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[00:00:00.320 --> 00:00:02.400] Candice Rivera has it all.
[00:00:02.400 --> 00:00:08.880] In just three years, she went from a stay-at-home mom to traveling the world, saving lives, and making millions.
[00:00:08.880 --> 00:00:13.360] Anyone would think Candice's charm life is about as real as Unicorn.
[00:00:13.360 --> 00:00:16.960] But sometimes the truth is even harder to believe than the lies.
[00:00:17.280 --> 00:00:18.000] Not true.
[00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:19.680] There's so many things not true.
[00:00:19.680 --> 00:00:21.440] You got a great lead.
[00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:28.000] I'm Charlie Webster, and this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by Seven Hills.
[00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:31.040] Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.
[00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:36.080] Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments?
[00:00:36.080 --> 00:00:40.160] When the killer's identity is about to be revealed.
[00:00:40.160 --> 00:00:43.840] During that perfect meditation flow.
[00:00:43.840 --> 00:00:47.840] On Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment.
[00:00:47.840 --> 00:00:57.600] That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath.
[00:00:57.600 --> 00:01:04.720] Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts ad-free, included with Prime.
[00:01:08.880 --> 00:01:14.560] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:21.280 --> 00:01:22.240] All right, hey, everybody.
[00:01:22.240 --> 00:01:23.120] It's Michael Shermer.
[00:01:23.120 --> 00:01:24.880] It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:24.880 --> 00:01:27.200] My guest today is Sarah McLaughlin.
[00:01:27.200 --> 00:01:32.880] She is a senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
[00:01:32.880 --> 00:01:34.400] FHIR, our friends at FHIR.
[00:01:34.400 --> 00:01:35.360] We love them.
[00:01:35.360 --> 00:01:53.360] Sarah graduated magna cum laude from Drexel University in 2014 with a BS in political science and has been working for FHIR ever since, defending students and faculty facing censorship in FHIRE's individual rights defense program, where she worked for five years.
[00:01:53.360 --> 00:02:00.120] She's also served as director of FHIRE's targeted advocacy program, where she focused on U.S.
[00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:07.000] universities' relationship with international threats to free speech and art censorship, much of what her new book is about.
[00:02:07.320 --> 00:02:18.120] Her writing about free speech issues, including protest and blasphemy laws, has been featured in publications including Foreign Policy, Artsy, The Huntington Post, and the New York Daily News.
[00:02:18.120 --> 00:02:20.840] We have to expand that, Sarah, to include Skeptic Magazine.
[00:02:20.840 --> 00:02:22.920] Come on, we've got to get you in here.
[00:02:22.920 --> 00:02:32.440] Here's a new book: Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.
[00:02:32.440 --> 00:02:34.040] All right, it's a great read.
[00:02:34.040 --> 00:02:36.120] You know, Sarah, I know a lot about this subject.
[00:02:36.120 --> 00:02:38.120] I knew nothing about all this international stuff.
[00:02:38.120 --> 00:02:41.240] I had no idea what these foreign countries were doing here.
[00:02:41.560 --> 00:02:47.320] Yeah, I think some people have started to catch on to what's happening in other industries.
[00:02:47.720 --> 00:03:01.080] You know, the NBA caught a lot of attention a few years ago with the controversy over Hong Kong tweet, but I don't think people have totally caught on yet to the way that this issue is presenting itself in higher education.
[00:03:01.080 --> 00:03:14.920] And if anything, higher education is kind of the most worrying industry for international censorship to be appearing in because it affects what all of us can see, say, what we learn, how we understand the world around us.
[00:03:14.920 --> 00:03:22.680] So I'm hoping that this book helps people understand a little bit better the stakes of what's happening in higher education.
[00:03:22.680 --> 00:03:26.280] So you graduated from Drexel in 2014.
[00:03:26.280 --> 00:03:27.880] Drexel's in Philadelphia, right?
[00:03:28.280 --> 00:03:29.080] It is, yes.
[00:03:29.320 --> 00:03:30.200] I'm from Philly.
[00:03:30.200 --> 00:03:31.080] I've been in Philly.
[00:03:31.480 --> 00:03:32.040] I see.
[00:03:32.040 --> 00:03:33.000] I see.
[00:03:33.480 --> 00:03:35.880] The city of brotherly love.
[00:03:35.880 --> 00:03:37.400] We're very friendly people.
[00:03:38.280 --> 00:03:40.760] And have you run up the rocky steps?
[00:03:40.760 --> 00:03:42.200] I have indeed.
[00:03:42.920 --> 00:03:44.200] I actually even boxed.
[00:03:44.960 --> 00:03:45.520] Oh my God.
[00:03:45.760 --> 00:03:46.240] You do?
[00:03:46.240 --> 00:03:47.280] You're a boxer?
[00:03:47.280 --> 00:03:47.600] Really?
[00:03:44.360 --> 00:03:50.960] I'm an amateur boxer for fun.
[00:03:51.200 --> 00:03:54.320] I'm not going to be competing soon.
[00:03:54.320 --> 00:03:57.200] You don't want to get CTE later in your life?
[00:03:58.720 --> 00:04:02.320] Ideally, no one will be punching me in the face too often.
[00:04:02.640 --> 00:04:12.240] So 2014, though, so you got out just about when the increase in censoriousness and speech issues really took off, right?
[00:04:12.240 --> 00:04:14.080] Wasn't that around the time?
[00:04:14.400 --> 00:04:20.480] Yeah, that's, I think, around the time when a lot of controversies about protests were happening across campuses in the U.S.
[00:04:20.640 --> 00:04:24.240] I think that started to peak around 2015, 2016.
[00:04:24.560 --> 00:04:33.520] But, you know, what I write about in the book with, you know, with China, with authoritarian countries, that's kind of been brewing in the background for even longer.
[00:04:34.160 --> 00:04:39.440] I think since the 90s, probably, this has started to develop on campuses.
[00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:43.120] And so before we get into all that, just what's your story?
[00:04:43.120 --> 00:04:51.520] How did you get into all this stuff, interested in this, and then become really an activist, or at least working for an activist organization like FHIR?
[00:04:51.840 --> 00:04:54.480] Yeah, I was always interested in civil liberties.
[00:04:54.640 --> 00:04:56.400] It's something I pursued in college.
[00:04:56.400 --> 00:05:00.160] I was actually an intern at FHIR when I was a college student.
[00:05:00.480 --> 00:05:04.720] And here I am, 13 years later.
[00:05:04.720 --> 00:05:07.280] So I really care about this work.
[00:05:07.280 --> 00:05:11.760] I'm really passionate about the First Amendment, free expression.
[00:05:11.760 --> 00:05:19.120] And I've always had a personal interest in just global censorship issues, even outside the United States.
[00:05:19.120 --> 00:05:29.760] And what I was starting to notice was that my interest in free speech in the United States and my interest in free speech abroad were starting to converge a little more than I was expecting them to.
[00:05:30.120 --> 00:05:34.520] And that was kind of, you know, the seed from where this book came from.
[00:05:34.520 --> 00:05:44.360] And go ahead and give us a little commercial for FHIR because it's an important organization and kind of put it in context of you're doing what the ACLU used to do.
[00:05:44.360 --> 00:05:46.280] And then what happened to them?
[00:05:46.760 --> 00:05:49.880] So FHIR has been around for over 25 years now.
[00:05:50.200 --> 00:05:53.800] We're a nonpartisan free speech organization.
[00:05:53.800 --> 00:05:57.080] We're here for any Americans whose rights are being violated.
[00:05:57.080 --> 00:06:01.400] And for most of our history, we were primarily a campus group.
[00:06:01.400 --> 00:06:05.320] We were only working around First Amendment issues on campus.
[00:06:05.480 --> 00:06:13.000] But a few years ago, we thought that there was a need for more people in this space defending First Amendment more broadly.
[00:06:13.000 --> 00:06:19.400] So we expanded off campus three years ago, and we are busier than ever.
[00:06:19.640 --> 00:06:21.640] As it turns out, the U.S.
[00:06:21.640 --> 00:06:24.920] still needs some help when it comes to free speech.
[00:06:24.920 --> 00:06:27.400] And I think of FHIR as politically neutral.
[00:06:27.400 --> 00:06:29.800] Would that be correct as a policy?
[00:06:30.360 --> 00:06:32.520] I would say we're nonpartisan.
[00:06:32.920 --> 00:06:39.880] So, you know, we don't pick and choose who we defend or whose rights we'll help based on whether we like them.
[00:06:40.680 --> 00:06:55.640] And honestly, I don't think we would be able to agree on who we all like anyway, because, you know, a lot of us have very different political views, different, you know, philosophical views, but we, you know, don't let that determine who we help or who we don't help.
[00:06:55.960 --> 00:07:04.120] And there are a lot of people who we've defended who I disagree with, some people who I do agree with, but it doesn't make a difference because the point isn't what we think.
[00:07:04.120 --> 00:07:05.960] The point is defending people's rights.
[00:07:05.960 --> 00:07:06.600] Yeah.
[00:07:06.600 --> 00:07:24.560] Well, I mentioned the ACLU because it seems like, and this is the chatter you see on social media, they've gone fairly woke, if I can put it that way, and have lost some of the perspective on free speech defense, regardless of one's political orientation.
[00:07:24.560 --> 00:07:28.720] Now, it seems like they're defending liberals and not defending conservatives.
[00:07:28.720 --> 00:07:31.600] Something like that is, I guess, a gross generalization.
[00:07:31.600 --> 00:07:47.600] I should remind my listeners that because of our wheelhouse of dealing with creationism and the teaching of evolution, the ACLU was founded in 1925 and they were advertising for a way to kind of get on the cultural map.
[00:07:47.600 --> 00:07:49.840] And they came to the defense of John T.
[00:07:49.840 --> 00:07:56.960] Scopes, who was teaching evolution at a high school biology in Dayton, Tennessee, 100 years ago last month.
[00:07:56.960 --> 00:07:59.520] And, you know, so that sort of put them on the map.
[00:07:59.520 --> 00:08:06.240] And, you know, they famously defended the Nazis at Skokie Nazi marches and all that stuff.
[00:08:06.400 --> 00:08:08.320] But it doesn't seem to me like they do that.
[00:08:08.320 --> 00:08:14.240] Now, anyway, they just, everybody I know that's into this stuff supports fire and has kind of lost confidence in ACLU.
[00:08:14.240 --> 00:08:17.680] So I don't know if you want to comment on that or if you just want to move on.
[00:08:17.840 --> 00:08:27.120] I know the ACLU has been getting a fair degree of criticism, but we're always happy and willing to work with groups that want to partner with us to defend free speech rights.
[00:08:27.120 --> 00:08:31.680] And we still work with ACLU chapters to defend the First Amendment.
[00:08:31.680 --> 00:08:32.320] Yeah.
[00:08:32.320 --> 00:08:32.880] Okay.
[00:08:33.200 --> 00:08:33.600] All right.
[00:08:33.600 --> 00:08:36.800] You write about, well, let's just start with authoritarians.
[00:08:37.280 --> 00:08:38.720] What do you mean by authoritarian?
[00:08:38.720 --> 00:08:39.840] What is that?
[00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:52.640] So I'm referring to governments that use their political might to essentially, silence all critics and all opposition within their countries.
[00:08:52.640 --> 00:08:56.000] And, you know, that's a problem within those countries to start with.
[00:08:56.320 --> 00:09:01.640] But what we're seeing more and more is this concept of transnational repression.
[00:09:01.960 --> 00:09:14.040] For anyone who's unfamiliar with it, transnational repression refers to countries that are authoritarian or that do silence their critics, doing so outside their own borders.
[00:09:14.040 --> 00:09:25.080] So it looks like Russia perhaps using Interpol to try to arrest its critics elsewhere, or the Chinese government threatening its activists in Canada.
[00:09:25.080 --> 00:09:36.200] So it's essentially what we're seeing is, you know, these authoritarians who like to silence their own citizens, trying to expand the borders of exactly who they can reach and silence.
[00:09:37.160 --> 00:09:37.640] Right.
[00:09:37.640 --> 00:09:43.560] So give me an example of that: like China is notoriously authoritarian on its own citizens.
[00:09:43.560 --> 00:09:53.240] What do they do to you talk about Chinese students in the United States, in American universities and colleges, or also even non-Chinese students?
[00:09:53.480 --> 00:09:58.920] So a lot of my work has been with students who are from China who come here to the U.S.
[00:09:59.240 --> 00:10:01.880] and they want to take part in the campus experience.
[00:10:01.880 --> 00:10:04.200] They want to take part in the First Amendment.
[00:10:04.200 --> 00:10:17.400] And so they will join protests, they will join social media, they will write op-eds, and then they'll find that they may have left the Chinese government at home, but the Chinese government hasn't quite left them.
[00:10:17.640 --> 00:10:29.080] And they'll have their family members who have been taken in for questioning by police or by Communist Party secretary or Communist Party groups, local chapters.
[00:10:29.320 --> 00:10:36.040] They will have security agents contact them and warn them that we're watching what you're doing.
[00:10:36.040 --> 00:10:39.400] You should be careful if you don't want to get into trouble.
[00:10:39.400 --> 00:10:46.640] We've even seen students who have returned home after studying in the United States and then found themselves arrested.
[00:10:46.640 --> 00:10:59.040] There was a student who was at the University of Minnesota and he was put in prison for six months for reposting some things about Xi Jinping to an account that I think had a handful of followers.
[00:10:59.440 --> 00:11:01.360] And that's the thing about the Chinese government.
[00:11:01.360 --> 00:11:08.160] I don't think there's a profile or a target that's small or minor enough.
[00:11:08.800 --> 00:11:17.520] You know, sometimes you think countries will really just target their big name critics, like really loud authors and activists or protesters.
[00:11:17.760 --> 00:11:24.960] But I don't think there's anyone who's unknown enough or small enough fish.
[00:11:24.960 --> 00:11:30.160] Anyone can be a target if they're criticizing the Chinese government.
[00:11:30.160 --> 00:11:30.800] Yeah.
[00:11:31.120 --> 00:11:42.960] So for them, speech critical of their president or dictator, whatever he is, Xi Jinping, that would be their equivalent of hate speech.
[00:11:42.960 --> 00:11:49.920] You're harming somebody and therefore censorship is acceptable, something like that.
[00:11:50.400 --> 00:11:53.600] I think it's that you're targeting the state.
[00:11:54.240 --> 00:12:01.680] A lot of times it's put in terms of like a national security issue more than anything else, especially in Hong Kong.
[00:12:01.680 --> 00:12:04.880] China has really been enforcing its authority in Hong Kong.
[00:12:04.880 --> 00:12:15.200] And that's really all been entirely under this concept of national security, sedition, you know, accusations that they're trying to secede from China.
[00:12:15.440 --> 00:12:18.800] And that's, I would say, more of the angle that it takes.
[00:12:19.360 --> 00:12:26.000] You know, you are trying to harm the government, which means you're also trying to harm your fellow citizens.
[00:12:26.880 --> 00:12:35.960] But I mean, I guess would they say, well, look, the far-left progressive woke Americans are censoring speech for the same reasons.
[00:12:36.120 --> 00:12:40.760] It harms somebody, it harms a group, and our group is the state.
[00:12:40.760 --> 00:12:43.960] And so, you know, we have precedence from what you guys are doing.
[00:12:43.960 --> 00:12:45.320] Something like that?
[00:12:45.960 --> 00:12:58.520] Well, you know, something really interesting that I was noticing that was happening on some campuses was that there were some students who were very vocally supportive of the Chinese government.
[00:12:58.520 --> 00:13:13.320] And they were kind of making arguments that, you know, speech that was against the Chinese government, against Xi Jinping, was actually hurtful, biased, offensive, and that was, you know, targeting them on their national origin.
[00:13:13.480 --> 00:13:18.840] So that was something really fascinating to watch unfold over the past decade or so.
[00:13:18.840 --> 00:13:21.080] And we did see it at some campuses.
[00:13:21.080 --> 00:13:25.880] There was a particularly galling example at George Washington University.
[00:13:26.360 --> 00:13:33.560] There, some students posted artwork by a dissident Chinese-Australian artist named Badia Chow.
[00:13:33.560 --> 00:13:37.720] And it was right before the 2022 Winter Olympics.
[00:13:37.720 --> 00:13:43.880] And so it was artwork that was, you know, from far away, it kind of looked like promotional posters.
[00:13:43.880 --> 00:13:55.800] But the closer you got to them, the more you realized it was artwork that was suggesting that human rights abuses were the main theme of the Beijing Olympics.
[00:13:56.040 --> 00:14:01.560] And so some students anonymously put up this artwork at George Washington University.
[00:14:01.560 --> 00:14:04.120] And then a few student groups complained to the universities.
[00:14:04.120 --> 00:14:10.920] They said, you know, it was deeply hurtful, deeply offensive, that it was an insult to students from China to have these flyers up.
[00:14:11.320 --> 00:14:16.720] And to my great shock, the university responded and said, You're right.
[00:14:16.960 --> 00:14:18.880] The president at the time agreed.
[00:14:19.120 --> 00:14:20.160] He took them down.
[00:14:20.160 --> 00:14:27.920] They had the university start investigating to see who put up this artwork that was critical of the Chinese government.
[00:14:28.080 --> 00:14:38.240] And, you know, Fire, myself, even some politicians, you know, immediately weighed in and said, What on earth is George Washington thinking?
[00:14:38.480 --> 00:14:42.480] And fortunately, that criticism pretty quickly got through to the university.
[00:14:42.480 --> 00:14:44.320] They admitted they made a mistake.
[00:14:44.640 --> 00:14:57.920] But this is something that happened that was shocking that a university would even think that that was an appropriate response, that it wasn't just appropriate to say to these students, you know, this is a university.
[00:14:57.920 --> 00:15:00.240] Sometimes you're going to encounter artwork you don't like.
[00:15:00.240 --> 00:15:08.400] It's not the role of the president of the university to use resources to try to find out who put up artwork you don't like.
[00:15:08.640 --> 00:15:26.800] And that's where, you know, there's some carelessness on behalf of university leadership, I think, where they're not considering the ways that students might be taking advantage of these notions of offense and insult to try to demand that government critics be silenced.
[00:15:27.760 --> 00:15:33.520] You talk about censors without borders and ask this question, so I'll ask it for you.
[00:15:33.520 --> 00:15:38.000] Why should I worry about censorship in a country thousands of miles away?
[00:15:38.640 --> 00:15:39.920] It's a good question.
[00:15:40.320 --> 00:15:53.680] And it's, you know, I put it that way because it's something I have encountered a lot from Americans who hear me talking about foreign censorship, and they will say, This is so irrelevant to me.
[00:15:53.680 --> 00:15:56.160] I don't care what's happening in Russia or China.
[00:15:56.960 --> 00:16:05.960] But the thing is, it's a lot more relevant to you than you might want to admit, especially with how deeply interconnected the world is.
[00:16:06.680 --> 00:16:15.320] What I think is an interesting example is Midjourney AI, which is an AI image generating platform or tool.
[00:16:15.560 --> 00:16:23.400] They actually made it their policy that you could not make pictures, satirical images of Xi Jinping.
[00:16:23.720 --> 00:16:26.200] That was the only world leader that was exempted.
[00:16:26.200 --> 00:16:29.720] And that wasn't just for products sold in China, that was globally.
[00:16:29.720 --> 00:16:31.880] That was the policy for everybody.
[00:16:31.880 --> 00:16:36.440] And that's just because they wanted to be able to sell their product in China.
[00:16:36.440 --> 00:16:41.240] And they thought that if they didn't do that, they might not be welcome.
[00:16:41.240 --> 00:16:53.560] And so, you know, with how interconnected we all are, other countries' censorship issues might in some ways become ours, either through tech, either through corporations.
[00:16:53.560 --> 00:17:17.400] And, you know, even if you just look at some pretty basic stuff like what the FBI has been doing lately, there have been a number of arrests in the past few years of individuals who are acting on behalf of the Chinese government or connected to the Iranian government who have tried to violently attack or kill or harm people just for criticizing foreign governments here in the United States.
[00:17:17.400 --> 00:17:18.680] And that's pretty shocking.
[00:17:18.680 --> 00:17:22.600] And so what I want people to understand is that we have the First Amendment.
[00:17:22.600 --> 00:17:23.480] It's fantastic.
[00:17:23.480 --> 00:17:24.520] It's important.
[00:17:24.520 --> 00:17:29.320] But it's not the only thing we need to think about when it comes to defending free speech here.
[00:17:29.640 --> 00:17:30.280] Right.
[00:17:30.360 --> 00:17:32.440] I'm going to give a read an example from your book.
[00:17:32.440 --> 00:17:34.520] I'm going to read several examples because it's hard.
[00:17:34.520 --> 00:17:37.240] Some of these are just hard to believe that they could happen.
[00:17:37.480 --> 00:17:42.520] This is a University of Tennessee professor Anming Hu?
[00:17:42.520 --> 00:17:43.240] Hu.
[00:17:43.240 --> 00:17:44.200] Is that how you pronounce that?
[00:17:44.200 --> 00:17:44.920] Huh H-U?
