C-SPAN celebrates 45 years of covering Congress like no other.
Since 1979, we've been your primary source for Capitol Hill, providing balanced, unfiltered coverage of government, taking you to where the policy is debated and decided, all with the support of America's cable companies.
C-SPAN, 45 years in counting, powered by Cable.
Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeyer and George Washington University President Emeritus Stephen Joel Trachtenberg discussed campus free speech following last year's October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas.
This was hosted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in Washington, D.C. Good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
It's wonderful to see all of you here.
We're in a difficult time in American higher education, to say nothing of our nation.
It's a time when we need wisdom and courage to bring us through.
Just one witness to that, the declining confidence in higher education.
In the last decade, we've seen a steady decline and now a nine-point decline in public confidence between just 2023 and 2024.
Now 32% of the respondents say they have little or no confidence in these great institutions that are the lifeblood of our progress.
41% of those who are disaffected say that that's because of the politicization of higher education.
So are we looking at correlation or cause?
I'm speaking in front of somebody who has devoted his life to those sorts of differences.
We had the repulsive spectacle of student and indeed some faculty behavior within the last year.
An embrace of an enemy that not only sought and seeks the destruction of Israel, but of our nation and the West.
And then we saw the tragic comedy before Congress of the chatty Anns who had an opinion on everything but could not give a full-throated denunciation of campus anti-Semitism.
For 29 years, ACTA has worked with boards of trustees, college leadership, the public, alumni, and legislatures on behalf of freedom of expression on campus and high academic standards, read academic rigor, and accountability.
So this summer we raced to put into the hands of boards of trustees, 23,000 of them, two guides for leadership.
I think you saw copies of those on the table outside, and if not, please do collect them.
One dedicated to preventing the kinds of encampments and occupations that created such a campus disgrace, and when one thinks about it, in their enemy, actually eroding the freedom of expression on campus.
And a second devoted to the problem of the calls for divestment.
Counseling trustees that there really is no reason to give in to pressure groups.
Indeed, on the contrary, very dangerous thing to be giving into pressure groups.
The desperate error of allowing such phenomena to happen on campus.
We're very proud to be able to inform the conversation on campus.
So let me introduce our two very, very distinguished, distinguished speakers.
Emeritus President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg has the hearts of this city.
I can say that among his many friends who are here.
Twice he was named by the City Council of Washington, D.C., or I should say a day was dedicated by the City Council, a Stephen Joel Trachtenberg Day.
His transformational leadership of George Washington University from 1988 to 2007 followed on the heels of his very successful leadership at the University of Hartford.
He put George Washington University into the top ranks of American higher education.
He's the author of six books, a paradigm and a mentor to many within the world of higher education leadership.
And perhaps his greatest distinction, he serves on ACTA's board of directors.
Chancellor Daniel Diermeyer will give a keynote address after which Stephen Joel Trachtenberg and Chancellor Diermeyer and I will engage in a fireside chat.
He has given us a new paradigm of thoughtful and firm leadership in higher education in time of crisis.
He is the ninth chancellor of Vanderbilt University, coming there in 2020 right at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And not surprisingly, for the kind of leadership that he exercised, the university was in person open in the fall.
He served as the provost of the University of Chicago from 2016 to 2020, and he's brought the values of the University of Chicago, the Chicago Principles of Freedom of Expression, and the Calvin Report on Institutional Neutrality to his leadership at Vanderbilt.
He's written extensively in the Wall Street Journal, in the New York Times, at Forbes, along with six major books in higher education management and management leadership.
So with that, let's welcome Chancellor Diermeyer.
Thank you so much for being with us.
Well, thank you, first of all, for the kind introduction, and thank you very much for having me with you today.
This is probably the most difficult challenging period in higher education since the 60s.
We have not seen that much conflict on campus.
Michael pointed out the erosion of public trust in higher education across the board.
These are challenging times for university leaders.
And so I look forward to the discussion.
I look forward to our discussion right here, to the questions, because I think this is a moment where as university leaders we have to step up and be clear about what the purpose of universities is, articulate it clearly, and then act accordingly.
So little background on Vanderbilt.
We are 151 years old.
So it's our Sesquicentennial plus one.
Rolls right off your tongue when you say it 40 times.
And so we had a wonderful celebration last year.
We were founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt 151 years ago.
And when you look at the letter, the founding document, when Cornelius Vanderbilt bestowed his gift to Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt University, he talks about his desires to establish a great university that would be a place where a divided country could come together.
Of course, he was thinking about the aftermath of the Civil War, but the idea that it is a university that can bring a divided country together animates our purpose in our mission to this day.
And of course, almost at no other time in the country is as important as it is today.
We are one of the leading research universities in America.
We have over a billion dollars in research funding.
We're a very desirable place now for students all across the country.
Our biggest market by students now is New York City.
We have like a great destination for faculty.
So the university is thriving.
And of course it's part of a region that is booming as well.
But sometimes you have a special week.
So two weeks ago we had a special week.
And you think you know where I'm going, but wait a minute.
Okay, so we had a Mac Arthur Genius Award winner on our faculty.
Then one of our alums won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
And then most importantly, we beat Alabama.
So for those of you that followed the tearing down of the Goldpost, the carrying through downtown, the throwing in the river, it was quite something.
And then we had one of our faculty members being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
So it was a week to remember.
And it's really something that is illustrative and something that we celebrate at Vanderbilt because we have a strong commitment to create an environment where every one of our students, faculty, and staff can realize their full potential, no matter what they do.
I always say from Bach to baseball and everything in between.
So I got the musical genre wrong and I got the sport wrong, but other than that, we were living up to our promise.
We also believe that a great university education requires a sense of community.
And so we believe that students develop their full potential if they're members of a community that's challenging and supportive.
So those are kind of who we are.
And let me tell you a little bit about our core values when it comes to free expression on campus.
They're really three.
The first one is what we call open forum.
And Michael was pointing that out.
