Jeanne McGuire: Well, thank you all for coming and thank our guests for agreeing to speak to us this evening. We’re going to start this evening and I’m not going to interrupt any of the time that they have because it’s too short for whatever has to take place here this evening.
So I’m going to turn right immediately to our first speaker of the evening, Christian Parenti, who is going to speak to us about the question of identity politics. Actually you just use a different word, diversity. The issue of diversity as it presents itself on campus as an issue
Today. Christian Parenti: Okay thank you very much. Actually I’m going to speak about wokeness. Okay so thank you all for coming out tonight and thank you for everybody who organized this. This was organized before October 7th so you know that is not my specialty but obviously that’s part of what motivates
The spirit of the moment, but anyway. So my comments are deal with wokeness, which is a controversial term, right? What is wokeness? Where did it come from? And how did the Anglophone left, and I’m sure I’m gonna offend a lot of people in here, but don’t take
It personally. And how did the Anglophone left become a cult of wokeness in which participants believe that social justice and perhaps even revolution can be achieved through rituals of political etiquette? Some on the left caution against using the term because it is a
Coinage of the right, more often than that, wokeness is denied. And look, we don’t have Cancel Culture, we have accountability culture. CP: Alas, wokeness is real in many quarters of academia and the nonprofit sector, at least in the United States, it is hegemonic. The problem with
Wokeness as I see it is that it is politically divisive, anti intellectual, and fundamentally authoritarian. As such, it serves the ruling class. That is, the social class which sets and decides the political and economic agenda of the society as a whole. Wokeness like versions of
Jingoistic patriotism has become part of ruling class control because it keeps the working class divided and distracted. A recent example of woke authoritarian anti intellectualism. At the 2023 joint meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropological Society, executives unilaterally cancelled a previously approved panel that had the subtitle
Why Biological Sex Remains A Necessary Analytic category in anthropology. This discussion was cancelled on the grounds that it would cause harm to trans and LGBTQ members of the anthropological community. Wokeness is left in form professing a concern for the downtrodden, but right in essence because
It is totally compatible with economic exploitation, class hierarchy, and military domination. CP: Thus woke themes are increasingly used to legitimize corporate capitalism and American empire. Recall the central intelligence agencies 2021 recruitment campaign called Humans of the CIA. You can Google this and you’ll find it. Which featured among other things, a cringe
Worthy monologue by a Latina CIA employee who said among other things this, “I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box checking exercise. I did not sneak into CIA. My employment is not and was not
A fluke or a slip through the cracks. I used to suffer from imposter syndrome”, says the spy. CP: But at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided, patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. This is an ad for the Central Intelligence Agency. You gotta think, are
The preppies and the frat boys at the CIA mocking us? Is this for real? It’s real. Despite the ubiquity of wokeness and of the critiques of it, definitions of wokeness are rarely offered. So I will try that to give you one. Wokeness is more than
A synonym for identity politics. It is not a synonym for identity politics. CP: I see wokeness, I see woke ideology as having six key features. Woke politics focus on the micro politics of politicized etiquette, and that’s has a moralizing fixation on the politics of language and symbols,
Right? In this regard, it’s very reminiscent to many forms of nationalism, right? The Ukrainians have changed the spelling of Odessa to distinguish themselves, to express their nationalism. Wokeness sees the world through reductive and essentialist identity politics, where oppression is based on categories of race, gender, indigeneity, sexual orientation,
Disability, mental health diagnoses, immigration status, et cetera. Three, the woke worldview is imbued with a therapeutic sensibility expressed in the language of trauma, healing, care, safety, doing the work. There is an obsessive focus on subjectivity in which emotional struggles become political struggles and vice versa. Woke ideology has a religious
Concern with moral hygiene. It constantly draws distinctions between politically clean and unclean, good and evil, friend and enemy. CP: Certain people, places, books, ideas, and consumer products must not be touched. Thus it was that when the New York Post, which is a scurrilous right
Wing rag in many ways, but is also one of the oldest, or the oldest newspaper in America, in the United States, and does real reporting, broke the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, none of my left wing friends would believe that story was real, or even have, like, just interesting conversation, what
Do you suppose this means? Until the New York Times and the Washington Post about a year and a half later finally admitted that it was real. Woke ideology uses Cancel Culture, that is the horizontally focused vigilante methodology of enforcement against offending utterances, personages by calling out and public denunciations,
Swarming condemnation, harassment by pressure on and appeals to employers, corporations, state agencies to silence and fire and deplatform and otherwise punish wrongdoers. Finally, and most importantly, woke politics eclipses and displaces old fashioned Universalist class politics. That is the struggle over who produces wealth, how, and for whom.
