On the mission of higher education, Trump's election and today's most pressing threats to campus free expression
Amna and Jeff appear on Princeton University's "Madison's Notes" Podcast
We visited Princeton last month to give a talk called “Speak Up or Shut Up? A Conversation about the State of Campus Free Expression Today.” While we were on campus, we had the pleasure of talking to Laura Laurent, who is the host extraordinaire of Madison’s Notes , the official podcast of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. We discussed, among other topics, the purpose of higher education, how campuses responded to Trump’s election and threats to campus free expression from across the political spectrum. Please give it a listen. The YouTube version is below. (Apple link here, Spotify link here.) And if you’d rather read than listen, there’s an edited transcript under the YouTube window.
Best wishes to all for 2025!
Amna & Jeff
Transcript
Laura: Welcome to the show, Jeff and Amna. It is wonderful to have both of you here on Princeton's campus. You two will be giving a lecture this evening. It’s early November, but post election. We're recording this episode while you're both physically here, which is unique sometimes for the way we do things with Madison's notes.
Amna: Thank you for having us.
Jeff: Yeah. Thanks so much.
Laura: You two do a lot of collaboration in the realm of academic freedom and free speech. But before we get into the collaborative efforts, I'm curious for each of you individually, and maybe Amna, you can start, can you tell us how you came to care so much about this subject and to start to put some of your academic and professional focus on this specific area?
Amna: It's a great opening question, but also one where I can talk for hours and hours. So do cut me off if I am over speaking. Very quickly, I come to the US via Britain and South Africa. Britain is where I did my postgraduate degrees. Pakistan is where I did my undergraduate degree.
I taught in South Africa for two years before coming to the US. I think to answer your question about why this is so important to me, I have to reflect on the context that I'm coming from. In Pakistan, I grew up under a series of military dictatorships. I know exactly what happens when censorship begins to take hold in a society, particularly in educational institutions.
For me, what's concerning and why I started investing myself in this area of academic inquiry, and perhaps even academic activism, is precisely because I come from a context where I've seen how quickly a public education system can be ripped apart. It takes decades and decades to build those kinds of institutions that most of us outside of the U.S. look to with envy. We admire the kinds of higher education institutions that have been set up and not just higher education, but public education in general in the United States has always had an exceptional reputation across the world.
To arrive here, to have made personal sacrifices precisely to have the freedom to think — to arrive in the U. S., which held this promise, and to see that being undermined from across the political spectrum was extremely disturbing, well that's what made me think about getting more involved in this area. My own expertise is in South Asian history and history of medicine. So it has been a switch, but one that I've felt passionately enough about to dedicate all my time and energy to speaking about it, to writing about it, and to hoping that people will be able to distance themselves from the politics of it all and recognize that academic freedom in particular is crucial for any kind of open inquiry.
Laura: Thank you. Jeff, how did you come to put your focus on academic freedom and freedom of speech?
Jeff: I started teaching at Carleton College, a small liberal arts college in Minnesota in the fall of 2012. Within the next academic year I had a student come to my office hours and say, “I think you should have included a trigger warning for the reading that we did yesterday in class.” I had never heard this phrase before. And I asked the student to explain, what is that. I was open minded. My attitude was one of curiosity when I first heard this term. But the more that I read about it, the more concerned I became that if we required or encouraged professors to put trigger warnings on syllabi or to issue trigger warnings in class before particular discussions, then about half of what I teach as a historian who focuses on the modern United States, would be potentially subject to a trigger warning. I anticipated if this trend continues, it's going to be very difficult for me to teach some of the core subjects from my classes.
I teach a class called, Will this be on the test? Standardized testing in American education. The first part of the class is a historical exploration of the origins of standardized testing, which are very intertwined with the invention of intelligence testing and IQ tests. And every single one of the major IQ testing architects and proponents was a eugenicist.
We do about a week on eugenics which is an incredibly disturbing topic that includes all sorts of sensitive material. I worried that were students to have a mechanism where they could say, “Hey, hold on a second, I'm not sure that I want to read this book or see these images,” whole parts of my curriculum were possibly on the chopping block.
