.720 Do you have any sense of that?

00:15:48.000 Uh, yeah, I mean, I think ultimately they were, they probably, they probably feared protests.

00:15:51.520 They feared reputational damage.

00:15:53.280 They feared a sense that all the students would think that Cambridge was, was, was enabling

00:15:58.720 someone whom these people regard as, as unacceptable.

00:16:01.760 Um, those are the things they feared.

00:16:04.000 But frankly, if you're an academic, the one thing, the one thing that is your job is not

00:16:09.600 to care what the mob thinks.

00:16:11.120 It's not to care, you know, who's going to be upset or frightened by the people you invite.

00:16:14.880 You probably invite people because they can speak the truth and you can have a discussion,

00:16:18.560 which leads to mutual, you know, understanding and advancement of knowledge.

00:16:21.600 So I think it was actually-

00:16:23.600 We should hope, we should all devoutly hope that an institution as august and as remarkable

00:16:31.200 as Cambridge would be a model for courage in such matters, instead of being cowed by a loud,

00:16:41.280 ideologically possessed minority.

00:16:43.120 Because, you know, you might think, well, if Cambridge University can't withstand this,

00:16:47.360 then who the hell can?

00:16:49.360 And that's a real, that's a serious question.

00:16:51.600 And, and these things have to be examined seriously.

00:16:54.640 I mean, it's, we need institutions that we can respect and that, and that hold up the standards

00:17:03.360 that have made them what they are.

00:17:05.360 And if they fold, well, how can you expect normal people, say, not to be cowed and intimidated

00:17:11.840 by the same tactics?

00:17:13.120 Absolutely, absolutely.

00:17:14.320 Actually, I mean, there were two other episodes on my mind, one of which sort of confirmed my

00:17:18.240 theory about what was happening in your case.

00:17:20.400 The other of which suggested different sorts of motivations.

00:17:22.720 So one of them was a case that occurred around the same time as yours, which was a case of a research

00:17:28.000 fellow at St Edmunds College here in Cambridge, who was doing research.

00:17:31.840 He was a sociologist, a very well-known, respectable sociologist.

00:17:35.440 He had work, his work profile in The Economist and top journals.

00:17:39.920 He was fired because there was, again, there was a mob protesting about his associations,

00:17:45.920 conferences he'd been to, journals that he published in, in which other people that they

00:17:49.520 found distasteful had published in, and so on.

00:17:51.520 Again, Donald said nothing illegal.

00:17:53.920 That was one case, which again, I think illustrates the sorts of pressures that I think were being brought

00:17:57.840 to bear.

00:17:58.160 And what were the topics for that?

00:17:59.760 The topics of race and intelligence.

00:18:01.760 Yes, yes, yes.

00:18:03.120 Well, the intelligence literature is rough, that's for sure.

00:18:07.040 I mean, the whole thing was so chilling, Jordan, because it was decided by an inquiry that was

00:18:12.000 kept secret.

00:18:12.720 Nobody's going to know what the evidence was in this inquiry.

00:18:16.080 So the whole thing was terrifying.

00:18:19.360 The other case was slightly different.

00:18:20.640 So there was another case that concerned me, which was a case where it was an event for the

00:18:24.880 Palestinian society, where there was a chair from that society, which the university threatened to

00:18:30.080 shut down because they thought they were worried that the chair might be an extremist or something.

00:18:34.160 She wasn't at all.

00:18:34.800 She was a respectful, respectable academic from SOAS.

00:18:38.480 And the university imposed its own, its own chair on that.

00:18:41.520 Now that was slightly different because that was responding to another, another threat of free speech,

00:18:46.160 which is the government's legislation on prevent and anti-terrorism.

00:18:49.120 Um, but those three events were sort of coalescing in my mind around the time that I tried to change

00:18:54.320 the, um, change the university's free speech policy.

00:18:58.400 Okay.

00:18:58.720 So what did, so let's talk about the change in the free speech policy.

00:19:01.920 What, what changes did you propose?

00:19:04.320 And then it took a couple of years, as I understand, to really get this through.

00:19:08.720 And I also understand from James that it wasn't that easy to get people to speak in favor of

00:19:14.480 your proposal, but that it was passed and when we need to go into that by an overwhelming majority

00:19:20.400 of the people who were concerned and able to legislate such things, so to speak for the university.

00:19:26.320 Yeah.

00:19:26.640 So I can take you through that.

00:19:27.840 What happened was it was, this was around actually March, 2020.

00:19:31.840 So about a year after your, your case and the university had decided that it was going to put

00:19:37.360 through a new freedom of speech policy.

00:19:39.440 Um, uh, this is obviously at a time when everyone had had other things on their mind.

00:19:44.160 At least in Britain in March, 2020, they didn't offer a vote on it.

00:19:47.600 They just wanted to put it straight through.

00:19:49.520 And it was a policy which I found concerning, especially in life of these incidents.

00:19:53.120 Um, one part of it was that it mandates said that we have a right to free speech,

00:19:57.600 but we must always exercise respect for other people's identities and opinions.

00:20:02.320 Now that might seem innocuous.

00:20:03.760 Um, uh, but of course the word respect being so vague.

00:20:07.680 It doesn't seem innocuous to me.

00:20:09.920 Indeed.

00:20:10.960 I mean, it seems terrible because it just, it just removes the first part of protection

00:20:16.080 for free speech.

00:20:16.800 I mean, if you have to be cautious about other people's opinions, much less their identity.

00:20:22.080 Well, we should reverse that their identity, much less their opinions as well.

00:20:25.600 Who decides when that's respectful and what?

00:20:27.840 Yeah.

00:20:28.080 Yeah.

00:20:28.240 It's just weasel words that.

00:20:29.520 Exactly.

00:20:30.240 And the bit about identities, I bet they had you in mind when they were saying that actually.

00:20:33.680 Um, uh, uh, but whenever anyone says I believe in free speech, but that's a good sign to me

00:20:38.800 that they don't believe in free speech. And that was the impression that this policy gave off.

00:20:43.120 Other parts of the policy, um, which may not have been directly explicitly new,

00:20:46.480 but which certainly brought you in those other cases, for instance,

00:20:49.040 the Palestinian society to mind were rules, which said that the university could stop speaker events

00:20:54.240 if they thought they would threaten the welfare of students.

00:20:56.560 No welfare is defined to get undefined and could be interpreted broadly.

00:21:00.800 Um, and indeed allowed the university to stop events under pretty much any circumstances

00:21:05.840 that they liked speaker events, for instance. So those were the, that was the proposed policy

00:21:10.560 in March, 2020.

00:21:11.840 So why did that, why did that bother you so much? I mean, you're pretty young and, and,

00:21:16.880 and starting your academic career in many ways. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but you know,

00:21:22.640 it's a hell of a thing to take on and it's not without its risks. And I'm always curious

00:21:26.560 about people's motives. It's like, there's lots of professors at Cambridge. Why,

00:21:30.560 why do you think this was your problem? Well, you flatter me about being young, but, uh, uh,

00:21:37.200 I will say that I guess there were two things. One of them was philosophical and one was more

00:21:40.640 to do with the nature of the job. So philosophically speaking, my basic philosophical position is,

00:21:45.760 is what you might call classical liberal. So my basic value is individual liberty. Um,

00:21:51.280 and, uh, you know, I would, uh, in terms of what I, what I do in my political engagement,

00:21:55.840 um, even my professional engagement, to some extent, you know, that's the, the ultimate and

00:22:00.480 most important, important value. So for me, it really touched a nerve. Um, uh, it touched something

00:22:04.800 that was the core of my identity. If you want to use that, that, um, appalling word. Um, the other

00:22:10.240 aspect, which I said was professional was simply to do something I alluded to earlier, which was,

00:22:14.240 what is this job for? It's part of your duty as an academic. I would have thought, you know,

00:22:18.720 academics are normally cautious as they should be, but the one thing that they shouldn't be cautious about

00:22:22.880 is defending the ultimate, um, uh, purpose of the academy. And that cannot be, um, pursued

00:22:28.240 without free speech. Um, and without the ability to question freely, um, beliefs that are held by

00:22:33.760 the majority, also beliefs that are held by minorities, and without worrying about who you're

00:22:37.520 going to offend, who's going to be hurt by your words, especially in a, in a subject like philosophy,

00:22:42.080 and I dare say in a subject like yours, and certainly in a subject like James's, you can't have

00:22:46.480 free discussion if every time you talk about something, you're frightened that you're going to

00:22:50.000 offend the other person, and then they might report to you and you might get in trouble.

00:22:53.120 I can't do my job. I didn't expect James can, I didn't expect you can, if you, if discussion

00:22:57.120 is curtailed in that way. So no scientists can, because that freedom of inquiry and the freedom

00:23:02.720 to upset traditional truths, let's say, well, in some, in a really fundamental sense, that's what

00:23:08.880 science is all about. And as a, let's say a creative scientist, you're always working against

00:23:16.400 what's established, because otherwise what you discovered wouldn't be new. And you're always

00:23:20.720 going to be facing people who are upset for one reason or another by your hypotheses and your

00:23:25.600 research. So it's, it's, it's not, it's not a side issue here. It's, it's crucial to the academy as such.

