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

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00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissing and this is a

00:00:39.940 show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people and a brilliant guest

00:00:45.240 we have for you today he's returning to the show for the third time a professor of politics at

00:00:49.940 berthberg college university of london eric kathman welcome back delighted to be here you

00:00:54.000 guys this is great and i'm very impressed by the way with how you guys are rising in the world with

00:00:58.160 studio. That's very kind of you to say. As I said to you before, this is what happens when you

00:01:02.480 criticise BLM in public. Your life just gets better and better. Apart from the fact you've 0.98

00:01:07.640 got no friends, but we don't talk about that. I never had any friends in the first place.

00:01:12.480 But Eric, listen, it's great to have you back. We wanted to get you back because you've just

00:01:15.920 been involved with a couple of reports, one in particular, looking at academic freedom,

00:01:20.200 something we've talked about plenty in the past. So tell us what's going on. What's the situation?

00:01:25.460 how free are we? Well, I think it's important because universities are where kind of cancel

00:01:30.980 culture and wokeness emanated from. So I think it's very important to start there and see what's

00:01:35.860 been happening. So really there have been three reports, two on the UK and one now that I did on

00:01:42.400 the US, Canada and the UK, which was much larger in scope. It's worth mentioning that the sort of

00:01:47.820 2020 August UK report on academic freedom was the one which five of our seven recommendations

00:01:54.600 went into the UK government's white paper.

00:01:57.580 So we're very pleased with that take-up of a lot of the ideas.

00:02:01.280 And I think it sort of gets to the notion that part of the practical aspect

00:02:06.740 of trying to take on cancel culture is forming these policy networks,

00:02:11.120 think tanks, academics, government,

00:02:13.280 where you can get some of these policies enacted.

00:02:17.700 But before I go into that detail,

00:02:19.560 I've just put out a more recent report for the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology,

00:02:24.220 which is a new think tank based in California, very small.

00:02:28.440 But what they're trying to do is get out sort of unconventional social science research

00:02:33.680 into the policy space and broadly into the domain

00:02:37.560 because so many of these questions are not being asked in universities

00:02:40.300 because you can't ask them or no one's interested in them for ideological reasons.

00:02:45.680 So, for example, studying wokeness, you know,

00:02:47.340 that's not something that's going to attract a lot of funding.

00:02:50.160 So what this report does is it's based on a lot of original research, eight surveys, taking the UK surveys that we did for the Policy Exchange 2020 report, adding on to that, surveys in Canada and Britain, and some surveys of post-graduates, so PhD students.

00:03:12.380 And what did we find?

00:03:13.240 Well, basically what we find is we confirm a lot of previous research

00:03:17.200 which shows that social science and humanities academia is extremely left,

00:03:21.860 as you might imagine.

00:03:23.180 So the numbers we were getting were about 14 to 1 left to right in Canada and the U.S.

00:03:29.680 and about 9 to 1 in Britain.

00:03:32.320 Other studies using sort of voter registration data,

00:03:35.480 which are more of a complete sample,

00:03:36.820 find something similar, roughly 12, 13 to 1, in the top 100, say, U.S. institutions.

00:03:43.160 I also looked at the top 40 Canadian institutions.

00:03:45.900 So what you've got now is more or less a monoculture.

00:03:49.080 You have a very small number of conservatives, a small number of centrists.

00:03:53.120 The conservatives are more or less in the closet, for the most part.

00:03:56.500 That atmosphere is one in which, essentially, it's not a free idea space where all ideas

00:04:02.860 are challenged equally.

00:04:03.900 good ideas have an equal shot at getting into journals or getting grant funding.

00:04:08.120 What I wanted to do with the surveys is to actually look at academics themselves, as

00:04:12.860 well as graduate students, and find out not only their political beliefs, but also their

00:04:16.760 support for cancel culture, because we didn't really have any proper studies on that, and

00:04:20.740 then willingness to politically discriminate, and then number three, how much are political

00:04:25.580 minorities, i.e. conservatives, to some extent centrists, but also gender-critical feminists,

00:04:30.760 How much are they essentially feeling unfree?

00:04:34.560 Because so often you'll get this retort from the academic establishment and particularly the progressive left that, well, it's a few no-platforming incidents which make the news.

00:04:45.120 These are blown out of proportion.

00:04:46.480 There was only 65 incidents.

00:04:49.040 It's only 0.01% of all academics that encounter this.

00:04:52.960 And that's true.

00:04:53.820 So I want to say that is actually true.

00:04:55.640 If we just want to focus on no-platformings as the problem, it is kind of a small problem.

00:05:00.260 But it's a symptom, what we argue in the report, what I argue in the report, is a symptom of a much larger threat to academic freedom, which is chilling effects.

00:05:10.040 All 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.

00:05:16.520 Yeah, but more than that, I wanted to get at the everyday academic in their teaching.

00:05:22.480 Do they feel free to raise issues?

00:05:25.020 In their research, are they researching what they really want to research and saying what they really want to say?

00:05:30.260 in conversation, in public commentary? Well, lo and behold, the answer is no. I mean, if you take

00:05:36.240 conservative academics in the U.S. and Canada, who are in the social sciences and humanities,

00:05:42.560 it's about three quarters who say their department is a hostile climate for their beliefs. It's about

00:05:47.620 between six and seven out of ten who say they self-censor in their research and teaching.

00:05:52.960 If you look at Trump-supporting academics, there are a very small number.

00:05:56.820 you know one out of ten would let that slip to a colleague whereas Biden supporters it's about

00:06:05.340 nine out of ten right so you're you know you're talking about a major difference in who feels

00:06:10.480 free to speak and who feels free within academia so it's really a problem that's concentrated

00:06:16.520 heavily on political minorities which is why a lot of academics who tend to be center-left

00:06:21.200 they don't see this because it's not affecting what they do they can just do their research

00:06:25.340 do their teaching? What's the problem? It's like in China, you know, if you just have a nice life, 0.99

00:06:29.800 you go to parties, you drink, you do whatever. What's the problem here? I don't feel unfree.

00:06:34.540 It's only once you cross the ideological regime that exists. And it's similar in a university.

00:06:40.280 It's only when you cross a boundary, which is, it could be around hot button issues,

00:06:46.680 race, gender, sexuality, not having the right opinions. So a Kathleen Stark, for example, 0.98

00:06:51.880 on gender-critical feminism, boom, all of a sudden you're in trouble. 0.99

00:06:55.940 You're getting no platforms.

00:06:57.060 You're getting hauled into disciplinary tribunals.

00:07:00.480 But as long as you toe the line, you're fine.

00:07:02.680 And so it's something similar in academia.

00:07:04.460 The other thing is being a conservative,

00:07:06.380 it's not technically crossing one of these hot-button issues,

00:07:10.180 but it is more or less associated with being on the wrong team.

00:07:13.900 And therefore, you also kind of endanger yourself if you're identified as such.

00:07:18.260 And 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. 0.99

00:07:28.600 That's who we're really feeling, this heat, this loss of liberty.

00:07:32.260 So I kind of concentrate a lot on them.

