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Jan. 17, 2022 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:19:11
Free Speech and Cambridge | James Orr & Arif Ahmed | EP 218
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What harm does your attempt to shut down what words you regard as harmful?
What's that likely to produce for harm?
Well, none.
It's like, oh, really?
So you haven't thought that part of it through at all?
And you're going to be the arbiter of what's harmful and what's not.
And there's no danger in that either, is there?
So that's a good way to...
Deal with that sort of thing.
I agree.
Of course, another thing that a lot of the time people don't see is they think, you know, we can impose on people's speech, we can tell them how to behave various ways, but they don't think that that's an instrument that could be abused in all sorts of ways.
So if you mandate speech on one thing one day, it's going to be mandated on other things the next day.
And in general, I think with any form of coercive principle, you need to think what's going to happen in the hands of somebody wicked and tyrannical.
That's how we should think about these things, not only in university but in politics more generally.
Hello, everybody.
I'm speaking today with Dr.
James Orr and Dr.
Arif Ahmed, both professors at Cambridge University.
Dr.
Orr is in the Faculty of Divinity and specializes in the philosophy of religion.
Dr.
Ahmed is in the faculty of philosophy and specializes in the study of decision-making in the face of uncertainty, which is a particular interest of mine, and is a leading expert on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work, including his writing on religions.
I recently released a discussion with Dr. Orr and Dr. Nigel Bigger, which was well-received, and about religious issues and philosophical issues in general, so a more academic discussion, But we decided to follow that up with a talk about some events that occurred in March 2019 when I was disinvited to Cambridge after being invited.
We're going to talk about what happened since.
Since I'm returning, I'm going to be going to Cambridge and to Oxford for the last two weeks of November.
So we're going to talk about how that came about, about the state of free speech at the Academy in general and other general issues.
So I'll start by telling the story of the disinvitation as I experienced it.
So I was invited to Cambridge by some professors in the Faculty of Divinity to conduct a seminar or to take part in the seminar on Exodus, which was to be a follow up to my lectures on Genesis, which proved to be somewhat surprisingly which was to be a follow up to my lectures on Genesis, which
And so I thought I would delve into Exodus with some of the world's leading authorities to sharpen myself up and then maybe dive into Exodus as a lecture series.
Anyways, we had that planned and then it got cancelled because a photograph of me emerged that was taken with this guy in New Zealand.
Now that was taken during a meet and greet after my So I went to 130 cities in 2018.
And afterwards, at all of them, I had my picture taken with about 100 people, one by one or two by two, sometimes with families.
So about maybe 15,000 pictures, photographs, of which this was one.
And so I remember this actually at New Zealand.
And so this guy came walking up to me and he sort of stopped and he had this T-shirt on and he looked at me sort of questioningly.
And it was a T-shirt outlining his criticisms of Islam, of radical Islam, as he saw it.
And I looked at it and I looked at him and again, he kind of looked questioning and apologetic.
And then I thought, well, you know, that's your T-shirt, mate, and that's up to you to wear that.
And so, you know, I motioned him forward.
We had our picture taken.
And I really didn't think anything of it after that.
But apparently many people did.
And so I was disinvited because of my repugnant views, which were hypothetically indicated by the fact that I took one picture out of 15,000 with this gentleman wearing an opinionated t-shirt.
And so that was apparently justification for cancelling An intense academic endeavor aimed at bringing the work in Exodus to as broad a public population as possible in the most rigorous manner possible.
And so that was quite a shock, I would say.
And, you know, it wasn't particularly enjoyable to go through all that.
So, well, that's turned around and now I'm invited back and I'm going in November.
And so...
How did, James, maybe you could start, how did that all come about, do you think?
Like, why did that happen and why has it been reversed?
Well, thank you, Jordan.
And just listening to you recount your experiences of beginning of March 2019 is, well, it's pretty moving to watch and difficult to hear.
But I just want to stress that with all that in the background, it's incredibly gracious of you to have I'm thrilled about it.
I'm thrilled about it.
So it's not a favor in any sense.
It's a great university and I think it's an unbelievable privilege to go there and to go to Oxford.
So I'm absolutely thrilled about it.
Well, if I may say so, I think it's a testament to your character and to your resilience and capacity for forbearance and forgiveness that you've accepted the invitation.
And just by way of encouragement, I want to say that the reaction to the news of your visit from colleagues and from students in the university, beyond the university, from members of the general public, has been overwhelmingly positive.
It's been difficult to respond to all the supportive messages I've received in the wake of the announcement.
And I just think it's obvious, just from the reaction to the kinds of questions that we were exploring on your podcast a few weeks ago, that there's a huge appetite among people for the kinds of questions that That we're exploring in that conversation and that we're planning to explore in research seminars and talks with colleagues and students here in November.
And as I said to my colleagues, who I think are excited about your visit, I've had almost no word of criticism at all.
I think there's a recognition that you're going to be a perfect interlocutor for all sorts of people here, particularly on quest for those of us who work in theology and religion.
You've encouraged lots of young people to take sacred texts seriously, to think about how you read ancient and difficult texts about the meaning and value of religion in society today.
I know that was a difficult time for you.
I'd not actually been appointed to my post back then, or maybe I had been appointed just a few weeks before that happened.
So I wasn't privy to the inner workings of the decision-making and so on.
I think what I can say is that it was a very, very small number of people who were Concerned or showing strong resistance to your coming.
I think this is something that we can talk about later, that the way in which in these big universities, a relatively small number of determined, ideologically driven students, often students, but also colleagues who will Who will buckle in the face of student resistance.
The capacity they have to project the idea that their view is a dominant orthodoxy.
And I think the mechanics of how that happens is a very interesting one.
And the gap between the sort of asymmetry between those two positions, what is actually a minority view, and then this impression that it's an orthodoxy,
as I said, was laid bare in the events that followed, which really were prompted by what Arif Yeah, well, it's very interesting and strange that I could be sufficiently reprehensible to be banned from the university, you know, three years ago, and I haven't changed, I don't think.
And yet, when I'm re-invited, that the overwhelming Response that you've received so far is positive.
That's very peculiar.
And so, and worth delving into, I think.
And Dr.
Ahmed, you played a role in...
Now, as I understand it, the policies of the university with regards to inviting speakers have actually been changed.
And the mechanics of that are worth delving into, too.
Just so maybe you could tell us the story about how that happened and why and how you got involved.
Yeah, thank you.
Before I start on that, Jordan, I just want to say that, first of all, we're really positive and looking forward to your visit.
And like James, I've had a lot of positive comments about it.
But also that we as a university should be very grateful to James Orr, because he was the one who had the vision and the initiative to re-extend the invitation.
And it's great that he's done that.
Now, in terms of what happened, as you say, there was this, what I regard as an outrageous disinvitation of you in the spring of 2019.
So as you know, what happened was you were invited, you accepted the invitation, and you were then disinvited, and as I recall, not even told that you'd been disinvited.
You found out...
Yeah, that was one of the funny things.
You found out on Twitter.
They didn't even have a...
I mean, it was not only discourteous, but worse than discourteous.
It was cowardly, I thought.
Well, if you had to make a case for the people who disinvited me, what do you think it was that they were trying to stop exactly?
I mean, it's worth investigating the motives and the belief, as well as then we can talk about, to some degree, the fact that it seems to be a minority view.