The far left of woke discourse will occasionally make reference to class struggle, but more often than not, woke leftists will describe class politics as reductive and even sexist and racist. CP: But the truth so often overlooked by woke politics is that the vast majority of the problems faced
By all subsets of the working class are common to that class as a whole, and can only be ameliorated or addressed when the whole working class comes together and fights as such. This is not to say that there is no legitimate concern other than class consorts, nor is it to
Say that working class economic victories heal all injuries or right all wrongs. Social oppression is important and cannot be addressed only by attacking economic exploitation. However, compared to the hyper variegated politics of wokeness, Universalist class first politics offers certain distinct benefits. First, the vast majority of everybody’s material needs are in common,
Work, shelter, education, healthcare. Second, policies of economic redistribution are best achieved by vast masses of people operating in large coalitions. And that is only possible when people unite on the basis of common economic interests and do so frequently despite cultural and even ideologically
Divergent views. You can be sure there were Trump supporters on the UAW picket lines. Maybe not many of them, but some, right? Third, the great irony of mass politics based on universal demands is that when victorious, they disproportionately benefit the most vulnerable among us. CP: If black trans people suffer disproportionately from inadequate
Housing, high unemployment, and lack of healthcare, then universal provision of such needs will disproportionately benefit black trans people. We see this reality at work in social security insurance system south of the border in the US bequeathed to us by the New Deal. All taxpayers contribute to social security and all seniors receive
Social security even though millionaires and poor people receive social security benefits, it is the poor who benefit disproportionately, right? A 1500$ or 1800$ cheque can be the difference between homelessness and a warm house for a poor person for a millionaire. Maybe it covers the
Dog walking or the lawn care. Fourth, the benefit of universal programs, a benefit of universal programs, is their political stability. Unlike politically unpopular, frequently attacked, means tested programs aimed at the most vulnerable, I.e. The subsets of the poor, universal programs like Social Security are widely popular. Indeed, Social Security and Medicare, the universal
Health insurance for the elderly south of the border, are the proverbial third rail in American politics whenever they are tempted to be cut and privatized, it fails except that of course Biden is having a pretty good run at sort of stealth privatization. So what are the origins of woke
Ideology? CP: Fundamentally the origins of woke ideology lie in the story of how the American new left was violently repressed and assiduously co opted. There are deeper roots we could get into about the drawing of the color line after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676
When there is a rebellion of white and black indentured servants in colonial Virginia. They burned the capital to the ground. The British repressed the rebellion and restored order and then out of that comes the slave codes that are finalized in 1704. Prior to Bacon’s Rebellion,
The definitive factor in who was a slave versus an indentured servant was not race, it was religion. “Heathens” could be enslaved. Christians had to be treated as indentured servants. And we have records. For example, of one guy named Anthony Johnson, who was African and Christian and
Was an indentured servant, and then in fact became a planter, and then won a legal case prior to Bacon’s Rebellion against a white planter over the question of some indentured servant of his who had run away. CP: So the color line is drawn as
Part of this class war. Then we could get into Madison’s Federalist 10, which is an argument put forward by James Madison, Federalist papers are designed to urge ratification of the constitution, and he is speaking to elite concerns. Elites were worried that political democracy would lead
To economic democracy, and Madison says, “no, don’t worry. That’s only a risk if the majority of people who are property less come together and use political democracy to affect their ends.” And the solution to the operative word in this essay is faction,
Right? And faction is basically a synonym for class, but it also means any other form of division of religion, geography, this and that. The solution to avoid a majority faction forming is to create as many kinds of faction as possible, to lean into the problem. Because you’re never gonna
Get rid of faction, you’re never gonna get everybody on the same page. JM: Divide et Impera is the logic. And it is at work throughout American history. Fast forwarding to more recent parts of the prehistory of wokeness, I think it’s important to look at
The US government’s Cold War era effort to build a non communist left. What? The US government was trying to build a left? Yes, they even had an acronym for it, the NCL. So the story of this hothouse non communist left starts in Europe.
I’m relying here on two books, one by Frances Stoner Saunders, the other by, Will, sorry, Hugh Wilford, and in occupied Europe, the US faces a politicized working class, large communist parties, and a left leaning anti American intelligentsia. The USSR is looking
Pretty good at this moment because it has done the bulk of the fighting against Nazi Germany, and the US realizes they cannot turn all these Europeans into American patriots. But what they can do at least is sort of nudged the European left away from the Soviet Union, away
From Communism, and so the CIA, through its Office of Plans and Coordination, begins investing heavily in citizens’ groups of all manners, this is done secretly. Student’s organizations, women’s groups, African American organizing, left religious groups, the labor movement. Most famous among these is the
Sort of the clearinghouse for all this, the Congress of Cultural Freedom. The feminist icon Gloria Steinem. CP: Infamously was involved in this. She was a member of the CIA sponsored National Student Association. And one of the things that Steinem excelled at was disrupting international
Left wing student gatherings with proto yippie style pranks and familiar Radlib style politics. So Steinem’s bohemian, left leaning anti communism was not only about foreign policy because the National Student Association had almost 500 chapters in the US, and it very much affected student culture in the run up to the new left.
