So To Speak Transcript: Teaching conservatism on a liberal college campus

Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Nico Perrino: Welcome back to “So to Speak” the free speech podcast where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through personal stories and candid conversations. I am your host Nico Perrino. Our guest is Eitan Hersh. He is a professor of political science at Tufts University and the author of the book “Politics is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change.” I first heard about Prof. Hersh in March when I read a longform article in Boston Magazine about a class he was teaching on American conservatism. 

The article entitled “A conservative thought experiment on a liberal college campus” raised interesting questions about viewpoint diversity in higher ed, our ability to talk across lines of difference, and how to address contentious current events in a scholarly environment. As students return to campus during an election year with conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East region, I thought getting a professor on the show to discuss how he navigates these issues in real time, in front of students, in a classroom setting might help us as citizens understand the current dynamics in higher ed and perhaps point a way forward. Prof. Hersh, welcome onto the show.

Eitan Hersh: Thank you for having me.

Nico Perrino: So, according to this Boston Magazine article you describe yourself as a right leaning centrist. Would you say that’s accurate?

Eitan Hersh: I don’t know how to describe myself. I mean, I guess that sounds about right.

Nico Perrino: This would make you a sort of outlier on college campuses, particularly in New England. The article cites a statistic from a 2016 study that found that liberal professors outnumber conservative professors 28 to 1. I’m sure that delta between 28 to 1 has only gone up in the intervening eight years. What’s it like being a right-leaning professor on a New England college campus? Is it as terrible as the headlines would suggest?

Eitan Hersh: I think like a lot of people, my politics are all over the place and have changed as I’ve aged a little bit.

Nico Perrino: Join the club.

Eitan Hersh: My politics are pretty downstream from religious commitments. I would say that issue by issue, it’s hard to predict. It’s easy for me to predict. I think it’s hard for students to kind of gauge where I am politically. On some issues I think I’m probably aligned with them on the liberal side, and on many issues I am not. But I think being just a religious person of any faith on campus is increasingly of a rarity. Being out of step with Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party also puts me in a minority position. I think if you are in Massachusetts, I might describe as like a Charlie Baker Republican, or Mitt Romney Republican. That would put you in the middle of the country, but that would put you to the far right of the university community.

Nico Perrino: So, among faculty though, does that even put you at a greater outlier? Is the student body at Tufts and other New England colleges more diverse than what you might find in a faculty environmentally politically, in regards to political science in particular, as well, which I imagine is different than what you might find in economics or sociology.

Eitan Hersh: Yes. Look, I don’t really know my colleagues’ politics, but I suspect that if it tracks with other universities, which I suspect it does, the humanities like history and anthropology are almost overwhelmingly entirely lefty. In the social sciences, political science, economics, the more math oriented social sciences, you have a little more diversity, and then even more as you go to the sciences as in engineering. Look, it’s hard to know. We don’t even talk about politics in our political science department that much. I don’t know everyone’s views about everything.

I think by the fact that I teach this course, that I do some public facing research related to issues related to the Jewish community, that I’m now the advisor to the student Federalist Society chapter, I think they can probably make some guesses about where I am politically. They may be guessing right or wrong, I don’t know. I guess it’s not a top of mind that people are evaluating other people’s politics, as far as I can tell.

Nico Perrino: Why did you decide to become an academic?

Eitan Hersh: Mostly because my politics are idiosyncratic. My first job in politics was as a Senate page, a Republican Senate page for John Chaffee in Rhode Island who was the left wing of the Republican Party. I worked after college for a year at the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Council, which was like the right wing of the Democratic Party. I love politics. I love the idea that we have to settle our disputes through elections and policy making. But when you don’t have such a strong partisan or ideological bone, it’s sort of hard to fit in as a young 20 something trying to get involved in politics. Where would you go? So, academia seemed to me to be a place where I could go and I could have whatever views I wanted to have and not have a boss, most importantly.

Nico Perrino: So, let’s talk about this course that you have at Tufts that was the basis for this Boston Magazine article. It’s a class on American conservatism. The article makes it sounds like this isn’t a sort of course that you find across the country. You almost needed to build a course anew. It’s not like there are syllabi that you could look at from colleagues from across the country in thinking it through. What was your impetus for building this course?