00:07:34.320 But also, it's not as if the vast rump of academia is off the hook because they're complicit in this system.

00:07:43.600 So it's not as though the Trump supporters and the conservatives and the gender-critical feminists are just being paranoid,

00:07:49.200 that actually everybody would love them and be open to their ideas.

00:07:51.880 Well, not really, because if you look at – I did something called a list experiment,

00:07:58.260 which allows you to get at people's true views in a way that a direct question doesn't.

00:08:03.500 And what I found was essentially four out of ten U.S. social science humanities academics would not hire a Trump supporter.

00:08:12.620 And 45% of Canadian academics, and in Britain it's about one in three who wouldn't hire a known Leave supporter.

00:08:19.060 So you've got pretty high political prejudice operating.

00:08:21.940 If you think about going up for promotion or trying to get something in a journal,

00:08:27.480 if you've got four referees and, well, 40% of them are going to be politically biased,

00:08:35.660 the chances are one or two of those people are going to be against you if they can smell your politics.

00:08:41.960 That means you're going to keep that politics in the closet in your work, right?

00:08:46.660 So this is the dynamic that's going on.

00:08:49.640 It's not so much fear.

00:08:51.300 I mean, it is fear of losing your job.

00:08:52.700 I want to come to that cancel culture point in a minute.

00:08:56.000 But the biggest problem is political discrimination.

00:08:59.580 Political discrimination is a huge topic, which is, it seems to me, not receiving anywhere near the attention it needs to get.

00:09:07.200 It is massive.

00:09:08.520 And it's not only academia.

00:09:10.360 Actually, if you take people of, say, whether left or right, they both discriminate relatively equally inside and outside academia.

00:09:20.800 It's just much more acceptable for people to say, I don't like this person because he's a Tory or he voted for Corbyn or whatever, and that's going to influence my decision.

00:09:29.980 That's actually not allowed in a hiring decision or a firing decision, but there seems to be a tolerance for it.

00:09:36.580 So anytime you get an institution that's, say, 10 to 1 or 14 to 1 of one group, say, in the university's case, it might be left to right, all of a sudden you're in a climate where there is massive political discrimination because in a situation where it was 50-50, everyone's equally prejudiced, the prejudice will cut both ways.

00:09:55.640 Yeah, you might annoy one person, but someone else might favor you for your views, so it comes out a bit more in the wash.

00:10:01.480 But 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.

00:10:11.720 And that's kind of what we're seeing in academia.

00:10:14.460 And what that then means is you get, with political discrimination, you get two things.

00:10:18.780 One is self-censorship and people concealing their views, but also you get people being repelled from going down the academic track.

00:10:27.480 And one of the surveys I did, which was on graduate students, showed that conservative graduate students,

00:10:33.840 particularly at the master's level, knew that academia was not a place that was friendly to their political ideas

00:10:39.920 and that that was significantly linked with not wanting to pursue an academic career.

00:10:45.320 So what you're now into is a sort of self-fulfilling feedback loop where you've got a hostile climate for conservative or gender-critical beliefs that keeps people with those beliefs from coming into the profession, which keeps the sort of impurities out and keeps it a monoculture.

00:11:01.720 And so it's reproducing itself.

00:11:03.780 And the big question is whether that dynamic is going to migrate to other spheres like publishing, like, I don't know, motion pictures or whatever, which may not be quite as advanced as universities.

00:11:16.840 Oh, they are.

00:11:17.140 Oh, maybe they are.

00:11:18.180 Okay.

00:11:18.980 I'm writing my first book at the moment.

00:11:20.980 Believe me, they are.

00:11:22.380 Yeah.

00:11:22.500 Yeah.

00:11:22.800 So 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.

00:11:33.980 And it's now about 12, 13 or thereabouts. So it's gotten worse.

00:11:37.620 It's not the case. Yes, academia, particularly social sciences, humanities, has leaned left for a long time.

00:11:43.620 But it's not leaned left to the same extent it has now. Things have gotten much worse.

00:11:48.540 And I think part of the explanation is the spiral, where you get a monoculture, which is then hostile, which then deters people, and that just drives this cycle more and more.

00:11:58.900 So yeah, that's pretty much the message of my report on academic freedom recently.

00:12:04.320 There weren't specific policy recommendations in this one the way they were in the British one.

00:12:12.060 The British one had a series of policy recommendations,

00:12:16.340 which I would also largely endorse for the U.S. case.

00:12:19.540 It's just that CSPI didn't want to go into the policy side of it,

00:12:22.900 and so I said, fine, we won't do that.

00:12:24.780 Because we had some disagreements amongst some of the other fellows,

00:12:27.640 and I thought, okay, we'll just, yeah, we'll keep it out of this.

00:12:30.140 We'll keep it empirical.

00:12:31.760 But I wrote up some of the policy stuff for City Journal,

00:12:34.700 which is the Manhattan Institute's in-house organ,

00:12:38.420 and sort of laid out some of my policy thoughts in that piece,

00:12:42.300 which largely kind of follow from what's been done here in Britain.

00:12:47.440 And it also gets into a wider conversation.

00:12:49.880 Eric, maybe you should remind people what they were.

00:12:52.820 Yeah, so for your viewers, particularly not from Britain,

00:12:56.480 back in February, the government basically committed to,

00:13:00.840 well, in a policy white paper, they set out some reforms

00:13:04.900 that were going to be made to universities here.

00:13:09.320 Now, this is still to pass through and become law,

00:13:12.540 but it's almost certainly likely to go through.

00:13:15.160 It's just a question of whether it goes through in its present form

00:13:18.360 or whether there's some amendments that are made.

00:13:20.020 But basically what this legislation does and policy guidance does,

00:13:26.080 almost all of it is about enforcing current law,

00:13:29.700 but it's about doing it proactively, right?

00:13:31.880 So instead of, for example, your academic freedom rights being violated because the university says, what you're saying, it puts our university in a bad light.

00:13:41.260 We've had some complaints from students, a.k.a. a kind of Twitter mob.

00:13:45.960 We've had these complaints, and therefore we would like you to stop writing what you're writing or whatever.

00:13:51.160 Or we haul you in and we punish you in some way.

00:13:53.600 We take you off, take you from this position.

00:13:56.080 You're no longer on this committee or you're no longer able to teach that.

00:14:00.180 So there's a punishment that's involved. Well, that is actually a violation of your academic freedom, even under current law. But the way the law is set up now is you've got these different obligations. The universities have an obligation to ensure academic freedom, but then they've also got their policy and work and study where you can't be seen to be harassing anybody.

00:14:19.960 and harassment is loosely, subjectively defined.

00:14:22.900 And then you've got our reputation of the university

00:14:26.680 and that, well, we can't have that sort of besmirched.

00:14:29.840 That's all used in a way to trump academic freedom.

00:14:33.240 So academic freedom comes last

00:14:34.540 and it's more or less thrown under the bus

00:14:36.300 whenever there's a conflict.

00:14:38.420 What this legislation would do was essentially say,

00:14:40.780 you can't do that, academic freedom is number one

00:14:43.500 and all these other considerations are two and three.