Well, my feeling is that it's related to the things that James was saying, that the university authorities, or those who are responsible for this decision, Have been frightened by a group of highly committed ideologues who gave the impression that this was a general university view, that there was outrage about your position.
In fact, I don't think that's true.
And in any case, Being photographed next to someone doesn't imply anything about your position at all.
And that was one of the most outrageous things with the statement by the university at the time, which they called, as I recall, endorsement by association, as though simply standing next to someone who's wearing clothes that expresses views implies that you have those views yourself.
That argument was so bad, it must have been a pretext.
And I think it was a pretext for a kind of fear of a mob.
So what do you think they were afraid of?
So let's say it wasn't the fact that I had my picture taken with this character who was wearing this t-shirt.
It was something else that they didn't want me to do, I suppose, or be.
What do you think that was exactly?
Do you have any sense of that?
Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately they probably feared protests.
They feared reputational damage.
They feared a sense that all the students would think that Cambridge was enabling someone whom these people regard as unacceptable.
Those are the things they fear.
But frankly, if you're an academic, the one thing that is your job is not to care what the mob thinks, is not to care who's going to be upset or frightened by the people you invite.
You probably invite people because they can speak the truth and you can have a discussion which leads to mutual understanding and advancement of knowledge.
Yes, well, and we should all devoutly hope that an institution as august and as remarkable as Cambridge...
Would be a model for courage in such matters instead of being cowed by a loud, ideologically possessed minority.
Because, you know, you might think, well, if Cambridge University can't withstand this, then who the hell can?
And that's a serious question.
And these things have to be examined seriously.
I mean, we need institutions that we can respect and that...
And that hold up the standards that have made them what they are.
And if they fold, well, how can you expect normal people, say, not to be cowed and intimidated by the same tactics?
Absolutely.
Actually, there were two other episodes on my mind, one of which sort of confirmed my theory about what was happening in your case, the other of which suggested different sorts of motivations.
So one of them was a case that occurred around the same time as yours, which was a case of a research fellow at St.
Edmunds College here in Cambridge.
He was doing research.
He was a sociologist, a very well-known respectable sociologist.
He had work profiled in The Economist and top journals.
He was fired because, again, there was a mob protesting about his associations, conferences he'd been to, journals that he published in, in which other people that they found distasteful had published in, and so on.
Again, Donald said nothing illegal.
That was one case which, again, I think illustrates the sorts of pressures that I think were being brought to bear.
What were the topics for that?
The topics of race and intelligence.
Yes, yes, yes.
Well, the intelligence literature is rough, that's for sure.
I mean, the whole thing was so chilling, Jordan, because it was decided by an inquiry that was kept secret.
Nobody's going to know what the evidence was in this inquiry.
So the whole thing was terrifying.
The other case was slightly different.
So there was another case that concerned me, which was a case where it was an event for the Palestinian society, where there was a chair from that society, which the university threatened to shut down because they thought they were worried that the chair might be an extremist or something.
She wasn't at all.
She was a respectable person.
Academic from SOAS. And the university imposed its own chair on that.
Now, that was slightly different because that was responding to another threat of free speech, which is the government's legislation on prevent and anti-terrorism.
But those three events were sort of coalescing in my mind around the time that I tried to change the university's free speech policy.
Okay, so let's talk about the change in the free speech policy.
What changes did you propose?
And then it took a couple of years, as I understand, to really get this through.
And I also understand from James that it wasn't that easy to get people to speak in favor of your proposal, but that it was passed, and we need to go into that, by an overwhelming majority of the people who were concerned and able to legislate such things, so to speak, for the university.
Yeah, so I can take you through that.
What happened was, this was around actually March 2020, so about a year after your case, and the university had decided that it was going to put through a new freedom of speech policy.
This was obviously at a time when everyone had had other things on their mind, at least in Britain, in March 2020.
They didn't offer a vote on it, they just wanted to put it straight through.
And it was a policy which I found concerning, especially in life of these incidents.
One part of it was that it said that we have a right to free speech, but we must always exercise respect for other people's identities and opinions.
Now, that might seem innocuous, but of course, the word respect being so vague can be interpreted It doesn't seem innocuous to me.
Indeed.
I mean, it seems terrible because it just removes the first part of protection for free speech.
I mean, if you have to be cautious about other people's opinions, much less their identity, well, we should reverse that.
Their identity, much less their opinions, well, who decides when that's respectful?
Yeah, it's just weasel words, that.
Exactly.
And the bit about identities, I bet they had you in mind when they were saying that, actually.
But whenever anyone says, I believe in free speech, but that's a good sign to me that they don't believe in free speech.
And that was the impression that this policy gave off.
Other parts of the policy, which may not have been directly explicitly new, but which certainly brought you and those other cases, for instance, the Palestinian society to mind, Were rules which said that the university could stop speaker events if they thought they would threaten the welfare of students.
Notice that welfare is defined undefined and could be interpreted broadly.
And indeed, allowed the university to stop events under pretty much any circumstances that they liked.
Speaker events, for instance.
So that was the proposed policy in March 2020.
So why did that bother you so much?
I mean, you're pretty young and starting your academic career in many ways.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
But, you know, it's a hell of a thing to take on and it's not without its risks.
And I'm always curious about people's motives.
It's like there's lots of professors at Cambridge.
Why do you think this was your problem?
Well, you flatter me about being young, but I will say that I guess there were two things.
One of them was philosophical and one of them was more to do with the nature of the job.
So philosophically speaking, my basic philosophical position is what you might call classical liberal.
So my basic value is individual liberty.
And in terms of what I do, my political engagement, even my professional engagement to some extent, that's the ultimate and most important value.
So for me, it really touched a nerve.
It touched something that was the core of my identity, if you want to use that appalling word.
The other aspect, which I said was professional, was simply to do something I alluded to earlier, which was, what is this job for?
It's part of your duty as an academic, I would have thought.
Academics are normally cautious, as they should be, but the one thing that they shouldn't be cautious about is defending the ultimate purpose of the academy, and that cannot be...
Pursued without free speech and without the ability to question freely beliefs that are held by the majority, also beliefs that are held by minorities, and without worrying about who you're going to offend, who's going to be hurt by your words, especially in a subject like philosophy, and I dare say in a subject like yours and certainly in a subject like James's, you can't have free discussion if every time you talk about something you're frightened that you're going to offend the other person and then they might report to you and you might get in trouble.
I can't do my job.
I don't expect James can.
I don't expect you can, if discussion is curtailed in that way.
Well, no, scientists can, because that freedom of inquiry and the freedom to upset traditional truths, let's say, well, in a really fundamental sense, that's what science is all about.
And as a, let's say, a creative scientist, you're always working against What's established, because otherwise what you discovered wouldn't be new.
And you're always going to be facing people who are upset for one reason or another by your hypotheses and your research.
So it's not a side issue here.
It's crucial to the academy as such.
Yeah, absolutely.
But that still doesn't explain why you made it your problem, say, when so many people were perfectly willing to remain silent.
Well, one thing I would say is that I was slightly surprised.
When I wrote...
So after the university's policy came out...
There was a discussion.
What's called a discussion in Cambridge University really means that you write a paper and it's published in the university magazine.
And so I sent a short paper off proposing some changes to these policies and stating my objections.
And I had expected, this being Cambridge University, that many other people would do the same, because I didn't think I was alone in being concerned about this.
Nobody else did.
So that was the first point at which I realised.
So there was no real bravery on my part because I had expected at that point that a lot of other people would be jumping in.
