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Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, and today, we'll be exploring the growing concerns within higher ed that institutions are turning into echo chambers, stifling dissent and censoring certain perspectives.

In this thought-provoking episode, we'll be discovering the challenges to academic freedom in the era of cancel culture. We'll explore how questioning a consensus can now come at a cost, impacting the pursuit of truth within academic institutions. We'll also uncover the story of the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard, which was formed to combat these challenges.

Join us as we delve into policies protecting free speech, and the vital role of civil discourse in the academic community. Together, we'll navigate the complex landscape of universities, grappling with the delicate balance between common knowledge and the suppression of dissenting opinions.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications. His twelfth book, published in 2021, is called Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Steven Pinker, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Steven Pinker: Thank you.

John Tomasi: It's nice to have you here in New York. We just finished a CAP seminar with you, talking about some of your new work. This is great to have you here in the center with us.

Steven Pinker: Thank you.

John Tomasi: I want to talk with you about a number of things, but I want to start by talking about the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard. And last spring, in April, you and a colleague, Bertha Madras, published an op-ed in Boston Globe. They got a lot of attention. A lot of us around the country with that op-ed with real interest and enthusiasm. Please tell us a bit about what led to the formation of the Council and what's going on.

Steven Pinker: There are nationwide problems with our universities. There was a widespread impression, to be a large part correct, that universities, rather than the cruciples of ideas and debate, are like medieval seminary subforcing daunus, that there are certain of the statements for which you can be censored, ostracized, fired, punished, and that universities are therefore forfeiting their mandate in places where society gives people the mandate to search for truth. You can't get at the truth if there are some things you can't say, where fallible species were riddled with biases and that fallacies. The only way that our species is managed to discover anything about anything is that some mortal people venture an idea, others say what's wrong with it, and then the best ideas survive. If you disable that process by making some ideas perishable, then you're guaranteed to lock yourself into error, and you forfeit the reputation of the university. And I'd have encountered people, intelligent people, who will respond to my saying, for example, that we have to add up climate change because an overwhelming consensus in science is that human activity is arming the planet. And they reply, well, why should we trust the consensus, because everyone knows that academia, if you challenge the consensus, you get canceled. That's right. So even when the academics are almost certainly correct, as they are in greenhouse gases warming the planet, we have lost all our accountability because of this culture of cancellation.

John Tomasi: I'd have to say that we've been following this at HxA about the decrease in trust in universities. There was a Gallup poll you always saw last summer that suggested that over the past 20 years, trust in higher education has cratered, cut 47 percent to something like 28 percent. Oh, the majority of people think that universities are not even one of the help of the country.

Steven Pinker: Yes. Which is remarkable.

John Tomasi: Which is remarkable. And which is, we think, I mean, it's driven by a number, such as exponentially increased tuition. But a large contributor to the curriculum trust in universities is often the viral videos and the accurate stories of students and professors being punished for, often for saying things that are true.

Steven Pinker: Such as there are two sexes. That's a true statement. And that drove one of my colleagues, Carole Hooven, out of science. Despite the university's self-proclaimed goal of enhancing participation of women in science with an aim toward that equity. But if you're a woman associated with two sexes, out you go. Now, that may have been one of the last straws, also the only one. There are other cases of lobs rising up to do nails as a professor because they found that in several years ago, he coaxed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court against gay marriage. Another professor has courts canceled because it evaluated the efficacy of counterinsurgency techniques, combating gang violence. And there's a long list of things that brought people. A law professor at Harvard who was defending Weinstein.

John Tomasi: I don't know if you're somewhere right now.

Steven Pinker: That is right. That is right. Who was believed in his post as a residential dean because he was defending Harvey Weinstein. Even though our constitutional system says that every defendant has the right to defense the alternative in. Something gets jailed because someone else says he's guilty. Well, obviously, we don't want that. As soon as we fail, it's not just the harm done to Ronald Sullivan calling it a law school, but it is an average of our responsibility to educate students and how things work. Such as the fact that if you have a criminal justice system where all it takes is to accuse someone to convict them and they don't get to defend themselves, then you open the door to untold horrors. History tells us that and other comparisons to kangaroo courts in our press and autocracies tell us that. And so for a Harvard faculty member to defend Harvey Weinstein, as well as in the scene might be, it's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. It shows that we've got a functioning criminal justice system. The students protest the mere fact that a defendant has a criminal defense attorney. There's something deep that they don't understand about sexual justice.