00:23:32.800 Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's absolutely...

00:23:34.800 But that still doesn't explain why you made it your problem, say, when so many people were perfectly

00:23:40.640 willing to remain silent.

00:23:41.360 Well, one thing I would say is that I was slightly, I was slightly surprised.

00:23:45.360 Um, when I wrote, so after, after the university's policy came out, um, there was a discussion.

00:23:51.840 What's called a discussion in Cambridge University really means that you write a paper and it's,

00:23:56.160 it's published in the university magazine. Um, and so I sent a short paper off proposing some

00:24:02.000 changes to these policies and stating my objections. And I had expected this being Cambridge

00:24:06.640 University that many other people would do the same. Um, because I didn't think I was alone in

00:24:10.960 being concerned about this. Um, uh, nobody else did. So I was, that was the first point at which I,

00:24:17.040 I realized. So there was no, there was no real bravery on my part because I had expected at that

00:24:21.280 point that a lot of people, a lot of other people would be, would be jumping in. Um, nobody did.

00:24:26.640 So that was the point at which I realized that I was perhaps more isolated, um, than I'd expected.

00:24:32.080 Um, to go back to your question about motivations, I mean, I don't know what more I can tell you. I mean,

00:24:35.840 these are things that matter to me. I don't really care if anyone else is doing it or not.

00:24:39.280 And did you face any trouble? So you voiced your opinion and you wanted to modify this,

00:24:44.000 this document, which had, let's say politically correct underpinnings and did it cause grief for

00:24:49.920 you? Were, were people outraged by what you said or, or did things proceed as a matter of course?

00:24:55.520 Well, it was interesting. So some people, uh, some people wrote to me, in fact,

00:24:59.280 quite a few people wrote to me at the time saying that they agreed with, with my concerns, um,

00:25:04.240 which sort of made it even more surprising that nobody had actually said so in public. Um, some

00:25:08.720 people wrote to me saying they agreed with my concerns, but weren't willing to, to, to say

00:25:11.760 anything in public. Um, uh, James was, was, as always was brilliantly helpful. James has always been

00:25:18.400 really supportive and James has been publicly supportive throughout this process, but it's

00:25:22.240 because there have been a few courageous people like James and a few others, you know, in Cambridge

00:25:26.160 at that stage, that was definitely a big, a big help. Um, so there was some support. I also had people

00:25:31.840 warning me. So I had people saying, you know, you might get, you know, you might get some kind

00:25:35.840 of disciplinary procedure. You might get some kind of investigation. I didn't expect anything at that

00:25:40.000 stage and indeed nothing happened, um, to me at that stage. And I'm pleased to say there'd be no

00:25:44.320 investigations or anything out of me, of me since. Um, so that's really interesting in two ways,

00:25:49.920 isn't it? Because it shows you how loathed people are to do this because they're afraid and

00:25:55.760 we shouldn't make light of that because this is actually no fun. You know, if, if you do something

00:26:01.440 like this and it explodes in your face, like it, it probably took me, oh, it took me a long time to

00:26:08.240 recover from the disinvitation, especially the way it was handled. And my health and my wife's health

00:26:13.760 were extremely compromised at the time. And so it came at a, a particularly bad time. We had just

00:26:20.960 received news that she probably had terminal cancer. And so this came on top of that. Now,

00:26:26.080 luckily that she survived, thank God, but you know, it was a harrowing time. And so I, I see why people

00:26:33.600 can be cowed like this because you know, you don't know when this is going to explode and when it's

00:26:38.800 going to tangle you up so deeply that while your job's gone, that's what happened to the Weinsteins,

00:26:42.800 for example, at Evergreen. And I mean, that was really, that did them a tremendous amount of damage.

00:26:48.080 They're unbelievably resourceful and they got back on their feet and, and, you know,

00:26:52.160 they were a husband and wife team, so they had each other and that was good, but not everybody

00:26:56.080 can do that. And you can get seriously taken out if, if something like this goes wrong.

00:27:01.040 So, but then that ties into this issue we discussed a bit earlier, which is how a small minority of,

00:27:06.960 you know, people who, whose wrath knows no bounds in some sense can be so dominant.

00:27:11.920 Yep. Yep. So it was, it was, it was in some ways a calculated risk. I mean, I can't imagine how

00:27:17.600 difficult that must have been for you, Jordan. It was, you know, it must have been horrific.

00:27:23.520 I mean, one thing I saw happening in Cambridge, not right, not quite then, but a little bit later,

00:27:27.440 was the treatment that was meted at to, not an academic, but to a member of the university staff.

00:27:33.040 So we have, we have college porters in Cambridge. And these are, these are people who work at the

00:27:37.600 colleges. Um, uh, often they're, they're sort of, you know, retired policemen or military or something,

00:27:42.240 um, really helpful. They do all kinds of jobs around the college. Students rely on them. The

00:27:46.480 academics rely on them. The ones in my college are brilliant. There was one at a college in

00:27:51.680 Cambridge who was also a labor counselor, um, who, uh, who resigned on political grounds, which was to do

00:27:58.560 with his view about, about trans issues. So he thought it was, you know, there was a, there was

00:28:03.280 a motion about trans issues that he thought, you know, threatened women's safety. And so he resigned

00:28:08.000 on a point of principle and that's his political activity. That's his right. I could, I could understand

00:28:12.240 his grounds for doing that. The students at his college. So these are typically much more privileged

00:28:17.920 people than him. Students at his college formed a mob to try to get this man sacked. Um, and this was,

00:28:24.080 this was, you know, this is a much more privileged people. They didn't care about, you know,

00:28:28.320 the consequences for him. Um, they just thought because he diverted from their line of ideological

00:28:32.640 purity. Do you remember this case, James? And James may know more about me, but yeah.

00:28:37.600 I do. And it was thanks to a very brave female undergraduate. I think she was in her,

00:28:41.760 even her second year, she spoke out, uh, wrote a public article about it, uh, uh, great courage,

00:28:48.560 uh, I thought to herself and she, uh, there was, there was an awful lot of resistance to her

00:28:52.800 doing that, but, uh, it was remarkable. Uh, she got in touch with us. I seem to remember,

00:28:57.040 and I can't remember how the case was resolved. The, well, I think the case, the case in the

00:29:01.360 end was resolved positively. Um, uh, but that's right. So Sophie, she was just Sophie Watson.

00:29:06.240 She was brilliant. Um, she actually wrote an article in which she said, and I thought

00:29:09.280 this is very telling to describe the state of the Academy. She said, when I came to Cambridge,

00:29:14.240 I was expecting, she said the, the motto of the Royal Society is don't take anyone's word for it.

00:29:18.800 And she said, that's what she was expecting. When I come to Cambridge, I was expecting

00:29:22.560 to engage in rigorous discussion where all of my cherished beliefs would be challenged. Um,

00:29:26.560 you know, and I'd come away shaken and uncomfortable. And I would think for myself

00:29:30.320 and I would be forced to rethink everything with the most important things in my life.

00:29:33.840 I think she was actually studying psychology. Um, and then she said, when I got here,

00:29:37.200 it wasn't like that. When I got here, I felt that, that I was being coddled and there were certain

00:29:41.280 things that you couldn't question, certain things that you were just made to feel an outsider.

00:29:44.640 I don't want you to question. It was a really, it was a brilliant article, um, uh, and really telling

00:29:48.960 because it was her own experience of what, what it's like for a student now compared to what it was

00:29:53.440 like when I was, when I was an undergraduate, you know, many years ago. Um, so that's an illustration

00:29:59.440 of, of how things can go wrong and the sorts of things, you know, we were seeing around us, um,

00:30:04.080 in the sort of summer and then the autumn of, of 2020. Um, James, did you want to say anything

00:30:09.360 more about that point? We can talk more about, about that. No, I mean, I think it was then,

00:30:14.160 wasn't it June, July, 2020. I remember you came, came around for lunch around here and we started

00:30:20.160 talking about, you know, who, who might be willing to, uh, sign in public, uh, a support,

00:30:26.080 which was required by the mechanisms of the, um, the, all the kind of procedural mechanisms.

00:30:30.720 I think we needed 25 names, wasn't it? Um, and I think we could come up between us. We managed to come

00:30:36.640 up with seven or eight and then over the, and then it took us another eight, 10 weeks to get past the

00:30:45.520 25. I think it was September that we were starting to, starting to look promising. And in fact, I think

00:30:50.400 in the end we got quite a few more than 25 for the three amendments that, that, that Arif was proposing

00:30:57.120 to introduce, to kind of, to, to, to take out the respect language and replace it with. Okay. So you

00:31:03.200 needed tolerance. You needed those 25 to put the amendments forward. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

00:31:11.360 So that would indicate that some people were concerned that that requirement for 25 rather

00:31:15.600 than just one person, but, and it was hard to get 25. Yeah, it was, it's telling, it's telling that,

00:31:21.360 that actually, um, I mean, there might've been two reasons why, one reason why it might've been because it

00:31:26.000 was a trivial issue and nobody cared about it. Who cares quibbling about a few, a few words.

