CI: So, I think my first question was, just how you got involved with the Heterodox Academy and sort of when and why? U: Hmmm CI: Because it s an interesting thing to be involved in. U: It s a pretty obvious thing, thank you. CI: I mean I think so, but not everyone thinks so. U: But I think not everyone thinks maybe because they don t really know. Because, ok but that wasn t the question. The question was why did I get involved. I first saw about them, 2-3 years ago, 3 years ago maybe. Quite close to I imagine what was their inception. And I liked the website. It had some interesting articles. They were quite thought provoking and so I sort of bookmarked it, and whenever you don t know what to do with your freetime, which is not that often, I would go and check it out occasionally and there was always something that made me think a bit. But I didn t think of joining. THen maybe last year as I was trying to prepare for orientation and I wanted to do something more active around free speech and, and, and I wanted to add some new elements. I went to look around online, to try to find is there anything good out there. And actually they have a set of modules designed to introduce a deeper understanding of free speech issues on campus. It s like a seven step kinda process. And while I actually ended up not using literally anything from it, it reminded me again that this is an interesting organization, that s trying to do some stuff that actually has practical implications. And so I decided, given that I am now actually more and more using their stuff and I like what they do, I can as well sign up for this whole thing. I didn t know that you have to be sort of vetted and there have to be people who approve of you and whatever. I just did it. And that s how I became a member. I liked what they offered. Makes sense, yeah. CI: Makes sense, yeah. U: That s why I become a member of most things. CI: Well, yeah that seems like a sensible reason. So, do you have a sense then, of a need for more education on free speech and dialogue on campus or on campuses generally? U: That s a good question. Yeah, I think, I think, yes. I think yes. That s a good question. But why? So I think that nearly everybody I know actually is in favor of free speech. I don t ever meet somebody who just tells me naw. That s just a bad thing to have. No, literally everybody I know is in favor of free speech. Including every student. When you ask them as such. The problem is that people don t necessarily understand what that fully means in practice. And how far it actually goes to be in favor of it. And sometimes for reasons that I think are extremely understandable and actually kind hearted reasons, people end up without maybe even realizing
it themselves, actually not being in favor of free speech. So they can both tell you with a straight face that they are but then also tell you things that mean or show the fact that they actually are not and and I understand how they can get there. I can easily see it. It s not stupidity, it s not evil, it s just a certain set of thought processes that take you there. And and I get those. And so I was looking for ways to indeed communicate with young people today of actually if you are in favor of free speech, you actually can t add a whole lot of qualifiers to it. It s a relatively fundamental thing, that may at time feel unjust or painful ro whatever. And yet that actually, precisely that actually, is part of being in favor of it. And yeah. I had maybe not in the past realized that I needed to have those conversations more. I just assume that we all understand it. And I think in many ways we kind of do. But kind of is not the same as fully doing. CI: Yeah? U: Yeah CI: That s interesting, so you ve found, because I know you ve worked at Tufts, you worked at Amherst, you ve been involved in college administration. And you ve found it s changed over that time? The need for conversations about that? U: Well, Probably but I am not a very good source of that. Because the fifteen years, for fifteen years I was at the graduate school only, at Tuffs I was for fifteen years at a place called the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, which was a graduate school. And I must say, it doesn t play out the same way at a graduate school. It just there is a different environment, a different vibe to those places. Neither better nor worse. Just different. Students tend to be at the places I was an average of 28 years old rather than, well, 20 years old. And that makes a real difference. They also came there for very professional reasons and focused more on that. And many of them also had already families. Just, and you know they had enough to do, just to balance work and life. So I did not encounter it there. So the experience I have done with undergraduate worlds was really two years at Amherst and then my now, I m now in my third year, here. But I can t give you sort of a long, 25 years evolution because I spent too much of it outside of that particular environment. So I can t tell you. It s interesting though, you know, on a fundamental philosophical level. For example, being a EUropean. I do come from a situation in which there are actually sometimes limits on free speech. Like Germany for example it is not allowed to sell Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. It is today illegal to do that. And so I did grow up with the fact that there are some limitations out there somewhere where as a society presumably, we set rules that create some type of limitation and I never really questioned that either. For example, on something like Mein Kampf, eh, living in America I now totally get just let it be already, you know? Its bullshit will be more easily contradicted when it s out there in the open, rather than when you make it almost extra appealing by *laughs* CI: *laughs* Like hiding it?