00:14:46.400 And so if there's ever a situation

00:14:47.800 where you say academic freedom is trumped by these other things,

00:14:51.020 you are actually going to be told to change that decision

00:14:53.480 and you're going to face fines.

00:14:54.820 So there's a regime that involves a new office,

00:15:00.200 someone called the Academic Freedom Champion,

00:15:02.280 which sits on the university's regulator called the OFS here in Britain.

00:15:07.420 And what they would have the power to do

00:15:09.220 is essentially investigate universities

00:15:10.760 and essentially tell them to reverse decisions,

00:15:13.400 issue fines, and so on.

00:15:15.520 This is the only way,

00:15:17.140 And I know there's a discussion around this.

00:15:20.220 I have this discussion with others who say, no, no, the market will sort it out and people will vote with their feet and good ideas will drive out the bad.

00:15:27.540 No, it's not actually how it works in a system such as the university system where there is, first of all, it's government-funded.

00:15:33.740 Secondly, there are huge network effects and legacy effects.

00:15:38.200 You can't just set up new universities left and right because there are tremendous advantages to being established.

00:15:44.320 So you have to work to reform the existing sector, which means you've got to use the power of government.

00:15:49.140 And that, for some libertarians, is anathema. 0.99

00:15:52.020 And I think if you go down the path of being a libertarian on issues around wokeness, whether it's tech firms or universities or whatever, in my view, you're being a useful idiot for the woke. 0.97

00:16:02.020 All you're doing is essentially taking away the only lever we have to try and roll back this stuff within these institutions. 0.93

00:16:10.900 Eric, can I just stop you there just for a second?

00:16:12.960 Because we're using the word woke, and this means different things to different people.

00:16:17.200 Right.

00:16:17.640 Because to some people, they would say, well, woke means just being socially aware,

00:16:20.940 aware that, you know, black people face racism.

00:16:23.760 Trans people, you know, they're exposed to, you know, their own form of prejudice.

00:16:27.480 What does wokeness actually mean?

00:16:29.160 How would you define it?

00:16:30.140 Okay, very good question.

00:16:31.540 One sentence, sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender, and sexual minorities.

00:16:37.900 That's the one sentence definition of woke.

00:16:39.960 So once you say that these categories of people are sacred, that means then that any kind of criticism of anything that might help or is in the name of helping these groups, right, affirmative action could be one, microaggressions could be any, or even the government's recent paper on equalities and anti-racism.

00:17:04.560 If 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.

00:17:17.560 So wokeness is really about sacralization of categories of people, and that's the bedrock behind it all.

00:17:24.540 So that's the definition.

00:17:26.760 Once you have that definition and once you see certain categories as being sacred and holy,

00:17:33.220 both in terms of their lived experience, in terms of their knowledge not equal, holier,

00:17:38.380 on the one hand higher, on the one hand lower because they need your protection.

00:17:41.620 You're the parent, they're the child, right?

00:17:43.340 So there's that kind of dynamic in which any kind of criticism of anything that's adjacent in any way to the sacred totems

00:17:54.140 is a blasphemy and that's kind of what 0.80

00:17:56.460 McWhorter is talking about in his

00:17:58.040 religion of anti-racism as well

00:18:00.180 is there's this very religious sacred quality

00:18:02.360 to this discussion so when I talk about

00:18:04.240 wokeness it is anything

00:18:06.420 that sort of would elevate these

00:18:08.120 categories and any ideas around these

00:18:10.400 categories as beyond reproach, beyond

00:18:12.200 criticism and any research

00:18:14.200 which might be construed as being

00:18:16.540 insensitive or in some way

00:18:18.420 critical of that

00:18:20.360 to be essentially struck down

00:18:22.880 So it prevents any kind of rational discussion.

00:18:25.460 And I think we see this in the recent Race Commission report where, you know, just saying, look, we've got to look at what is the driver of, you know, higher, you know, disparate sentencing between black and white or disparate outcomes in terms of maternal mortality.

00:18:40.040 We actually have to look at not just racism.

00:18:42.260 You know, there is a gap there, but we don't just jump to racism.

00:18:45.260 We actually want to look at, well, what are the other factors that might be going on, like not pleading guilty, for example.

00:18:52.280 How can we address these other drivers of the gap?

00:18:54.920 That is heretical because it questions an explanation, i.e. institutional racism,

00:19:01.120 which is associated with helping the sacred category.

00:19:05.600 But at the core of this is the sacralization of these categories.

00:19:09.700 So, yeah, that's sort of the definition of wokeness. 1.00

00:19:13.220 You were talking about how libertarians are useful idiots. 1.00

00:19:16.120 Right, right. 1.00

00:19:16.740 So as that is then used as a battering ram to institute policies,

00:19:22.120 which violate academic freedom, such as bias response teams,

00:19:25.220 such as diversity training that uses critical race theory,

00:19:30.080 such as decolonizing the curriculum, mandatory decolonizing of the curriculum.

00:19:35.980 In other words, your reading list must be X percent this and that, X percent that,

00:19:40.300 which is in some places where we're moving,

00:19:43.240 which is a violation of your freedom to set your own reading list, for example.

00:19:47.400 But essentially you get these policies that are pushed in institutions by quite a small group.

00:19:51.860 So 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.

00:20:02.980 But that's huge, 10%.

00:20:04.220 It is huge, yeah.

00:20:06.300 One in 10.

00:20:07.400 One in 10.

00:20:08.560 But it's also one in 10 amongst non-academics, right, who are on the left.

00:20:11.880 So it's not about academics, but it is about there is a 10% in the population.

00:20:18.340 Well, 10% of society think, you know, Larry Elder always makes the point, 10% of society think Elvis is still alive.

00:20:24.100 And if you send him a letter, he'll get it.

00:20:26.140 But I think where you're probably going, Eric, I'm going to guess here, is that there's a very large body of people who, while not supporting it, will not vocally oppose it.

00:20:35.800 Exactly.

00:20:36.320 That's crucial.

00:20:37.360 So 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.

00:20:45.560 And when I say not opposed, I don't mean they don't stick their head above the parapet.

00:20:49.860 No, I mean even on a survey, they wouldn't be opposed to firing.

00:20:55.540 So that is a very permissive atmosphere.

00:20:59.240 And the further left you are, the more permissive you are on this.

00:21:03.160 And conservatives are obviously much more likely to actively oppose.

00:21:07.040 So you've got two problems.

00:21:08.620 One is you've got that 10% that are active, pro-cancel.

00:21:14.180 And then you've got that 40% to 50% intermediate group who kind of sympathize with the aim of protecting disadvantaged groups, again, partly because they buy into that woke substructure of 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.

00:21:37.440 A lot of them have a commitment to academic freedom, but it's in tension with their sympathy with these means.

00:21:44.380 And it's interesting, you can change the question around and get radically different answers.

00:21:48.240 So 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?

00:21:57.920 Among social science, humanities, academics in Britain, it's like 75% pro-political correctness, 20% against.