That's how I initially became interested as a professor at a liberal arts institution where I could see these threats to academic freedom really impeding my ability to teach my courses in the most accurate and powerful way. And if I could just add an addendum to that, when Amna and I first started writing on these issues, we wrote about trigger warnings; we wrote about bias response teams; we wrote about campus diversity initiatives and DEI offices. We were often critiquing what our colleagues saw as the left or people who are interested in social justice.
These threats to academic freedom were coming from inside the academy, trigger warnings and these kinds of things. But then circa 2020, 2021, you had an incredibly important movement from outside of the academy. You started to see anti critical race theory legislation in red states like Florida, the Stop WOKE Act being the iconic example of this kind of legislation. Here was a threat coming from outside of academia that was also impinging on the freedom to teach and learn in the classroom. So that re-energized both Amna and I in terms of a whole new area of concern—laws passed in red state legislatures.
Amna: Can I just add onto that? When I first came here, I was very used to legislators or people in authority, in terms of political authority, cracking down on the freedom to speak and the freedom to think. So I was really taken aback when I saw that kind of push coming from within campuses and it was, of course, cloaked in progressive values and things that I actually agree with in many ways. I was really taken aback by that at the outset when I first came. But since 2020, as Jeff was saying, when in red states, legislators started going for directing what can and can't be taught in the classroom, it was very familiar territory to me given where I come from.
I, under no circumstances, can endorse that kind of intervention. I feel it is my responsibility as a global citizen to push back against it. We're very used to Americans taking on the mantle of pushing things globally. I'd like to reverse the tables here and say there's plenty that the US could learn from the rest of the world in this moment and recognize that this is a dangerous, dangerous move.
Laura: I'm really curious about your collaboration together. Were you both at Carleton College and found that you had this similar interest? Was it something you were at a dinner party and you realized you both were writing on the same topic at the same place? What was the moment that your collaboration was formed?
Amna: It was back in 2016. Carleton was considering having a bias response team. I'd never heard of such things; I had never encountered them. A professor friend of mine dragged me to the town hall. It was over lunch. I actually wasn't intending to go because I didn't even understand what it was. But as I sat there and heard about what was being proposed — mind you this was still early days and they were brainstorming and presenting what they thought would be a good bias response team — I remember the hairs on the back of my neck standing. I remember thinking, Oh dear God, I have ended up from the frying pan into the fire because if this is what thinking people believe is the right approach towards cultivating a culture of tolerance and open inquiry, God help us. It was very familiar to me.
It's not entirely the same, of course but the feeling I had at that moment was very similar to what I used to feel like in Pakistan when people tried to shut down what you were saying by classifying it as anti-religion or as anti-state or anti-military.
In the aftermath of that town hall, I was appalled by what I had heard. Jeff and I had known each other as colleagues across campus, but we'd really never connected. I discovered Jeff was equally incensed and we met up for a cup of coffee to discuss this bias response team proposal. At the end of that coffee, I remember Jeff just saying, “Hey, do you want to write something with me on this?” That was the start of what has ended up being quite a long and productive partnership.
Laura: Fantastic. Now I'd love to get into more about the state of free inquiry on campuses. But before we do that, I think it's really important for our listeners and also for ourselves to have a really good understanding of the approach that we're taking when we talk about the purpose of the university.
I know that your perspective of the purpose of the university isn't always in line with what some people think. Sometimes the purpose of the university is labeled as truth seeking, it's like discovery to find the ultimate truth. Can you tell me about your perspective of what the purpose of the university is and how that contrasts with how people maybe traditionally think of higher education and higher learning?
Jeff: Whenever Amna and I give public talks about free speech or about the purpose of the education, we have this one quote that we really like from a federal judge called Kevin Newsom. He was writing in 2022 and he said, the chief mission of colleges and universities is to “equip students to examine arguments critically and perhaps even more importantly, to prepare young citizens to participate in the civic and political life of our democratic republic”. If you look at the mission statements of colleges and universities over the past 100 years or so, you see consistently that there are two main themes or two main objectives:
One is knowledge seeking, truth seeking, the dissemination of knowledge. From a student's perspective that's about inculcating critical thinking. And then another important theme or strand or objective is that of preparing students to be informed and engaged citizens.