U: By hiding it, cuz that usually has the opposite effect. On the other hand, given the history of that country, maybe it meant something nonetheless to actually say no, that crap will not be repeated here. I don t know. So I can imagine that there are some. But nonetheless they ought to be extremely small, I believe, generally, and things that are decided on in that case very consensually. There shouldn t be somebody declaring, that is in and that is out. If there were limitations, it should be one that has a strong social basis and frankly should be quite limited. CI: Yeah, do you have a sense of, and I mean, it s sounds like it would really depend, given the social situation, what those limits could or should be in different circumstances? I mean it s a very vague, multivariabled situation. U: Yeah, it s very hard to know. CI: Yeah U: No, I m not enough of a political philosopher frankly to think through that. CI: Fair. U: I am sure that there would be great courses and maybe even we offer one, between the gov department and the philosophy department that actually address this. I wouldn t mind taking the course. But I imagine that whatever I say, I would immediately think, yeah but wait a minute there something else. CI: There could be some exception, yeah. U: Yeah, yeah, and so I don t really know. No, I don t know. CI: It s just interesting. Because I ve heard people, formulate it: there is only free speech, there are no limitations, perhaps with the exception of something of like, deliberate calls for violence or like yelling fire in a theater. But how you delineate if you re alright with very small limitations and where that falls is very complicated. U: You re right there s always, the slippery slope argument with this. CI: Well not even that, but just like, how do you choose? U: Yes. And who gets to do the choosing. And and by what process and how solid should that process - I agree with you. Yeah, I mean the fact that we live in a situation where the law provides certain limitations and mostly they are indeed about things which are dangerous or violent or whatever, and I guess I feel quite comfortable with that. So there are some. But beyond that it is hard isn t it? To, yeah. To me personally at least in a place like ours, and that holds actually I imagine for nearly all places, we are also communities. So the fact is, free
speech gives me certain rights to say things. And I think that those rights should rarely be limited at all. As we discussed. At the same time, by being in a community with you I also have certain obligations, to treat you respectfully and ideally with kindness and openness. And you me. Right? So I do hope, and I have tried as dean to speak about it that way, that the fact that we have these rights doesn t mean that It means that we can use them in an untrammelled way, yes. I could call you whatever I want to call you, frankly, but you would have the right to feel deeply offended adn to frankly think that I would be highly unprofessional if I did that. Like what? Right? And so there are deep expectations that you can have towards me about how I should as dean, or as professor, or as administrator, or as fellow human being, frankly, behave to you. And they re all slightly different, by the way, these expectations. The expectation of fellow human being might be a bit different from the one of a professor, which is again somewhat different as from the expectation you would have of me, as vice president of this institution, representing this institution as a whole as well. Right? And I have free speech the whole time, and yet you expect of me, and I should, I think, behave, that I limit that to some extent. And uphold certain principles and standards. And I think, in return, I expect some of those things of you. And these things are not written down anywhere necessarily, they are in our minds and to some extent in our hearts. And maybe more we are a community the more we are inclined to spontaneously behave actually according to these norms almost that we have been socialized into. And it doesn't contradict that there is free speech. The fact that we can do something, doesn t mean that we do it. Right? And I suppose that what s happening now days is the less and less we see ourselves as being part of the same community, and governed by the same rules, the more and more we start testing the outer boundaries of that speech. And all try to clamp down. Either way. And that is what I think makes it today, harder than it used to be. CI: That s very interesting. It s something that I ve thought about as well before and it seems like a complicated relationship and hard to map directly without looking at a very particular instance. Do you see particular, sort of - not necessarily lacking in community - but some level of lack of cohesion in the community on campus, that drives some of the conversations about free speech? Or do you think it is a relatively cohesive community? It s hard to say too. U: It s hard to say for me. And I m too far out of it to know. Because often when I notice things it is because people are pissed off. CI: Fair. U: And they are typically at the border of the sense of community. So I can t speak to that so well. To our own community here. But I think, as a society, as a whole however, we see that. CI: Yeah.