The CIA in all this relied heavily on former communists, people like Jay Lovestone, who had actually at one point ran the Communist Party, and Richard Wright, who did 10 years in the Communist Party. The American author Richard Wright, most famous for Native Son. Wright becomes
Disaffected with communism. He leaves the party and he moves to Europe. And while in Europe, he starts working with these Western backed efforts to create the NCL. He then becomes disaffected with that. And right before he dies in 1960 at age 52, he holds a press conference where
He denounces these efforts. Quote, this is Wright speaking, he says, “I’d say that most revolutionary movements in the Western world are government sponsored, they are launched by agent provocateurs to organize the discontented so that the government can keep an eye on them.” CP: As part
Of this effort by the CIA, foundations were very important. And today, the US left, it’s probably the same in Canada, I don’t know, but the US left is heavily shaped by foundations, right? The US left is dominated by nonprofits and they are heavily dependent on foundations
And they receive much of their culture and instructions from these foundations. So at first, American foundations were not overtly political in that they did not fund social movements. There’s one little episode of funding so as to misdirect the NAACP from 23 to 30 to get them to stop doing legal work against segregation
And lynching and work on education instead. But when the CIA efforts to create a non communist left are finally exposed in the late ’70s via the eponymous Church Committee, it was found that in the ’60s alone, the CIA had worked with 164 foundations. And it is
During the mid ’60s that the foundations finally become overtly political. CP: And this is not necessarily all due to the role they had played for the CIA. I mean, Frances Stoner Saunders here is a quote here I should read to you. So she describes
The agency’s relationship to these foundations. She said, “A central feature of the agency’s efforts to mobilize culture as a Cold War weapon was the systematic organization of a network of private groups and friends into an unofficial consortium. This was an entrepreneurial coalition of philanthropic foundations, business corporations, and other institutions and individuals
Who worked hand in hand with the CIA to provide the cover and the funding pipeline for its secret programs in Western Europe. Additionally, these friends could be depended on to articulate the government’s interests at home and abroad, whilst appearing to do so solely on their own
Initiative”. CP: And many of these foundations just volunteered for it. For example, the president of Welch’s Juice Corporation, last name Kaplan, was the head of the Kaplan Foundation. He volunteers to the CIA, he says, “let me help you in this fight.” And so he ends up
Funding, among other things, an institute that is headed by the American Socialists and occasional presidential candidate, Norman Thomas. So it does seem that the foundations are becoming increasingly politicized in the ’50s through this association. But the real moment of foundations kind of trying to capture the new left is when
The Ford Foundation appoints in 1966, mixed George Bundy, who’s former national security advisor to both President Kennedy and Johnson. CP: He becomes head of Ford. At that time, Ford was the biggest foundation, it was like 40% bigger than the next biggest foundation. And as Karen Ferguson put in
Her book, Top Down, the Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism Bundy’s focus at Ford was, as he put it, the social revolution at home. These were tumultuous times. Between 1965 and 1970, there were more than 500 urban riots, or if you prefer,
Uprisings. And as Ferguson reports, between 1965 and 1970, Ford grants relating to African Americans increased from 2.5% of total domestic program outlays to a staggering 40%. In this, Ford clearly favored grantees who were black nationalists and race reductionists and did not have a class analysis.
They preferred cultural and psychological explanations rather than political economic ones. They funded, for example, the Congress on Racial Equality headed by Ford McKissick, who by 1969 is supporting Nixon. CP: They are not funding the Black Panthers, right? Ford is not funding the Dodge Revolutionary
Union Movement, a black led revolutionary caucus within the United Auto Workers. Ford attempts to co opt King. It’s important to note too, that the civil rights movement had very little foundation involvement. It was mostly self funded, and there was some support from unions.
Ford makes one grant to King, but as King keeps moving left on class, Ford cuts him off. And a year later, King is assassinated while supporting a labor strike by black and white sanitation workers in Memphis. And this was part of his larger work to
Build the Poor People’s March on Washington, which was another class centered, thoroughly integrated effort. And he did not live to see that. So, along with this Co optation, there is a wave of repression. Fred Hampton, to take one example, explicitly Marxists leader of the Black
Panther Party in Chicago. CP: He’s starting to organize a gang truce. He reaches out to a number of white gangs. He’s incredibly effective. He is assassinated because he’s drugged by an FBI infiltrator. He passed out and there’s a Chicago police raid, and he’s killed during that police
Raid. So at the same time that there’s this foundation, Co optation, there’s government repression, there’s also government Co optation happening through the War on poverty, the use of block grants, right? There isn’t an effort to create a National Poor people’s union to pressure the federal
Government to, reallocate money. It’s about turning social movements into nonprofits, turning organizers into managers and bureaucrats. CP: One could go on and on, but, I don’t want to go too long. I want to keep it to 30 minutes. So there’s other, elements in what become woke is like the psychological turn, right? That’s
Volumes have been written on that. But the rise of this kind of like pop psychology culture, the rise of cult and cult like organizations in the ’60s. The Privilege Walk, which is a sort of quintessential woke exercise, actually comes out of reevaluation counseling, which is itself,
Comes out of Scientology. And you, read the history of the left and you see that these kind of cult like groups are everywhere. Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers gets, involved with Synanon, the weather underground involved, weird stuff like that. There’s also the vagueness of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
Which for strange reasons that I don’t fully understand, it doesn’t have hiring quotas. CP: And so instead it sets these vague goals, which encourages corporate America and also it allows people to sue, to force employers to adhere to the letter of the law. It’s both the Justice Department and everyone else. And so
What happens is that corporate America starts investing very, very heavily in the HR departments. And this is the material basis of people like Robin DiAngelo that Norman has written so well about, not of about in his book, right? So just to put it in perspective, in 1968,
Only one in 558 American workers were employed in human resources. By 2021, that number had reached one in 102. One in every 102 people works in a human resource capacity. Then as most critiques of woke have, there’s the post structuralist takeover of the social sciences in
Academia, whether it’s relativism, it’s anti Marxism, it’s textual obsession that’s sort of infusing language with a, inordinate amount of power. CP: And there is of course the internet and social media. I hardly need to tell anyone my age or younger about what that
Is. I’m not on social media because I see it as an anti intellectual machine for creating a hive mind and getting people to think like a computer where you’re either for or against something as opposed to just like reading things and maybe being neither for nor against it.
So what’s at stake in all this? I think what’s at stake in this is the good parts of political liberalism, right? Academic freedom, freedom of speech, and now around this war, the left people who call for ceasefire, people who support Palestine are finding themselves under attack, being cancelled.
And it’s pretty difficult for the left to do much about that and push back against that, when it has spent at least the last two decades doing the exact same thing. CP: And so now the donors are saying, well, hey, if it works for you, it works for us.
We’re gonna pull the funding for the library unless you, Columbia University or some other university shut down this student group, et cetera, et cetera. So the risk is of course that this is always gonna come for the left. That if the left embraces the stuff, it’s coming for it.
