Censorship in Higher Education: A PEN America Perspective:

Changing Higher Ed® podcast 241 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Jeremy Young

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed Podcast 241

[00:00:30] Introduction and Host Welcome

David: Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

[00:00:50] Guest Introduction: Dr. Jeremy Young

Drumm McNaughton: My guest today is Dr. Jeremy Young, Program Director of Freedom to Learn at PEN America. He leads PEN America’s efforts to fight government censorship in higher education institutions. And this program, the Champions of Higher Education Initiative, as per their website, affirmatively promotes a positive vision of American higher education as an essential guarantor of free expression in a democracy and defends the autonomy of educational decisions made by colleges and universities against political and legislative incursions.

Jeremy joins me to talk about this important work that PEN America is doing with respect to academic freedom and real free speech in colleges and universities and why it’s critical for the U. S. to maintain its global leadership in higher education.

Jeremy, welcome to the program.

Jeremy Young: Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. I am so looking forward to our conversation. You are with PEN America, which is one of the last bastions of free speech in this country, true free speech. before we dig into the conversation for today about academic freedom and free speech, please give us a little bit of background.

[00:02:08] Background of Dr. Jeremy Young

Drumm McNaughton: I’d like to find out more about who you are.

Jeremy Young: Well, that’s kind of you to say. I mean, my background is in academia. I was a history professor for the better part of a decade and taught at a few regional public institutions around the country. Most recently at the Utah Tech University in rural Utah, where I directed the Institute of Politics and Public Affairs and was a professor of U. S. and European history.

[00:02:30] Overview of PEN America

Jeremy Young: I work at PEN America now which, as you noted, is a free speech organization, a hundred year old organization, actually, that is made up of writers, our members are professional writers. And our mission is to celebrate literature and to defend the freedoms that make it possible, of which some of the foremost are, academic freedom and the freedom of expression.

So I direct a program at PEN America called the Freedom to Learn Program, which is our program that combats the censorship of higher education institutions and faculty by state legislatures. And that’s the work we do.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, trying to censor universities. What a concept, have you ever heard of that before?

Jeremy Young: Never. Completely new to me.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. This is so strange. I’ve never heard of this.

What does PEN stand for?

Jeremy Young: You know, PEN doesn’t stand for anything right now. Originally it was Poets, Essays, and Novelists, but then they decided that wasn’t fully encompassing of all types of writers out there, so they tried to add playwrights and editors, and then they just decided it was too many, so PEN just stands for PEN, but we have kept the acronym because it reflects our identity as a writers organization.

Drumm McNaughton: That’s fascinating for me because organizations like universities, they tend to morph, they change, but to retain the same name is brilliant. It’s good marketing.

Jeremy Young: I think it’s very smart.

Drumm McNaughton: So tell us about PEN America, please. Well,

Jeremy Young: What PEN does, you know, is PEN is a part of PEN International, which comprises over 140 PEN Centers all around the world, of which PEN America is the largest. And PEN America does a lot of different things. We have a set of well-regarded awards. We have a World Voices Festival, a Literary Gala in New York. We do protection work for writers all over the world who are being targeted for their writing with hate or threats or even imprisonment. We do advocacy against book bans here in the United States, particularly in school libraries. We advocate for campus free speech and against disinformation and for freedom of the press. And then our higher ed advocacy work that I direct is one of our newer programs, but also one of our more successful.

[00:04:43] Challenges in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: You’ve done some incredible work and we had a great conversation a few days ago talking about how your organization is a “center left” type organization, but because of the way you approach things, you maintain relationships with both sides of the aisle.

Jeremy Young: We do. Right now, there are some barbs being traded between FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is a “center right” organization, and the AAUP, American Association of University Professors, which is a more left-leaning organization. And it’s a strange moment for us because we’re on great terms with both of them. We think they’re both vital organizations that advocate for free expression. Our approach, because of our center left status, really is to build coalitions, try to bring people together, and try to focus on what unites us, which is a defense of free expression in the higher education space.

Drumm McNaughton: And that is so critical. People don’t stop to think about how important that is. I think of myself being exposed to multiple perspectives growing up, and especially in my graduate work with the Fielding Graduate Institute years ago. It’s a lot longer than I thought it was, but anyway, we won’t go there, but being exposed to multiple different perspectives, it helps to evolve your own perspective.

