PRES. HARROZ: Hello, I am Joe Harroz, President of the University of Oklahoma. I want to welcome you to our Conversations with the President. This platform gives me the chance to talk to some of the great people who make OU so special. Make sure you are subscribed to Conversations with the President, and you'll be the first to know when new episodes are released. Let's get started.
Alright, first things first. Let's talk about where we are. We're halfway through the semester, and here at Oklahoma, it finally feels like fall. Not just that, but it's homecoming week, so we see lots of alumni around waiting for the big football game. I will mention in case you hadn't heard that we are 6-0 and just beat Texas.
NADINE STROSSEN: Congratulations.
PRES. HARROZ: That's right. It’s very exciting. It’s an incredible time, so this is also, in addition to being homecoming week, it's also Free Speech Week. It’s a national recognition and a national week. We began celebrating it here three years ago, and it's really critical. A lot of folks take the freedom to speak, the First Amendment, as something that they just inherited, and will always be there. We know that really isn’t the case at all. It's something that is foundational to our democracy, and it's absolutely critical to a university. So each year now this tradition goes we celebrate it and we could not be more excited than to invite our guest today who has already spoken as the keynote speaker for Free Speech Week just prior to this and did a magnificent job. But it's truly one of the foremost intellectuals on this topic, and we are just absolutely thrilled that you are here. Your vita is so long that my eyes couldn’t read all of them, so I will excerpt a couple of these. You have an idea who we have here with us, it is Nadine Strossen, and she is a Professor of Law Emerita at the New York Law School. Served as president of the ACLU for 17 years, which is a remarkable tenure. What I love about that tenure is my understanding is that it was capped off with a luncheon in your honor where three different Supreme Court justices that were all sitting up different ideological events all came to honor you, which speaks to the depth and foundation of your thoughts. You are a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, which I think is now rebranding itself, so that name may be a little different.
NADINE STROSSEN: It is slightly different. It is now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, still doing a lot of work on campus, but recognizing that the free speech battles on campus don't stay on campus and that there is a real need to defend these freedoms in the broader society as well as.
PRES. HARROZ: Yeah, well it's fantastic and much‑needed. You testified before Congress on many occasions, you do something like 257 speaking events a year. Every major national and international broadcast that features the question of free speech has had you on it and we are honored to have you. Thank you for joining us.
NADINE STROSSEN: Joe, I'm so happy to be here, and I want to salute you for being such an inspiring leader and defender and user of free speech here on your campus. You are a pioneer in honoring Free Speech Week, which is under celebrated by many universities.
PRES. HARROZ: Well, that is very kind, and we should go on about that more, I'm just kidding. That seems self‑congratulatory. We actually have a friend in common, Dr. Evelyn Aswad.
NADINE STROSSEN: Yes, a wonderful professor at your distinguished law school faculty who is internationally recognized both for her scholarship, and for her activism including one of her most recent, very important positions is as a member of the so‑called oversight board of Facebook, META, many people refer to it as the Supreme Court of the social media platform. And with Evelyn's leadership, they have been doing a very good job of adhering to international human rights law standards of free speech in advising META, and often overturning META's content moderation decisions. I think that is very positive because Evelyn has been a very effective exponent of interpreting those international standards in a very speech protective way. Many people make the argument, oh the United States is so extreme and exceptionalist, in its first protection of free speech, but Evelyn along with other international human rights scholars has made the argument to know, the only truly international free speech law, which is under UN treaties, ratified by almost every country in the world is very close to the United States Supreme Court in robustly protecting free speech.
PRES. HARROZ: It is critically important. I was honored to get to recruit Dr. Evelyn Aswad to come to the OU College of Law, and she is an absolute treasure –
NADINE STROSSEN: Congratulations.
PRES. HARROZ: Both for the university and internationally in this role that she holds, and I know you nominated her, so thank you for doing that for us here at OU, but more importantly for all of us that our users of social media, especially that platform.