U: Yeah. I was reading this article yesterday in the New York Times, about about politics and it made an argument that for democracies to work there have to be a couple of things. I don t know if you saw it. It was an oped. CI: I don t think I did. U: One of them was that actually the various instances of government have to actually limit themselves in someway. Not because they have to but because they want to. And it made the argument that for example, congress can at any time actually, by law, not fund the government. It can do that at any time. And similarly the Presidency can at any time do this or that. In other words, at any time, since already 100 years or 200 years we can screw each other. And we have that capability, right? And and for things to work we must actually decide that actually we re not going to screw each other. We re going to make things work we re gonna give each other some benefit of the doubt. We re gonna sort of find compromises. We re gonna work with each other. And it s interesting because it seems at that level now, that doesn t seem to be so often the case, right? If presented with the opportunity to screw each other, versus not, like oh yay, let s go for it already. *laughs* CI: *laughs* Here we go! U: *laughs* Why wait? CI: * laughs* Finally! U: And it seems sad. And in a way I think that holds for smaller communities to. We have many rights in many ways and I think it s important we have them. But often we don t fully use them to the maximum like the full 100 percent. The very deepest. We stop ourselves. Because we tend to think, ah, how will it look to others or how will it affect these others? Or what message does it send. Or whatever. We care enough to see it from the other perspective. And at the moment that you care less about that then you might use more of them, right? And where you previously stopped at 80 percent of your potential you now say, damn it, principle demands that I go to 99.9 percent. And you can. And you could before too. It is true you can. And then the question is really, does it serve us. Can we find ways to stop short of it and nonetheless hear each other s differences. Because the differences matter. They matter dramatically. And they matter in all directions. Not just some differences or some people s differences. Everybody s matter. They really do. Not because they re all equal. All the time. But because we can t figure out the value of them if we can t voice them. And if we can t hear each other about them. And colleges and universities should be places we can do that. And my gut feeling is that actually, most of the time we do. It s just that sometimes we fail. And then everybody focuses on that sometimes. CI: Well, it s more attention grabbing I guess. That kind of brings me back to the questions about the Heterodox Academy.
U: Yes. CI: Cuz I know that they are big proponents of free speech but they are also big proponents of intellectual diversity on campus. Did that figure into why you liked Heterodox Academy. Do you feel like there is a need for more intellectual diversity on campuses? In general or here? U: Oh yeah. So Heterodox Academy is dedicated to intellectual diversity on campus, that s correct. It s not dedicated to a conservative cause and obviously neither to a progressive cause. It is dedicated to being both present. And that s what I liked about it. Had it been an organization dedicated solely to the advancement of conservative ideas, I wouldn t have joined it. But it is an organization dedicated to having viewpoint diversity on campus. And in that respect I absolutely back that, or favor that or want to support that. And it s not my job to decide what students get to hear. Or to like or to adopt or to go home with. But it is my job to ensure that they get a fair hearing of diverse perspectives. And this is exactly what heterodox academy is dedicated to and it s exactly what I like. Or why I joined it. CI: That s good to know. Cuz there s multiple elements to it as well. I know you haven t been at CMC for decades, but what do you think the state of intellectual diversity is at the 5Cs and at CMC? If you can have a sense of that. U: I can primarily speak to this one. I certainly think that we have a fairly high degree of viewpoint diversity. I actually think it is one of the features of this place. And it s actually one of the reasons that I came. I liked the thought of being in a place where that is the case. And it certainly is the case here more than on average in American elite academia. I can t speak for non-elite because I haven t worked for it. And by elite I mean sort of highly selectively places. CI: Yeah, yeah. U: Not elite in the old meaning of the term. So it is more the case here than elsewhere, yes. And I enjoyed it about it. So in a way me joining it wasn t necessarily because there is some major crusade that needs to be fought here to finally get a point across at CMC. Because I think the point is getting across at CMC very well. And I think that the overwhelming majority of the faculty, wherever they are on the political spectrum, here enjoys working in a place that actually has a political spectrum. As opposed to one spot. And I think that this holds over well nearly for the students as well, nearly all the time. I can speak less to that because I don t meet with students as often. And again, when I see them, they re often angry so, it s harder to know. So my gut feeling is nonetheless that this is the case for them. So it is a defining feature of this place. It is one that we should absolutely and in all conditions maintain. And it is actually one that I have played up more, like in in, if you now look at the Dean of the Faculty s web page I rewrote it. And it s actually a big part of it, or not a big part of it, but when I now speak to alumni or parents or whatever. I say that there are four things that set this college apart. And this is one of the four. The other ones being: research, our students do far more actually research with