Eitan Hersh:. Look, I have a personal angle here, which is I went to Tufts, that is where I now work, as an undergraduate. In the early 2000s when I went here, I found a very robust intellectually, ideologically diverse community. It was right after 9/11. I could process that as a student with people who are from the left and the right and everywhere else. Now, when I came back as a faculty, I don’t know, seven or something years ago, the student body really had changed such that I rarely encountered conservative students. I rarely encountered religious students of any flavor. I noticed that when I was teaching my regular classes like on elections that students just had no exposure to conservative ideas.

Just to take an example from a class on elections, I have three lectures on money and politics. Almost all the students have heard of Citizens United, and they almost had all formed opinions. Then we read the court case, including the dissents, and we have a discussion about it. Every student is like, “Oh, I guess it’s a little complicated. I never thought about it.” That’s the great thing about being a teacher, you get to say, “You thought this thing was simple and it’s actually quite complicated.” But I realized on many areas of public policy, students were just majoring in political science and not really thinking about a full range of viewpoints.

So, when I started seeing what is out there in other syllabi, there are a number of classes at many universities on conservative themes or on conservatism. To me, they mostly bucket into two categories. One was more like political theory, history of political thought –

Nico Perrino: So, this is like Machiavelli, for example?

Eitan Hersh: Yes.

Nico Perrino: And John Locke.

Eitan Hersh: Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of that. Then there are classes on the history of the Republican Party or history of the conservative movement. But it was oftentimes taught from – like how the Republican Party got racist, – What I was interested in was actually neither of those things. I was interested in something contemporary and focused on public policy. So, the class that is taught has basically two weeks on family policy, a week on religion, a week on welfare politics, a week on capitalism and regulation, a week on guns and criminal justice, a week on affirmative action, etc. So, there are contemporary public policy topics taught through learning about A). conservative perspectives, and then just straight social science that is part of the discussion, mostly from the right.

Nico Perrino: And what was the response from your colleagues in wanting to do this class? It sounds like you got a thumbs up.

Eitan Hersh: Yeah, people don’t usually say don’t teach a class. It’s a huge amount of work to teach a new class, especially one that there’s not a textbook. So, I put a lot of time into it. I think my colleagues are – I’ve heard nothing – I have some friends who are colleagues who joke with me about what we’re doing to the students here. But it’s all very positive. Look, I’ll have 100 students in it this fall. It’s a good, popular, high enrollment classes that are going to help students learn new things, that tends to be a good thing.

Nico Perrino: At the start of the course you issue what Boston Magazine describes as a sort of trigger warning. You note that students, when you first try to articulate a position, you often get it wrong, or it might come out wrong. In other words, you’re asking for grace and goodwill. How did that go?

Eitan Hersh: For the most part it went great. One thing that is very early lesson in the class is not only is there obvious political diversity in the room, in this room we for sure will have some conservative students and a lot of liberal ones. But even the ones who say – to people who say they’re liberal, say, when they engage in the material, they realize they strongly disagree about these things and they’re trying to process that. A lot of students have this experience of, “Oh, I thought I was sort of a down the line liberal. But it turns out I’m complicated.

That includes on issues where people have just really strong commitments. At the very beginning of the class I introduce a policy issue that we don’t talk about at all in the class, which is circumcision. I bring it up because it’s a kind of squirmy topic. It’s not something that’s really politicized. But it’s something that I know people in the classroom will have actually strong disagreements on, to the point that it will feel very personal. So, I talk about in my tradition boys are circumcised when they’re eight days old and that’s been for generations, for generations and generations. Other students in the class might find that to be child abuse, it should be against the law. If they wanted to make something like that against the law I would find that very threatening personally. How do we work this out?

I introduce that topic just to say that’s what every issue is basically like. Welcome to the club. You are walking around people who have views you think are vile all the time. That’s how we operate here. In terms of grace, for the most part it’s so self-selecting that kids do a great job. I’m teaching this class this fall at 9 a.m. on Monday mornings. If you know any college students, if any of your listeners know any college students, that is not a popular time.