Nobody did.
So that was the point at which I realised that I was perhaps more isolated.
Than I'd expected.
To go back to your question about motivations, I mean, I don't know what more I can tell you.
I mean, these are things that matter to me.
I don't really care if anyone else is doing it or not.
And did you face any trouble?
So you voiced your opinion and you wanted to modify this document, which had, let's say, politically correct underpinnings.
And did it cause grief for you?
Were people outraged by what you said?
Or did things proceed as a matter of course?
Well, it was interesting.
So some people...
Some people wrote to me, in fact, quite a few people wrote to me at the time saying that they agreed with my concerns, which sort of made it even more surprising that nobody had actually said so in public.
Some people wrote to me saying they agreed with my concerns but weren't willing to say anything in public.
James was, as always, was brilliantly helpful.
James has always been really supportive and James has been publicly supportive.
Throughout this process, but it's because there have been a few courageous people like James and a few others in Cambridge at that stage, that was definitely a big help.
So there was some support.
I also had people warning me.
So I had people saying, you might get some kind of disciplinary procedure.
You might get some kind of investigation.
I didn't expect anything at that stage.
And indeed, nothing happened to me at that stage.
And I'm pleased to say there have been no investigations or anything out of me since.
So that's really interesting in two ways, isn't it?
Because it shows you how loathe people are to do this because they're afraid.
And we shouldn't make light of that because this is actually no fun.
You know, if you do something like this and it explodes in your face, like it probably took me...
Oh, it took me a long time to recover from the disinvitation, especially the way it was handled.
And my health and my wife's health were extremely compromised at the time, and so it came at a...
A particularly bad time.
We had just received news that she probably had terminal cancer, and so this came on top of that.
Now, luckily, she survived, thank God, but, you know, it was a harrowing time.
And so I see why people can be cowed like this, because you don't know when this is going to explode and when it's going to tangle you up so deeply that, well, your job's gone.
That's what happened to the Weinsteins, for example, at Evergreen.
And I mean...
That was really...
That did them a tremendous amount of damage.
They're unbelievably resourceful, and they got back on their feet.
And, you know, they were a husband and wife team, so they had each other, and that was good.
But not everybody can do that, and you can get seriously taken out if something like this goes wrong.
So...
But then that ties into this issue we discussed a bit earlier, which is how a small minority of, you know, people whose wrath knows no bounds in some sense can be so dominant...
So it was in some ways a calculated risk.
I can't imagine how difficult that must have been for you, Jordan.
It must have been horrific.
One thing I saw happening in Cambridge, not quite then, but a little bit later, was the treatment That was meted at to, not an academic, but to a member of the university staff.
So we have college porters in Cambridge.
And these are these people who work at the colleges.
Often they're sort of, you know, retired policemen or military or something.
Really helpful.
They do all kinds of jobs around the college.
Students rely on them.
The academics rely on them.
The ones in my college are brilliant.
There was one at a college in Cambridge who was also a Labour councillor who resigned on political grounds, which was to do with his view about trans issues.
So he thought it was, you know, there was a motion about trans issues that he thought, you know, threatened women's safety.
And so he resigned on a point of principle.
And that's his political activity.
That's his right.
I could understand his grounds for doing that.
The students at his college, so these are typically much more privileged people than him, students at his college formed a mob to try to get this man sacked.
And this was, you know, they're much more privileged people.
They didn't care about, you know, the consequences for him.
They just thought, because he diverted from their line of ideological purity.
Do you remember this case, James?
I do.
I do.
And it was thanks to a very brave female undergraduate.
I think she was in her second year.
She spoke out, wrote a public article about it.
A great courage, I thought, to herself.
And there was an awful lot of resistance to her doing that.
But it was remarkable.
She got in touch with us, I seem to remember.
And I can't remember how the case was resolved.
Well, I think the case in the end was resolved positively.
But that's right, Sophie.
She was Sophie Watson.
She was brilliant.
She actually wrote an article in which she said, and I thought this is very telling, just described the state of the academy.
She said, when I came to Cambridge, I was expecting, she said, the motto of the Royal Society is don't take anyone's word for it.
And she said that's what she was expecting when I come to Cambridge.
I was expecting to engage in rigorous discussion where all of my cherished beliefs would be challenged, you know, and I'd come away shaken and uncomfortable, and I would think for myself, and I would be forced to rethink everything with the most important things in my life.
I think she was actually studying psychology.
And then she said, when I got here, it wasn't like that.
When I got here, I felt that I was being coddled and there were certain things that you couldn't question, certain things that you were just made to feel an outsider where you questioned.
It was a brilliant article and really telling because it was her own experience of what it's like for a student now compared to what it was like when I was an undergraduate many years ago.
So that's an illustration of how things can go wrong and the sorts of things we In the summer and then the autumn of 2020.
James, did you want to say anything more about that point?
We can talk more about that.
No, I mean, I think it was then, wasn't it June, July 2020?
I remember you came round for lunch around here and we started talking about, you know, who might be willing to sign in public a support which was required by the mechanisms of the...
all the kind of procedural mechanisms.
I think we needed 25 names, wasn't it?
And I think we could come up between us.
We managed to come up with seven or eight.
And then over the...
And then it took us another 8-10 weeks to get past the 25.
I think it was September that we were starting to look promising.
And in fact, I think in the end, we got quite a few more than 25 for the three amendments that Arif was proposing to introduce to take out the respect language and replace it with language of tolerance.
You needed those 25 to put the amendments forward?
Yes.
That's right, yeah.
So that would indicate that some people were concerned, that requirement for 25 rather than just one person.
And it was hard to get 25.
Yeah, it's telling.
It's telling that actually, I mean, there might have been two reasons why.
One reason why it might have been because it was a trivial issue and nobody cared about it.
Who cares quibbling about a few words?
Another reason, which I suspect was, you know, which turned out was with a more likely explanation, was that actually a lot of people were afraid to sign something in public.
So why do you think it's not trivial?
And why do you think that argument's invalid?
The reason I thought the argument was invalid, because the additional evidence that I got after the vote, because the vote actually had a very high, a lot of people bothered to vote on this.
And they bothered to vote for that change.
If it had been a trivial thing, nobody would have cared to vote.
So that was one bit of evidence.
The other bit of evidence was the testimony of the people who wrote to me or who I called up at the time.
And James may have got this as well.
People who were saying, look, we support this.
We can see what you're doing and we can see why it's a concern.
But I just don't want to get involved in this kind of fight right now.
Getting involved in this is going to be too difficult for me right now.
I'm up for promotion right now.
I don't want to face all of these things.
Yeah, well, you practice what you become.
You become what you practice.
This is something I learned as a psychologist, and I think maybe it was part of my temperament to begin with.
If you put off fights, they don't get better.
Not usually.
They usually get worse.
And maybe you think, well, I'll be in a better position later.
And you might be, but probably you won't.
And so that notion that it's not a good time, fair enough.
You know, I hate conflict.
I really hate it.
I'm not built for it temperamentally.
But I've learned through painful experience, I would say, and not least as a clinician, that When you see the elephant's trunk under the rug, you can infer the rest of the elephant, and it's going to get bigger as you feed it with your stupidity and your withdrawal, and you let whatever it's feeding on continue.
And it's extremely dangerous.
You see this reflected in In ancient mythology, actually, quite nicely, in many situations, you see that in the Mesopotamian creation myth, where a dragon grows in the background, essentially, that threatens to swamp everything, and that's eventually defeated by a great, you know, Marduk, as it turns out.