That is very similar to the University of Chicago stance on free expression.
These values go back to our fifth chancellor, Alexander Hurt, who formulated them during the time of conflict in the late 60s, early 70s.
Now you're doing the math, 151 years, nine chancellors, people tend to hang around for a while at Vanderbilt.
So that's a good thing.
Open forum means that we want to create an environment where ideas can flow freely and people can follow them no matter where they take.
Because at the end of the day, what is our purpose of our university?
We think about it as creating an environment.
I mentioned one aspect already, the transformative education of our students and then the path-breaking research that our faculty conduct.
And everything that we do, including our values of free expression, should serve that purpose.
So pillar one, open forum.
What does this mean in practice?
Many things, but here's one example.
So we have a policy, again, goes back to the 60s, that any registered student group on campus and any faculty member can bring any speaker on campus as they see fit.
So they don't have to be vetted, they don't have to be approved by anybody, and we have a culture on campus that we respect that.
And so the flip side, of course, of that, there's no heckless vetos and we will not tolerate disruptions that make it impossible for speakers to be on campus.
That goes back, as I mentioned, to the 1960s.
That was called at the time the impact, the impact forum, where students brought to campus at the time speakers that were very controversial at this time.
Storm Thurman and Stokely Karmichael came to Vanderbilt campus in the late 60s.
And you can imagine the outcry in the local media when the students brought these speakers on campus, but my predecessor, Chancellor Heard, affirmed that principle and we live by that principle to this day.
So think about this pillar one, open forum free expression.
Pillar two, that's civil discourse.
Civil discourse, by that we mean that we are members of one community that treat each other with respect, that come together as members of a living learning community, that try to convince each other through arguments and reasons that are based on facts, and that have a commitment to each other to listen and to learn from each other.
And so when our students arrive on campus, they sign a pledge.
We call it the Community Creed that is signed at the same time when they sign the Honor Code to remind everybody that this is a crucially important component of what Vanderbilt University stands for.
The third component is called institutional neutrality.
Institutional neutrality codified and identified and named originally by the University of Chicago in the 1967 Calvin Report.
The idea of institutional neutrality is as follows.
It says, you as a university leader can speak on behalf of the institution on core issues related to the core functioning of the university, such as questions of academic freedom.
But on anything else, political and social issues that go beyond the core function, the core purpose of the university, your duty is to be silent.
Why?
To create the maximal possible spot, place, room for students and faculty to explore ideas on their own.
Or to put it differently, the purpose of a university is to encourage debate, not to settle them.
That's the institutional neutrality postulate, and it's the third pillar of what has been guiding us at Vanderbilt.
Again, it goes back to Alexander Hurd, who has been talking about it already.
The University of Chicago, of course, has, in the Calvin Report, codified these principles.
And it may come as a little bit of a surprise to you that there are very few universities that have subscribed to the principle of institutional neutrality.
Among the major universities, and I'm sure I'm going to miss one right now and then people get upset, so bear with me.
University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, University of North Carolina.
What we have seen in the last month, six weeks, probably because of the experience of last year, is a movement towards institutional neutrality among many universities.
Harvard is one of them, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Northwestern, USC, University of Southern California, Penn, a whole variety of universities have now decided that they will adopt principles of institutional neutrality.
When you look a little closer, and I've argued that in one of my opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal, from my point of view, this doesn't go far enough.
So here's what I mean.
Some universities have said this applies only to speech by the president.
Statements, if you will.
That's great.
That is a wonderful development.
But it's very important to understand that institutional neutrality, and this is how the University of Chicago and Vanderbilt has always interpreted it over the decades, doesn't just apply to speech, it also applies to actions.
Crucially, it applies to how you deal with the endowment.
So institutional neutrality has meant at the University of Chicago and at Vanderbilt that the endowment will not be used for political purposes.
So calls for divestment are inconsistent with the principle of institutional neutrality, no matter what the cause is.
That is not where most universities are at this point.
I think it is, to me, logically inconsistent to say, I refrain from condemning Israel and then I'm going to divest from Israeli companies.
Because if you're divesting, you're making a statement and you're saying that it is inappropriate or contrary to university values to have our endowment invested in fossil fuel companies, private prisons, whatever the particular issues that you're thinking about.
So those are the three values.
Institutional neutrality, I want to spend a little bit more time on because that is at the heart of what happened last year.
There is a free speech issue that sometimes catches the headlines, but the real issue is about institutional neutrality.
So to put it differently, the student activist group, especially the pro-Palestinian groups, were pressing on their university campuses for the president to condemn Israel of genocide, to divest their endowment from companies that have any ties to Israel, and also to stop hiring vendors that have connections to Israel, including like, you know, where you buy humas.
And so it's important that this was part of what's called the BSD movement, or a BDS movement, which stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.
The idea was to cut off all ties to companies doing business in Israel and also boycott Israeli academics.
That was the point.
So clear example of pushing the university to take a position in this particular case, of course, on the conflict in the Middle East.
So how does this, how does this, why is this so important?
The reason why this is critical is because when you are taking a position on an issue such as divestment from fossil fuel or foreign policy issue, you are signaling to your community that this is the right answer.
The Calvin report has argued that if you do that, you are undermining an environment where free expression of ideas can flourish, because people are now concerned that they're violating the party line, and that creates a chilling effect.
So that's the classic argument that you will find in the Calvin Report.
I have argued that there are at least two other reasons for why institutional neutrality is crucially important for universities.
Number one, universities are about expertise, about doing the careful work, about figuring out what's happening, what's going on.
That is difficult and it requires years long of training and expertise and scholarship and we spend a lot of time certifying our students that they have cleared the hurdle to get an undergraduate degree, a doctorate degree, or professors of course that we've appointed to the faculty.
So expertise is crucial to the mission of a university.