This morning, I actually went and looked at the Princeton mission statement. Of course, there's a lot about research and learning and scholarship, but there's a little section where it says that the university's defining characteristics and aspirations include “a commitment to prepare students for lives of service.” It's been our impression that a lot of people in the higher ed space, pundits, professors, commentators, when they are talking about the mission of the university, they really tend to focus on the purely or strictly academic features. But if you look at what colleges and universities are actually doing it's hard to not see how important citizenship, civic engagement, whatever exact term you want to use, really is to the overwhelming majority of the some 4, 000 colleges and universities in the United States at this point.
Amna: When we think about the mission of the university, Jeff quite rightly pointed out that there are these two arms to it. One is critical thinking and the other one is citizenship. But I want to reflect a little bit more on what we mean by critical thinking and critical inquiry. For a long time people have talked about the mission of the university as being truth seeking. Let me be very clear. I am in no way saying that the mission of the university excludes truth seeking. It is part of what we do. But as a historian, I'm very aware of the fact that concepts and missions and ideas and categories don't, descend from heaven fully conceived.They're actually contingent on the historical circumstances where they're being produced. So for me, the mission of the university as truth seeking, is very much reflective of the late 19th, early 20th century, when we'd shifted away from capital T Truth to small t truth. But it was still rooted in the positivist idea that there was a truth to be accessed.
Now, that is definitely the case in many fields and lines of inquiry that are part of the academy. But much has happened in the academy since then. To boil it down to saying it's truth seeking is actually alienating many within the academy. People in music and art and literature do not engage in these endeavors to find the truth. They do it to bring in a more expansive understanding of the human condition and human experience. That, I think, needs to be reckoned with. There's been a wave of people who have critiqued this notion of critical inquiry, the way we've put it forward as the mission of the university, saying that this is pandering to post-modernism, or is derivative of post structuralism. The fact of the matter is, whether you like it or not, post modernism and post structuralism have been incredible movements in the history of thought in the 20th century, and have allowed us to ask some very important questions that are at the heart of how we are conceiving of what it even means to be a citizen. So I just want to say that when we think about critical inquiry in the academy, it is a big umbrella, which includes truth seeking, but also incorporates what many of our colleagues who are engaged in the university are doing.
Jeff: If I can add onto that, I'm just looking at some stats here. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, across the country, we've got about 11,000 economics professors and about 12,000 who are in physics. And at least from an outsider's view looking in, perhaps in physics truth seeking, looking for universal laws, I can imagine that's important. We certainly wouldn't want to say that's illegitimate. But then I'm looking at these numbers and see that there are 69,000 professors who are in art, drama, and music. And, whether you're talking about different interpretations of Moby Dick, whether you're talking about how to throw a clay plot, whether you're talking about learning a foreign language, Russian, French, Spanish, Mandarin, whatever it is, I'm not sure that the professors and especially the students who are engaged in those endeavors would think of it as being in the pursuit of truth.So on an empirical level, this idea that we're all in the business of truth seeking just doesn't map onto what people are actually doing inside classrooms and labs across college campuses.
If I could say one more quick point here. We've thought some about this issue, but neither of us are, philosophers in epistemology, and this isn’t our area as historians. But we wanted to talk about the importance of both citizenship and critical inquiry and knowledge seeking more broadly in order to try and create a bigger tent for people and organizations that are devoted to academic freedom and free expression.
The Academic Freedom Alliance is a organization we have incredible respect for. I'm a member. Amna is a founding member. Their tagline is solidarity in pursuit of truth. At least it was last time I went to the website. I think that for a lot of people, especially in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, when they see that tagline, they don't see their own academic work reflected. So part of this was just a pragmatic maneuver. There are so many reasons to be concerned about threats to academic freedom and free speech. Let's broaden the tent beyond more empirically-driven positivist conceptions of the nature of knowledge and scholarly inquiry.
