Free Speech and Cambridge ｜ James Orr & Arif Ahmed ｜ EP 218 (9wjw3udMNBc)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9wjw3udMNBc

What harm does your attempt to shut down what words you regard as harmful? What’s that likely to produce for harm? Well, none it’s like oh really So you haven’t thought that part of it through at all and you’re gonna be the arbiter of what’s harmful and what’s not and There’s no danger in that either is there so that’s a good way to deal with that sort of thing I agree Another thing that the lot of the time people people don’t say is they think you know We can impose on people’s speech we can tell them how to behave various ways But they don’t think that that’s an instrument that could be abused in all sorts of ways So if you mandate speech on one thing one day, it’s going to be mandated on other things the next day and in general I think with any form of coercive coercive principle, you need to think what’s going to happen in the hands of somebody wicked and and you know Tyrannical that’s how we should think about about these things not only in university, but in politics more generally You Hello everybody I’m speaking today with dr. James or and dr. Arif Ahmed both professors at Cambridge University Dr. Or is in the faculty of divinity and specializes in the philosophy of religion Dr. Ahmed is in the faculty of philosophy and specializes in the study of decision-making in the face of uncertainty Which is a particular interest of mine and is a leading expert on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work including his writing on religions I recently released a discussion with dr. Or and dr. Nigel bigger Which was well received and about religious issues and philosophical issues in general so more academic discussion But we decided to follow that up with a talk about some events that occurred in March 2019 when I was disinvited to Cambridge after being invited We’re going to talk about what happened since since I’m returning I’m going to be going to Cambridge and to Oxford for the last two weeks of November So we’re going to talk about how that came about about the state of free speech at the Academy in general and other general issues So I’ll start by telling the story of the disinvitation as I experienced it So I was invited to Cambridge by some professors in the faculty of divinity to conduct a seminar or to take part in the seminar on Exodus which was to be a follow-up to my lectures on Genesis which proved to be somewhat surprisingly popular on YouTube and so I thought I would delve into Exodus with some of the world’s leading authorities to sharpen myself up and then maybe dive into Exodus as a lecture series Anyways, we had that planned and then it got cancelled because a photograph of me Emerged that was taken with this guy in New Zealand and Now that was taken during a meet-and-greet after my Tour lecture, so I went to a hundred and thirty cities in 2018 and Afterwards at all of them. I had my picture taken with about a hundred people One by one or two by two sometimes with families. So about maybe fifteen thousand pictures photographs Of which this was one and so I remember this actually at New Zealand so this guy Came walking up to me and he sort of stopped and he had this t-shirt on and he looked at me sort of questioningly and it was a t-shirt outlining his criticisms of Islam at a radical Islam as he saw it and I looked at it and I looked at him and again He kind of looked questioning and apologetic and then I thought well, you know, that’s your t-shirt mate And that’s up to you to wear that and so, you know, I motioned him forward We had our picture taken and I really didn’t think anything of it after that but apparently many people did and so I Was disinvited because of my repugnant views which were hypothetically indicated by the fact that I took one picture out of 15,000 with this gentleman wearing a Opinionated t-shirt and so that was apparently justification for canceling an intense academic endeavor aimed at bringing the work in Exodus to as broad a public population as possible in the most rigorous manner possible. And so that was quite a Shock I would say and You know, it wasn’t particularly enjoyable to go through all that So Well, that’s turned around and now I’m invited back and I’m going in November and so How did James maybe you could start? How did that all come about? Do you think like why did that happen and why? Has it been reversed? Well, thank you Jordan and just listening to you recount your your experiences of beginning of March 2019 Was it beginning of 2019 is? Well, it’s it’s it’s pretty pretty Moving to watch and difficult to hear but I just want to stress that with all that in the background It’s incredibly gracious of you to have Accepted my invitation to to come over to Cambridge I’m thrilled about it. I’m thrilled about it. So it’s not a favor in any sense I’m it’s it’s a great university and I’m I think it’s an unbelievable privilege to go there and to go to Oxford. So I’m absolutely thrilled about it Well, if I may say so, I think it’s a it’s a testament to your character and to your resilience and capacity for Forbearance and forgiveness that you’ve that you’ve accepted the invitation and just by way of encouragement I want to say that the reaction to the news of of your visit from colleagues and from students In the university beyond the university from members of the general public has been overwhelmingly positive It’s been difficult to respond to all the supportive messages I’ve received in the wake of the announcement And I just think it’s obvious from just from the reaction to the kinds of questions that we were exploring On on your podcast a few weeks ago that there’s a huge appetite among people for the kinds of questions that That we’re going that we were exploring in that conversation and that we’re planning to explore in research seminars and talks With colleagues and students here In november and as I said to my colleagues Who I think are excited about your visit. I’ve had almost no no word of criticism at all From colleagues in the faculty or from students in the faculty I think there’s a recognition that that you would be you’re going to be a perfect interlocutor for All sorts of people here particularly on quest those of us who work in For those of us who work in theology and and religion You’ve encouraged Lots of young people to to take sacred texts seriously to think about how you read to read ancient and difficult texts about the The meaning of value of religion and society today. So You know, I know that was a difficult time for you and I’d not actually been appointed to my post back then or think I maybe I had been appointed just to Happened but so I wasn’t privy to the kind of inner workings of the decision making and so on and I think what I can say is that it was a Relative a very very small number of people who were Concerned or showing strong resistance to to to your coming I think this is something that we can talk about later that the way in which in These different ways that we can talk about In these big universities a relatively small number of determined ideal ideologically driven students, it’s often students, but but also colleagues who will Who will buckle in the face of student resistance? uh can the the the the capacity they have to project the idea that their view is a dominant orthodoxy and I think the mechanics of how that happens is is a very interesting one and and and the the the gap between the sort of asymmetry between those two two positions what seems what is actually a a a minority view and then this this impression that that it’s it’s a it’s a very That it’s an orthodoxy as I said, uh was laid there in the in the events that that followed which um Really were prompted by What aref decided to do in response to the university announcing that it was going to set out a uh, uh, uh, yeah, well, it’s very It’s very interesting and strange that I could be sufficiently Reprehensible to be banned from the university, you know three years ago and I haven’t changed I don’t think and yet when i’m reinvited that the overwhelming Response that you’ve received so far is positive. That’s very peculiar and so and and worth delving into I think and and and Dr. Achmed you were you played a role in now as I understand it the policies of the university with regards to inviting speakers Have actually been changed and the mechanics of that are worth delving into too Just so maybe you could tell us the story about how that happened and why and how you got involved. Yeah. Thank you Um, uh before I start on that george and I just want to say That we first of all really positive and looking forward to your to your visit and like james i’ve had a lot of positive Comments about it. Um, but also that we as a university should be very grateful to james all because he was the one who had The vision and the initiative to to re-extend the invitation. Um, and it’s great that he’s that he’s done that Now in terms of what happened, um, as you say there was this what I regard as outrageous, um, Disinvitation of you in the spring of 2019. So as you know what happened was was you were invited you accepted the invitation and You were then disinvited and as I recall not even told that you’ve been disinvited You found out yeah, that was one of the funny things you found out on twitter They didn’t even have a I mean it was not only discourteous but worse than discourteous. It was it was cowardly. I thought um Well, if you had to make a case for the people who disinvited me like What is it what do you think it was that they were trying to stop exactly? I mean, it’s worth investigating the motives and the belief as well as then we can talk about to some degree the fact that it Seems to be a minority view Well, my my feeling is that it’s it’s related to the things that james was saying that The university authorities or those who are responsible for this decision? Um have been frightened by by a group of highly committed ideologues Who gave the impression that this was a general university view that there was outrage about about your position In fact, I don’t think that’s true. And