It is to me inconsistent with the very notion of expertise if on the one hand I have faculty that spent their entire life talking about the Supreme Court and Roe versus Wade, whether it was a good idea or a bad idea and whether it was well argued or not, for me to come over the weekend and say, well, I think the Supreme Court was wrong.
I have no expertise in this area, certainly not a constitutional law expert, and I don't play one on TV.
So the idea that the president can settle these types of issues that should be the question of scholarly debate violates expertise.
That's the second reason for why we don't want university presidents to take positions like that.
The third one is, if you will, a pragmatic reason, and we saw this now on full display in the last year.
If you are taking positions on foreign policy issues, issues related to climate policy, issues responded to conflicts in the country, policy issues that are controversial, you are encouraging an environment where competing interest groups or activist groups are trying to push you in one direction or the other.
And I think we could all see is that what happened on so many campuses is that very well motivated groups were pulling or pulling the university fabric apart.
So the last thing you want is to create an environment that further encourages the polarization on campus.
So those are the three reasons I think that are fundamental to our understanding of institutional neutrality and you can see that at least the way we think about it, they're tightly connected to the university purpose.
So where are we?
As I mentioned before, we have a movement now towards institutional neutrality.
That is very gratifying.
So I've been arguing for the importance of institutional neutrality for over two years, two and a half years now.
As these things go, at first, no, everybody ignores you, and then something happens, and then people pay attention, and that's a wonderful thing.
And I think that the discussions in the boardroom have been an important part of that as well.
This is not uncontested.
So we still have a lot of discussions going on, both within universities and across university presidents, but the movement is salutary.
However, there are three dimensions where I think it doesn't go far enough or doesn't fully implement the concept of institutional neutrality.
Number one, I mentioned this in passing before, it is not only about words, but it's also about deeds, about actions.
So it means that if you have a policy of institutional neutrality and you refrain from taking issues, from talking about issues unrelated to the university, you cannot use your endowment for political purposes.
That is not widely accepted at this point.
Number two, institutional neutrality needs to go down to the academic units.
It is not only a problem at the university level, it is arguably much more of a problem at the level of schools, colleges or departments.
It is very difficult for faculty, especially for junior faculty, when everybody pressures them to sign or to be in line with a statement by a department that say, I object.
So very important that the same environment that encourages the free expression of ideas and debate happens not only at the university level, but at the level of the law school or the school of social work or whatever academic unit we're talking about.
Again, not widely, certainly not widely practiced.
And then the third dimension, totally underappreciated from my point of view, but I've been vocal on that as well, is the politicization of scholarly associations.
This has, I think, caught not everybody's, but some people's attentions after the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, which years ago played an important role, 100 years ago really, to define the concept of academic freedom, and now, I think, in a disastrous decision, reversed their stand against academic boycotts and are now endorsing the use of academic boycotts,
meaning that certain people will be disappointed from conferences or participating in scholarly endeavors for political purposes.
That is very troubling, but it's not the only problem that we have.
So we have a variety of professional associations in sociology, in mathematics, and it goes all the way across the board that routinely take positions on political issues totally unrelated to their mission or their purpose.
Now the reason why this is important is because these scholarly associations bestow honors and recognition on faculty.
So American Sociology as Sociological Association, if you win the best dissertation award, that's hugely valuable for a young scholar or you win the best book award.
Now if there is now a political litmus test to win the best book award, it will undermine the scholarly standards in the discipline.
Many of these associations also publish journals.
Some of the most prestigious journals are published by professional associations.
And again, we have to be extremely worried that standards of scholarly excellence are being undermined by political position taking.
So that's not widely appreciated yet.
I think it's an enormous important question and an enormous important problem.
And so I have asked, what I've called that associations, scholarly associations, abide by the same institutional neutrality principles as universities.
So that's where we are.
At the end of the day, these are all manifestations of the same problem.
And then they're different manifestation as well, which is the fundamental question, what is the purpose of universities?
What are the values that guide and undergird that purpose?
And are you acting according to these values?
Or do we see a consistent drift of universities where they become political actors, take political actions that are inconsistent or undermine the very purpose that they stand for?
So it's fundamentally a question about the politization on campus.
It is very important that we're sharp about that, that we're clear about what the purposes of universities are, because let's not forget, with all the drama on campuses, universities, especially American research universities, whether private or public, are the envy of the world.
They are an enormous source of innovation.
They're an enormous source of economic growth.
Virtually every innovation that has transformed our world from the iPhone to AI had its roots in university research.
So as much as it's important that we reconnect and reaffirm the core purpose of the university, it is also important that we don't throw off the baby with a bot, bathwater, and destroy what is the envy of the world and which has been the source of America's competitiveness and prosperity for so many years.
So with that, I thank you, and I look forward to joining the discussion.
Thank you so much, Chancellor Diermeier.
You've laid out for us very, very important directions.
I thought perhaps we might start with one of the key issues.
Let me back up a bit.
In our publication on preventing encampments, I took your advice, President Trachtenberg, which was to counsel leadership to require students to sign a statement at the very beginning of each academic year at registration that they understand the rules of behavior and understand the consequences for breaking those rules.
So I thought maybe we would talk a little bit about a concept that's so old-fashioned as discipline and how the student code of conduct and indeed even the faculty handbook will affect the way our institutions are able to function.
Okay.
So maybe I'll set the stage a little bit to tell you what happened on our campus and how we tried to put these principles in action.
And then the concept of discipline will play an important role of that.
So the first thing that I should say is that after October 7th, our students did a remarkable job.
We had lots of very intense discussions.
We had vigils.
We had great discussions inside the classroom, inside our residential colleges.
I was extremely proud of of our university community that stepped up in a moment that was very, very difficult.
Then in about late in the year, around December, we saw the formation of a more radical pro-Palestinian student activist group who, right before the holidays, asked for me to denounce Israel of genocide, divest, and cut any connections with vendors that had business relationships to Israel.