Laura: Yeah. It's interesting.I studied philosophy in school, but I'm also very artistic and have a lot of creative pursuits. And when I think about the way that philosophy was taught to me in school, it was this like capital T, go find the answer. But in my creative life, if you try to find the answer, it doesn't exist. And that actually destroys the creative heart of the human soul.
Jeff: That's exactly right. Why do we care about academic freedom or free expression? A big component of that is what John Stuart Mill said, the quest for truth or knowledge, however you want to put it-- that’s absolutely at the heart of what we do on campuses. But there's an additional element to the importance of especially free expression, which is self expression. That doesn't necessarily lead to an assertion that can be reality tested, right? Is this true or false? I don't think that's the question that people are asking if they see a painting or if they read a poem. It's a completely different mode of inquiry. It's much more interpretive. Most art, I don't think is driven by the pursuit of truth. I'm sure some of it is for some people, but I don't think that's the case for most people and most artists.
Amna: To put an even finer point on it, we're not saying critical thinking alone, we're saying critical inquiry. For that, we draw on what Dewey saw as the four natural human instincts or interests. One is conversation and communication, two is investigation, three is construction, and the fourth is artistic expression. That is the full range of how we explore and inquire and that is what we're trying to say is the mission of the institution.
Jeff: If I may say one more thing. We’re here at Princeton University and I’ve got nothing but love for the Ivy League. I grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is where Dartmouth college is and my dad was a professor there. But the pursuit of truth as the only organizing idea for a collegiate mission is I think elitist in a way that ignores a couple of different important features of higher ed. One is that four out of ten undergraduates attend a community college. And there are millions of students across the United States who are pursuing vocational education of some sort. If you're talking about welding, for example, some sort of trade, it is an art, it is a science; I don't think the pursuit of truth is part of it, but I think that if you teach welding or computer coding, whatever it is, in a way, that's not just about training and isn't super simplistic and reductive, it is a form of inquiry, learning a trade or a craft like that. Critical inquiry is broad enough to even incorporate a lot of vocational education, which of course at elite institutions, we don't even have. We don't have a welding program. We don't have a business major at Carleton. We have an economics program, right? So I just think it's a broader, more capacious, more expansive way of thinking about and understanding higher ed that at least we hope could be possibly useful in enlisting more people in the cause of academic freedom and free expression.
Laura: I want to go into the state of free speech on campus. You've mentioned the Stop WOKE Act. This is post-election, so there could be some other things we don't know yet. From my own experience, my freshman year in college was 2016. That was the first Trump election. And freedom of speech became a partisan issue associated with conservatism in that conservative ideas and students were being shouted down and therefore there needed the support of freedom of speech. I'm curious, is it the same now? Is that still how it's playing out? Or has the sort of freedom of speech and academic inquiry, freedom of academic inquiry shifted over the last few years?
Jeff: Free speech — I was going to say for better or for worse, but it is for worse — since you joined college, since Trump 1.0, that first Trump administration, free speech has been politicized. I'm a historian of education and part of what I study is the intersection between schooling and the culture wars and arguing that public schools, especially K-12 schools, are central sites for culture wars in the United States, from the teaching of evolution to critical race theory.
On college campuses during the first Trump administration for a whole generation of college students, including it sounds like yourself, the phrase free speech took on a very particular valence. It was culturally coded in a culture wars idiom and came to be seen by many students as a conservative or a rightwing cause or value.
And I can understand that. If you are a 18 year old and you step onto campus and no matter how good your civics program was in your high school, no matter how well-read you are, your understanding of academic freedom, free expression, free speech issues is probably pretty limited. Their first exposure to free speech was the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Ann Coulter, and other people who run the gamut from, I would say, right wing provocateurs to neo Nazis coming to college campuses. When they received pushback and critiques about their right to speak they capitalized on that resistance and draped themselves in the cloak of being free speech champions and free speech martyrs.