00:31:30.480 Another reason, which I suspect was, you know, which turned out was with the more likely explanation

00:31:35.280 was that actually a lot of people were afraid to sign something in public.

00:31:38.560 Um, so why do you think it's not trivial and why do you think that argument's invalid?

00:31:42.640 And, uh, the reason I thought the argument was, it was invalid because the additional evidence

00:31:46.720 that I got after the vote, because the vote actually had a very high, a lot of people bothered to

00:31:50.320 vote on this. Um, and they bothered to vote for that change. If it had been a trivial thing,

00:31:55.040 nobody would have cared to vote. Um, so that was one bit of evidence. The other bit of evidence

00:31:59.040 was the testimony of the people who wrote to me or who I called up at the time. Um, and James may

00:32:03.200 have got this as well. You know, people who were saying that we support this and we can see what

00:32:06.240 you're doing and we can see why it's a concern, but I just don't want to get involved in this kind

00:32:09.760 of fight right now. Getting involved in this is going to be too difficult for me right now. I'm up for

00:32:13.520 promotion right now. No, I don't want to face all of these things. So yeah. Well, you practice what you

00:32:19.040 become, we'd be sorry. You become what you practice. And you know, that's well, and this

00:32:24.400 is something I learned as a psychologist. And I think maybe it was part of my temperament to begin

00:32:28.400 with is like, if you put off fights, they don't get better. Not usually they usually get worse.

00:32:34.560 And maybe you think, well, I'll be in better position later. And you might be, but probably you

00:32:39.360 won't. And so that notion that it's not a good time. Fair enough. You know, I hate conflict. I really

00:32:47.200 hate it. I'm not built for it temperamentally, but I've learned through painful experience,

00:32:54.080 I would say, and not least as a clinician that when the, when you see the elephant's trunk under

00:33:00.240 the rug, you can infer the rest of the elephant and it's going to get bigger as you feed it with

00:33:05.920 your stupidity and your withdrawal and, and you let whatever it's feeding on continue. And it's

00:33:12.080 extremely dangerous. You see, you see this reflected in, in ancient mythology, actually quite,

00:33:17.680 quite nicely in many, in many situations. You see that in this, in the Mesopotamian creation myth,

00:33:23.120 where a dragon grows in the background, essentially that threatens to swamp everything. And,

00:33:29.200 and that's eventually defeated by a great, you know, a Marduk, as it turns out, this is a very old

00:33:35.360 idea that little things left grow in the dark and get big. And so it's not really a very good reason.

00:33:41.280 And especially if your conscience is bugging you, because it's something that looks into the

00:33:45.120 future and says, well, this is kind of small at the moment, but, but, but, yeah, no, that's right.

00:33:53.200 And actually go on James.

00:33:55.280 Well, I was just saying, yeah, I remember reading that, that there's a kind of Babylonian creation

00:33:59.920 myth, I think, isn't it? But, but that sense of things just growing with a kind of gathering

00:34:04.880 a momentum of their own is, is something that we've, we've experienced a lot of. I think it's,

00:34:09.280 it's there's, there's been some work on this in sociology. I think they call it the spiral of

00:34:14.160 silence. Um, is it's, I can't remember her, Elizabeth Neumann or Noel Neumann. And the basic

00:34:21.760 idea is that, is that fear of isolation, uh, social isolation, ostracism is, is, is, is,

00:34:29.120 is like a huge motivating factor in a person's behavior. And yeah, well, there's two great fears,

00:34:33.840 right. That's one is, is being, is being, uh, isolated and thrown out of the group because

00:34:39.840 then you die. And the other is biological catastrophe. Those are the two big classes

00:34:43.760 of fears that you see as a clinician. Right. So that's the animating idea. And then the spiral

00:34:49.520 starts, you know, the monster starts to grow when some people notice that their opinions are, are

00:34:55.040 spreading fast and that gives them a kind of confidence to double down and express themselves

00:35:02.080 more confidently. And then on the other hand, people who disagree with those opinions see that

00:35:07.360 their views gaining less traction and they stay silent because of the fear of social isolation.

00:35:13.840 And then they get weaker. They get weaker. And then of course, yeah.

00:35:17.920 And a lot of these people are gorgeous. Well, I was just going to say that, you know,

00:35:24.000 social media and those sorts of things that obviously all the network effects from that

00:35:27.920 accelerates that. Um, and so it, and, and what happens is that people are just get very bad at

00:35:33.840 judging what the real spread of opinion is in, in a social environment. Uh, and then it's a kind of,

00:35:38.960 so it's a dynamic process is it's a spiral. And so you get a spiral to the point where

00:35:44.000 what is a confident minority, but minority position becomes this completely unassailable

00:35:50.400 orthodoxy. Um, and, and I think that's one reason why in the case of what was started to happen in

00:35:57.440 Cambridge and in the summer of 2020 and leading up to the vote in, in December is, is, is that, uh,

00:36:04.160 what, what we saw was that, although there was reluctance, deep reluctance among colleagues who

00:36:09.520 struggled to get more than 25 votes to, to sign in public that are Arab's amendments when it came

00:36:15.120 to the vote, uh, uh, which crucially operated via a secret ballot. So you were allowed to measure

00:36:21.920 opinion, but with people voting by people voting from within the closet, as it were. Uh, and as soon

00:36:29.200 as that, that mechanism was allowed to operate, you suddenly that the spiral of silence, just the,

00:36:34.160 as it were, the, the, the monster explodes. Right. So that's really interesting procedurally

00:36:40.080 as well, because these sorts of positive feedback loop phenomenon, you see those in,

00:36:44.480 in clinical therapy too. So for example, when people start to get depressed, then they withdraw

00:36:50.240 and, and they stop socializing say, and they stop engaging in their, in the activities that bring them

00:36:56.720 meaning and joy. And so that makes their depression worse. And then they're more likely to, to withdraw

00:37:01.120 again. And, you know, it's probably an example of something like the Pareto principle operating

00:37:06.000 again, right? That things can spiral up very, very rapidly and dominate, and they can spiral down

00:37:11.840 very, it's non-linear on both ends. And, and there's some truth to that, that kind of process that

00:37:18.080 underlies all sorts of phenomena. So that secret ballot issue, that's really relevant for bringing

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00:41:21.280 Go ahead, Arif.

00:41:22.400 Okay. No, I was going to say one part of the isolation process also, I think,

00:41:26.640 is certain kinds of social interactions or professional interactions. And what I mean is the

00:41:32.160 experience of being in meetings, for instance, departmental meetings or college meetings, where

00:41:36.240 probably a lot of people, there'll be some mad or insane proposal, I don't know, to say,

00:41:41.760 we're going to remove all pronouns from our policy, or we're going to have this change of the syllabus

00:41:45.840 or whatever. And everybody, or maybe most people in the room were thinking, this is nonsense,

00:41:51.040 but I'm not going to say it's nonsense. And they left the meeting thinking they were the only person who

00:41:54.400 thought it was nonsense. Because nobody spoke out and the thing was not decided by a secret ballot.

00:41:58.480 If it had been decided by a secret ballot, as was the case, as James says in December,

00:42:02.800 suddenly you had thousands of people realizing that they weren't alone.

00:42:06.080 It's also possible that the objections, so imagine those objections manifest themselves

00:42:11.440 in people's imagination, but they're not hooked so tightly to the whole, to a whole ideological network

00:42:16.560 as the proposal is. And so, in some sense, people don't have the right words at hand immediately.

00:42:22.640 You know, the pronoun thing is a good indication because, well, justify your use of he and she.

00:42:29.360 It's like, well, I don't know how to do that exactly. You know, that's what everyone does.

00:42:33.600 We've done that forever. And that's my justification. It's like, well, it's pretty weak

00:42:38.400 compared to that whole ideology that's coming at you. And, and those people who are so committed,

00:42:43.200 they're, they're often pretty verbal. They're pretty well able to articulate that ideology

00:42:48.320 and quite forcefully and they're emotionally committed to it. And so that's also a structural

00:42:54.480 problem. Yeah. And they have devices. So for instance, if you think about the, the way I found

00:42:59.120 the way these people use terms, like not only welfare, but also harm, you know, the idea that

00:43:03.120 words do harm to people, um, which has a lot of currency now in Britain and is chilling, um,

00:43:08.800 is based on an absurdly inflated conception of harm. But when you're in the middle of a discussion,

00:43:12.880 you know, it's also related to another cognitive problem, which is one of the things I

00:43:17.920 often did as a therapist, when someone told me they were afraid of something, doing something is

00:43:22.240 I said, well, that's because you're not afraid enough of not doing it because the doing produces

00:43:28.240 this harm, let's say, and you can be afraid of that, but the not doing is sort of invisible.

00:43:34.000 And that, that has something to do with decision-making in uncertainty, by the way. And so I used to get

00:43:38.640 people to flesh out what would happen if they didn't do the thing they were afraid of. And then they

00:43:43.120 thought, oh, I see there's real risk both ways. And now I get to pick my risk. And

00:43:48.160 this harm issue is the same thing because you could say, well, sometimes words do do harm.