Now you're not going to be shocked to hear is that when students and everybody came back after the holidays, which is right after New Year for us, I sent a letter to the community that I made clear that these type of demands are inconsistent with institutional neutrality and so we will not consider them.
About now interestingly, the student group at the time then stated in their social media post that they don't feel bound by institutional neutrality, but they also felt that they weren't bound by civil discourse, which is kind of an interesting statement, because the issue is too important.
So we didn't quite know what that meant until late March.
And so in late March, the following happened.
We have an administrative building called Kirkton Hall, named after one of our chancellors.
And the building was, we did a gut-level renovation, was still closed to the public.
We did some kind of minor repairs and so forth.
So you couldn't just walk in.
But people were working there, including myself.
And so the students pretended that they had an appointment.
There was a group of students, about 27 of them.
And then they basically bullrushed the door.
The door was pushed open.
A security guard was run over, smashed into a door frame, and got injured.
And the students then ran upstairs to where my office is.
Actually, they took the elevator.
They didn't run upstairs.
They took the elevator, tried to get into my office.
My staff restrained them from that.
And then they sat down, there was pushing, and then they sat down in like a foyer area in front of my office.
So that happened around 9, 9, 9.30 a.m.
We then made it clear that they were violating university rules, which had been clearly stated to them before, and that they had broken or they had gained entry into a closed building, and they're supposed to leave.
And if they were not supposed to leave, they would be subject to student discipline.
I think it was 4 or 5 a.m.
We arrested three of them, those that had kind of smashed a security guard in, that had smashed their cigarette in the door.
Everybody else then went back to their residential college.
By the way, there was no food and no access to bathrooms either.
And that did not go over well.
So there was a lot of criticism.
But we said that you're not supposed to be here and we don't have a moral duty to provide you with pizza.
So we're not going to do it.
So the students left, then as we had told them, were subject to student discipline.
The three students were charged for criminal trespass, but assault, a misdemeanor assault by the DA.
And the process is going on right now.
The final trial will be in November.
Everybody was put on interim suspension, which means they couldn't take classes and couldn't be in the colleges.
Then everybody went through a student discipline process, which is the same student discipline process we use for everything else.
Three of them were expelled.
We had some suspended and some were on long-term probation, which is long-term probation means for us it's substantial.
You can't run for student leadership roles and so forth.
So that's what we did.
So it is absolutely essential to clearly to be clear about your values and principles and rules, to communicate them clearly to your campus community and then act upon them.
And that's not easy.
People, you know, you're in an environment of people of all sorts of different points of view, but we felt that this was a clear case of violation of the rules of how students can express their opinion.
So we took action accordingly.
Now, that is not the norm.
You probably have seen in many other university campuses there was wavering back and forth.
And then also something that's worthwhile paying attention to is how many of the students that broke into buildings or clearly violated university rules were disciplined.
So that varies from university to university, but it is, but we were one of, I think we're one of the very few universities that actually took disciplinary action at that level.
We looked at it very clearly.
If you are like, if you're breaking into a building and you're pushing one of our staff members into a door where they're injured, that has serious consequences.
In our case, there was expulsion.
So that's the way we handled it.
President Trachtenberg, you're bringing, I think, at least four decades of experience on your way to the University of Hartford to see the installation of the new president and then distinguished tenure at George Washington University.
What's your historical wisdom and view for moving forward?
Well, I'm afraid this is going to be less exciting than I anticipated since I find myself agreeing with everything the Chancellor has said and wish I myself had followed that wisdom when I was in office.
I believe that when university presidents take office, they surrender their First Amendment rights.
I think it's difficult even when they say I'm speaking only for myself, not for the institution.
I think that's nonsense.
Inevitably, you are perceived of as the president of George Washington University and what you say becomes a position that the institution is taking.
This issue, by the way, is not a contemporary one.
It goes back many, many years.
I remember as an undergraduate going to a meeting at Ohio Wesleyan of the National Student Association, where the debate at the time was our position on the Cold War.
And I thought to myself, I'm a sophomore at college.
How do I develop a position on the Cold War?
And so I was part of a group that argued that the National Student Association should restrict its issues to those about which we had standing and expertise, which is to say scholarships on campus, federal aid to universities, things that students might reasonably have a point of view about, an informed one perhaps, rather than international policy.
It's amazing to me that all these years later, the agenda hasn't changed all that much, which perhaps suggests how important these issues are, ultimately, to an understanding of what university purposes are.
Why don't we make sure we get a little time to talk about something that about which we may in fact disagree to some degree, namely the position of the president who respects freedom of expression and has deep respect for institutional neutrality, but still feels the appropriateness of exercising moral leadership.
And of course this came to the fore with Swarthmore recently.
Should, in that case it was the vice president, condemn the celebration of murder in mayhem.
Or is that overstepping?
So we got into a very interesting territory of the prerogative, if not the duty, of the president to exercise some leadership over behavior and how we define the difference between a political position and one that is actually the expression of the kind of leadership that we would expect from a place that may just have a little vestige of in loco parentis,
that's trying to develop character.
First of all, I want to say you were way ahead of your time as a young student.
So I think that, so there's a lot to say on that.
I think the one thing that one needs to keep in mind is that is that many of these cases that you were mentioning need to be addressed in the context of the regulatory environment of higher education.
What does that mean?
So, number one, this is a technical issue, but it's important to keep it in mind.
Private universities are not subject to the First Amendment like public universities.
However, most of them, including Vanderbilt, has decided that in their norms and practices would be guided by the First Amendment.
That's comment one.
So even though legally it's not a requirement for us, it has informed our decision-making, our posture, hence the open forums.
It has always been understood, including by the Supreme Court, that universities are a separate thing from a public space.
And so it has, it comes with, and so when you think about free speech, it needs to be contextualized in the context of education.
So for example, things that would be protected by the First Amendment would not typically be protected in a university context, even according to the Supreme Court.
So for example, students need to study.
So you can't just run into a classroom and things like that.
So that's comment one.