This is a very old idea, that little things left...
Well, this is kind of small at the moment, but...
But, but...
No, that's right.
And actually, go on, James.
Well, I'll just say, yeah, I remember reading that.
That's a kind of Babylonian creation myth, I think, isn't it?
But that sense of things just growing with a kind of gathering a momentum of their own is something that we've experienced a lot of.
I think there's been some work on this in sociology.
I think they call it the spiral of silence.
Yeah.
I can't remember her, Elizabeth Neumann or Noel Neumann.
And the basic idea is that fear of isolation, social isolation, ostracism is a huge motivating factor in a person's behavior and Yeah, well, there's two great fears, right?
That's one, is being isolated and thrown out of the group, because then you die.
And the other is biological catastrophe.
Those are the two big classes of fears that you see as a clinician.
Right.
So that's the animating idea.
And then the spiral starts, you know, the monster starts to grow when some people notice that their opinions are spreading fast.
And that gives them a kind of confidence to double down and express themselves more confidently.
And then on the other hand, people who disagree with those opinions see that their views gaining less traction, and they stay silent because of the fear of social isolation.
And then they get weaker.
They get weaker, but then of course, yeah.
A lot of these people...
So go on, Jeffs.
Well, I was just going to say that social media and those sorts of things, obviously all the network effects from that accelerates that.
And what happens is that people just get very bad at judging what the real spread of opinion is in a social environment.
And then it's a dynamic process.
It's a spiral.
And so you get a spiral to the point where what is a confident minority position becomes this completely unassailable orthodoxy And I think that's one reason why in the case of what was started to happen in Cambridge in the summer of 2020 and leading up to the vote in December is that what we saw was that although there was reluctance,
deep reluctance among colleagues who struggled to get more than 25 votes to sign in public the Arabs amendments, When it came to the vote, which crucially operated via a secret ballot, so you were allowed to measure opinion by people voting from within the closet, as it were.
And as soon as that mechanism was allowed to operate, suddenly the spiral of silence just, as it were, the monster explodes.
Right, so that's really interesting procedurally as well, because these sorts of positive feedback loop phenomenon, you see those in clinical therapy too.
So, for example, when people start to get depressed, then they withdraw and they stop socializing, say, and they stop engaging in the activities that bring them meaning and joy.
And so that makes their depression worse, and then they're more likely to withdraw again.
And, you know, it's probably an example of something like the Pareto principle operating again, right, that...
Things can spiral up very, very rapidly and dominate, and they can spiral down.
It's nonlinear on both ends.
And there's some truth to that kind of process that underlies all sorts of phenomena.
So that secret ballot issue, that's really relevant for bringing something like this to a halt.
Yeah.
I mean, I think...
Go ahead, Arif.
Okay.
No, I was going to say, one part of the isolation process also, I think, is certain kinds of social interactions or professional interactions.
And what I mean is the experience of being in meetings, for instance, departmental meetings or college meetings, where probably a lot of people, there'll be some mad or insane proposal, I don't know, to say, we're going to remove all pronouns from our policy, or we're going to have this change of the syllabus or whatever.
And everybody, or maybe most people in the room, We're thinking this is nonsense, but I'm not going to say it's nonsense.
And they left the meeting thinking they were the only person who thought it was nonsense.
Because nobody spoke out and the thing was not decided by a secret ballot.
If it had been decided by a secret ballot, as was the case, as James says in December, suddenly you had thousands of people realizing that they weren't alone.
It's also possible that the objections, so imagine those objections manifest themselves in people's imagination, but they're not hooked so tightly to a whole ideological network as the proposal is.
And so, in some sense, people don't have the right words at hand immediately.
You know, the pronoun thing is a good indication because...
Well, justify your use of he and she.
It's like, well, I don't know how to do that exactly.
You know, that's what everyone does.
We've done that forever, and that's my justification.
It's like, well, it's pretty weak compared to that whole ideology that's coming at you.
And those people who are so committed, they're often pretty verbal.
They're pretty well able to articulate that ideology, and quite forcefully.
And they're emotionally committed to it.
And so...
That's also a structural problem.
And they have devices.
So, for instance, if you think about the way I found the way these people use terms like not only welfare, but also harm, you know, the idea that words do harm to people, which has a lot of currency now in Britain and is chilling, is based on an absurdly inflated conception of harm.
But when you're in the middle of a discussion, you know...
It's also related to another cognitive problem, which is one of the things I often did as a therapist when someone told me they were afraid of something, doing something, is I said, well, that's because you're not afraid enough of not doing it.
Because the doing produces this harm, let's say, and you can be afraid of that.
But the not doing is sort of invisible, and that has something to do with decision-making in uncertainty, by the way.
And so I used to get people to flesh out what would happen if they didn't do the thing they were afraid of.
And then they thought, oh, I see there's real risk both ways.
And now I get to pick my risk.
And this harm issue is the same thing, because you could say, well, sometimes words do do harm.
There's no doubt about that.
And maybe that's it's unfair to conflate that with something like physical violence, although you could have a discussion about that.
But the question that isn't being asked then is, well, what harm does your attempt to shut down what words you regard as harmful?
What's that likely to produce for harm?
Well, none.
It's like, oh, really?
So you haven't thought that part of it through at all, and you're going to be the arbiter of what's harmful and what's not.
And there's no danger in that either, is there?
So that's a good way to...
Deal with that sort of thing.
I agree.
Of course, another thing that a lot of the time people don't see is they think, you know, we can impose on people's speech, we can tell them how to behave various ways, but they don't think that that's an instrument that could be abused in all sorts of ways.
So if you mandate speech on one thing one day, it's going to be mandated on other things the next day.
And in general, I think with any form of coercive principle, you need to think what's going to happen in the hands of somebody wicked and, you know, tyrannical.
That's how we should think about these things, not only in university but in politics more generally.
Typical right-wing claptrap.
Well, that's kind of an interesting thing, right?
Because one thing that conservative thinking does always is say, yeah, but.
It's like, well, you're putting this forward for the good, and fair enough, you know, and it's based on compassion, and that's actually a virtue, although it is by no means the only virtue, and sometimes it's a vice.
But why are you so sure that this will only do the thing you think it will do and nothing else, and that you're wise enough to make that change, right?
In something that's sort of working already.
Part of the problem might be that I think it's a sort of a glitch within liberalism.
When you think back to Mill's idea, the famous no harm principle, which for many, many years operated as a very, very good basic rule for governing social interaction.
But you can understand the temptation of trying to fold under the notion of harm or violence.
I think it's the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam calls this concept creep.
You can see that you see the sort of the power that comes from leveraging these concepts, particularly when an institution is caught in the headlights of a Twitter mob or whatever it might be, that there's sort of threat to the harm.
You know, there's harm or threats of harm or violence to the person which are.
In the end, I mean, I think I take your point, Jordan, there may well be certain situations in which use of speech can be thought of as inflicting harm.
But that is something that society and the legislature in that society needs to deliberate upon and decide.
We all accept that freedom of speech is not It's not an unqualified right, and indeed academic freedom has proper parameters imposed as well.
But we can also be grown up and say that it's dangerous, but necessary.
It's dangerous, but necessary.
I think the danger comes in when what counts as harm is being subjectively determined.