NADINE STROSSEN: I think it is wonderful that faculty members can be both scholars and activists so that their ideas are benefiting not only scholarly pursuit of truth and understanding, but having an impact on policies that affect real people in our everyday lives.
PRES. HARROZ: Absolutely. There are so many questions to ask you, and I know that our time is limited. We just left a public event you did with Dr. Jeremy Bailey who has our Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage. His opening question, I thought was a really honest one, which is give us your stump speech, give us your elevator speech on why the work you do is important.
NADINE STROSSEN: Why my work advocating free speech is important is because free speech is important. Freedom of speech is essential not only for every individual in order to explore and develop and express our own individual sense of self and identity and our values and ideas and beliefs, but it is also essential for the pursuit of every other cause including every human rights cause. And if I may say, you have been wonderful in the three years that you have pioneered the celebration of Free Speech Week in pointing out contrary to much rhetoric, that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between freedom of speech and diversity, equity, equality, and inclusion ideals. And also, freedom of speech is essential in a university community for the pursuit of truth and in a democracy for we the people to actually exercise our sovereign power and hold the officials we elect accountable to us.
PRES. HARROZ: Yes, what I love too is these aren't academic ideas that are moved from your everyday life, you obviously have done both of those as you talked about, Evelyn, you two have held dual roles. And I also love the fact that you live these ideas even when they are inconvenient and uncomfortable. I love your personal story and how it impacts and reinforces your advocacy today. Can you say a couple of words about your family and its history and the challenges that you have faced directly in the free speech area confronting things that would have been uncomfortable.
NADINE STROSSEN: I was raised with stories from both sides of my family, my mother and my father, which led me to the conclusion that free speech is absolutely essential for all of the reasons that I alluded to. On my mother's side, her father was an immigrant to this country from what is now Croatia, who was a pacifist and a dissenter from the United States war policies in the World War I era among other things. He was concerned about family members of his back in Europe. And at this time, despite the literal existence of free speech under the First Amendment, it had never actually been enforced by the courts, and that was one of the reasons why the ACLU was founded. During that era, 15,000 people who simply expressed peaceful objections to the war including on religious grounds were persecuted and prosecuted and imprisoned. My grandfather was actually sentenced by a court in New Jersey. His ‑‑ for being a conscientious objector and a descendant to the war effort. His sentence was to stand outside the courthouse facing it with his hands and feet splayed against the courthouse wall so that passersby could spit on him.
My father's story is that he also came to this country himself as a refugee. He fortunately and almost miraculously survived the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was born as what was called under Hitler's racist laws a half Jew. His mother was Jewish, his father was "Arianne", and for that crime as well as for being a staunch political opponent of Hitler, even as a teenager, I am so proud of him. He was sentenced to a concentration camp and barely survived. In fact, in some sense, I barely survived because he was scheduled to be sterilized. The Nazis had a program of sterilization of undesirables, and he literally had an appointment to be sterilized. The day before that appointment, Buchenwald was liberated by the US military. I hold my very life as well ‑‑
PRES. HARROZ: The day before.
NADINE STROSSEN: The day before, literally. You know, so many people would say well, but don’t you support censorship of at least nazi speech or fascist speech, and my answer is no because Jews and other disempowered minorities are the ones who especially depend on the protection of free speech to explore their identities, to call for help if they need help, to advocate for equality and nondiscrimination.
PRES. HARROZ: It is interesting. In reading some of your work, it was not intuitive to me. I thought that it would be sort of the opposite, and I'm sure that you see that a lot that there is feeling that you need to protect those that are disenfranchised, those of minority groups, those that are historically disadvantaged that somehow there needs to be some protection of speech against them, but it is the opposite.