in any case Being photographed next to someone um doesn’t imply anything about your position at all And that was one of the most outrageous things was the statement by the university at the time Which they called as I recall endorsement by association as though Simply standing next to someone who’s who’s wearing clothes that expresses views implies that you have those views yourself Um that argument was so bad. It must have been a pretext and I think it was a pretext It was a pretext for a kind of a kind of fear of a mob So what do you think they were afraid of? So let’s say it wasn’t the fact that I got had my picture taken with this character who was wearing this t-shirt It was something else That they didn’t want me to do I suppose or be what do you think that was exactly? Do you have any sense of that? Yeah, I think ultimately they were they probably they probably feared protests They feared reputational damage. They feared a sense that all the students would think that Cambridge was was Was enabling someone whom these people regard as as unacceptable. Um, those are the things they feared but frankly If you’re an academic the one thing that the one thing that is your job is not to care what the mob thinks It’s not to care You know who’s going to be upset or frightened by the people you invite you better invite people because they can speak the truth And you can have a discussion which leads to mutual, you know understanding and advancement of knowledge So I think yes well and we should hope we should all devoutly hope that an institution as august and as remarkable as Cambridge Would be a model for courage in such matters instead of being cowed by a loud Ideologically possessed minority because you know, you might think well if Cambridge University can’t withstand this Then who the hell can? And that’s a really that’s a serious question and and these things have to be examined seriously. I mean It’s we need institutions that we can respect and that And that hold up the standards that have made them what they are and if they fold well, how can you expect? Normal people say not to be cowed and intimidated by the same tactics. Absolutely. Absolutely Actually, I mean there were two other episodes on my mind one of which sort of confirmed my theory about what was happening in your case The other of which suggested different sorts of motivations So one of them was a case that occurred around the same time as yours Which was a case of a research fellow at st. Edmunds college here in Cambridge Who’s doing research? He’s a sociologist Very well-known respectable sociologist. He had work his work profiles in the economist in top journals Um, he was fired because there was again there was a mob protesting about His associations conferences he’d been to journals that he published in which other people that they found his taste for had published in so on Again, donnell said nothing illegal That was one case which again I think illustrates the sorts of pressures that I think were being brought to bear What were the topics for that? The topics of race and intelligence. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, the intelligence literature is Is rough. That’s for sure I mean the whole the whole thing was so chilling jordan because it was it was decided by an inquiry that was kept secret Nobody’s going to know what the evidence was in this inquiry. Um, so the whole thing was was terrifying um The other case was slightly different. So there was another case that concerned me which was a case Where it was a it was an event for the palestinian society where there was a chair from that society Um, which the university threatened to shut down because they thought they were worried that the chair might be an extremist or something She wasn’t at all. She was a respectful respectable Academic from soas And the university imposed its own its own chair on that now that was slightly different because that was responding to Another another threat of free speech, which is the government’s legislation on prevent and anti-terrorism But those three events were sort of coalescing in my mind around the time that I tried to change the um Changed the university’s free speech policy Okay, so what did so let’s talk about the change in the free speech policy What what changes did you propose and then it took a couple of years as I understand to really get this Through and I also understand from james that it wasn’t that easy to get people to speak in favor of your proposal But that it was passed and we need to go into that by an overwhelming majority of the people who were concerned and and able to Legislate such things so to speak for the university Yeah, so I can take you through that what happened was it was this was around actually march 2020 So about a year after your your case and the university had decided that it was going to put through a new freedom of speech policy Uh, this is obviously at a time when everyone had had other things on their mind at least in britain in march 2020 They didn’t offer a vote on it. They just wanted to put it straight through And it was a policy which I found concerning especially in life of these incidents One part of it was that it mandates said that we have right to free speech But we must always exercise respect for other people’s identities And opinions now that might seem innocuous. Um But of course the word respect being so vague it doesn’t seem innocuous to me Indeed. I mean it seems terrible because it just it just Removes the first part of protection for free speech. I mean if you have to be cautious about other people’s opinions Much less their identity. Well, we should reverse that their identity much less their opinions as well Who decides when that’s respectful and what? Yeah. Yeah, it’s just weasel words that exactly And the bit about identities, I bet they had you in mind when they were saying that actually But whenever anyone says I believe in free speech, but that’s a good sign to me that they don’t believe in free speech And that was the impression that this policy gave off Other parts of the policy, um, which may not have been directly explicitly new But which certainly brought you and those other cases for instance the palestinian society to mind Were rules which said that the university could stop speaker events if they thought they were threatening the welfare of students Notice that wealth welfare is defined to get undefined and could be interpreted broadly And indeed allowed the university to stop events under pretty much any circumstances that they like speaker events for instance So those were that that was the proposed policy in march 2020 So why did that why did that bother you so much? I mean you’re pretty young and and and starting your academic career in many ways maybe i’m wrong about that but You know, it’s a hell of a thing to take on and it’s not without its risks and i’m always curious about people’s motives It’s like there’s lots of professors at cambridge. Why why do you think this was your problem? Well, you flatter me about being young but uh, uh I will say that I guess there were two things one of them was philosophical one with more to do with the nature of the job So philosophically speaking my basic Philosophical position is what you might call classical liberal. So my basic value is individual liberty And you know, I would in terms of what I would I do my political engagement Um, even my professional engagement to some extent, you know, that’s the the ultimate and most important important value So for me it really touched a nerve. Um, it touched on it was the core of my identity if you want to use that that appalling word um The other aspect which I said was professional was simply to do something I alluded to earlier Which was what is this job for it’s part of your duty as an academic I would have thought you know academics are normally cautious as they should be but the one thing that they shouldn’t be cautious about Is defending the ultimate um purpose of the academy and that cannot be pursued without free speech and without the ability to question freely Beliefs that are held by the majority also beliefs that are held by minorities and without worrying about who you’re going to offend Who’s going to be hurt by your words? especially in a subject like philosophy and I dare say in a subject like yours and certainly in a subject like james’s You can’t have free discussion if every time you talk about something you’re frightened that you’re going to offend the other person And then they might report you and you might get in trouble. I can’t do my job I don’t expect james can I don’t expect you can if you if discussion is curtailed in that way So no scientists can because that freedom of inquiry and the freedom to upset traditional truths, let’s say well in some in a really fundamental sense, that’s what science is all about and as a Let’s say a creative scientist. You’re always working against What’s established because otherwise what you discovered wouldn’t be new and you’re always going to be facing people Who are upset for one reason or another by your hypotheses and your research? So it’s it’s it’s not it’s not a side Uh issue here. It’s it’s crucial to the academy as such Yeah, absolutely. It’s it’s absolutely but that still doesn’t explain why you made it your problem say when so many people Were perfectly willing to remain silent. Well, one thing I would say was that I was like I was slightly surprised When I wrote so after after the university’s policy came out There was a discussion what’s called a discussion in cambridge university really means that you write a paper and it’s it’s published in the university magazine um, and So I sent a short paper off proposing some changes to these policies and stated my objections And I had expected this being cambridge university that many other people would do the same Because I didn’t think I was alone in being concerned about this. Um, Uh, nobody else did so I was that was the first point in which I realized so there was no there was no real Braver on my part because I’d expected at that point that a lot of people a lot of other people would be would be jumping in