0: I think especially this question is what raised people's concerns is calling for
the genocide of Jews a violation of their school's code
of conduct against harassment and bullying, and none of them could really give
a clear answer. So what should they have said?
1: The first thing they should have said was express their own
disgust at calls for genocide. Sure. Right.
They should have also said that generally in law answers,
you can't give a one yes or no answer to law. That's not the way law works.
And when it comes to First Amendment, it's not the way you want the law to work.
You don't want it to be, oh no, you can never say that thing.
It is generally not the way that works.
So while they were technically correct to say that context matters,
they just did a very bad job of actually explaining it in a clear and compelling
way.
0: And you have numerous examples in your books of how these universities just are
not upholding speech whatsoever. So I mean,
have they suddenly discovered the value of free expression or what's going on
here?
1: If the presidents of Harvard and Penn had run institutions that were
consistently excellent on freedom of speech,
then I'd be the first person in line defending even their ham fisted
answers during these hearings saying that even though they didn't say it very
well, they were correct,
but they sort of reaped what they sowed last week
because they're terrible.
These are institutions that are utterly terrible and it wasn't.
Our ranking isn't based on our opinion on what schools are the
worst. They're based on the largest survey of student opinion of
the free speech environment on campus ever done.
The largest database of professor cancellation, student cancellations,
campus speech codes and de platforming.
And Harvard really earned its position dead last on this,
and Penn was second to last.
Then they show huge double standards when it comes to freedom of speech.
They've actually been pretty terrible institutions for freedom of speech.
And when it came time to actually act like they were great on free speech all of
a sudden in front of Congress, nobody believed them.
And it has a little bit of a sort of boy who cried wolf kind of situation where
it's like, well, yeah, nobody's going to trust you at this point on this.
0: I mean, can you help me understand how some of these same students who have
demanded safe spaces trigger warnings who have said words are violence
are now seemingly standing up for actual
violence? It just seems like so strange.
1: Yeah. This is something that fire has been trying to point out.
We turn 25 next year and for that entire time we've been trying
to point out that speech restrictions can only be
enforced with double standards because the minute you actually enforce them
against by the plain language of the code,
they won't last a day because everyone would be silenced.
Speech codes are designed to embed double standards,
and it was made so brazen just in the past couple of weeks
that the language of micro aggress we're concerned about everyone
feeling psychologically safe.
Those are also concepts that can only be applied selectively or else they lead
to even more absurd results than we've seen.
Seeing a comparison right now that students are
saying some pretty shocking stuff about Jewish
students in Israel makes them really,
the students themselves in many cases look like hypocrites too,
for caring about safe spaces, microaggressions, all of these kinds of stuff.
Words are violence, for example, because words aren't violence.
But you've seen students actually in some cases being grabbed and assaulted in
some of these cases. That is.
0: Violence. Yes. Right.
Given the Penn President's very quick resignation
and a lot of other calls for the Harvard President and MIT president to also
step down, is this another form of cancellation?
Is the cancel law going after these folks or is it
deserved?
1: So when it comes to the University of Penn president,
I do believe it is deserved because no free
speech defender who at least knows about McGill's record and University of
Pennsylvania's record could defend her given on her behavior.
And the most distressing thing that came out of McGill was that after she
had flubbed the testimony so badly,
she decided to try to correct herself by saying,
we are no longer going to link our policies to constitutional standards,
which just struck us as one of the worst things we'd ever heard at fire
of a university president out of the president's mouth,
because it's not as if the problem had been,
there's too much free speech on these campuses to begin with. Basically,
since this has to be enforced by someone,
this is saying that administrators will have even more power over freedom of
speech, which was already part of the problem.
So you can't really defend McGill from a free speech standpoint.
We're a little bit hopeful, at least at University of Pennsylvania,
that the donors are talking about de bureaucratizing a lot of these universities
and getting rid of some of the administrators who actually think of it as their
job to police speech. If that's what results,
that could actually be a positive come for free speech.
Are we holding our breath about how it's actually going to work out? Yes,
but we really,
really hope people will take advantage of fire's standing offer to help
advise,
help give advice on how to actually improve the environment for free speech.