NADINE STROSSEN: Joe, you are making a really important point, which is that defense of freedom of speech is counterintuitive. One of my colleagues at FIRE, the CEO of FIRE, Greg Lukianoff, calls freedom of speech the internally radical idea. What we are going to defend freedom, even for the speech that we hate, to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes. That seems completely against common sense. So you have to get beyond that natural tendency to want to suppress the idea that you hate, to understand the consequences of doing that. If you empower a majority acting through elected officials to decide which ideas are sufficiently hateful to be suppressed, you better watch out. That can very well come back and bite you. Let me take a very contemporary example to prove the point that one persosn ‑‑ that hatred is in the eye at the beholder, hate speech is in the eye of the beholder. Many people consider Black Lives Matter advocacy to be the opposite of hate speech. This is antiracism, it’s pro-equality and dignity and inclusivity for everybody including racial minorities who have traditionally been discriminated against and worse. And yet, powerful politicians and others have called Black Lives Matter advocacy hate speech. They say it is hate speech against white people, it's hate speech against police officers. And so it is especially those who lack political power that don't want to give this inherently subjective sensorial power to majoritarian politicians.
PRES. HARROZ: Yeah, I am always struck at how fragile our democracy is, how dependent it is upon us having educated citizens, and yet how much we miss and in that how much risk we put ourselves at. The Annenberg survey on voting age Americans that I think occurs every five years lays out some of the simplest things, can you name all three branches of government, and that number sometimes goes into the low 20s percent of Americans that can name the three branches of government. Do you believe that there is a need for civics education around the First Amendment?
NADINE STROSSEN: Yes, I do. And I want to salute you and your university for your five pillars in the strategic plan that you spearheaded because I see that. Forgive me, I don’t remember the number of the pillar, but one of them was very much in sync with that objective. Including through the orientation program of orienting students toward the special culture here at the university, which extends to a very appropriately robust full‑fledged concept of diversity, equity and inclusion as extending not only to all people regardless of their identity, but also to all ideas and beliefs and perspectives regardless of whether you agree or disagree. And I think for people, for the students to get the maximum and new faculty members to get the maximum out of the educational opportunities and research opportunities here, they should be acculturated in those values from the beginning.
PRES. HARROZ: Yeah, it is interesting. Everyone is for freedom of speech as long as it’s speech with which they agree, right?
NADINE STROSSEN: Yes, and the test really comes when it’s an idea you disagree with. People always ask me because one of the ACLUs most controversial cases ever was defending freedom of speech for Nazis who were demonstrating in Skokie, Illinois. A town that had not only a large number of Jewish members of its population, but many of them were Holocaust survivors. How could I, as a daughter of a Holocaust survivor, possibly defend freedom of speech in that situation? Actually, Joe, it wasn't hard for me because we were not defending the Nazi’s speech per se, we were defending a principal that is especially important for anti‑nazis. And let me give you a very concrete example, which the ACLU pointed to in our brief in that case.
Just a few years earlier, we had defended that very same principle that government may never restrict speech just because it's very unpopular or even hated in the particular community. That very same principle in another town in Illinois, not very far away, but completely different demographically namely Cicero, which Time Magazine, a major magazine at the time described it as Selma, Alabama without the southern drawl because it was very ‑‑ the population was very racially exclusionary. And was a very opposed to speech by our clients who wanted to peacefully demonstrate there, and it wasn't the Nazis, it was Martin Luther King Jr. and his pro‑civil rights demonstrators. We had to rely on the very same principle because their speech was as unpopular and as hated and as feared and seen as dangerous and subversive in Cicero as the Nazis speech was in Skokie.
PRES. HARROZ: And again, without having the foundational education, the human emotion would take over and probably lead you to the opposite conclusion.
NADINE STROSSEN: Yes. And the challenge is, you know you asked me for an elevator pitch, but it is quite hard to explain this in a sound bite. It is much easier to say let's outlaw hate speech, let's outlaw fascist speech or whatever speech we personally loathe.
PRES. HARROZ: No, it's fascinating from Skokie to Cicero is, I guess, not that far, but it's the same point, right?
NADINE STROSSEN: Yes, and today I make the point for so many people are saying well maybe we should make an exception and suspend professors and expel students who are making pro‑Hamas statements in the wake of the horrible terrorist attacks, but you know, I say you better watch out because on other campuses making statements that are seen as pro‑Zionist or pro‑Israel are going to be as unpopular and they are going to be as many calls for censoring those as well. For everybody who says that Hamas this is good engaging and genocide and war crimes, there are counterclaims being made about Israel.