um Nobody did so that was the point at which I realized that I was perhaps more isolated Than I’d expected. Um To go back to your question about motivations. I mean, I don’t know what more I can tell you I mean, these are things that matter to me I don’t really care if anyone else is doing it and did you face any trouble? So you voiced your opinion and you wanted to modify this This document which had let’s say politically correct underpinnings And did it cause grief for you were were people outraged by what you said or or did things proceed as a matter? Of course Well, it was interesting. So some people uh, some people wrote to me In fact quite a few people wrote to me at the time saying that they agreed with with my concerns Um, which sort of made it even more surprising that nobody had actually said so in public Some people wrote to me saying they agree with my concerns, but weren’t willing to to say anything in public. Um James was was as always was brilliantly helpful. James has always been really supportive and James has been publicly supported Throughout this process, but it’s because there have been a few courageous people like James and a few others You know in Cambridge at that stage that was definitely a big a big help Um, so there was some support I also had people warning me So I had people saying you know, you might get you know, you might get some kind of disciplinary procedure You might get some kind of investigation. I didn’t expect anything at that stage and indeed nothing happened To me at that stage and i’m pleased to say there’ve been no investigations or anything that of me of me since um so that’s really interesting in two ways, isn’t it because It shows you how loathe people are to do this because they’re afraid and we shouldn’t make light of that because This is actually no fun You know if if you do something like this and it explodes in your face like it it Probably took me Oh, it took me a long time to recover from the disinvitation, especially the way it was handled and my health and my wife’s health were extremely compromised at the time and so it came at a A particularly bad time. We had just received news that she probably had terminal cancer And so this came on top of that now luckily that she survived thank god, but you know, it was a harrowing time and so I I see why people can be cowed like this because You know, you don’t know when this is going to explode and what’s going to tangle you up so deeply that while your job’s gone That’s what happened to the Weinsteins for example at evergreen and I mean That was really that did them a tremendous amount of damage. They’re unbelievably resourceful and they got back on their feet And and you know, they were a husband and wife team so they had each other and that was good But not everybody can do that and you can get seriously taken out if if something like this goes wrong So but then that ties into this issue. We discussed a bit earlier Which is how a small minority of you know people who whose wrath knows no bounds in some sense can be so dominant Yep. So it was it was it was in some ways a calculated risk and I’m like I imagine how difficult that must have been for you Jordan it was it was you know, it must have been a horrific. Um I mean one thing I saw happening in cambridge not right not quite then but a little bit later was the treatment That was meted out to not an academic but to a member of the university staff So we have we have college porters in cambridge and these are these people who work at the colleges Often they’re they’re sort of, you know, retired policemen or military or something Really helpful. They do all kinds of jobs around the college students rely on them The academics rely on them the bonds of my college are brilliant There was one at a college in cambridge who was also a labor counselor Who uh who resigned on political grounds which was to do with his view about about trans issues So he thought it was you know, there was there was emotion about trans issues that he thought, you know Threatened women’s safety and so he resigned on a point of principle and that’s his political activity That’s his right. I could I could understand his grounds for doing that The students at his college So these are typically much more privileged people than him students at his college formed a mob to try to get this man sacked Um, and this was this was you know, this is a much more privileged people They didn’t care about you know, the consequences for him Um, they just thought because he diverted from their line of ideological purity. Do you remember this case james and james may know all Yeah I do and it was thanks to a very brave female undergraduate I think she was in her second year. She spoke out wrote a public article about it Great courage, uh, I thought to herself and she uh, there was an awful lot of resistance to her doing that But uh, it was remarkable. Uh, she got in touch with us. I seem to remember and I can’t remember how the case was resolved Well, I think the case the case in the end was resolved positively. Um, uh, But that’s right. So so she was just so she was brilliant Um, she actually wrote an article in which she said and I thought this is very telling just describe the state of the academy She said when I came to cambridge, I was expecting she said the the motto of the royal society is don’t take anyone’s word for it And she said that’s what she was expecting when I come to cambridge I was expecting to engage in rigorous discussion where all of my cherished beliefs would be challenged Um, you know and I would come away shaken and uncomfortable and I would think for myself and I would be forced to rethink everything The most important things in my life. I think she was actually studying psychology. Um, and then she said When I got here, it wasn’t like that when I got here I felt that that I was being coddled and there were certain things that you couldn’t question Certain things that you would just make feel an outsider. We questioned. It was a really it was a brilliant article. Um, Uh and really telling because it was her own experience of what what it’s like for a student now compared to what it was like When I was when I was an undergraduate, you know many years ago um So that’s an illustration of how things can go wrong in the sorts of things You know we were seeing around us. Um in the sort of summer and then the autumn of 2020 um, james did you want to say anything more about that point so we can talk more about about that No, I mean, I think it was then wasn’t it june july 2020 I remember you came came around for for lunch around here. We started talking about you know, who might be willing to sign in public uh a support which was required by the mechanisms of the um, All the kind of procedural mechanisms. I think we needed 25 names, wasn’t it? Um, And I think we could come up between us we managed to come up with seven or eight and then over the And then it took us another eight to ten weeks to Get past the 25. I think it was september that we were starting to starting to look promising And in fact, I think in the end we got quite a few more than 25 for the three amendments that That that aref was proposing to introduce to kind of to to take out the respect plan Which and replace it with okay, so you needed tolerance you needed those 25 to put the amendments forward That’s right. Yeah. Yeah So that would indicate that some people were concerned that that requirement for 25 rather than just one person But and it was hard to get 25. Yeah, it was it’s telling it’s telling that actually um, I mean there might have been two reasons why one reason why it might have been because it was a trivial issue Nobody cared about it. Who cares quibbling about a few a few words Another reason which I suspect was you know Which turned out was with a more likely explanation was that actually a lot of people were afraid to sign something in public So why do you think it’s not trivial? And why do you think that argument’s invalid? The reason I thought the argument was it was invalid because the additional evidence that I got after the vote because the vote actually had A very high a lot of people bothered to vote on this And they bothered to vote for that change if it had been a trivial thing. Nobody would have cared to vote So that was one bit of evidence the other bit of evidence was the testimony of the people who wrote to me who I called Up at the time and james may have got this as well You know people who are saying look we support this we can see what you’re doing and we can see why it’s concerned But I just don’t want to get involved in this kind of fight right now getting involved This is going to be too difficult for me right now. I’m up for promotion right now. Yeah I don’t want to face all of these things. So yeah, well you practice what you become You be sorry you become what you practice and you know, that’s well And this is something I learned as a psychologist and I think maybe it was part of my temperament to begin with is like If you put off fights, they don’t get better. Not usually They usually get worse and maybe you think well i’ll be in better position later and you might be but probably you won’t And so that notion that it’s not a good time fair enough You know, I hate conflict. I really hate it. I’m not built for it temperamentally, but i’ve learned through painful experience I would say and not least as a clinician that When the when you see the elephant’s trunk under the rug you can infer the rest of the elephant and It’s going to get bigger as you feed it with your stupidity and your withdrawal and and you let Whatever it’s feeding on continue and it’s extremely dangerous. You see you see this reflected in In ancient mythology actually quite quite nicely in many in many situations you see that this in the mesopotamian creation myth where a dragon grows in the background essentially that threatens to swamp everything and And that’s eventually defeated by a great, you know a Marduk as it turns out. This is a very old idea that little things left Grow in the dark and get big and so it’s not really a very good reason and especially if your conscience is