Jeremy Young: That’s exactly right. And, a lot of what we argue these days, we’re arguing with people who really want to constrict the space of ideas that are available to students on a college campus. Their view is that because colleges lean left, and there’s no argument for me about that, faculty lean left, even many school student bodies lean left. That means that the solution to that is not to add more voices on the right, which I think is a great idea, but instead to constrain the voices that are already there. To ban courses, to ban curricula, to harass and harry various university administrators, and that’s just not our approach. Our view is that the solution to speech is more speech, and the more voices that are out there in universities, the better.

[00:06:50] Book Banning and Censorship

Drumm McNaughton: Well, we’re seeing that in so many different places, and we’re going to get into that in just a moment, but taking a look at one perspective that you mentioned earlier, book banning. It’s like, why would you ban books? I don’t understand.

Jeremy Young: The people who want to ban those books, the Moms for Liberty types, their view is that if you expose a student to an idea, they’ll claim that this is about obscenity because a book for young adult readers has a sex scene in it, or an anatomy book has images of, well, anatomy, that it’s, it’s smutty and it’s pornographic. But what they’re really trying to do, if you do an analysis, as we have done, of all of the books that they have banned across school districts in the country, there’s an overwhelming majority of them represent some kind of minoritized identity.

LGBTQ identities, or race, is a main topic of the book, or sexual violence. And their view is that if you expose kids to these ideas that it’s going to turn them gay, or it’s going to make them, I don’t know, more sympathetic to people around them, and, our view is that people need to see themselves reflected in books, and that’s why we have a lot of different kinds of books in the school library. That’s the value of it, but no, their argument is they just want to, again, it’s about constraining ideas, cutting off viewpoints for students to learn.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. And it’s, to me, that’s just antithetic to who we are.

Jeremy Young: Sure is.

Drumm McNaughton: So Jeremy, PEN America, we understand what you guys stand for and I think that’s fabulous. You do a report on free speech country. Your latest one came out. Tell us a little bit about that, please.

[00:08:30] America’s Censored Classrooms Report

Jeremy Young: The report is called “America’s Censored Classrooms 2024”, and you can tell by the date that it’s an annual report. We’ve been putting these out since, in some versions, since 2021. This is the fourth edition, and they focus on state legislation around the country that is aimed at censoring colleges and universities and sometimes at K-12 institutions as well.

So in previous years, we’ve had a tracking index. We still have that, the index of what we call educational gag orders, but it now tracks other types of bills as well. Legislation that is proposed or that becomes law in states around the country. What we originally tracked, what we call educational gag orders, bills that specifically censor certain topics or ideas in the classroom, so the speech of professors, reading assignments, things like that. And then secondarily, a set of bills that restrict the autonomy and governance of universities that go after DEI offices or curriculum or mission statements or accreditation standards or tenure or shared governance.

And so we’ve been tracking those two types of legislation for the past few years. We put out this report every year. And it’s really a report that focuses on what bills have been proposed, what have been passed, what are the key trends that we’ve seen across the year, and what do we expect to see happening in the year to come?

Drumm McNaughton: And so some of those behaviors that you track you mentioned, when we spoke before, jawboning.

[00:09:51] Jawboning and Legislative Threats

Drumm McNaughton: What is that?

Jeremy Young: Jawboning. This is something we’ve seen a lot of in 2024 and expect to see more of going forward. To think of jawboning, imagine those old photos, perhaps you’ve seen them of Lyndon Johnson when he was in the Senate as the majority leader going up to this 90-year-old Senator and literally leaning over him, so the guy is leaning back on the table, and Johnson is sticking out his jaw and sort of intimidating him. That’s a classic example of jawboning. It refers to lawmakers, threatening or bullying usually people who aren’t lawmakers. So in this case, university presidents, into doing something they want them to do without having to pass a law. And jawboning is a really insidious form of censorship. In this case, what they’re trying to get them to do is close DEI offices or shut down certain majors or minors related to identity categories. It’s a really insidious approach because it takes a lot of democratic elements out of the lawmaking process. There are no hearings where people can show up and voice their opposition to what’s being proposed. There’s no law on the books, ultimately, that enables legal firms like the ACLU to mount a court challenge against something that might be unconstitutional.

There’s just a lawmaker going up to a college president and saying, you’re going to cut these DEI offices, or we’re going to cut your funding. Or maybe we’re going to pass a worse bill next year if you don’t cut them this year. And it’s a very tough situation for presidents to be in. They don’t really have anyone who can help them in that situation, and they have very limited leverage.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, then you also have congressional hearings on anti-Semitism, and if you take a look at the six university presidents who’s appeared before these committees, three of them are already gone. The fourth is on its way out, and only two have survived thus far.