And so this notion that started to gather steam in the last few years, this idea of a microaggression, Which, in effect, is an aggression or a claim that harm has been inflicted on a person that is subjectively determined.
That is to say, it's in principle not an offense that could be explored in any kind of forensic context by a jury or a judge.
That is to say, the only evidence of the harm that could possibly count is the subject saying, you've hurt me.
And so the danger of the language that Arif was protesting against, the identitarian respect language, is that it effectively conferred a veto on the most psychologically fragile person in the university.
And who could simply say, and there would be no way of establishing whether or not they were sincere with that, they'd have to be just simply taken at face value, that this person, the invitation to this speaker troubles me, upsets me, does me harm.
Yeah, well, that's interesting, too.
Like, imagine you take that hypothetical sensitive person.
it might not be in their best interests to actually grant them that sort of veto power because one of the things you do with someone who's really depressed or anxious is actually, especially if you're working as a cognitive behaviorist, let's say, is you get them to look at the thoughts that are upsetting them and maybe modify the ones that is you get them to look at the thoughts that are upsetting them and maybe modify the ones that are And that's also, to some degree, judged subjectively by them.
And so it isn't necessarily the case that protecting people in that manner and giving them that sort of power is actually in their best interest.
So...
It reminds me of that insight of Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their, I think it's their 2017 Atlantic article that became the coddling of the American mind, where one of the three principles I think Jonathan isolates is a sort of inversion of the Nietzschean idea that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
That is to say, anything that, you know, the sort of harm or violence, that sort of any kind of threat, it doesn't have, it's not something that can toughen you up.
It's not an opportunity to try and strengthen your character or to develop resilience.
And I know that I think this is something you've touched on.
Well, that's also a huge part of what universities are doing for universities.
There are students, if you think about it psychologically, so we could talk about people who are hypersensitive to anxiety and depression, let's say they're higher in neuroticism.
One of the things you want to do when you get educated is arm yourself with defenses and And I mean practical defense is both ideational, so the way you think and the way you act, against that kind of onslaught.
And education can really do that, right?
Because you're quicker on your feet and you know more.
And also, if you're trying to reduce someone's anxiety and depression, and they're temperamentally tilted that way, what you actually do is gradually expose them to the things that they're afraid of.
You don't protect them more and more and more because that actually makes that positive spiral descent into depression and anxiety worse.
So the fact, the idea that you should remove everything that might threaten someone's identity And you should make that a university-wide policy is actually exactly the opposite of what you should do, speaking clinically, if you're trying to help people become more resilient.
This is a serious issue.
Well, obviously, this is all serious.
But the fact is, universities in the UK are, to some extent, going in the opposite direction.
So they do have, as James points out, this category of what's called microaggressions.
And these are things which can even be a matter for disciplinary action.
If you're reporting for it.
At NYU, there's posters all over the place, in the bathrooms, for example, encouraging people to report such things to the appropriate, you know, well-paid bureaucratic authorities.
Cambridge tried to introduce a system where you could report these things anonymously.
So not confidentially, anonymously.
Nobody knows who made the report.
So it's like East Germany.
The report comes in, and then somebody could, in principle, be disciplined for it.
No one would ever misuse that.
No, you couldn't imagine that.
So as you say, you know, if making fun of someone's religion, for instance, is something I can't do, you know, that's a kind of challenge which might upset them.
And as you say, part of the point of words is to some extent that they do some harm.
They're meant to be upsetting.
They're meant to shake your views about things.
You know, if the conversations you have at university, you know, never upset you, never make you feel a little bit less confident, never make you, perhaps even make you cry sometimes, university isn't doing its job.
Yeah.
I couldn't agree more.
And in fact, the anonymous reporting tool mechanism that is accompanied with these long shopping lists of microaggressions, effectively, where, as you say, it's happening at NYU, Jordan, the students and staff are encouraged effectively to police each other and to censor each other.
It's a very disturbing development.
I mean, thankfully, it was stopped...
It's absolutely important.
As far as he said, as I recall, he wasn't aware that it had gone up, but he wasn't aware of the microaggressions component.
But this is a problem throughout the UK. I mean, it turned out that the company is a sort of tech startup called CultureShift, which rolled it out in Cambridge.
But I think there are 50 or 60 other universities in the UK that have a system of this kind.
You know, there's no such thing as a joke that isn't a microaggression.
Right?
Jokes aren't funny unless they're microaggressions, especially witty jokes.
And so, you know, that's why I'm so concerned when I see comedians getting stopped, because they're bellwethers for this sort of thing.
And if you can't take a joke, I mean, I was talking with my wife and some friends about the way working class men...
Sort of test each other out.
And a huge part of that is this throwing back and forth of microaggressions.
Sometimes they're not so micro, right?
It's like, let's see if I can get under your skin.
Can you take a joke?
Can you lower your ego, you know?
Or do you get too upset?
Are you too narcissistic?
Are you too arrogant?
Can we rely on you in a crunch or even a little crunch?
Like, can you cooperate?
Can you subordinate your needs to the group now and then?
Are you a narcissist?
All that's played out with aggressive humor.
And putting a clamp on that is a catastrophe.
Plus, it's not funny anymore.
We need some humor.
I think there are different subcultures where you get different kind of equilibria here.
So there are some cultures, like, as you say, in barracks, for instance, also in Roman times.
Hume describes, as Hume says, Roman people were very rude to each other, from what we know of their conversations, compared to even high and low-ranking people.
They were not afraid to be rude to each other and make fun of each other, compared to How we are in our society now.
Other ones, military environments, I think are like that.
Some environments I was in when I was a child.
You know, these are equilibria that societies can end up in.
And there are other equilibria which are much more cobbling and much, much more timid.
And it seems the fear is, as you say, we're going to end up in one of those.
Yeah, and those are authoritarian.
You know, one of the things I learned as studying psychoanalytic thought mostly was the notion of compassion as devouring.
An excess of compassion is a vice and it becomes totalitarian.
And no one that I know of yet has had a serious conversation about female totalitarianism.
And that's a conversation long overdue because females are now part and parcel of the general political culture in a way they haven't been in many societies for a very long time.
And so...
This totalitarianism of compassion is no joke.
It was Freud's primary concern, and that's the Oedipal mother, fundamentally.
The word, the expression I've heard used in a lot of places for this is what people call soft totalitarianism.
So it's not...
Yeah, it's cuddly totalitarianism.
It's not the jackboot or the prison.
It's the smiley emoji and the not hurting people's feelings.
But the results are the same when it comes to free speech and argument and the truth and just having rational discourse because so much of it is suppressed.
So that's what we're fearing.
But as James says, there are reasons for hope.
When you compare...
So as James was talking about the microaggressions episode in Cambridge, you know, the backlash against that, I mean, I don't know what you think, James, but my impression was the backlash against that was much more quick in public than it was against the free speech policy a year and a bit before.
So you might have opened a door.
The culture, to some extent, seems to be improving a bit.
People seem a bit more confident to speak at.
James, I don't know if that's your question.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're right.
I mean, I think on the one hand, it was distressing after the scale of the vote and the clarity with which the views of the majority of staff or the majority of those voted.
And I can't remember what the margins were.
It was about 85%.
Voted for the tolerance language over the respect language.
It was depressing that, you know, barely six months later, this campaign has rolled out that just seemed to be antithetical in every conceivable respect to what that, to the views that were expressed at the ballot box in December.