[00:17:45.280 --> 00:17:46.080] I believe so.
[00:17:46.080 --> 00:17:59.360] Yeah, a naturalized citizen of Canada, who's accused of hiding ties with the Chinese government and was placed on house arrest for over a year, put on trial, which resulted in a mistrial, and suspended from his job without pay.
[00:17:59.360 --> 00:18:00.720] He was ultimately acquitted.
[00:18:00.720 --> 00:18:08.800] Part of the investigation originated from an FBI agent's open source investigation, meaning an online search into who.
[00:18:08.800 --> 00:18:22.160] The agent found a flyer written in Chinese that he roughly translated through Google showing who had a teaching contract with the Beijing University of Technology, who had failed to list this teaching position on one form.
[00:18:22.160 --> 00:18:30.000] The agent later admitted that he showed UT leadership a presentation accusing Hugh of being a member of the Chinese military.
[00:18:30.000 --> 00:18:39.360] But based on my summary translations, my reports, and my online, no, Hugh wasn't involved in the Chinese military, he said at the trial.
[00:18:39.360 --> 00:18:43.760] I lost two years of my life, who, now back on his job, said of the ordeal.
[00:18:44.000 --> 00:18:44.880] That's astonishing.
[00:18:44.880 --> 00:18:46.800] That can happen in America.
[00:18:46.800 --> 00:18:54.480] Yeah, and that's a good example of where our efforts to combat this kind of thing can go wrong.
[00:18:54.800 --> 00:19:00.000] I think there's a lot we need to be doing to recognize this problem, to respond to it.
[00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:11.200] But if we're not careful, that was under what was called the China Initiative, which was kind of killed and is now potentially being brought back.
[00:19:11.200 --> 00:19:13.440] It's unclear exactly where that will end up.
[00:19:13.440 --> 00:19:24.560] But if we're not careful about how we respond to foreign governments' repressive behavior, we might end up accidentally mimicking it ourselves.
[00:19:24.560 --> 00:19:26.640] And that's something we really need to be careful about.
[00:19:26.640 --> 00:19:26.880] Right.
[00:19:26.880 --> 00:19:28.800] It sort of sets a precedent.
[00:19:28.800 --> 00:19:31.000] Yeah, and unfortunate one.
[00:19:29.840 --> 00:19:35.800] I think we're setting a lot of unfortunate precedents these days.
[00:19:36.440 --> 00:19:46.680] Well, because you also write about sensitivity exploitation, appeals to cultural sensitivity to justify or demand censorship of political speech critical of authoritarian governments.
[00:19:46.680 --> 00:19:59.000] So if we allow it to happen here from other authoritarian governments, why shouldn't students or faculty or whatever do the same, you know, kind of reverse the roles there for our own government or the core of the government?
[00:19:59.320 --> 00:20:00.120] Absolutely.
[00:20:00.120 --> 00:20:00.440] Yeah.
[00:20:00.440 --> 00:20:16.280] And, you know, I think there have been some worrying pushes in that direction, especially, you know, in the past few months, we've seen the Trump administration use specific language about targeting anti-American speech.
[00:20:16.280 --> 00:20:19.160] I don't like to see that for my government.
[00:20:19.400 --> 00:20:27.400] But, you know, that term you mentioned, sensitivity, exploitation, you know, that's the kind of thing that I was discussing at George Washington University a few minutes earlier.
[00:20:27.720 --> 00:20:41.880] This idea that you should be able to use cultural politeness and sensitivity to further political censorship that ultimately aids an authoritarian government.
[00:20:42.120 --> 00:20:46.520] There was a really interesting example at McMaster University in Canada.
[00:20:46.840 --> 00:20:58.520] There, students had invited a Uyghur activist to talk about being the target of repression from the Chinese government, how China targets its ethnic and religious minorities.
[00:20:59.000 --> 00:21:01.480] And some students had attempted to get...
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[00:22:29.200 --> 00:22:41.280] The ones that invited her in trouble for violating the university's hate speech policy because they said this woman's speech about the Chinese government was hateful and hurtful and divisive and the university needed to act.
[00:22:41.280 --> 00:22:53.040] And so that's why universities need to be really careful when it comes to how they write their speech policies, how they enforce them, because you should not be writing a policy that's open to that kind of abuse.
[00:22:53.200 --> 00:23:00.000] That's just, it's pretty simple stuff, and that we haven't figured that out already is a little worrying.
[00:23:00.760 --> 00:23:17.240] Yes, well, in that episode with the three university presidents before Congress who were asked, you know, is it okay to call for the elimination of Jews or whatever or anti-Semitic policies?
[00:23:17.240 --> 00:23:19.160] And they said, well, it depends.
[00:23:19.320 --> 00:23:20.920] I guess technically that's correct.
[00:23:21.720 --> 00:23:28.520] If it leads to actual harm or restricting students' physical movement on campus, that sort of thing, then yes, it would.
[00:23:28.520 --> 00:23:37.000] But if it's just calling for the elimination of Jews, I mean, it's hard to believe it was President Gay at Harvard couldn't condemn that.
[00:23:37.320 --> 00:23:41.400] So I guess in our country, what is the policy allowed?
[00:23:41.400 --> 00:23:42.920] I mean, the First Amendment is one thing.
[00:23:42.920 --> 00:23:44.760] That's what the government can and cannot do.
[00:23:44.760 --> 00:23:46.840] But what about universities?
[00:23:47.160 --> 00:23:54.920] Yeah, I think in that hearing you mentioned, there was a lot of things that could have been said and done differently.
[00:23:55.160 --> 00:23:56.920] For the most part, they were right.
[00:23:57.080 --> 00:23:59.640] Harassment is context-specific.
[00:23:59.960 --> 00:24:11.000] There's a difference between saying something that's deeply offensive and then saying it while you perhaps advance on a student to push them out of the way or to physically target them.
[00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:15.400] So, yes, it does actually matter the context that words are said in.
[00:24:15.400 --> 00:24:19.160] That's just always been, you know, a pretty basic matter of law.
[00:24:19.800 --> 00:24:32.280] But I think a lot of people fairly pointed out that it seems like university presidents might pick and choose when they're willing to say certain speech is unacceptable.
[00:24:32.840 --> 00:24:34.840] And were they legally right?
[00:24:34.840 --> 00:24:37.240] Yes, for the most part.
[00:24:37.240 --> 00:24:47.760] But I think there was some anger spilling over at the feeling that universities have not always been as willing to defend offensive and hurtful speech.
[00:24:48.320 --> 00:24:55.120] And to answer your follow-up question, so when it comes to public universities, the First Amendment applies in full force.
[00:24:55.360 --> 00:24:57.600] So universities are bound by the First Amendment.
[00:24:57.600 --> 00:25:00.560] They cannot just censor speech because they don't like it.
[00:25:00.560 --> 00:25:04.400] When it comes to private universities, they are not bound by the First Amendment.
[00:25:04.400 --> 00:25:06.800] They're not government actors in that way.
[00:25:07.120 --> 00:25:30.320] But it still means they should probably stick by First Amendment standards because, you know, they've been battered a bit, but I think we can still come out the other side and say that the First Amendment does a very good job of allowing people to speak their mind without punishment and ensuring that the broadest range of views can be expressed, which is important in higher education.
[00:25:30.320 --> 00:25:35.040] So private universities don't have to abide by First Amendment standards.
[00:25:35.280 --> 00:25:40.800] Perhaps if they've made contractual agreements, they may be held to it.
[00:25:40.800 --> 00:25:46.000] But either way, just as a moral matter, they should because it's the best way to learn.
[00:25:46.000 --> 00:25:46.640] Yeah.
[00:25:46.960 --> 00:25:51.200] Well, I went to Pepperdine University as an undergraduate, which was a Church of Christ school.
[00:25:51.200 --> 00:25:52.640] I was a Christian at the time.
[00:25:52.640 --> 00:25:57.120] Now I'm a fairly prominent atheist, so I don't think they're going to hire me anytime soon.
[00:25:57.120 --> 00:26:06.000] And I guess I wouldn't feel like my speech was being censored if I intended to go on campus and give a talk and say, you know, the resurrection was a bunch of bullshit.
[00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:07.360] It never happened.
[00:26:07.680 --> 00:26:16.960] You know, I mean, they have a kind of a duty to their students to provide a Christian context or environment because that's what they're paying for, right?
[00:26:16.960 --> 00:26:22.400] So that seems different than if I went on a public campus and said something and I was censored.
[00:26:22.720 --> 00:26:24.000] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:26:24.000 --> 00:26:30.000] But, you know, even religious universities, some of them have been very clear that they are not going to defend free expression.
[00:26:30.600 --> 00:26:36.600] And they say outright, you're going to dress this way, you're going to talk this way, and you're going to conduct yourself this way.
[00:26:37.000 --> 00:26:40.920] And when, you know, people have the right to associate freely.
[00:26:40.920 --> 00:26:43.720] They have the right to say, that's the kind of environment I want to be in.
[00:26:44.520 --> 00:26:46.760] That's the way I want to live.
[00:26:47.080 --> 00:26:55.640] But we've seen a lot of religious universities try to play both sides and say, we're the religious university, here's our speech rules.
[00:26:55.640 --> 00:26:58.440] But we also offer free speech protections.
[00:26:58.440 --> 00:27:00.760] We believe in the right to speak.
[00:27:00.760 --> 00:27:02.840] And so sometimes those are going to clash.
[00:27:02.840 --> 00:27:10.760] And we think that if you promised your students and faculty the right to speak their minds, you have to follow through on it.
[00:27:10.760 --> 00:27:17.240] Now, I think they should bring me on campus to say these things, at least more respectfully, because it would help their students think more critically, right?
[00:27:17.240 --> 00:27:21.720] John Stewart Mill, those who only know their own side of the argument don't even know that, right?
[00:27:21.720 --> 00:27:23.960] So you should hear what the atheists have to say.
[00:27:23.960 --> 00:27:36.040] Yeah, there's a long tradition of religious believers learning how to best advocate for their faith by fighting about it with non-believers.
[00:27:36.440 --> 00:27:47.160] The other thing that's happened recently under the Trump administration restricting federal money even to private universities, I think a lot of us had no idea how much money they were getting of federal funds.
[00:27:47.160 --> 00:27:49.480] I mean, just hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.
[00:27:49.480 --> 00:27:50.760] Astonishing.
[00:27:50.760 --> 00:28:01.320] So I guess even a private university, there's so much blending with the federal government and public money, tax money, that, well, there's no clear line there.
[00:28:01.960 --> 00:28:13.560] Yeah, so, you know, granting federal money doesn't give the federal government the authority to violate the First Amendment of these institutions, which unfortunately is still what we're seeing.
[00:28:13.560 --> 00:28:29.200] And, you know, I think people can have, you know, good discussions about how much money those institutions should be receiving, whether they have been, you know, using it appropriately, what has been the benefit to taxpayers.
[00:28:29.200 --> 00:28:35.200] But no matter what, I don't think that the way this is being conducted is remotely appropriate.
[00:28:35.680 --> 00:28:40.720] It's, you know, this isn't the way, the process by which you provoke federal funding.
[00:28:40.720 --> 00:28:54.160] And I really worry about what we're doing to our institutions if we're creating universities that want to do whatever they must to please the federal government.
[00:28:54.160 --> 00:28:55.920] I don't think that's how you produce good knowledge.
[00:28:55.920 --> 00:28:59.120] I don't think that's how you create good research.
[00:28:59.120 --> 00:29:05.680] And I do have a lot of concerns about what the future of higher education is going to look like in the U.S.
[00:29:05.680 --> 00:29:10.400] if universities feel that they must please the government.
[00:29:10.400 --> 00:29:13.120] And that's something I've been talking about in my book.
[00:29:13.760 --> 00:29:21.600] One of the biggest problems is universities feeling like they have to appease the Chinese government or the UAE or Qatar.
[00:29:21.600 --> 00:29:23.840] And it goes to bad places really quickly.
[00:29:23.840 --> 00:29:27.600] And to have that here in the U.S., it's not a good road to go down.
[00:29:27.600 --> 00:29:28.800] Yeah, for sure.
[00:29:29.120 --> 00:29:34.160] So I've spoken at a couple of conferences on this subject in the last year.
[00:29:34.160 --> 00:29:47.360] And I had Chris Rufo on the podcast as well to have this little debate about what's the right approach to correct the universities kind of going off the rails of political correctness and wokeness and all that stuff.
[00:29:47.360 --> 00:29:52.720] And, you know, as you know, Rufo sort of feels like, well, my argument was it's a battle of ideas.
[00:29:52.720 --> 00:29:55.680] And so we can chase out bad speech with good speech.
[00:29:56.000 --> 00:30:03.720] And his response to that, not just to me, but to a lot of people, like Steve Pinker, for example, is that you guys lost that battle.
[00:29:59.920 --> 00:30:04.440] It's over.
[00:30:04.920 --> 00:30:11.080] The wokeness people have won in the academy, and the only way we're going to correct it is through government intervention.
[00:30:11.400 --> 00:30:12.840] Your thoughts?
[00:30:14.120 --> 00:30:24.920] Well, as a starting principle, I do not believe you are going to censor your way to academic freedom or to free expression or to diversity of opinion.
[00:30:24.920 --> 00:30:26.600] I think that's pretty basic.
[00:30:26.600 --> 00:30:34.760] And I am not comfortable with people suggesting that we trade some kind of censorship for another.
[00:30:34.760 --> 00:30:36.440] That's not the way it works.
[00:30:36.440 --> 00:30:40.120] We are not going to censor our way out of these problems.
[00:30:40.360 --> 00:30:51.160] And so, you know, there are a lot of reforms that need to happen, of course, but there are other ways to approach them than by empowering the federal government to violate our rights.
[00:30:51.800 --> 00:31:01.400] So I feel that we just need to take that option off the table because it's not legally appropriate and it's not morally appropriate.
[00:31:01.720 --> 00:31:07.720] Well, I guess Rufo and people on that side would say, well, they shouldn't be getting federal money in the first place.
[00:31:07.720 --> 00:31:16.440] And this was similar to the argument they made when I brought up his and Ron DeSantis' attack on Disney in Florida.
[00:31:16.600 --> 00:31:20.520] You know, that just seems like, first, it seems like a very unconservative thing to do.
[00:31:20.520 --> 00:31:22.280] You know, we're going after big corporations.
[00:31:22.280 --> 00:31:25.800] I thought conservatives like big corporations and the free market.
[00:31:25.800 --> 00:31:27.400] You should be free, right?
[00:31:27.720 --> 00:31:35.800] But their response to that was, well, Disney, you know, had all these tax-free breaks on the land that they bought there.
[00:31:35.800 --> 00:31:43.320] And the state of Florida gave them all kinds of tax breaks and other favors to get them there in the first place and keep them there.
[00:31:43.320 --> 00:31:44.680] It's a win-win for everybody.
[00:31:44.960 --> 00:31:52.560] But now, what DeSantis is doing is just pulling the favors they were getting that they shouldn't have been getting in the first place.
[00:31:52.560 --> 00:31:53.360] Okay.
[00:31:54.000 --> 00:31:59.760] Yeah, so again, we're kind of going back to the funding of universities question.
[00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:03.120] There are two separate questions: is this funding a good idea?
[00:32:03.120 --> 00:32:05.040] Is this tax break a good idea?
[00:32:05.040 --> 00:32:09.200] And then, is revoking it based on expression we don't like a good idea?
[00:32:09.600 --> 00:32:11.440] I don't have perfect answers to the first one.
[00:32:11.440 --> 00:32:13.680] I think that's a rich area of discussion.
[00:32:13.680 --> 00:32:15.840] But for the second one, no.
[00:32:16.800 --> 00:32:21.600] I mean, there's only so much you can expect a First Amendment believer to say.
[00:32:21.600 --> 00:32:32.480] But, you know, the government revoking opportunities or creating punishments on the basis of protected expression is a problem.
[00:32:32.480 --> 00:32:33.680] It's not okay.
[00:32:34.640 --> 00:32:38.560] You know, people may like the way it's being used now.
[00:32:38.560 --> 00:32:40.720] You might not like the president four years from now.
[00:32:40.720 --> 00:32:43.280] You might not like the governor that follows.
[00:32:43.280 --> 00:32:50.240] Eventually, you're going to see these things that you're celebrating against your political enemies used against your political allies.
[00:32:50.720 --> 00:32:55.520] This is why we need principled approaches to First Amendment and free expression issues.
[00:32:55.840 --> 00:32:57.920] You know, our rights are a shared thing.
[00:32:58.160 --> 00:33:02.560] You're not, you know, cutting out a slice and leaving the rest.
[00:33:02.560 --> 00:33:05.600] You're cutting out a slight that's ultimately going to hurt you too.
[00:33:05.840 --> 00:33:10.960] May not seem that way right now, but these are why we need principles.
[00:33:10.960 --> 00:33:17.520] So political expediency and partisanship do not harm all of our rights in the long run.
[00:33:17.520 --> 00:33:17.920] Yeah.
[00:33:18.240 --> 00:33:22.480] That was the point that Megan Kelly made during that whole episode.
[00:33:22.480 --> 00:33:29.440] Like, this is not the kind of precedence we want to have because what if the next governor of Florida is a Democrat?
[00:33:29.440 --> 00:33:35.800] And we've empowered them to withhold money and favors for corporations they don't like?
[00:33:36.120 --> 00:33:38.840] Yeah, it's honestly pretty simple stuff.
[00:33:38.840 --> 00:33:41.960] Imagine this power in the hands of your political enemies.
[00:33:41.960 --> 00:33:44.040] Do you still think it's a good idea?
[00:33:44.360 --> 00:33:53.080] I don't think this is a very complicated question once you think just a little bit past the immediate political question.
[00:33:53.080 --> 00:33:56.760] Once you think six months from now, one year from now.
[00:33:57.480 --> 00:34:05.320] And I hope that people could come to this conclusion, not just because it suits them and it's the good logical thing.
[00:34:05.320 --> 00:34:07.560] I also think it's the moral answer, too.
[00:34:07.560 --> 00:34:13.000] I don't think it's something we should celebrate or pursue to violate other people's rights.
[00:34:13.000 --> 00:34:17.080] I don't think that's something we should be proud of or want to crow about.
[00:34:17.080 --> 00:34:17.640] Yeah.
[00:34:18.440 --> 00:34:24.120] Parenthetically, I wanted to ask you because I've asked every First Amendment person I encounter.
[00:34:24.120 --> 00:34:29.720] January 6th, did Trump's speech rise to the level of incitement of violence or no?
[00:34:30.680 --> 00:34:36.680] Honestly, I have not done much incitement work.
[00:34:36.680 --> 00:34:40.600] So I'm going to direct you to my lawyer colleagues on that question.
[00:34:41.320 --> 00:34:41.960] Okay.
[00:34:41.960 --> 00:34:44.120] Most of the people I talk to say no.
[00:34:44.440 --> 00:34:46.760] It's not, it didn't rise to that level.
[00:34:46.760 --> 00:34:47.880] Close, but not quite.
[00:34:47.880 --> 00:34:53.240] I mean, if you actually put it in court as a trial, you know, it probably wouldn't pass.
[00:34:53.560 --> 00:34:54.040] Yeah.
[00:34:54.280 --> 00:34:54.600] All right.
[00:34:54.600 --> 00:34:55.880] So you talked about China a little bit.
[00:34:55.880 --> 00:34:58.760] Let's talk about the UAE and Qatar and all that.
[00:34:58.760 --> 00:35:04.920] How much money is coming into the United States through the Academy, through these countries, and what are they doing with that?
[00:35:05.240 --> 00:35:09.160] So, there's the question: how much is coming in, and how much do we know is coming in?
[00:35:09.320 --> 00:35:10.520] Okay, all right.
[00:35:11.080 --> 00:35:17.280] Yeah, so one of the bigger problems is that for years there has just been billions in unreported funds.
[00:35:17.600 --> 00:35:28.880] And it's that lack of transparency does not suggest positive things about these relationships between universities and the Gulf states.
[00:35:29.200 --> 00:35:32.320] So, but to answer your broad question, it's a lot of money.
[00:35:32.320 --> 00:35:37.920] We might not know exactly how much, but it's very large amounts in the billions.
[00:35:38.400 --> 00:35:43.680] And, you know, the reason why this is worrying is, again, I think it's pretty simple.
[00:35:43.680 --> 00:35:51.040] If someone is giving you a lot of money, you're going to feel like you need to ensure that you can continue to get that money.
[00:35:51.040 --> 00:36:03.760] And it's going to create incentives for you to perhaps not, maybe, maybe not hold that event, maybe not issue that statement, maybe not invite that speaker.
[00:36:03.760 --> 00:36:08.480] Because is it really worth upsetting this business partner?
[00:36:08.480 --> 00:36:28.400] And so that's what one of the primary things I worry about with these ties when it comes to the Gulf states, when it comes to China, that universities have an incentive that they might not even be fully aware that they have, that they don't want to offend someone that's a good financial partner to them.
[00:36:28.400 --> 00:36:44.880] And there have been a few really troubling incidents that have come out of American satellite campuses in the region that I write about in the book, and that I think universities still need to do some accounting for, specifically when it comes to Qatar.