Jeremy Young: That’s true. Although the one who’s on his way out was already planning to leave before the hearing started. But, yes, I mean, that’s another classic example of jawboning is those hearings. Just bringing a lot of presidents into a room and yelling at them and threatening them and just trying to, in at least Stefanik’s case, openly saying that these people should be fired by their boards and, it’s a very difficult and adversarial way to deal with lawmakers. And it’s frustrating because I think it’s a good idea for Congress to take very seriously the rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses, something that was appearing really before October 7th and has certainly escalated since then.

But these hearings aren’t a serious effort to do that. In the very first of those hearings, Virginia Foxx saying, ” the cause of anti Semitism is DEI”, and just pivoting to things she wants to talk about, not really trying to solve the problem, just trying to exploit it for political gain.

Drumm McNaughton: And unfortunately, that’s where a lot of it comes down to is just political gain.

Jeremy Young: Yeah. And some of this is about, the hearings I think certainly are about politics and trying to win a popular victory over these unpopular presidents. But what we see in state legislatures, in some cases, is more about policy change. The goal really is to force the university to do something the lawmaker wants them to do or to stop doing something the lawmaker doesn’t want them to do, and to do it in a sort of secretive, stealthy way. And that’s really the message of our 2024 report, which is that in this and a variety of other ways, lawmakers are really engaging increasingly in censorship, not above board, but censorship by stealth.

Drumm McNaughton: And then you have Florida, which is quite open in many of their attacks. They’re the only state that I know of that has had a report from the AAUP. It’s only the eighth cautionary report that they’ve issued. The first one was on McCarthy and the censorship back then. They’ve passed DEI bans, all those things. Talk us through a little bit of that, if you would, please.

[00:13:32] Florida’s Higher Education Crisis

Drumm McNaughton: Florida

Jeremy Young: has been Armageddon for higher education over the last couple of years. I mean, they passed the Stop Woke Act, which is the worst educational gag order in the country, direct restriction on faculty speech. And although the higher ed portion of that has been temporarily stayed by a court, that was just the beginning. They followed it up in 2023 with SB 266, a law that banned DEI and placed all sorts of restrictions on curriculum and general education. Banning whole swaths of courses from the general education curricula. I think Florida State University had to remove 400 courses from its general ed curricula in response to that law. The University of North Florida felt compelled to eliminate its interfaith center because it considered it to be part of the DEI programs that were being banned. It’s just been a bloodbath. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, the governor came into New College of Florida, a small sort of experimental, public liberal arts college, and completely replaced the board with a bunch of out-of-state, national conservative figures from places like the Claremont Institute and the Manhattan Institute who proceeded to drive a bunch of the faculty and students out of the campus and completely rewrite the curriculum and mission statement.

So it’s been a terrible situation. We’ve taken it so seriously that PEN has actually opened up an office permanent office in Florida to try to respond to some of these threats.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, it’s interesting you bring up University of North Florida, and the interfaith. I thought religious freedom was part of the Constitution. Did I read a different version?

Jeremy Young: Well, apparently, you did read a different version than some of the lawmakers making this decision because they seem to think that it’s impermissible DEI. And my favorite part is that it’s not a, it’s not a center for a particular religion. It’s a center for interfaith tolerance and pluralism. That’s its mission or was its mission. And that’s what the university decided, following the law, they were going to have to eliminate.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. That’s, oh, well, there’s other things that they’ve done.

[00:15:27] DEI Bans Across States

Drumm McNaughton: The Women’s Center and the Multicultural Centers, all under the banning DEI?

Jeremy Young: Yes, and we’ve seen that in every state that has tried to ban DEI, that they have had to close all of their cultural centers. We saw this in Utah where I taught for many years. The Multicultural Inclusion Center that was just the next building over from my office, that many of my students went to and spent time in has closed. All those staff have been reassigned to other roles. And in some states like Texas, the staff have been forced to be laid off, according to the state or the university risks, losing additional funding.

Drumm McNaughton: And so with this, there’s other states, you just mentioned Utah, but Texas, they’ve shut down pretty much all their DEI offices.

Jeremy Young: Right, and the other, the fourth one is Iowa, which passed the nation’s most draconian ban on DEI, which included a ban on creating any programming, quote, “developed with reference to race”. Meaning that if you even think about race when you’re developing a program, you potentially run afoul of that law.

It also included a series of 16 topics related to race, gender, and identity that universities, in Iowa are not allowed to opine on, and then at the end of the list of 16 topics, it says, “Or any related formulation of these concepts”, which really could apply to almost any idea in the world that is restricted, from being commented on by that university.