00:22:03.600 So massively in favor of political correctness. But then you ask, okay, well, social justice or academic freedom, which one do you, if you had to pick? And then it swings to 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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00:23:33.260 eric let me ask you this because this is something that i find really interesting

00:23:39.240 how much of this is about left versus right or how much about this is majority versus minority

00:23:46.160 And here's what I'm getting at. If the majority of the faculty at universities were conservatives, do you think these attitudes would flip?

00:23:56.780 Or is there something inherent about being on the left that makes you pro-cancel culture or more open to it?

00:24:03.400 And is there something inherent about being on the right that makes you sort of like, we don't care about people's feelings, we're all about the research?

00:24:10.260 Or is it just simply a function of the fact, like, the left is the majority, therefore we want to dominate, and the right is the minority, we want to have some breathing space?

00:24:19.580 How much of that is going on?

00:24:21.260 I think it's mostly what you say, that if it were a conservative majority, then you'd get the dynamics moving in the opposite direction.

00:24:27.960 That is, certainly on political discrimination, it would be pretty much the same picture.

00:24:32.900 So political discrimination is heavily down to, are you a majority or are you a minority?

00:24:37.580 But the difference, I think, is on support for cancel culture.

00:24:41.260 And 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.

00:24:52.480 Well, that's good news.

00:24:53.100 Yeah, exactly.

00:24:54.380 And graduate students are even more.

00:24:56.040 So, I mean, I asked four hypothetical questions and, you know, it was about 10% of academics back cancellation in any one of those scenarios.

00:25:03.060 But 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.

00:25:14.980 So one in two PhDs backs at least one of these four hypothetical cancel campaigns.

00:25:20.680 So 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.

00:25:28.760 So, I mean, really all of the data that we see

00:25:31.140 is that we've got a more intolerant generation coming at us

00:25:34.760 and we should expect to see these problems get worse and not better.

00:25:38.420 And why do you think that is, Eric?

00:25:40.060 Why do you think that young people become more censorious than ever?

00:25:42.980 Isn't that when you're meant to be more free, more open,

00:25:45.880 you know, you're more experimental when you're young?

00:25:48.960 The end of corporal punishment, that's what happened.

00:25:50.720 Yeah, yeah.

00:25:51.940 No, Eric, that was a joke.

00:25:53.680 You're not supposed to go, yeah, yeah, to the joke

00:25:56.120 about how we stop beating kids.

00:25:57.860 That was the joke.

00:25:59.160 I missed that.

00:25:59.600 It was under your breath.

00:26:01.740 We don't beat kids enough, Eric.

00:26:03.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:26:04.540 That'll be the clip that we use, Eric.

00:26:06.220 I know, I know.

00:26:06.580 That's a Latino coming out. 0.99

00:26:07.800 No, you're right.

00:26:08.100 Exactly. 0.95

00:26:08.460 We need to beat our children. 1.00

00:26:10.240 That's right. 0.86

00:26:11.760 No, no.

00:26:13.440 Well, God, I've kind of lost the thread now.

00:26:15.940 What the hell were you asking?

00:26:16.520 The question was why young people more. 0.57

00:26:18.480 Oh, yeah, young people, yeah.

00:26:20.160 Yeah, this is interesting

00:26:21.160 because there's all kinds of other data that we find.

00:26:23.500 There was a survey now by the FIRE,

00:26:26.240 the Foundation for the Individual Rights in Education,

00:26:28.520 20,000, huge sample.

00:26:31.740 It's like 75% of people were opposing,

00:26:34.580 so 65, 75% were opposing

00:26:36.520 having different kinds of controversial speaker on campus,

00:26:39.660 you know, around someone who thinks

00:26:41.360 that all abortion should be illegal

00:26:42.780 or someone who thinks that BLM is a hate group.

00:26:46.260 You know, you would have only 20, 25% saying

00:26:48.760 such a person should be allowed on campus to speak.

00:26:51.160 You know, yeah, we are seeing definitely more intolerance.

00:26:54.300 Why is that happening?

00:26:55.140 I think it comes down to this wokeness thing

00:26:57.440 which I mentioned which is

00:26:58.560 if you've been watching movies and reading

00:27:01.480 books and in your social

00:27:03.580 media feed are, if you're seeing

00:27:05.560 this narrative in which

00:27:07.020 you've kind of got the bad whites and then 0.89

00:27:09.560 you have the good white allies and you have the 0.58

00:27:11.380 minorities who are kind of, and typically

00:27:13.760 the storyline will be about 0.88

00:27:15.300 slavery or it'll be about the Nazis

00:27:17.460 this is sort of, I think

00:27:19.660 a lot of it comes down to stories and storytelling

00:27:21.680 and the kinds of

00:27:23.420 affective attachments people form to certain kinds of minority groups. Again, those sacralized

00:27:29.560 race, gender, sexuality minority groups. That's now kind of second nature, I think, to a lot of

00:27:35.500 younger people. Although I think there are very interesting divisions within the younger

00:27:40.120 population, which we can get to later. But I think you have an acceptance of the sacredness

00:27:45.420 of these groups now, which then shuts down the tolerance. So once you accept that you can't

00:27:52.040 criticize, you must be ultra-sensitive around these groups that are sacred because they have

00:27:56.240 a history of being marginalized. Once you accept that logic, then free speech drops down. So people

00:28:01.960 say yes, yes to free speech in the abstract, but whenever there's a clash with any of the sacred

00:28:07.340 progressive values, free speech drops down. So yeah, I think we're facing a growing problem.

00:28:12.580 And so I really think this is one of the reasons why I think simply playing the libertarian long

00:28:18.200 game and thinking that, you know, good ideas will drive out the bad, eventually people will come to

00:28:21.520 their senses. It's just not the case. I think you have to actually enlist government and public

00:28:27.500 sentiment and the law to actually start to unpick this in the major institutions of society. So one

00:28:36.040 of the things I say is we can't think of society as just government and individuals and the

00:28:41.780 government oppresses individuals and so we need government off our backs. That's very 1980s

00:28:45.980 Reaganite libertarianism. That might be the case for the economy, but it is the wrong model for

00:28:52.620 what's going on now. What we actually have now is three layers. We've got government,

00:28:57.500 the institutions, such as universities, tech firms, or other kinds of charities. Media.

00:29:03.320 Less so media, which is, I think, a little bit more free market, but I can talk about that in

00:29:07.180 a minute. And then you've got individuals. And so these institutions in the middle are actually

00:29:13.680 where a lot of the threats to liberty are coming out of.

00:29:16.580 Whereas elected government, you know,

00:29:18.240 they can enable that oppression to go on in the middle,

00:29:21.480 but if you're going to find a solution

00:29:23.880 to the oppression that's happening,

00:29:25.620 you actually have to use government and the law.

00:29:28.840 And a good example might be,

00:29:30.580 if you think of southern universities in the U.S., 1960s,

00:29:34.700 they didn't allow black students.

00:29:37.000 The federal government actually had to come in

00:29:39.240 and say to these universities,

00:29:40.640 you have to desegregate

00:29:41.880 in order to give these students their rights.