[00:36:45.200 --> 00:36:57.360] It sure seems like an obvious conflict of interest, you know, going back to academic research on smoking and lung cancer funded by the tobacco companies.
[00:36:57.360 --> 00:36:58.240] Like, really?
[00:36:59.880 --> 00:37:07.640] I mean, it's pretty obvious what's going on here, which is why you have to declare any financial interest in your support of your research and so on.
[00:37:07.640 --> 00:37:14.680] How is this possible that that's not being done now by universities who are on the front line of calling that out?
[00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:21.000] Yeah, and I think that's, you know, been the ultimate issue here: the lack of transparency.
[00:37:21.000 --> 00:37:28.520] And the flip side is that universities have been opening these satellite campuses in these countries.
[00:37:28.840 --> 00:37:40.520] They're now starting in Saudi Arabia, which I don't really think I need to explain why that might worry a free speech advocate to see a campus opening up in Saudi Arabia.
[00:37:40.840 --> 00:37:45.160] But they have made some promises about what these campuses are going to do.
[00:37:45.480 --> 00:37:50.840] You know, they're going to offer the same speech protections on these satellite campuses.
[00:37:50.840 --> 00:37:56.280] It's going to be the same environment, but in a different place, different opportunities and resources.
[00:37:56.280 --> 00:37:58.360] But that's clearly not the case.
[00:37:59.320 --> 00:38:12.040] And it seems a little silly that universities are pretending that they're going to offer the same rights and protections in countries that imprison people for blasphemy that they're going to have in the United States.
[00:38:12.040 --> 00:38:14.920] But they really have just not been honest about it.
[00:38:14.920 --> 00:38:27.720] And that's how we ended up with instance like Georgetown censoring a debate about blasphemy at its campus in Qatar because, you know, they made plenty of lofty promises about free expression on their campus.
[00:38:27.720 --> 00:38:36.040] And then eventually they were kind of forced to admit, I believe the exact words were, in accordance with Qatari law.
[00:38:37.000 --> 00:38:38.200] Expand on that a little bit more.
[00:38:38.360 --> 00:38:39.720] What was the incident?
[00:38:39.720 --> 00:38:44.760] Yeah, so a few years ago, there was a student debate group that was trying to host an event.
[00:38:45.440 --> 00:38:52.640] It was when a song came out about, I think it was, I believe, God is a woman, something like that, somewhere in that vein.
[00:38:52.880 --> 00:38:56.880] And so students were going to host a debate about female depictions of God.
[00:38:57.200 --> 00:39:03.920] They put up flyers, they were planning this event, and then it went viral on Twitter at the time.
[00:39:03.920 --> 00:39:09.520] And there was a hashtag, if I recall correctly, it was Georgetown Insults God.
[00:39:09.840 --> 00:39:21.760] And so the idea was that by allowing this debate to happen on their Qatari campus, they were offending local sensitivities, the government, and God.
[00:39:22.080 --> 00:39:24.240] And so Georgetown canceled it.
[00:39:24.240 --> 00:39:33.440] And they said, as universities like to do when they cancel a controversial event, they said, you know, there's a security issue, they didn't plan it properly.
[00:39:33.680 --> 00:39:43.280] And then after they were kind of poked and prodded, they admitted, and it does not, it must be in accordance with Qatari laws.
[00:39:43.280 --> 00:39:45.040] Qatar has a blasphemy law.
[00:39:45.040 --> 00:39:47.920] And so, you know, this is the kind of thing universities have been doing.
[00:39:47.920 --> 00:39:52.560] They've been pursuing global engagement, which, to be clear, is not inherently a bad thing.
[00:39:52.560 --> 00:39:57.760] There's a lot we can learn from the rest of the world and from having partnerships and having ties.
[00:39:57.760 --> 00:40:03.200] But we have to do it clear-eyed about what the restrictions are actually going to be.
[00:40:03.200 --> 00:40:07.920] And we have to be honest with our students about what kind of environment they're going to be in.
[00:40:08.560 --> 00:40:16.960] Saying that you're on a campus that's open to freedom of expression and then saying, well, you can't talk about God.
[00:40:16.960 --> 00:40:17.280] Right.
[00:40:17.360 --> 00:40:19.760] That's kind of a pretty big exception.
[00:40:19.760 --> 00:40:20.400] Yeah.
[00:40:20.720 --> 00:40:23.360] Yeah, you have some stunning examples here.
[00:40:23.360 --> 00:40:24.880] I'll read another one.
[00:40:26.160 --> 00:40:27.600] Let's see here.
[00:40:27.600 --> 00:40:30.040] This is in your How Did We Get Here chapter.
[00:40:29.600 --> 00:40:34.200] Imagine you're a professor hired to teach a class on global art history.
[00:40:34.520 --> 00:40:47.400] So you do exactly that, offering a section on Islamic art throughout history and showing a famous and respectful medieval Islamic painting of the Prophet Muhammad with the angel Gabriel, one intended and commissioned to honor Islam.
[00:40:47.400 --> 00:41:02.120] Knowing that depictions of the prophet are today considered inappropriate or blasphemous by many followers of Islam, you take care to sufficiently and repeatedly warn students that the image will be shown so that students can choose to avoid seeing it if they wish.
[00:41:02.120 --> 00:41:08.120] You teach material necessary to the subject, but in a way that would still respect individual students' sensibilities.
[00:41:08.120 --> 00:41:12.440] For Erica Lopez Pratter, it's Candace Rivera has it all.
[00:41:12.440 --> 00:41:18.920] In just three years, she went from stay-at-home mom to traveling the world, saving lives and making millions.
[00:41:18.920 --> 00:41:23.480] Anyone would think Candace's charm life is about as real as Unicorn's.
[00:41:23.480 --> 00:41:27.000] But sometimes the truth is even harder to believe than the lies.
[00:41:27.320 --> 00:41:28.120] Not true.
[00:41:28.120 --> 00:41:29.800] There's so many things not true.
[00:41:29.800 --> 00:41:31.480] You got a great lead.
[00:41:31.800 --> 00:41:38.040] I'm Charlie Webster, and this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by Seven Hills.
[00:41:38.040 --> 00:41:40.840] Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.
[00:41:41.480 --> 00:41:44.200] It seemed that doing her job is how she lost it.
[00:41:44.200 --> 00:41:46.360] All right, what happened to her?
[00:41:46.920 --> 00:42:00.360] So this was actually, so you know, in this chapter, I discuss the factors that have gotten us to a place where, you know, a university might consider silencing a critic of the Chinese government because it's hurtful to some students.
[00:42:00.520 --> 00:42:04.280] And so that's an example from Hamlin University a few years ago.
[00:42:04.280 --> 00:42:07.480] That was just kind of hard to believe.
[00:42:07.480 --> 00:42:10.040] That just happened in the United States.
[00:42:10.200 --> 00:42:12.280] But yes, this is a private university.
[00:42:12.280 --> 00:42:22.160] An instructor was very respectfully teaching a course about this artwork, and she even told students it was going to be shown.
[00:42:22.800 --> 00:42:31.760] And this is artwork that it's not universally agreed upon within Islam that this artwork isn't appropriate for believers to look upon in the first place.
[00:42:31.760 --> 00:42:40.720] I'm sure many believers do think that you can't depict or look at depictions of Muhammad, but that's not the universal view of Islam.
[00:42:40.720 --> 00:42:43.280] There's a lot of debate and discussion within Islam.
[00:42:43.280 --> 00:42:46.320] And even if it were, it's a university.
[00:42:46.560 --> 00:42:51.760] Academics have to be able to teach freely and openly.
[00:42:52.160 --> 00:43:02.000] And so to have Hamlin act this way, this is the kind of sensitivities that we're talking about that are easy to be exploited.
[00:43:02.320 --> 00:43:08.560] And Hamlin got a lot of criticism for the way it conducted itself there.
[00:43:08.880 --> 00:43:26.560] But the university was really defending itself and arguing that this is just another way to perceive academic freedom of taking in the sensitivities of the classroom to have that moderate how an instructor teaches.
[00:43:26.560 --> 00:43:30.800] But it's not like she was showing a South Park episode making fun of the Prophet Muhammad, right?
[00:43:30.800 --> 00:43:32.560] No, she's not.
[00:43:32.880 --> 00:43:33.840] Here's another one.
[00:43:34.240 --> 00:43:46.640] This is an undergraduate student named Naomi Matthew approached staff members at Truman State, starting a campus group associated with PETA, people for the ethical treatment of animals.
[00:43:46.640 --> 00:43:56.320] Concerned about the possibility of emotional risk engendered by hostile confrontations over the group message, Truman State denied the request.
[00:43:56.320 --> 00:43:57.040] Consider that.
[00:43:57.040 --> 00:44:04.760] Truman State chose to violate a student's rights rather than risk the mere possibility that her speech could result in hurt feelings.
[00:43:59.840 --> 00:44:05.640] Not done yet.
[00:44:05.880 --> 00:44:13.720] Administrators also fretted over the reputational risk for the university to have its students associated with PETA.
[00:44:13.720 --> 00:44:19.640] Matthew responded by using public record laws to find out who else's rights had been violated.
[00:44:19.640 --> 00:44:22.920] In cases like these, lightning rarely strikes just once.
[00:44:22.920 --> 00:44:25.000] Go ahead and expand on that.
[00:44:25.320 --> 00:44:36.600] Yeah, and so that's again, you know, part of that is, you know, the emotional harm aspect, but there's also the reputational risk, which I go into more in that chapter, which I find really interesting.
[00:44:36.920 --> 00:44:49.080] The ways that universities are becoming more than anything else, a brand in some ways, and that what's most important to them is protection of the brand, protection of the reputation.
[00:44:49.080 --> 00:44:51.800] And you know what's sometimes bad for a reputation?
[00:44:52.040 --> 00:44:58.520] Unpopular speakers who cause a lot of anger on social media.
[00:44:58.520 --> 00:45:04.760] And so I think that's part of the problem and part of the reason why universities have been acting this way.
[00:45:04.760 --> 00:45:17.320] It's because they see themselves more as financial institutions, as brands, as reputational groups rather than academic institutions.
[00:45:17.320 --> 00:45:23.880] And so they are willing to try to censor speech if it is, you know, quote unquote bad for the brand.
[00:45:24.520 --> 00:45:31.160] And, you know, part of it is, you know, just in the ways that universities are staffed.
[00:45:31.480 --> 00:45:42.840] You know, you can look at the rates of administrative staff versus tenured faculty versus, you know, people who are on short-term teaching contracts.
[00:45:43.240 --> 00:45:52.880] And the numbers are not very friendly when it comes to who's going to care about academic freedom in that group and who's going to want to protect the university's financial interests.
[00:45:52.880 --> 00:45:54.000] Yeah, here's the numbers you had.
[00:45:54.000 --> 00:46:02.640] Over the last 40 years, the number of full-time faculty at colleges and universities has grown by 50%, in line with increases in student enrollment.
[00:46:02.640 --> 00:46:13.440] But in the same period, the number of administrators has risen by 85%, and the number of staffers required to help the administrators has jumped by a whopping 240%.
[00:46:13.840 --> 00:46:15.760] It's like, what are these people doing?
[00:46:15.760 --> 00:46:24.320] I mean, and how did, when I was in college in the 70s, how did we survive getting an education without all those administrators and their help?
[00:46:24.640 --> 00:46:27.680] Well, yeah, we're getting very bureaucratic universities.
[00:46:27.680 --> 00:46:34.080] And I think it speaks to the shifting priorities because that's ultimately what this is about.
[00:46:34.240 --> 00:46:44.960] Universities choosing financial gain, choosing reputational management over their values and over their commitments to pretty basic stuff like academic freedom and free expression.
[00:46:44.960 --> 00:46:49.600] And it's why we're in a problem when it comes to foreign authoritarianism.
[00:46:49.600 --> 00:46:52.720] I think it's why we're having problems here in the U.S.
[00:46:53.280 --> 00:46:56.880] You know, even if you remove the question of foreign censorship.
[00:46:56.880 --> 00:47:01.120] So I think it's at the root of a good number of our problems.
[00:47:01.360 --> 00:47:19.120] And another thing I talk about in that chapter is other political censorship that I think is taking place in legislatures and state houses that I really worry is making higher education more ripe for abuse when it comes to political censorship.
[00:47:19.120 --> 00:47:40.120] Because if you have, you know, state legislators creating laws that violate the First Amendment because they want to stop, you know, whatever they call anti-woke speech in classrooms, we keep just opening the door wider and wider to different kinds of political speech that we're going to be censoring in higher ed.
[00:47:40.120 --> 00:47:43.640] And that door is just going to keep opening further.
[00:47:43.640 --> 00:47:46.200] You can't just crack it open a little.
[00:47:46.200 --> 00:47:49.560] Here's one more example from Indiana University.
[00:47:49.560 --> 00:47:55.240] Janitor and student Keith Sampson was charged with racial harassment in 2007.
[00:47:55.240 --> 00:48:06.120] The charges came after he was found reading is the book called Notre Dame versus the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan during one of his breaks.
[00:48:06.120 --> 00:48:16.600] The book is, of course, not an endorsement of the KKK, as anyone who bothered to read to the end of the book's title, again, how they defeated the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:48:17.240 --> 00:48:25.400] Instead, the book tells the story of a group of Notre Dame students who got in an altercation with members of the white supremacist group in South Bend, Indiana.
[00:48:25.400 --> 00:48:26.520] But that did not matter.
[00:48:26.520 --> 00:48:48.600] In response to a handful of complaints, the university's affirmative action office launched an investigation and quickly found Sampson guilty of racial harassment, writing that, quote, he used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black coworkers.
[00:48:48.760 --> 00:48:57.000] So, mind you, he wasn't giving a lecture, he wasn't in class, he wasn't a professor, he's a janitor reading a book over in the corner somewhere.
[00:48:57.000 --> 00:48:59.720] I mean, that's astonishing in America.
[00:48:59.720 --> 00:49:02.600] Yeah, that was one of the earlier cases for fire.
[00:49:02.600 --> 00:49:11.960] That was in the earlier days, but it's just shocking that these things could have even happened at all.
[00:49:12.280 --> 00:49:20.560] Well, I guess the larger thread here is that universities have shifted their focus from the search for truth to social justice.
[00:49:21.760 --> 00:49:24.960] Yeah, I think there's a number of different problems.
[00:49:24.960 --> 00:49:35.440] And it's whatever the priorities have become, I don't think that academic freedom and free expression are the primary goals anymore.
[00:49:35.440 --> 00:49:37.920] And I think you can see that in a lot of different ways.
[00:49:38.640 --> 00:49:47.280] And, you know, the ways that that has kind of grown in recent years has shifted from time to time.
[00:49:47.280 --> 00:50:00.400] But either way, I don't think those really basic values that are the underlying support of higher education, we're seeing them just shift away.
[00:50:00.400 --> 00:50:10.320] And I don't know what higher education is going to look like when we keep giving in to political and philosophical violations of academic freedom.
[00:50:10.320 --> 00:50:23.600] And yet they're not consistent about this because if you bring up the Uyghurs, if the university has Chinese money, then all of a sudden they're not interested in that as a social justice issue.
[00:50:23.920 --> 00:50:53.360] Yeah, well, there's, you know, one thing that I thought was particularly galling that I talk about in the book is when a Harvard Law vice dean essentially made a Chinese dissident who was on the campus, who was part of a temporary program at the school, he made him essentially cancel an event about human rights in China because it was scheduled to take place while the president of Harvard was going to be in China meeting Xi Jinping.
[00:50:53.760 --> 00:50:57.120] And this dean said that it would embarrass the university.
[00:50:57.760 --> 00:50:59.440] So it's shocking.
[00:50:59.440 --> 00:51:02.840] It's hard to imagine that kind of thing happening.
[00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:10.040] But this is what happens when you put other interests ahead of really basic expressive values.
[00:51:10.040 --> 00:51:23.480] When you say protecting our university brand, protecting our relationship to Chinese partners matters more than scholars on our campus being willing to speak their minds about some of the most pressing political issues of the day.
[00:51:23.800 --> 00:51:28.200] Why do you think that shift has happened over the last several decades?
[00:51:28.520 --> 00:51:30.360] I think there's a lot of different reasons.
[00:51:30.680 --> 00:51:48.040] So as I mentioned earlier, I think the growth of the campus administration, the bureaucracy, the people who are most interested in making their universities financially wealthy, global institutions, that's a big part of it.
[00:51:48.680 --> 00:51:55.080] If you are seeking new opportunities and funding sources, you're eventually probably going to look overseas.
[00:51:55.320 --> 00:51:57.160] So that's a big part of it.
[00:51:57.160 --> 00:52:02.520] Another part of it that's really been a challenge is the presence of international students.
[00:52:02.520 --> 00:52:14.200] And this isn't a criticism of international students, but when you have hundreds of thousands of students from China coming to the United States, universities really want to preserve that as a funding source.
[00:52:14.200 --> 00:52:18.360] They want to make sure that they can continue to get access to those students.
[00:52:18.360 --> 00:52:26.600] And the best way to continue making sure that you have access to those students is by not offending the Chinese government.
[00:52:26.840 --> 00:52:38.440] And so we actually saw, it's only happened a couple times to my knowledge, but the Chinese government has derecognized at least one university's diploma because they invited the Dalai Lama.
[00:52:38.440 --> 00:52:41.480] And so that means Chinese students were not going to go to that university.
[00:52:41.720 --> 00:52:48.080] And so, you know, I think these kinds of punishments are rare, but universities know they can happen.
[00:52:48.080 --> 00:53:03.200] And so you're not going to risk losing major funding sources, whether it's grants, whether it's ties with other universities in China or businesses in China or access to students.
[00:53:03.200 --> 00:53:08.400] You're not going to risk, you know, all that money if you don't have to.
[00:53:08.640 --> 00:53:16.800] And I think for most people, you know, it's not going to seem worth it to say, let's invite this Chinese dissident.
[00:53:16.800 --> 00:53:23.200] Let's make sure we're hosting events and scholarship if it's going to risk us a lot of money.
[00:53:23.200 --> 00:53:25.520] And it's a shame, but I think that's where we are.
[00:53:25.520 --> 00:53:27.200] How are they getting Chinese money?
[00:53:27.200 --> 00:53:32.560] Just students, Chinese students paying the higher tuition out of state tuition?
[00:53:32.560 --> 00:53:36.000] Or are there other sources funding professorships and things like that?
[00:53:36.000 --> 00:53:37.280] Yeah, so there's other sources.
[00:53:37.280 --> 00:53:41.120] There's research grants, there's joint institutes.
[00:53:41.120 --> 00:53:42.800] That's a pretty popular method.
[00:53:43.120 --> 00:53:46.960] Universities partnering with a university in China.
[00:53:47.280 --> 00:53:51.440] And then usually there's some financial exchange that takes place.
[00:53:51.680 --> 00:54:03.120] Kane University, which is a public university in New Jersey, they're, to my knowledge, the first public university to open a satellite campus in China, but they received a lot of money for that institute.
[00:54:03.440 --> 00:54:05.600] And so that's a big part of it.
[00:54:06.480 --> 00:54:17.200] There's also partnerships with Chinese tech companies that tend to be very wealthy and able to provide universities with large grants.
[00:54:17.440 --> 00:54:24.640] And there's also, this has essentially died out because of media pressure, political pressure.
[00:54:24.640 --> 00:54:41.720] But for a time, universities were getting probably grants from like $200,000 to $300,000 range from Confucius Institutes, which were that's a Chinese government-run program that essentially matches an American university with a Chinese university.
[00:54:42.120 --> 00:54:49.560] And there's a little bit of money that passes between them, but often teaching materials, educators, staff.
[00:54:49.560 --> 00:54:59.880] And so in the 2010s, that was a pretty prevalent way for the Chinese government to create partnerships with American universities.
[00:54:59.880 --> 00:55:15.480] But I think there's less than a dozen, probably a handful left, because people were rightfully asking some questions about whether it was appropriate for universities to be having these kinds of ties with the Chinese government.
[00:55:15.480 --> 00:55:16.200] Should the U.S.
[00:55:16.200 --> 00:55:19.400] government be concerned about those kinds of ties?
[00:55:19.400 --> 00:55:23.000] I mean, is that a moral panic or is there something to it?
[00:55:23.960 --> 00:55:29.320] In some ways, in some ways, the criticism could be exaggerated.
[00:55:29.640 --> 00:55:40.920] You know, when you look and you find how many proven incidents of definitive censorship originating from Confucius Institutes, it did happen from time to time.
[00:55:40.920 --> 00:55:48.760] It was not, I don't think most institutes were, you know, a censorship powerhouse on the campus.
[00:55:49.640 --> 00:56:06.840] But ultimately, what you have is a partnership where you might make other decisions that are never asked for you by the Chinese government or by the Confucius Institute, but you might say, I want to make sure I preserve this relationship.
[00:56:06.840 --> 00:56:10.200] So I'm going to not invite the Dalai Lama to speak.
[00:56:10.520 --> 00:56:17.360] And, you know, Confucius Institutes have objected before when universities have invited the Dalai Lama.