To be clear for both Amna and I, if it's a public university and they've been invited, they should be allowed to speak. We don't want to de platform them. But the notion that Milo Yiannopoulos is actually a champion of free speech is grotesque. It's comical. However, from the point of view of those students, that's what they were seeing. They're seeing some very far right figures claiming that their free speech rights are being infringed upon. Students were interpreting that as, “okay, when I hear free speech what that means to me is that people have the license to say offensive things, especially about minorities and vulnerable populations. So free speech equals racism, free speech equals white supremacy, free speech equals transphobia.” I think that feature of the Trump era has been incredibly damaging to, for lack of a better term, the branding, the currency of free speech in our culture. I think it's changing and maybe Amna can jump in here and talk about how free speech as a term is evolving. I think it's taking on slightly different connotations now.
Amna: I'd say many of the people who were arguing for limiting free speech on campuses were driven by progressive values and were reacting to the moment of Trump coming to power and these provocateurs coming to college campuses, causing mayhem and looking for attention. I think that's shifted a little bit since the war in Gaza. Many of those students or not just students, but constituencies on campus who were in favor of limiting speech are beginning to see how quickly it can be used to limit their own speech. I think it's been a very eye opening moment for American higher education to contend with some biases that it has with respect to what can and cannot be discussed on campuses.
It's not a mystery to me that this has blown up around the issue of Palestine, which has always been a very heated topic, but one that institutions have preferred not to speak about. It's not that I think institutions should be talking about it (i.e. issuing statements about it). But they have not fostered the kind of culture where people in their institutions can take up and speak about this openly.
So, I think things are shifting a little bit. But I'm not going to go so far as to say things have changed, the tables have turned. Unfortunately, that's not the case, and neither am I looking to make a case that free speech belongs to the left. I think it belongs to us all, and that's the shift that I would like to see happening on college campuses. In terms of the culture on campuses, we're far from that.
Jeff: There's an interesting plot line here that tracks how we think about free expression on campus and the meaning of free speech. The phrase that Amna and I use is the discourse of harm. So there is this idea that being exposed to a particular speaker, idea, work of art, music lyric, if offensive, controversial or graphic, is going to cause students significant psychological distress and harm. It’s a kind of avoidance rationale. But I think what this moment has clarified is that everybody hurts. I'm a Gen Xer and R. E. M. was a big band when I was in high school and college. They had a song that came out in the late 90s called “Everybody Hurts.” I think what people are discovering is that if you traffic in the discourse of harm, if colleges and universities say, “hey, you know what, we're really going to listen to students when they say my feelings have been hurt, we're going to take that seriously, maybe we will launch an investigation,”— well then everybody hurts. Everybody's got feelings. And..
Amna: Sorry to interrupt, but look at the framing of the Stop WOKE Act. It is based on the idea that if students feel psychological distress by virtue of any conversation about their ancestors having done things that portray them in negative light, then that should not be discussed in class. It's a very tricky and slippery thing when we start playing with harm, because it can be used by anyone. And the point is that the people who suffer at the end of the day are the students whose freedom to learn is being infringed upon.
Jeff: What I'm trying to say also is the flipping the script dynamic that Amna described before where people who were concerned about “snowflakes” and that people were too sensitive, are the same people who have made allegations about anti Semitism. I’m not saying that those allegations don't have merit. But what we've seen on college campuses over the last year is almost these parallel tracks where students of Jewish descent are alleging anti-Semitism, students of Palestinian descent or people who are in the pro Palestinian movement are saying, “Hey, hold on a second, there is Islamophobia or anti-Palestinian bias, our voices are being silenced.” So when you've created these conditions where the discourse of harm is the currency, anybody, any constituency can raise their hand and say, “Hey, what about me?”
Laura: Everybody hurts.
Jeff: Everybody hurts. Yeah. I hope that this would be an instructive lesson as Amna said that free speech, free expression belongs to all of us.
If we go the censorship route, censorship is a tool that unfortunately belongs to all of us. Whether you're on the right or whether you're on the left, there will be a group of people who are going to eagerly and aggressively embrace censorship to promote their political viewpoints.
