In this episode, Eric Kathman returns to the show to talk about his new report on academic freedom, and why we should all be worried about what's happening in the world of politics in the 21st century. He also talks about what it means to be a left-wing academic in a right-wing America.
00:02:19.560I've just put out a more recent report for the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology,
00:02:24.220which is a new think tank based in California, very small.
00:02:28.440But what they're trying to do is get out sort of unconventional social science research
00:02:33.680into the policy space and broadly into the domain
00:02:37.560because so many of these questions are not being asked in universities
00:02:40.300because you can't ask them or no one's interested in them for ideological reasons.
00:02:45.680So, for example, studying wokeness, you know,
00:02:47.340that's not something that's going to attract a lot of funding.
00:02:50.160So what this report does is it's based on a lot of original research, eight surveys, taking the UK surveys that we did for the Policy Exchange 2020 report, adding on to that, surveys in Canada and Britain, and some surveys of post-graduates, so PhD students.
00:04:03.900good ideas have an equal shot at getting into journals or getting grant funding.
00:04:08.120What I wanted to do with the surveys is to actually look at academics themselves, as
00:04:12.860well as graduate students, and find out not only their political beliefs, but also their
00:04:16.760support for cancel culture, because we didn't really have any proper studies on that, and
00:04:20.740then willingness to politically discriminate, and then number three, how much are political
00:04:25.580minorities, i.e. conservatives, to some extent centrists, but also gender-critical feminists,
00:04:30.760How much are they essentially feeling unfree?
00:04:34.560Because so often you'll get this retort from the academic establishment and particularly the progressive left that, well, it's a few no-platforming incidents which make the news.
00:04:53.820So I want to say that is actually true.
00:04:55.640If we just want to focus on no-platformings as the problem, it is kind of a small problem.
00:05:00.260But it's a symptom, what we argue in the report, what I argue in the report, is a symptom of a much larger threat to academic freedom, which is chilling effects.
00:05:10.040All right, for every one person who gets on a platform, there are ten people who don't allow themselves to be on a platform because they don't speak up in the first place.
00:05:16.520Yeah, but more than that, I wanted to get at the everyday academic in their teaching.
00:06:57.060You're getting hauled into disciplinary tribunals.
00:07:00.480But as long as you toe the line, you're fine.
00:07:02.680And so it's something similar in academia.
00:07:04.460The other thing is being a conservative,
00:07:06.380it's not technically crossing one of these hot-button issues,
00:07:10.180but it is more or less associated with being on the wrong team.
00:07:13.900And therefore, you also kind of endanger yourself if you're identified as such.
00:07:18.260And therefore, very much this small group of maybe 3% to 5% of academia is just the gender-critical feminists, the conservatives in the social sciences and humanities.
00:07:28.600That's who we're really feeling, this heat, this loss of liberty.
00:07:32.260So I kind of concentrate a lot on them.
00:07:34.320But also, it's not as if the vast rump of academia is off the hook because they're complicit in this system.
00:07:43.600So it's not as though the Trump supporters and the conservatives and the gender-critical feminists are just being paranoid,
00:07:49.200that actually everybody would love them and be open to their ideas.
00:07:51.880Well, not really, because if you look at – I did something called a list experiment,
00:07:58.260which allows you to get at people's true views in a way that a direct question doesn't.
00:08:03.500And what I found was essentially four out of ten U.S. social science humanities academics would not hire a Trump supporter.
00:08:12.620And 45% of Canadian academics, and in Britain it's about one in three who wouldn't hire a known Leave supporter.
00:08:19.060So you've got pretty high political prejudice operating.
00:08:21.940If you think about going up for promotion or trying to get something in a journal,
00:08:27.480if you've got four referees and, well, 40% of them are going to be politically biased,
00:08:35.660the chances are one or two of those people are going to be against you if they can smell your politics.
00:08:41.960That means you're going to keep that politics in the closet in your work, right?
00:08:46.660So this is the dynamic that's going on.
00:09:10.360Actually, if you take people of, say, whether left or right, they both discriminate relatively equally inside and outside academia.
00:09:20.800It's just much more acceptable for people to say, I don't like this person because he's a Tory or he voted for Corbyn or whatever, and that's going to influence my decision.
00:09:29.980That's actually not allowed in a hiring decision or a firing decision, but there seems to be a tolerance for it.