Drumm McNaughton: I’m sorry, my snarkiness is going to come out just a little bit, so help me understand who was brought over, was it the slaves that were brought over from Africa, what not, did they not have any color?

Jeremy Young: Well, if they did, the university is not allowed to talk about it anymore. We saw this in Utah, for instance, where they banned the university from commenting on the term bias. Not implicit bias or some unconscious bias, but just bias. They’re not allowed to tell you the president of the University of Utah, not allowed to tell you whether it’s good or bad to be biased against someone without violating state law.

Drumm McNaughton: Wow. It’s hard to render me speechless, but you have, thank you. It’s probably a good thing. So we’ve got the DEI bans; there’s Texas that’s going on. There are also some comments that we need to touch on.

[00:17:44] Accreditation and DEI Standards

Drumm McNaughton: Going after the accreditors as a way of enforcing these type of things, and WASC was in the news talking about changing. WASC has embedded into their most recent standards, and they’ve got four standards, they’ve embedded DEI into all four of the standards. There was a thing that came out, and you were quoted in the news a couple of three times about the changing of the standards instead of a DEI, but it is all students achieving. And then they just backed out of that.

Jeremy Young: Right. So, Project 2025 has a very meticulous plan for the weaponizing of accreditation to fight DEI work. And the simplest version of that plan requires all accreditors to remove any reference to DEI from their standards. Now, it’s unclear whether the government is going to be able to implement this. It may or may not require new legislation to allow them to do it. Or it may be able to be something they can do at the, executive branch level, but it’s certainly raising concerns for accreditors. President Trump, when he was running for reelection said that he wanted to fire the accreditors, all of them. Again, unclear whether he could do that, but WASC was considering the possibility of essentially, unilaterally disarming, taking this language out of their standards. And look, PEN America is a free-expression organization. We don’t care whether accreditors have DEI standards or not. Our concern is that when the federal government threatens you and threatens to censor ideas from your standards, that’s the last time that you should be considering preemptively complying in advance.

So we wrote a letter, and some other organizations wrote letters, some of the WASC members wrote letters. They had opened this up for public comment. And then they responded after receiving some of these letters that they were going to continue to study the question and not make any changes right now, which I think is wise. It’s not that they need to maintain these standards forever, but if the government is going to try to censor you, you need to make them actually do it. You don’t want to comply in advance.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, we talked about this a little bit. What happens when they put one of these laws into place to censor, whatever, it takes possibly years to get that law reversed. I mean the Stop Woke Act happened within, what, eight months? It was fast in legal channels. So when a law goes into place, it stays there, you have to comply until it’s challenged, and by then you’ve removed the capacity for doing what you need to do.

Jeremy Young: Exactly right. The classic example of this is the Tucson Ethnic Studies case, where in 2010, the state of Arizona passed a state law banning the Tucson Unified School District from having an Ethnic Studies curriculum. It was challenged at the Supreme Court level and the Supreme Court eventually overturned the law and said that the Ethnic Studies curriculum could continue. But from the moment that the law was passed to the time the Supreme Court handed down the final judgment took seven years. And of course, by that time, the curriculum was gone, the funding was gone, all the staff were gone, and the program was gone. And we’re seeing this in other places in the country, that the Stop Woke Act was ruled on extraordinarily fast, four and a half months after it went into effect. Even then, the Appellate Court, which is the next court to hear it, just completed oral arguments a few months ago, a year and a half after the initial decision. They still haven’t handed down their judgment, which will probably be appealed to the Supreme court. So we’re talking about multiple years there.

A similar case in Oklahoma took over two years from filing to the initial judgment on the preliminary injunction by the judge. So this is a very slow process and it’s very challenging for universities to figure out how to handle these laws, many of which may be unconstitutional or may certainly be challengeable on constitutional grounds. Trying to figure out how to handle that when they don’t know what the law is going to be this year or next year,

Drumm McNaughton: And it’s so true. It makes it very difficult to do what you think is the right thing.

[00:21:37] University Presidents and Free Speech

Drumm McNaughton: I mean when we start talking about academic freedom and university autonomy, the presidents of the universities, they’re basically saying we are going to be neutral, we’re not going to take stances. There are certain things that they should remain neutral on, but there are other things that they should make a stance on. Is it going to end up that they don’t come out against anything?