But there’s another risk too, which is that by silencing debate, due to this woke culture, the left is undermining its own ideas. Mills, John Stewart Mills in on Liberty puts this well, he say, “Ideas always need to be tested, even the truth needs to be tested. And even if the received”
This is a quote from Mills, “Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth, unless it is suffered to be and actually is vigorously and earnestly contested, it will by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice with little
Comprehension or feeling for its rational grounds. And, not only this, but the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost and in feeble and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct the dogma becoming a mere formal profession will prevent the
Growth of any real and heartfelt conviction from reason or personal experience.” CP: And so I fear that the left is in fact self destructing to some extent, driving intelligent people away and making its ideas which are often very good and very strong, seem like stale
Catechisms. And that is not good for those of us who would like to see more democracy, both political democracy and economic democracy. So that’s my critique of wokeness. JM: And you all know who Mr. Finkelstein is, and I’m sure many of you came to hear him exactly. JM: He’s
Going to speak this evening on, one of his key topics in his book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It, as one who has burnt some many bridges he knows about from what she speaks. JM: Academic freedom. So take it away. Norman Finkelstein: Well, thank you
For having me. And I have to say at the outset that, this evening was decided on before October 7th, and the topic was chosen before October 7th. And I think the responsible thing is to speak on the topic as it was decided, and not to change the topic. On the other hand,
I will to the extent I’m able to integrate the broad topic with illustrations from the most recent events since October 7th. So I feel I will be both meeting my professional responsibility to the library, but also trying to be relevant to the moment, which is why I suspect so many people turned
Out. NF: I want to begin, by discussing what we mean by academic freedom. It’s a term that’s thrown around a lot, but I don’t think it’s really understood very well. Academic freedom means basically three things. Number one, it means that professors are more competent
Than any outside force to decide what should and shouldn’t be taught in the classroom. So originally, most universities, they were spawned by religious religions and religious groups, and academic freedom grew out of mostly German universities. And the idea of science being the hallmark of intellectual pursuit. So at the very beginning,
The purpose of academic freedom was to free it from the control of religion and allow science to decide what is and what isn’t truth. In my own country in the United States, and I suspect it’s not much different in Canada, once religion was taken out of academic life,
The big challenge became big business. NF: At the beginning of the 20th century, there were many intense labor struggles in the United States, and there were faculty in various universities who were sympathetic to working people. And the very wealthy attempted to have various professors evicted
From academia because they were agitating on behalf of working people. Not to jump the gun here, but we do have a version of that problem now recurring, especially since October 7th, namely very rich people who are endowing universities with huge sums of money. By any reckoning, you can have this or that individual
Giving a university at a shot a $100 million, or in another case of another university, $50 million. And these individuals, just like what were called in my country at the beginning of the 20th century, just like the robber barons in my country who tried to silence university professors who were agitating
On the side of working people, they are now in their own way trying to control the curriculum and even the student life, of the university. NF: So that battle, which many thought had already been won, namely evicting the influence of big business
From academic life, that battle it seems, is now resurging or recurring again, most notably, most visibly since October 7th. And in the United States, most visibly, and vividly at the major universities, be it Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, where not only is the curriculum being infringed on, but in pretty barefaced
Ways, university presidents are being browbeaten into making statements on this or that event since October 7th, simply by virtue of money. And we have to be honest about it. It’s pure, simple blackmail, and many universities are succumbing to it. So that was the second great battle. The first battle was against organized
Religion infiltrating, academia. The second battle was against big business. And the third battle was basically fought out roughly in the time I was born, namely the McCarthy era where there were attempts made to evict from academia, those people who were sympathetic to the left and prohibiting professors who had leftist, socialist, communist
Leanings or tendencies evicting them from academia. NF: That battle was basically won, you could say by the 1960s, where if you were a professed communist, it wouldn’t bar you from teaching. It didn’t mean you would be happily joining the faculty, but it wouldn’t in and of itself bar you. So to summarize that,
A core tenet of academic freedom is, it’s your colleagues in whatever department or discipline who you happen to teach in. They are best able to determine your competence to teach. It’s not religion, it’s not big business, it’s not politically inclined people. It’s your colleagues. That’s the first principle
Of academic freedom. Is it a good principle in general? It is a good principle I think. Everybody here would agree that Justin Trudeau should not be deciding who is competent to teach astrophysics. That’s fairly straightforward. And if you apply that principle across the board, you would say, for example, that Donald Trump
Should not be deciding who should be teaching anything. Yeah. NF: I like the way you folks filled in that blank. NF: That was very nicely done. NF: As my mind stalled, everyone started to say in unison anything. NF: So that principle in general,
It’s a good principle. The only underside of that principle is that in general, once you get into a position of power in your department or in your field, you become very resistant to any kinds of challenges from below, because you want to preserve your professional power.
And so even though it’s professors making the decisions as against, priests or politicians, there’s still a very, in my opinion, a very conservative tendency because in any profession, they’re consolidates, the wise men and now wise men and wise women who become very intolerant of
Dissent. NF: And I think, well, I won’t personalize it. I’ll just make it as a general statement. The second principle of academic freedom is a very simple one, which Christian addressed in his remarks, namely that you can’t find the truth, assuming that the purpose of truth
Is the purpose, of academic life. So the motto of Harvard University, it’s motto is Veritas, truth. The purpose of a university is the pursuit of truth. And the basic principle as Christian already mentioned, is you cannot find truth if you don’t have freedom of liberty of
Thought. People have to be able to articulate their belief. If you disagree with them, you have to prove them wrong. As Mill, John Stewart Mill says, at one point on liberty, he says that the only way you can know what you believe is true actually is true.