But as I have said, the sort of grassroots response I mean, it's true, I think, that, and this might have been to some extent true of the vote itself, that one big difference from two or three years ago with the rescission of your invitation, Jordan, is the The extramural support that we've had outside the university.
So the public awareness, public attention and public concern, taxpayer concern, has been much more focused on the problem of the perceived crisis at the university.
And so there was quite a lot of press coverage.
I remember around about end of May, beginning of June when this was happening.
And I think that must have Put a lot of pressure on and brought about an immediate and dramatic institutional response that, I don't know what Araf thinks, but I think would have been very, very hard to achieve just internally by writing letters and complaining using sort of ordinary procedures.
So I think that played a big role.
I think people are starting to understand to some degree that these obscure goings on in universities move downstream with incredible rapidity.
When I first made that observation, not that I was the first to do it, that the general public should be concerned about these strange academic ideas, it seemed like I was overreacting, but...
You know, everyone's learned in some sense since then.
What do they say?
Politics is downstream from culture and cultures generated in the universities for better or worse.
And so...
What happens on campus doesn't stay on campus.
Yes, exactly.
Unlike Las Vegas, right?
And I wanted to clear something up because earlier you pointed to the utility of anonymity in a vote, right?
But then you criticized anonymous reporting.
And so I just want to clear that up.
So it's way different because anonymous reporting is one person and that can easily be someone who's quite malevolent.
And if you don't think people like that exist, it's just because you're naive.
They can use that as an unbelievably powerful weapon to take down in a very painful way anyone they want.
Whereas if it's a vote and we should talk about the vote, because my understanding is that thousands of people voted on this policy.
So who were those thousands of people and how did that come about?
Well, it was it was I mean, you're quite right about the distinction, first of all.
I mean, the point about anonymous reporting is that if someone reports something anonymously, you can't come back to them to check their evidence.
You know, the person who's been accused can't even face their accuser.
So there's no possibility of deep process.
With the anonymous voting, so the turnout was about 1,500 people, so it was about 30%, which doesn't seem that high, but actually it was very high by historical standards.
So I've been looking back over the last three or four decades, and I couldn't find one where there was such a high turnout and such a decisive margin, actually.
So it was a big result, especially given that it was taking place during the lockdown, or taking place at the height of the pandemic.
So the people who are voting, they were all academics.
Cambridge is unusual in British academia, and maybe unusual in Western academia more generally, in that it and Oxford are both self-governing.
And what that means is that it's the supreme body that decides what it does, is the sort of Main body of senior academics, so all lecturers, professors, and so on.
And there's about 7,000 of those.
That's called Regent House, and that has supreme authority.
Now, there is an executive body called the Council, which handles most day-to-day business.
And the Council often makes proposals on which there is no vote, unless it doesn't propose a vote.
And one of the telling things was that the Council put forward this proposal, which was On a matter of fundamental value, I can't think of anything of more importance to a university than its view on freedom of speech.
It put forward this change.
It did not offer a vote.
When I made my objections, it did not offer a vote.
When I made my objections, it didn't negotiate.
It didn't say, well, I can see the point of this.
Maybe we should have a wider consultation.
There's no attempt at consultation, no attempt at a vote.
It just tried to push it through.
So the difficulty was in getting a vote in the first place.
Once we got a vote, As it turned out, things worked well, but the difficulty was in getting the vote, and the vote was conducted by senior academics, so people like me, James, you, if you've been in Cambridge.
I can't imagine that Toronto is run like that.
I don't know if any American universities or North American universities have run like that, but Cambridge and Oxford are lucky in that they have that system of governance.
I received quite a few messages after the vote, and I think probably Araf did too, from colleagues around the country and actually around the world who were expressing a kind of envy that they didn't have that sort of quasi-parliamentary mechanism, which, you know, it's a clunky tool.
It took Araf and those supporting him a very long time to get it all going and to challenge the university's decisions, but it did work.
It gives the faculty final say and not the administration, and that's really something.
Yeah, it's important.
It's not quite as simple as that because there are some administrators who can vote as well, and they tend to vote the same way I would imagine, but it does give us the say.
And I want to say again, none of it would have been possible without James as well.
He played a massive role in getting the support, giving it public support and helping with publicity and so on.
So he was brilliant.
I do want to add, I got messages, and I'm sure James did too, not just from academics, but from members of the public as well, who were sort of relieved that an important British institution like Cambridge was actually standing up for basic values.
Because this is not an abstruse academic matter, and it's not even an intellectually very difficult thing to see.
You know, the arguments were not intellectually obscure or difficult or required any great intelligence.
You know, it was really simple matters of basic principle.
So I think it would have been a disaster, I think, if Cambridge had not supported this.
I wanted to point out something else to clarify, something that you just said when we were talking about anonymous reporting and differentiating that from anonymous voting.
You said, well, this anonymous reporting circumvents due process.
And you didn't say that very loud, and we just went on.
It's like, no, no, we're going to say that again.
This anonymous reporting circumvents due process.
It's like, what the hell's up with you guys?
You're doing an end run around due process.
Who the hell do you think you are?
Exactly.
Due process.
It's like, God, how long has English common law been working out due process?
It is a basic principle of English common law and it's a basic principle of natural justice that you know the identity of your accuser and you know the grounds on which he's making the accusation.
And these mechanisms that are introduced often without any kind of scrutiny at all are cut completely against that principle.
Yeah, and they're designed to.
Because with that sort of thing, I always prefer to presume ignorance and not malevolence, but when something like that happens, there's something damn ugly going on way down at the bottom.
What's worrying is that it's across, as James was saying, it isn't just in Cambridge where we managed to stop it.
This firm, which appears to be running this platform, this kind of snitching portal or Stasi portal, for making anonymous denunciations, It has been bought by about 50 or 60 universities across the country.
I remember someone saying to me when I was protesting against it in Cambridge, they said, well, look, most universities in England have got it.
Why are you so bothered whether we get it?
As though it was a perfectly normal, acceptable thing that we should easily say.
Oh, good.
So now we have an automated system in place in 60 universities in the UK to circumvent due process.
Brilliant.
To be fair, I think some of them are ones where the only thing you can submit anonymously is a report on which no formal action is taken.
So you just tick some boxes and nothing happens.
But there are some where it goes further.
So it's terrifying that we're at that state in universities in all places.
Yeah.
Yeah, there was a report done last December by Civitas, which is a sort of right-leaning think tank.
a very, very good report on the state of academic freedom in the UK.
And I think they found, if you have a look, 83 out of 140 UK universities were found to have some kind of anonymous reporting system.
So it's very, very widespread.
And yeah, it's a huge issue, very, very concerning.
And I think that, as Araf says, a lot of it may well be well-intentioned, but I think the point is that it starts off processes and procedures, disciplinary procedures, where You know, the end result may not be anything at all.
It may just be a few weeks of having to go and, you know, see the chair of your faculty.
You'll go to see some committee or you'll have to pay trips to HR. But as a colleague of ours says, you know, the process is the punishment.
Yeah, exactly.
There's nothing trivial about any of that.
That's awful.
When that happens to someone, it's so awful.
It just does them in.
It takes its toll.
Yeah.
And it puts a shadow on them.
And it has a chilling effect as well.
When you see it happen to one person in your department or your university, you know, you just watch yourself.
You don't say things like that.
Again, or yourself.
What you publish, what you say in meetings, what you say to students, you just become more and more careful.