[00:56:17.360 --> 00:56:24.960] I think it was 2009, NC State disinvited the Dalai Lama after the Confucius Institute objected.
[00:56:25.360 --> 00:56:28.160] And so, you know, those things are rare, but they happen.
[00:56:28.480 --> 00:56:42.400] But what we don't have as good of a sense of is what decisions universities have made that have never been ordered or asked of them, but they have just voluntarily followed through on their own side to make sure they protect those ties.
[00:56:42.400 --> 00:56:46.160] And that's what's really difficult to track and really difficult to get a sense of.
[00:56:46.480 --> 00:56:48.960] So, you know, that's part of the risk.
[00:56:48.960 --> 00:56:55.440] And another part of it is just what it means for, I think, dissident international students from China.
[00:56:55.440 --> 00:57:09.760] If you're walking around on campus and you see a Confucius Institute, you might think my university is not going to protect me if I feel like the Chinese government is censoring me because, look, they gave them a hall, an office down the hall.
[00:57:09.760 --> 00:57:19.520] So, you know, it's not just about what those institutes themselves have done, but it's about what it says about the university's priorities and its decision making.
[00:57:19.520 --> 00:57:20.160] Yeah.
[00:57:20.480 --> 00:57:26.560] Well, I mean, you don't have to invite the Dalai Lama, but if you have already, then, you know, follow through, right?
[00:57:26.560 --> 00:57:30.160] So that's the problem with the disinvitation issue.
[00:57:30.320 --> 00:57:39.200] I remember when Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley, and, you know, all hell broke loose before he even got into the auditorium.
[00:57:39.200 --> 00:57:42.960] And, you know, there were like fires and riots, and it was insane.
[00:57:42.960 --> 00:57:49.840] And so I called my president at the Chapman University, he's a good friend, and said, we should bring this guy to Chapman and I'll debate him.
[00:57:49.840 --> 00:57:51.920] He's like, Are you out of your mind?
[00:57:52.720 --> 00:57:55.440] So, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos is not the Dalai Lama.
[00:57:55.440 --> 00:57:55.840] Okay.
[00:57:55.840 --> 00:57:59.880] You know, maybe you don't want to invite a troublemaker.
[00:57:59.600 --> 00:58:02.280] That's not exactly a free speech issue.
[00:58:02.760 --> 00:58:12.520] But once you've invited somebody who's a noted scholar or somebody who's respected, then disinviting them seems off the goals of the university.
[00:58:12.840 --> 00:58:20.120] Well, and I think with Milo and similar speakers, I think what had happened in a lot of those cases was that student groups had invited him.
[00:58:20.120 --> 00:58:24.520] And then, you know, there was some kind of intervention to not let the students invite him.
[00:58:24.520 --> 00:58:26.440] And, you know, student groups have rights.
[00:58:26.440 --> 00:58:31.320] Students have the right to invite and hear speakers that the rest of the campus doesn't like.
[00:58:31.320 --> 00:58:42.680] And, you know, there are a lot of ways to respond to that that are not, you know, disrupting the event or, you know, in a couple of cases, violence.
[00:58:42.920 --> 00:58:44.200] You can counter protest.
[00:58:44.200 --> 00:58:46.120] You can hold your own event.
[00:58:46.120 --> 00:58:48.680] You can try to encourage people not to go.
[00:58:48.680 --> 00:58:53.480] There are a lot of things you can do that don't violate someone's rights.
[00:58:53.960 --> 00:58:55.560] You can just practice your own.
[00:58:55.640 --> 00:59:00.520] Remember the point I made at the time because I've done a lot of university talks, hundreds.
[00:59:00.520 --> 00:59:04.680] And I said, you know what's worse than having protesters come to your talk?
[00:59:04.680 --> 00:59:06.440] Having nobody come to your talk.
[00:59:06.440 --> 00:59:08.760] You walk in and it's like a mostly empty auditorium.
[00:59:08.760 --> 00:59:11.640] It's like, oh, this is really depressing.
[00:59:13.240 --> 00:59:15.320] Yeah, I think everybody's been there at some point.
[00:59:15.320 --> 00:59:15.800] Yeah.
[00:59:16.040 --> 00:59:21.480] But that seems to miss the point of what's the motive behind it, which is very moralistic in nature.
[00:59:21.720 --> 00:59:24.120] You know, it's one thing to just not go.
[00:59:24.120 --> 00:59:25.240] I'm not going to read that book.
[00:59:25.240 --> 00:59:27.640] I'm not going to attend the speaker's talk or whatever.
[00:59:27.640 --> 00:59:31.240] But that doesn't seem to be enough in the new campus environment.
[00:59:31.800 --> 00:59:37.800] We need to punish this person, or in the case of some cancel culture, get the person fired.
[00:59:37.800 --> 00:59:43.960] You know, it's not enough to just say, I disagree with you, and you're wrong, and here's why, but you need to lose your job over this.
[00:59:43.960 --> 00:59:45.000] I mean, why that?
[00:59:45.760 --> 00:59:50.960] I think, you know, a lot of this stuff just fundamentally misunderstands human nature.
[00:59:52.320 --> 00:59:57.440] People want to see what they're told not to look at or what not to hear.
[00:59:57.440 --> 01:00:00.880] I think there's just something deeply ingrained in human beings.
[01:00:01.440 --> 01:00:08.240] I have this problem where if I see, you know, like a post has been hidden, I always have to click.
[01:00:08.240 --> 01:00:09.360] I need to see why.
[01:00:09.360 --> 01:00:10.480] I just have to find out.
[01:00:11.120 --> 01:00:12.160] It's silly.
[01:00:12.320 --> 01:00:18.400] But, you know, I think there's just something innate where, you know, we get a little bit more curious about things.
[01:00:19.280 --> 01:00:25.680] You know, there's a lot of things going on where they're trying to ban kids' access to certain books.
[01:00:25.920 --> 01:00:28.400] I could not think of a better way to get kids to read those books.
[01:00:28.800 --> 01:00:29.040] I know.
[01:00:29.920 --> 01:00:31.280] I want my books banned.
[01:00:31.680 --> 01:00:39.680] Or it's like if I was a gene company like American Eagle, you know, everybody in the world has to watch the Sydney Sweeney jeans commercial now.
[01:00:39.680 --> 01:00:45.040] I mean, you do realize you're helping capitalists, right, make a lot of money.
[01:00:46.640 --> 01:00:50.400] I am just choosing to ignore all of that.
[01:00:50.720 --> 01:00:56.400] Oh, you know, these culture war things, they erupt so quickly and they spread so fast.
[01:00:56.400 --> 01:00:59.680] You know, sometimes I'll go out on a couple hour bike ride and come back.
[01:00:59.680 --> 01:01:02.880] I've missed like three major events in three hours.
[01:01:02.880 --> 01:01:04.640] It's like, whoa, okay.
[01:01:05.280 --> 01:01:12.480] Yeah, sometimes I've been on a flight and not paid for Wi-Fi and then landed and I feel like there's been three cultural cycles I missed.
[01:01:12.480 --> 01:01:14.000] I was in the air.
[01:01:14.000 --> 01:01:15.440] Now back to the Saudi money.
[01:01:15.440 --> 01:01:19.080] Don't universities have to declare like all their research funds.
[01:01:19.080 --> 01:01:27.520] And if you have a professorship funded by some family, royal family, don't you have to declare this to the government, the IRS?
[01:01:27.480 --> 01:01:38.440] Um, so there's um certain uh restrictions that universities have to report money, um, you know, at a certain threshold where it's coming from.
[01:01:38.440 --> 01:01:46.920] Uh, but the problem is, you know, they've been mostly ignoring, or not mostly, uh, but there's been significant underreporting on that.
[01:01:46.920 --> 01:02:02.040] Um, that has been in the billions, and so I think there's more, there's been more attention on the past five to ten years about, you know, this foreign funding that's kind of been skyrocketing and under the radar.
[01:02:02.280 --> 01:02:15.800] So, I think that people are starting to become familiar with the problem of under-reporting, but we're definitely playing catch-up on that front where we're trying to see what we missed in the past couple of decades.
[01:02:16.120 --> 01:02:19.000] And I don't think we're fully there just yet.
[01:02:19.320 --> 01:02:24.680] But, yeah, universities have not been entirely following reporting restrictions on that.
[01:02:24.680 --> 01:02:38.600] And then, in addition to the people that are directly censoring because they're getting funds from, say, the Chinese government, does this also spread to others who are not funded, but because they can see what the damages are by speaking up?
[01:02:38.600 --> 01:02:40.200] They self-censor.
[01:02:40.520 --> 01:02:53.880] Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed during that perfect meditation flow on Amazon Music.
[01:02:53.880 --> 01:02:56.360] We believe in keeping you in the moment.
[01:02:56.360 --> 01:03:06.120] That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath.
[01:03:06.120 --> 01:03:13.240] Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts ad-free, included with Prime.
[01:03:14.200 --> 01:03:15.200] Yeah, absolutely.
[01:03:14.840 --> 01:03:18.560] I think self-censorship is one of the biggest concerns here.
[01:03:19.520 --> 01:03:41.360] You know, you could just imagine, you know, if you're starting out in political science and you're choosing which field you want to go into, which area of research, and you know that if you want to be someone who's researching, you know, something that the Chinese government does not want you to research, you might not be able to get a visa.
[01:03:41.360 

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Prompt 5: Context Setup

You are an expert data extractor tasked with analyzing a podcast transcript. 
I will provide you with part 2 of 2 from a podcast transcript. 
I will then ask you to extract different types of information from this content in subsequent messages. Please confirm you have received and understood the transcript content.

Transcript section:
on the past five to ten years about, you know, this foreign funding that's kind of been skyrocketing and under the radar.
[01:02:02.280 --> 01:02:15.800] So, I think that people are starting to become familiar with the problem of under-reporting, but we're definitely playing catch-up on that front where we're trying to see what we missed in the past couple of decades.
[01:02:16.120 --> 01:02:19.000] And I don't think we're fully there just yet.
[01:02:19.320 --> 01:02:24.680] But, yeah, universities have not been entirely following reporting restrictions on that.
[01:02:24.680 --> 01:02:38.600] And then, in addition to the people that are directly censoring because they're getting funds from, say, the Chinese government, does this also spread to others who are not funded, but because they can see what the damages are by speaking up?
[01:02:38.600 --> 01:02:40.200] They self-censor.
[01:02:40.520 --> 01:02:53.880] Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed during that perfect meditation flow on Amazon Music.
[01:02:53.880 --> 01:02:56.360] We believe in keeping you in the moment.
[01:02:56.360 --> 01:03:06.120] That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath.
[01:03:06.120 --> 01:03:13.240] Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts ad-free, included with Prime.
[01:03:14.200 --> 01:03:15.200] Yeah, absolutely.
[01:03:14.840 --> 01:03:18.560] I think self-censorship is one of the biggest concerns here.
[01:03:19.520 --> 01:03:41.360] You know, you could just imagine, you know, if you're starting out in political science and you're choosing which field you want to go into, which area of research, and you know that if you want to be someone who's researching, you know, something that the Chinese government does not want you to research, you might not be able to get a visa.
[01:03:41.360 --> 01:03:44.560] You're going to have issue getting access to research materials.
[01:03:44.560 --> 01:03:53.200] You're going to have, you know, the fear that maybe some universities won't want to hire you because they won't want someone doing that work on their campus.
[01:03:53.200 --> 01:04:09.840] And so I think from the very start, you know, there are a lot of incentives for people to self-censor and to maybe just avoid that kind of material in the first place and to change their career path because it's not the most viable career path.
[01:04:09.840 --> 01:04:19.120] I mean, academia is already a difficult field for a lot of people and the job market is not promising.
[01:04:19.120 --> 01:04:32.240] And so, you know, the thought of going into, you know, an area of study where you might be creating a lot of difficulties for yourself, more than you're already going to have, I don't think it's very attractive.
[01:04:32.560 --> 01:04:34.080] Here's some examples of this.
[01:04:34.080 --> 01:04:41.920] I'm pulling from Steven Pinker's next book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, from his chapter on The Canceling Instinct.
[01:04:41.920 --> 01:04:49.600] The subtitle of the chapter is The Urge to Prevent Ideas from Becoming Common Knowledge, Even in the Knowledge Profession, universities.
[01:04:49.920 --> 01:04:53.120] So, here's some questions that you really are not supposed to ask.
[01:04:53.120 --> 01:04:57.360] Do women on average have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?
[01:04:57.360 --> 01:05:01.000] Did indigenous peoples frequently engage in war and genocide?
[01:05:01.000 --> 01:05:07.480] Are recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse really implanted by suggestive questioning by psychotherapists?
[01:05:07.480 --> 01:05:11.960] Is morality an evolutionary adaptation of our brains with no divine mandate?
[01:05:12.280 --> 01:05:16.680] Does racial diversity benefit neighborhoods, academic departments, and companies?
[01:05:16.680 --> 01:05:19.480] Are there two sexes in animals, including humans?
[01:05:19.480 --> 01:05:21.880] Do men have an innate motive to rape?
[01:05:21.880 --> 01:05:26.120] Do violent riots reduce support for liberal political candidates?
[01:05:26.120 --> 01:05:28.120] I won't go on for much longer.
[01:05:28.120 --> 01:05:32.440] Would a rapid reduction in fossil fuel consumption do more harm than good?
[01:05:32.440 --> 01:05:37.480] Is average intelligence declining because duller people have more children than smarter people?
[01:05:37.480 --> 01:05:42.520] And then, of course, the biggest one of all is: are there racial group differences in IQ, right?
[01:05:42.520 --> 01:05:50.760] So, these are all pretty close to taboo subjects for academics to research, particularly in sciences.
[01:05:51.000 --> 01:05:56.040] And yet, they should be, you know, on the free speech issue, you should be all free to research whatever you want.
[01:05:56.040 --> 01:05:58.200] But there's a lot of those I wouldn't touch.
[01:05:58.200 --> 01:06:00.120] I don't have to research everything, right?
[01:06:00.120 --> 01:06:01.880] We don't have to know everything.
[01:06:02.200 --> 01:06:11.960] So, I mean, isn't there some rationality behind choosing some topics to research and not others without it being a censorious issue?
[01:06:11.960 --> 01:06:13.080] Oh, yeah, of course there is.
[01:06:13.080 --> 01:06:23.560] And, you know, not every decision to avoid a research subject implies some greater, you know, authoritarian impulse pressing down on people.
[01:06:23.800 --> 01:06:38.040] But there are people that, you know, do face this kind of pressure and who do experience the kind of repercussions that academics are afraid of for pursuing research against authoritarian governments.
[01:06:38.040 --> 01:06:42.600] And we're seeing it more and more, you know, especially with visa restrictions.
[01:06:42.600 --> 01:06:54.640] If you are in a certain field that requires you to travel to a country to do on-the-ground research and you are seen as a critic of that government, you really might have a lot of trouble getting that visa.
[01:06:55.040 --> 01:07:03.360] We've seen it in China, we're seeing it in India, and we might be seeing more and more here in the United States, which is really unfortunate to say.
[01:07:03.360 --> 01:07:14.160] But we might be adding certain questions about American politics to the list of things scholars don't want to touch because they're afraid their university won't stand by them.
[01:07:14.160 --> 01:07:18.560] They're afraid that there will be a funding threat if they pursue that inquiry.
[01:07:18.560 --> 01:07:28.720] They're afraid that if they're an international scholar, maybe they won't be here very long if the federal government doesn't like what they're saying and thinks that they're a national security threat.
[01:07:28.720 --> 01:07:31.120] So, yeah, it's unfortunate.
[01:07:31.120 --> 01:07:35.520] But I think, you know, this problem is only growing.
[01:07:35.520 --> 01:07:38.800] And in part, it's growing because we've let it.
[01:07:39.680 --> 01:07:46.320] I don't think, you know, I'm very troubled by what's been happening in the past eight months of the Trump administration.
[01:07:46.800 --> 01:07:53.200] You know, I do not think we're on a good path right now for free expression, especially in higher education.
[01:07:53.200 --> 01:07:58.720] But, you know, these are things that universities have been letting bloom for a long time.
[01:07:58.720 --> 01:08:03.360] And they need to stand up to all of this authoritarianism, all of this pressure.
[01:08:03.360 --> 01:08:07.360] It can't just be picking and choosing which ones you stand up against.
[01:08:07.360 --> 01:08:09.520] And they need to develop more of a spine.
[01:08:10.640 --> 01:08:25.600] Well, that was one of Marco Rubio's arguments about these students, foreign students that come here, seemingly pretty critical of the United States government and way of life, democracy, capitalism, and our freedoms, and yet they want to come here anyway.
[01:08:25.600 --> 01:08:27.200] Why should we let them in?
[01:08:27.200 --> 01:08:29.360] If you hate us so much, go somewhere else.
[01:08:29.360 --> 01:08:31.080] That was his argument.
[01:08:29.920 --> 01:08:33.960] Yeah, so, you know, for a few things.
[01:08:34.600 --> 01:08:41.800] Number one, I think America is strong enough to be able to withstand having immigrants criticize it.
[01:08:42.280 --> 01:08:46.360] For me, I think that's, you know, what loving America means.
[01:08:46.360 --> 01:09:07.640] I think it means believing that it's strong enough to withstand, you know, some harsh criticism, maybe unfair criticism, but, you know, I don't think that we gain something by broadening the restrictions for what can be said here and who can come here.
[01:09:07.640 --> 01:09:21.880] And I think we've, you know, one of the best things that America has been is a place where people from around the world who are fleeing oppression, who, you know, they come here and they think they can finally speak their mind.
[01:09:22.120 --> 01:09:30.520] That doesn't mean we need to like what they're saying, but I think it's a net good for the country and for the world that the United States, for a lot of people, has been that place.
[01:09:30.520 --> 01:09:35.080] It's been somewhere where they can come and for the first time speak freely.
[01:09:35.080 --> 01:09:43.480] And so to throw that all away so we can, you know, achieve some of the administration's political goals, I think that's a shame.
[01:09:43.480 --> 01:09:46.200] I do not think that's something we should pursue or be proud of.
[01:09:46.200 --> 01:09:56.440] And, you know, if something looks more like China or Russia would be doing it, maybe we should go the opposite direction.
[01:09:57.080 --> 01:10:00.520] All right, Sarah, let's wrap up by talking about solutions.
[01:10:00.520 --> 01:10:09.480] If the Secretary of Education called you and said, I read your book, and I want to bring you in and tell us what we should do because we don't want to go down this road.
[01:10:09.480 --> 01:10:11.160] What would you tell them?
[01:10:11.400 --> 01:10:16.240] Well, number one, we'd stop violating the First Amendment for our universities.
[01:10:14.920 --> 01:10:18.000] That's the number one place to start.
[01:10:18.640 --> 01:10:22.960] But, you know, there are a lot of things that I actually think universities themselves can be doing.
[01:10:23.280 --> 01:10:29.600] I think they need to revisit their partnerships that they've been pursuing abroad for years.
[01:10:29.920 --> 01:10:36.000] You know, if you opened a campus in China 20 years ago, the situation on the ground there politically was very different then.
[01:10:36.320 --> 01:10:41.120] And universities need to acknowledge that things change.
[01:10:41.120 --> 01:10:47.200] And, you know, what seemed like a good idea 20 years ago might not be working as well today.
[01:10:47.200 --> 01:10:55.360] And so they need to go back, they need to look at what they've been doing, see if there have been rights violations going on at these campuses.
[01:10:55.360 --> 01:11:00.880] If there are, they need to at least respond in some capacity, perhaps close them.
[01:11:00.880 --> 01:11:05.760] And I think they need to be doing a lot more for their international students now more than ever.
[01:11:06.080 --> 01:11:09.920] When I wrote this book, it was about threats from abroad.
[01:11:09.920 --> 01:11:14.720] But, you know, now I think there are threats to international student speech rights kind of from every direction.
[01:11:14.720 --> 01:11:28.800] So universities need to be doing a good job of educating them, making sure they understand what their rights are when they get here, what universities can do for them if a government, any government tries to violate those speech rights.
[01:11:29.040 --> 01:11:31.360] So those are just places to start.
[01:11:31.360 --> 01:11:38.320] They need to do a lot better job of maintaining speech protections, even in the United States.
[01:11:38.320 --> 01:11:40.480] Not everything's about a satellite campus.
[01:11:40.480 --> 01:11:49.760] Just here, they need to make sure that academics who come here from China, from India, feel that they can speak freely without facing some kind of administrative punishment.
[01:11:50.000 --> 01:12:00.000] And, you know, for Americans more generally, I think we need to be doing a better job of pursuing policies and politicians that want to protect speech rights.
[01:12:00.920 --> 01:12:08.600] Because unfortunately, right now, I don't think that it hurts a candidate to be pro-censorship.
[01:12:09.160 --> 01:12:10.920] And that's not how things should be in the U.S.
[01:12:11.640 --> 01:12:17.320] You know, it should hurt your campaign, not help it, if you talk about whose rights you want to take away.
[01:12:17.960 --> 01:12:19.240] You would think.