Comment two is we are subject to an elaborate regulatory environment that is intended to ensure that our students can fully participate in the educational experience.
Title IX, Title VI are usually where this plays a role.
Title VI is a prohibition against discrimination.
That has been interpreted that it is our responsibility to create an educational environment that is free of harassment so that students, no matter what their background is, and this space is on race, national origin, gender, that you can thrive as a student in the educational environment.
And the Office of Civil Rights has taken action against university, and a whole variety of them that in their judgment have failed to do so.
So if a Jewish student cannot participate in the educational experience because he or she feels that they're harassed or they can't go to class or they're yelled at or they're prevented from participating fully in the education that the university has promised over them, that could be considered a Title VI violation.
Now, the interesting, tricky aspect of that, you know, since you have like academics on stage, can help you with that, is like, so how does that now work with the First Amendment?
And the answer is basically you can't violate the First Amendment, but you still have a duty to credit an environment that's welcoming to all students.
Good luck.
So that's the challenge for us to set this up.
So I think that many of the cases that I think you were alluding to, you already have to address that.
In the context of Title VI, so that it is, that a university campus is free from harassment.
Well, I think there's also a contractual issue.
Yes.
Students come to a university, they pay you money to be educated.
I used to point this out to students frequently.
They didn't have to give me an education as well as their money.
Their money was sufficient.
I was already educated.
Moreover, I was being compensated by the university.
And so for all these reasons, it seemed to me, it was for me to tell them rather than for them to tell me.
I'm reminded of an occasion when John Silber, then the president of Boston University, sustained a vote of no confidence by the faculty.
He convened the vice presidents and the deans and had a vote of no confidence in the faculty.
His attitude was that he was protecting their ability to vote no confidence in him by having voting no confidence in them.
I always thought that was an interesting initiative, and I planned to do it at some time, but never had the opportunity.
So if I ever come back as an acting chancellor, I'm going to try and try that out.
I do think there is a confusion about the role of students and the role of administrators and the role of faculty that has slowly and little by little grown up over the past two or three decades.
For example, at some universities, if undergraduates feel an absolute obligation to break down the door before they graduate, otherwise they haven't fulfilled the mission of the institution.
As an undergraduate of Columbia, I look back as an alumnus on the undergraduate takeover of Hamilton Hall, which every entering class feels some duty to replicate in their own time or not be an authentic Columbia undergraduate.
It seems to me the administration needs to either change the nature of the glass they're using in these doors or either make them easier to break or harder to break.
In any case, I think a lot of these issues have really gotten confused and the authority of presidents has been eroded over the past 20, 30 years so that the decisions they could make on behalf of the institution, ways they could protect their faculty, have been stripped away in loco parentis with regard to students and in terms of the presidency with regard to professors.
So it's fascinating to see the faculty at Columbia who tie the hands of the president in terms of making decisions, but not when the accountability for those decisions comes down.
That's when the president gets called to the Congress, not the faculty members.
I mean, all of that has been blurred considerably in the last few years about who's really in charge.
I used to ask faculty when I made decisions, what exactly do you think you're paying me to do?
And some actually thought or wanted the president to be essentially clerical, not to be making significant consequential decisions, but they were never prepared to make them themselves.
There are limits to the kinds of decisions that can be made by committees, and they tend to be always negative.
That is truly an apocalyptic vision of the enemy that would set in if the president simply becomes clerical.
Can I make one comment?
Yes, then we'll turn this over to the audience.
I just love your, there are a lot of interesting things you said that I'm going to fight away.
But one thing that is, I think it's just important to understand, because this gets, I think there's a lot of confusion on that.
So you hear students, including in the case of Annabelle and many other cases, say that if you process them or if you discipline them for trespassing or assault, you're violating their free speech rights.
Now, Cass Sunstein, who is one of the preeminent constitutional scholars in the United States, used to be at the University of Chicago now at Harvard, wrote a little book on free speech, and I had a wonderful line in there.
He says, the First Amendment doesn't protect trespass.
And so if you break the rules, you break the rules, that's nothing to do with your First Amendment rights or free speech.
The second confusion, which you also see, is that some try to put this into the context of civil disobedience.
Also interesting.
So there is odd there.
You see from time to time a reference back to the civil rights movement.
And of course, when you look at that, the way Martin Luther King or Gandhi have interpreted civil disobedience is that it is an intention of breaking off some rules because you feel so strongly about them.
It's often done symbolically, it's done openly, and you accept the consequences.
So shielding your identity or trying to destroy property, that is not what people mean by civil disobedience.
And then you accept the consequence.
You don't try to negotiate an amnesty.
So there's confusion here, lack of clarity.
I think the clarity of protest protected under free speech or consistent infringement, even civil disobedience, were clearly understand concept, and that has been replaced by the rather amorphous concept of disruption, which often means breaking windows or getting into buildings.
And a reminder of the imperative of educating students.
Well, we have some traveling microphones, I think, for members of the audience who have questions.
I think I saw your hand first.
Yes, there we go.
Hi.
Thank you for the clarity of your distinction and bringing this conversation into the open forum.
But I have a finute into your analysis of free speech and First Amendment, which I'm a firm defender of.
That's my day job and personally.
The students for the justice of Palestine, as you know, they, in their bylaws, in their mission, they say that they are an extension of Hamas, that they believe in the mission of Hamas, that they believe the death of Israel, they believe in the death for Americas, they believe from the river to the sea.
That's in their mission.
And they have been granted student organizational status on these universities.
And they are receiving federal funding and then university funding because they're a student organization.
So I understand their free speech.
They can say that.
But when they stop a Jewish student from entering a classroom, from entering a building, walking across the quad, circling them and spitting on them and yelling at them, that is where their free speech stops because it became an action.
So do you still have them as an authorized organization on campus?
That's a problem.
And when you expel them, most of those students, if they were foreign students, they automatically lose their scholarship if they're not an active student.