bugging you because it’s something that looks into the future and says well, this is kind of small at the moment, but but yeah, but Yeah, no, that’s right. And actually go on james Well, i’ll just say yeah, I remember reading that that’s a kind of bavillonian creation myth I think isn’t it? um, but but that sense of things just growing uh with a kind of gathering a momentum of their own is is something that we’ve We’ve experienced a lot of I think it’s there’s there’s been some work on this in sociology I think they call it the spiral of silence um, is it’s i can’t remember elizabeth neumann or noel neumann and The basic idea is that is that? fear of isolation uh social isolation ostracism is is is like a huge motivating factor in a person’s behavior and Yeah, well, there’s two great fears, right? That’s one is is being is being uh isolated and right thrown out of the group Because then you die and the other is biological catastrophe. Those are the two big classes of fears that you see as a clinician Right, so that’s the animating idea and then the spiral starts, you know, the monster starts to grow when Some people notice that their opinions are are spreading fast and that gives them a kind of confidence to double down and express themselves more confidently And then on the other hand people who disagree with those opinions See that their views gaining less traction And they stay silent because of the fear of social isolation and then they get weaker They get weaker and of course, yeah And a lot of these people they they’re gorgeous Well, i’m just going to say like, you know social media and those sorts of things that obviously all the network effects from that accelerates that um and so it and and what happens is that people just get very bad at judging what the real spread of opinion is in a social environment And then it’s a kind of so it’s a dynamic process. It’s a spiral and so you get a spiral to the point where What is a confident minority but minority position becomes this completely unassailable orthodoxy um And and I think that’s one reason why in the case of what was started to happen in cambridge in the summer of 2020 and leading up to the vote in in december is is is that Uh, what we saw was that Although there was reluctance deep reluctance among colleagues who struggled to get more than 25 votes to to sign in public the arab’s amendments When it came to the vote Which crucially operated by a secret ballot. So you were allowed to measure opinion But with people voting by people voting from within the closet as it were Uh, and as soon as that that mechanism was allowed to operate you suddenly the the spiral of silence just as it worked the the monster explodes Right. So that’s really interesting procedurally as well because these sorts of positive feedback loop phenomenon You see those in in clinical therapy, too So for example when people start to get depressed then they withdraw and and they stop Socializing say and they stop engaging in their in the activities that bring them meaning and joy And so that makes their depression worse and then they’re more likely to to withdraw again And you know, it’s probably an example of something like the Pareto principle operating again, right? Things can spiral up very very rapidly and dominate and they can spiral down very it’s non-linear on both ends and and There’s some truth to that That kind of process that underlies all sorts of phenomena so that secret ballot issue that’s really relevant for bringing something like this to a halt Yeah, I mean I think yeah Go go go ahead. Okay. No, it’s good to say one. I mean one one part of the isolation process also I think I mean I is Certain kinds of social interactions or professional interactions and what I mean is the experience of being in meetings for instance departmental meetings or college meetings where probably a lot of people There’ll be some mad or insane proposal I don’t know to say we’re going to remove all pronouns from our policy or we’re going to have this this this change of the syllabus or whatever and Everybody or maybe most people in the room We’re thinking this is nonsense But i’m not going to say it’s nonsense and they left the meeting thinking they were the only person who thought it was Because nobody spoke out and the thing was not decided by a secret ballot If it had been decided by a secret ballot as was the case as james says in december Suddenly you have thousands of people realizing that they weren’t alone It’s also possible that the objections So imagine those objections manifest themselves in people’s imagination But they’re not hooked so tightly to the whole to a whole ideological network as the proposal is and so in some sense People don’t have the right words at hand immediately. You know, the pronoun thing is a good indication because Well justify your use of he and she it’s like well, I don’t know how to do that exactly, you know That’s what everyone does we’ve done that forever and and that’s my justification It’s like well, it’s pretty weak compared to that whole ideology that’s coming at you and and those people who are so committed They’re they’re often pretty verbal. They’re pretty well able to articulate that ideology and quite forcefully and they’re emotionally committed to it. And so That’s also a structural problem. Yeah, and they have devices So for instance if you think about the the way I found the way these people use terms like not only welfare But also harm, you know the idea that words do harm to people Which has a lot of currency now in britain and is chilling Is based on an absurdly inflated conception of harm, but when you’re in the middle of a discussion, you know It’s also related to another cognitive problem Which is one of the things I often did as a therapist when someone told me they were afraid of something doing something is I said well, that’s because you’re not afraid enough of not doing it Because that the doing produces this harm, let’s say And you can be afraid of that but the not doing is sort of invisible And that that has something to do with decision making in uncertainty by the way And so I used to get people to flesh out What would happen if they didn’t do the thing they were afraid of and then they thought oh I see there’s real risk both ways And now I get to pick my risk and this harm issue is the same thing because you could say well Sometimes words do do harm There’s no doubt about that and maybe that’s it’s unfair to conflate that with something like physical violence Although you could have a discussion about that But the the the question that isn’t being asked then is well What harm does your attempt to shut down what words you regard as harmful? What’s that likely to produce for harm? Well, none. It’s like oh really So you haven’t thought that part of it through at all and you’re going to be the arbiter of what’s harmful and what’s not And there’s no danger in that either Is there? so That’s a good way to Deal with that sort of thing I agree and of course another thing that a lot of the time people people don’t say is they think You know we can impose on people’s speech we can tell them how to how to behave various ways But they don’t think that that’s an instrument that can be abused in all sorts of ways So if you mandate speech on one thing one day it’s going to be mandated on other things the next day and in general I think with any form of coercive coercive principle You need to think what’s going to happen in the hands of somebody wicked and and you know, um tyrannical That’s how we should think about about these things. Not only in university, but in politics more generally typical right-wing claptrap Well, that’s kind of an interesting thing right because one one thing that conservative thinking does always is say Yeah, but It’s like well you’re putting this forward for the good and fair enough, you know And it’s based on compassion and that’s actually a virtue although it is by no means the only virtue and sometimes it’s a vice But why are you so sure that this will only do the thing you think it will do and nothing else and that you’re Wise enough to make that change right in something that’s sort of working already so Yeah, part of part of the problem might be that I think it’s a sort of a glitch within Liberalism when you think back to to mills idea the famous no harm principle Which for many many years operated as a very very good Basic rule for governing social interaction But you can understand the temptation of trying to fold under the notion of harm or violence I think it’s the australian psychologist nick haslam called calls this concept creep You can see that you see the sort of the power that comes from leveraging these concepts, particularly When an institution is caught in the headlights of a of a twitter mob or whatever it might be Uh that there’s sort of threat to the heart, you know There’s harm or threats of harm or violence to to the person which are In the end, I mean, I think I take your point jordan There may well be certain situations in which use of speech can be thought of as as as Implicting harm, but that is something that society and and and and the legislature in that society needs to Deliberate upon and and decide and and you know, we all accept that freedom of speech is not Is not an unqualified right and and indeed academic freedom has has proper parameters imposed as well Um, so but we can also be growing up and say that it’s it’s dangerous but necessary It’s dangerous, but necessary I think the the danger comes in when what counts as harm is being subjectively determined And so this notion that that’s that started to uh, gather steam in the last few years this idea of a microaggression Which in effect is is is an aggression or a claim that harm has been inflicted on a person that that is subjectively determined That is to say it’s it’s in principle not an offense that could be Uh explored in any kind of forensic context by by a jury or a judge That is to say the only evidence that count of the harm that could possibly count Is the subject saying you’ve hurt me And the and so the danger of the language that that aref was was uh, protesting against the rest