[01:12:20.040 --> 01:12:20.920] I would hope.
[01:12:21.240 --> 01:12:25.800] I will read your final closing lines here in your wonderful book.
[01:12:25.800 --> 01:12:33.000] Censorship has global repercussions, and we cannot wish it away by treating it as someone else's problem.
[01:12:33.000 --> 01:12:41.080] Activists, scholars, students, and dissidents around the world have shown tremendous bravery in pushing back against the horrors of authoritarianism.
[01:12:41.080 --> 01:12:46.280] It is on us to ensure that our universities aid them and not their oppressors.
[01:12:46.280 --> 01:12:50.920] A free world cannot exist without free universities.
[01:12:50.920 --> 01:12:58.200] There it is: Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.
[01:12:58.200 --> 01:13:00.040] Everyone in academia needs to read this book.
[01:13:00.040 --> 01:13:02.760] Actually, everybody who's into free speech needs to read this book.
[01:13:02.760 --> 01:13:05.880] All right, Sarah, thank you so much for your work and keep it up.
[01:13:05.880 --> 01:13:06.520] We need you.
[01:13:06.520 --> 01:13:07.320] Thanks for having me.
[01:13:07.320 --> 01:13:08.520] Appreciate it.
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Prompt 6: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 7: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 8: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

[00:00:00.320 --> 00:00:02.400] Candice Rivera has it all.
[00:00:02.400 --> 00:00:08.880] In just three years, she went from a stay-at-home mom to traveling the world, saving lives, and making millions.
[00:00:08.880 --> 00:00:13.360] Anyone would think Candice's charm life is about as real as Unicorn.
[00:00:13.360 --> 00:00:16.960] But sometimes the truth is even harder to believe than the lies.
[00:00:17.280 --> 00:00:18.000] Not true.
[00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:19.680] There's so many things not true.
[00:00:19.680 --> 00:00:21.440] You got a great lead.
[00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:28.000] I'm Charlie Webster, and this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by Seven Hills.
[00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:31.040] Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.
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[00:00:36.080 --> 00:00:40.160] When the killer's identity is about to be revealed.
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[00:01:08.880 --> 00:01:14.560] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:21.280 --> 00:01:22.240] All right, hey, everybody.
[00:01:22.240 --> 00:01:23.120] It's Michael Shermer.
[00:01:23.120 --> 00:01:24.880] It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:24.880 --> 00:01:27.200] My guest today is Sarah McLaughlin.
[00:01:27.200 --> 00:01:32.880] She is a senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
[00:01:32.880 --> 00:01:34.400] FHIR, our friends at FHIR.
[00:01:34.400 --> 00:01:35.360] We love them.
[00:01:35.360 --> 00:01:53.360] Sarah graduated magna cum laude from Drexel University in 2014 with a BS in political science and has been working for FHIR ever since, defending students and faculty facing censorship in FHIRE's individual rights defense program, where she worked for five years.
[00:01:53.360 --> 00:02:00.120] She's also served as director of FHIRE's targeted advocacy program, where she focused on U.S.
[00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:07.000] universities' relationship with international threats to free speech and art censorship, much of what her new book is about.
[00:02:07.320 --> 00:02:18.120] Her writing about free speech issues, including protest and blasphemy laws, has been featured in publications including Foreign Policy, Artsy, The Huntington Post, and the New York Daily News.
[00:02:18.120 --> 00:02:20.840] We have to expand that, Sarah, to include Skeptic Magazine.
[00:02:20.840 --> 00:02:22.920] Come on, we've got to get you in here.
[00:02:22.920 --> 00:02:32.440] Here's a new book: Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.
[00:02:32.440 --> 00:02:34.040] All right, it's a great read.
[00:02:34.040 --> 00:02:36.120] You know, Sarah, I know a lot about this subject.
[00:02:36.120 --> 00:02:38.120] I knew nothing about all this international stuff.
[00:02:38.120 --> 00:02:41.240] I had no idea what these foreign countries were doing here.
[00:02:41.560 --> 00:02:47.320] Yeah, I think some people have started to catch on to what's happening in other industries.
[00:02:47.720 --> 00:03:01.080] You know, the NBA caught a lot of attention a few years ago with the controversy over Hong Kong tweet, but I don't think people have totally caught on yet to the way that this issue is presenting itself in higher education.
[00:03:01.080 --> 00:03:14.920] And if anything, higher education is kind of the most worrying industry for international censorship to be appearing in because it affects what all of us can see, say, what we learn, how we understand the world around us.
[00:03:14.920 --> 00:03:22.680] So I'm hoping that this book helps people understand a little bit better the stakes of what's happening in higher education.
[00:03:22.680 --> 00:03:26.280] So you graduated from Drexel in 2014.
[00:03:26.280 --> 00:03:27.880] Drexel's in Philadelphia, right?
[00:03:28.280 --> 00:03:29.080] It is, yes.
[00:03:29.320 --> 00:03:30.200] I'm from Philly.
[00:03:30.200 --> 00:03:31.080] I've been in Philly.
[00:03:31.480 --> 00:03:32.040] I see.
[00:03:32.040 --> 00:03:33.000] I see.
[00:03:33.480 --> 00:03:35.880] The city of brotherly love.
[00:03:35.880 --> 00:03:37.400] We're very friendly people.
[00:03:38.280 --> 00:03:40.760] And have you run up the rocky steps?
[00:03:40.760 --> 00:03:42.200] I have indeed.
[00:03:42.920 --> 00:03:44.200] I actually even boxed.
[00:03:44.960 --> 00:03:45.520] Oh my God.
[00:03:45.760 --> 00:03:46.240] You do?
[00:03:46.240 --> 00:03:47.280] You're a boxer?
[00:03:47.280 --> 00:03:47.600] Really?
[00:03:44.360 --> 00:03:50.960] I'm an amateur boxer for fun.
[00:03:51.200 --> 00:03:54.320] I'm not going to be competing soon.
[00:03:54.320 --> 00:03:57.200] You don't want to get CTE later in your life?
[00:03:58.720 --> 00:04:02.320] Ideally, no one will be punching me in the face too often.
[00:04:02.640 --> 00:04:12.240] So 2014, though, so you got out just about when the increase in censoriousness and speech issues really took off, right?
[00:04:12.240 --> 00:04:14.080] Wasn't that around the time?
[00:04:14.400 --> 00:04:20.480] Yeah, that's, I think, around the time when a lot of controversies about protests were happening across campuses in the U.S.
[00:04:20.640 --> 00:04:24.240] I think that started to peak around 2015, 2016.
[00:04:24.560 --> 00:04:33.520] But, you know, what I write about in the book with, you know, with China, with authoritarian countries, that's kind of been brewing in the background for even longer.
[00:04:34.160 --> 00:04:39.440] I think since the 90s, probably, this has started to develop on campuses.
[00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:43.120] And so before we get into all that, just what's your story?
[00:04:43.120 --> 00:04:51.520] How did you get into all this stuff, interested in this, and then become really an activist, or at least working for an activist organization like FHIR?
[00:04:51.840 --> 00:04:54.480] Yeah, I was always interested in civil liberties.
[00:04:54.640 --> 00:04:56.400] It's something I pursued in college.
[00:04:56.400 --> 00:05:00.160] I was actually an intern at FHIR when I was a college student.
[00:05:00.480 --> 00:05:04.720] And here I am, 13 years later.
[00:05:04.720 --> 00:05:07.280] So I really care about this work.
[00:05:07.280 --> 00:05:11.760] I'm really passionate about the First Amendment, free expression.
[00:05:11.760 --> 00:05:19.120] And I've always had a personal interest in just global censorship issues, even outside the United States.
[00:05:19.120 --> 00:05:29.760] And what I was starting to notice was that my interest in free speech in the United States and my interest in free speech abroad were starting to converge a little more than I was expecting them to.
[00:05:30.120 --> 00:05:34.520] And that was kind of, you know, the seed from where this book came from.
[00:05:34.520 --> 00:05:44.360] And go ahead and give us a little commercial for FHIR because it's an important organization and kind of put it in context of you're doing what the ACLU used to do.
[00:05:44.360 --> 00:05:46.280] And then what happened to them?
[00:05:46.760 --> 00:05:49.880] So FHIR has been around for over 25 years now.
[00:05:50.200 --> 00:05:53.800] We're a nonpartisan free speech organization.
[00:05:53.800 --> 00:05:57.080] We're here for any Americans whose rights are being violated.
[00:05:57.080 --> 00:06:01.400] And for most of our history, we were primarily a campus group.
[00:06:01.400 --> 00:06:05.320] We were only working around First Amendment issues on campus.
[00:06:05.480 --> 00:06:13.000] But a few years ago, we thought that there was a need for more people in this space defending First Amendment more broadly.
[00:06:13.000 --> 00:06:19.400] So we expanded off campus three years ago, and we are busier than ever.
[00:06:19.640 --> 00:06:21.640] As it turns out, the U.S.
[00:06:21.640 --> 00:06:24.920] still needs some help when it comes to free speech.
[00:06:24.920 --> 00:06:27.400] And I think of FHIR as politically neutral.
[00:06:27.400 --> 00:06:29.800] Would that be correct as a policy?
[00:06:30.360 --> 00:06:32.520] I would say we're nonpartisan.
[00:06:32.920 --> 00:06:39.880] So, you know, we don't pick and choose who we defend or whose rights we'll help based on whether we like them.
[00:06:40.680 --> 00:06:55.640] And honestly, I don't think we would be able to agree on who we all like anyway, because, you know, a lot of us have very different political views, different, you know, philosophical views, but we, you know, don't let that determine who we help or who we don't help.
[00:06:55.960 --> 00:07:04.120] And there are a lot of people who we've defended who I disagree with, some people who I do agree with, but it doesn't make a difference because the point isn't what we think.
[00:07:04.120 --> 00:07:05.960] The point is defending people's rights.
[00:07:05.960 --> 00:07:06.600] Yeah.
[00:07:06.600 --> 00:07:24.560] Well, I mentioned the ACLU because it seems like, and this is the chatter you see on social media, they've gone fairly woke, if I can put it that way, and have lost some of the perspective on free speech defense, regardless of one's political orientation.
[00:07:24.560 --> 00:07:28.720] Now, it seems like they're defending liberals and not defending conservatives.
[00:07:28.720 --> 00:07:31.600] Something like that is, I guess, a gross generalization.
[00:07:31.600 --> 00:07:47.600] I should remind my listeners that because of our wheelhouse of dealing with creationism and the teaching of evolution, the ACLU was founded in 1925 and they were advertising for a way to kind of get on the cultural map.
[00:07:47.600 --> 00:07:49.840] And they came to the defense of John T.
[00:07:49.840 --> 00:07:56.960] Scopes, who was teaching evolution at a high school biology in Dayton, Tennessee, 100 years ago last month.
[00:07:56.960 --> 00:07:59.520] And, you know, so that sort of put them on the map.
[00:07:59.520 --> 00:08:06.240] And, you know, they famously defended the Nazis at Skokie Nazi marches and all that stuff.
[00:08:06.400 --> 00:08:08.320] But it doesn't seem to me like they do that.
[00:08:08.320 --> 00:08:14.240] Now, anyway, they just, everybody I know that's into this stuff supports fire and has kind of lost confidence in ACLU.
[00:08:14.240 --> 00:08:17.680] So I don't know if you want to comment on that or if you just want to move on.
[00:08:17.840 --> 00:08:27.120] I know the ACLU has been getting a fair degree of criticism, but we're always happy and willing to work with groups that want to partner with us to defend free speech rights.
[00:08:27.120 --> 00:08:31.680] And we still work with ACLU chapters to defend the First Amendment.
[00:08:31.680 --> 00:08:32.320] Yeah.
[00:08:32.320 --> 00:08:32.880] Okay.
[00:08:33.200 --> 00:08:33.600] All right.
[00:08:33.600 --> 00:08:36.800] You write about, well, let's just start with authoritarians.
[00:08:37.280 --> 00:08:38.720] What do you mean by authoritarian?
[00:08:38.720 --> 00:08:39.840] What is that?
[00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:52.640] So I'm referring to governments that use their political might to essentially, silence all critics and all opposition within their countries.
[00:08:52.640 --> 00:08:56.000] And, you know, that's a problem within those countries to start with.
[00:08:56.320 --> 00:09:01.640] But what we're seeing more and more is this concept of transnational repression.
[00:09:01.960 --> 00:09:14.040] For anyone who's unfamiliar with it, transnational repression refers to countries that are authoritarian or that do silence their critics, doing so outside their own borders.
[00:09:14.040 --> 00:09:25.080] So it looks like Russia perhaps using Interpol to try to arrest its critics elsewhere, or the Chinese government threatening its activists in Canada.
[00:09:25.080 --> 00:09:36.200] So it's essentially what we're seeing is, you know, these authoritarians who like to silence their own citizens, trying to expand the borders of exactly who they can reach and silence.
[00:09:37.160 --> 00:09:37.640] Right.
[00:09:37.640 --> 00:09:43.560] So give me an example of that: like China is notoriously authoritarian on its own citizens.
[00:09:43.560 --> 00:09:53.240] What do they do to you talk about Chinese students in the United States, in American universities and colleges, or also even non-Chinese students?
[00:09:53.480 --> 00:09:58.920] So a lot of my work has been with students who are from China who come here to the U.S.
[00:09:59.240 --> 00:10:01.880] and they want to take part in the campus experience.
[00:10:01.880 --> 00:10:04.200] They want to take part in the First Amendment.
[00:10:04.200 --> 00:10:17.400] And so they will join protests, they will join social media, they will write op-eds, and then they'll find that they may have left the Chinese government at home, but the Chinese government hasn't quite left them.
[00:10:17.640 --> 00:10:29.080] And they'll have their family members who have been taken in for questioning by police or by Communist Party secretary or Communist Party groups, local chapters.
[00:10:29.320 --> 00:10:36.040] They will have security agents contact them and warn them that we're watching what you're doing.
[00:10:36.040 --> 00:10:39.400] You should be careful if you don't want to get into trouble.
[00:10:39.400 --> 00:10:46.640] We've even seen students who have returned home after studying in the United States and then found themselves arrested.
[00:10:46.640 --> 00:10:59.040] There was a student who was at the University of Minnesota and he was put in prison for six months for reposting some things about Xi Jinping to an account that I think had a handful of followers.
[00:10:59.440 --> 00:11:01.360] And that's the thing about the Chinese government.
[00:11:01.360 --> 00:11:08.160] I don't think there's a profile or a target that's small or minor enough.
[00:11:08.800 --> 00:11:17.520] You know, sometimes you think countries will really just target their big name critics, like really loud authors and activists or protesters.
[00:11:17.760 --> 00:11:24.960] But I don't think there's anyone who's unknown enough or small enough fish.
[00:11:24.960 --> 00:11:30.160] Anyone can be a target if they're criticizing the Chinese government.
[00:11:30.160 --> 00:11:30.800] Yeah.
[00:11:31.120 --> 00:11:42.960] So for them, speech critical of their president or dictator, whatever he is, Xi Jinping, that would be their equivalent of hate speech.
[00:11:42.960 --> 00:11:49.920] You're harming somebody and therefore censorship is acceptable, something like that.
[00:11:50.400 --> 00:11:53.600] I think it's that you're targeting the state.
[00:11:54.240 --> 00:12:01.680] A lot of times it's put in terms of like a national security issue more than anything else, especially in Hong Kong.
[00:12:01.680 --> 00:12:04.880] China has really been enforcing its authority in Hong Kong.
[00:12:04.880 --> 00:12:15.200] And that's really all been entirely under this concept of national security, sedition, you know, accusations that they're trying to secede from China.
[00:12:15.440 --> 00:12:18.800] And that's, I would say, more of the angle that it takes.
[00:12:19.360 --> 00:12:26.000] You know, you are trying to harm the government, which means you're also trying to harm your fellow citizens.
[00:12:26.880 --> 00:12:35.960] But I mean, I guess would they say, well, look, the far-left progressive woke Americans are censoring speech for the same reasons.
[00:12:36.120 --> 00:12:40.760] It harms somebody, it harms a group, and our group is the state.
[00:12:40.760 --> 00:12:43.960] And so, you know, we have precedence from what you guys are doing.
[00:12:43.960 --> 00:12:45.320] Something like that?
[00:12:45.960 --> 00:12:58.520] Well, you know, something really interesting that I was noticing that was happening on some campuses was that there were some students who were very vocally supportive of the Chinese government.
[00:12:58.520 --> 00:13:13.320] And they were kind of making arguments that, you know, speech that was against the Chinese government, against Xi Jinping, was actually hurtful, biased, offensive, and that was, you know, targeting them on their national origin.
[00:13:13.480 --> 00:13:18.840] So that was something really fascinating to watch unfold over the past decade or so.
[00:13:18.840 --> 00:13:21.080] And we did see it at some campuses.
[00:13:21.080 --> 00:13:25.880] There was a particularly galling example at George Washington University.
[00:13:26.360 --> 00:13:33.560] There, some students posted artwork by a dissident Chinese-Australian artist named Badia Chow.
[00:13:33.560 --> 00:13:37.720] And it was right before the 2022 Winter Olympics.
[00:13:37.720 --> 00:13:43.880] And so it was artwork that was, you know, from far away, it kind of looked like promotional posters.
[00:13:43.880 --> 00:13:55.800] But the closer you got to them, the more you realized it was artwork that was suggesting that human rights abuses were the main theme of the Beijing Olympics.
[00:13:56.040 --> 00:14:01.560] And so some students anonymously put up this artwork at George Washington University.
[00:14:01.560 --> 00:14:04.120] And then a few student groups complained to the universities.
[00:14:04.120 --> 00:14:10.920] They said, you know, it was deeply hurtful, deeply offensive, that it was an insult to students from China to have these flyers up.
[00:14:11.320 --> 00:14:16.720] And to my great shock, the university responded and said, You're right.
[00:14:16.960 --> 00:14:18.880] The president at the time agreed.
[00:14:19.120 --> 00:14:20.160] He took them down.
[00:14:20.160 --> 00:14:27.920] They had the university start investigating to see who put up this artwork that was critical of the Chinese government.
[00:14:28.080 --> 00:14:38.240] And, you know, Fire, myself, even some politicians, you know, immediately weighed in and said, What on earth is George Washington thinking?
[00:14:38.480 --> 00:14:42.480] And fortunately, that criticism pretty quickly got through to the university.
[00:14:42.480 --> 00:14:44.320] They admitted they made a mistake.
[00:14:44.640 --> 00:14:57.920] But this is something that happened that was shocking that a university would even think that that was an appropriate response, that it wasn't just appropriate to say to these students, you know, this is a university.
[00:14:57.920 --> 00:15:00.240] Sometimes you're going to encounter artwork you don't like.
[00:15:00.240 --> 00:15:08.400] It's not the role of the president of the university to use resources to try to find out who put up artwork you don't like.
[00:15:08.640 --> 00:15:26.800] And that's where, you know, there's some carelessness on behalf of university leadership, I think, where they're not considering the ways that students might be taking advantage of these notions of offense and insult to try to demand that government critics be silenced.
[00:15:27.760 --> 00:15:33.520] You talk about censors without borders and ask this question, so I'll ask it for you.
[00:15:33.520 --> 00:15:38.000] Why should I worry about censorship in a country thousands of miles away?
[00:15:38.640 --> 00:15:39.920] It's a good question.
[00:15:40.320 --> 00:15:53.680] And it's, you know, I put it that way because it's something I have encountered a lot from Americans who hear me talking about foreign censorship, and they will say, This is so irrelevant to me.
[00:15:53.680 --> 00:15:56.160] I don't care what's happening in Russia or China.
[00:15:56.960 --> 00:16:05.960] But the thing is, it's a lot more relevant to you than you might want to admit, especially with how deeply interconnected the world is.
[00:16:06.680 --> 00:16:15.320] What I think is an interesting example is Midjourney AI, which is an AI image generating platform or tool.
[00:16:15.560 --> 00:16:23.400] They actually made it their policy that you could not make pictures, satirical images of Xi Jinping.
[00:16:23.720 --> 00:16:26.200] That was the only world leader that was exempted.
[00:16:26.200 --> 00:16:29.720] And that wasn't just for products sold in China, that was globally.
[00:16:29.720 --> 00:16:31.880] That was the policy for everybody.
[00:16:31.880 --> 00:16:36.440] And that's just because they wanted to be able to sell their product in China.
[00:16:36.440 --> 00:16:41.240] And they thought that if they didn't do that, they might not be welcome.
[00:16:41.240 --> 00:16:53.560] And so, you know, with how interconnected we all are, other countries' censorship issues might in some ways become ours, either through tech, either through corporations.
[00:16:53.560 --> 00:17:17.400] And, you know, even if you just look at some pretty basic stuff like what the FBI has been doing lately, there have been a number of arrests in the past few years of individuals who are acting on behalf of the Chinese government or connected to the Iranian government who have tried to violently attack or kill or harm people just for criticizing foreign governments here in the United States.
[00:17:17.400 --> 00:17:18.680] And that's pretty shocking.
