Imagine a new school—let’s call it Shady Grove College—that adopts the Chicago Principles on day one. The Chicago Principles state, among other things, that the university has a neutral stand on the political events of the day. It will issue no statements of support or criticism one way or the other on any political or social issue. Shady Grove also takes seriously the Chicago Principles’ rejection of “the heckler’s veto,” or the shouting-down of speakers who may have unpopular things to say. Shady Grove goes out of its way to recruit faculty and students who agree with these principles. There is no pressure from anyone to deplatform even a truly controversial speaker.
One might think that Shady Grove College would become a bastion of open intellectual exchange, where students and faculty could test out unusual ideas and even proclaim outré points of view without fear of ostracism. But as my guest Rajiv Sethi argues in this clip, that won’t necessarily be the case. Even when the institution adopts and fosters a principle of neutrality, and even when the campus accepts it, the problem of self-censorship remains.
Say a student is a committed opponent of abortion. Openly stating such a view will surely place them in the minority among college students—many people with staunch pro-choice views may even see the student as a misogynist and therefore worthy of disdain. Though the university has no position on abortion, and though anti-abortion speakers are as welcome as anyone on campus, the student knows that stating his views openly will subject him to ostracism anyway. His classmates will, rightly or wrongly, infer all sorts of negative things about the student’s character. The student, not wanting to become a pariah, will likely hold his tongue when abortion comes up in conversation. He won’t have to be shouted down—he’ll censor himself before anyone has the chance.
As Rajiv says in this clip, the problem of self-censorship cannot be solved by institutional principles alone. It’s too dependent on complex social dynamics for a simple rule to fix it. And it’s not only on campus that such dynamics inhere—they’re at work everywhere, including in our government. I’m less pessimistic than Rajiv, though. The constraints imposed by the social dynamics of self-censorship are less ironclad than they may appear. As Hans Christian Anderson taught us, it may only take one person to say aloud what everyone else is thinking to break the silence that prevents us from knowing each others’ minds, and from acting on that knowledge.
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GLENN LOURY: This was not on our agenda, and don't answer if you don't want to. The war in Gaza is creating a lot of consternation on college campuses around the country, including Columbia, right there in New York City, with a heavily Jewish population and home of the late, great Edward Said, amongst others. It’s a focal point similar to, although perhaps not as intense, here at Brown. We're both college professors. What do you think our responsibility is in our respective positions of teachers and researchers and in loco parentis, to a certain degree, with the young charges that we have? How are you viewing it? What's going on at Columbia, and how are you processing it?
RAJIV SETHI: What's going on is not that different from what's going on, I suspect, at Brown and other campuses across the country. There are divisions. There are people with very strong feelings on all sides of this issue and other people who just want to find out, really, where they should stand, how they should think about it. And our responsibility, I feel, is to create an environment in which constructive dialogue can occur, where people can learn, listen, and possibly think about whether they want to modify or adjust their positions. And that hasn't really happened, Glenn. The environment is much more acrimonious, too acrimonious, to allow for that.
I've heard that things along those lines have been happening at Dartmouth, partly through conversations and collaborations between heads of Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies departments there. That's the kind of thing I think we should be facilitating, that kind of dialogue. And we are not finding it on campus, but we are finding it in unusual places.
You've been on the Comedy Cellar podcast with Noam Dworman. He has strong feelings on this issue. My understanding is that he's a Zionist, pro-Israel, but he has had Norman Finkelstein on with Eli Lake on exactly the same episode, just having at it with each other.
I saw it.
That was fascinating to me. You ask what's our responsibility. I feel that these voices, no matter how fringe they may be considered by people who oppose them, ought to be brought into contact with each other. And it's not happening, really, on campus. But it is happening at in various places in the podcast space.
It's interesting that you mentioned Noam Dorman, who's the proprietor of the Comedy Cellar and a host of this podcast that you're talking about. He's a good friend of mine. I've done shows from the Comedy Cellar on a couple of occasions. Noam and I have gotten to know each other.
And you're right. He does have a strong pro-Israel position on the conflict. But he is open, and he is very much driven by facts and by argument and is willing to talk with people about it. His relationship with Finkelstein, for example, is almost comic. The Comedy Cellar is an appropriate venue to see these two guys going at each other.
But the story I want to tell you is that Noam called me up and he said, “Can I come up and take you and your wife out to dinner?” He lives in New York City. I live in Providence, Rhode Island. It's a three-hour drive. He comes up in the company of Coleman Hughes and their respective spouses. Coleman is engaged—his fiancee and Noam's wife. And they take LaJuan and I out to a very nice restaurant, very nice dinner. I don't know, a four or five hour dinner. And apropos of what you just said about what the role of the university is in a moment like this, he comes with a bag full of books for me.
Wow.
To educate me, as it were, about the history and the nuances and whatnot of this conflict, which is a hundred years old. And I've been reading some of them. I've been reading Benny Morris's One State, Two States, for example, which is a review of the arguments about how you create the political foundation for a multi-state resolution of the Jewish and Arab population conflict in Palestine. Anyway, I've been reading the books, I'm getting an education, and Noam's coming on The Glenn Show.