Nico Perrino: No, it’s not. A little more popular than the 8 a.m. class, but yes, generally not popular.

Eitan Hersh: The 100 students who are taking the class on conservative at 9 a.m. on Mondays are ready for this discussion and are more mature and frankly smarter than the average student. I will say that the Israel-Palestine stuff tested our classroom a bit, I would say. That was an issue that was so immediate, that is some big thing happened, and students were so obviously on very opposite sides. Frankly, I don’t know exactly what I thought, but I was very affected by the initial part of the war, personally.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I’ve got some data here on topics that students believe are difficult to discuss on college campuses. So, FIRE has this college free speech ranking. The core of the ranking is a student survey. Last year we did 55,000 college students. This next one is 59,000 college students. In the 2024 ranking, which precedes October 7, the most hot button, difficult to discuss issue was abortion. 49% of students chose [inaudible – crosstalk] [00:17:11] one of many options that are difficult to discuss. Beneath that, gun control, 43%, racial inequality, 42%, transgender rights, 42%. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was 26%. But this next year, it’s 54%, by far the most difficult topic to discuss on campus.

On some campuses, 80% of students or more say that it’s a difficult conflict to discuss. That’s at Barnard, Pomona, Brandeis, American, Vassar. Then you have a number of other campuses, like a dozen, where between 75 and 79% of students say it’s difficult to discuss. That includes, of course, Columbia. So, that is obviously an issue that students feel is difficult to discuss. They talk in various surveys we’ve looked at about feeling a good deal or great deal of pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in their class. In our survey, 25% of students said that they feel a good deal or great deal of pressure to avoid discussing topics in their class. At Tufts, it’s right around there at 24%.

So, how do you navigate that?

Eitan Hersh: I think that some issues are hard to discuss because you want to be sensitive to other people. So, in our class we have a week where we talk about gay marriage and trans rights. We’re reading conservative perspectives on these things. Students want to learn how the other side thinks from their perspective, which is almost all progressive.

For example, we read about gay marriage, there’s a question before gay marriage was legal in the United States of whether it’s good for kids, for example. Are gay couples as good as straight couples. It’s complicated. You can think about it empirically, are they adopting kids, whatever. And there’s some empirical evidence that leans in both direction. For example, gay couples with kids are much more likely to get divorced than straight couples with kids. And divorce is pretty bad for kids on average. So, we can talk about that empirically. And we can also have a view that I don’t care that it’s terrible for kids, it’s a right.

So, I think just trying to work through on the basis of a shared text how do we understand this, how do we break down the moral, how do we break down the empirical? That’s fine. That’s I think very productive. But on some issues, there are issues where there’s an ethical or religious something perspective where people understand the terms of the debate, and maybe understand the empirical terms, but they just are on other sides of the issue. Israel-Palestine has a bit of both flavors. There’s empirical questions, is there a way for these two sides get along? Did one side commit crimes this time or that time or whatever? But then there’s also these moral commitments.

I think what’s clear from the data is that many students don’t want to be friends or in social company with people who disagree with them morally. If you are on a campus and you are prolife or if you support that a Jewish state should exist, then those are views that are considered by many students to be the signs of bad people. You are prolife, that means you’re a bad person. You support Trump, that means you’re a bad person.

Nico Perrino: And is that new? You said the dynamics on campus changed since you were an undergraduate in the post 9/11 years. Is this something that’s just innate to human nature? Or is it something that’s developed?

Eitan Hersh: Well, the student populations of these campuses have changed. I don’t know exactly what our ideological diversity is, but it seems quite low.

Nico Perrino: is this kind of moral revulsion to being around and having relationships with people, is that new? Because presumably in a previous environment you could disagree with someone while still dating them or while still enjoying dinner with them. But what you’re saying now is students don’t want to have these relationships.

Eitan Hersh: Right. We have this long 50-year polarization happening where there are not as many conservative Democrats, hardly any, and liberal Republicans. So, social issues are highly correlated with politics. So, it could be 50 years ago you could have two Democrats dating but one’s prolife and religious, and one is not. So, there’s that. I think since Trump’s emergence in 2016, the university environment, and many business environments also, have changed so that what they think of culturally as out of bounds has narrowed. That if you support Trump, for example, you’re out of bounds, you’re a fascist, you’re whatever.