of the identitarian respect language is that it Effectively conferred a veto on the most psychologically fragile person on in the university Uh, and who could simply say and we would not there would be no way of establishing whether or not they they were sincere With that they’d have to be just simply taken at face value, but this person the the invitation to this speaker Troubles me upsets me does does me harm. Yeah. Well, that’s interesting too. Like imagine you take that hypothetical Sensitive person it might not be in their best interests To actually grant them that sort of veto power because one of the things you do with someone who’s really depressed or anxious is actually Especially if you’re working as a cognitive behaviorist Let’s say is you get them to look at the thoughts that are upsetting them and maybe modify the ones that are making them Sensitive beyond what is good for them And that’s also to some degree judged subjectively by them And so it isn’t necessarily the case that protecting people in that manner and giving them that sort of power is actually in their best interest so It reminds me of that insight of jonathan height and greg lukey arnolf in there I think it’s their 2017 atlantic article that became the coddling of the american mind where one of the three principles, I think jonathan isolates is um Is a sort of inversion of the nichian idea that you know, um, uh, what what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker That is to say Anything that that you know the sort of harm or or violence that that sort of any kind of threat is it doesn’t have It’s not something that can toughen you up. It’s not an opportunity to try and Strengthen your character or to develop resilience. I know that I think this is something you’ve touched Well, that’s also a huge part of what you that’s also a huge part of what universities are doing for Their students if you think about it psychologically so we could talk about people who are hypersensitive to anxiety and depression Let’s say they’re higher in neuroticism One of the things you want to do when you get educated is arm yourself with defenses And I mean practical defenses both Idiational so the way you think and the way you act against that kind of onslaught And education can really do that, right? because you’re quicker on your feet and you you know more and And and also if you’re trying to reduce someone’s anxiety and depression and they’re temperamentally tilted that way What you actually do is gradually expose them to the things that they’re afraid of You don’t you don’t protect them more and more and more because that actually makes that positive Spiral descent into depression and anxiety worse So the fact the idea that you should remove everything that might threaten someone’s identity And you should make that a university-wide policy is actually exactly the opposite of what you should do speaking clinically if you’re trying to help people become more resilient This is a serious issue and and Well, obviously this is all serious But the fact the fact is universities in the uk are to some extent going in the opposite direction So they do have as james points out this category of what’s called microaggressions And these are things which can even be a matter for disciplinary action If you’re reporting for it where you say something at nyu there’s posters all over the place in the bathrooms, for example Encouraging people to report such things to the appropriate, you know, well-paid bureaucratic authorities Okay, so which tried to introduce a system where you could report you could report these things anonymously so not confidentially Anonymously nobody knows who made the report So it’s like east germany the report comes in and then somebody could in principle be disciplined for it Yeah, no one would ever use that No, you couldn’t imagine that. Um, so as you say, you know If if making fun of someone’s religion for instance is something I can’t do, you know, that’s a kind of challenge which might upset them Um, and as you say part of the point of words is to some extent that they do some harm They’re meant to be upsetting they’re meant to shake your views about things, you know If the conversations you have at university You know never upset you never make you feel a little bit less confident never make you make you perhaps even make you cry Sometimes university isn’t doing its job Yeah I couldn’t agree more and in fact the anonymous reporting tool Mechanism that is accompanied with these long shopping lists of microaggressions effectively Uh where as you say it’s happening at nyu jordan the students and staff are encouraged effectively to to to police each other and to censor Each other is a very disturbing development. I mean Thankfully, it’s appalling It’s absolutely appalling and this is well This is part of the good story the story of good positive developments in cambridge is that when the university Rolled out this. Uh, I think it was called change the culture campaign back back in may that it spent a couple of years working on the the backlash I think was uh intense enough among senior colleagues to for stephen to the vice chancellor to To in the in the end take it down and and admit that it’d been put up in error and as actually as far as uh As far as he said as a recall that he he wasn’t aware that it had gone up, but he wasn’t aware of the microaggressions Um component but but this is a problem throughout the uk I mean it turned out that the company is a sort of tech startup called culture shift Which uh, which rolled it out in cambridge, but there are there I think there are 50 or 60 other universities in the uk that have a system of this kind You know, there’s no there’s no such thing as a joke that isn’t a microaggression Right jokes aren’t funny unless they’re microaggressions, especially witty jokes And so so, you know That’s why i’m so concerned when I see comedians getting stopped because they’re bellwethers for this sort of thing And if you can’t take a joke, I mean Well, I was talking with my wife and some friends about the way working-class men Sort of test each other out and a huge part of that is this throwing back and forth of Microaggressions sometimes they’re not so micro, right? It’s like let’s see if I can get under your skin Can you take a joke? Can you lower your ego? You know, or do you get too upset? Are you too narcissistic? Are you too arrogant? Can we rely on you in a crunch or even a little crunch like can you cooperate can you subordinate your needs to the group? Now and then or you narcissist all that’s played out with aggressive humor And putting a clamp on that is a catastrophe Plus, it’s not funny anymore. Like, you know, we need some we need some humor I think there are there are different subcultures where you get different kind of equilibria here So there are some cultures like as you say, you know in barracks for instance, um, also in roman times You know hugh describes, you know Roman p as a hugh says roman people were very rude to each other from what we know of their conversations Compared to even at high high and low ranking people They were not afraid to be rude to each other and make fun of each other compared to How we are in our society now other ones military military environments. I think I like that Some environments I was in when I was a child, you know, these are these are equilibria That societies can end up in and there are other equilibria which are much more cobbling And much much more timid and it seems the fear is as you say we’re we’re going to end up in one of those Where where yeah, and those are also authoritarian, you know One of the things I learned as studying psychoanalytic thought mostly was the notion of compassion as devouring An excess of compassion is a vice and it becomes totalitarian and no one that I know of yet has had a serious conversation About female totalitarianism And that’s a conversation long overdue because females are now part and parcel of the general political culture in a way they haven’t been in many societies for a very long time and so This totalitarianism of compassion is no joke You know as freud’s primary concern, that’s the edible mother fundamentally The word that the expression i’ve heard used in a lot of places for this is what people call soft totalitarianism So it’s not it’s not the cuddly totalitarianism It’s not the jackboot or the or the or the prison, you know It’s the smiley emoji and and the you know, not hurting people’s feelings Um, but the results are the same when it comes to free speech and argument and the truth And just having rational discourse because so much of it is suppressed So that’s what we’re fearing but as james says, you know, there are reasons for hope when you compare So as james was talking about the microaggressions episode in cambridge, you know the backlash against that I mean what I don’t know what you think james my impression was the backlash against that was much more quick in public than it was against the the um The free speech policy a year and a bit before so that so you might open the door The the the culture to some extent seems to be improving a bit people seem a bit more confident to speak out James I don’t know if that’s your yeah, I mean I think you’re right I mean, I think on the one hand it was it was distressing after the scale of the vote and the uh, The clarity with which the views of the majority of staff of the majority of those voted and I can’t remember what the margins were It’s about eighty-five percent voted for the tolerance language over the respect language it was Depressing that you know barely six months later. This campaign has rolled out that just seemed to be Antithetical in every conceivable respect to what that To to have to have to the views that were expressed at the ballot box in in december But as I have said that the sort of grout the grassroots Resistance to it was was much faster. Um, I mean it’s true. I think that and this might have been to some extent true of the vote itself that one different one big difference from two three years ago with your the rescission of your invitation jordan is the the The extramural support that