Jeremy Young: Presidents are scared right now. And one of the reasons they’re scared is that just like with everything else, we’re seeing a good idea, institutional neutrality, be turned into a lot of bad law. There are states that are passing laws banning presidents from commenting on anything or from commenting on specific sets of issues. And that’s always a bad idea because the issue, institutional neutrality is a great principle. You want the university to not be commenting on matters of public concern that don’t concern the mission, but what concerns the mission is inherently a judgment call. And the judgment has to be made by the president, by the trustees, by the faculty, by the institution as a whole. Once the lawmakers start substituting their judgment for the judgment of the people who are running the institution, then you have a situation that once again, is just trying to constrict ideas on campus.

Drumm McNaughton: And again, I may have read a different constitution, but somehow I thought there was something in there, that the government shall not legislate any laws prohibiting the free speech of people.

Jeremy Young: Well, their argument is that university presidents are government employees, at least at public institutions. And even at private institutions, they can’t forbid them to say things, but they can restrict funding if they talk about certain issues. And they’re not wrong about that at some level.

What we have to understand is that academic freedom and faculty do have some constitutional protections on their free speech and on their academic freedom. We have to understand that academic freedom is not possible if the people who oversee the faculty, the people in these university leadership roles, are under the direct ideological thumb of the government. Then they can only act in a way that politicians want them to, and that suits the whims of the political moment. Suddenly academic freedom becomes a very weak reading.

Drumm McNaughton: Going back to the censoring behavior and “jawboning”. We will pull your funding unless XYZ happens or ABC doesn’t happen.

Jeremy Young: Exactly.

Drumm McNaughton: So that’s, what are presidents supposed to do?

Jeremy Young: It’s a really challenging moment for them and I think a lot of them are doing the wrong thing, but it’s hard to tell sometimes what the right thing is. I think the wrong thing is unilateral disarmament. We’ve seen some presidents close their DEI programs, even in states where it’s very clear that they’re not going to face a law that’s going to require them to do so in the near future. Those laws could be ruled unconstitutional by the time they come to some of these states. The people pushing them could change their targets and start focusing on something else. There’s no guarantee that a state is going to ban something until it does, and we see presidents sort of just trying to squirm away from being the target.

I think that’s self-defeating here because that’s a strategy that presidents develop when they’re dealing with their local lawmakers on a local or state issue. This is not coming from their local or state lawmakers, this is coming from the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation and a well funded national campaign, and they’re not going to stop just because presidents try to appease them.

What I do think, though, is that presidents are right to be prudent about what they say in public. It’s always heartening to imagine a president coming out and forthrightly defending their right, their independence really, from, this kind of legislative meddling. That’s going to get the president fired and they’re going to be replaced by someone who will do the bidding of the legislature.

So I think the key is that they have to recognize, as most presidents do, that they have limited leverage in dealing with lawmakers who sign their checks, in some ways, and that they need to prioritize using that leverage to protect the ideological independence of the university, while perhaps not fighting quite so hard for the university to be independent in all other ways. Welcoming lawmakers in to discuss budgets and campus safety and issues to do with student success and graduation rates and career preparation and campus relations with the community.

All those things are places to embrace a relationship with lawmakers, but controlling what ideas can be present on a campus is not. And I think that’s where they have to draw the line, but they have to do it in careful and private and strategic ways.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. And then when you’ve got faculty who are speaking out, I know some of the institutions have come out and said, if a faculty speaks out about a particular issue, they have to be very clear that they’re not speaking for the university, that they’re speaking for themselves personally.

Jeremy Young: I think that’s good policy, and I think smart faculty will agree to it. But I also think that sometimes we see universities that are pursuing the right approach here, that are trying to strategically defend themselves in private, but are just so afraid that the faculty are going to say something impolitic and blow the lid off the whole situation that they don’t share enough information with their faculty about what their strategy is, and that they try to restrict their faculty from saying things that actually could help the institution.

Sometimes I think it helps the institution for faculty to be more outspoken than the institution can, and the faculty will say, “I’m not speaking for the university”. If the university wants them to say that, which they should. But then they’re going to go out and make a really important point that the university, perhaps, can’t make. And I think that there’s value in that sort of good cop, bad cop approach, that universities don’t always take advantage.

Drumm McNaughton: There was an article written, and I got this from either the Chronicle of Higher Education with Michigan State University’s new president, Kevin Gustowitz, that “university colleges and departments shouldn’t issue statements on current events unless they directly affect the institution. Although he doesn’t want leaders to sideline themselves in public conversation, using the institution’s voice for anything but the most critical purposes risks undermining academic freedom. Chilling free expression and silencing alternative views”.