00:29:44.620 So the government actually had to curb the autonomy of the institutions

00:29:48.280 to give autonomy to the individuals.

00:29:51.020 And that's sort of the situation we're in.

00:29:53.440 The government actually has to lean on institutions like universities or tech firms

00:29:57.840 that are monopolistic in order to free up society.

00:30:02.200 And that's very hard for a lot of traditional libertarians who are just anti-government to get.

00:30:07.220 But we have to get past that kind of 1980s-style reasoning

00:30:11.040 and start to use government effectively to protect liberty.

00:30:15.480 And it's actually not that hard a concept.

00:30:16.880 If you imagine a gang of people out there

00:30:18.920 who want to lynch you for hosting trigonometry.

00:30:22.000 I mean, there are.

00:30:23.320 There's more than one of them, mate.

00:30:24.600 Especially in this part of London.

00:30:26.060 Yeah, thankfully they're very weak physically.

00:30:29.000 But the only way you can get...

00:30:30.600 Says the man who also has soy milk, by the way.

00:30:33.660 Listen, I have dietary requirements.

00:30:36.720 He's got intolerances of the worst kind.

00:30:39.140 But yeah, so you imagine a gang of people out there wanting to lynch us.

00:30:42.720 So you need the police to come in and evict them to get your freedom back.

00:30:46.440 So you need the state actually to intervene when you have these intermediate level forces.

00:30:51.420 And that's the kind of world we're increasingly living in.

00:30:54.840 And the problem is not that everyone in these institutions is illiberal.

00:30:59.100 In fact, it's only a minority who are.

00:31:00.840 But that minority, by playing these sacred values, is able to exert much, much more pressure on people's consciences and their fear of their reputations and everything.

00:31:12.560 The small group is allowed to essentially force multiply itself by leveraging these taboos.

00:31:18.640 And the only way you get at that is by making it so the institutions have no wiggle room.

00:31:24.780 So if an institution like a university sort of is told you're going to be fine if you abrogate academic freedom as defined here, and that has to take precedence over any kind of subjective definitions of emotional safety and harassment in your policies, then when the activists come knocking and breathing down their necks on Twitter, in committees, and so on, the administrators in the universities can say, well, yes, we're with you, but we can't do it.

00:31:52.280 our hands are tied. And that's the response we're looking for, is to say,

00:31:56.460 we don't want the administrators to declare loyalty necessarily to free speech. What we

00:32:01.320 want them to be able to do is to say no to the activists. And once the activists are unable to

00:32:07.380 push the administrations in their direction, they've lost their power. And that's the whole

00:32:12.220 point, is to use the law and government to try and take away the levers of power that connect

00:32:19.040 these activist campaigns to these

00:32:21.440 institutions. If you can break that link

00:32:23.300 then all of a sudden you massively

00:32:25.780 increase the freedom of the people working

00:32:27.440 in these institutions and it's not enough

00:32:29.500 to allow people to sue.

00:32:31.740 Yes, that is important. The Free Speech

00:32:33.680 Union and FIRE and all of these groups are

00:32:35.580 doing hugely important work

00:32:36.980 and counterweight as well

00:32:39.640 which is Helen Pluckrose's

00:32:41.320 organization. That's hugely important that people

00:32:43.560 actually have someone to go

00:32:45.580 to if they come under attack

00:32:47.880 but it's not really enough

00:32:49.740 because still for people to actually engage in a lawsuit

00:32:53.200 that's a lot of money, that's time, emotional distress

00:32:55.640 you're just going to take the easy route

00:32:58.060 so in order to get rid of that chilling effect

00:33:01.080 that says I don't want to touch this subject

00:33:03.600 because I could be in trouble

00:33:05.200 I don't want to say this because I could be in trouble

00:33:07.640 in order to really address that

00:33:09.500 you need a proactive government

00:33:12.240 that is actively looking at

00:33:15.460 hearing whistleblower complaints

00:33:17.220 that is acting in real time to shut down attempts to discipline people

00:33:22.080 whose ideas contravene dogma, for example.

00:33:25.300 And it's that proactive application of the law,

00:33:27.640 which is what I think we need to move to

00:33:29.860 if we really want to address the chilling effects.

00:33:33.640 Hey, Constantine, do you like success?

00:33:36.740 Well, I'm working with you, so clearly not.

00:33:38.960 There's this great new podcast called Secret Leaders

00:33:41.720 where they have honest conversations with fascinating people

00:33:45.120 from the world of business.

00:33:46.260 Have they taken our strapline? Because if they have, I'm going to sue the f***ing motherf***ers back. 0.99

00:33:50.800 No, no, no. I wrote that bit. 0.99

00:33:53.560 Ah, okay. Well, tell me about Secret Leaders then.

00:33:57.000 It's brilliant. They interview some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world.

00:34:01.720 My personal favourite was with Huel founder Julian Hearn, who explains how to become a food and drink millionaire.

00:34:08.480 Yeah, you listened to that one because it's all about food, didn't you? Yeah, I knew it.

00:34:12.420 Who else have they interviewed then?

00:34:13.540 I don't know. I only listened to the food ones. Joking aside, though, they've talked to the founders of pioneering startups like BrewDog, Monzo and Joe Malone.

00:34:22.320 My favorite episode actually was with Alex Stephanie, the CEO of Beam, who spoke about how business could solve huge societal problems like homelessness.

00:34:32.920 Oh, wow. That sounds great. Where do I go to listen to Secret Leaders?

00:34:36.700 Just download it right now from wherever you get your podcasts. All you need to do is search for Secret Leaders.

00:34:43.240 Easy.

00:34:45.360 Isn't one of the challenges going to be,

00:34:47.040 so you've used the examples of university in the 1960s being overtly racist,

00:34:51.460 but that was very easy to prove.

00:34:53.920 Very, very, very easy to prove.

00:34:55.760 This is far more difficult, isn't it, Eric?

00:34:58.740 Well, it's not hard to prove.

00:35:00.160 I mean, my surveys, which are by no means the only ones that have been done,

00:35:04.000 show that there is a very substantial body of people

00:35:06.960 willing to politically discriminate.

00:35:08.900 So that's fact, right?

00:35:10.840 Yeah.

00:35:11.380 We know that the universities have become more and more and more ideologically skewed,

00:35:15.500 losing their viewpoint diversity.

00:35:17.060 Again, that's established fact.

00:35:19.880 So we've got these two things, which are pretty...

00:35:22.060 Now, let's imagine that the university had very few black or non-white academics in there,

00:35:29.280 or even students. 0.53

00:35:30.260 But let's just take academics.

00:35:31.880 And we had surveys that were showing that 30 or 40% of academics

00:35:35.520 would discriminate against a black applicant.

00:35:37.780 you know there's just no way that would stand nor should it stand right so that would be sufficient

00:35:43.100 evidence for radical change and action to to happen we've got the evidence but what the problem

00:35:50.340 and also the european courts and other courts have essentially said you cannot politically

00:35:55.720 discriminate you can't just fire somebody because they're a labor party supporter you know your

00:36:00.080 political beliefs are protected so this is not legal um it's not legal to do it and so part of

00:36:07.000 the problem is, okay, how do we then get to a situation where we can apply the law into these

00:36:13.540 institutions? That's not being discussed now. You don't receive any guidance that you're not

00:36:18.380 allowed to discriminate on political grounds when you're going into a hiring committee, for example.