we’ve had outside the university So the public awareness public attention and public concern tax bear concern Uh has been much more focused on on the problem of the crisis of the perceived crisis of the university And so we there was quite a lot of press coverage I remember around about you know end of may beginning of june and this was happening and I think that must have Put a lot of pressure on and and brought about immediate instant an immediate and dramatic institutional response that I don’t know what aref thinks but I think would have been very very hard to achieve just internally by writing letters and Complaining using sort of ordinary procedures um, so so I think that that would have that that played a big role and I think people are starting to understand to some degree that these obscure goings on in universities Moved downstream with incredible rapidity when I first made that observation not that I was the first to do it That you should that the general public should be concerned about these strange academic ideas It seemed like I was overreacting but you know, everyone’s learned in some sense in that since then what do they say politics is downstream from culture? and culture is generated in the universities for better or worse and so What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus? Yes, exactly unlike las vegas, right? And I wanted to clear something up because earlier you pointed to the utility of Anonymity in a vote, right? But then you criticized anonymous reporting and so I just want I want to clear that up so it’s way different because anonymous reporting is one Person and that can easily be someone who’s quite malevolent. And if you don’t think people like that exist, it’s just because you’re naive They can use that as an unbelievably powerful weapon to take down in a very painful way anyone they want Whereas if it’s a vote and we should talk about the vote because my understanding is that thousands of people voted on this policy So who were those thousands of people and how did that come about? Well, it was it was I mean you’re quite right about the distinction first of all I mean the point about anonymous reporting is that you report something anonymously. You can’t come back to them to check their evidence You know the person who’s been accused can’t you can’t even face their accuser. So there’s there’s no possibility of deep process Um With anonymous voting so the turnout was about it’s about 1500 people So it’s about 30 which doesn’t seem that high but actually it was it was very high by historical standards So i’ve been looking back over the last three or four decades and I couldn’t find one where there was such a high Turnout and such a decisive margin actually. So it was a big it was a big Result, especially given that it was taking place during the lockdown. I believe or taking place At the height of the pandemic So the people who are voting they were all academics Cambridge is unusual in British academia and maybe unusual in western academia more generally in that It and Oxford are both self-governing and what that means is that it’s the supreme body that decides what it does is the sort of main body of senior academics so all lecturers professors and so on And there’s about 7 000 of those those that’s called Regent House and that has supreme authority Now there is an executive body called the council which handles most day-to-day business And the council often makes proposals on which there is no vote unless it doesn’t propose a vote and one of the telling things that the council put forward this this proposal which was On a matter of fundamental value. I can’t think of anything of more importance to a university than its view on freedom of speech Um, it put forward this change. It did not offer a vote when I made my objections It did not offer a vote when I made my objections it didn’t negotiate it didn’t say well I can see the point of this. Maybe we should have a wider consultation. There’s no attempt at consultation No attempt at a vote. It just tried to push it through So the difficulty wasn’t getting a vote in the first place once we got a vote um As it turned out, um Things the things were well, uh But the difficulty was in getting the vote and the vote was was conducted by by senior academics So people like me james you if you’ve been in cambridge, I can’t imagine that toronto is being is run like that I don’t know if any american universities or north american Universities have run like that but cambridge and oxford are lucky in that they have that system of governments I received quite a few messages after the vote and I think probably araf did too from from colleagues around the country and And actually around the world who was sort of expressing a kind of envy that they didn’t have that sort of Quasar parliamentary mechanism, which you know, it’s a clunky tool It took araf and those supporting him a very long time to to to kind of get it all going and and and to And to challenge the university’s decisions, but it did work It gives the faculty final say and not the bureau and not the administration and that’s really something Yep. Yep. It’s important I mean, it’s not quite as simple as that because there are some administrators who can vote as well But and they all they kind of tend to vote the same way I would imagine but it does give us the say and I Want to say again? Um, you know none of it would have been possible without james as well He played a massive role in getting the support, you know in giving it public support and helping with the publicity and so on um So he was brilliant. Um, I do want to add we got I mean I got messaging I’m sure james did too not just from from academics but from members of the public as well. Um Who was sort of relieved that an important british institution like cambridge was actually standing up for For basic values because this is not an obstructive academic matter and it’s not even intellectually very difficult thing to see You know, the arguments were not intellectually obscure or difficult or required any great intelligence, you know It was really simple matters of basic principle. Um, so I think it would have been it would have been a disaster I think if cambridge had had you know had not supported this I wanted to point out something else to clarify something that you just said when we were talking about anonymous reporting and Differentiating that from anonymous voting You said well this anonymous reporting circumvents due process and you didn’t say that very loud and we just went on it’s like No, no, we’re going to say that again This anonymous reporting circumvents due process. It’s like what the hell’s up with you guys You’re doing an end run around due process. Who the hell do you think you are exactly? Due process it’s like god. How long has english common law been working out due process? It is a basic principle of english common law and it’s a basic principle of natural justice that you know The identity of your accuser and you know the grounds on which he’s making the accusation And these mechanisms that are introduced often without any kind of scrutiny at all um Cut completely against that principle. Yeah, and they’re designed to So because with that sort of thing there’s you know, I always prefer to to presume ignorance and not malevolence But when something like that happens, there’s something damn ugly going on way down at the bottom So what’s worrying is that it’s across as james was saying it isn’t just in cambridge where we managed to we managed to stop it This this firm which appears to be running this this platform this kind of snitching portal or starzy portal Um for making anonymous denunciations has been bought by about 50 or 60 universities across the country Um, I remember someone saying to me when I was protesting against it in cambridge as they said well Look, most universities in england have got it Why you know why you so bothered whether we we get it as though it was a perfectly normal acceptable thing that we should we should as You say oh good So now we have an automated system in place in 60 universities in the uk to circumvent due process I really hope to be fair to be fair. I think some of them are ones where Where you could only the only thing you can submit anonymously is a report on which no formal action is taken So you just tick some boxes and nothing happens, but there are some where it goes further So so it’s terrifying that we’re at that state in universities in all places Yeah, yeah, there was a report done last december by civitas which is a sort of right-leaning think tank Very very good report on the state of academic freedom in the uk and I think they found You have a look 83 out of 140, you know uk universities were found to have some kind of anonymous Reporting systems, so it’s it’s it’s very very widespread Um, and uh, yeah, and it just it’s a huge issue Very very concerning and and I think that as araf says, I mean a lot of it is may well be well intentioned Um, but I think the point is that it starts off processes and procedures disciplinary procedures where You know the end result may not be anything at all. It may just be a few weeks of um having to go You know see the chair of your faculty or go to see some committee or you’ll have to pay trips to hr But as a colleague of ours says, um, you know, it’s the process is the punishment Yeah, exactly. There’s nothing trivial about any of that. That’s awful when that happens to someone. It’s so awful It just it just does them in You get it’s all Yeah, and it puts a shadow on them Right, right And it has a chilling effect as well What do you see it happen to one person in your department or your university? You know, you just watch yourself and you don’t say things like that You know again or yourself, you know what you publish what you say in meetings what you say to students You just become more and more careful and another thing I think is that is that I mean tockville talks about this quite well Which is the one way to terrorize people is Not to not to control them in big things but to control them in little things so that tyranny becomes a habit conformity becomes a habit Every