That's great. Aside from the episode with Finkelstein and Eli Lake, he had Benny Morris on. And Benny Morris is interesting, because Benny Morris has characterized—and he did so on on the show—the situation in the West Bank is as similar to apartheid based not on race, but on nationality. That ruffles quite a lot of feathers. And Benny Morris is not in any sense affiliated with the Palestinian cause. He's very much a respected Israeli historian, but he recognizes that the conditions on the West Bank—not in Israel proper, but in the West Bank—are comparable to apartheid. And he said so. Now, they went back and forth.
What's his position on the war?
I don't know what his position is on the conduct of the war. I think he sees the war itself as somewhat necessary. But he's one of the many eminent signatories to a letter a couple of months before the October 7th attacks which pointed out that the conditions on the West Bank were leading to a catastrophe for Israel. Benny Morris, I find to be an interesting character. But also Rashid Khalidi at Columbia. They are coming at it from very different points.
Have you read Ilan Pappé's book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine?
No, I have not. Honestly, to tell you the truth, I've been trying to absorb as much information as I can, because I want to be informed about this situation. But I'm interim chair of my department. My chair is on leave. I am completely swamped with other things, so I can't read a whole lot of folks. But I'm trying to listen to the podcasts and newsletters and just trying to try to learn as much as I can, as indeed, I think our students want to do.
Now, this is a classic self-censorship situation here.
Yes, absolutely.
Rajiv and I have been talking for, I don't know, 25 years about the sociolinguistic phenomenon of not being willing to say exactly what you think in social company for fear of others making an inference about you based on what you say that is adverse, and all the complexities that go in on that. I have, if I may, a classic essay that was published in the journal Rationality and Society in 1994—that's coming up on 30 years—which elaborates on this. Others have written about it, and there's a lot.
But people want to know what side you're on. I'm getting this here at the podcast, and I apologize to those who may be followers of The Glenn Show and who are disappointed with the set of guests whom I've had to talk about this issue. I had Omer Bartov, my colleague and a very distinguished historian of genocide studies and of Holocaust studies on the show. He wants the war to stop. He's calling for a ceasefire. I've had Norman Finkelstein on the show. Not to talk about Israel or Gaza, to talk about his book on woke intellectual corruption.
I read that book after listening to him on your episode, cover to cover. I read it.
But he's a fierce critic of Zionism, that is Norman Finkelstein. I've had John Mearsheimer on the show, the student of international affairs at the University of Chicago, political scientist, who's written a book with Stephen Walt called The Israel Lobby. Okay, not to talk about Israel, to talk about Ukraine. That's what he mostly talked about when I had him on the show. But people know that he's this guy, he has this mark on him in the minds of certain people because of the book that criticized the Israel lobby on the show.
And then people are saying like, “When are you going to have a pro-Israel person on the show?” To which I'm saying, okay, fair enough, I will. But don't ask me for a loyalty test, here. Don't make me have to choose a side about something that's complicated, where, in effect, what you're saying is, “Who are you?” My willingness to talk to somebody is now a black mark on me? It has to be countered by talking to somebody else in order to prove to you that I'm on your side? That's what this is about? I object.
Yeah, lots to process there, Glenn. Going back to your paper, the self-censorship paper. I think it's one of the best papers written by an economist. I don't call it an economics paper. It's too broad for that. It's spans a huge space. It's beautifully written, as is your memoir, which we can also talk about if you like.
Let's do.
But on self-censorship, that is exactly right. There are many ideas in that paper. Some have been developed by theorists like Banerjee and Somanathan and Stephen Morris. But there are other ideas in that paper that have not been developed. And one of the most important ideas is the idea of the “ad hominem inference.” You said that it is something that is disparaged or looked down upon, but it's completely rational. So when people speak, when people say something, the inference that people draw about their character and values it's not necessarily related to the literal content of what they're saying. It is related to who else would say that kind of a thing, what kind of character. That's a key part of that paper.
Now, the fear of being judged, the fear of having one's values and character brought into question, causes self-censorship. And this is very much related to what's going on on campus right now, which is the topic that we started off with. Many schools are considering adopting principles that were codified in the Kalven Report, the 1967 report out of Chicago, which argued for university neutrality, that the university itself, and even maybe divisions like the departments, not make statements on political issues of the day unless they directly involve university affairs so that faculty can be free. The Kalven Report says faculty ought to be free to take positions, no matter how extreme, no matter how out-of-step with the mainstream. But in order for them to be free to do so, the university itself cannot take any positions.
And this has been adopted by Williams College, for example. Many others have debated adopting something similar. Although at this time, it seems that the accusation is made that it's being adopted opportunistically. You don't want to make a statement on the Middle East right now, so you adopt these principles and maybe, in a year or two, you'll go back to the old ways of doing things.