00:36:22.920 The universities are allowed to be blatantly political. I think they should have to be

00:36:27.640 politically neutral at the administrative level, not the academic. Academics should be able to

00:36:32.000 have whatever political views and say them in class, and well, that's fine. They've got their

00:36:35.900 freedom, but I think it's at the departments. Departments saying we are a progressive department

00:36:40.620 and posting political things in their common rooms. Again, different if individual academics

00:36:46.640 post stuff on their doors, but for official parts of the university to be pushing a political

00:36:51.900 message I think should not be permitted in publicly funded institutions. Like schools,

00:36:57.300 they should have to be neutral. So putting that kind of neutrality in would I think help to change

00:37:03.140 the atmosphere. So all I'm saying to you is we've got the proof. I don't think we need more proof.

00:37:07.940 We have pretty strong evidence now. It's just what do you do about it? Well, this is my question

00:37:12.740 because what you're talking about, and I, by the way, like the libertarian position, which I used

00:37:18.720 to be quite sympathetic to, clearly doesn't work in the modern environment. There's no argument

00:37:23.300 about that. You know, this idea, oh, let's just have another Twitter. Well, we saw what happened

00:37:27.620 to parlor, right? And it doesn't work. It's just, to me, that's just a given. But what it sounds

00:37:34.560 like to me, given the demographic dynamics of a university, particularly with the younger people

00:37:42.300 that you're talking about being so woke and so pro-cancel culture, and, and, and, and, you're

00:37:49.180 sort of trying to solve a problem from the top down, but the problem is from the bottom up,

00:37:53.740 isn't it? Right. Well, that's a very good question. So I think we've got two issues here.

00:37:57.260 And this is kind of encapsulated in the sort of Chris Rufo versus IDW debate.

00:38:03.200 So for anyone who's not familiar with this, just give us a summary.

00:38:06.220 Yeah, so this is really a kind of debate between Chris Rufo who's sort of saying, well, you know, intellectual dark web, you're a talking shop.

00:38:15.180 It's great that you're having these programs, but you're having no effect on day-to-day operation of people's lives in institutions and on politics.

00:38:23.700 Now, my own view is actually both of these positions have merit that you do need to win the war of ideas.

00:38:29.320 Ultimately, 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.

00:38:37.180 So you do have to ultimately win the battle of ideas to get a free speech culture, as Greg Lukianoff would put it.

00:38:43.960 Support for free speech as a cultural thing in order to underpin the legal and political framework.

00:38:50.320 However, in the long run, we're all dead, and in a way, to kind of condemn everybody to a woke inquisition within these institutions for the foreseeable future for at least a couple of generations or however long it's going to take, right, for this generation to pass through the system and for the next one to a more sensible one.

00:39:09.160 Although I think actually this generation is not as lost as that might sound.

00:39:13.000 They're actually much more varied and fractious.

00:39:16.020 But still, I think you've got to play the long game on the ideas front.

00:39:20.260 But you also have to play the short game, which is that most of the public are pro-free speech.

00:39:26.500 And so you need to enlist them via the democratic process to penetrate these institutions and push them towards essentially ensuring expressive and academic freedom.

00:39:36.800 and also to work on the viewpoint diversity front

00:39:40.620 where that is an issue,

00:39:42.160 as in, say, the BBC, for example,

00:39:43.840 or as in academia.

00:39:46.140 And I think you need to do both.

00:39:47.880 You've got to fight the battle of ideas.

00:39:49.400 I think the IDW is very important,

00:39:52.020 but I also think what Rufo's doing

00:39:53.900 on critical race theory

00:39:54.860 is extremely important as well.

00:39:56.360 It's just that Rufo's important for the here and now.

00:39:59.780 IDW is very important for the longer term.

00:40:03.160 Although I will say one thing,

00:40:04.380 which is that government policy can shift cultural norms you know governments brought in anti-smoking

00:40:09.980 and seat belt regulations which then shifted cultural norms around the acceptability of

00:40:14.640 smoking and not wearing a seat belt and I think Cass Sunstein makes this point in his book on

00:40:18.960 conformity so it's important to do both and I certainly don't think government activity

00:40:24.140 weakens the energy behind the battle of ideas as some people have asserted I think you've got to

00:40:30.300 go both routes. And Eric, don't you think the part of the problem as well is, well, let's call it

00:40:36.060 old-fashioned backbone. We see institutions, we see head of institutions capitulating to mobs.

00:40:42.700 The latest example is Batley Grammar School, where the head essentially acquiesced to the mob,

00:40:49.100 and they demanded that this teacher be fired, all the rest of it, and he bowed down. Isn't that part

00:40:55.140 the problem as well. It is, but I'm leery of relying on sort of strong individuals.

00:41:02.020 You know, it's not a sustainable approach. People are going to be rational maximizers. They're going

00:41:07.520 to take whatever decision is, you know, the path of least resistance. I think what we need to do

00:41:12.280 is build in policies and structures that can make it easier for such individuals to act in a

00:41:17.120 different way. So, for example, if the Conservative government is saying to Bantley Grammer, you know,

00:41:23.380 that was the wrong decision.

00:41:25.820 I don't know quite where the autonomy lies here,

00:41:28.820 but they might, if, for example,

00:41:30.280 this was a violation of the academic freedom

00:41:33.260 of the teacher, for example,

00:41:34.860 then the regulator could simply go to the school

00:41:40.560 and say, you know, you've got to reverse that decision

00:41:42.460 and they just have to do it.

00:41:44.200 I mean, that would be an example of where,

00:41:45.780 if this was happening a lot,

00:41:47.320 and of course you want to give as much

00:41:48.380 institutional autonomy as possible,

00:41:50.720 that is the ideal.

00:41:52.560 But where this is then presenting an opportunity for flash mobs and activists to push on these levers,

00:41:58.920 and they're pushing in the administrative layer, that middle layer of institutions,

00:42:03.620 then the government has to come in and more or less prescribe and say, no, you can't do that.

00:42:08.640 You've got to reverse this decision.

00:42:09.840 So that would be the model in this case where the government or the regulator would say,

00:42:14.700 sorry, you've got to actually reverse that decision.

00:42:17.020 Simple.

00:42:17.600 Because these are the policies.

00:42:19.400 This is the way Obligation A sits with regard to Obligation B.

00:42:24.400 And if Obligation A is legally worded in a way that says you have a duty to,

00:42:29.480 as opposed to some other legalistic wording,

00:42:31.820 which suggests that the second obligation is like, say, to safety

00:42:35.260 or something has a lower standing, then the one trumps the other.

00:42:39.420 It's all about specifying these things in law.

00:42:41.900 I think the Free Speech Union has some good ideas here.

00:42:44.300 You've actually got to get into the legal nitty-gritty.