00:43:53.280 There's no doubt about that. And maybe that's, it's unfair to conflate that with something like

00:43:58.160 physical violence, although you could have a discussion about that. But the, the, the question

00:44:03.200 that isn't being asked then is, well, what harm does your attempt to shut down? What words you

00:44:08.880 regard as harmful? What's that likely to produce for harm? Well, none. It's like,

00:44:13.680 oh, really? So you haven't thought that part of it through at all. And you're going to be the

00:44:17.520 arbiter of what's harmful and what's not. And there's no danger in that either. Is there?

00:44:22.960 So that's a good way to deal with that sort of thing.

00:44:26.400 I agree. And of course, another thing that the, the, the, a lot of the time people,

00:44:29.840 people don't see is they think, you know, we can impose on people's speech. We can tell

00:44:33.200 them how to, how to behave various ways, but they don't think that that's an instrument that

00:44:36.640 could be abused in all sorts of ways. So if you mandate speech on one thing, one day,

00:44:41.120 it's going to be mandated on other things the next day. And in general, I think with

00:44:44.400 any form of cohesive, cohesive principle, you need to think what's going to happen in the hands of

00:44:48.880 somebody wicked and, and, you know, um, tyrannical. That's how we should think about, about these

00:44:53.440 things, um, not only in university, but in politics more generally.

00:44:57.200 Typical right wing clap trap. Well, that's, that's kind of an interesting thing, right? Because one,

00:45:03.200 one thing that conservative thinking does always is say, yeah, but it's like, well,

00:45:09.280 you're putting this forward for the good and fair enough, you know, and it's based on compassion.

00:45:13.200 And that's actually a virtue, although it is by no means the only virtue. And sometimes it's a vice,

00:45:18.160 but why are you so sure that this will only do the thing you think it will do and nothing else?

00:45:22.960 And that you're wise enough to make that change, right? In something that's sort of working already.

00:45:27.360 Right. So part of the problem might be that I think it's a sort of a glitch within liberalism.

00:45:35.360 And you think back to, to Mill's idea, the famous no harm principle, which for many, many years

00:45:40.880 operated as a very, very good basic rule for governing social interaction, but you can understand

00:45:47.760 the temptation of trying to fold under the notion of harm or violence. I think it's the Australian

00:45:54.320 psychologist, Nick Haslam calls this concept creep. You can see that you see the sort of the power

00:46:00.240 that comes from leveraging these concepts, particularly when an institution is caught in

00:46:05.040 the headlights of a Twitter mob or whatever it might be, that there's sort of threat to the harm,

00:46:11.280 you know, there's harm or threats of harm or violence to the person which are. In the end, I mean,

00:46:16.640 I think I take your point, Jordan, there may well be certain situations in which use of speech can be thought of as

00:46:24.320 as inflicting harm. But that is something that society and, and the legislature in that society

00:46:31.680 needs to deliberate upon and, and decide. And, and, you know, we all accept that freedom of speech is

00:46:37.920 not, is not an unqualified right. And, and indeed, academic freedom has, has proper parameters imposed

00:46:45.040 as well. So, well, we can also be grown up and say that it's, it's dangerous, but necessary.

00:46:52.560 It's dangerous, but necessary.

00:46:54.480 I think that the danger comes in when what counts as harm is being subjectively determined.

00:47:00.960 And so this notion that, that's, that started to gather steam in the last few years, this idea of a

00:47:07.040 microaggression, which in effect is, is, is an aggression or a claim that harm has been inflicted

00:47:14.560 on a person that, that is subjectively determined. That is to say, it's, it's in principle, not an

00:47:20.640 offence that could be explored in any kind of forensic context by, by, by jury or a judge. That is to say,

00:47:28.160 the only evidence that count of the harm that could possibly count is the subject saying, you've hurt me.

00:47:34.800 And the, and so the danger of the language that, that Arif was, was, uh, protesting against the,

00:47:41.440 the, the, the identitarian respect language is that it effectively conferred a veto on the most

00:47:48.960 psychologically fragile person on in the university. Uh, and who could simply say, and we would not,

00:47:56.960 there would be no way of establishing whether or not they, that they were sincere with that.

00:48:00.960 They'd have to be just simply taken at face value that this person, that the invitation to this

00:48:05.840 speaker troubles me, upsets me, does, does me harm. Yeah. Well, that's interesting too. Like,

00:48:12.160 imagine you take that hypothetical sensitive person. It might not be in their best interests

00:48:19.680 to actually grant them that sort of veto power, because one of the things you do with someone who's

00:48:24.080 really depressed or anxious is actually, especially if you're working as a cognitive behaviorist,

00:48:28.880 let's say, is you get them to look at the thoughts that are upsetting them and maybe modify the ones

00:48:34.080 that are making them, um, sensitive beyond what is good for them. And that's also to some degree,

00:48:42.480 judged subjectively by them. And so it isn't necessarily the case that protecting people in

00:48:47.280 that manner and giving them that sort of power is actually in their best interest. So

00:48:51.360 it reminds me of that, um, insight of Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their,

00:48:57.200 I think it's their 2017 Atlantic article that became the coddling of the American mind,

00:49:02.240 where one of the three principles I think Jonathan isolates is, um, is a sort of inversion of the

00:49:08.320 Nietzschean idea that, you know, um, uh, what, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker.

00:49:12.640 Um, that is to say, uh, and anything that, that, you know, the sort of harm or, or, or, or violence

00:49:19.440 that, that, that sort of, uh, any kind of threat is, it doesn't have, it's not something that can

00:49:23.680 toughen you up. It's not an opportunity to try and, um, strengthen your character or to develop

00:49:29.200 resilience. I know that I think this is something you've touched on.

00:49:31.760 Well, that's also a huge part of what you, that's also a huge part of what universities are doing for

00:49:37.280 their students. If you think about it psychologically, so we could talk about

00:49:40.880 people who are hypersensitive to anxiety and depression, let's say they're higher in neuroticism.

00:49:45.760 Well, one of the things you want to do when you get educated is arm yourself with defenses.

00:49:52.240 And I mean, practical defenses, both ideational. So the way you think and the way you act against

00:49:57.760 that kind of onslaught and education can really do that, right? Because you're quicker on your feet

00:50:02.960 and you, you know, more and, and, and also if you're trying to reduce someone's anxiety and

00:50:08.720 depression and they're temperamentally tilted that way, what you actually do is gradually expose

00:50:14.160 them to the things that they're afraid of. You don't, you don't protect them more and more and

00:50:18.640 more because that actually makes that positive spiral descent into depression and anxiety worse.

00:50:24.960 So the fact, the idea that you should remove everything that might threaten someone's identity,

00:50:29.840 and you should make that a university wide policy is actually exactly the opposite of what you should

00:50:36.800 do speaking clinically. If you're trying to help people become more resilient, this is a serious

00:50:41.680 issue. And, and it, well, obviously this is all serious. But the fact, the fact is universities in

00:50:48.640 the UK are to some extent going in the opposite direction. So they do have, as James points at this

00:50:53.920 category of what's called microaggressions. And these are things which can even be a matter for

00:50:58.320 disciplinary action. If you're reporting for it, where you say something at NYU, there's posters

00:51:03.600 all over the place, like in the bathrooms, for example, encouraging people to report such things

00:51:08.640 to the appropriate, you know, well-paid bureaucratic authorities. Cambridge tried to

00:51:13.760 introduce a system where you could report, you could report these things anonymously. So not

00:51:17.920 confidentially, anonymously, nobody knows who made the report. So it's like East Germany, the report

00:51:23.040 comes in, and then somebody could in principle be disciplined for it.

00:51:26.320 Yeah, no one would ever misuse that.

00:51:28.160 No, you couldn't imagine that. So as you say, you know, if making fun of someone's religion,

00:51:33.440 for instance, is something I can't do, you know, that's a kind of challenge which might upset them.

00:51:37.920 And as you say, part of the point of words is to some extent that they do some harm. They're

00:51:41.360 meant to be upsetting. They're meant to shake your views about things. You know, if the conversations

00:51:45.200 you have at university, you know, never upset you, never make you feel a little bit less

00:51:49.120 confident, never make you, make you perhaps even make you cry sometimes, university isn't doing its job.

00:51:53.680 Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And in fact, the anonymous reporting tool mechanism that is

00:52:00.800 accompanied with these long shopping lists of microaggressions effectively, where, as you say,

00:52:06.720 it's happening at NYU, Jordan, the students and staff are encouraged effectively to police each

00:52:11.760 other and to censor each other. It was a very disturbing development. I mean, thankfully,

00:52:16.720 it's appalling. It's absolutely appalling.