PRES. HARROZ: It is interesting. We were talking about two speakers we had on campus recently, and one of those that spoke here at OU a few weeks later was actually shouted down at a different university. How do you think about deeply held passions by people over certain positions and their own philosophy? We know how divided America is. How do you feel about the idea that if you don't agree with the speakers view, that you have the right to shout them down?
NADINE STROSSEN: You have a right to express your disagreement and in fact, I wrote a book called Hate, Why We Should Resist It with free speech not censorship. So I am urging people to exercise their free speech rights to voice their protest and objection and disagreement and loathing of hate speech as opposed to censoring it. However, when you cross the line from non‑obstructively, nondestructively protesting at an event to disruptively protesting, that is stopping the speaker from carrying forward with the speech. Stopping the audience from hearing the speech, then that becomes an exercise not of free speech and of censorship. As with everything in First Amendment law, it's a matter of judgment and degree, and you know, we have to entrust – I would entrust university officials to decide, well outbursts of a few seconds are okay, but beyond that, it is too disruptive, and we have to escort the protesters out of the forum so that the speaker can proceed.
PRES. HARROZ: Yeah, to be specific, we had Robert George in the same platform as Cornell West, which by the way, that combination drew the second largest crowd we have ever had for a speech of that kind. We had something ‑‑ we had to cut it off. It was a dinner of like 750 people.
NADINE STROSSEN: They are phenomenal.
PRES. HARROZ: They are phenomenal. It was magical and then to see Robert George get shouted down just a few weeks later having had the opportunity to meet him, be with him, listen to him, it does speak to a real problem that eliminates the ability to have a marketplace of ideas, and to me so much of it centers around this idea that is permeating culture that somehow we as individuals know everything and have nothing left to learn from anybody with a contrary view.
NADINE STROSSEN: I assume that Robbie and Cornell talked about how they started this tag team, and it was precisely because they had such strong disagreements. By the way, you were kind enough to mention my friendship with several Supreme Court justices and that is how I became good friends with Nino, as he asked me to call him, Scalia, because we were debating each other in public forums on very important topics that we both felt strongly about, but disagreed on, and yet had a mutual respect. As with all two people, you are going to have some issues where you strongly disagree and some where you strongly agree. I daresay that is true for all spouses, especially the happily married ones. Right? Yet, you can always learn, and I think if you have ‑‑ an essential prerequisite for education is being open minded, and having a sense of humility and curiosity. If you think you know all of the answers, and you are not going to learn anything, why do you even bother going to a university? In all fairness, this new book that I wrote is all in question and answer format that is part of a trademark series by Oxford University Press, and the first series of questions that I ask and answer in this book, Joe, are what are the 12 strongest arguments against free speech and what are the strongest responses? And then I invite readers of the book to answer me back. Challenge me. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. I don't want to reaffirm what I have been saying just because I have been saying it, I am trying to pursue the truth here. If you persuade me that I’m wrong, you are doing me a favor.
PRES. HARROZ: Yeah. Isn't that beautiful? And by the way, the book, which I now have my own copy that is autographed by you, free speech what everyone needs to know. I love that you break these down into simple, clear messages. You know what you are getting into, and it's very approachable, and we desperately need that. I have been fascinated with the Supreme Court justices I have had the pleasure of meeting. How many of them are part of Justice O'Connor's established I civics, which I thought initially was so simple. Why would a retired Supreme Court justice who is an icon commit her after court professional life to something so simple? The reality is that it became clear is that we need to know our civics, and those folks that have joined her, including very conservative justices, to me, speak to this need and this hunger. And I love that Justice Scalia was at your luncheon, and I love his famous friendships with other justices who are ideological, other ends of the spectrum because it just shows that all of us, if we will just listen to those who have views different than ours have something to learn.