I think that created a norm that infected classrooms, infected research seminars, it effected just water cooler talk where there is an assumption that we are all on the same page. I think that’s quite damaging because, of course, we’re not all on the same page. When the issue is – like the difference between – there’s obviously different proportions of people on different sides of these issues.

So, when the university makes a statement in support of Ukraine, that might be very unpopular to a few Russian nationals, but it’s so few that they’re not a major concern. But if a university has 5 or 10% of student or faculty or staff who identify as Zionists and you said, “Okay, we think you are a bunch of Nazi genocidal people, or something,” well, we don’t think that.

Nico Perrino: you’re speaking about institutional neutrality there, that is the idea that a college or university would remain neutral on issues of social or political import or controversy in the nation, or not. As you suggest, they would issue a statement on Ukraine, or they would issue a statement on the war on the Middle East. Do they find themselves in a quagmire when they start issuing statements? Or do you think they have a moral duty to do so?

Eitan Hersh: I think my view is that universities should and can have a diversity of brands, and that some of them that want to be first amendment style, free speech private schools can have that brand. Those who want to be institutionally neutral, fine. But I also think there should be room for schools, for example, that have more – are more guided by religious ideas, schools that have dress codes and honor codes, and say we don’t allow technology here or we don’t allow – I think there should be a lot of room for schools like that as well. And –

Nico Perrino: How would you draw the distinction between private and public? Do you think that diversity should be able to exist in the public context as well as the private context? Or are you just talking about private schools here?

Eitan Hersh: So, I think public is trickier because you have that constitution thing. In the private market, I would say, I would hope there would be a diversity. That is I don’t think every school needs to be a free speech absolutist school because I actually think that the schools that say we have a brand that’s focused on modest dress and honor codes for not cheating, and who knows, other expectations like you have to work out every day, whatever it is, that’s fine. That means there might be schools that say we’re the leftist school that’s going to try to turn your children into social justice warriors or whatever. And that’s okay too.

I think where things go wrong is when the school tries to – when a school promotes itself with one thing but offers something else. I think that is where we have seen the most trouble. It’s schools that say that – out of one side of their mouth they want to encourage free speech and debate, but on the other side they only will recruit students who are one side of that debate and only have guest speakers on one side of that debate and come very hard on students who do this but not that. I think if your brand is free speech, then you’ve got to stick to it. But I do want to leave room for schools to not have that be their brand.

Nico Perrino: Well, you actually don’t diverge from FIRE, really at all, on that position. FIRE believes to the extent you have a private university, and you want to organize around shared values, you should be free to do so. That’s the reason that FIRE doesn’t go after, do any case work at schools like Brigham Young or Yeshiva University. They organize around a different set of values, religious values in many cases. Bringham Young you can’t wear a beard, so I wouldn’t be allowed to be a student there. I think that’s just part of a pluralistic society.

Nico Perrino: And we are on the same page on the second part of your answer too, which is that to the extent you advertise yourself as one thing, you need to have truth in advertising. You need to actually live up to those values. So, if you like at Yale, for example, have the Woodward Report which says that students and faculty should be free to think the unthinkable, challenge the unchallengeable, and mention the unmentionable, if you mention something that someone doesn’t like and the university comes after you for it, well that would be an abdication of that principle or that policy.

Although, when one faculty member tried to cite that policy in a lawsuit against Yale, they disavowed it and said this is just something that’s aspirational, it doesn’t actually mean anything here. Which you’re seeing more of lately, unfortunately, particularly at private universities. But you see more colleges moving in the direction of that sort of institutional neutrality. Although, I’m not sure Tufts has. I can be mistaken.

Eitan Hersh: No, I hope they will, but I don’t think they have made such a statement yet.

Nico Perrino: What is your perspective on how everything unfolded post October 7 at Tufts? The article does make it very clear that it was a point of contention in the classroom.