[00:17:18.680 --> 00:17:22.600] And so what I want people to understand is that we have the First Amendment.
[00:17:22.600 --> 00:17:23.480] It's fantastic.
[00:17:23.480 --> 00:17:24.520] It's important.
[00:17:24.520 --> 00:17:29.320] But it's not the only thing we need to think about when it comes to defending free speech here.
[00:17:29.640 --> 00:17:30.280] Right.
[00:17:30.360 --> 00:17:32.440] I'm going to give a read an example from your book.
[00:17:32.440 --> 00:17:34.520] I'm going to read several examples because it's hard.
[00:17:34.520 --> 00:17:37.240] Some of these are just hard to believe that they could happen.
[00:17:37.480 --> 00:17:42.520] This is a University of Tennessee professor Anming Hu?
[00:17:42.520 --> 00:17:43.240] Hu.
[00:17:43.240 --> 00:17:44.200] Is that how you pronounce that?
[00:17:44.200 --> 00:17:44.920] Huh H-U?
[00:17:45.280 --> 00:17:46.080] I believe so.
[00:17:46.080 --> 00:17:59.360] Yeah, a naturalized citizen of Canada, who's accused of hiding ties with the Chinese government and was placed on house arrest for over a year, put on trial, which resulted in a mistrial, and suspended from his job without pay.
[00:17:59.360 --> 00:18:00.720] He was ultimately acquitted.
[00:18:00.720 --> 00:18:08.800] Part of the investigation originated from an FBI agent's open source investigation, meaning an online search into who.
[00:18:08.800 --> 00:18:22.160] The agent found a flyer written in Chinese that he roughly translated through Google showing who had a teaching contract with the Beijing University of Technology, who had failed to list this teaching position on one form.
[00:18:22.160 --> 00:18:30.000] The agent later admitted that he showed UT leadership a presentation accusing Hugh of being a member of the Chinese military.
[00:18:30.000 --> 00:18:39.360] But based on my summary translations, my reports, and my online, no, Hugh wasn't involved in the Chinese military, he said at the trial.
[00:18:39.360 --> 00:18:43.760] I lost two years of my life, who, now back on his job, said of the ordeal.
[00:18:44.000 --> 00:18:44.880] That's astonishing.
[00:18:44.880 --> 00:18:46.800] That can happen in America.
[00:18:46.800 --> 00:18:54.480] Yeah, and that's a good example of where our efforts to combat this kind of thing can go wrong.
[00:18:54.800 --> 00:19:00.000] I think there's a lot we need to be doing to recognize this problem, to respond to it.
[00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:11.200] But if we're not careful, that was under what was called the China Initiative, which was kind of killed and is now potentially being brought back.
[00:19:11.200 --> 00:19:13.440] It's unclear exactly where that will end up.
[00:19:13.440 --> 00:19:24.560] But if we're not careful about how we respond to foreign governments' repressive behavior, we might end up accidentally mimicking it ourselves.
[00:19:24.560 --> 00:19:26.640] And that's something we really need to be careful about.
[00:19:26.640 --> 00:19:26.880] Right.
[00:19:26.880 --> 00:19:28.800] It sort of sets a precedent.
[00:19:28.800 --> 00:19:31.000] Yeah, and unfortunate one.
[00:19:29.840 --> 00:19:35.800] I think we're setting a lot of unfortunate precedents these days.
[00:19:36.440 --> 00:19:46.680] Well, because you also write about sensitivity exploitation, appeals to cultural sensitivity to justify or demand censorship of political speech critical of authoritarian governments.
[00:19:46.680 --> 00:19:59.000] So if we allow it to happen here from other authoritarian governments, why shouldn't students or faculty or whatever do the same, you know, kind of reverse the roles there for our own government or the core of the government?
[00:19:59.320 --> 00:20:00.120] Absolutely.
[00:20:00.120 --> 00:20:00.440] Yeah.
[00:20:00.440 --> 00:20:16.280] And, you know, I think there have been some worrying pushes in that direction, especially, you know, in the past few months, we've seen the Trump administration use specific language about targeting anti-American speech.
[00:20:16.280 --> 00:20:19.160] I don't like to see that for my government.
[00:20:19.400 --> 00:20:27.400] But, you know, that term you mentioned, sensitivity, exploitation, you know, that's the kind of thing that I was discussing at George Washington University a few minutes earlier.
[00:20:27.720 --> 00:20:41.880] This idea that you should be able to use cultural politeness and sensitivity to further political censorship that ultimately aids an authoritarian government.
[00:20:42.120 --> 00:20:46.520] There was a really interesting example at McMaster University in Canada.
[00:20:46.840 --> 00:20:58.520] There, students had invited a Uyghur activist to talk about being the target of repression from the Chinese government, how China targets its ethnic and religious minorities.
[00:20:59.000 --> 00:21:01.480] And some students had attempted to get...
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[00:22:29.200 --> 00:22:41.280] The ones that invited her in trouble for violating the university's hate speech policy because they said this woman's speech about the Chinese government was hateful and hurtful and divisive and the university needed to act.
[00:22:41.280 --> 00:22:53.040] And so that's why universities need to be really careful when it comes to how they write their speech policies, how they enforce them, because you should not be writing a policy that's open to that kind of abuse.
[00:22:53.200 --> 00:23:00.000] That's just, it's pretty simple stuff, and that we haven't figured that out already is a little worrying.
[00:23:00.760 --> 00:23:17.240] Yes, well, in that episode with the three university presidents before Congress who were asked, you know, is it okay to call for the elimination of Jews or whatever or anti-Semitic policies?
[00:23:17.240 --> 00:23:19.160] And they said, well, it depends.
[00:23:19.320 --> 00:23:20.920] I guess technically that's correct.
[00:23:21.720 --> 00:23:28.520] If it leads to actual harm or restricting students' physical movement on campus, that sort of thing, then yes, it would.
[00:23:28.520 --> 00:23:37.000] But if it's just calling for the elimination of Jews, I mean, it's hard to believe it was President Gay at Harvard couldn't condemn that.
[00:23:37.320 --> 00:23:41.400] So I guess in our country, what is the policy allowed?
[00:23:41.400 --> 00:23:42.920] I mean, the First Amendment is one thing.
[00:23:42.920 --> 00:23:44.760] That's what the government can and cannot do.
[00:23:44.760 --> 00:23:46.840] But what about universities?
[00:23:47.160 --> 00:23:54.920] Yeah, I think in that hearing you mentioned, there was a lot of things that could have been said and done differently.
[00:23:55.160 --> 00:23:56.920] For the most part, they were right.
[00:23:57.080 --> 00:23:59.640] Harassment is context-specific.
[00:23:59.960 --> 00:24:11.000] There's a difference between saying something that's deeply offensive and then saying it while you perhaps advance on a student to push them out of the way or to physically target them.
[00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:15.400] So, yes, it does actually matter the context that words are said in.
[00:24:15.400 --> 00:24:19.160] That's just always been, you know, a pretty basic matter of law.
[00:24:19.800 --> 00:24:32.280] But I think a lot of people fairly pointed out that it seems like university presidents might pick and choose when they're willing to say certain speech is unacceptable.
[00:24:32.840 --> 00:24:34.840] And were they legally right?
[00:24:34.840 --> 00:24:37.240] Yes, for the most part.
[00:24:37.240 --> 00:24:47.760] But I think there was some anger spilling over at the feeling that universities have not always been as willing to defend offensive and hurtful speech.
[00:24:48.320 --> 00:24:55.120] And to answer your follow-up question, so when it comes to public universities, the First Amendment applies in full force.
[00:24:55.360 --> 00:24:57.600] So universities are bound by the First Amendment.
[00:24:57.600 --> 00:25:00.560] They cannot just censor speech because they don't like it.
[00:25:00.560 --> 00:25:04.400] When it comes to private universities, they are not bound by the First Amendment.
[00:25:04.400 --> 00:25:06.800] They're not government actors in that way.
[00:25:07.120 --> 00:25:30.320] But it still means they should probably stick by First Amendment standards because, you know, they've been battered a bit, but I think we can still come out the other side and say that the First Amendment does a very good job of allowing people to speak their mind without punishment and ensuring that the broadest range of views can be expressed, which is important in higher education.
[00:25:30.320 --> 00:25:35.040] So private universities don't have to abide by First Amendment standards.
[00:25:35.280 --> 00:25:40.800] Perhaps if they've made contractual agreements, they may be held to it.
[00:25:40.800 --> 00:25:46.000] But either way, just as a moral matter, they should because it's the best way to learn.
[00:25:46.000 --> 00:25:46.640] Yeah.
[00:25:46.960 --> 00:25:51.200] Well, I went to Pepperdine University as an undergraduate, which was a Church of Christ school.
[00:25:51.200 --> 00:25:52.640] I was a Christian at the time.
[00:25:52.640 --> 00:25:57.120] Now I'm a fairly prominent atheist, so I don't think they're going to hire me anytime soon.
[00:25:57.120 --> 00:26:06.000] And I guess I wouldn't feel like my speech was being censored if I intended to go on campus and give a talk and say, you know, the resurrection was a bunch of bullshit.
[00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:07.360] It never happened.
[00:26:07.680 --> 00:26:16.960] You know, I mean, they have a kind of a duty to their students to provide a Christian context or environment because that's what they're paying for, right?
[00:26:16.960 --> 00:26:22.400] So that seems different than if I went on a public campus and said something and I was censored.
[00:26:22.720 --> 00:26:24.000] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:26:24.000 --> 00:26:30.000] But, you know, even religious universities, some of them have been very clear that they are not going to defend free expression.
[00:26:30.600 --> 00:26:36.600] And they say outright, you're going to dress this way, you're going to talk this way, and you're going to conduct yourself this way.
[00:26:37.000 --> 00:26:40.920] And when, you know, people have the right to associate freely.
[00:26:40.920 --> 00:26:43.720] They have the right to say, that's the kind of environment I want to be in.
[00:26:44.520 --> 00:26:46.760] That's the way I want to live.
[00:26:47.080 --> 00:26:55.640] But we've seen a lot of religious universities try to play both sides and say, we're the religious university, here's our speech rules.
[00:26:55.640 --> 00:26:58.440] But we also offer free speech protections.
[00:26:58.440 --> 00:27:00.760] We believe in the right to speak.
[00:27:00.760 --> 00:27:02.840] And so sometimes those are going to clash.
[00:27:02.840 --> 00:27:10.760] And we think that if you promised your students and faculty the right to speak their minds, you have to follow through on it.
[00:27:10.760 --> 00:27:17.240] Now, I think they should bring me on campus to say these things, at least more respectfully, because it would help their students think more critically, right?
[00:27:17.240 --> 00:27:21.720] John Stewart Mill, those who only know their own side of the argument don't even know that, right?
[00:27:21.720 --> 00:27:23.960] So you should hear what the atheists have to say.
[00:27:23.960 --> 00:27:36.040] Yeah, there's a long tradition of religious believers learning how to best advocate for their faith by fighting about it with non-believers.
[00:27:36.440 --> 00:27:47.160] The other thing that's happened recently under the Trump administration restricting federal money even to private universities, I think a lot of us had no idea how much money they were getting of federal funds.
[00:27:47.160 --> 00:27:49.480] I mean, just hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.
[00:27:49.480 --> 00:27:50.760] Astonishing.
[00:27:50.760 --> 00:28:01.320] So I guess even a private university, there's so much blending with the federal government and public money, tax money, that, well, there's no clear line there.
[00:28:01.960 --> 00:28:13.560] Yeah, so, you know, granting federal money doesn't give the federal government the authority to violate the First Amendment of these institutions, which unfortunately is still what we're seeing.
[00:28:13.560 --> 00:28:29.200] And, you know, I think people can have, you know, good discussions about how much money those institutions should be receiving, whether they have been, you know, using it appropriately, what has been the benefit to taxpayers.
[00:28:29.200 --> 00:28:35.200] But no matter what, I don't think that the way this is being conducted is remotely appropriate.
[00:28:35.680 --> 00:28:40.720] It's, you know, this isn't the way, the process by which you provoke federal funding.
[00:28:40.720 --> 00:28:54.160] And I really worry about what we're doing to our institutions if we're creating universities that want to do whatever they must to please the federal government.
[00:28:54.160 --> 00:28:55.920] I don't think that's how you produce good knowledge.
[00:28:55.920 --> 00:28:59.120] I don't think that's how you create good research.
[00:28:59.120 --> 00:29:05.680] And I do have a lot of concerns about what the future of higher education is going to look like in the U.S.
[00:29:05.680 --> 00:29:10.400] if universities feel that they must please the government.
[00:29:10.400 --> 00:29:13.120] And that's something I've been talking about in my book.
[00:29:13.760 --> 00:29:21.600] One of the biggest problems is universities feeling like they have to appease the Chinese government or the UAE or Qatar.
[00:29:21.600 --> 00:29:23.840] And it goes to bad places really quickly.
[00:29:23.840 --> 00:29:27.600] And to have that here in the U.S., it's not a good road to go down.
[00:29:27.600 --> 00:29:28.800] Yeah, for sure.
[00:29:29.120 --> 00:29:34.160] So I've spoken at a couple of conferences on this subject in the last year.
[00:29:34.160 --> 00:29:47.360] And I had Chris Rufo on the podcast as well to have this little debate about what's the right approach to correct the universities kind of going off the rails of political correctness and wokeness and all that stuff.
[00:29:47.360 --> 00:29:52.720] And, you know, as you know, Rufo sort of feels like, well, my argument was it's a battle of ideas.
[00:29:52.720 --> 00:29:55.680] And so we can chase out bad speech with good speech.
[00:29:56.000 --> 00:30:03.720] And his response to that, not just to me, but to a lot of people, like Steve Pinker, for example, is that you guys lost that battle.
[00:29:59.920 --> 00:30:04.440] It's over.
[00:30:04.920 --> 00:30:11.080] The wokeness people have won in the academy, and the only way we're going to correct it is through government intervention.
[00:30:11.400 --> 00:30:12.840] Your thoughts?
[00:30:14.120 --> 00:30:24.920] Well, as a starting principle, I do not believe you are going to censor your way to academic freedom or to free expression or to diversity of opinion.
[00:30:24.920 --> 00:30:26.600] I think that's pretty basic.
[00:30:26.600 --> 00:30:34.760] And I am not comfortable with people suggesting that we trade some kind of censorship for another.
[00:30:34.760 --> 00:30:36.440] That's not the way it works.
[00:30:36.440 --> 00:30:40.120] We are not going to censor our way out of these problems.
[00:30:40.360 --> 00:30:51.160] And so, you know, there are a lot of reforms that need to happen, of course, but there are other ways to approach them than by empowering the federal government to violate our rights.
[00:30:51.800 --> 00:31:01.400] So I feel that we just need to take that option off the table because it's not legally appropriate and it's not morally appropriate.
[00:31:01.720 --> 00:31:07.720] Well, I guess Rufo and people on that side would say, well, they shouldn't be getting federal money in the first place.
[00:31:07.720 --> 00:31:16.440] And this was similar to the argument they made when I brought up his and Ron DeSantis' attack on Disney in Florida.
[00:31:16.600 --> 00:31:20.520] You know, that just seems like, first, it seems like a very unconservative thing to do.
[00:31:20.520 --> 00:31:22.280] You know, we're going after big corporations.
[00:31:22.280 --> 00:31:25.800] I thought conservatives like big corporations and the free market.
[00:31:25.800 --> 00:31:27.400] You should be free, right?
[00:31:27.720 --> 00:31:35.800] But their response to that was, well, Disney, you know, had all these tax-free breaks on the land that they bought there.
[00:31:35.800 --> 00:31:43.320] And the state of Florida gave them all kinds of tax breaks and other favors to get them there in the first place and keep them there.
[00:31:43.320 --> 00:31:44.680] It's a win-win for everybody.
[00:31:44.960 --> 00:31:52.560] But now, what DeSantis is doing is just pulling the favors they were getting that they shouldn't have been getting in the first place.
[00:31:52.560 --> 00:31:53.360] Okay.
[00:31:54.000 --> 00:31:59.760] Yeah, so again, we're kind of going back to the funding of universities question.
[00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:03.120] There are two separate questions: is this funding a good idea?
[00:32:03.120 --> 00:32:05.040] Is this tax break a good idea?
[00:32:05.040 --> 00:32:09.200] And then, is revoking it based on expression we don't like a good idea?
[00:32:09.600 --> 00:32:11.440] I don't have perfect answers to the first one.
[00:32:11.440 --> 00:32:13.680] I think that's a rich area of discussion.
[00:32:13.680 --> 00:32:15.840] But for the second one, no.
[00:32:16.800 --> 00:32:21.600] I mean, there's only so much you can expect a First Amendment believer to say.
[00:32:21.600 --> 00:32:32.480] But, you know, the government revoking opportunities or creating punishments on the basis of protected expression is a problem.
[00:32:32.480 --> 00:32:33.680] It's not okay.
[00:32:34.640 --> 00:32:38.560] You know, people may like the way it's being used now.
[00:32:38.560 --> 00:32:40.720] You might not like the president four years from now.
[00:32:40.720 --> 00:32:43.280] You might not like the governor that follows.
[00:32:43.280 --> 00:32:50.240] Eventually, you're going to see these things that you're celebrating against your political enemies used against your political allies.
[00:32:50.720 --> 00:32:55.520] This is why we need principled approaches to First Amendment and free expression issues.
[00:32:55.840 --> 00:32:57.920] You know, our rights are a shared thing.
[00:32:58.160 --> 00:33:02.560] You're not, you know, cutting out a slice and leaving the rest.
[00:33:02.560 --> 00:33:05.600] You're cutting out a slight that's ultimately going to hurt you too.
[00:33:05.840 --> 00:33:10.960] May not seem that way right now, but these are why we need principles.
[00:33:10.960 --> 00:33:17.520] So political expediency and partisanship do not harm all of our rights in the long run.
[00:33:17.520 --> 00:33:17.920] Yeah.
[00:33:18.240 --> 00:33:22.480] That was the point that Megan Kelly made during that whole episode.
[00:33:22.480 --> 00:33:29.440] Like, this is not the kind of precedence we want to have because what if the next governor of Florida is a Democrat?
[00:33:29.440 --> 00:33:35.800] And we've empowered them to withhold money and favors for corporations they don't like?
[00:33:36.120 --> 00:33:38.840] Yeah, it's honestly pretty simple stuff.
[00:33:38.840 --> 00:33:41.960] Imagine this power in the hands of your political enemies.
[00:33:41.960 --> 00:33:44.040] Do you still think it's a good idea?
[00:33:44.360 --> 00:33:53.080] I don't think this is a very complicated question once you think just a little bit past the immediate political question.
[00:33:53.080 --> 00:33:56.760] Once you think six months from now, one year from now.
[00:33:57.480 --> 00:34:05.320] And I hope that people could come to this conclusion, not just because it suits them and it's the good logical thing.
[00:34:05.320 --> 00:34:07.560] I also think it's the moral answer, too.
[00:34:07.560 --> 00:34:13.000] I don't think it's something we should celebrate or pursue to violate other people's rights.
[00:34:13.000 --> 00:34:17.080] I don't think that's something we should be proud of or want to crow about.
[00:34:17.080 --> 00:34:17.640] Yeah.
[00:34:18.440 --> 00:34:24.120] Parenthetically, I wanted to ask you because I've asked every First Amendment person I encounter.
[00:34:24.120 --> 00:34:29.720] January 6th, did Trump's speech rise to the level of incitement of violence or no?
[00:34:30.680 --> 00:34:36.680] Honestly, I have not done much incitement work.
[00:34:36.680 --> 00:34:40.600] So I'm going to direct you to my lawyer colleagues on that question.
[00:34:41.320 --> 00:34:41.960] Okay.
[00:34:41.960 --> 00:34:44.120] Most of the people I talk to say no.
[00:34:44.440 --> 00:34:46.760] It's not, it didn't rise to that level.
[00:34:46.760 --> 00:34:47.880] Close, but not quite.
[00:34:47.880 --> 00:34:53.240] I mean, if you actually put it in court as a trial, you know, it probably wouldn't pass.
[00:34:53.560 --> 00:34:54.040] Yeah.
[00:34:54.280 --> 00:34:54.600] All right.
[00:34:54.600 --> 00:34:55.880] So you talked about China a little bit.
[00:34:55.880 --> 00:34:58.760] Let's talk about the UAE and Qatar and all that.
[00:34:58.760 --> 00:35:04.920] How much money is coming into the United States through the Academy, through these countries, and what are they doing with that?
[00:35:05.240 --> 00:35:09.160] So, there's the question: how much is coming in, and how much do we know is coming in?
[00:35:09.320 --> 00:35:10.520] Okay, all right.
[00:35:11.080 --> 00:35:17.280] Yeah, so one of the bigger problems is that for years there has just been billions in unreported funds.
[00:35:17.600 --> 00:35:28.880] And it's that lack of transparency does not suggest positive things about these relationships between universities and the Gulf states.
[00:35:29.200 --> 00:35:32.320] So, but to answer your broad question, it's a lot of money.
[00:35:32.320 --> 00:35:37.920] We might not know exactly how much, but it's very large amounts in the billions.