faculty here than they do elsewhere. And the third one is indeed that we do have this sort of willingness to look at hte practical. We are not averse to it. The way that other colleges are. And we put our money where our mouth is in terms of internships and experiences and opportunities for learning, co curricular, and then the fourth one is the Claremont Colleges, the consortium. Which really gives us you know both the advantages of an intimate small liberal arts college but also the advantages of pretty decent research university size in terms of library, opportunities, whatever.so but those four, that I say, set us apart from other liberal arts colleges. But the high degree of viewpoint diversity on our campus is one of them. Yeah. CI: Interesting. What do you think is the relationship between a liberal arts college and education and intellectual diversity? That might be a bit complicated, but I m just curious. U: I mean. The point of a good education is to oblige you almost or at least strongly encourage you to think beyond what you would have been thinking had you not received the education. Right? If you walked in and out of here, unchallenged and largely thinking the same thoughts and thinking them in the same way then frankly this was just an expensive holiday. So the point of a good education is to make you or to encourage you, we can t force anybody, but to encourage you as much as we can, to think more broadly. Whether that s disciplinarily with methods you didn t know existed before, ethically, aesthetically, whatever, but also indeed ideologically. The point is not to change your ideology, that s not my business. You figure out yourself where you stand on these matters and where you stand on them today might well not be where you stand on them ten years from now or twenty or thirty and that s your life. But the point would be that you understood the methods and the assumptions and the approaches and the rich intellectual histories that underlie either or all of them. Right? And that you don t just stick to the one that you felt most comfortable with or that you just happen to have fallen into, or whatever. And that s really the point of an education and so I do believe that our faculty, whether they are left, center, right, or wherever they are, try generally to provide many of these viewpoints within their courses. They actually do. It isn t as if most faculty whether conservative, centrist, or liberal, actually are out on this massive quest to make you think the way you think. Most of them don t, many of them, and that included me when I was in the classroom, we are actually kind of happy if our students don t know where we stand on stuff. Because we don t like, most of us, the notion that we would be acting as these sort of. Yeah we want to give you opportunities. We don t want to tell you what to think. We want to allow you to think for yourself, right? And I do think that faculty from left, center, and right all actually largely share this. There are always some exceptions out there, who wear ideologies more strongly on their sleeves and so on, but the large majority of faculty in good universities and colleges would actually feel the proudest if a student at the end of the semester said: I don t know where the professor stands on this matter, ideologically. I always felt proud of this. And I know that many of my colleagues do to. Because that would mean that students would have felt throughout that they were encouraged to think for themselves and that the professor s opinion didn t needlessly limit their own thought. Right? THey should also in that case not be worried that I would contradict my ideology, because they wouldn t know what it is in the first place, almost. And I think that
generally, I have been very good at that. Probably because I m a relatively centrist kinda dude. But we all try that to some extent. So it isn t as if in a college where you have more faculty of one kind than another you will only be the whole time exposed to that, I think you will read conservative authors in a class taught by a progressive philosophy professor or contradictory authors on whatever. You will. Nonetheless, I do believe that it is fundamentally helpful to have faculty of a greater diversity. Because it is true that being human we will more spontaneously nonetheless appreciate a powerful argument of an argument that s closer to our way of thinking. We might present the other one and give it a fair hearing, but let s face it, at the end of the day, being human, we will find it easier to see the extra higher quality of the