Eitan Hersh: Look, I think Tufts like other schools has created a brand that has been very unwelcome to conservatives, to religious people. If you look at students across the country age 18 to 25 who are associated with universities across the country, 30% are conservative. 30% of all university students across the country are conservative. About 30% also attend religious services at least once a week. You look at a place like Tufts and Tufts is working hard to and meeting benchmarks around issues like diversity around race, ethnicity, LGBT status.

But if you look at their religious and ideological diversity, it’s just not – it’s just clearly not been a big priority. I think that has resulted in a situation with the war where there were students who – a small minority of students, Jewish students, who felt one way about this conflict, and then a very loud voice among other students who not only support Palestinian rights but supported Hamas from October 7. The students in Justice in Palestine group here on October 8th or 9th issued this sort of celebratory statement, “We’re excited about the creative strategies used by Hamas.” That group wasn’t ostracized on campus. They were themselves celebrated and grew this big coalition of activists. Again –

Nico Perrino: Do you think they should have been disbanded as an official student organization? Or do you think separate from that, they should have just been ostracized?

Eitan Hersh: look, my personal view is if you’re celebrating Hamas on October 8th and saying these are creative strategies, I think that’s the equivalent of someone who’s a pro KKK person. Now, if the school wants to have first amendment style rights, okay, we have some KKK people, I guess, and we have some Hamas people, and let’s just all fight it out and have a welcoming environment and anyone can say it. But that’s not how the school sees itself.

Again, all the same issues that Harvard and Penn got wrapped up in, do you have double standards where you are very sensitive around not calling someone by this name if they are gay, but you are not sensitive about calling for terrorist attacks and rapes or whatever against Israeli civilians. The same issues we had here I think we had at many universities. I think that there are some things our school and many schools should do differently related to who they have as part of their community, how they build that diversity of perspectives.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I think Harvard just added a new question to its admissions program asking students how they would interact with someone they deeply disagree with. It seems to be getting at the idea that when you come to Harvard, if you are a student here, that is going to happen, and we want to know how you’re going to respond to it. Which seems like to me a smart way to approach admissions for a scholarly environment.

Eitan Hersh: Right. And then there are things that have nothing to do with students or faculty. I think there are staff here who really thought that was part of their job to lead students in a revolution. So, if you asked a staff member who runs something that has nothing to do with politics, some center for student life or something like that, would Zionist students be welcome in your environment? “We are an anti-oppression group here, so you know, maybe not.” I think that’s the kind of thing, in my view, that person should not – a person who has that kind of view probably should not be employed in a job where they’re supposed to be treating to students without respect to a political view.

Look, a lot of people here, I think, believe that basically someone to the right of the Mitt Romney, say, is out of bounds. I think they have a view, I think it’s a very common view that essentially something between the Hamas curious progressives and Mitt Romney, that’s where they’re happy to have a debate and disagreement. But then everything to the right of that is out of bounds. The person who is in Congress who voted against the certification of elections, that’s most Republicans in Congress, they’re out of bounds. If you are opposed to gay rights or trans rights, you’re out of bounds. If you’re opposed to immigration, you’re out of bounds. If you’re, you know. And so, I think the one problem we have is there’s a lot of people who think the bounds of appropriate discourse are very narrow.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Well, [audio cuts out] [00:36:54] first principles here, I think we take it as dogma, and you and I would agree on this, that viewpoint diversity on college campuses is a good thing. But why is it a good thing? What’s the sort of first principle that you bring to that belief?

Eitan Hersh: Let me say it from two perspectives. From an educational perspective, I can’t emphasize enough how much of a delight it is to teach a class where you’re exposing students to something they’ve never seen before. Of course, all of us like learning in that same way. A student has never thought about some issue like, I don’t know, what’s a good example? Let’s talk about religion. Is religion good for society? Well, people who are religious tend to be happier, have much better physical and mental health. Does that mean the government should encourage it? How do we think about that? Let’s read some different perspectives. What would it mean for the government to encourage it? Does the government currently discourage religion? If so, how?

Maybe that’s an old conversation too. I think for a lot of our students who grew up in secular environments, it’s a totally new conversation. And it’s just such a delight to teach students new things. That’s one thing. But why would they want to learn it? I think they want to learn it because they’re going to have to operate in a world where people disagree with them. The people in their family might disagree with them. For sure, their future colleagues and I think we want them to learn how to deal with that without their heads exploding.