[00:35:38.400 --> 00:35:43.680] And, you know, the reason why this is worrying is, again, I think it's pretty simple.
[00:35:43.680 --> 00:35:51.040] If someone is giving you a lot of money, you're going to feel like you need to ensure that you can continue to get that money.
[00:35:51.040 --> 00:36:03.760] And it's going to create incentives for you to perhaps not, maybe, maybe not hold that event, maybe not issue that statement, maybe not invite that speaker.
[00:36:03.760 --> 00:36:08.480] Because is it really worth upsetting this business partner?
[00:36:08.480 --> 00:36:28.400] And so that's what one of the primary things I worry about with these ties when it comes to the Gulf states, when it comes to China, that universities have an incentive that they might not even be fully aware that they have, that they don't want to offend someone that's a good financial partner to them.
[00:36:28.400 --> 00:36:44.880] And there have been a few really troubling incidents that have come out of American satellite campuses in the region that I write about in the book, and that I think universities still need to do some accounting for, specifically when it comes to Qatar.
[00:36:45.200 --> 00:36:57.360] It sure seems like an obvious conflict of interest, you know, going back to academic research on smoking and lung cancer funded by the tobacco companies.
[00:36:57.360 --> 00:36:58.240] Like, really?
[00:36:59.880 --> 00:37:07.640] I mean, it's pretty obvious what's going on here, which is why you have to declare any financial interest in your support of your research and so on.
[00:37:07.640 --> 00:37:14.680] How is this possible that that's not being done now by universities who are on the front line of calling that out?
[00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:21.000] Yeah, and I think that's, you know, been the ultimate issue here: the lack of transparency.
[00:37:21.000 --> 00:37:28.520] And the flip side is that universities have been opening these satellite campuses in these countries.
[00:37:28.840 --> 00:37:40.520] They're now starting in Saudi Arabia, which I don't really think I need to explain why that might worry a free speech advocate to see a campus opening up in Saudi Arabia.
[00:37:40.840 --> 00:37:45.160] But they have made some promises about what these campuses are going to do.
[00:37:45.480 --> 00:37:50.840] You know, they're going to offer the same speech protections on these satellite campuses.
[00:37:50.840 --> 00:37:56.280] It's going to be the same environment, but in a different place, different opportunities and resources.
[00:37:56.280 --> 00:37:58.360] But that's clearly not the case.
[00:37:59.320 --> 00:38:12.040] And it seems a little silly that universities are pretending that they're going to offer the same rights and protections in countries that imprison people for blasphemy that they're going to have in the United States.
[00:38:12.040 --> 00:38:14.920] But they really have just not been honest about it.
[00:38:14.920 --> 00:38:27.720] And that's how we ended up with instance like Georgetown censoring a debate about blasphemy at its campus in Qatar because, you know, they made plenty of lofty promises about free expression on their campus.
[00:38:27.720 --> 00:38:36.040] And then eventually they were kind of forced to admit, I believe the exact words were, in accordance with Qatari law.
[00:38:37.000 --> 00:38:38.200] Expand on that a little bit more.
[00:38:38.360 --> 00:38:39.720] What was the incident?
[00:38:39.720 --> 00:38:44.760] Yeah, so a few years ago, there was a student debate group that was trying to host an event.
[00:38:45.440 --> 00:38:52.640] It was when a song came out about, I think it was, I believe, God is a woman, something like that, somewhere in that vein.
[00:38:52.880 --> 00:38:56.880] And so students were going to host a debate about female depictions of God.
[00:38:57.200 --> 00:39:03.920] They put up flyers, they were planning this event, and then it went viral on Twitter at the time.
[00:39:03.920 --> 00:39:09.520] And there was a hashtag, if I recall correctly, it was Georgetown Insults God.
[00:39:09.840 --> 00:39:21.760] And so the idea was that by allowing this debate to happen on their Qatari campus, they were offending local sensitivities, the government, and God.
[00:39:22.080 --> 00:39:24.240] And so Georgetown canceled it.
[00:39:24.240 --> 00:39:33.440] And they said, as universities like to do when they cancel a controversial event, they said, you know, there's a security issue, they didn't plan it properly.
[00:39:33.680 --> 00:39:43.280] And then after they were kind of poked and prodded, they admitted, and it does not, it must be in accordance with Qatari laws.
[00:39:43.280 --> 00:39:45.040] Qatar has a blasphemy law.
[00:39:45.040 --> 00:39:47.920] And so, you know, this is the kind of thing universities have been doing.
[00:39:47.920 --> 00:39:52.560] They've been pursuing global engagement, which, to be clear, is not inherently a bad thing.
[00:39:52.560 --> 00:39:57.760] There's a lot we can learn from the rest of the world and from having partnerships and having ties.
[00:39:57.760 --> 00:40:03.200] But we have to do it clear-eyed about what the restrictions are actually going to be.
[00:40:03.200 --> 00:40:07.920] And we have to be honest with our students about what kind of environment they're going to be in.
[00:40:08.560 --> 00:40:16.960] Saying that you're on a campus that's open to freedom of expression and then saying, well, you can't talk about God.
[00:40:16.960 --> 00:40:17.280] Right.
[00:40:17.360 --> 00:40:19.760] That's kind of a pretty big exception.
[00:40:19.760 --> 00:40:20.400] Yeah.
[00:40:20.720 --> 00:40:23.360] Yeah, you have some stunning examples here.
[00:40:23.360 --> 00:40:24.880] I'll read another one.
[00:40:26.160 --> 00:40:27.600] Let's see here.
[00:40:27.600 --> 00:40:30.040] This is in your How Did We Get Here chapter.
[00:40:29.600 --> 00:40:34.200] Imagine you're a professor hired to teach a class on global art history.
[00:40:34.520 --> 00:40:47.400] So you do exactly that, offering a section on Islamic art throughout history and showing a famous and respectful medieval Islamic painting of the Prophet Muhammad with the angel Gabriel, one intended and commissioned to honor Islam.
[00:40:47.400 --> 00:41:02.120] Knowing that depictions of the prophet are today considered inappropriate or blasphemous by many followers of Islam, you take care to sufficiently and repeatedly warn students that the image will be shown so that students can choose to avoid seeing it if they wish.
[00:41:02.120 --> 00:41:08.120] You teach material necessary to the subject, but in a way that would still respect individual students' sensibilities.
[00:41:08.120 --> 00:41:12.440] For Erica Lopez Pratter, it's Candace Rivera has it all.
[00:41:12.440 --> 00:41:18.920] In just three years, she went from stay-at-home mom to traveling the world, saving lives and making millions.
[00:41:18.920 --> 00:41:23.480] Anyone would think Candace's charm life is about as real as Unicorn's.
[00:41:23.480 --> 00:41:27.000] But sometimes the truth is even harder to believe than the lies.
[00:41:27.320 --> 00:41:28.120] Not true.
[00:41:28.120 --> 00:41:29.800] There's so many things not true.
[00:41:29.800 --> 00:41:31.480] You got a great lead.
[00:41:31.800 --> 00:41:38.040] I'm Charlie Webster, and this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by Seven Hills.
[00:41:38.040 --> 00:41:40.840] Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.
[00:41:41.480 --> 00:41:44.200] It seemed that doing her job is how she lost it.
[00:41:44.200 --> 00:41:46.360] All right, what happened to her?
[00:41:46.920 --> 00:42:00.360] So this was actually, so you know, in this chapter, I discuss the factors that have gotten us to a place where, you know, a university might consider silencing a critic of the Chinese government because it's hurtful to some students.
[00:42:00.520 --> 00:42:04.280] And so that's an example from Hamlin University a few years ago.
[00:42:04.280 --> 00:42:07.480] That was just kind of hard to believe.
[00:42:07.480 --> 00:42:10.040] That just happened in the United States.
[00:42:10.200 --> 00:42:12.280] But yes, this is a private university.
[00:42:12.280 --> 00:42:22.160] An instructor was very respectfully teaching a course about this artwork, and she even told students it was going to be shown.
[00:42:22.800 --> 00:42:31.760] And this is artwork that it's not universally agreed upon within Islam that this artwork isn't appropriate for believers to look upon in the first place.
[00:42:31.760 --> 00:42:40.720] I'm sure many believers do think that you can't depict or look at depictions of Muhammad, but that's not the universal view of Islam.
[00:42:40.720 --> 00:42:43.280] There's a lot of debate and discussion within Islam.
[00:42:43.280 --> 00:42:46.320] And even if it were, it's a university.
[00:42:46.560 --> 00:42:51.760] Academics have to be able to teach freely and openly.
[00:42:52.160 --> 00:43:02.000] And so to have Hamlin act this way, this is the kind of sensitivities that we're talking about that are easy to be exploited.
[00:43:02.320 --> 00:43:08.560] And Hamlin got a lot of criticism for the way it conducted itself there.
[00:43:08.880 --> 00:43:26.560] But the university was really defending itself and arguing that this is just another way to perceive academic freedom of taking in the sensitivities of the classroom to have that moderate how an instructor teaches.
[00:43:26.560 --> 00:43:30.800] But it's not like she was showing a South Park episode making fun of the Prophet Muhammad, right?
[00:43:30.800 --> 00:43:32.560] No, she's not.
[00:43:32.880 --> 00:43:33.840] Here's another one.
[00:43:34.240 --> 00:43:46.640] This is an undergraduate student named Naomi Matthew approached staff members at Truman State, starting a campus group associated with PETA, people for the ethical treatment of animals.
[00:43:46.640 --> 00:43:56.320] Concerned about the possibility of emotional risk engendered by hostile confrontations over the group message, Truman State denied the request.
[00:43:56.320 --> 00:43:57.040] Consider that.
[00:43:57.040 --> 00:44:04.760] Truman State chose to violate a student's rights rather than risk the mere possibility that her speech could result in hurt feelings.
[00:43:59.840 --> 00:44:05.640] Not done yet.
[00:44:05.880 --> 00:44:13.720] Administrators also fretted over the reputational risk for the university to have its students associated with PETA.
[00:44:13.720 --> 00:44:19.640] Matthew responded by using public record laws to find out who else's rights had been violated.
[00:44:19.640 --> 00:44:22.920] In cases like these, lightning rarely strikes just once.
[00:44:22.920 --> 00:44:25.000] Go ahead and expand on that.
[00:44:25.320 --> 00:44:36.600] Yeah, and so that's again, you know, part of that is, you know, the emotional harm aspect, but there's also the reputational risk, which I go into more in that chapter, which I find really interesting.
[00:44:36.920 --> 00:44:49.080] The ways that universities are becoming more than anything else, a brand in some ways, and that what's most important to them is protection of the brand, protection of the reputation.
[00:44:49.080 --> 00:44:51.800] And you know what's sometimes bad for a reputation?
[00:44:52.040 --> 00:44:58.520] Unpopular speakers who cause a lot of anger on social media.
[00:44:58.520 --> 00:45:04.760] And so I think that's part of the problem and part of the reason why universities have been acting this way.
[00:45:04.760 --> 00:45:17.320] It's because they see themselves more as financial institutions, as brands, as reputational groups rather than academic institutions.
[00:45:17.320 --> 00:45:23.880] And so they are willing to try to censor speech if it is, you know, quote unquote bad for the brand.
[00:45:24.520 --> 00:45:31.160] And, you know, part of it is, you know, just in the ways that universities are staffed.
[00:45:31.480 --> 00:45:42.840] You know, you can look at the rates of administrative staff versus tenured faculty versus, you know, people who are on short-term teaching contracts.
[00:45:43.240 --> 00:45:52.880] And the numbers are not very friendly when it comes to who's going to care about academic freedom in that group and who's going to want to protect the university's financial interests.
[00:45:52.880 --> 00:45:54.000] Yeah, here's the numbers you had.
[00:45:54.000 --> 00:46:02.640] Over the last 40 years, the number of full-time faculty at colleges and universities has grown by 50%, in line with increases in student enrollment.
[00:46:02.640 --> 00:46:13.440] But in the same period, the number of administrators has risen by 85%, and the number of staffers required to help the administrators has jumped by a whopping 240%.
[00:46:13.840 --> 00:46:15.760] It's like, what are these people doing?
[00:46:15.760 --> 00:46:24.320] I mean, and how did, when I was in college in the 70s, how did we survive getting an education without all those administrators and their help?
[00:46:24.640 --> 00:46:27.680] Well, yeah, we're getting very bureaucratic universities.
[00:46:27.680 --> 00:46:34.080] And I think it speaks to the shifting priorities because that's ultimately what this is about.
[00:46:34.240 --> 00:46:44.960] Universities choosing financial gain, choosing reputational management over their values and over their commitments to pretty basic stuff like academic freedom and free expression.
[00:46:44.960 --> 00:46:49.600] And it's why we're in a problem when it comes to foreign authoritarianism.
[00:46:49.600 --> 00:46:52.720] I think it's why we're having problems here in the U.S.
[00:46:53.280 --> 00:46:56.880] You know, even if you remove the question of foreign censorship.
[00:46:56.880 --> 00:47:01.120] So I think it's at the root of a good number of our problems.
[00:47:01.360 --> 00:47:19.120] And another thing I talk about in that chapter is other political censorship that I think is taking place in legislatures and state houses that I really worry is making higher education more ripe for abuse when it comes to political censorship.
[00:47:19.120 --> 00:47:40.120] Because if you have, you know, state legislators creating laws that violate the First Amendment because they want to stop, you know, whatever they call anti-woke speech in classrooms, we keep just opening the door wider and wider to different kinds of political speech that we're going to be censoring in higher ed.
[00:47:40.120 --> 00:47:43.640] And that door is just going to keep opening further.
[00:47:43.640 --> 00:47:46.200] You can't just crack it open a little.
[00:47:46.200 --> 00:47:49.560] Here's one more example from Indiana University.
[00:47:49.560 --> 00:47:55.240] Janitor and student Keith Sampson was charged with racial harassment in 2007.
[00:47:55.240 --> 00:48:06.120] The charges came after he was found reading is the book called Notre Dame versus the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan during one of his breaks.
[00:48:06.120 --> 00:48:16.600] The book is, of course, not an endorsement of the KKK, as anyone who bothered to read to the end of the book's title, again, how they defeated the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:48:17.240 --> 00:48:25.400] Instead, the book tells the story of a group of Notre Dame students who got in an altercation with members of the white supremacist group in South Bend, Indiana.
[00:48:25.400 --> 00:48:26.520] But that did not matter.
[00:48:26.520 --> 00:48:48.600] In response to a handful of complaints, the university's affirmative action office launched an investigation and quickly found Sampson guilty of racial harassment, writing that, quote, he used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black coworkers.
[00:48:48.760 --> 00:48:57.000] So, mind you, he wasn't giving a lecture, he wasn't in class, he wasn't a professor, he's a janitor reading a book over in the corner somewhere.
[00:48:57.000 --> 00:48:59.720] I mean, that's astonishing in America.
[00:48:59.720 --> 00:49:02.600] Yeah, that was one of the earlier cases for fire.
[00:49:02.600 --> 00:49:11.960] That was in the earlier days, but it's just shocking that these things could have even happened at all.
[00:49:12.280 --> 00:49:20.560] Well, I guess the larger thread here is that universities have shifted their focus from the search for truth to social justice.
[00:49:21.760 --> 00:49:24.960] Yeah, I think there's a number of different problems.
[00:49:24.960 --> 00:49:35.440] And it's whatever the priorities have become, I don't think that academic freedom and free expression are the primary goals anymore.
[00:49:35.440 --> 00:49:37.920] And I think you can see that in a lot of different ways.
[00:49:38.640 --> 00:49:47.280] And, you know, the ways that that has kind of grown in recent years has shifted from time to time.
[00:49:47.280 --> 00:50:00.400] But either way, I don't think those really basic values that are the underlying support of higher education, we're seeing them just shift away.
[00:50:00.400 --> 00:50:10.320] And I don't know what higher education is going to look like when we keep giving in to political and philosophical violations of academic freedom.
[00:50:10.320 --> 00:50:23.600] And yet they're not consistent about this because if you bring up the Uyghurs, if the university has Chinese money, then all of a sudden they're not interested in that as a social justice issue.
[00:50:23.920 --> 00:50:53.360] Yeah, well, there's, you know, one thing that I thought was particularly galling that I talk about in the book is when a Harvard Law vice dean essentially made a Chinese dissident who was on the campus, who was part of a temporary program at the school, he made him essentially cancel an event about human rights in China because it was scheduled to take place while the president of Harvard was going to be in China meeting Xi Jinping.
[00:50:53.760 --> 00:50:57.120] And this dean said that it would embarrass the university.
[00:50:57.760 --> 00:50:59.440] So it's shocking.
[00:50:59.440 --> 00:51:02.840] It's hard to imagine that kind of thing happening.
[00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:10.040] But this is what happens when you put other interests ahead of really basic expressive values.
[00:51:10.040 --> 00:51:23.480] When you say protecting our university brand, protecting our relationship to Chinese partners matters more than scholars on our campus being willing to speak their minds about some of the most pressing political issues of the day.
[00:51:23.800 --> 00:51:28.200] Why do you think that shift has happened over the last several decades?
[00:51:28.520 --> 00:51:30.360] I think there's a lot of different reasons.
[00:51:30.680 --> 00:51:48.040] So as I mentioned earlier, I think the growth of the campus administration, the bureaucracy, the people who are most interested in making their universities financially wealthy, global institutions, that's a big part of it.
[00:51:48.680 --> 00:51:55.080] If you are seeking new opportunities and funding sources, you're eventually probably going to look overseas.
[00:51:55.320 --> 00:51:57.160] So that's a big part of it.
[00:51:57.160 --> 00:52:02.520] Another part of it that's really been a challenge is the presence of international students.
[00:52:02.520 --> 00:52:14.200] And this isn't a criticism of international students, but when you have hundreds of thousands of students from China coming to the United States, universities really want to preserve that as a funding source.
[00:52:14.200 --> 00:52:18.360] They want to make sure that they can continue to get access to those students.
[00:52:18.360 --> 00:52:26.600] And the best way to continue making sure that you have access to those students is by not offending the Chinese government.
[00:52:26.840 --> 00:52:38.440] And so we actually saw, it's only happened a couple times to my knowledge, but the Chinese government has derecognized at least one university's diploma because they invited the Dalai Lama.
[00:52:38.440 --> 00:52:41.480] And so that means Chinese students were not going to go to that university.
[00:52:41.720 --> 00:52:48.080] And so, you know, I think these kinds of punishments are rare, but universities know they can happen.
[00:52:48.080 --> 00:53:03.200] And so you're not going to risk losing major funding sources, whether it's grants, whether it's ties with other universities in China or businesses in China or access to students.
[00:53:03.200 --> 00:53:08.400] You're not going to risk, you know, all that money if you don't have to.
[00:53:08.640 --> 00:53:16.800] And I think for most people, you know, it's not going to seem worth it to say, let's invite this Chinese dissident.
[00:53:16.800 --> 00:53:23.200] Let's make sure we're hosting events and scholarship if it's going to risk us a lot of money.
[00:53:23.200 --> 00:53:25.520] And it's a shame, but I think that's where we are.
[00:53:25.520 --> 00:53:27.200] How are they getting Chinese money?
[00:53:27.200 --> 00:53:32.560] Just students, Chinese students paying the higher tuition out of state tuition?
[00:53:32.560 --> 00:53:36.000] Or are there other sources funding professorships and things like that?
[00:53:36.000 --> 00:53:37.280] Yeah, so there's other sources.
[00:53:37.280 --> 00:53:41.120] There's research grants, there's joint institutes.
[00:53:41.120 --> 00:53:42.800] That's a pretty popular method.
[00:53:43.120 --> 00:53:46.960] Universities partnering with a university in China.
[00:53:47.280 --> 00:53:51.440] And then usually there's some financial exchange that takes place.
[00:53:51.680 --> 00:54:03.120] Kane University, which is a public university in New Jersey, they're, to my knowledge, the first public university to open a satellite campus in China, but they received a lot of money for that institute.
[00:54:03.440 --> 00:54:05.600] And so that's a big part of it.
[00:54:06.480 --> 00:54:17.200] There's also partnerships with Chinese tech companies that tend to be very wealthy and able to provide universities with large grants.
[00:54:17.440 --> 00:54:24.640] And there's also, this has essentially died out because of media pressure, political pressure.
[00:54:24.640 --> 00:54:41.720] But for a time, universities were getting probably grants from like $200,000 to $300,000 range from Confucius Institutes, which were that's a Chinese government-run program that essentially matches an American university with a Chinese university.
[00:54:42.120 --> 00:54:49.560] And there's a little bit of money that passes between them, but often teaching materials, educators, staff.
[00:54:49.560 --> 00:54:59.880] And so in the 2010s, that was a pretty prevalent way for the Chinese government to create partnerships with American universities.
[00:54:59.880 --> 00:55:15.480] But I think there's less than a dozen, probably a handful left, because people were rightfully asking some questions about whether it was appropriate for universities to be having these kinds of ties with the Chinese government.
[00:55:15.480 --> 00:55:16.200] Should the U.S.