John Tomasi: And can I say something about that? It seems to me that those kinds of moments when students would say something like, "We don't want the law professor in our school defending someone we think is evil and wrong and should be punished," that we used to call it a teaching moment. It's an opportunity to explain to students what the judicial system works, what that reserve system means. But there seems to be something new on the block in the last 10 or 15 years. For students who hear those teaching moments of discussions, they stick with their view. They don't back out.

Steven Pinker: Well, the thing is it's up to teachers to identify and take advantage of teachers. They're not called learnable moments. They're called teachable moments because they open up a word for teachers to teach. But we haven't been doing that. Well, all too often the administrators have been the opposite of new skills and opportunities. They have basically kissed the student's ass and say, "This makes you upset. Okay, okay, we don't want you to be upset."

John Tomasi: Well, what I want to push you on a little bit is this, and it's something I've noticed. I'll give an example. New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly gave a lecture at Brown University, in which a bunch of students and some people from off campus came to the lecture and they shouted them down. It was one of the first big public shout-downs. And when the students who organized that shout-down were confronted with the fact they violated the student conduct and said they've done the wrong thing because they prevented other students from listening and so on, and they're confronted with those facts, the new thing on the block, in my view, was that the students stood their ground. They said that there are reasons for it. If you wouldn't cancel this lecture, we're going to cancel this lecture. This next speaker puts students of color in a dangerous way. We have an obligation above your lectures, above your ideas, that justifies this in doing this. And that seems to be something new on the block, that it seems to be there are sets of ideas that have grown within universities that I think justify some of these actions of students. Does that seem right to you, or is this something...

Steven Pinker: By justify, you mean really does justify, or that is acceded to as something that is not opposed, but ought to be?

John Tomasi: I think there's a challenge of the fundamental principles underway. And in the case of those groups of students of Brown, who stood proud to say we shouted them down, and we'd do it again. Some of them referred to Marcuse, and there's an essay by Marcuse in 1967, "A Regression of Toleration," in which he talks about the need to defend the oppressed, even against the advocates of free speech and toleration. The toleration and the neutrality are masked for power, and there's this critical theory idea that a lot of these liberal ideas of free speech and toleration and neutrality are simply masked for power. And the job of this new generation is to unmask those things and to tear them down.

Steven Pinker: Oh, yes. So I agree that that is why we believed, and I think it's a perditious belief. It's not a belief on which our universities have added. It's not given to the procedures of our universities. It's the principles of our universities or an archocracy. Marcuse was a Marxist. They retook Marxism in his own new directions. But that's not the society we live in, and I'm glad it isn't. And there are good arguments why it shouldn't be. Namely, how do we know that what Marcuse was saying is, right, why should we shut him up? Why should we shut out the students who are arguing for Marcuse? The fact that they think they're right is not a good enough reason, because I think I'm right. So do I get to shut them down? And the answer has to be no. No one gets to shut anyone down, to shut anyone up. Ideas, including that one, can be voiced, but they don't carry the day when it comes to silencing their opponents. And in the case of the police commissioner, it's another case in which voicing heterodox opinions is not just a case of a prerogative of a professor or an arcane point of principle. It's not like the famous case in which the ACLU defended the right of Nazis to march in the Jewish community who spoke in the late 1970s, that we may find the content postures of a Republican, but we defend their right to say it. There are, in the university today, many of the case of the Indians that are being oppressed, are probably true. In the case of, let's say, what the U.S. should do with the U.S. New York reduced its homicide rate by 75% in eight years. That's an awful, and that was an awful lot of black lives saved, who'd be dead if it wasn't for a bone. So this is a case where, far from reinforcing oppression or racial oppression, this saved more black lives than all the protests put together, what he did to induce gang violence. And so this is a paradigm case where it ought to be, or at least he ought not to be repressed, if what we care about is the well-being of minority communities.

John Tomasi: And you don't know whether it will be an official academic unless you have a case being made. You can argue against that. I'm wondering whether there's something new in universities that we can identify. You've sat at Harvard for a long time. How long have you been at Harvard?

Steven Pinker: I've been at Harvard for 20 years. Before that, I was at MIT for 21 years. And before that, I was at Harvard at Stanford. So I've been in the system for a long time.

John Tomasi: And yet, the Council of Academic Freedom was founded just this year, and here for 2023. Why then? Why not before? Can you explain all these things we know about the rise of this? Do you know that's what's happened?