00:42:46.560 And this is one of the things about the whole culture war thing is you actually have to have a policy network that gets into the weeds, gets into the way laws are written and the way these things are traded off against each other, where the thresholds are.

00:43:00.420 you have to get, like with the BBC for example

00:43:02.860 and I agree with you, I don't agree

00:43:05.020 with defunding the BBC but what I

00:43:06.920 would agree with is a more interventionist

00:43:08.920 approach to, for example, a fairness doctrine

00:43:11.120 where you would be able to look at

00:43:12.960 content and look for balance

00:43:15.000 and monitor that through, which we can do

00:43:16.860 through things like sentiment analysis

00:43:18.500 the other side needs

00:43:20.780 the sort of anti-woke side has to get into

00:43:22.840 these cultural weeds, they can't just say

00:43:24.820 oh we're going to cut this, we're going to cut that

00:43:26.700 I don't think we can cut our way out of this problem

00:43:28.860 it's a cultural issue

00:43:30.100 and you need to sort of engage it as a cultural issue.

00:43:33.660 Well, you've hinted and teased that there may be a ray of hope

00:43:37.660 when it comes to the new generation coming.

00:43:40.540 Right.

00:43:41.080 So break that down for us a bit

00:43:42.660 because the initial figures you gave us were really scary.

00:43:46.420 Half of PhDs pro-cancel culture, blah, blah, blah.

00:43:49.520 But you've kept injecting little notes of optimism in there.

00:43:52.820 So what's the breakdown with young people?

00:43:55.040 What's their attitude?

00:43:56.180 Well, I think it depends.

00:43:57.520 I think in Britain we can see something slightly different from the U.S.,

00:44:01.960 although we see something that is similar in terms of the way opinion is shaking up.

00:44:06.380 But in Britain, for example, I would say, to put it crudely,

00:44:11.380 18-year-olds are a lot more sensible than 22-year-olds now.

00:44:16.120 And if you look at, even politically, support for the Labour Party, for example,

00:44:22.820 or Corbyn or whatever peaks at around age 22

00:44:26.560 and then it drops considerably down to age 18.

00:44:29.720 18-year-olds are kind of similar to 40-year-olds in this country

00:44:32.420 in terms of their political views.

00:44:34.820 Really?

00:44:35.400 Yeah, in many things, on many things,

00:44:37.040 and certainly in political party support, left-right support.

00:44:40.140 So we're seeing something happening between age 22.

00:44:43.920 Now, part of this could just be they didn't live through Brexit,

00:44:47.000 that didn't shape their consciousness.

00:44:48.240 And I think that's sort of my leading hypothesis.

00:44:50.940 but we don't know what is causing this shift to the right,

00:44:55.500 if you like, amongst the very youngest Zoomers 1.00

00:44:59.600 coming in in Britain.

00:45:00.700 We don't see anything like that in the US, by the way,

00:45:02.760 so I thought there was some evidence for it

00:45:04.400 but there actually isn't.

00:45:05.420 Sorry, guys.

00:45:06.340 Sorry, yeah. 1.00

00:45:08.040 The American people are like, damn! 1.00

00:45:10.600 But, you know, because we keep being told 0.99

00:45:12.940 and sort of anecdotally there's elements of truth to this

00:45:15.640 that certainly when it comes to comedy,

00:45:17.180 which is our, well, former field,

00:45:18.940 right you could say before before we we removed ourselves from it uh involuntarily but the idea

00:45:25.060 was that like there's this new generation of people who like really want edgy comedy and

00:45:30.000 all of that coming and you're sort of i mean possibly hinting that that may be the case here

00:45:34.420 in britain it is the case i mean i would say and this was kind of something i was going to say at

00:45:38.400 the end of the show but i do think there's a very an emerging quite shocking gender divide on this

00:45:44.320 Oh, yeah.

00:45:45.260 So I'm just not sure quite how to approach that.

00:45:49.040 But I mean, look at him trying not to get cancelled.

00:45:51.240 Exactly.

00:45:52.320 But I mean, it's not to say that's the most...

00:45:55.020 No, no, no.

00:45:57.080 But, you know, it's like 30 or 40 points gap in attitudes to kind of support for political correctness.

00:46:05.520 Some of the attitudes around cancel culture between the genders, particularly at the elite institutional level.

00:46:12.740 I'm sorry, elite university level.

00:46:13.920 So how is that actually going to pan out?

00:46:17.960 The fair of sex turns out to be less fair.

00:46:20.140 Is that what you're saying, Eric?

00:46:21.660 It looks that way, but who knows?

00:46:24.860 I think people obviously get married and they whatever.

00:46:28.500 But I think...

00:46:29.780 But can we just put it in sort of in plain terms?

00:46:33.480 Women are much more in favour, young women,

00:46:35.480 of political correctness, cancel culture, etc.

00:46:37.960 Is that accurate?

00:46:38.680 Yes, that's right.

00:46:39.380 I mean, what I would say is that your young Zoomer males are not particularly politically correct. 1.00

00:46:45.860 Now, again, this is not to say that gender is the only thing that matters.

00:46:50.340 It clearly isn't.

00:46:51.240 But it's part of what looks to be an emerging political split that's wider than it's been.

00:46:58.240 And you see that in the U.S. and in Britain.

00:47:00.420 Now, the one thing I would say, however, is in the 2019 academic freedom report,

00:47:07.220 What we saw was that when we presented a paragraph that was, say, pro-academic freedom, people read that before answering a question like, is free speech more important than emotional safety?

00:47:18.720 You can actually get undergraduates to shift their opinions like 15 points when they read something about the history of the battle for free speech.

00:47:26.560 But you can also shift them 15 points in the sort of emotional safety direction when they read about historically marginalized groups.

00:47:33.980 So that opinion is up for grabs in a way that the PhD student opinion is not.

00:47:40.660 And the academic opinion, by and large, is not.

00:47:44.280 So any efforts need to be focused on the sort of people before they become adults.

00:47:49.660 I mean, that is really where opinion is more malleable.

00:47:52.300 So I still think there is a lot of hope that that opinion can be shifted.

00:47:57.120 And, of course, the Free Speech Union wants the government to be teaching about free speech in schools.

00:48:01.660 I think that would be an excellent idea.

00:48:03.440 Also, students when they come to universities should receive just a standard mailing informing them of their rights,

00:48:09.920 their free speech rights being protected, why this is important.

00:48:13.000 That should be standard issue as well.

00:48:14.600 So I think we have to make the case to younger people because I don't think it figures in their thinking very much.

00:48:21.160 I mean, one of the things on the FIRE survey, one of the questions was actually about allowing someone on campus who said all whites are racist.

00:48:27.540 Now, that's a central tenet to critical race theory, which is interesting.

00:48:32.300 But 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.

00:48:43.280 So there is a sort of knee-jerk kind of intolerance that is partly ideological, but it's just partly because they haven't learned about the importance and the value and the struggle for things like the right to criticize the government in the 18th century in England.

00:48:58.380 You 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.

00:49:17.300 You know, none of that is part of their education, from what I can tell.