And another thing I think is that, I mean, Tocqueville talks about this quite well, which is that one way to tyrannise people is not to control them in big things, but to control them in little things, so that tyranny becomes a habit.
Conformity becomes a habit.
Every time you say something little, some small interactions, you're constantly looking over your shoulder worrying whether to say this or not.
That, Tocqueville said, is the most efficient way to turn people into sheep.
No, it's also sort of, in some sense, the ultimate reach of totalitarianism, because your life is made out of small things.
You know, big things are rare and seldom.
And so having to watch that, well, I have to say to watch your sense of humor, for example.
You know, and fair enough, you can cross the line and an astute person reads the crowd properly.
But you see, great comedians, man, they're right on that edge, right?
They're right at the point where they shouldn't be saying what they're saying.
Well, some of them far past that line on purpose, you know, but everyone knows.
But...
But to chill that is to take almost all the fun, the dynamic fun out of social interactions, that spirit that's a free spirit and that makes all that partly what makes life worth living.
It's terrible that these things are happening.
And it's more terrible that the universities are doing it.
How shameful.
So, okay, so of this, about how many of the 7,000 eligible people voted, do you know?
So it was about 30% of them.
That was a high turnout historically, very high turnout.
And of those, it was, as James says, about 85% was in favour of my amendments.
It varied depending on the amendments.
So one of the amendments, that was the one which was most popular, was in favor of replacing the language of respect with a much more neutral and, I think, liberal language of tolerance.
The other amendments were essentially saying that the university couldn't stop speaker events unless they were illegal.
That's a good rule.
And then another amendment was incorporating some of the language of the Chicago principles, which I think is a good sort of standard, to replace this language which was saying the university could stop things whenever it wanted, and it would pay attention to the welfare of students and the public when people were giving talks.
So now we've got a policy where if you've been invited, you can't be disinvited.
And it doesn't matter.
Unless you're doing something illegal, you can't be disinvited.
So it's been a change.
And indeed, it was actually the people who first celebrated it were the radical feminists.
So it was actually, surprisingly, amongst my allies, you know, there were Christians and there were also radical feminists, you know, because those are both different sides who felt for various reasons And hard scientists as well.
They too.
So it was the hard scientists, radical feminists, lawyers, Christians.
They were all, for various reasons, felt that their speech had been curtailed or was being limited.
And it was the feminists who celebrated it first.
So Sophie, that very brave student that we talked about, organized what she called replatforming events, where she invited a number of You know, very controversial speakers, Kathleen Stock, for instance, and others to come and give talks in Cambridge about topics.
Is that girl still around?
That young woman?
Is she still around Cambridge?
I'm not in touch with her.
I believe she graduated with a first class degree last summer.
Invite her to the talk.
I'm sure that will be possible.
So there were some very brave people amongst the feminists and amongst these other groups.
And that was the first thing that happened afterwards.
And then now we've had another thing, which is your invitation, and we're hoping to invite other controversial speakers.
And not only that, I think in some ways, more importantly, the culture is, I hope, changing.
Day-to-day interactions are changing.
People are more willing to speak out at meetings.
I want to try and get through changes whereby there is, you know, secret voting happens at all meetings, at all levels, not just at these big levels.
Yeah, well, one of the things we're facing, all of us, as a potential danger, is that although in the West, in some ways, we've got our large-scale, uppermost political institutions tilted quite hard against totalitarianism, it seems to be creeping into middle-level bureaucracies continually, right?
And there it's a lot harder to fight.
It's harder to get people interested.
It's more invisible.
All of that.
What do you think?
I'd be interested to know what your view and experience is, because my impression has been of the sort of mid and high level bureaucracy in my university, for instance, is that they're not really ideological.
They're not committed to some sort of mad, hard left ideology or any of that.
Really, they just, you know, They want to respond to concerns from students and others.
They've been given a misleading impression that a lot of people have these concerns.
There are also commercial concerns because, of course, universities charge fees now and they have to care about attracting students and so on.
And so they're just sort of doing what's, you know, they're taking the path of least resistance.
Well, I think part of what's happened is that Well, HR is punching way above its weight.
You know, it was bottom of the totem pole in corporations for years and also in institutions like universities.
And then it latched on to this diversity, inclusivity and equity mantra.
And there is power in that, man.
And so I would say yes to everything you said, except...
For that exception.
And watching corporations jump on this is really quite comical in some sense, because what that is all allied with is not something that has capitalism as its central interest.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah.
You end up...
I think that's absolutely right.
As Araf says, the mid-level administration is typically not particularly ideologically driven.
But as we were discussing earlier, all it takes is two or three dedicated activists to cause a lot of trouble.
What's happening now in the administrative landscape of a lot of these institutions, corporations, universities, and other sectors as well, is that you've effectively got People whose job it is to deliver on equality, diversity, and inclusion initiatives.
That is to say, that's their standing job.
That's their profession.
As it were, the revolution can never come to an end.
You can never reach the sunlit uplands.
There's always got to be the next phobia to confront.
And so it's kind of...
Or you lose your job or your job disappears.
Yes, or you make yourself redundant.
And so there are kind of structural problems there and kind of ratchet effects that are very, very, very difficult to address.
Yeah.
Do you think one way to think about addressing that might be to introduce ratchet effects in the other direction so that, you know, you can have a sort of free speech bureaucracy and you can have, you know, we have legislation in this country, for instance, which is trying to strengthen the duty.
Or at least strengthen their sort of regress for breaking the duty to promote freedom of speech.
And it could be that that gives rise to sort of internal bureaucracies and people will start thinking, well, people who would have thought I can make a career out of promoting equality and diversity might start thinking, well, I can make a career out of promoting free speech.
And they'll be as keen on that as they are, as they were in the other direction.
I don't know whether what your experience in Toronto has been with regards to that, but I wonder.
Well, I can't really say because I haven't really been part of the university in any real sense, I would say, in any profound sense since 2016, since all this blew up around me.
So, you know, I'm out of the loop.
I think that's a worthwhile experiment.
It's like if there is a bureaucracy, and you know, a lot of things get settled with these opponent processes.
That's how we think, you know.
It's almost always one thing against another.
And yeah, I think, and you were going to talk about the potential proposed legislation in the UK that sort of, I understand, emerged out of all this.
So what's happening on the legislative front?
Well, should I just say something about that, Araf?
I mean, it's just worth giving you...
Araf has mentioned it already, and it's worth giving you a little bit of background to that, Jordan.
It was 2019 that there was...
Roundabout then, I think it was May 2019, there was certainly a lot of talk about what had happened to you at Cambridge in policy circles and government circles.
And out of those sorts of discussions, I suspect...
That kind of crystallized a manifesto commitment in the Conservative Party manifesto for the December 2019 UK general election, which had a very strong statement about the importance of the university sector, importance of higher education in a post-Brexit economy, and also signaled some concerns about what was going on there, especially on academic freedom.
So that was remarkable to see.
I still remember when I saw that manifesto claim, I thought that's Absolutely fantastic.
It looks like they're going to be serious about this.
And indeed, they delivered.
They started drafting a very important piece of legislation.
I think it's really probably one of the first of its kind that is that clear and emphatic in the West.
I think the UK is leading the way on this.
The legislation itself, some people, my own view is that it's just a shame that it's had to come to this.
We do not want governments stepping into and regulating the intellectual cultures of the university.
Now, that's not what the legislation does.
It just provides a right for academics or visiting speakers who've been disinvited, academics who've been...