The only way you can know whether what you believe is true, actually is true, is to quote Mill, ” A standing invitation to the world to prove you wrong. You can only know whether what you believe to be true is true if you invite anybody and everyone to say,
Prove me wrong. ” NF: And that means there has to be complete and total liberty of speech in the pursuit of truth. That value, I think, and here I agree with Christian, and I’ll get back to it in a few moments. That value in my opinion, has been lost in the current
Cancel Culture, wokeness, trend in academic life. There are people who believe that they possess a monopoly on truth, and therefore they have the right to suppress anybody who disagrees with them on the grounds that they possess the truth. And therefore, why should we have to hear anybody
Else out? We already possess the truth. There are two problems with that argument. Argument number one is what Mill calls the presumption of infallibility. That means unless you believe you are God, unless you are convinced that you are omniscient, you have no grounds for the assumption that you know
A priori in advance, that what you think is true actually is true. Because anybody and everybody can be wrong. NF: And Mill then says the presumption of infallibility is, it’s not just that you think you you’re right. It’s much more sinister than that because the presumption of infallibility
Is you think you’re right, you think you possess the truth, and therefore you have the right to deny others to decide for themselves. Fine, if you think you possess the truth and you don’t wanna listen, nobody can force you to listen. But that doesn’t give you the right to deny others
The possibility of hearing another side and deciding for themselves. And that, I think, is a very big… NF: It’s a very big problem in this Cancel Culture, this kind of very self righteous, maybe for noble ends, and I’m not going to dispute the nobility of the ends, but for noble ends,
Denying each of us the right to decide for ourselves what is and what isn’t the truth. So that is the second principle of academic culture, excuse me, academic freedom. Number one, professors are the most competent to decide who does and does not qualify to teach.
And number two, that in as much as the purpose of a university is the pursuit of truth, a prerequisite for preserving pursuit of truth is there has to be complete freedom of thought. And now there’s a third principle of academic freedom. And that one is also very current since October 7th.
That principle is each of us is two things at the same time once you have attained adulthood. One, it’s your professional life. NF: And then there is your life as a citizen. And you should have the same rights as a citizen, as everybody else. So what does that mean as a practical matter?
It means that the principle of academic freedom says, when you’re in that classroom, you have certain professional obligations, okay? However, it goes on to say that once you leave the classroom, once you leave the university, once you step off campus, then, like everybody else, you should have
Full freedom to say and think as you like because in the United States, it’s a constitutionally protected right. It’s the First Amendment. So that principle basically says you have professional obligations while you’re on the university campus, but once you step off, you have the same rights as any other American citizen. NF: And
On its surface, that sounds logical, but in practice, I do not believe it’s altogether practical, even though I recognize the importance of that value. And I will give a couple of examples which will immediately resonate for this audience. Let’s just start off, before I give the examples, by a show of hands.
How many people think that’s a reasonable principle? When you’re in your professional life as a professor, you have to abide by the principles of academic freedom, allowing everybody to speak and think as they please. But once you get off campus, professors should be allowed to say what
They want because they’re citizens like everybody else. If you believe that sounds reasonable, raise your hand. Okay, as you can see by a show of hands, it’s at least three quarters of this room. NF: But then we have… Let’s take a couple of commonplace examples. A professor
At home, at his or her computer, on his or her Facebook page, writes, I hope Israel kills every single Palestinian. And that professor teaches, let’s say, math on campus. He or she is off campus. He or she is exercising their First Amendment right. Now let’s see by a show of hands,
How many people think that professor should have the right to do that? Look around you. I would say about 10 altogether. So in the blink of an eye, a principle which most of you agreed with in the abstract suddenly gets very little support. And I think everybody can recognize
That if a professor, say a male professor, off campus on his or her computer terminal starts making lascivious, that means sexually charged remarks about females, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a student to say, “I think I would be very uncomfortable with that professor at office hours.”
NF: And I’m not trying to evoke applause at this moment. I’ll wait till the end for that. I’m simply trying to make the point that abstract principles become much more complicated when you try to apply them in real life. And I am not of the opinion
That that last principle really has, can really withstand any serious challenges to it. So that’s academic freedom, what it is. Forgive me, but I always go into my teaching mode. And part of the teaching mode is to keep reiterating the point so the student retains it. Number one, professional competence is determined
By your peers, as it’s called. Number two, there should be full liberty of speech in the pursuit of truth. And number three, that professors’ comments off campus should not affect their professional status. NF: Okay, now having said that, I’m going to now try to give three illustrations
Of the problems that have arisen within the context of this framework, the problems that have arisen since October 7th. The first question that comes to mind is, are there occasions when an event of such magnitude occurs on the world stage that it’s permissible to encroach on or breach certain principles of academic freedom?
So let me give you practical examples. The first practical example is in academic life, if you’re hired to teach math, you can’t use your classroom as a soapbox to talk about Palestine. You can be very upset by what’s happening there. You can feel like a genocide is occurring.
How can I now be talking about algebra? And on the other hand, that’s what you were hired to teach, mathematics. You weren’t hired to teach about Palestine. That’s not part of your professional obligation. NF: Do you have the right to say, what we said in the 1960s,
One of the famous slogans during the anti war, in this case the anti Vietnam War movement, was the slogan, no business as usual. The United States was carrying on an extermination in Vietnam. By the end, about 3 million Vietnamese were killed and another
Million Cambodians and Laotians were killed. And it was our opinion or the opinion of many people, which I’m sure you remember the slogan, no business as usual. And so a question arises, do you have the right to breach that principle of academic professionalism by turning the classroom into what we used to call
A teach in to talk about what’s happening. I would just say my own vivid recollection, and there are many instances of it. First of all, I remember when I was in high school, there were days when the school agreed to suspend business as usual and English class and history class
Was given over to just talking about the war in Vietnam. That was one breach of it. NF: Another was what were called teach ins where students would get together to inform themselves just about the war in Vietnam. And I think, personally, that’s a very tough question, whether you’re allowed or should be allowed
To change or alter your purpose for being in the classroom and suddenly turning it into not necessarily a soapbox where you shout your opinions, but not doing, to be honest, not doing your job. And I don’t think that’s an easy question.