00:09:36.580So anytime you get an institution that's, say, 10 to 1 or 14 to 1 of one group, say, in the university's case, it might be left to right, all of a sudden you're in a climate where there is massive political discrimination because in a situation where it was 50-50, everyone's equally prejudiced, the prejudice will cut both ways.
00:09:55.640Yeah, you might annoy one person, but someone else might favor you for your views, so it comes out a bit more in the wash.
00:10:01.480But once you get a situation that's highly tilted, yeah, that one person may be equally prejudiced as these ten, but ten to one means the effect hits the political minorities just that much more.
00:10:11.720And that's kind of what we're seeing in academia.
00:10:14.460And what that then means is you get, with political discrimination, you get two things.
00:10:18.780One is self-censorship and people concealing their views, but also you get people being repelled from going down the academic track.
00:10:27.480And one of the surveys I did, which was on graduate students, showed that conservative graduate students,
00:10:33.840particularly at the master's level, knew that academia was not a place that was friendly to their political ideas
00:10:39.920and that that was significantly linked with not wanting to pursue an academic career.
00:10:45.320So what you're now into is a sort of self-fulfilling feedback loop where you've got a hostile climate for conservative or gender-critical beliefs that keeps people with those beliefs from coming into the profession, which keeps the sort of impurities out and keeps it a monoculture.
00:11:03.780And the big question is whether that dynamic is going to migrate to other spheres like publishing, like, I don't know, motion pictures or whatever, which may not be quite as advanced as universities.
00:11:22.800So that's the issue. And if you go back to like 1965, 1970, in the social sciences and humanities, you can see it's about three to one left to right.
00:11:33.980And it's now about 12, 13 or thereabouts. So it's gotten worse.
00:11:37.620It's not the case. Yes, academia, particularly social sciences, humanities, has leaned left for a long time.
00:11:43.620But it's not leaned left to the same extent it has now. Things have gotten much worse.
00:11:48.540And I think part of the explanation is the spiral, where you get a monoculture, which is then hostile, which then deters people, and that just drives this cycle more and more.
00:11:58.900So yeah, that's pretty much the message of my report on academic freedom recently.
00:12:04.320There weren't specific policy recommendations in this one the way they were in the British one.
00:12:12.060The British one had a series of policy recommendations,
00:12:16.340which I would also largely endorse for the U.S. case.
00:12:19.540It's just that CSPI didn't want to go into the policy side of it,
00:12:22.900and so I said, fine, we won't do that.
00:12:24.780Because we had some disagreements amongst some of the other fellows,
00:12:27.640and I thought, okay, we'll just, yeah, we'll keep it out of this.
00:12:31.760But I wrote up some of the policy stuff for City Journal,
00:12:34.700which is the Manhattan Institute's in-house organ,
00:12:38.420and sort of laid out some of my policy thoughts in that piece,
00:12:42.300which largely kind of follow from what's been done here in Britain.
00:12:47.440And it also gets into a wider conversation.
00:12:49.880Eric, maybe you should remind people what they were.
00:12:52.820Yeah, so for your viewers, particularly not from Britain,
00:12:56.480back in February, the government basically committed to,
00:13:00.840well, in a policy white paper, they set out some reforms
00:13:04.900that were going to be made to universities here.
00:13:09.320Now, this is still to pass through and become law,
00:13:12.540but it's almost certainly likely to go through.
00:13:15.160It's just a question of whether it goes through in its present form
00:13:18.360or whether there's some amendments that are made.
00:13:20.020But basically what this legislation does and policy guidance does,
00:13:26.080almost all of it is about enforcing current law,
00:13:29.700but it's about doing it proactively, right?
00:13:31.880So instead of, for example, your academic freedom rights being violated because the university says, what you're saying, it puts our university in a bad light.
00:13:41.260We've had some complaints from students, a.k.a. a kind of Twitter mob.
00:13:45.960We've had these complaints, and therefore we would like you to stop writing what you're writing or whatever.
00:13:51.160Or we haul you in and we punish you in some way.
00:13:53.600We take you off, take you from this position.
00:13:56.080You're no longer on this committee or you're no longer able to teach that.
00:14:00.180So there's a punishment that's involved. Well, that is actually a violation of your academic freedom, even under current law. But the way the law is set up now is you've got these different obligations. The universities have an obligation to ensure academic freedom, but then they've also got their policy and work and study where you can't be seen to be harassing anybody.
00:14:19.960and harassment is loosely, subjectively defined.