[00:55:16.200 --> 00:55:19.400] government be concerned about those kinds of ties?
[00:55:19.400 --> 00:55:23.000] I mean, is that a moral panic or is there something to it?
[00:55:23.960 --> 00:55:29.320] In some ways, in some ways, the criticism could be exaggerated.
[00:55:29.640 --> 00:55:40.920] You know, when you look and you find how many proven incidents of definitive censorship originating from Confucius Institutes, it did happen from time to time.
[00:55:40.920 --> 00:55:48.760] It was not, I don't think most institutes were, you know, a censorship powerhouse on the campus.
[00:55:49.640 --> 00:56:06.840] But ultimately, what you have is a partnership where you might make other decisions that are never asked for you by the Chinese government or by the Confucius Institute, but you might say, I want to make sure I preserve this relationship.
[00:56:06.840 --> 00:56:10.200] So I'm going to not invite the Dalai Lama to speak.
[00:56:10.520 --> 00:56:17.360] And, you know, Confucius Institutes have objected before when universities have invited the Dalai Lama.
[00:56:17.360 --> 00:56:24.960] I think it was 2009, NC State disinvited the Dalai Lama after the Confucius Institute objected.
[00:56:25.360 --> 00:56:28.160] And so, you know, those things are rare, but they happen.
[00:56:28.480 --> 00:56:42.400] But what we don't have as good of a sense of is what decisions universities have made that have never been ordered or asked of them, but they have just voluntarily followed through on their own side to make sure they protect those ties.
[00:56:42.400 --> 00:56:46.160] And that's what's really difficult to track and really difficult to get a sense of.
[00:56:46.480 --> 00:56:48.960] So, you know, that's part of the risk.
[00:56:48.960 --> 00:56:55.440] And another part of it is just what it means for, I think, dissident international students from China.
[00:56:55.440 --> 00:57:09.760] If you're walking around on campus and you see a Confucius Institute, you might think my university is not going to protect me if I feel like the Chinese government is censoring me because, look, they gave them a hall, an office down the hall.
[00:57:09.760 --> 00:57:19.520] So, you know, it's not just about what those institutes themselves have done, but it's about what it says about the university's priorities and its decision making.
[00:57:19.520 --> 00:57:20.160] Yeah.
[00:57:20.480 --> 00:57:26.560] Well, I mean, you don't have to invite the Dalai Lama, but if you have already, then, you know, follow through, right?
[00:57:26.560 --> 00:57:30.160] So that's the problem with the disinvitation issue.
[00:57:30.320 --> 00:57:39.200] I remember when Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley, and, you know, all hell broke loose before he even got into the auditorium.
[00:57:39.200 --> 00:57:42.960] And, you know, there were like fires and riots, and it was insane.
[00:57:42.960 --> 00:57:49.840] And so I called my president at the Chapman University, he's a good friend, and said, we should bring this guy to Chapman and I'll debate him.
[00:57:49.840 --> 00:57:51.920] He's like, Are you out of your mind?
[00:57:52.720 --> 00:57:55.440] So, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos is not the Dalai Lama.
[00:57:55.440 --> 00:57:55.840] Okay.
[00:57:55.840 --> 00:57:59.880] You know, maybe you don't want to invite a troublemaker.
[00:57:59.600 --> 00:58:02.280] That's not exactly a free speech issue.
[00:58:02.760 --> 00:58:12.520] But once you've invited somebody who's a noted scholar or somebody who's respected, then disinviting them seems off the goals of the university.
[00:58:12.840 --> 00:58:20.120] Well, and I think with Milo and similar speakers, I think what had happened in a lot of those cases was that student groups had invited him.
[00:58:20.120 --> 00:58:24.520] And then, you know, there was some kind of intervention to not let the students invite him.
[00:58:24.520 --> 00:58:26.440] And, you know, student groups have rights.
[00:58:26.440 --> 00:58:31.320] Students have the right to invite and hear speakers that the rest of the campus doesn't like.
[00:58:31.320 --> 00:58:42.680] And, you know, there are a lot of ways to respond to that that are not, you know, disrupting the event or, you know, in a couple of cases, violence.
[00:58:42.920 --> 00:58:44.200] You can counter protest.
[00:58:44.200 --> 00:58:46.120] You can hold your own event.
[00:58:46.120 --> 00:58:48.680] You can try to encourage people not to go.
[00:58:48.680 --> 00:58:53.480] There are a lot of things you can do that don't violate someone's rights.
[00:58:53.960 --> 00:58:55.560] You can just practice your own.
[00:58:55.640 --> 00:59:00.520] Remember the point I made at the time because I've done a lot of university talks, hundreds.
[00:59:00.520 --> 00:59:04.680] And I said, you know what's worse than having protesters come to your talk?
[00:59:04.680 --> 00:59:06.440] Having nobody come to your talk.
[00:59:06.440 --> 00:59:08.760] You walk in and it's like a mostly empty auditorium.
[00:59:08.760 --> 00:59:11.640] It's like, oh, this is really depressing.
[00:59:13.240 --> 00:59:15.320] Yeah, I think everybody's been there at some point.
[00:59:15.320 --> 00:59:15.800] Yeah.
[00:59:16.040 --> 00:59:21.480] But that seems to miss the point of what's the motive behind it, which is very moralistic in nature.
[00:59:21.720 --> 00:59:24.120] You know, it's one thing to just not go.
[00:59:24.120 --> 00:59:25.240] I'm not going to read that book.
[00:59:25.240 --> 00:59:27.640] I'm not going to attend the speaker's talk or whatever.
[00:59:27.640 --> 00:59:31.240] But that doesn't seem to be enough in the new campus environment.
[00:59:31.800 --> 00:59:37.800] We need to punish this person, or in the case of some cancel culture, get the person fired.
[00:59:37.800 --> 00:59:43.960] You know, it's not enough to just say, I disagree with you, and you're wrong, and here's why, but you need to lose your job over this.
[00:59:43.960 --> 00:59:45.000] I mean, why that?
[00:59:45.760 --> 00:59:50.960] I think, you know, a lot of this stuff just fundamentally misunderstands human nature.
[00:59:52.320 --> 00:59:57.440] People want to see what they're told not to look at or what not to hear.
[00:59:57.440 --> 01:00:00.880] I think there's just something deeply ingrained in human beings.
[01:00:01.440 --> 01:00:08.240] I have this problem where if I see, you know, like a post has been hidden, I always have to click.
[01:00:08.240 --> 01:00:09.360] I need to see why.
[01:00:09.360 --> 01:00:10.480] I just have to find out.
[01:00:11.120 --> 01:00:12.160] It's silly.
[01:00:12.320 --> 01:00:18.400] But, you know, I think there's just something innate where, you know, we get a little bit more curious about things.
[01:00:19.280 --> 01:00:25.680] You know, there's a lot of things going on where they're trying to ban kids' access to certain books.
[01:00:25.920 --> 01:00:28.400] I could not think of a better way to get kids to read those books.
[01:00:28.800 --> 01:00:29.040] I know.
[01:00:29.920 --> 01:00:31.280] I want my books banned.
[01:00:31.680 --> 01:00:39.680] Or it's like if I was a gene company like American Eagle, you know, everybody in the world has to watch the Sydney Sweeney jeans commercial now.
[01:00:39.680 --> 01:00:45.040] I mean, you do realize you're helping capitalists, right, make a lot of money.
[01:00:46.640 --> 01:00:50.400] I am just choosing to ignore all of that.
[01:00:50.720 --> 01:00:56.400] Oh, you know, these culture war things, they erupt so quickly and they spread so fast.
[01:00:56.400 --> 01:00:59.680] You know, sometimes I'll go out on a couple hour bike ride and come back.
[01:00:59.680 --> 01:01:02.880] I've missed like three major events in three hours.
[01:01:02.880 --> 01:01:04.640] It's like, whoa, okay.
[01:01:05.280 --> 01:01:12.480] Yeah, sometimes I've been on a flight and not paid for Wi-Fi and then landed and I feel like there's been three cultural cycles I missed.
[01:01:12.480 --> 01:01:14.000] I was in the air.
[01:01:14.000 --> 01:01:15.440] Now back to the Saudi money.
[01:01:15.440 --> 01:01:19.080] Don't universities have to declare like all their research funds.
[01:01:19.080 --> 01:01:27.520] And if you have a professorship funded by some family, royal family, don't you have to declare this to the government, the IRS?
[01:01:27.480 --> 01:01:38.440] Um, so there's um certain uh restrictions that universities have to report money, um, you know, at a certain threshold where it's coming from.
[01:01:38.440 --> 01:01:46.920] Uh, but the problem is, you know, they've been mostly ignoring, or not mostly, uh, but there's been significant underreporting on that.
[01:01:46.920 --> 01:02:02.040] Um, that has been in the billions, and so I think there's more, there's been more attention on the past five to ten years about, you know, this foreign funding that's kind of been skyrocketing and under the radar.
[01:02:02.280 --> 01:02:15.800] So, I think that people are starting to become familiar with the problem of under-reporting, but we're definitely playing catch-up on that front where we're trying to see what we missed in the past couple of decades.
[01:02:16.120 --> 01:02:19.000] And I don't think we're fully there just yet.
[01:02:19.320 --> 01:02:24.680] But, yeah, universities have not been entirely following reporting restrictions on that.
[01:02:24.680 --> 01:02:38.600] And then, in addition to the people that are directly censoring because they're getting funds from, say, the Chinese government, does this also spread to others who are not funded, but because they can see what the damages are by speaking up?
[01:02:38.600 --> 01:02:40.200] They self-censor.
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[01:03:14.200 --> 01:03:15.200] Yeah, absolutely.
[01:03:14.840 --> 01:03:18.560] I think self-censorship is one of the biggest concerns here.
[01:03:19.520 --> 01:03:41.360] You know, you could just imagine, you know, if you're starting out in political science and you're choosing which field you want to go into, which area of research, and you know that if you want to be someone who's researching, you know, something that the Chinese government does not want you to research, you might not be able to get a visa.
[01:03:41.360 --> 01:03:44.560] You're going to have issue getting access to research materials.
[01:03:44.560 --> 01:03:53.200] You're going to have, you know, the fear that maybe some universities won't want to hire you because they won't want someone doing that work on their campus.
[01:03:53.200 --> 01:04:09.840] And so I think from the very start, you know, there are a lot of incentives for people to self-censor and to maybe just avoid that kind of material in the first place and to change their career path because it's not the most viable career path.
[01:04:09.840 --> 01:04:19.120] I mean, academia is already a difficult field for a lot of people and the job market is not promising.
[01:04:19.120 --> 01:04:32.240] And so, you know, the thought of going into, you know, an area of study where you might be creating a lot of difficulties for yourself, more than you're already going to have, I don't think it's very attractive.
[01:04:32.560 --> 01:04:34.080] Here's some examples of this.
[01:04:34.080 --> 01:04:41.920] I'm pulling from Steven Pinker's next book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, from his chapter on The Canceling Instinct.
[01:04:41.920 --> 01:04:49.600] The subtitle of the chapter is The Urge to Prevent Ideas from Becoming Common Knowledge, Even in the Knowledge Profession, universities.
[01:04:49.920 --> 01:04:53.120] So, here's some questions that you really are not supposed to ask.
[01:04:53.120 --> 01:04:57.360] Do women on average have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?
[01:04:57.360 --> 01:05:01.000] Did indigenous peoples frequently engage in war and genocide?
[01:05:01.000 --> 01:05:07.480] Are recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse really implanted by suggestive questioning by psychotherapists?
[01:05:07.480 --> 01:05:11.960] Is morality an evolutionary adaptation of our brains with no divine mandate?
[01:05:12.280 --> 01:05:16.680] Does racial diversity benefit neighborhoods, academic departments, and companies?
[01:05:16.680 --> 01:05:19.480] Are there two sexes in animals, including humans?
[01:05:19.480 --> 01:05:21.880] Do men have an innate motive to rape?
[01:05:21.880 --> 01:05:26.120] Do violent riots reduce support for liberal political candidates?
[01:05:26.120 --> 01:05:28.120] I won't go on for much longer.
[01:05:28.120 --> 01:05:32.440] Would a rapid reduction in fossil fuel consumption do more harm than good?
[01:05:32.440 --> 01:05:37.480] Is average intelligence declining because duller people have more children than smarter people?
[01:05:37.480 --> 01:05:42.520] And then, of course, the biggest one of all is: are there racial group differences in IQ, right?
[01:05:42.520 --> 01:05:50.760] So, these are all pretty close to taboo subjects for academics to research, particularly in sciences.
[01:05:51.000 --> 01:05:56.040] And yet, they should be, you know, on the free speech issue, you should be all free to research whatever you want.
[01:05:56.040 --> 01:05:58.200] But there's a lot of those I wouldn't touch.
[01:05:58.200 --> 01:06:00.120] I don't have to research everything, right?
[01:06:00.120 --> 01:06:01.880] We don't have to know everything.
[01:06:02.200 --> 01:06:11.960] So, I mean, isn't there some rationality behind choosing some topics to research and not others without it being a censorious issue?
[01:06:11.960 --> 01:06:13.080] Oh, yeah, of course there is.
[01:06:13.080 --> 01:06:23.560] And, you know, not every decision to avoid a research subject implies some greater, you know, authoritarian impulse pressing down on people.
[01:06:23.800 --> 01:06:38.040] But there are people that, you know, do face this kind of pressure and who do experience the kind of repercussions that academics are afraid of for pursuing research against authoritarian governments.
[01:06:38.040 --> 01:06:42.600] And we're seeing it more and more, you know, especially with visa restrictions.
[01:06:42.600 --> 01:06:54.640] If you are in a certain field that requires you to travel to a country to do on-the-ground research and you are seen as a critic of that government, you really might have a lot of trouble getting that visa.
[01:06:55.040 --> 01:07:03.360] We've seen it in China, we're seeing it in India, and we might be seeing more and more here in the United States, which is really unfortunate to say.
[01:07:03.360 --> 01:07:14.160] But we might be adding certain questions about American politics to the list of things scholars don't want to touch because they're afraid their university won't stand by them.
[01:07:14.160 --> 01:07:18.560] They're afraid that there will be a funding threat if they pursue that inquiry.
[01:07:18.560 --> 01:07:28.720] They're afraid that if they're an international scholar, maybe they won't be here very long if the federal government doesn't like what they're saying and thinks that they're a national security threat.
[01:07:28.720 --> 01:07:31.120] So, yeah, it's unfortunate.
[01:07:31.120 --> 01:07:35.520] But I think, you know, this problem is only growing.
[01:07:35.520 --> 01:07:38.800] And in part, it's growing because we've let it.
[01:07:39.680 --> 01:07:46.320] I don't think, you know, I'm very troubled by what's been happening in the past eight months of the Trump administration.
[01:07:46.800 --> 01:07:53.200] You know, I do not think we're on a good path right now for free expression, especially in higher education.
[01:07:53.200 --> 01:07:58.720] But, you know, these are things that universities have been letting bloom for a long time.
[01:07:58.720 --> 01:08:03.360] And they need to stand up to all of this authoritarianism, all of this pressure.
[01:08:03.360 --> 01:08:07.360] It can't just be picking and choosing which ones you stand up against.
[01:08:07.360 --> 01:08:09.520] And they need to develop more of a spine.
[01:08:10.640 --> 01:08:25.600] Well, that was one of Marco Rubio's arguments about these students, foreign students that come here, seemingly pretty critical of the United States government and way of life, democracy, capitalism, and our freedoms, and yet they want to come here anyway.
[01:08:25.600 --> 01:08:27.200] Why should we let them in?
[01:08:27.200 --> 01:08:29.360] If you hate us so much, go somewhere else.
[01:08:29.360 --> 01:08:31.080] That was his argument.
[01:08:29.920 --> 01:08:33.960] Yeah, so, you know, for a few things.
[01:08:34.600 --> 01:08:41.800] Number one, I think America is strong enough to be able to withstand having immigrants criticize it.
[01:08:42.280 --> 01:08:46.360] For me, I think that's, you know, what loving America means.
[01:08:46.360 --> 01:09:07.640] I think it means believing that it's strong enough to withstand, you know, some harsh criticism, maybe unfair criticism, but, you know, I don't think that we gain something by broadening the restrictions for what can be said here and who can come here.
[01:09:07.640 --> 01:09:21.880] And I think we've, you know, one of the best things that America has been is a place where people from around the world who are fleeing oppression, who, you know, they come here and they think they can finally speak their mind.
[01:09:22.120 --> 01:09:30.520] That doesn't mean we need to like what they're saying, but I think it's a net good for the country and for the world that the United States, for a lot of people, has been that place.
[01:09:30.520 --> 01:09:35.080] It's been somewhere where they can come and for the first time speak freely.
[01:09:35.080 --> 01:09:43.480] And so to throw that all away so we can, you know, achieve some of the administration's political goals, I think that's a shame.
[01:09:43.480 --> 01:09:46.200] I do not think that's something we should pursue or be proud of.
[01:09:46.200 --> 01:09:56.440] And, you know, if something looks more like China or Russia would be doing it, maybe we should go the opposite direction.
[01:09:57.080 --> 01:10:00.520] All right, Sarah, let's wrap up by talking about solutions.
[01:10:00.520 --> 01:10:09.480] If the Secretary of Education called you and said, I read your book, and I want to bring you in and tell us what we should do because we don't want to go down this road.
[01:10:09.480 --> 01:10:11.160] What would you tell them?
[01:10:11.400 --> 01:10:16.240] Well, number one, we'd stop violating the First Amendment for our universities.
[01:10:14.920 --> 01:10:18.000] That's the number one place to start.
[01:10:18.640 --> 01:10:22.960] But, you know, there are a lot of things that I actually think universities themselves can be doing.
[01:10:23.280 --> 01:10:29.600] I think they need to revisit their partnerships that they've been pursuing abroad for years.
[01:10:29.920 --> 01:10:36.000] You know, if you opened a campus in China 20 years ago, the situation on the ground there politically was very different then.
[01:10:36.320 --> 01:10:41.120] And universities need to acknowledge that things change.
[01:10:41.120 --> 01:10:47.200] And, you know, what seemed like a good idea 20 years ago might not be working as well today.
[01:10:47.200 --> 01:10:55.360] And so they need to go back, they need to look at what they've been doing, see if there have been rights violations going on at these campuses.
[01:10:55.360 --> 01:11:00.880] If there are, they need to at least respond in some capacity, perhaps close them.
[01:11:00.880 --> 01:11:05.760] And I think they need to be doing a lot more for their international students now more than ever.
[01:11:06.080 --> 01:11:09.920] When I wrote this book, it was about threats from abroad.
[01:11:09.920 --> 01:11:14.720] But, you know, now I think there are threats to international student speech rights kind of from every direction.
[01:11:14.720 --> 01:11:28.800] So universities need to be doing a good job of educating them, making sure they understand what their rights are when they get here, what universities can do for them if a government, any government tries to violate those speech rights.
[01:11:29.040 --> 01:11:31.360] So those are just places to start.
[01:11:31.360 --> 01:11:38.320] They need to do a lot better job of maintaining speech protections, even in the United States.
[01:11:38.320 --> 01:11:40.480] Not everything's about a satellite campus.
[01:11:40.480 --> 01:11:49.760] Just here, they need to make sure that academics who come here from China, from India, feel that they can speak freely without facing some kind of administrative punishment.
[01:11:50.000 --> 01:12:00.000] And, you know, for Americans more generally, I think we need to be doing a better job of pursuing policies and politicians that want to protect speech rights.
[01:12:00.920 --> 01:12:08.600] Because unfortunately, right now, I don't think that it hurts a candidate to be pro-censorship.
[01:12:09.160 --> 01:12:10.920] And that's not how things should be in the U.S.
[01:12:11.640 --> 01:12:17.320] You know, it should hurt your campaign, not help it, if you talk about whose rights you want to take away.
[01:12:17.960 --> 01:12:19.240] You would think.
[01:12:20.040 --> 01:12:20.920] I would hope.
[01:12:21.240 --> 01:12:25.800] I will read your final closing lines here in your wonderful book.
[01:12:25.800 --> 01:12:33.000] Censorship has global repercussions, and we cannot wish it away by treating it as someone else's problem.
[01:12:33.000 --> 01:12:41.080] Activists, scholars, students, and dissidents around the world have shown tremendous bravery in pushing back against the horrors of authoritarianism.
[01:12:41.080 --> 01:12:46.280] It is on us to ensure that our universities aid them and not their oppressors.
[01:12:46.280 --> 01:12:50.920] A free world cannot exist without free universities.
[01:12:50.920 --> 01:12:58.200] There it is: Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.
[01:12:58.200 --> 01:13:00.040] Everyone in academia needs to read this book.
[01:13:00.040 --> 01:13:02.760] Actually, everybody who's into free speech needs to read this book.
[01:13:02.760 --> 01:13:05.880] All right, Sarah, thank you so much for your work and keep it up.
[01:13:05.880 --> 01:13:06.520] We need you.
[01:13:06.520 --> 01:13:07.320] Thanks for having me.
[01:13:07.320 --> 01:13:08.520] Appreciate it.
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