00:52:19.680 And this is, well, this is part of the good story, the story of good positive developments in

00:52:23.600 Cambridge is that when the university rolled out this, I think it was called change the culture

00:52:29.680 campaign back in May that it spent a couple of years working on that, that the backlash, I think,

00:52:34.480 was intense enough among senior colleagues for Stephen Tooth, the vice chancellor, to in the end,

00:52:43.280 take it down and admit that it had been put up in error. And actually, as far as he said,

00:52:49.120 as I recall, he wasn't aware that it had gone up and he wasn't aware of the microaggressions

00:52:55.040 component. But this is a problem throughout the UK. I mean, it turned out that the company is a sort

00:53:00.320 of tech startup called Culture Shift, which rolled it out in Cambridge. But I think there are 50 or

00:53:07.120 60 other universities in the UK that have a system of this kind.

00:53:11.440 Yeah. You know, there's no such thing as a joke that isn't a microaggression.

00:53:18.000 Right? Jokes aren't funny unless they're microaggressions, especially witty jokes.

00:53:22.000 And so, you know, that's why I'm so concerned when I see comedians getting

00:53:27.040 stopped because they're bellwethers for this sort of thing. And if you can't take a joke, I mean,

00:53:32.560 well, I was talking with my wife and some friends about the way working class men sort of test each

00:53:37.760 other out. And a huge part of that is this throwing back and forth of microaggressions.

00:53:43.200 Sometimes they're not so micro, right? It's like, let's see if I can get under your skin.

00:53:48.560 Can you take a joke? Can you lower your ego? You know, or do you get too upset? Are you too

00:53:53.200 narcissistic? Are you too arrogant? Can we rely on you in a crunch or even a little crunch? Like,

00:53:58.320 can you cooperate? Can you subordinate your needs to the group now and then? Are you a narcissist?

00:54:03.360 All that's played out with aggressive humor and putting a clamp on that is a catastrophe.

00:54:09.680 Plus it's not funny anymore. Like, you know, we need some, we need some humor.

00:54:14.160 I think there are different subcultures where you get different kinds of equilibrium here. So

00:54:17.840 there are some cultures, like, as you say, you know, in barracks, for instance,

00:54:20.720 also in Roman times, you know, Hume describes, you know, as Hume says, Roman people were very

00:54:26.160 rude to each other from what we know of their conversations compared to even high and low

00:54:30.400 ranking people. They were not afraid to be rude to each other and make fun of each other compared to

00:54:35.120 how we are in our society now. Other ones, military environments, I think are like that.

00:54:39.600 Some environments I was in when I was a child, you know, these are equilibria that societies can end up

00:54:45.440 in. And there are other equilibria, which are much more cobbling and much, much more timid.

00:54:49.920 And it seems the fear is, as you say, we're, we're going to end up in one of those where, where

00:54:54.880 Yeah. And those are authoritarian. You know, one of the things I learned as studying psychoanalytic

00:55:00.320 thought mostly was the notion of compassion as devouring. And excessive compassion is a vice

00:55:06.880 and it becomes totalitarian. And no one that I know of yet has had a serious conversation about

00:55:12.240 female totalitarianism. And that's a conversation long overdue because females are now part and

00:55:18.000 parcel of the general political culture in a way they haven't been in many societies for a very long

00:55:22.400 time. And so this totalitarianism of compassion is no joke. You know, it was Freud's primary concern.

00:55:29.440 That's the Oedipal mother fundamentally.

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00:56:38.480 The word that the expression I've heard used in a lot of places for this is what people call soft

00:56:42.400 totalitarianism. So it's not, it's not totally totalitarianism. It's not the jackboot or the,

00:56:47.360 or the, or the prison, you know, it's the smiley emoji and the, you know, not hurting people's

00:56:51.600 feelings. But the results are the same when it comes to free speech and argument and the truth

00:56:59.440 and just having rational discourse because so much of it is suppressed. So that's what we're

00:57:03.760 fearing. But as James says, you know, there are reasons for hope when you compare. So as James was

00:57:08.400 talking about the microaggressions episode in Cambridge, you know, the backlash against that,

00:57:12.240 I mean, I don't know what you think, James, my impression was the backlash against that was much

00:57:15.200 more quick in public than it was against the, the, the, um, the free speech policy a year and a bit

00:57:22.080 before. So that, so you might have opened a door. The, the, the culture to some extent seems to be

00:57:27.360 improving a bit. People seem a bit more confident to speak out, James. I don't know if that's your

00:57:31.360 question. Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. I mean, I think on the one hand, it was, it was

00:57:34.960 distressing after the scale of the vote and the, uh, the clarity with which the views of the majority of

00:57:41.120 staff of the majority of those voted. And I can't remember what the margins were. It's about 85%

00:57:46.160 voted for the tolerance language over the respect language. It was depressing that, you know,

00:57:51.920 barely six months later, this campaign has rolled out that just seemed to be antithetical in every

00:57:58.240 conceivable respect to what that to, to, to, to, to, to, to the views that were expressed at the ballot box in,

00:58:05.120 in December. But as I have said that the sort of route, the grassroots, um, resistance to it was,

00:58:11.440 was much faster. Um, I mean, it's true. I think that, and this might've been to some extent

00:58:17.040 true of, of the vote itself, but, that one different, one big difference from two or three

00:58:22.160 years ago with your, the rescission of your invitation, Jordan, is the, the, um, the extramural

00:58:28.320 support that we've had outside the university. So the public awareness, public attention,

00:58:34.000 and public concern, taxpayer concern, uh, has been much more focused on, on the problem of the,

00:58:40.160 the, the crisis of the perceived crisis of the university. And so we, there, there was quite a

00:58:44.960 lot of press coverage. I remember around about, uh, you know, end of May, beginning of June,

00:58:48.400 when this was happening. And I think that must've put up, put a lot of pressure on and, and brought

00:58:53.360 about immediate and immediate and dramatic institutional response that I don't know what Araf thinks,

00:58:59.600 but I think would have been very, very hard to achieve just internally by writing letters

00:59:03.920 and, and, and, and complaining using sort of ordinary procedures. Um, so, so I think that,

00:59:09.520 that would have, that, that, that played a big role. And I think people are starting to understand

00:59:15.200 to some degree that these obscure goings on in universities, uh, move downstream with incredible

00:59:22.320 rapidity. When I first made that observation, not that I was the first to do it, that you should,

00:59:28.400 that the general public should be concerned about these strange academic ideas. It seemed like I was

00:59:33.840 overreacting, but you know, everyone's learned in some sense in that since then, what do they say?

00:59:38.560 Politics is downstream from culture and cultures generated in the universities for better or worse.

00:59:43.840 And so what happens on campus doesn't stay on campus.

00:59:48.000 Yes, exactly. Unlike Las Vegas. Right. And I wanted to clear something up because earlier you

00:59:53.600 pointed to the utility of anonymity in a vote, right? But then you criticized anonymous reporting.

01:00:01.360 And so I just want, I want to clear that up. So it's way different because anonymous reporting is

01:00:06.720 one person and that can easily be someone who's quite malevolent. And if you don't think people like

01:00:12.000 that exist, it's just because you're naive, they can use that as a, an unbelievably powerful weapon

01:00:18.000 to, to take down in a very painful way, anyone they want. Whereas if it's a vote and we should

01:00:23.520 talk about the vote because my understanding is that thousands of people voted on this policy.

01:00:29.040 So who were those thousands of people and how did that come about?

01:00:32.080 Well, it was, it was, I mean, you're quite right about the distinction, first of all. Um, I mean,

01:00:36.880 the point about anonymous reporting is that if someone reports something anonymously, you can't

01:00:40.640 come back to them to check their evidence. You know, the person who's been accused can't, you

01:00:44.560 know, can't even face their accuser. So there's, there's no possibility of deep process, um, with

01:00:50.000 the anonymous voting. So the turnout was about, it's about 1500 people. So it was about 30%,

01:00:54.160 which doesn't seem that high, but actually it was, it was very high by historical standards.