NADINE STROSSEN: One of the anecdotes about Scalia that I had not known until his good friend and my good friend, Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke at his funeral was that when he wrote the famous dissent from case involving the Virginia Military Institute in which the Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion and it basically upheld gender equality at formerly gender segregated military institutions, he wrote a very ferocious dissent, but he gave her -- he made a special point of walking down to her chambers and gave her the draft of his dissent before a weekend began because he said I know you are going on a trip, and I want you to have the maximum time to read this so that you can write your strongest possible response to it.
PRES. HARROZ: I love it. That is the way it should, right. The search for the truth not just simply to try to validate your own current beliefs.
NADINE STROSSEN: One of my friends, I gave a talk at Chautauqua recently. They were having their own Free Speech Week on different parts of the calendar, and she talked about how we all talk about freedom of speech, and learning how to speak, but we really don't learn about how to listen, right? First of all, freedom of speech does extend to the audience’s right to listen as well as the speakers right to speak, but we don't attune ourselves to really meaningfully listen. Those who study communication say that most of us are listening only to plan what our rebuttal is going to be to what the speaker has said rather than really trying to empathize and understand why they have that belief, to understand and experience that gives rise to that belief so that at least we can relate to it in human terms, even if we might disagree with it as a philosophical matter.
PRES. HARROZ: Yeah, you know it's fascinating. One of the questions ‑‑ I'm allowed to guest lecture in our ‑‑ we have a mandatory American Federal Government class for all of the freshman, and I love asking the question, you know, how many of us, you know, as you think about your own political belief system, how many of us think the other side has nothing to offer?
NADINE STROSSEN: Are they candid in answering?
PRES. HARROZ: It's interesting. I don't ask them to respond, I ask them to think about it. And I explain to them that I am guilty of it. And it's really, if you think about ‑‑ I have been fascinated ‑‑ I am fascinated with this and I know you are, our democracy, and we are a relatively young country, but we are the oldest continuing democracy, and there are so many ‑‑ we just saw an important vote in Poland this weekend, which is more pro-democracy ‑‑ loss of audio ‑‑
NADINE STROSSEN: And I will, with the greatest respect, and I know you weren't endorsing this concept, but I don't like the formulation or concept of the other side. These are every issue that we're talking about, every issue under the sun is very complex and nuanced, and it's not a binary. Even free speech, for example, I think part of the reason why there is so much opposition to it is that people think well it's absolute free speech or not, no --or absolute censorship or not. No, that's not true. I don't know anybody who disagrees with the proposition that there should be free speech, but there should be some limits on free speech, in other words, some censorship is appropriate. And the debate is not whether free speech, whether censorship, but where should we draw the line between protected free speech and permissible censorship? And in terms of seeing people as the other side, social psychologist, as you know, have shown and political commentators have shown that we now have a tendency to not only engage in othering people with different political beliefs on some issue, but saying not only are they wrong, that they are evil.
PRES. HARROZ: Right. Absolutely. And in class I talk about if you affiliate as Republican or Democrat, how do you feel about the other party? Because at a certain point, it becomes an identity instead of an ideology. I thought there was a great piece a couple of weeks ago that ran in the Atlantic by David Brooks, why are Americans so mean. I'm not sure if you had a chance to read it, but I thought it was a really insightful piece, and it really speaks to this reality that for us to have the growth that we want to take place on a college campus, we know that those that are fortunate enough to be at a comprehensive research university. That it is not enough to be able to intellectually understand there is an opposing view, but can you create the humanity, sort of the moral and social, to his point, framework to be able to listen to someone else, to value what they have to say, and as you say really listen to see if somehow your view isn’t perfect.
NADINE STROSSEN: Yes, you know, John Stuart Mill back in 1859 made what I consider to be the most enduring, most persuasive argument in favor of free speech, and in the sense of no idea should be beyond debate because we do have a lot of students, and even some faculty members now saying that question is non‑debatable. Mill says everything should be subject to debate and questioning, even indeed, especially the ideas that you hold the most deeply, and there are logically only three consequences from questioning and debating an idea. Number one, you will be persuaded that your idea is wrong.