I think we do have, actually, some brand diversification where you start to see schools in the south, for example, public schools in the south say, “We really care about this kind of diversity,” and people want it, parents want it, kids want it. What I would like to not see happen is for the older legacy private institutions to lose an edge because they’re thinking that people want something different than they want.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. To say nothing of the truth-seeking enterprise that many colleges approach. David Ogilvy, the great advertising executive used to say you only get a spark when the stone and the flint are moving in opposite directions. So often I’ve learned from talking with people with whom I’ve disagree forcing me to reconsider my initial premises and positions. When I went to college I was very much an antitheist in the old Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris mold, Richard Dawkins. I started questioning that when I started debating and engaging with religious students on campus. I’m very appreciative for that experience.

There was a conflict at Tufts last year, I believe, September 29th where a chapter of the Federalist Society, a national conservative libertarian legal organization, held an in-person discussion, I’m quoting here from Boston Magazine, “Between two male professors over the morality of abortion.” The magazine reports that on the evening of the event pro choice Tufts students frequently interrupted the speakers with noise makers, playing the sounds of boos and cars honking. The protestors kept at it even after campus police arrived. Only after a second officer showed up 45 minutes into the event did the disruption stop.

How do you get students to remove themselves and engage with the idea rather than the identity of the speaker or remove themselves and put their identity aside when they engage in an issue? Or should they even do that in the first place?

Eitan Hersh: That’s an interesting question. So, first of all on that particular episode, I should say in part because I’m advisor to that Federalist Society chapter, they actually tried very hard to get lots of different people to be speakers for that event. One problem that happens at universities across the board is you have – why do you have so few debates? And why do you have so few conservative speakers? Sometimes the university will say, “Well, the student’s don’t really want. They won’t come to a conservative speaker, to the debate.” A lot of times they’ll say the speakers won’t come because they don’t want to be seen – conservative speakers don’t want to come to liberal campuses. Or liberal campus professors don’t want to debate with conservative professors and give them a platform.

So, there are a lot of problems that I think are a precursor to why you have fewer debates like this. But when it comes to gender and abortion, at least up until Dobbs, there’s no relationship between gender and your views on abortion. There are as many pro life women as men. I think a lot of our students don’t like – a lot of students on the left might not like to think that, that there’s no relationship between being a woman and being pro choice. It might have changed a little after Dobbs, but before Dobbs, no relationship.

I don’t think the students should be forced to attend a debate like that. But I think if they want to attend a debate, they shouldn’t be stopped by a bunch of protestors. I think the protestors need to let events like this to happen even if they disagree with them if they want to be a part of the community. if you’re a campus organization or professor and you reserve a room and people want to go, I would enforce pretty stiff penalties for students disrupting that.

Nico Perrino: Oh yeah. And FIRE, while we don’t advocate certain penalties for certain campus activities, we very much see the shout downs, the blockades, even the use of violence to stop different speakers as being antithetical to a truth-seeking institution’s mission. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. So, to the extent that students are allowed to blockade a campus event and prevent others from accessing it or prevent that event from moving forward, it needs to be investigated with all, of course, due process provided, and punished appropriately so it doesn’t happen again.

Eitan Hersh: I was going to say a lot of students want – not all students, but there are students who maybe they have some policy issue that’s really tied closely to their identity. For that reason they want to explore it more. When they do it in a context of a class, it’s such a beautiful thing because it sort of is a safe space. In other words, we’re going to read some anti-trans thing. And some trans student might take that class, read that thing, and then the assignment for the class is you have to choose a reading to critique. Then they get to engage with this research. That’s a very healthy way to learn about people who disagree with you and understand their arguments. It’s a different context than the speaker circuit on campus where you have more of an advocacy environment.

There’s no advocacy environment in the classroom. I think that makes it special. But I think the advocacy environment where you get to see people actually debate is also very worthwhile, and we should do more of it. I constantly have been pushing the organizers of events here to have more ideological diversity. Because I think the students, it’s good for them to hear from advocates too.