A related question is, and this has come up a lot since October 7th, whether universities should take a position as a university on what’s going on. At the very beginning, it was a very strange thing. It was actually almost amusing. So because of the Cancel Culture
And the wokeness, after the killing of George Floyd, many universities took a stand on the George Floyd case. NF: And university administrations spoke out very vigorously against racism and denunciation of George Floyd. Then after that, Ukraine came along, and many a cultural institution
Took a stand on that. I remember when I walked into Lincoln Center, a cultural hub in New York, and they had a whole wall dedicated to musicians in the various orchestras that were of Ukrainian descent. So then along comes October 7th, And the wealthy Jewish billionaire class
Then start to say, hey folks, you took a stand on George Floyd. You took a stand on Ukraine. Why aren’t you taking a stand on what happened on October 7th? And the university presidents were in a very difficult situation. If you took those stands, then why aren’t you taking
One deploring what happened on October 7th? Now, university professors are not stupid. I should say presidents are not stupid. And so they immediately understood we have a real problem here. And everybody here understands the problem. NF: If we take a stand on October
7th, then we’re gonna have to take a stand on everything that happened after October 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, the next two months. And so if they didn’t take a stand they were gonna lose the money, and it was very big money,
And we shouldn’t kid ourselves about that. But if they did take a stand, then they would have to take a stand on 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and they’d lose the money anyway. So it became, it was a moment where you could say,
I’m glad I’m not a university president. It was a very tough situation. So that to me, points to the second problem with this, the basic principles. When I wrote the book on academic culture, and there was all this wokeness, political correctness, you have to take a stand on this, that, or the other,
I immediately thought to myself, it’s not a good idea. And here’s what I wrote. First of all, there was a famous case in the United States where there was a Jewish community, many of whom consisted of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust in Skokie,
Illinois. NF: And the Nazi party, the US Nazi party, which is legal in the United States, wanted to march through that neighborhood. And there was a question, should they be allowed to march through that neighborhood? And the question became, if they marched through that neighborhood,
They were gonna cause such hurt feelings among the community, which consists mostly of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, and it would cause the members of that community severe trauma. I’ll be honest with you about that. As most of you know, my parents did pass through the Nazi Holocaust.
And I did have to put in my mind’s eye, what would my mother and father think if they’re looking through the living room window and walking past them are these avowed members of the Nazi party? And should they have to endure it? Our Supreme Court ruled
They did have to endure it. NF: And their grounds were as follows. It is particularly difficult to distinguish a person who suffers actual psychological trauma from a person who is only highly offended. And our court has made it clear that speech may not be punished merely because it offends. You can’t
Suppress speech merely because it offends. And at that point, I wrote in the book, and bear in mind it’s two years ago, I said, The practical difficulties with this principle of suppressing speech because it hurts my feelings. The practical difficulties, I say, run much deeper. First, the issue of consistency. NF: Palestinian students
Can’t very well seek to cancel a guest Israeli professor who said atrocious things about Arabs on the ground that they feel unwelcome and uncomfortable, yet insist on their free speech rights when Israeli students subsequently seek to cancel a pro Palestinian speaker who makes them feel unwelcome and
Uncomfortable. I think the principle should be obvious because that’s what’s happening now. There was a period when the Palestine movement joined forces with all of the other woke social movements on campus And they felt we have the right to suppress pro Israeli speakers who say atrocious things because it hurts
Our feelings. NF: That was the argument. But now what’s happening now it’s the Jewish students or the Hillels who are making the exact same argument. They’re saying slogans like from the river to the sea, mean the destruction of the state of Israel. Israel is part of my
Personal identity, and therefore these are assaults on my identity and they should be suppressed. Now, I would say it’s very difficult to make a distinction between when you are allowed to suppress speech on the ground. So it hurts my feelings or makes me feel uncomfortable. And when you are not allowed to make
That argument, so I believe my opinion, we should go back to the basics and allow for all those forms of speech to be expressed on a college campus. Whether or not it hurts your feelings, whether or not it causes you trauma.
Because the moment you go down that road of using your feelings and your trauma as a grounds for vetoing another person’s right to speak, it’s going to backfire on you. NF: And I wrote that two years ago. I knew exactly what was going to happen,
And it’s happening now in very, in my opinion, in very ugly ways. And there’s one last aspect, and I’m gonna leave it off at that. The last aspect is when you use the argument, you have nothing except your persons to assist you. But when the other side uses the argument,
They have people with lots of money and power to assist them. So when they say, our feelings are hurt, we feel threatened by these slogans, we feel traumatized. What happens next? The billionaire donor said, why aren’t you protecting these students if you don’t protect them
We’re withdrawing the money. So they have the money and the power to enforce their demand. You do not have that money or power. And so once you go down that road, it’s not just your side and their side using the same tactic. It’s your side without money, without power versus their side
With money and with power and you will, in the end, pay the much bigger price. Thank you. JM: We will not have a lot of time for question and answers, but we are going to have some time for question and answers. But before we go to you,
We’re gonna go to me ’cause I’ve gotta have some role up here. JM: So yeah thank you. And I actually wanted to ask both of them, it maybe applies more to the discussion that Norman has given us, but it also, comes, affects the content of Christian’s
At discussion. And that is this idea that, well, you both talked about ideas that are current and ideas that are contentious. And what I wanna ask is, neither of you mentioned, and you weren’t required to mention it because that’s not your topic,
But neither of you dealt with the notion that at certain times we are not debating all ideas. I mean, not all ideas are in the marketplace of the academic. I mean, no one is today challenging us on the divine right of kings.