Having a better understanding of that kind of basic feature is useful. This is a feature, not a bug of humanity, of campus politics. There was an LA times columnist who said that censorship is the strongest drive in human nature. Sex is a distant second. That's about accurate.
Laura: In the context of looking at how university politics and the student body is going to be reacting to each other, we have these different interests to impose the same censorship on the other party. We've talked about the purpose of the institution. Just a few days ago, on November 8th, you co-authored this article that says, “Stop treating students like babies” with the Chronicle. You critique universities’ response to the election by setting up spaces with crafting or counseling, dogs, emotionally meditative areas, which on the surface don't maybe seem like the worst thing. Of all the things you could do, you're setting up spaces for students to come and pet some dogs. Why is this an issue and what exactly should universities be providing for their students in this age where political conflict is so high?
Amna: Let me begin with the 2016 election. As someone who comes from Pakistan where we have all kinds of people that we elect (and many of them are very unsavory characters) when I walked into my classroom, the day after the 2016 election I was gobsmacked by the reaction of my students. They were dysfunctional. They expected me to not have class or to hold some kind of session where they could process things? It really threw me off. Again I must say it would behoove us to look beyond our borders and see that people have survived and do survive many far worse situations and circumstances.
So this time round, I actually had a conversation with my class the day before the election saying I will not be changing course — you want to process things, by all means, in a very constructive educational fashion where we should sit and contend with whatever the result is going to be and analyze it and think about it. But I am not going to be holding a space where people can just feel morose. For me, what happened in the aftermath of the election results where institutions set up these self-care suites was basically the culmination of what we've been seeing happening for a few years now, where we are infantilizing students, where we're telling them that they're not able to think for themselves, where we're telling them that every time there's a problem, they need to run to an authority figure to resolve it. We're not equipping them with the kind of, I don't even want to call it courage, just basic skill of being able to disagree and confront someone you disagree with civilly, to have that conversation, which is a difficult conversation — a skill that lies at the heart of the education experience.
So when in the aftermath of the election results this year, I saw once again, institutions responding in ways that frankly they would never have responded in if Kamala Harris had been elected. Let's just be honest over there. The idea that these are ideologically neutral interventions is nonsense. It's absolute rubbish. For me this is a moment when we should really take stock and say, “okay, what is it that we have done that has prevented our students from seeing what was happening.” We've put them in this bubble and they've never had a moment of engagement with the outside world. That is what we need to be reflecting on, not sitting there and having calming jars and, doggies to pet so that you can feel better.
his is the time to get to work. This is the time to realize that we have failed our students. It's not our students that I blame. I want to be very clear about that. This is not a situation of snowflakes and, oh, kids these days. This is a situation where institutions need to look inside and say, we have failed them and why have we failed them such that our students are falling to pieces when this election result was announced.
For me, education is a tool of empowering people to think and contend with and to learn to see the world as it is. You cannot even begin to change the world if you do not honestly see it as it is. And we have failed in helping our students do that. I am a strong supporter of higher education. I will defend it when it comes to attacks on academic freedom, be they internal or external. At this moment the threats to academic freedom are coming fast and furious from the outside. We need to be concerned. I think higher education has deep, deep value for a democracy. I would like us as institutions to take this moment to pivot and remind ourselves what we are there for, to re-embrace what our missions are, and to get to work; not just sit there and hand out hankies. That's really despicable and disgraceful.
Jeff: Well, this is the triumph of a therapeutic model or a therapeutic approach to education that we've seen over the last 10 years. A lot of the listeners, I'm sure, are familiar with The Coddling the American Mind — this emphasis on safetyism and what I was talking about before, the discourse of harm. Should colleges and universities have therapy available to individual students who have mental health issues? Absolutely. We have a professional and a moral obligation to take care of our students’ health, including their mental health. But that model of engagement with the world, I don't believe should be part of the educational mission. Therapy is not educational in the way that education is meant to proceed at a college or university. I think there is something interesting and ironic here in that one of the knocks on Trump voters from social progressives on the left is that they aren't guided enough by reason and that they're responding to these really powerful, affective or emotional appeals — that they're voting against their interests. They're being manipulated.