time you say something little, you know some small interactions You’re constantly looking over your shoulder worried whether to say this or not That tockville said is the most efficient way to turn people into sheep No, it’s also the sort of in some sense the ultimate reach of totalitarianism because your life is made out of small things You know big things are rare and seldom and so having to watch that Well, I have to say to watch your sense of humor, for example, you know And fair enough you can you can cross the line and an astute person reads the crowd properly and but you see great comedians Man, they’re right on that edge right? They’re right at the point where they shouldn’t be saying what they’re saying Well, and some of them far past that line on purpose, you know, but everyone knows But but to chill that is to take almost all the fun the dynamic fun out of social interactions that spirit That’s that’s a free spirit and that makes all that partly what makes life worth living It’s terrible that these things are happening and it’s more terrible that the universities are doing it How how shameful so, okay, so of this about how many of the 7 000 eligible people voted do you do you know? So it was about 30 percent of them. I’ll just say that that was that was a high turnout historically very high turnout And of those, uh, it was as james says about 85 percent was in favor of of my amendments Vary depending on the amendment So one of the amendments was that was the one which is most popular was was in favor of respect replacing the language of respect With a much more neutral and I think liberal language of tolerance Um, the other amendments were essentially saying that the university couldn’t stop speaker events unless they were illegal. Um, That’s a good that’s a good rule And then another amendment was was incorporating some of the language of the chicago principles Which I think is a good example a good sort of standard to replace this language Which was saying the university could stop things whenever it wanted and it would pay attention to the welfare of students and the public when people were giving We’re giving talks. So now we’ve got a policy where if you’ve been invited you can’t be disinvited Um, and it doesn’t matter unless you’re doing something illegal You’re invited and you’re legal. You can’t be disinvited Um, so it’s been a change. Um, and indeed it was actually the people who first celebrated it were the radical feminists So so it was actually surprisingly up Amongst my allies, you know, there were christians and there were also radical feminists You know because there’s both different sides who felt for various reasons and hard scientists as well they do So it was the hard scientists radical feminists, um lawyers, um christians They were all for various reasons felt that their speech had been curtailed or was being limited And it was the feminists who celebrated it first So sophie that that very brave student that we talked about organized what she called replatforming events where she invited a number of of You know very controversial speakers kathleen stock for instance and others to come and give talks in cambridge Um about to be fun. Is that girl still around that young woman? Is she still around cambridge? I’m not in touch with her. I believe she graduated with a first class degree last summer. Um Uh, be fun to invite her to the talk. Yeah. Yeah, um, i’m sure we get that that would be possible. Um Uh, but uh, so there were some very brave people amongst the feminists and amongst these other groups Um, and that was that was the first thing that happened afterwards and then now we’ve had another thing which is your invitation And we’re hoping to invite other other controversial speakers and and not only that I think in some ways more importantly The culture is I hope changing day-to-day interactions are changing people are more willing to speak out at meetings I want to try and get through changes whereby There is you know secret voting happens at all meetings at all levels not just at these big levels Yeah, well one of the things we’re facing All of us as a potential danger is that although in the west in some ways we’ve got our large-scale uppermost political institutions tilted quite hard against totalitarianism It seems to be creeping into middle level bureaucracies continually right and there it’s a lot harder to fight Uh, it’s harder to get people interested. It’s more invisible um all of that What what do you think i’d be interested to know what your your view and experience is because my my impression has been of Of the sort of mid and high level bureaucracy in my university for instance is that they’re not they’re not really ideological They’re not committed to this. There’s some sort of mad hard left ideology or any of that really they’re just they they just you know They want to respond to concerns from students and others They’ve been given a misleading impression that a lot of people have these concerns There are also commercial concerns because of course universities charge fees now and they have to care about attracting students and so on And so they’re just sort of doing what’s you know, they’re taking the path of least resistance that’s well, I think part of what’s happened is that Well, hr is is punching way above its weight You know It was bottom of the totem pole in corporations for years and also in institutions like universities and then it latched on to this diversity inclusivity and equity mantra and there is power in that man and so I would say yes to everything you said except for that exception and correct and watching corporations jump on this is really quite comical in some sense because What that is all allied with is not something that has capitalism as its central interest. Let’s put it that way. So Yeah, I see you end up Yeah, no, I mean, I I think that’s absolutely right So that there are as are says the sort of mid-level administration is typically not particularly Ideologically ideologically driven but as we were discussing earlier all it takes is sort of two or three dedicated Activists to cause a lot of trouble and what’s happening now in the kind of administrative landscape of a lot of these institutions corporations universities and and and in other sectors as well is that you’ve effectively got people whose job it is to deliver on equality diversity and and And inclusion initiatives that is to say that’s their standing job. That’s their profession And so is it where the revolution can never come to an end, right? You can never reach the sunlit uplands. There’s always got to be the next There’s always got to be the the the the next phobia to confront And so it’s kind of or you lose your job or your job disappears. Yes, or you make yourself redundant Um, and and so that there’s a kind of structural problems there and kind of ratchet effects that are Very very very difficult to to to address um And what do you think? Um one way to think about addressing that might be to introduce ratchet effects in the other direction So that you know, you can have a sort of free speech bureaucracy And you can have you know, we have legislation in this country for instance Which is trying to try to strengthen the duty or at least strengthen the sort of address for breaking the duty to promote freedom of speech um And it could be that that gives rise to sort of internal bureaucracies and people will start thinking Well people who would have thought I can make a career out of promoting equality diversity might start thinking Well, I can make a career out of promoting free speech And they’ll be as keen on that as they are as they were in the other direction I don’t know whether what your experience in toronto has been with regards to that, but um, I wonder Well, I can’t really say because I haven’t really been part of the university in any real sense I would say in any profound sense since 2016 since all this blew up around me So, uh, you know, i’m out of the loop. Um, I think that’s a worthwhile experiment, right? It’s like if there is a bureaucracy and you know a lot of things get settled with these opponent process processes That’s how we think, you know, it’s almost always one thing against another and yeah I think and and you were going to talk about the legis the potential Proposed legislation in the uk that sort of I understand emerged out of all this So what’s happening on the legislative front? Well, should I just say something about that? I mean, yeah, it’s just worth giving you Araf has mentioned it already and it’s worth giving you a little bit of background to that. Um, jordan it was 2019 that the there was Roundabout then it was a short I think was may 2019 There was certainly a lot of talk about what had happened to you at cambridge in Policy circles and government circles and out of those sorts of discussions. I suspect That kind of crystallized a manifesto commitment in the conservative party manifesto for the december 2019 uk general election Which had a very a very strong statement about the importance of the university sector importance of higher education in a post-brexit economy And also signaled some concerns about what was going on there, especially on academic freedom So that was remarkable to see I still remember when I when I saw that manifesto claim I thought that’s absolutely fantastic. It looks like they’re going to be serious about this Uh, and indeed, um, they they delivered they started drafting Very important piece of legislation. I think it’s really the probably one of the first of its kind that that’s um, That that’s that is that clear and and emphatic in In in the west, I think the uk’s leading the way on this. Um The the legislation itself, you know some people, you know, my own view is that it’s it’s just a shame that it’s had to come to this You know, we do not really we do not want governments stepping into and regulating. Um, uh, The intellectual cultures of the university um Now that’s not what the legislation does. It just provides a right for academics or visiting speakers who’ve been disinvited academics who’ve been fired on fairly to a kind of direct line of appeal to an ombudsman