01:00:58.320 So I've been looking back over the last three or four decades and I couldn't find one where there was

01:01:02.800 such a high turnout and such a decisive margin, actually. So it was a big, it was a big, um, uh,

01:01:07.840 result, especially given that it was taking place during the lockdown or taking place at the height

01:01:12.960 of the pandemic. Um, so the people who were voting, they were all academics. Cambridge is unusual in

01:01:19.920 British academia and maybe unusual in Western academia, more generally in that it and Oxford

01:01:25.200 are both self-governing. And what that means is that it's the supreme body that decides what it does

01:01:30.560 is the sort of main body of senior academics. So all lecturers, professors, and so on. Um, and there's

01:01:37.200 about 7,000 of those, those that's called Regent House and that has supreme authority. Now there

01:01:42.400 is an executive body called the council, which handles most day-to-day business. And the council

01:01:47.520 often makes proposals on which there is no vote unless it doesn't propose a vote. And one of the

01:01:52.480 telling things was that the council put forward this, this proposal, which was on a matter of

01:01:57.440 fundamental value. I can't think of anything of more importance to a university than its view on

01:02:01.360 freedom of speech. Um, it put forward this change. It did not offer a vote. When I made my objections,

01:02:07.360 it did not offer a vote. When I made my objections, it didn't negotiate. It didn't say, well, I can see

01:02:12.320 the point of this. Maybe we should have a wider consultation. There's no attempt at consultation,

01:02:16.800 no attempt at a vote. It just tried to push it through. Um, so the difficulty was in getting a vote

01:02:21.520 in the first place. Once we got a vote, um, as it turned out, um, things, the things worked well,

01:02:28.640 uh, but the difficulty was in getting the vote and the vote was, was conducted by,

01:02:32.800 by senior academics. So people like me, James, you, if you've been in Cambridge,

01:02:36.720 I can't imagine that Toronto is being, is run like that. I don't know if any American universities

01:02:41.360 or North American universities have run like that, but Cambridge and Oxford are lucky

01:02:45.440 in that they have that system of governments. I received quite a few messages after the vote,

01:02:52.800 and I think probably Araf did too, from, from colleagues around the country and, and actually

01:02:57.440 around the world who was sort of expressing a kind of envy that they didn't have that sort of

01:03:03.440 quasi parliamentary mechanism, which, you know, it's a clunky tool. It took Araf and those supporting

01:03:08.720 him a very long time to, to, to kind of get it all going and, and, and to, and to challenge the

01:03:14.560 university's decisions, but it did work. And it gives the faculty final say and not the bureau

01:03:19.840 and not the administration. And that's really something. Yep. Yep. It's important. I mean,

01:03:25.120 it's not quite as simple as that because there are some administrators who can vote as well,

01:03:28.480 but they all, they kind of tend to vote the same way I would imagine, but it does give us the say.

01:03:32.960 And I want to say again, um, you know, none of it would have been possible without James as well.

01:03:36.480 He played a massive role in getting the support, you know, and giving it public support and helping

01:03:40.640 with publicity and so on. Um, so he was brilliant. Um, I do want to add, we got, I mean, I got

01:03:46.080 messages and I'm sure James did too, not just from, from academics, but from members of the public as

01:03:50.480 well. Um, who was sort of relieved that an important British institution like Cambridge was actually

01:03:56.160 standing up for, for basic values, because this is not an abstruse academic matter. And it's not even

01:04:01.520 intellectually very difficult thing to see. You know, the arguments were not intellectually obscure

01:04:06.080 or difficult or required any great intelligence. You know, it was really simple matters of basic

01:04:10.480 principle. Um, so I think it would have been, it would have been a disaster. I think if Cambridge

01:04:15.280 had had, you know, had not supported this. I wanted to point out something else to clarify something

01:04:21.040 that you just said when we were talking about anonymous reporting and different differentiating

01:04:25.680 that from anonymous voting, you said, well, this anonymous reporting circumvents due process. And

01:04:32.160 you didn't say that very loud. And we just went on. It's like, no, no, we're going to say that again.

01:04:37.520 This anonymous reporting circumvents due process. It's like, what the hell's up with you guys?

01:04:43.520 You're doing an end run around due process. Who the hell do you think you are? Exactly.

01:04:48.800 Due process. It's like, God, how long has English common law been working out due process?

01:04:55.280 Yeah. It is a basic principle of English common law. And it's a basic principle of natural justice

01:04:59.920 that, you know, the identity of the, of your accuser and you know, the grounds on which

01:05:04.000 he's making the accusation. Uh, and these mechanisms that are introduced often without

01:05:08.880 any kind of scrutiny at all, um, uh, cut completely against that principle.

01:05:13.920 Yeah. And they're designed to, so, because with that sort of thing, there's, you know,

01:05:18.720 I always prefer to, to presume ignorance and not malevolence, but when something like that happens,

01:05:24.800 there's something damn ugly going on way down at the bottom.

01:05:28.480 So what's worrying is that it's across the universe, as James was saying, it isn't just

01:05:31.680 in Cambridge where we managed to, we managed to stop it. This, this firm, which appears to be

01:05:36.960 running this, this platform, this kind of snitching portal or Stasi portal, um, for making anonymous

01:05:42.880 denunciations has been bought by about 50 or 60 universities across the country. Um, I remember

01:05:49.840 someone saying to me when I was protesting against it in Cambridge, they said, well, look, most universities

01:05:54.160 in England have got it. Why, you know, why are you so bothered whether we, we get it as though

01:05:57.840 it was a perfectly normal, acceptable thing that we should, we should easily say.

01:06:00.880 Oh, good. So now we have an automated system in place in 60 universities in the UK to circumvent due

01:06:06.480 process. Brilliant. To be fair, to be fair. I think some of them are ones where, where you could only,

01:06:13.200 the only thing you can submit anonymously is a report on which no formal action is taken. So you

01:06:17.040 just tick some boxes and nothing happens, but there are some where it goes further. So, so it's terrifying

01:06:22.400 that we're at that state in universities in all places. Yeah. Yeah. I think there was a report

01:06:26.480 done last December by Civitas, which is a sort of right-leaning think tank with a very, very good

01:06:31.040 report on the state of academic freedom in the UK. And I think they found, you have a look, 83 out of

01:06:36.560 140, you know, UK universities were found to have some kind of anonymous, uh, reporting system. So it's,

01:06:43.120 it's, it's very, very widespread. Um, and, uh, yeah, and it just, it's, it's a huge issue, uh, very,

01:06:49.840 very concerning. And, and I think that as Araf says, I mean, a lot of it is may well be well

01:06:54.720 intentioned. Um, but I think the point is that it starts off processes and procedures, disciplinary

01:07:00.800 procedures where, you know, the end result may not be anything at all. It may just be a few weeks of,

01:07:06.080 um, having to go and, uh, you know, see the chair of your faculty, you'll go to see some committee,

01:07:11.200 or you'll have to pay trips to HR. But as a colleague of ours says, um, you know,

01:07:16.160 it's the process is the punishment. Yeah, exactly. There's nothing trivial about any of that. That's

01:07:20.800 awful. When that happens to someone, it's so awful. It just, it just does. Yeah. And it puts a shadow

01:07:28.800 on them. Right. Right. And it has a chilling effect as well. What do you see it happen to

01:07:33.760 one person in your department or your university? You know, you just watch yourself that you don't

01:07:37.920 say things like that, you know, again, or yourself, you know, what you publish, what you say in

01:07:42.880 meetings, what you say to students, you just become more and more careful. And another thing

01:07:46.960 I think is that, is that, I mean, Tocqueville talks about this quite well, which is that one

01:07:50.560 way to tyrannize people is not to, not to control them in big things, but to control them in little

01:07:54.960 things so that tyranny becomes a habit. Conformity becomes a habit. Every time you say something

01:07:59.680 little, you know, some small interactions, you're constantly looking over your shoulder,

01:08:03.040 worrying, worrying whether to say this or not. That, Tocqueville said, is the most efficient way to

01:08:07.280 turn people into sheep. No, it's also the sort of, in some sense, the ultimate reach of

01:08:12.080 totalitarianism because your life is made out of small things. You know, big things are rare and

01:08:17.920 seldom. And so having to watch that, well, I have to say to watch your sense of humor, for example,

01:08:23.680 you know, and fair enough, you can, you can cross the line and an astute person reads the crowd

01:08:28.320 properly. And, but you see great comedians, man, they're right on that edge, right? They're right

01:08:33.120 at the point where they shouldn't be saying what they're saying. Well, some of them far past that line

01:08:38.480 on purpose, you know, but everyone knows. But, but to chill that is to take almost all the fun,

01:08:44.720 the dynamic fun out of social interactions, that spirit, that's, that's a free spirit. And

01:08:50.480 that makes all that partly what makes life worth living. It's terrible that these things are

01:08:55.440 happening. And it's more terrible that the universities are doing it. How, how shameful.

01:09:01.760 So, okay. So of this, about how many of the 7,000 eligible people voted? Do you, do you know?

01:09:07.120 So it was about 30% of them. That was, that was a high turnout historically, very high turnout.

01:09:12.400 Um, and of those, uh, it was, as James says, about 85% was in favor of, of my amendments. Um,

01:09:20.240 it varied depending on the amendments. So one of the amendments was, that was the one which was most

01:09:24.880 popular was, was in favor of respect, replacing the language of respect with a much more neutral.

01:09:29.600 And I think liberal language of tolerance. Um, the other amendments were essentially saying that

01:09:35.200 the university couldn't stop speaker events unless they were illegal. Um, and that's a good,

01:09:39.920 that's a good rule. And then another amendment was, was incorporating some of the language of

01:09:44.880 the Chicago principles, which I think is a good example, a good sort of standard to replace this

01:09:49.360 language, which was saying the university could stop things whenever it wanted. And it would pay

01:09:53.280 attention to the welfare of students in the public when people were giving, were giving talks.

01:09:57.120 So now we've got a policy where if you've been invited, you can't be disinvited. Um,

01:10:01.360 and it doesn't matter unless you're doing something illegal, right? And you're legal,

01:10:05.600 you can't be disinvited. Um, so it's been a change. Um, and indeed it was actually the,

01:10:11.360 the people who first celebrated it were the radical feminists. So, so it was actually surprisingly up

01:10:17.200 amongst my allies, you know, there were Christians and there were also radical feminists,

01:10:20.800 you know, because those are both different sides who felt for various reasons and hard scientists

01:10:25.520 as well. They too. So it was the hard scientists, radical feminists, um, lawyers, um, Christians.