Nico Perrino: I’ve actually heard some anecdotal evidence that the Federalist Society organizations across the country are having a hard time getting the American Constitution Society organizations on certain campus to cosponsor events. It used to be very, very common. A high-profile speaker’s coming to campus, speaking about legal issues, ACS and Federalist Society would collaborate on those events. Now ACS in a couple of instances that I’ve heard about is refusing to do so on sort of moral revulsion grounds that we were speaking about earlier, which is sad because I think everyone wants to see this cross-partisan discussion and the idea being that just because you’re sponsoring a speaker or sponsoring a debate does not mean you agree necessarily with everything that’s going to be said there, but rather that these sort of discussions are important to academic environment.

FIRE’s College Free Speech rankings from last year, 2024, more than 2 in 5 students said that students blocking other students from attending a speech is acceptable to some degree. So, it’s 45% of students. That’s up from 37% the year before. More than a quarter of students, that’s 27% said that using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable to some degree, up from 20%. 63% support shout downs, up from 62% the year before. These seem to me to be anti-intellectual activities, anti-scholarly activities that students just do not understand the basis for objecting too.

Eitan Hersh: Right. Yeah, that’s sad. Even the students in my class on conservative who are a self-selecting group, many of them did support the shouting down of the prolife speaker and trying to disrupt the event.

I think that if a university said, “Our norms, we expect the following, and we’re going to enforce this norm. And that is you’re not going to disrupt someone else’s event,” that is – I think they can do it, and I think they can do it very quickly. I think that the selective schools actually have the greatest power to do this by the virtue of their selectivity. They can say, “You don’t want to be here? There’s thousands of kids standing in line waiting for your spot. If you are not mature enough to let someone else talk to a group of people they want to talk to, get out of here.” It doesn’t mean the student deserves to go to jail, but maybe they deserve to go to another school. To me, if the schools wanted to, they could change this culture very quickly. I hope they want, but I’m not sure they do.

Nico Perrino: There’s that old saying in business management that culture, if it’s not set from the top down, will be created from the bottom up. And that everything that happens in an institution is either created or allowed by leadership. I think that too many of these leaders at many colleges or universities are acting more like politicians than leaders of an academic institution and are trying to please everyone, and as a result pleasing no one.

I want to turn now to talk about faculty. In 2021, more than half of faculty, this is 52%, reported being worried about losing their jobs or reputation because someone misunderstands something they have said or done. Almost three quarters of conservative faculty feel that way, 56% of moderates, and 40% of liberals. So, you have this situation where over half of college faculty, taken in the aggregate, across the political spectrum are worried about speaking up, worried about hits to their reputation, worried about someone taking something they said out of context.

Eitan Hersh: Obviously, I teach sensitive topics. If a student doesn’t like how I said something, they can file a complaint with the Office of Equal Opportunity and cost me hours and hours and hours and hours of my life and maybe even having to pay a lawyer. Because the university’s created this process of I think ass covering is the only way to describe it where any complaint goes through essentially an officer where there – I think they’re mostly like social workers, but they’re acting as investigators, but they have unclear authority. You can be wrapped up in some horrible thing because a student didn’t like what you said.

So, tenure protects you maybe from getting fired from something like this, but it doesn’t protect you from just wasting a huge amount of time and effort dealing with complaints like this. There’s obviously other forms of public shaming. When I was at Yale I had posted my syllabi publicly. It’s nice to be able to share syllabi, a lot of faculty do it. But then I saw at some point, maybe 2016, 2017 faculty were calling each other out on Twitter if they didn’t have the right number of female authors or minority authors on their syllabi. I thought why would I ever post a syllabus if there’s a risk that if I don’t hit some metrics that some bean counter is counting I’m going to get shamed? So, I’ve since not published my syllabi.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. And you also don’t have as many tenured faculty teaching on campus as you used to. Far more adjuncts than there once were. I should note, to the extent we have any faculty listening, and you are reported for something you say in the class or outside the class, particularly in the class when it’s pedagogically relevant and you feel like this is a violation of your academic freedom rights or your pedagogical prerogative, reach out to FIRE. We have a faculty legal defense fund, and we provide attorneys pro bono to help navigate the internal disciplinary and investigatory processes. We’ve helped a lot of faculty through those processes over the years. Many of those cases don’t get reported publicly because we just help in the background.