Trump gets reelected but you're still shocked! And then you say, okay, let's wallow in our feelings. We're doing exactly the same sort of thing.
Laura: It's the same reaction to what happened before.
Jeff: It's the same kind of “oh, let's really attend to our emotions and process our feelings.” Sure, do that on your own time. But on a college or university we should be asking why so many college students, faculty and admin were floored by Trump's reelection. You can't do that by wallowing in a self-care circuit or going to attend “Pawfice” hours. That is not going to advance your understanding of society. It has no educational value in terms of, as Amna said, seeing the world clearly as it is. You’ve substituted critical thinking for wishful thinking. These spaces are all about wishful thinking.
Amna: I just want to say, there's something especially jarring and frankly nauseating when we consider that there are people right now who are dying to have the right to an education. There are children who get shot in the face, standing up to people who are denying them an education. There are women in Afghanistan who are crying out for the world to come in and help them at a moment when they really need help. There are people in Gaza whose universities and schools have been decimated and they want an education. Does it behoove us to sit in our privilege, wallow and cancel classes when we are traumatized by the election of one candidate over another? No matter how you feel about it, it is frankly a legitimate democratic process and we have pathologized it.
Laura: I think it's interesting as I mentioned earlier, my freshman year was 2016 and everyone was surprised the first time. It set off this internal inquiry because I was like, “why am I so surprised?” And I really didn't want to believe that, quote unquote, half of America would vote for Trump. I was like, “I don't think half of America is stupid.” That would be really dumb of me to assume that about everybody else. So what is it that I was missing in understanding this outcome? Of course, that critical inquiry took me a gazillion different places, politically, religiously, philosophically, and it's been an adventure that hasn't always been very fun.
Amna: Adventures aren't meant to be fun. They're meant to be risky, right? That's what actually makes it an adventure.
Jeff: What you're saying here is, there's a rush to judgment and a rush to condemnation. Rather than saying what's wrong with Trump supporters, the question should be, what's up with Trump supporters? How did Trump end up gaining so much more of the Black, Latino and American Indian vote this time around? That's an interesting sociological question. But if you just stop at a knee jerk emotional response — “Oh, those people are idiots” — that is fundamentally anti-intellectual. Your first job in a classroom or any sort of educational environment is to try and understand. I’m not even talking about empathy. I think that's probably important in the realm of citizenship. But purely from an intellectual exercise, to see the world for what it is, you've got to be primarily concerned and motivated by the urge to understand the world, not to stand and cast judgment and aspersions and ring down self-righteous condemnation on people who think differently. That's a dead end from an academic, scholarly or pursuit of knowledge angle.
Laura: I'm curious as we look forward, there's a number of things institutions can do. We're looking at also the external risks to freedom of speech. But I think personally, when I look at this issue, I see that maybe the greatest risk is the self censorship that can happen when it comes to associating political beliefs very closely with self identity. I just want to ask you, what do you tell your students and what do you say to individuals, not just students, to foster that disposition of curiosity over that disposition of judgment, because it's hard. That is a hard thing to do. How do you instruct or develop that skill set in the people you're currently working and interacting with?
Amna: Self censorship is indeed a grave threat to academic inquiry. But it's not the only big threat or the biggest threat. I actually think at this moment, we need to be paying attention to what's coming out of legislatures who are going to be emboldened to interfere in our curricula. I do not discount in any way, especially as someone who comes from a campus which is completely liberal, the issue of self censorship. This change that we are hankering after on college campuses is not a change that is merely going to be instituted by a change of policies. This is a cultural shift that we're talking about, and we need to work at it. We're all involved in it. We need to start modeling disagreement. Embracing disagreement and showing that actually disagreement is normal. Increasingly, as you begin to talk with people who look, speak, and think differently from you, you are going to have disagreement. And it is through that disagreement that we reap the benefits of diversity. There's no shortcut to the benefits of diversity. You can’t bypass all this friction and just suddenly find yourself basking in diversity. No. That's not how it works. The whole point is that you have that kind of friction and you have that kind of disagreement. And it starts with us. It starts with the administration and the faculty showing that we're okay with disagreement amongst ourselves. We need to move away from this administrative approach, which is dominant on college campuses that if there's disagreement, it needs to be managed. We don't manage disagreement. We lean into it to reap the full benefit of different perspectives and diversity of viewpoints.