No one wants to fight for it, and no one is forced to defend it. And what I wanna know is when at what point does an idea pass into irrelevancy? JM: And I’m thinking specifically, I’ll give you an example. There’s lots of examples. I’m sure that people can come
Up with them. But the example that comes to my mind is in about 1950, Ashley Montagu essentially destroyed the concept of race and racism. In about 1980, Stephen Jay Gould did it again, but we’re still debating it. And we’re still having people come back and
Argue. I mean, people will know that there have been people who make those arguments. At what point is it an illegitimate idea that can pass into history rather than one that we are forced to continually debate or forced? I mean, you, you talk about the notion of we must be
Prepared to defeat them. Those ideas, if they’re incorrect, how long for how long must we be prepared to do that? I’ll ask both of you two. NF: Well, I’m gonna begin ’cause only because I’ve had to contend it with this issue
As I have taught John Stuart Mills On Liberty in Mills On Liberty, he makes a very interesting remark. He says, many interesting remarks, I’ll just recall one. He says, there’s no inherent power in truth that falsehood does not have. People can be as fanatical in their belief
In a true idea as a false idea. So truth doesn’t have any inherent power to it that falsity does not have. You can be fanatical in your belief in truth, but you can be fanatical in your belief in falsity. And as Mill says, if you have power behind your falsity,
You’re going to defeat truth. But then Mill there goes on to make an interesting point, he says, the great advantage of truth is this, that truth keeps appearing over and over and over again until a time comes where the moment is ripe. NF: It makes sufficient
Headway and it can never be undone. So everybody knows, going back to Spartacus, there were the great slave uprisings throughout human history, asserting the equality of humankind and the wrongness of slavery. The slave uprisings were repressed once, repressed twice repressed many times, at a certain point in human history, usually put in the
19th century, the idea of the wrongness of slavery gained sufficient headway that even in your wildest imagination, the worst possible nightmare Donald Trump is reelected. It’s most unlikely that he’s going to reinstitute slavery. That idea, to use your point, has passed.
The second great idea after slavery was the idea of the equality of women. And up until the 19th century the idea of the equality of women like the wrongness of slavery, it had to be fought again and again and again. It’s defeated. NF: But by the 20th century,
I think it’s fair to say in anybody’s nightmare scenario, the idea that any government would reinstitute a system in which women are denied the right of suffrage, the right to vote, it’s unthinkable. So that too is an idea that has passed.
Now, there are some ideas which we thought were over, or I should say a third idea was genocide. You have to remember, up until the mid 20th century, a dominant concept in the western world was the Social Darwinian idea that it’s historically progressive for superior races
To wipe out inferior races. That was a very accepted idea in a large amount of the scholarly literature. And it took the Nazi Holocaust to discredit that notion of superior races, having the right to wipe out physically inferior races. There are other ideas which we thought were wiped
Out. NF: There was a long time where it seemed as if the idea of the legitimacy of torture had been wiped out, that it belonged with slavery, subjection of women, and the genocide. But after 9/11, the idea of the legitimacy of torture resurged. So my view is it’s perfectly legitimate in academic life
To ignore ideas, which as you put it, no longer have any currency because we have, in academic life, it’s called economies of time. That is, you only have just so much time to teach. Students take a one course here, one course there.
And so you have the right, let’s say if you’re teaching a course on the you’re teaching a course a women’s studies course, you have a right to say, we are not gonna discuss whether women should have the right to vote. It’s a dead issue wasting time, okay? NF: But wherever an
Issue is real or alive, then I think you have an obligation to teach it and let people decide for themselves whether they believe it or not. So a large part of the book I wrote was devoted to the question, should you teach Holocaust denial? And my view was
If nobody believes it, then it’s a waste of time. But if a large number of people do believe it then how do you convince them they’re wrong? Unless you openly discuss it, debate it, and convince people of the wrongness of their beliefs.
And I have to say, and I’m afraid this is gonna be a very unpopular view. I cannot agree. And we’re comrades across a border, but we’re still comrades. I don’t think it’s correct to say that Stephen Jay Gould defeated the idea of race. It was one book,
It had some strengths in it. NF: It also had a lot of weaknesses in it. And I think if we’re honest in this room, if we’re honest in this room, we would have to grant that large numbers of people, including, I would say at the risk of offending anyone
Here, including a majority of people do have that ingrained belief, which springs from having been born in a racist society, that some groups of people are intellectually inferior to others. You may not articulate it, but most of you are carrying it around with you. It’s your psychological baggage. And that being the case,
I do think it should be openly discussed. The evidence openly confronted and trying. If you think that idea is wrong, to persuade people why it’s wrong, otherwise there’s no possibility of rid people of that idea, they’re gonna just continue to carry continue to carry it because it’ll
Be seen as a taboo. We can’t talk about it. I don’t think that’s… If you’re really committed to human progress and human advancement, then if you think an idea is retrograde or wrong, you shouldn’t smack a taboo on it. You should openly confront
It, debate it, and try to persuade people why it’s wrong. CP: Yeah. That’s essential. CP: I think, and implicit in your question is that some things are beyond discussion. And I think that’s very dangerous. And that’s what that Mill quote that I read got
To right, that it’s like even the truth can lose favor with people if it’s not continually challenged and stress tested. And I think we’ve lived through that and with the internet and episodes with the alt right? All sorts, many of these questions didn’t go away. I mean, you can
Find, I’ve never looked for it, but I’m sure you can find blogs where people are talking about how women shouldn’t have the right to vote, the divine right of kings, all this kind of stuff. And so if it comes up, if you get a sense that there are students
Who are entertaining these ideas, then I think the absolutely wrong thing to do is say that idea is done with, and we don’t discuss anymore. No, it’s gotta be dealt with, right? JM: Okay. CP: Otherwise you end up with a generation of leftists who have these beliefs that they
Can’t actually defend and articulate. And if it is so true, then it should be easy enough to defeat those positions. JM: Okay. So I know in the sciences it’s different. So we don’t ask science to teach creationism, right? Clearly it’s not scientific. So there would be no call for science to teach it.