To end here, what are you expecting as students return to campus this year? Do you expect it to be as contentious a year as it was this past school year? And do you think schools are better equipped to handle it?

Eitan Hersh: Ah [laughter]. So let me say a few things. First of all, in case any of your listeners are interested in this, I am at the beginning stages of trying to build something a little bit bigger in terms of creating space on our campus, but also as a model for other campuses to diversify curricula, to diversify speaker series, to help students develop into civic leaders who are accustomed to debate and disagreement. So, if you have listeners who want to help do this, they can email –

Nico Perrino: Does it have a name yet?

Eitan Hersh: No, it doesn’t have a name yet. We’re very early. Well, it has a tentative name. I don’t want to say yet. That’s number one. What do I expect in the fall is I’m continuing to create and build hopefully a bigger and bigger bubble inside a bubble. So, I always love this time of year. I love the fall. I love meeting the new students. To have 100 kids in conservatism and 100 kids in elections, all I know is that for those 200 students, we’re going to be learning in a way that is going to pick apart every argument left and right, it’s going to be a delight. I don’t control what happens outside of my sphere, so I don’t know what the rest of the bubble is going to look like. But I know my bubble is going to be great.

In terms of what I expect to see, I expect to see the same kind of tensions around Israel-Palestine to suddenly reemerge as soon as the students are back on campus, and to continue maybe until – I think if Trump is reelected, then probably the attention will shift to that. For better or worse, a lot of the activism is quite faddish. So, a few years ago, if you asked students their number one issue was police reform and criminal – Police reform was their most important issue in their world. Suddenly, if you ask students now, that’s not a big issue for them.

Nico Perrino: Then it was abortion, now it’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s a contentious issue on campus. FIRE said for a long time that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is where tensions get to be the highest. We’re even careful in how we talk about it. We don’t use the word Palestine because it’s not a recognized state. If we use that word are people going to assume that we’re taking a political position on the controversy? So, there’s a lot of landmines that you need to avoid stepping on and even just weighing in.

Eitan Hersh: Yeah. But I assume the tensions are going to be similar. I think the schools are getting smarter. I do think at the administrative level anyway, schools are moving more in the direction of institutional neutrality, moving away from a DEI framework in which Jews have a very precarious position. I think one of the reasons why this year was very hard was that the schools had developed and hired a lot in their development of a DEI framework which they thought meant one thing, and then when it came to the Israel-Palestine conflict and Jewish Americans and Israeli Americans and Israeli Nationals, it didn’t fit into how the DEI leadership thought about diversity, equity, inclusion because of a sense of who’s an oppressor and who’s an oppressed.

I think the Israel-Palestine conflict showcased some of the real serious limitations and risks of schools going all in as that as an organizing framework for their institutions. So, I think they’re dialing some of that back.

Nico Perrino: We’ll see how it goes. I wish you all of luck in building your ever-expanding bubble and teaching this course on American conservative. Hopefully it points a way for debate and discussion across lines of difference and getting universities back to that core ethos of truth seeking. Prof. Hersh, thanks for coming on the show.

Eitan Hersh: Thank you for having me. Nice talking to you.

Nico Perrino: That was Tufts University Political Professor Eitan Hersh. The Boston Magazine article that served as the impetus for this conversation will be linked in the show notes and is titled, “A conservative thought experiment on a liberal college campus.” I am Nico Perrino, and this podcast was recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my FIRE colleagues, including Aaron Reese and Chris Maltby. It is coproduced by my colleague Sam Li. To learn more about “So to Speak,” you can subscribe to our YouTube channel or Substack page. Both of which feature video versions of this conversation. You can follow us on X by searching for the handle Free Speech Talk. And you can find us on Facebook.

If you have feedback on this conversation or feedback on the show in general, you can send us an email to sotospeak@thefire.org, again that is sotospeak@thefire.org. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcast, Google Play, or wherever else you get your podcast. Reviews help us attract new listeners to the show. And until next time, I thank you all again for listening.

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Duration: 61 minutes