Jeremy Young: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that perspective. It’s not exactly mine. I mean, I think that the idea that because a university president expresses his or her opinion on an issue that somehow the faculty feel that means they’re not allowed to express a dissenting opinion. I think that’s an overblown concern. I mean, if you know anything about faculty, you know that they aren’t particularly shy in expressing their views no matter what they think the university is saying.

Drumm McNaughton: Really?

Jeremy Young: That’s been my experience, certainly on faculty. And I don’t think that’s the concern so much. To me the real issue is whether leaders are inserting themselves into debates where there’s no real good role for them to play, and they’re not necessarily helping things by talking about it. We too often try to solve, and I sound like a libertarian here, but we too often try to solve problems in higher education through policy that are really just an issue of judgment. I think we’ve seen a lot of presidents in recent years have exercised failures of judgment in what they should and should not comment on and how they should or should not make those comments. That doesn’t mean that we need a policy to force them all to do one thing. That’s probably going to do more harm than good. We just need to help them understand how to make statements better and how to make them in ways that really advance the interest of the institution.

Drumm McNaughton: And keeping people focused on the mission, which is helping transform students.

Jeremy Young: That’s exactly right. Focusing on the mission, rooting everything they do in that mission. And I’ll tell you another reason I think there’s value in having a university speak. Because in some ways this allows university leaders to be more open to dissenting views that can be very offensive, that would be very difficult to tolerate. We think that if an offensive speaker is welcomed onto campus to give a talk, the proper response from a university is to welcome them, to defend to the death their right to say anything that they want, and then to feel completely unconstrained about stating whether or not that speaker’s views comport with the values of the institution.

And by doing that, that allows the university to actually have that debate on campus in a more comfortable way. They can say, yeah, we don’t agree with what this person’s saying. We think it’s horrible. We think it’s hate speech. We think it’s offensive, but they have a right to say it because this is a place where all ideas get a fair hearing.

And that’s how you square the principles of free expression with the need to defend an institutional mission.

Drumm McNaughton: It reminds me of Nick Dirks, when he was the president of Berkeley. They came on and they ended up having riots about it. It’s a shame. We should be able to express ourselves verbally. People can take offense, but when it raises to the level of quote, hate speech, and there’s violence involved, then it has no place in higher education or in America.

That’s my statement.

Jeremy Young: People are often surprised to hear that there is no constitutional exception from the First Amendment for hate speech. Incitement to violence, absolutely, but just saying something that’s hateful and offensive. No. And I think Nick Dirks handled that situation pretty well.

 One of our initiatives at PEN America is something called the champions of higher education, which is a group of over 300 retired college presidents or former college presidents who have banded together to speak out against this legislation that we chronicle and fight, and Nick is one of the signatories of that and he’s been a great friend to that program. And I think he understands, as do a lot of these presidents, that the importance of protecting speech of all kinds on campus, while also protecting the ability of a campus to maintain that.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. So Jeremy, this has been a fascinating conversation for me. Obviously I’ve spoken way more than I generally do. I thank you for all the work that you’re doing there at PEN America on behalf of the institutions of learning here in the U. S. and please keep up the great work.

[00:31:13] Conclusion and Takeaways

Drumm McNaughton: As we always do, last two questions. Three takeaways for university presidents and boards, especially given that we’re about to have massive changes in Washington with all three branches turning red.

Jeremy Young: Three takeaways. I would say don’t do the censors work for them, don’t comply in advance, and do promote the values of free expression no matter what is happening in the country. I’d say those are my three takeaways. You’ve got to stand up for the values of the institution, and that means protecting the institution from undue political influence, as many accreditation standards require, many, many board standards require. But it also means recognizing that people need to be trained in how free expression works and promoting the principles of free expression on your campus, really from orientation to graduation.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, those are great takeaways. What’s next for you? What’s next for pEN America?

Jeremy Young: Well, we’re going into the 2025 legislative session. We are getting ready to deal with all sorts of threats that we’re seeing both at the state and federal levels. We’ll be writing another report next October and will be responding to individual laws and tracking legislation and continuing to fight the good fight.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you for all you’re doing. Jeremy, this has been a fascinating conversation for me. Thank you so much, and please keep up the good work.

Jeremy Young: Thank you.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening and a special thank you to my guest, Dr. Jeremy Young, Program Director of Freedom to Learn at PEN America. Jeremy, thank you so much for being on the program. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to the next time our paths cross. Thanks again for listening. See you next week.