00:14:22.900And then you've got our reputation of the university
00:14:26.680and that, well, we can't have that sort of besmirched.
00:14:29.840That's all used in a way to trump academic freedom.
00:15:17.140And I know there's a discussion around this.
00:15:20.220I have this discussion with others who say, no, no, the market will sort it out and people will vote with their feet and good ideas will drive out the bad.
00:15:27.540No, it's not actually how it works in a system such as the university system where there is, first of all, it's government-funded.
00:15:33.740Secondly, there are huge network effects and legacy effects.
00:15:38.200You can't just set up new universities left and right because there are tremendous advantages to being established.
00:15:44.320So you have to work to reform the existing sector, which means you've got to use the power of government.
00:15:49.140And that, for some libertarians, is anathema.
00:15:52.020And I think if you go down the path of being a libertarian on issues around wokeness, whether it's tech firms or universities or whatever, in my view, you're being a useful idiot for the woke.
00:16:02.020All you're doing is essentially taking away the only lever we have to try and roll back this stuff within these institutions.
00:16:10.900Eric, can I just stop you there just for a second?
00:16:12.960Because we're using the word woke, and this means different things to different people.
00:16:31.540One sentence, sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender, and sexual minorities.
00:16:37.900That's the one sentence definition of woke.
00:16:39.960So once you say that these categories of people are sacred, that means then that any kind of criticism of anything that might help or is in the name of helping these groups, right, affirmative action could be one, microaggressions could be any, or even the government's recent paper on equalities and anti-racism.
00:17:04.560If you say structural racism or institutional racism doesn't exist, any criticism of something that is in the name of these sacred groups becomes, in effect, you are putting yourself in the excommunicated box.
00:17:17.560So wokeness is really about sacralization of categories of people, and that's the bedrock behind it all.
00:18:22.880So it prevents any kind of rational discussion.
00:18:25.460And I think we see this in the recent Race Commission report where, you know, just saying, look, we've got to look at what is the driver of, you know, higher, you know, disparate sentencing between black and white or disparate outcomes in terms of maternal mortality.
00:18:40.040We actually have to look at not just racism.
00:18:42.260You know, there is a gap there, but we don't just jump to racism.
00:18:45.260We actually want to look at, well, what are the other factors that might be going on, like not pleading guilty, for example.
00:18:52.280How can we address these other drivers of the gap?
00:18:54.920That is heretical because it questions an explanation, i.e. institutional racism,
00:19:01.120which is associated with helping the sacred category.
00:19:05.600But at the core of this is the sacralization of these categories.
00:19:09.700So, yeah, that's sort of the definition of wokeness.
00:19:13.220You were talking about how libertarians are useful idiots.
00:19:16.740So as that is then used as a battering ram to institute policies,
00:19:22.120which violate academic freedom, such as bias response teams,
00:19:25.220such as diversity training that uses critical race theory,
00:19:30.080such as decolonizing the curriculum, mandatory decolonizing of the curriculum.
00:19:35.980In other words, your reading list must be X percent this and that, X percent that,
00:19:40.300which is in some places where we're moving,
00:19:43.240which is a violation of your freedom to set your own reading list, for example.
00:19:47.400But essentially you get these policies that are pushed in institutions by quite a small group.
00:19:51.860So what's interesting in the surveys is only about 10% of academics favor firing academics who are doing controversial research across a series of different topics on race.
00:20:08.560But it's also one in 10 amongst non-academics, right, who are on the left.
00:20:11.880So it's not about academics, but it is about there is a 10% in the population.
00:20:18.340Well, 10% of society think, you know, Larry Elder always makes the point, 10% of society think Elvis is still alive.
00:20:24.100And if you send him a letter, he'll get it.
00:20:26.140But I think where you're probably going, Eric, I'm going to guess here, is that there's a very large body of people who, while not supporting it, will not vocally oppose it.
00:20:37.360So you've got about half, 40 to 50% of academics who, you know, they won't support a campaign to get rid of somebody, but they're also not opposed to it.
00:20:45.560And when I say not opposed, I don't mean they don't stick their head above the parapet.
00:20:49.860No, I mean even on a survey, they wouldn't be opposed to firing.
00:20:55.540So that is a very permissive atmosphere.
00:20:59.240And the further left you are, the more permissive you are on this.
00:21:03.160And conservatives are obviously much more likely to actively oppose.