I don't know the clarification on probation and things like that, but how do you deal with that?
Because these people need to leave this country.
Sorry, I'm a little passionate about this.
No problem at all.
So the first thing, just like you say, if you're blocking students from accessing classes, harassing them, spitting on them, that was your example, that is totally unacceptable conduct and needs to be disciplined.
No question about that.
And we haven't had that on our campus.
I know it happened at other campuses.
But if that is to occur, student discipline needs to step in and deal with the offenses according to what hopefully is a functioning student discipline process.
That's that.
That can also mean that registered student organizations lose their status.
Now, on the issue of foreign students, we didn't have foreign students involved in our case on that.
So it didn't occur.
It occurred a couple of university campuses, as you know.
This was a case where we had mostly undergraduate students.
I think we had one or two graduate students.
That's again very different on different campus to different campus.
My sense is that it's extremely important to have a clear, well-established student discipline process that is fair and that looks at each case individually.
And it's not set up now in the moment of crisis.
So we have a fantastic student affairs offered of students who did a great job at this.
But we had thought earlier about what these processes should be like.
We applied them then, and those were the consequences.
So in other cases, you may have international students.
You need to follow your process on that and make a decision based on what these processes are.
My worry is that the disciplinary processes are not functioning well.
They take too long, months in some cases, literally half a year.
And I have there are cases where you have to ask yourself, well, where are the consequences?
And the worry is that they're captured.
That's the worry.
So that there is an ideological capture.
That's particularly a worry when you have elaborate processes with multiple different steps and so forth.
So that would be the concern.
And something I think to pay attention to as we look campus to campus.
President Trachtenberry, any thoughts on that?
Yes, I think the answer is you do those by a case-by-case basis.
I mean, your hypothetical, of course, comes to a logical conclusion.
But every case is not going to be exactly as you articulated it, and they each have to be looked at individually.
When people violate certain kinds of rules, there should be consequences.
Or, as I indicated earlier, in talking about the contractual obligations you have to them, I think you're not doing your side of the agreement.
Somebody comes to a university, they say they're there to be educated, and by God, you have some obligation to educate them.
More questions?
Let's get first Mr. Fuller and then Ms. Jarvis.
When I was an undergraduate back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, when I started in college, I found that the professors all seemed to have one particular viewpoint.
This is particularly evident in the economics department and the political science department where I took most of my courses.
And I didn't know enough back then to really express a viewpoint, how shall we phrase it, adequately, perhaps, is the only word I can use.
But every time I tried to do that, it seemed to me that although the professors professed openness, willingness to tolerate other viewpoints, they were shocked when they found there wasn't a viewpoint.
And I could not really, I felt like it was a cancerous cell in the class.
No one really wanted to, the professors didn't want to listen to me.
And I just think that was very appropriate.
But I couldn't kind of, I didn't know enough how to deal with it.
I didn't know whether I should go to my class advisor, whether I should go to the head of the department or whatever.
So I didn't.
I just, I won't say I went along, I expressed my opinions and so on in exams.
And fortunately, we had an anonymous grading system, so I wasn't tagged with being an outright identifiable cancerous cell.
But it's almost a problem to me.
And I don't know whether you, sir, as a president, how do you deal with something like this?
If you're aware of it, the students just don't feel like they can express themselves freely in class without being ridiculed or being ostracized by their fellow students.
How do you handle that?
Now, the intellectual diversity question, yes.
It's a hugely important question.
And I mean, one way to think about it is that the classroom needs to be a place for learning, not for indoctrination.
That's the goal.
So if we have the case where this is not the case and where we see indoctrination in the classroom or where just because people disagree along the lines that you described, you're being penalized or your work is not being evaluated fairly, we got a problem.
You've got to have to see the dean.
I mean, that's not acceptable.
And we couldn't, and it's important that we don't lose track of that.
Now, like in everything in life, exactly how do you do this and implement it, and now we have to look at the case and what was, that's, of course, that's what we have law schools for, right?
Things are to find out exactly what happened in a particular case.
But the fundamental principle is that the classroom is a place for learning and not for ideological indoctrination is fundamental.
If we're not doing that, we're deviating from our purpose.
And it's our responsibility as presidents, as provosts, as university leaders to make sure that these values are upheld and implemented and the reality on campus.
Precisely.
And students of the sort that you described are the oregano on the pizza.
I mean, without some students taking a contrary position, adding a little spice to the conversation, it's a pretty boring class, whatever it is, economics you were talking about.
You want some students who are going to take a contrarian view so that you can have the debate.
I remember at Columbia as an undergraduate, we would have faculty members who would come in periodically and declare their political positions in the first lecture and tell you that this is where they were coming from, but you were to ignore it during the course of the rest of the semester, which sometimes was a little hard.
But at least they would put their cards on the table, and that would allow for the debate to proceed for the rest of the semester.
I think it's a little tough, though.
I mean, if you have a faculty member who takes a strong position, students are likely to comply.
So I think it's not only a question of the presidents holding their political positions or their points of view, but faculty members, in order to induce more conversation in the classroom, need to try and maintain a certain amount of balance to allow that to transpire.
It is a sad thing that in the many surveys we do of students, how often we see a very large percentage creeping up towards 50% who, this is of course self-identification, say that they feel that they have to agree with the professor to get a good grade.
That's a disgrace.
Ms. Jarvis, you had your hand up.
Thanks.
I'm a member of the board of a small and large college, and my question goes to the role of boards in presidents' statements.
Boards look at the fiduciary responsibility that they have as members of the board, and presidents are members of the board.
So then my question goes to what you believe to be an important role of boards in the public statements that presidents make, and whether you believe that boards can be both helpful and maybe not.
So it's the role of boards in public statements of presidents.
It seems to me they've got both formal and informal responsibilities.
The problem being a president is there are very few people you can talk to.
Everybody on the campus wants something from you.
And I once got into trouble advising university presidents to get married so they would have spouses.