00:49:21.040 And that needs to change, I think.

00:49:22.700 I love the fact you've been talking about cancel concert and then it's right there.

00:49:26.220 Oh, yes.

00:49:28.380 But on a depressing note, Eric, what will happen, do you think?

00:49:32.220 Very on brand for you.

00:49:33.040 Yeah, it is. It's what I do. It's what I'm here to bring.

00:49:35.780 What do you think will happen if we don't implement these changes into universities?

00:49:41.220 Well, I think a lot of, essentially, things will just continue moving in the direction they are,

00:49:45.860 which is that every year, which with every crisis, whether it's the Everard, Sarah Everard killing,

00:49:52.860 or whether it is the BLM or whatever, you get a surge of activism.

00:49:56.960 And more diversity training, more bias response teams, more decolonizing the curriculum, increasingly overt progressive messaging from the university.

00:50:08.520 I 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.

00:50:22.640 So yeah, I just think things are going to get worse unless we do something.

00:50:26.600 And it's worth saying that some of these changes have been in train for a long time.

00:50:31.440 I mean, speech codes came in in the U.S. universities in the late 80s.

00:50:35.100 So we're now talking about our fourth decade of these sorts of speech restrictions being in place.

00:50:42.680 So this is not McCarthyism, something that's going to blow and then go away.

00:50:46.400 It's not going away unless it's sort of something's done about it.

00:50:49.900 well if you're watching at home

00:50:53.360 make sure you send this and every other

00:50:55.060 trigonometry interview to an 18 year old female

00:50:57.100 this is how this gets solved

00:50:58.840 that sounds so creepy

00:50:59.740 why?

00:51:03.160 there's nothing creepy about it

00:51:04.740 we're just trying to change the world

00:51:06.480 we're trying to make the world a better place

00:51:08.020 one interview at a time

00:51:09.080 Eric, thank you so much for coming back

00:51:11.400 it's great to have you

00:51:12.260 I think you're doing important work

00:51:13.840 and it's really good to get that information out there

00:51:16.980 and hopefully people in policy making positions

00:51:19.780 pay attention as they have done in the past. So with that in mind, what is the one thing that we

00:51:24.840 are still not talking about that we should be? Well, I touched upon it and that is political

00:51:29.360 discrimination. Should it be acceptable for people in society to be able to discriminate

00:51:35.420 on people's politics, whether it be for hiring, but not just for hiring and firing, but how about

00:51:41.880 socially. One of the statistics that is remarkable in this FIRE survey is that only 7% of all female

00:51:51.960 students in the FIRE survey who did not support Donald Trump, which is the vast majority, right,

00:51:58.960 sort of over 80%, only 7% would date a Trump supporter. Now, the reverse is nowhere near,

00:52:06.820 you know, other studies just suggest the reverse is not as bad as that. But it does raise this

00:52:11.120 question. So right-wing wingman will happily date a liberal? More so. More so. Yeah, much more so.

00:52:18.560 To me, that's surprising. Right, right, right. But there is this question about, you know,

00:52:23.380 how acceptable should it be? We know that we shouldn't be discriminating on the basis of race

00:52:27.460 or on the basis of religion, but political belief, which is in a way a cousin of religious belief,

00:52:33.440 you know, is it acceptable to be discriminating socially, politically on the basis of political

00:52:38.440 believe. I don't think it is, and I think we need to begin to really start to go after that and say

00:52:44.220 it's one thing if someone is an absolute extremist, but just if they are belonging to this broad

00:52:50.220 category, which may in fact be 50% of your population, or Brexiteers 52%, actually that's

00:52:57.440 very pathological and is one of the key sources of friction in society. We need to start talking

00:53:02.920 about that and perhaps addressing it in many ways. Eric, when you said that, he was talking,

00:53:10.140 I thought you meant like, would liberal men go out with a Trump-supporting woman?

00:53:15.360 And the question is, that would be following, is how hot is she? 1.00

00:53:18.600 Right.

00:53:19.560 Yeah.

00:53:20.560 Yeah, he's talking about women, so it's all very different.

00:53:23.200 Right, well, it does work the other way around. So a Trump, sort of a, someone who opposes Trump

00:53:28.020 who's male, you know, when they're asked if they would go out with a Trump-supporting female,

00:53:31.880 You know, it's maybe like 20% or 22%.

00:53:34.860 It's men.

00:53:37.100 I'm sure, I'm sure, yeah.

00:53:38.420 And he's only being polite.

00:53:39.780 In reality, it's more like 80%.

00:53:41.540 But yeah, what Eric is saying is

00:53:44.580 find someone you disagree with politically 1.00

00:53:46.160 and have sex with them. 1.00

00:53:47.400 That is the recommendation of this interview. 1.00

00:53:50.200 Consensually.

00:53:50.900 Obviously.

00:53:51.760 Thanks for having that.

00:53:52.840 Now that's creepy.

00:53:54.280 Eric, it's good to have you back.

00:53:56.040 And thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:53:58.520 We look forward to seeing you again.

00:53:59.760 All the very best.

00:54:00.540 where can people follow you to keep up to date with what you're doing and anything they should

00:54:05.060 check out well you can either follow me on twitter which is um at epk a u f m or you can go to my

00:54:11.460 website www.snaps which is s-n-e-p-s dot net and that sort of lists everything i'm doing that's

00:54:19.940 actually named sort of a corruption of of the surname of a sort of hockey player from vancouver

00:54:24.740 where i grew up harold snaps who's sort of a hero of a lot of people even though he was a plugger

00:54:29.040 and he wasn't actually a big goal scorer.

00:54:30.700 So why was he a hero?

00:54:32.180 He was just one of these sort of lunch bucket players 0.96

00:54:34.540 who was sort of, you know, tough in games

00:54:36.640 and everyone loved him and chanted his name.

00:54:39.820 That's the story of Harold Snupps, really.

00:54:41.840 Lunch bucket player, what does that mean?

00:54:43.660 Well, it means sort of one of these guys

00:54:45.720 who's not particularly flashy,

00:54:47.360 but who is sort of one of these character players

00:54:49.540 who in the tough games kind of meets it out

00:54:51.740 to the other players on the ice.

00:54:53.580 Would that be like Dennis Wise?

00:54:55.420 Is that like a Dennis Wise type of player?

00:54:56.620 Is he just someone who liked fighting, basically?

00:54:58.740 Well, yeah, he liked to mix it up, but he's not a complete goon,

00:55:03.040 but he certainly wouldn't be averse to dropping the gloves.

00:55:06.960 Sounds like the two of us.

00:55:08.480 Anyway, Eric, thanks for coming back and thank you for watching.

00:55:11.240 We will see you very soon with another episode like this one or a live stream.

00:55:15.200 All of them go out 7 p.m. UK time.

00:55:17.120 Take care and see you soon, guys.

00:55:28.740 We'll be right back.

00:55:58.740 July 11th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:56:01.920 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

TRIGGERnometry - April 07, 2021

New Report： Political Discrimination Rife at Universities - Eric Kaufmann

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