01:10:32.000 Um, they were all for various reasons, felt that their speech had been curtailed or was being limited.

01:10:38.080 And it was the feminists who celebrated it first. So Sophie, that, that very brave student that we

01:10:42.560 talked about organized what she called replatforming events, where she invited a number of, of,

01:10:47.200 you know, very controversial speakers, Katherine Stock, for instance, and others to come and give

01:10:51.840 talks in Cambridge, um, about topics. Is that girl still around that young woman? Is she still around

01:10:58.160 Cambridge? I'm not in touch with her. I believe she, she graduated for the first class degree last

01:11:02.560 summer. Um, uh, invite her to the talk. Yeah. Yeah. Um, uh, I'm sure we could, that, that would be possible.

01:11:09.040 Um, uh, but, uh, so there were some very brave people amongst the feminists and amongst these other

01:11:14.240 groups. Um, and that was, that was the first thing that happened afterwards. And then now we've had

01:11:18.960 another thing, which is your invitation. And we're hoping to invite other, other controversial

01:11:23.200 speakers. And not only that, I think in some ways, more importantly, the culture is, I hope,

01:11:28.800 changing day-to-day interactions are changing. People are more willing to speak out at meetings.

01:11:33.280 I want to try and get through changes whereby there is, you know, secret voting happens at all

01:11:38.160 meetings, at all levels, not just at these big levels. Yeah. Well, one of the things we're facing,

01:11:43.040 all of us as a potential danger is that although in the West, in some ways, we've got our large

01:11:48.400 scale, uppermost political institutions tilted quite hard against totalitarianism, it seems to

01:11:54.720 be creeping into middle-level bureaucracies continually, right? And there, it's a lot harder to

01:11:59.600 fight. Uh, it's harder to get people interested. It's more invisible. Um, all of that. What do you

01:12:06.480 think? I'd be interested to know what your, your view and experience is, because my, my impression has

01:12:10.400 been of, of the sort of mid and high level bureaucracy in my university, for instance,

01:12:15.600 is that they're not, they're not really ideological. They're not committed to this,

01:12:19.680 this, some sort of mad, hard left ideology or any of that. Really, they're just, they, they just,

01:12:25.040 you know, they want to respond to concerns from students and others. They've been given

01:12:28.960 a misleading impression that a lot of people have these concerns. There are also commercial

01:12:32.880 concerns because of course universities charge fees now, and they have to care about attracting

01:12:36.640 students and so on. And so they're just sort of doing what's, you know, they're, they're taking

01:12:40.480 the path of least resistance. Yeah. Well, I think part of what's happened is that,

01:12:45.280 well, HR is, is punching way above its weight. You know, it was bottom of the totem pole in

01:12:50.560 corporations for years and also in institutions like universities. And then it latched onto this

01:12:56.240 diversity, inclusivity and equity mantra, and there is power in that man. And so I would say yes to

01:13:02.640 everything you said, except for that exception. And Cora and the watching corporations jump on this

01:13:09.120 is really quite comical in some sense, because what that is all allied with is not something

01:13:14.240 that has capitalism as its central interest. Let's put it that way. So yeah, I think you, you end up.

01:13:21.760 Yeah, no, I mean, I, I think that's absolutely right. So that there are, as Arab says, the sort of

01:13:26.000 mid-level administration is typically not particularly ideology, ideologically driven, but as we were

01:13:31.440 discussing earlier, all it takes is sort of two or three dedicated activists to cause a lot of

01:13:37.840 trouble. And what's happening now in the kind of administrative landscape of a lot of these

01:13:42.480 institutions, corporations, universities, and in other sectors as well, is that you've effectively

01:13:47.680 got people whose job it is to deliver on equality, diversity, and inclusion initiatives. That is to

01:13:56.320 say that's their standing job, that's their profession. And so as it were, the revolution can never come to an

01:14:01.280 end, right? You can never reach the sunlit uplands. There's always got to be the next,

01:14:06.080 there's always got to be the next phobia to confront. And so it's kind of-

01:14:11.680 Or you lose your job, or your job disappears.

01:14:13.760 Yes, or you make yourself redundant. And so that, the kind of structural problems there,

01:14:19.120 and the kind of ratchet effects that are very, very, very difficult to address.

01:14:24.720 Do you think one way to think about addressing that might be to introduce ratchet effects in the

01:14:32.080 other direction? So that, you know, you can have a sort of free speech bureaucracy. And you can have,

01:14:37.600 you know, we have legislation in this country, for instance, which is trying to try to strengthen the

01:14:42.080 duty, or at least strengthen the sort of regress for breaking the duty to promote freedom of speech.

01:14:47.280 And it could be that that gives rise to sort of internal bureaucracies, and people will start

01:14:51.120 thinking, well, people who would have thought, I can make a career out of promoting equality and

01:14:54.960 diversity might start thinking, well, I can make a career out of promoting free speech.

01:14:59.360 And they'll be as keen on that as they are, as they were in the other direction. I don't know

01:15:03.040 whether what your experience in Toronto has been with regards to that, but I wonder.

01:15:07.520 Well, I can't really say, because I haven't really been part of the university in any real sense,

01:15:12.720 I would say in any profound sense since 2016, since all this blew up around me. So, you know,

01:15:19.280 I'm out of the loop. I think that's a worthwhile experiment, right? It's like, if there is a

01:15:24.800 bureaucracy, and you know, a lot of things get settled with these opponent process processes,

01:15:29.840 that's how we think, you know, it's almost always one thing against another. And yeah, I think,

01:15:35.280 and you were going to talk about the legis, the potential proposed legislation in the UK,

01:15:40.240 that sort of, I understand emerged out of all this. So what's happening on the legislative front?

01:15:46.160 Well, should I just say something about that, Araf? I mean, it's just worth giving you,

01:15:51.280 Araf has mentioned it already, and it's worth giving you a little bit of background to that,

01:15:54.960 Jordan. It was 2019 that there was round about then, it was a short, I think it was May 2019,

01:16:01.120 there was certainly a lot of talk about what had happened to you at Cambridge in policy circles and

01:16:06.640 government circles. And out of those sorts of discussions, I suspect that kind of crystallized

01:16:12.560 a manifesto commitment in the Conservative Party manifesto for the December 2019 UK general election,

01:16:19.440 which had a very, a very strong statement about the importance of the university sector,

01:16:24.240 importance of higher education in a post Brexit economy, and also signaled some concerns about

01:16:29.760 what was going on there, especially on academic freedom. So that was remarkable to see. I still

01:16:34.480 remember when I, when I saw that manifesto claim, I thought that's absolutely fantastic. It looks like

01:16:38.720 they're going to be serious about this. And indeed, they delivered, they started drafting

01:16:44.720 a very important piece of legislation. I think it's really the, probably one of the first of its

01:16:48.720 kind that that's, that, that that's, that is that clear and emphatic in, in the West. I think the UK

01:16:56.480 is leading the way on this. The legislation itself, you know, some people, you know, my own view is that

01:17:02.880 it's, it's just a shame that it's had to come to this. You know, we do not really, we do not want

01:17:07.200 governments stepping into and regulating the intellectual cultures of the university. Now,

01:17:15.360 that's not what the legislation does. It just provides a right for academics or visiting speakers

01:17:23.440 who've been disinvited, academics have been fired unfairly to a kind of direct line of appeal to an

01:17:30.560 ombudsman, effectively, an so called academic freedom champion. And that's, so there's a kind

01:17:36.560 of quasi judicial process there, which is going to would hold in principle, open up universities to

01:17:41.760 significant financial liability through fines, if they were found to have breached their duty to

01:17:46.960 promote academic freedom and protect the rights of visiting speakers, and so on. So I think, you know,

01:17:52.560 you in principle may have had a line of appeal to that new post as and when it comes into being.

01:18:02.960 Now, there's still some problems with the legislation. For example, I think Araf and I agreed that it

01:18:07.040 doesn't go far enough on protecting academics from institutional interference or politicization of

01:18:17.360 curricular content. You know, the freedom of, for academics, freedom of speech means freedom to

01:18:23.840 teach, freedom to select content and freedom to deliver it as they see fit. Of course, to some

01:18:29.440 extent, it's a shared institutional enterprise, designing curricula and so on, but there should be

01:18:34.000 a defeasible presumption that academics can teach what they want to teach and how they want to teach it.

01:18:40.400 Nevertheless, I mean, I think it will, it will, I think, I hope shift the shift the culture in some of the

01:18:48.240 ways that the equalities legislation shifted the culture 10 years ago. And, and even if it may be imperfect

01:18:55.200 when it gets royal assent, nevertheless, I mean, I think that it will make vice chancellors and senior

01:19:01.920 university staff throughout the throughout the country sort of sit up and realize that there are

01:19:05.920 consequences to, to continuing to, to, to allow this, this culture to flourish.