And a feminist group seemed to think that I insisted that the spouses be women.
My attitude was you need a partner.
You need somebody you can come home to at the end of the day and say, you won't believe what these idiots want from me today.
I think to some extent boards can be very helpful.
I find, on the other hand, that boards are frequently disappointing.
They don't understand the question.
They don't understand their role.
They do understand the fiduciary obligations, but they are less empathetic to the responsibilities of the president than you think.
They want compliant presidents.
And they're never there when the presidents get into hot water.
So they're with you until you make the decision.
If it turns out okay, they're with you.
But if it turns out bad, you can't find them.
I find boards and boards of trustees get appointed to the boards frequently for the wrong reasons.
I like rich people as much as the next guy, but it's not necessarily the most consequential and helpful criteria when you're dealing with the kinds of issues that we've got on our agenda today, which is not to say that I'm an enemy of philanthropy.
So finally we disagree on something.
And so I love my board.
And I've said this before this conversation.
And I'll tell you what I, my board is really fantastic.
The chair is fantastic.
And I tell you what makes this board work.
And I've had enough board interactions, both on boards I'm on and so forth, non-profit boards, to see the difference.
This is a courageous board.
This is a courageous board.
It was courageous for them to hire me.
I mean, here's a German by origin, comes from the place where fun comes to die, no connection to the SEC, no connection in Nashville, come on down.
That seems like a great idea.
So that was a great sign.
They were totally behind us when we decided to have the campus open in the fall of 2020 to bring undergraduates and students back on campus.
We had 85% of undergraduates on campus.
And the staff worked heroically to create as much as we can of an education experience with classes all over the place and the libraries right there in the classrooms.
But we met once every week and talked this through.
And they understood that we may have to pivot if this is not working and it would not look good on them.
So everybody understood the risk.
We talked about it and we held hand and we made the decision.
So they were courageous.
Now, things turn out okay.
So you know your case didn't occur in this case, but we had very candid discussions on that.
And the same thing with respect to our commitment to free expression and institutional neutrality.
I had board members personally attacked by name because some activist group thought that not taking a stance on this particular issue was immoral.
I had them named.
I had them named where they go to church.
I had them named where their kids go.
It was, I mean, they don't mess around the activist groups, you know.
And so my board was there and I said, yeah, we get it.
We understand that.
That's what's happening.
We support you.
So the most important thing, I think, for the board in these cases is to have real dialogue about what the values and principles are and then metaphorically or literally hold hands and make the decision.
That's what it is.
And then you have to support your president or your chance at this point.
My sense is, I only know my board, I'm not in the other board conversations, that that discussion is now happening at a different level than a year and a half ago.
Because of the experience of last year, and I think also because the principles of institutional neutrality are now, they're not a household word, but they are out there.
People talk about them, they discuss them.
And frankly, university does say, we don't want to do it, they have to explain why.
And what's the alternative position?
And is that a good idea?
And is that consistent with their mission?
So I think we have debates and discussions right now that people tried to avoid or wanted to avoid or was too complicated that are happening in boardrooms right now.
I think that's healthy.
Going back to our shared experience with ancient Greek, the Kairos, the wonderful work.
What a wonderful work.
Yes.
It's not crisis in the narrow sense of the word.
It's a turning point.
It's the place where we can do things better.
Opportunity.
Yes.
And to set up new paradigms, new examples for other leaders and boards to share.
This is a great step forward.
Let me ask our impresario: do we have time for one more?
One more question?
I'm going to ask Sylvé Gold, please, to speak.
Thank you.
He spoke very well about how neutrality extends not just to words but also to actions.
And I want to ask a fairly specific question, but I hope with more general credibility.
I have it on good authority that the president of a major university declined to participate in a vigil on October 7th for figures on October 7th, specifically citing institutional neutrality as the reason.
Now, this is the president who doesn't otherwise seem to care about neutrality, but setting that aside, do you think that's actually true, that neutrality would be preventing President Trump attending such a goal?
I think one thing that people always get this wrong.
And it's not, you look, the thing with institutional neutrality is that you have to live it and you have to have a couple of examples like it, and then you kind of, it's like free speech.
You have to work through these things.
In a moment of trauma, in a moment where people are hurting and where something horrendous happened to them or people they know, there is a, I'm going to call it a rabbinical or pastoral role that a president can play.
To grieve with people.
That is an important thing.
Now, you want to do it in a way that you're not taking a position.
That's the art.
And that's not so easy.
And I'll give you an example in a minute.
But to participate in a vigil, it does not mean you take a position.
It means your community, you're taking part in the grief and the processing of the grief in your community.
So now, if you only go to one and if you do it selectively, that's a problem.
Or while doing it, you take a political position.
That's a problem.
But I think it is utterly critical for presidents and chancellors to fulfill this role.
I call it rabbinical pastoral function.
Because this is a community of people that live together.
It's like a little town.
It's like a little community.
Young people that live there, not always making the best decisions, but that is part of your role as well.
So I'll make it concrete for you.
So a year and a half ago, we had a school shooting in a school about two and a half miles away from our campus, the Covenant School.
It was a horrendous, horrendous case of a school.
It was an elementary school.
It's about as ugly and awful as you can imagine.
The head of school was a Vanderbilt alum, and two other teachers were Vanderbilt alums that were killed.
And one child was killed who was the child of one of our faculty members.
As horrible, it's just a moment that you dread in your life.
And of course, it deeply affected our community to the core.
So I react to that.
I had a video.
I mean, the whole thing that you would expect in this particular case.
People, some members of my faculty were very angry with me that during this moment I did not ask for a specific measure of gun control.
So that to me is the distinction.
We grieve with your community, you are there with them, but that is not the time to talk about this, and it is not consistent with institutional neutrality in the first place.
And on issues of gun control, we have on Vanderbilt some of the world's best experts on that, and it's their expertise, not mine.