one that s closer to how we think. And it s very hard to avoid it. And hence having a faculty that also has more of the viewpoint diversity just so it increases the integrity maybe or the depth or the richness by which it s done. It s not an either or business. It s probably a degree business. All faculty try to give multiple perspectives but the more you have faculty who themselves reflect multiple perspectives, the more likely this is gonna be pervasive. CI: Alright. I know you said that CMC has a remarkably high level of intellectual diversity and tolerance for intellectual diversity, I think at least, you implied. Do you feel that s the case? How do you think it compares then to other campuses in the country, like elite campuses, high ranked campuses. Do you think there is some sort of problem? I know you said that it s also largely true that most faculty, in your experience, care about intellectual diversity. U: But not, necessarily, all equally. Again, I have worked on too few to make broad general statements. But by the fact that I told you that I think we have more of it, I also told you, indirectly, that they have less of it. So obviously there is a difference. How big it is, how that it plays itself out in the education of students, it would be more up to students to figure that out. CI: Makes sense. I guess then, my last question is: do you see particular ways that students can become involved, formally or informally in encouraging freedom of speech and intellectual diversity at CMC? U: I mean obviously, at the end of the day, it s more in students hands than in administrator's hands. We can try, we can set rules, we can pontificate a little bit here and there. And whatever, but ultimately students make this campus, honestly more than I do, which probably is a good thing. Most of the time. So obviously students can do things, yes. And in a way, it is exactly what I described earlier. The real life challenge for most of us is to combine a commitment and a willingness to challenge and be challenged right? Which is that whole free speech idea. With an equally strong commitment and willingness to listen very carefully and fairly and openly. And I can t actually force anybody to do that. I can only say what a great thing it is if we can do it. And how much we can learn if we can do that. But ultimately people have to do it. And it s not easy to do it today I imagine. It's hard to do it sometimes in a small community where you feel that you know whatever you say will stick to you for a long time to come. It s hard to do it probably in a world of social media that sometimes amplifies every utterance beyond recognition. It s hard
to do it if you re worried that you re not part of a community and that people might well want to take your words out of context. And to score points rather than to listen carefully. It s hard to do it in so many ways probably. So it s you know, as dean, I don t possess all the tools to make that happen either. Although I will try to do what I can obviously. WIthin what s, within my power. But yeah students are the ones who ultimately have to find that spot where they do that. Where they both exercise their rights and defend them but also use the respect and the kindness and the empathy and the willingness to hear carefully - it s both. One without the other is a partial story. Yeah. I know, probably an unsatisfactory answer, but it is how I tried to write the whole time with my communications to students over the last few years. I ve always affirmed very strongly a deep belief in the fact that speech ought not to be curtailed. And my equally deep belief - as a matter of principle ought to not be curtailed. And my equally deep belief in the fact that as human beings we can and should challenge ourselves also to listen very carefully. Like one and the other are two sides of the same coin. CI: And so it s mostly individual action, more informal and sort of I guess social? U: It s everywhere. It s in the classroom. It s outside of the classroom. It s in the dorm. It s even maybe just with ourselves, you know listening carefully. Maybe not in public, at the moment we are listening to something, that we are pissed and in our head we are already thinking of the many reasons why somebody is wrong. And we are good at that because we are smart. That little voice that finds little holes in somebody else s argument is always working well. But maybe in the evening, to just take a moment and say, hmm, did they actually make a point? What if I were in their shoes? How would I see it in that case. Doesn t mean that you have to then suddenly say: Oh they re totally right! Obviously not. But just that capability to do that, that s where, because if not, free speech just becomes screaming louder than somebody else or better, which is really not the point either. Although it is absolutely allowed. The real point is to actually learn. Especially in a college. Out there, in society at large, maybe there are other fights that need to be fought and everybody fights the fights they want to fight. It s not up to me to decide that for them. But while you re in college this is the moment to keep on questioning, keep on learning, including yourself. We re always better at questioning somebody else than ourselves. And that s human.