Jeff: An exceptionally significant and generative concept that comes out of librarianship and library sciences is intellectual freedom, which has a slightly different emphasis from academic freedom or free speech. I'm paraphrasing here, but the American Library Association defines intellectual freedom as something like the right to seek and access information and ideas from all points of view without restriction. What I'd like to encourage all of us to do, faculty, admin but especially our students, is to hear different perspectives. Self censorship is about what you are willing to express in some form of social setting, whether that's a classroom or your dorm room. But then there's our information diet or our media diet, which we've curated based on our feeds, who we follow on social media, which magazines we subscribe to, which newspapers we read. We all have curated a set of inputs that no matter what your politics are, it's probably relatively narrow. Part of intellectual freedom isn't just the right to access the voices and listen to the voices of people, you're going to agree with, but, following Fox news on Twitter, going to the Breitbart website, subscribing to the National Review, actually talking to your friends and colleagues and family members who don't share your politics. That takes a self conscious disciplined effort; If we don't make that effort, we really won't be able to see the world clearly. We will be stuck in our own little nook, in our own little corner.
Amna: Jeff, you've put your finger on it. Reaching out and listening to voices you dislike, is an unnatural act in that nobody wants to do it; it goes against human nature. That's why we have higher education, where we cultivate, repeatedly with discipline and thought, these habits of mind which tell you that you are going to get a distorted view of the world if you keep sitting with people who agree with you and not listening to people who disagree with you. This is why disagreement is so central. I hear many of the critiques about social media and how it feeds us what we want to hear and creates these bubbles. That is all correct. But it has also made it equally that much easier to just push that little button where you say, follow Breitbart, follow Daily Mail. Within seconds, you will have a whole different array of ways in which people think about the world. Blaming social media, sure, I get that critique. I'm on board. But let's also just take some responsibility for not doing these things ourselves.
Jeff: These are habits of mind that one needs to cultivate and one needs to practice. I'm not conservative. I'm left, center left. When Trump first ran for president, I started reading and watching a lot of conservative news media because I wanted to understand how is he gaining so much traction, because it didn't make an intuitive sense to me. These are things that you can't just do in small doses, like, “Oh, I'm going to watch five minutes of Fox news.” It actually takes practice to be exposed to views that you might find challenging. The first step is just building one's tolerance to be able to engage with different viewpoints and then you can move beyond that gut reflex of, “Oh my gosh…”
As a liberal, when I watch Fox News, 95 percent of it I think is bullshit. But 5 percent of the time I think they're onto something and they're making valid points. I just think there are no quick fixes because as Amna said, this fundamentally runs against our nature to conform, to close ranks, to feel comfortable, to just not think. Thinking is effortful and requires discipline. The default is mental shortcuts. We all do it all the time. One does have to be self-conscious about expanding one’s political horizons.
Amna: Yeah, and those mental shortcuts might have space in other walks of life, but not at institutions whose mission is to teach people how to think. That's the piece that I think is really important, and that's the piece that I think higher education really needs to reorient itself to. That is what is going to allow us to defend ourselves from attacks, both from within and outside the academy.
Laura: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. It's fantastic to both be in the room with you, to hear your perspectives and to get a better idea of your background. I wish that we could go on for much longer. For our listeners: they write frequently, they publish frequently. Go check out their resources with a quick Google search and make sure to follow somebody you find really uncomfortable. Thanks for coming on the show today.
Amna: Thanks for having us, Laura. This was so much fun.
Jeff: Yes, really a pleasure. Thanks.