01:19:11.520 And I think it's really, it's really appropriate that that initiative came from the faculty of

01:19:19.120 divinity at Cambridge, you know, that it can be traced at least to the events, perhaps the events

01:19:24.640 that took place there. It's quite, that's quite something when you, you know, step back and think about it.

01:19:30.080 Well, I mean, you know, in its, in its defense, I, I had a conversation with Roger Scruton around

01:19:37.040 about that time who, who expressed his, uh, deep disappointment at, uh, um, the, the treatment

01:19:43.360 meted out to you. And he said something quite interesting. He said, uh, when he was in Eastern

01:19:48.400 Europe in the 1980s, setting up, uh, underground universities in, uh, Warsaw Pact countries, particularly

01:19:54.720 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, uh, by some kind of strange quirk. Um, although the university

01:20:01.520 of university of Cambridge wouldn't, uh, confer, uh, degrees or, or credentials, it was considered

01:20:07.280 politically too difficult. I think the divinity faculty did have some kind of degree conferring

01:20:13.440 power. It had, was able to accredit or recognize a diploma in theology. And that's exactly how Roger got

01:20:19.760 his, his students, um, uh, their, their diplomas as it were from the faculty of divinity at the

01:20:25.440 university. So it was, I think from his point of view, it was especially, you know, heartbreaking

01:20:30.720 that, that things developed as, as, as they did in, in early 2019, but, you know, just to reiterate,

01:20:37.040 I I've had no, uh, criticisms or, um, uh, from colleagues within the faculty. I think there's great

01:20:44.400 excitement that you're coming over and, and, and great gratitude to you that you've shown

01:20:49.600 the kind of graciousness and forbearance to, to, um, as it were, let bygones be bygones and,

01:20:56.480 and, and go ahead with the visit that had been planned back then, which, which I think you

01:21:01.760 probably wouldn't have been able to, to, to, to, uh, do anyway, given all the horrible things that

01:21:06.720 started to, to happen to you, you know, and Tammy health wise, um, in, in 2019.

01:21:12.800 Yeah. Well, like, like I said, I'm, I'm absolutely thrilled to be able to do this well,

01:21:17.440 because I seem to be able to do it. And that's something, but also that I have the opportunity.

01:21:21.680 Again, I think you'd have to be a pretentious fool, not to take an, an, an opportunity like

01:21:28.240 that and be grateful for it. And like people, there's mistake mistakes made, you know, and

01:21:33.520 that's that, but who knows, you know, if, if the upshot of this all is that the protection for

01:21:39.520 freedom of inquiry and speech in the UK is, is strengthened. And maybe that's a model for the

01:21:44.480 West. It's like, well, that's a pretty small price to pay, even though it was, you know,

01:21:50.160 it was unpleasant. So now say, you know, well, well, I, I think I joked to you the other day,

01:21:55.920 Jordan, in, uh, in an email, I think that Arif is not going to agree with this, but Providence bears

01:22:00.400 strange fruits. Um, and, uh, those of us with a kind of theological lens on things may see something

01:22:07.360 there, but no, I, I, I, you're right. I think that, you know, there's, there's, there's hope on the

01:22:12.960 horizon. There's reason to be much more cheerful than there were two, three years ago. There are

01:22:19.520 still challenges ahead, uh, that I know Arif and I are concerned about. We're especially worried

01:22:25.760 that, you know, for example, our colleague Kathleen Stock last week has been treated to, uh, uh, just

01:22:31.280 appallingly by a group of, uh, of activists for her views that, that there should be, as it were,

01:22:37.600 female only spaces that have been posters have gone up calling for her dismissal. She's had the

01:22:42.640 police round. She's had to put CCTV up in her, uh, around her home. So, you know, that it's still a

01:22:50.080 significant problem. Um, and then there are other more kind of structural issues. I think it was St.

01:22:55.680 Andrew's a couple of weeks ago, the, the, up in Scotland, there was news that there would, um,

01:23:01.120 that, that incoming undergraduates, incoming students would have to sit what amounted from,

01:23:05.520 I'm not sure of the details here, but from what I could tell,

01:23:08.320 an ideological purity test that come very close. I think, in fact, cross line in coercing speech,

01:23:14.480 that is to say, you had to answer certain. Well, do you, do you know, do you know that

01:23:18.720 at least 70% of researcher applications for professorships in the UC, you, you California

01:23:26.560 system now statewide were rejected on the basis of their diversity statement prior to their research

01:23:34.400 CV being reviewed more than 70%. That's extraordinary. Yes. Yeah. Extraordinary. I think

01:23:41.920 you want to kill, you want to kill universities. That's a good way to do it. It's, it's not just

01:23:46.880 California. I, I, I think you drew my attention a few weeks ago to the Newton trust, which is a very

01:23:52.800 big and distinguished, uh, grant making research, uh, body. I think now requires almost every application

01:23:59.680 submitted to, uh, be accompanied by a statement explaining how the research will have a positive

01:24:06.240 impact on gender equality. Um, so the thought of these poor, I believe similar things have happened

01:24:11.920 to at the, at the grant level federally in Canada. Yeah. Yeah. And that's horrible. It's absolutely

01:24:18.240 unbelievably bad that. So it looks like we're getting to this problem with, with graduate students

01:24:23.040 and with undergraduates as well, that you can't, you can't even access the benefits of university

01:24:27.520 education, university research and so on, unless you agree with some sort of, you know, ideological

01:24:32.480 line. Um, in the case, as James says, in the case of undergraduates, it's close enough to compelled

01:24:37.800 speech because you have to answer, you have to pass the test and passing the test means getting

01:24:41.840 enough questions. Right. I think in some cases it might even mean getting so terrible psychologically,

01:24:46.720 you know, I mean, there's some good psychological experiments. So imagine you do this, you take a group

01:24:51.120 of people and they have an opinion about something, eh? Then you make them write out, you ask them to write

01:24:56.000 out a counter opinion. That's quite, uh, detailed and you test their, their beliefs before they do

01:25:03.600 that. And then a week later, and what you see is a massive shift in the direction of what they've

01:25:08.080 detailed out partly because they've detailed it out, but also partly to reduce cognitive dissonance,

01:25:13.360 right? Well, I said this, therefore, well, I'm either a liar or I much, I must believe it. So these are

01:25:20.160 not trivial issues. Like, well, you know, and students say, they, they say things to me and I've heard them

01:25:25.840 say, well, I just write what the professor wants me to say. It's like, no, you don't just write that

01:25:30.400 because writing is thinking. And if you don't think that practice becomes part of you and those words

01:25:35.700 become part of you, that's just because you don't understand practice or words. And the fact that you

01:25:40.560 have to do that at university, that's like the reverse of education. It's, it's not bad education. It's

01:25:45.680 anti-education. Yeah, it is. It's anti-education. That's a really excellent point. I mean, that's,

01:25:51.120 I remember William James talks about that as well. The way in which the, you know,

01:25:54.320 the direction goes the other way. It's from the things that you do sort of feeds into what you

01:25:58.160 think. Um, so they're real. Well, that's, that's like a basic principle of behavioral therapy.

01:26:03.600 It's no, no, the action, the action, you know, the cognition, so to speak, are secondary and not

01:26:08.880 always, but of course they're secondary because well, the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor

01:26:14.480 cortex and action is everything. And so abstraction follows in the, in the pathway of action.

01:26:21.520 Hopefully like, I mean, we'd be in real trouble if that wasn't the case. So, but yeah, it's appalling

01:26:27.040 and that universities are doing this. It's makes me ashamed to be part of them. It's so, and then I

01:26:32.320 see students or listen to them. They've been educated like this. It's just like, it's this grating

01:26:36.960 noise that they're emitting that just hurts my soul. So, well, more work to be done, right? Well,

01:26:43.020 so this is positive. Everything we've been talking about virtually movement in a positive

01:26:46.940 direction. Thank you to very much for your commitment to, well, I can't thank you, you

01:26:52.860 know, because you did it for all sorts of reasons, but I admire it. It's great. And look what's

01:26:58.060 happened. And so I hope that, I hope that, uh, my visit is worth all the trouble. I'm going

01:27:04.140 to do what I can to make it that. And I am, like I said, I'm so thrilled that I get to do

01:27:08.300 this. It's so ridiculously wonderful that I can come back there and talk to you guys at

01:27:12.940 Cambridge and go to speak at Oxford and, and that the basic response from people is positive.

01:27:18.220 Like if I would wish for something better, I couldn't think of anything better. So it's

01:27:24.220 been, it's been a terrific response and we're so thrilled that you'll be coming. And I think

01:27:27.980 it will be really positive. You know, the students here, the staff here, everyone is going to learn

01:27:32.060 so much from the discussions that we'll be having. So that's excellent. God willing and all that.

01:27:38.620 Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. I'm very much looking forward to meeting you,

01:27:42.620 Dr. Ackman. Thank you for talking to me today, James. It was a pleasure as always.

01:28:02.060 Thank you.

218. Free Speech and Cambridge ｜ James Orr and Arif Ahmed

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