Especially not in a moment of tremendous emotional trauma and pain for us as a community now to come in and make a policy pronouncement is entirely inappropriate for the moment, but also because it's inconsistent with institutional neutrality.
Let me footnote that, though.
Occasionally, issues come to you, perhaps in that nature, where the chief of police at George Washington University would regularly come to me, annually actually, wanting permission for the police on the campus to carry guns.
I used to do a cost-benefit analysis in my head, and I would respond: look, if one of our officers sees somebody stealing something, believe me, we can replace it.
Let them steal it.
We are surrounded by other police departments in Washington, at least a half a dozen within proximity of the campus.
I prefer that the District of Columbia police carry the guns, or the Parks police carry the guns, or the Secret Service carry the guns, than the George Washington University.
So I declined, year after year after year, after year after year.
Naturally, when I retired, they immediately went to my successor, who hired a consultant to come in and do a study on the subject, which ultimately led to his declining.
His successor also declined.
Then there was an interim president who concurred.
And so the GW police are now armed, or some portion of them are.
I think the officer, the principals, the sergeants and up or something like that.
It seems to me only a blunder can come from this.
Only badness can come from this.
And yet, the GW police seemed determined to get it and kept coming and kept coming and kept coming.
Ultimately, I acceded.
I live in dread of that decision, the outcome of that decision.
It's a variation, I think, of what the Chancellor is talking about because it's very practical and had to be, in fact, decided upon and implemented.
But I think he couldn't be righter.
The presence of the president makes a difference.
I never could understand why people cared if I came to the funerals of university faculty or staff, but it seemed to matter to people.
And so I made it my business to go to funerals, retirement dinners.
I prayed with the evangelicals.
I smoked cigars with the cigar club.
The president needs to spread himself around a little bit like Margarine and develop a certain familiarity with the constituency that he serves.
Now, there used to be a scholar of higher education who argued that presidents needed to be at arm's length in the community.
You remember Jim Fisher?
He wrote book after book in which he said the president needed to be at arm's length and that be a little mysterious rather than I never understood that.
The advice I give to young presidents is to be as well known as possible and to know as many people as possible so that when an issue came up, you were a real thing, a real person, a real personality, rather than some hypothetical, the president.
It's very easy to push against the hypothetical, but it's a lot harder if you're a real person.
So I try to give an example of that.
It was a Saturday.
I'm coming out of the office.
There's a kid coming into the building.
I said, where are you going?
The building's locked up.
Oh, he said, I'm going to the bank.
I said, it's Saturday.
The bank is closed.
Problem?
He said, I'm out of money.
How are you going to eat for the next couple of days?
He said, well, that's the problem.
He said, I was going to go and cash a check.
I said, let me see your ID card.
So he shows me his ID card.
I take the ID card, I put it in my pocket.
I say, here's $20.
Come see me on Monday.
I'll give you back your ID card.
Give me your $20.
Did you charge interest to it?
No, no.
Okay, good.
It's like the Hebrew Free Loan Society.
Now, I once got into a little trouble with that.
I was standing online getting my lunch, and I overheard two students, and one of them was a girl from Hawaii.
And she was having a problem.
Christmas break was coming up, and she was having a problem getting back to a flight back to Hawaii.
And I said to her, well, I said, we've got a guest room at the president's house.
I said, why don't you come spend one night with us at the president's house, and then you can catch that plane back to Hawaii.
She looked at me a little suspiciously.
I said, my wife will be there.
Both my children will be there.
So she came and spent a week.
I got a note from her mother, ultimately, not from her, thanking me for putting her up for the night.
You have to be a little bit careful about these things today.
In any case, I think that the problem in some ways is that many of the institutions that we've seen presidents fail at most recently were staffed by presidents who were newly appointed, who had not yet had an opportunity to build up any reservoir of goodwill which they could draw down on when difficult issues came to the campus.
So I remember, for example, when the 9-11 took place at the Pentagon, when those two airplanes crashed into the Pentagon, I slept on campus for four days, mostly taking calls from parents all over America, all over the world, actually, getting me to reassure them that I would protect their children and nothing terrible was going to happen to them.
You have to personalize, you have to personalize the presidency.
And I think that's less frequent than it used to be.
Chancellor Dearmeyer, you were saying you had a response.
I just have a small addendum and then I want to come back to your friend.
So I think the example of campus police is a great example because when you look at that, right, we decline to take a position on policing in general in the community, but we do have a point of view on our police on campus.
And I'm actually another mild point of disagreement.
I like spawn police forces on campus.
I think we had it at the University of Chicago, but at Vanderbilt, large part because they understand the campus.
To understand how to operate in a university environment.
So I'm a supporter of that, but of course I understand your concerns.
But the point I think that you made at the end is exactly, I think, where the difficulties are: is that the personal connection with your community, I think, is essential.
And we are a community.
I mean, I said it at the very beginning.
We're a community.
This is a community where people live and learn together.
In the whole Trumboldian ideal, that is really realized on many undergraduate campuses and universities across the country.
And you want to participate in that, and you need to, in some sense, be the steward of that community.
But it is utterly clear that you're not inadvertently or intentionally then trying, then deviating from what the core purpose of the university is.
And getting that just right is exactly the challenge I think that we face in universities today.
Well, I realize we're coming to the hour, and I think the National Press Club will probably evict us.
But at the beginning of this program, I asked for wisdom and courage, and I saw a lot of wisdom and courage from our guests.
And I'll add magnanimity, a sense of greatness of soul, which is the kind of leadership we need.
I'm enormously grateful to both of you for being with us.
Thank you.
Let's thank our guests.
Today, Independent Senator Angus King faces his Republican and Democratic challengers, David Costello and Demi Kuzunas, in a debate to be Maine's next U.S. senator.
Hosted by WGME-TV in Portland, you can watch the debate live at 7 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
With one of the tightest races for control of Congress in modern political history, stay ahead with C-SPAN's comprehensive coverage of key state debates.