After all, as someone else said, every great truth began as a blasphemy, and a lot of things that even as recently as 20 years ago or generally – or even one year ago we are generally believed to be true, let's say the origin of the COVID and so forth are now proven to be probably not so true. Secondly, maybe you will be not persuaded that your idea was completely wrong, but that it could be improved upon, and so you will amend your idea. That has definitely happened to me in all of my thinking about free speech in a very positive way. That is a benefit. And the third possibility is you will be reaffirmed completely in the pre‑existing beliefs, but by virtue of having had it subject to testing and examination and questioning, you will understand it more fully, and you will be able to articulate it and explain it more persuasively rather than just wrotely repeating it as a dead dog mess.
PRES. HARROZ: No, great points. And one of the things I think about a lot, and the recent polling shows is a real problem. There is this decline in the number of those that are finishing high school that go to college. Five years ago, 70% did. Today it is 63%, and when you look at the polling around Republican voters, 58% according to this one poll said that they were concerned about going to college because they believed that there would be a hostility to their political view in college. And you and I as members of the Academy have an obligation to make sure that there is not some sort of indoctrination that is taking place, that there really is a diversity of views.
NADINE STROSSEN: Yes. And even in addition to the disturbing polls that you mentioned, Joe, there are others that show that large segments of the public, Republicans more than Democrats, but still Democrats as well distrust universities and colleges and believe that they are a negative influence on society, and that is extremely corrosive, not only to the pursuit of truth, but also to democracy. The Supreme Court, when it began protecting academic freedom as an implied First Amendment right said we are doing this, not only for the benefit of the members of the academic community, the students and the faculty, but for society at large for our political system. We really need to have these special enclaves for the pursuit of truth where people can have some trust in the information that is being generated.
PRES. HARROZ: Yeah, I mean it’s truly foundational unless there is freedom of thought, inquiry, expression, each of those areas, the foundations of the University is undermined, and there is a reason. At public flagship universities like OU that public dollars are part of this. They believe in the opportunity for the individual and higher education being the latter to economic opportunity. They believe in the ability to drive the economy, and we all know the evidence is difficult to deny that the jobs of tomorrow are vastly disproportionate going to go to those who have a college degree, but the third most important element for why states and the federal government fund colleges and universities is because you have to have an educated citizenry to keep this democratic experience, right, this idea of democracy alive. So it is vital and the work that you do -- I could talk to you for another four hours, but the work that you're doing being a proponent of free speech, attaching intellectual honesty to it, and approaching it with humility in a way where our view is not the only way they can be thought, I think is so important.
NADINE STROSSEN: Thank you so much. One of the reasons I really enjoy speaking as much as I do is I enjoy listening, and I'm constantly learning. So many thanks to you for what I have learned from you, and for leading a campus with wonderful faculty members and students for whom I have also learned a lot during my visit.
PRES. HARROZ: That is the joy of our jobs, right? It’s the ability to continue learning and to be around – to me it’s optimism. Right, it is seeing challenges, understanding our past, understanding history and having context for making decisions about things that are complicated. Free speech seems so simple, but it is so complicated and so integral to who we are and who we want to continue to be. Thank you so much. I want to thank you. Looking at my closing notes, and the first one is thank you. Truly thank you for being on this podcast.
NADINE STROSSEN: Thank you so much.
PRES. HARROZ: Thank you for the work that you have committed yourself to. It would be much easier as many years of service as you put into this to simply ‑‑ what you are doing matters and so thank you for doing that. It improves all of us.
NADINE STROSSEN: Thank you so much for your influential exercise and defense of free speech.
PRES. HARROZ: It is critical. Oddly enough, as I tell the students in law school and in undergraduate, nothing requires the Constitution to be enforced except for the people themselves. So we have to do it. Thank you all for being part of Free Speech Week, for listening to this podcast and make sure you are subscribed so you can hear all future podcasts. I look forward to our next Conversation with the President.