00:21:08.620One is you've got that 10% that are active, pro-cancel.
00:21:14.180And then you've got that 40% to 50% intermediate group who kind of sympathize with the aim of protecting disadvantaged groups, again, partly because they buy into that woke substructure of these are sacred groups that are – we have to do everything in our power because – so they buy into the kind of progressive aims, but they may be a little uneasy with the means of violating academic freedom.
00:21:37.440A lot of them have a commitment to academic freedom, but it's in tension with their sympathy with these means.
00:21:44.380And it's interesting, you can change the question around and get radically different answers.
00:21:48.240So you might, if you ask a question, are you in favor of political correctness because it protects minority groups or do you oppose it because it's a threat to free speech?
00:21:57.920Among social science, humanities, academics in Britain, it's like 75% pro-political correctness, 20% against.
00:22:03.600So massively in favor of political correctness. But then you ask, okay, well, social justice or academic freedom, which one do you, if you had to pick? And then it swings to majority going for academic freedom, maybe 55 to 35 against, for social justice. So there's this kind of tension, I guess, between these competing values, and it comes out differently depending on how you phrase the question.
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00:23:33.260eric let me ask you this because this is something that i find really interesting
00:23:39.240how much of this is about left versus right or how much about this is majority versus minority
00:23:46.160And here's what I'm getting at. If the majority of the faculty at universities were conservatives, do you think these attitudes would flip?
00:23:56.780Or is there something inherent about being on the left that makes you pro-cancel culture or more open to it?
00:24:03.400And is there something inherent about being on the right that makes you sort of like, we don't care about people's feelings, we're all about the research?
00:24:10.260Or is it just simply a function of the fact, like, the left is the majority, therefore we want to dominate, and the right is the minority, we want to have some breathing space?
00:24:21.260I think it's mostly what you say, that if it were a conservative majority, then you'd get the dynamics moving in the opposite direction.
00:24:27.960That is, certainly on political discrimination, it would be pretty much the same picture.
00:24:32.900So political discrimination is heavily down to, are you a majority or are you a minority?
00:24:37.580But the difference, I think, is on support for cancel culture.
00:24:41.260And one of the things, by the way, I didn't mention was that amongst younger academics aged 35 and under, twice as supportive of cancelling as those 50 and over.
00:24:56.040So, I mean, I asked four hypothetical questions and, you know, it was about 10% of academics back cancellation in any one of those scenarios.
00:25:03.060But about 25%, if you consider people who backed at least one of the four cancel scenarios, well, that number was over 50% for PhD students in the U.S.
00:25:14.980So one in two PhDs backs at least one of these four hypothetical cancel campaigns.
00:25:20.680So people who say that somehow these things come and go, these phases come and go, McCarthyism came and went, this is going to come and go.
00:25:28.760So, I mean, really all of the data that we see
00:25:31.140is that we've got a more intolerant generation coming at us
00:25:34.760and we should expect to see these problems get worse and not better.
00:30:36.720He's got intolerances of the worst kind.
00:30:39.140But yeah, so you imagine a gang of people out there wanting to lynch us.
00:30:42.720So you need the police to come in and evict them to get your freedom back.
00:30:46.440So you need the state actually to intervene when you have these intermediate level forces.
00:30:51.420And that's the kind of world we're increasingly living in.
00:30:54.840And the problem is not that everyone in these institutions is illiberal.
00:30:59.100In fact, it's only a minority who are.
00:31:00.840But that minority, by playing these sacred values, is able to exert much, much more pressure on people's consciences and their fear of their reputations and everything.
00:31:12.560The small group is allowed to essentially force multiply itself by leveraging these taboos.
00:31:18.640And the only way you get at that is by making it so the institutions have no wiggle room.
00:31:24.780So if an institution like a university sort of is told you're going to be fine if you abrogate academic freedom as defined here, and that has to take precedence over any kind of subjective definitions of emotional safety and harassment in your policies, then when the activists come knocking and breathing down their necks on Twitter, in committees, and so on, the administrators in the universities can say, well, yes, we're with you, but we can't do it.
00:31:52.280our hands are tied. And that's the response we're looking for, is to say,
00:31:56.460we don't want the administrators to declare loyalty necessarily to free speech. What we
00:32:01.320want them to be able to do is to say no to the activists. And once the activists are unable to
00:32:07.380push the administrations in their direction, they've lost their power. And that's the whole
00:32:12.220point, is to use the law and government to try and take away the levers of power that connect
00:34:13.540I don't know. I only listened to the food ones. Joking aside, though, they've talked to the founders of pioneering startups like BrewDog, Monzo and Joe Malone.