But in a social science, if somebody were just to bring that idea to a social science class. I mean, the problem is, I suppose I suspect, and what I’m saying is that can every instructor be… Yeah. NF: I would hope. I would hope an instructor would be able to respectfully
Engage such a student and stay well, you know through radioisotopes, we can date the strata and we know that and explain what the radioisotope is, other works. And we can see that these are layers of time that these fossils occurred before these fossils. And
I respect that your faith says it all happened only 6000 years ago. But to the extent that you believe in this methodology and these tools we have, they say something very different. And it shouldn’t be, I mean, you shouldn’t be afraid of taking on a creationist idea.
JM: Well no, I don’t think anybody would be, because it’s pretty easy to dismiss. But… NF: See, I don’t I would like… CP: I wouldn’t work it, I wouldn’t go out of my way to anticipate this. NF: I would like
You to repeat what you just said. I’d like you to repeat what you just said. The last words were trailed off. JM: Sorry? NF: Well, you just said, well you said, well, I would hope that you could defeat it because there’s
Nothing really to it, right? JM: That there’s not a lot of science to it yet. NF: Well, I find that an interesting point for the following reason. The basic view being expressed here, well, it’s because it’s so obviously wrong, it shouldn’t be easy to defeat.
And one thing I’ve learned in life is never underestimate your enemies. NF: No, don’t. There’s a large number of Muslims in this room today, and as you know, Muslims tend to focus for various career reasons. They tend to focus in civil engineering and various other of the
Science disciplines, especially of female Muslims are much more confident about their mathematical skills than Western raised women. Exactly why I am not sure, my guess is because your father tells you, I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, you’re gonna be a civil engineer. NF: And so
You have to do well in math. In any event, you have many Muslims who excel in physics, excel in math, excel in the sciences, and are very devout Muslims. NF: They don’t see there is a contradiction between their religious belief and their scientific knowledge. And so we shouldn’t be so confident in assuming
That if you believe in science, math and so forth, then you obviously can’t believe in certain religious creeds. No. History shows you can. I remember once and there might be of some interest to people in the room, one of the great minds of the 20th century was Bertrand Russell.
Many of you have probably heard of him. And Russell was a devout atheist. He has a… There’s a book collecting his writings called Why I Am Not a Christian. And Russell was a first class mind. And once I tuned in the debate between him and a religious figure in
The UK a very respected religious figure, and they were operating at a very high level of abstraction, I couldn’t follow it. NF: It was just a very high level of philosophy. But what struck me was, Russell didn’t easily defeat him. He did not. I think we should always be careful
About being overconfident about our beliefs. I like the phrase that Christian just used. He said, “Your beliefs may be right, but they still need to be stress tested. Otherwise you get a little bit too cocky about how smart you are and how right you are. And then you discover that you’re not really
Very able to defend your beliefs against other people.” I’m gonna give one last example, which just occurred two days ago. As many of you probably know, I’ve been on the podcast circuit, since October 7th. And on the whole, I think I’ve fared well under attack and I’ve been able to hold my own.
NF: But then a couple of days ago, this fellow came on one of these podcasts, this young man, and he started to cite statistics about Gaza. And he said, if you look at life expectancy and you look at infant mortality, and you look at several other standard
Metrics, he said, the fact of the matter is Gaza falls in the category of a developing country in the world. If you look at those metrics. And I have to be honest, so as you know, many of you know, I was calling Gaza a
Concentration camp. And then along comes this fellow who says concentration camp if you look at the metrics, it looks more like Ecuador. And I did have to stop and think, it did cause me, I sat down and I had to reason the whole matter through. But I have to recognize,
And this is one of the problems which I hope you folks will take or take away with you, not just from this evening, but from your own life experience, that in virtually every case when it comes to the humanities or social sciences,
There are always arguments on the other side. NF: It’s never open and shut. It’s never black and white. And that if you want to persuade the people, you’ve got to listen to the other side in order to learn how to answer. When you’re talking to yourself, there’s no problem, okay? Everybody who
Has the expression has its, singing to the choir. It’s no problem. But you have to remember, the choir is not the world. You are engaging with the whole of public opinion and you wanna win people over. And when you want to win people
Over, you have to remember there are arguments on the other side and sometimes you have to pause and think through what’s wrong with this argument. And I think you judge for yourself on another day because we don’t have the time. Now, I felt I was able, very calmly, but afterthought and reflection,
I thought I was able to answer that argument. But it did remind me, number one, as much as, you know, speaking for myself as much as you know, there are arguments on the other side. And number two, you’ve got to listen to those arguments because they’re gonna keep coming
Up and you have to be able to answer them as a political person if you want to persuade and win over others to your cause, which in my opinion is a just cause. JM: Okay.
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