Fired unfairly, a kind of direct line of appeal to an ombudsman, effectively, a so-called academic freedom champion.
So there's a kind of quasi-judicial process there, which would hold, in principle, open up universities to significant financial liability through fines if they were found to have breached their duty to promote academic freedom and protect the rights of visiting speakers and so on.
So I think you, in principle, may have had a A line of appeal to that new post as and when it comes into being.
Now, there's still some problems with the legislation.
For example, I think Araf and I agreed that it doesn't go far enough on protecting academics from institutional interference or politicization of curricular content.
that freedom of for academics, freedom of speech means freedom to teach, freedom to select content and freedom to deliver it as they see fit.
Of course, to some extent, it's a shared institutional enterprise, designing curricula and so on.
But there should be a defeasible presumption that academics can teach what they want to teach and how they want to teach it.
Nevertheless, I mean, I think it will, it will, I think, I hope shift the shift the culture in some of the ways that the equalities legislation shifted the culture 10 years ago.
And even if it may be imperfect when it gets royal assent, nevertheless, I mean, I think that it will make vice chancellors and senior university staff throughout the country sort of sit up and realize that there are consequences to I think it's really appropriate that that initiative came from the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge.
You know, that it can be traced at least to the events, perhaps, the events that took place there.
That's quite something when you step back and think about it.
Well, I mean, you know, in its defense, I had a conversation with Roger Scruton around about that time, who expressed his deep disappointment at the treatment meted out to you.
And he said something quite interesting.
He said when he was in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, setting up underground universities in Warsaw Pact countries, particularly Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, By some kind of strange quirk, although the University of Cambridge wouldn't confer degrees or credentials, it was considered politically too difficult, I think the divinity faculty did have some kind of degree conferring power.
was able to accredit or recognize a diploma in theology.
And that's exactly how Roger got his students, their diplomas, as it were, from the Faculty of Divinity at the university.
So it was, I think from his point of view, it was especially, you know, heartbreaking that things developed as they did in early 2019.
Just to reiterate, I've had no criticisms from colleagues within the faculty.
I think there's great excitement that you're coming over and great gratitude to you that you've shown the kind of graciousness and forbearance to As it were, let bygones be bygones and go ahead with the visit that had been planned back then, which I think you probably wouldn't have been able to do anyway, given all the horrible things that started to happen to you and Tammy health-wise in 2019.
Yeah, well, like I said, I'm absolutely thrilled to be able to do this.
Well, because I seem to be able to do it, and that's something, but also that I have the opportunity again.
I think you'd have to be a pretentious fool not to take an opportunity like that and be grateful for it.
There's mistakes made, you know, and that's that.
But who knows, you know, if the upshot of this all is that...
The protection for freedom of inquiry and speech in the UK is strengthened, and maybe that's a model for the West.
It's like, well, that's a pretty small price to pay, even though it was, you know, it was unpleasant.
So, c'est la vie, you know.
Well, I think I joked to you the other day, Jordan, in an email.
I think that Arif is not going to agree with this, but Providence bears strange fruits.
And those of us with a kind of theological lens on things may see something there, but no, I... You're right.
I think there's hope on the horizon.
There's reason to be much more cheerful than there were two or three years ago.
There are still challenges ahead that I know Arif and I are concerned about.
We're especially worried.
For example, our colleague Kathleen Stock last week has been treated just appallingly by a group of activists for her views that there should be, as it were, female-only spaces.
Posters have gone up calling for her dismissal.
She's had the police round.
She's had to put CCTV up around her home.
It's still a significant problem.
And then there are other more kind of structural issues.
I think it was St.
Andrews a couple of weeks ago, up in Scotland, there was news that incoming undergraduates, incoming students would have to sit, what amounted from, I'm not sure of the details here, but from what I could tell, ideological purity tests that come very close, I think, in fact, cross the line in coercing speech.
That is to say, you had to answer certain Well, do you know that at least 70% of researcher applications for professorships in the UC, California system now statewide, were rejected on the basis of their diversity statement prior to their research CV being reviewed?
More than 70%.
That's extraordinary.
Yes, extraordinary.
You want to kill universities, that's a good way to do it.
It's not just California.
I think you drew my attention a few weeks ago to the Newton Trust, which is a very big and distinguished grant-making research body.
I think now requires almost every application submitted to be accompanied by a statement explaining how the research will have a positive impact on gender equality.
I believe similar things have happened at the grant level federally in Canada.
It's horrible.
It's absolutely, unbelievably bad, that.
So it looks like we're getting to this problem with graduate students and with undergraduates as well, that you can't even access the benefits of university education, university research, and so on, unless you agree with some sort of ideological line.
In the case, as James says, in the case of undergraduates, it's close enough to compelled speech because you have to answer.
You have to pass the test.
And passing the test means getting enough questions right.
I think in some cases it might even mean getting enough questions right.
It's so terrible psychologically, you know.
I mean, there's some good psychological experiments.
So imagine you do this.
You take a group of people and they have an opinion about something, eh?
Then you make them write out, you ask them to write out a counter-opinion that's quite detailed.
And you test their beliefs before they do that, and then a week later.
And what you see is a massive shift in the direction of what they've detailed out.
Partly because they've detailed it out, but also partly to reduce cognitive dissonance, right?
Well, I said this, therefore, well, I'm either a liar or I must believe it.
So, these are not trivial issues.
Like, you know, when students say things to me, and I've heard them say, well, I just write what the professor wants me to say.
It's like, no, you don't just write that.
Because writing is thinking.
And if you don't think that practice becomes part of you, and those words become part of you, that's just because you don't understand practice or words.
And the fact that you have to do that at university, that's like the reverse of education.
It's not bad education, it's anti-education.
Yeah, it is.
It's anti-education.
That's a really excellent point.
I remember William James talks about that as well, the way in which the direction goes the other way.
It's from the things that you do sort of feeds into what you think.
No, they're real.
Well, that's like a basic principle of behavioral therapy.
It's no, no, the action, the action.
You know, the cognitions, so to speak, are secondary, and not always, but of course they're secondary, because, well, the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex, and action is everything, and so abstraction follows in the pathway of action, hopefully.
Like, I mean, we'd be in real trouble if that wasn't the case.
But yeah, it's appalling.
And that universities are doing this.
It makes me ashamed to be part of them.
And then I see students or listen to them.
They've been educated like this.
It's this grating noise that they're emitting that just hurts my soul.
So...
Well, more work to be done, right?
Well, so this is positive.
Everything we've been talking about virtually, movement in a positive direction.
Thank you, too, very much for your commitment to...
Well, I can't thank you, you know, because you did it for all sorts of reasons.
But I admire it.
It's great.
And look what's happened.
And so I hope that...
I hope that my visit is worth all the trouble.
I'm going to do what I can to make it that.
And like I said, I'm so thrilled that I get to do this.
It's so ridiculously wonderful that I can come back there and talk to you guys at Cambridge and go to speak at Oxford.
And that the basic response from people is positive.
Like, if I would wish for something better, I couldn't think of anything better.
It's been a terrific response, and we're so thrilled that you'll be coming, and I think it will be really positive.
You know, the students here, the staff here, everyone is going to learn so much from the discussions that we'll be having, so that's excellent.
God willing, and all that.
Well, thank you very much, gentlemen.
I'm very much looking forward to meeting you.
Dr.
Aukman, thank you for talking to me today.
James, it was a pleasure, as always.
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