00:34:22.320My favorite episode actually was with Alex Stephanie, the CEO of Beam, who spoke about how business could solve huge societal problems like homelessness.
00:34:32.920Oh, wow. That sounds great. Where do I go to listen to Secret Leaders?
00:34:36.700Just download it right now from wherever you get your podcasts. All you need to do is search for Secret Leaders.
00:35:31.880And we had surveys that were showing that 30 or 40% of academics
00:35:35.520would discriminate against a black applicant.
00:35:37.780you know there's just no way that would stand nor should it stand right so that would be sufficient
00:35:43.100evidence for radical change and action to to happen we've got the evidence but what the problem
00:35:50.340and also the european courts and other courts have essentially said you cannot politically
00:35:55.720discriminate you can't just fire somebody because they're a labor party supporter you know your
00:36:00.080political beliefs are protected so this is not legal um it's not legal to do it and so part of
00:36:07.000the problem is, okay, how do we then get to a situation where we can apply the law into these
00:36:13.540institutions? That's not being discussed now. You don't receive any guidance that you're not
00:36:18.380allowed to discriminate on political grounds when you're going into a hiring committee, for example.
00:36:22.920The universities are allowed to be blatantly political. I think they should have to be
00:36:27.640politically neutral at the administrative level, not the academic. Academics should be able to
00:36:32.000have whatever political views and say them in class, and well, that's fine. They've got their
00:36:35.900freedom, but I think it's at the departments. Departments saying we are a progressive department
00:36:40.620and posting political things in their common rooms. Again, different if individual academics
00:36:46.640post stuff on their doors, but for official parts of the university to be pushing a political
00:36:51.900message I think should not be permitted in publicly funded institutions. Like schools,
00:36:57.300they should have to be neutral. So putting that kind of neutrality in would I think help to change
00:37:03.140the atmosphere. So all I'm saying to you is we've got the proof. I don't think we need more proof.
00:37:07.940We have pretty strong evidence now. It's just what do you do about it? Well, this is my question
00:37:12.740because what you're talking about, and I, by the way, like the libertarian position, which I used
00:37:18.720to be quite sympathetic to, clearly doesn't work in the modern environment. There's no argument
00:37:23.300about that. You know, this idea, oh, let's just have another Twitter. Well, we saw what happened
00:37:27.620to parlor, right? And it doesn't work. It's just, to me, that's just a given. But what it sounds
00:37:34.560like to me, given the demographic dynamics of a university, particularly with the younger people
00:37:42.300that you're talking about being so woke and so pro-cancel culture, and, and, and, and, you're
00:37:49.180sort of trying to solve a problem from the top down, but the problem is from the bottom up,
00:37:53.740isn't it? Right. Well, that's a very good question. So I think we've got two issues here.
00:37:57.260And this is kind of encapsulated in the sort of Chris Rufo versus IDW debate.
00:38:03.200So for anyone who's not familiar with this, just give us a summary.
00:38:06.220Yeah, so this is really a kind of debate between Chris Rufo who's sort of saying, well, you know, intellectual dark web, you're a talking shop.
00:38:15.180It's great that you're having these programs, but you're having no effect on day-to-day operation of people's lives in institutions and on politics.
00:38:23.700Now, my own view is actually both of these positions have merit that you do need to win the war of ideas.
00:38:29.320Ultimately, if you lose the war of ideas, even if you get regulation and the law, that will only keep the wolf from the door for so long.
00:38:37.180So you do have to ultimately win the battle of ideas to get a free speech culture, as Greg Lukianoff would put it.
00:38:43.960Support for free speech as a cultural thing in order to underpin the legal and political framework.
00:38:50.320However, in the long run, we're all dead, and in a way, to kind of condemn everybody to a woke inquisition within these institutions for the foreseeable future for at least a couple of generations or however long it's going to take, right, for this generation to pass through the system and for the next one to a more sensible one.
00:39:09.160Although I think actually this generation is not as lost as that might sound.
00:39:13.000They're actually much more varied and fractious.
00:39:16.020But still, I think you've got to play the long game on the ideas front.
00:39:20.260But you also have to play the short game, which is that most of the public are pro-free speech.