effectively an so-called academic freedom Champion and that’s uh, so there’s a kind of quasi judicial process there Which is going to would hold in principle open up universities to significant financial liability through fines If they were found to have breached their duty to promote academic freedom and protect the rights of visiting speakers uh, and so on so I think you know you in principle may may may have had a uh a line of of uh appeal to that New post as and when it it it comes into being now there’s still some problems with the legislation For example, I think araf and I agreed that it doesn’t uh go far enough on protecting, uh academics from uh, uh Institutional interference or politic the politicization of curricular content Uh, you know the the freedom of for academics freedom of speech means freedom to teach Uh freedom to select content and freedom to deliver it as they see fit of course to some extent It’s a shared institutional enterprise designing curricula and so on But there should be a defeasible presumption that academics can can can teach what they want to teach and how they want to to teach it Nevertheless, I mean, I think it will Uh, it will I think I hope shift the shift the culture in some of the ways that the equalities legislation shifted culture 10 years ago and and even if it may be imperfect when it gets royal assent. Nevertheless, I mean, I think that it will um make vice chancellors senior university staff throughout the throughout the country sort of sit up and realize that there are consequences to to continuing to to to allow this this culture to flourish and I think it’s really it’s serially appropriate That that initiative came from the faculty of divinity at cambridge, you know That it can be traced at least to the offense perhaps the events that took place there It’s quite that’s quite something when you you know step back and think about it Well, I mean, you know in its in its defense I I had a conversation with roger scrutin round about that time who who expressed his uh, deep disappointment The the treatment meted out to you and he said something quite interesting He said when he was in eastern europe in the 1980s setting up, uh underground universities in Warsaw pack countries particularly poland hungary and the czech republic Uh by some kind of strange quirk, um, although the university of the university of cambridge wouldn’t uh confer Degrees or credentials it was considered politically too difficult I think the divinity faculty did have some kind of degree Conferring power it had was able to accredit or recognize a diploma in theology and that’s exactly how roger got his his students, um Their diplomas as it were from the faculty of divinity at the university. So it was I think from his point of view, it was especially, you know heartbreaking that that things developed as As they did in in early 2019 but you know just to reiterate i’ve had no uh criticisms or um From colleagues within the faculty I think there’s great excitement that that you’re coming over and and and great gratitude to you that you’ve shown the kind of graciousness and forbearance to to Um, as it were let bygones be bygones And and and go ahead with the visit that had been planned back then which which I think you probably wouldn’t have been able to To to to do anyway given all the horrible things that started to to happen to you, you know, and tammy health-wise um in 2019 Yeah, well like like I said, i’m i’m absolutely thrilled to be able to do this Well, because I seem to be able to do it not something but also that I have the opportunity again I think you’d have to be a pretentious fool not to take an An an opportunity like that and be grateful for it and like every people there’s mistake mistakes made, you know And that’s that but who knows, you know, if if the upshot of this all is that The protection for freedom of inquiry and speech in the uk is is strengthened and maybe that’s a model for the west It’s like well, that’s a pretty small price to pay Even though it was you know, it was unpleasant so now say la vie, you know Well, I I think I joked to you the other day jordan in in an email I think the araf is not going to agree with this but providence bears strange fruits um and uh Those of us with a kind of theological lens on things may see something there, but no I I You’re right. I think that you know, there’s there’s hope on the horizon. There’s a reason to be much more cheerful than There were sort of two three years ago. There are still challenges ahead that I know araf and I are concerned about we’re especially worried That you know, for example our colleague kathleen stop last week has been treated to uh, uh, just Appallingly by a group of of activists for her views that there should be as it were female only Spaces that been posters have gone up calling for her dismissal. She’s had the police round She’s had to put cctv up in her around her home. So, you know that It’s still a significant problem And then there are other more kind of structural issues. I think it was st. Andrews a couple of weeks ago The up in scotland there was news that they would um that incoming undergraduates incoming students would have to sit what amounted From I’m not sure the details here, but from what I could tell An ideological purity test that come very close. I think in fact crossed line in coercing speech That is to say you had to answer certain. No, do you do you know do you know that at least 70%? Of researcher applications for professorships in the uc u california system now statewide Were rejected on the basis of their diversity Statement prior to their research cv being reviewed more than 70 percent That’s extraordinary. Yes. Yeah extraordinary I think you want to kill you want to kill universities. That’s a good way to do it It’s it’s not just california. I I think you drew my attention a few Weeks ago to the newton trust which is a very big and distinguished, uh grant making research body I think now requires almost every application submitted to Be accompanied by a statement explaining how the research will have a positive impact on gender equality So the thought of these poor I believe similar things have happened to at the at the grant level federally in canada Yeah, yeah, and that’s horrible. It’s absolutely unbelievably bad that So it looks like we’re getting to this problem with with graduate students and with undergraduates as well But you can’t you can’t even access the the benefits of a university education university researchers are Unless you agree with some sort of you know, ideological line Um In the case as james says in the case of undergraduates It’s close enough to compelled speech because you have to answer you have to pass the test and passing the test means Getting enough questions, right? I think in some cases it might even be getting well, you know, they’re so terrible psychologically, you know I mean, there’s some good psychological experiments So imagine you do this you take a group of people and they have an opinion about something, eh? Then you make them write out. You ask them to write out a counter opinion. That’s quite Detailed and you test their their beliefs before they do that and then a week later And what you see is a massive shift in the direction of what they’ve detailed out partly because they’ve detailed it out But also partly to reduce cognitive dissonance, right? Well, I said this therefore while i’m either a liar or I much I must believe it So these are not trivial issues like well, you know and students say they say things to me and i’ve heard them say To me and i’ve heard them say well, I just write what the professor wants me to say It’s like no you don’t just write that because writing is thinking And if you don’t think that practice becomes part of you and those words become part of you That’s just because you don’t understand practice or words and the fact that you have to do that at university That’s like the reverse of education. It’s it’s not bad education. It’s anti-education. Yeah, it is. It’s anti-education That’s a really excellent point. I mean that’s I remember william james talks about that as well the way in which you know The direction goes the other way. It’s from the things that you do sort of feeds into what you think So they’re real. Well, that’s that’s like a basic principle of behavioral therapy. It’s no no the action the action You know the cognitions so to speak are secondary and not always but of course they’re secondary because well The prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex and action is everything and so abstraction follows in the in the pathway of action Hopefully like I mean we’d be in real trouble if that wasn’t the case So but yeah, it’s appalling and that universities are doing this. It’s makes me ashamed to be part of them It’s so and then I see students or listen to them. They’ve been educated like this It’s just like it’s this grating noise that they’re emitting. That just hurts my soul So well more work to be done, right? Well, so this is positive everything we’ve been talking about virtually movement in a positive direction Thank you to very much for your commitment to Well, I I can’t thank you, you know because you did it for all sorts of reasons, but I admire it It’s great and look what’s happened. And so I hope that I hope that uh, my visit is worth all the trouble I’m gonna do what I can to make it that and I like I said, i’m so thrilled that I get to do this it’s so ridiculously wonderful that I can come back there and Talk to you guys at Cambridge and go to speak at Oxford and and that the basic response from people is positive Like if I would wish for something better, I couldn’t think of anything better. So It’s been it’s been a terrific response and we’re so thrilled that you’re becoming and and I think it’ll be really positive You know the students here the staff here. Everyone is going to learn so much from discussions that that we’ll be having so That’s excellent God willing and all that. Well, thank you very much gentlemen I’m very much looking forward to meeting you. Dr. Aukman. Thank you for talking to me today. James. It was a pleasure as always