And then the other thing that colleges are thinking about adopting is the Chicago Principles. I think this is [2014], another document out of Chicago, which is basically about free expression on campus. And the most important component of that, in my opinion, is a condemnation of the heckler's veto, that if somebody's invited onto campus, no matter how offensive their speech may be to some segments of the population, those who would like to listen to them ought to be allowed to do so without interference. You can protest in various ways that don't disrupt the event. And Columbia adopted the Chicago Principles a few years ago. Barnard is debating doing so now.
But my position on these two things, I think they're admirable. Frankly, I think we should adopt them. But they won't do anything. The effect will be negligible. And the reason I think it will be negligible is precisely because of the self-censorship incentives that are in place. You can have the adoption of principles that aim to foster dialogue, aim to reduce the pressure to self-censor, but it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen unless people genuinely feel that they won't be judged, they won't be punished for views that are out of step with the majority opinion on campus. And that's going to take something more than just adopting Kalven or adopting Chicago.
I think a couple of things. I think of Tom Schelling, the great economist Tom Schelling, my friend. He passed away in 2016. And the problem is self-binding strategies. This is the problem of self-command. Tying yourself to the mast, as Ulysses does, so that when the vessel sails past the Sirens, he can hear the callbut not be free to respond to it. Whatever the merits of the principles in terms of the internal structure of the university, there's something to be said for a university announcing in advance. And your point about, is this a strategic move on their part? They're saying it now because they don't want to answer the question. But having laid that down as a predicate—“we don't talk about this”—releases them of the need to respond to someone who says, “What's your position? What's your position?” And I think that would be a good thing, as a general rule.
I agree. In fact I've stated this in my newsletter. But you can't go back on it. You might be tempted to do it opportunistically, but there is a commitment there. You would look ridiculous if, two years from now you said, “Okay, we are now no longer abiding by these principles.”
So absolutely right. Making a public statement is self-reinforcing to some degree. My point was not so much that we shouldn't do it. I'm saying it won't make much of a difference precisely because it doesn't really address the issue of self-censorship, because the ad hominem inference remains in place. People are going to judge characters and values based on speech exactly as they were previously. Just committing the university to neutrality, abstaining from making statements about the events of the day, doesn't change what people feel about the events of the day and how they judge their peers when they make statements about the events of the day. Those things remain in place.
Where, in your view, is this most injurious to the quality of public discourse, this fear of the ad hominem inference and this climate of self-censorship? What's at stake?
Oh, what's at stake is everything. What's at stake is knowledge. You brought this out in your paper, in fact. If we don't debate these things openly and honestly, the distribution of opinion is concealed. The distribution of expressed opinion starts to vary from the distribution of held opinion.
Would you be prepared to say, in the context of the war in Israel and Gaza, that the US policy is not as effective as it would be if we didn't have the constraints on our discourse?
Yes. So those are the stakes. The stakes are measured in thousands of lives and in guns and butter.
How do I avoid, then, the thought that maybe the US’s unquestioned “we have your back no matter what” position is not in the interest of the country but can't be altered because the discourse about the question is hemmed in in all kinds of ways along the lines that you're gesturing at here?
Yes, exactly. That's exactly right. And if you think about a companion paper to yours, when I teach your paper, I teach also Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's paper on “The Spiral of Silence.”
I know that paper. I know the book.
And the dam can break, right? Because you get this variance between expressed opinion and held opinion. At some point, people suddenly start to change. You've had very dramatic changes in opinion, for example, about same-sex marriage. And so it could happen.
And it happened very quickly. This is also Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies. I have a paper, a little talk that I've been giving recently called “Naked Emperor Equilibria Can Be Unstable.” And it's exactly this point. It's a naked emperor equilibrium if the emperor is naked but no one will say so because no one wants to be thought to be the person who speaks out of turn about the emperor. And that's not stable, because as soon as a few people break the taboo, then everybody starts to know that other people know that the naked emperor is a fraud. The whole thing collapses.
That's right. The way I would put it is that I wouldn't say it's unstable, but it has a small basin of attraction. Now, a few perturbations can get you out of the basin of attraction, and then you're zooming off somewhere totally different.
I accept that as a refinement.
Good column, Glenn, but my built-in "Devil's advocate" wants to know how far "Shady Grove College" is prepared to go to defend its "neutrality". Is it reasonable for an educational institution to support the free expression of all opinions, no matter how outlandish? Let me pose a hypothetical but I think plausible "heckler's veto" scenario:
A student group or academic department invites a professor from another university to give a talk at Shady Grove. The invited speaker, who has published highly respected work in the fields of history, sociology, and economics, has a reputation for stimulating vigorous debate by challenging his audiences to grapple with controversial ideas. The title of his proposed talk is "Bringing Back Slavery: Pros and Cons". Those familiar with the speaker's work in this area know that after a rigorous logical analysis, he always comes down firmly on the anti-slavery side. However, a group of militant protestors, some from within the campus community and some from outside it, claim that the mere title of the lecture marks the speaker indelibly as a "genocidal white-supremacist lunatic", and vows to "burn the campus to the ground" if the talk takes place. So, should Shady Grove stand its ground and proceed as planned, regardless of the apparent serious threat to campus safety, while also taking whatever precautions may be necessary to head off any violence, no matter how expensive those measures might turn out to be?