00:39:26.500And so you need to enlist them via the democratic process to penetrate these institutions and push them towards essentially ensuring expressive and academic freedom.
00:39:36.800and also to work on the viewpoint diversity front
00:42:19.400This is the way Obligation A sits with regard to Obligation B.
00:42:24.400And if Obligation A is legally worded in a way that says you have a duty to,
00:42:29.480as opposed to some other legalistic wording,
00:42:31.820which suggests that the second obligation is like, say, to safety
00:42:35.260or something has a lower standing, then the one trumps the other.
00:42:39.420It's all about specifying these things in law.
00:42:41.900I think the Free Speech Union has some good ideas here.
00:42:44.300You've actually got to get into the legal nitty-gritty.
00:42:46.560And this is one of the things about the whole culture war thing is you actually have to have a policy network that gets into the weeds, gets into the way laws are written and the way these things are traded off against each other, where the thresholds are.
00:43:00.420you have to get, like with the BBC for example
00:46:51.240But it's part of what looks to be an emerging political split that's wider than it's been.
00:46:58.240And you see that in the U.S. and in Britain.
00:47:00.420Now, the one thing I would say, however, is in the 2019 academic freedom report,
00:47:07.220What we saw was that when we presented a paragraph that was, say, pro-academic freedom, people read that before answering a question like, is free speech more important than emotional safety?
00:47:18.720You can actually get undergraduates to shift their opinions like 15 points when they read something about the history of the battle for free speech.
00:47:26.560But you can also shift them 15 points in the sort of emotional safety direction when they read about historically marginalized groups.
00:47:33.980So that opinion is up for grabs in a way that the PhD student opinion is not.
00:47:40.660And the academic opinion, by and large, is not.
00:47:44.280So any efforts need to be focused on the sort of people before they become adults.
00:47:49.660I mean, that is really where opinion is more malleable.
00:47:52.300So I still think there is a lot of hope that that opinion can be shifted.
00:47:57.120And, of course, the Free Speech Union wants the government to be teaching about free speech in schools.
00:48:01.660I think that would be an excellent idea.
00:48:03.440Also, students when they come to universities should receive just a standard mailing informing them of their rights,
00:48:09.920their free speech rights being protected, why this is important.
00:48:13.000That should be standard issue as well.
00:48:14.600So I think we have to make the case to younger people because I don't think it figures in their thinking very much.
00:48:21.160I mean, one of the things on the FIRE survey, one of the questions was actually about allowing someone on campus who said all whites are racist.
00:48:27.540Now, that's a central tenet to critical race theory, which is interesting.
00:48:32.300But there, only 20-25% of students were in favor of allowing such a person on campus, which I thought was quite ironic given the emphasis on critical race theory.
00:48:43.280So there is a sort of knee-jerk kind of intolerance that is partly ideological, but it's just partly because they haven't learned about the importance and the value and the struggle for things like the right to criticize the government in the 18th century in England.
00:48:58.380You know, even these sorts of things, the Cultural Revolution in China, none of those stories they know, whereas they know all about, you know, civil rights movement and the Nazis, which is great, but they don't know anything about the things Orwell talks about or the battle for the right to criticize and publish against the government.
00:49:17.300You know, none of that is part of their education, from what I can tell.
00:49:33.040Yeah, it is. It's what I do. It's what I'm here to bring.
00:49:35.780What do you think will happen if we don't implement these changes into universities?
00:49:41.220Well, I think a lot of, essentially, things will just continue moving in the direction they are,
00:49:45.860which is that every year, which with every crisis, whether it's the Everard, Sarah Everard killing,
00:49:52.860or whether it is the BLM or whatever, you get a surge of activism.
00:49:56.960And more diversity training, more bias response teams, more decolonizing the curriculum, increasingly overt progressive messaging from the university.
00:50:08.520I mean, so each time you get one of these events, the ratchet gets turned up one notch, making things even more hostile for political minorities than it is now, skewing the truth-seeking mission of the university more and more away from what it should be.
00:50:22.640So yeah, I just think things are going to get worse unless we do something.
00:50:26.600And it's worth saying that some of these changes have been in train for a long time.
00:50:31.440I mean, speech codes came in in the U.S. universities in the late 80s.
00:50:35.100So we're now talking about our fourth decade of these sorts of speech restrictions being in place.
00:50:42.680So this is not McCarthyism, something that's going to blow and then go away.
00:50:46.400It's not going away unless it's sort of something's done about it.