Steven Pinker: Oh, it's about way worse. Just as an objective fact, there are far more firings, censorings, sanctions for content speech in the last six years that they were appearing beforehand. The Foundation for Individual Rights of Expressions documented that. And it's just obvious that it includes the university. So the answer to the question, why now, is it's gotten worse. And in a timely development that was fortunate for us for propaganda reasons, it wasn't the ibis or the council. The FIRE published in Zermankin's Free Speech, five out of 248 universities.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Steven Pinker: Harvard came at last place as a score of zero. And we got a score of zero because they decided not to go into negative numbers.

John Tomasi: I didn't know that negative numbers were.

Steven Pinker: Yeah. So next year, who knows? We have something to aspire to. That was helpful in answering the question that you just asked, like, why do we need this at Harvard? And believe me, it is a ranking that we hold the attention of our new president and our new dean in saying why we are needed. What we hope to do is, first of all, is make people aware of the value in speech in the university. And that's why we have what it is, why it's necessary to enforce policies that are already on the books, that prevent the harassment or punishment of people for speech. To come to the aid and support and supper of people who have been targeted and then ostracized, which can be emotionally devastating. To, when it so often happens, there are activists who are yammering to the ear of a dean, pressuring them to do something, we're going to yammer into the other ear. So at least they're going to have to think about what's the right decision rather than just making the trouble go away by trying to placate the loisiness objectors. And we hope to encourage student groups that have a parallel aim and groups in other universities. Harvard has the, we get asked the question, who cares what happens at Harvard or just a university? And there is, I know, first I experience, a tendency to think far too much of ourselves. But for better or worse, the world cares about that. Absolutely. So we have a responsibility to capitalize on that possibly undeserved attention, but at least to make something.

John Tomasi: Got it. Well, I think it's a wonderful thing. One of the lines from the author that really struck me, you and Madras said, quote, "Academic freedom needs a defense theme."

Steven Pinker: Yes.

John Tomasi: And that was a really striking line.

Steven Pinker: Also, this does actually relate to my own special specialty of cognitive psychology, where one of the reasons we need free speech is that people are fallible. And so we're saddled with these brains that are riddled with fallacies, biases. Foremost among them, the motivated reasoning. And we steer our reasoning to a conclusion that we wanted to be true in the first place. And the my side bias, what we can call intellectual tribalism. That is, we favor whatever position makes our coalition look good. And these are psychological phenomena that mean we should be incapable of discovering the truth. As it happens, our species has discovered some truths. We've figured out DNA, solar system, galaxy, brain science, and great tectonics. How do we manage to do it given that each one of us is so saddled with biases? And the answer is we form communities in which one person can criticize the idea of another.

John Tomasi: And do you think the students and faculty members who are skeptical of free speech, who are behind some of these campaigns to fire people, do they deny the things you just said? What do you think? When I said before, why is it happening now? And I said, why for this council now? You answered because the problems have been rising now. But I guess I think what I mean by that question is, why are the problems rising now? Is there something, is there something happening that you, do you diagnose why this then need? The need has arisen then?

Steven Pinker: Yeah.

John Tomasi: So in terms of root causes.

Steven Pinker: Yeah, I doubt that. There are a number of candidates. The country, of course, has gotten more colloquially polarized. Some people blame social media, book chambers, filtering bubbles. But another possible cause is residential and social segregation by education. Increasingly, people with higher degrees of education hang out with one another in urban centers and university towns. People with less of an education within the outer suburbs or rural areas. And so, and the institutions that used to cross social classes, which were more now weeks educational classes, like party, like churches, like service organizations have weakened. So people just put in social circles where everyone thinks and feels so.

John Tomasi: I'm thinking of Charles Murray's Coming Apart, which is a controversial thinker. I'll just see the reason what we've touched on. But that's one of his main theses, right? They were divided as society based on the fact that you're talking about.

Steven Pinker: Absolutely. So that's contributing factor. That's contributing factor. There's also some legal mandates that have had been perhaps unintended consequence of strip and speech, such as the criteria of a hostile climate for Title IX, that it can be actionable. You can sue a company or a university if, not just if they're over acts of discrimination, but just if the climate is a welcoming to women or minority groups, sexual, racial minorities. And that opens the door to all kinds of police say their speech, which contributes to climate. There's the burgeoning bureaucracy supporting the climate, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, and the much-looking bureaucracy in universities. So that's empowered often to clap down loud speech or to apply filters, such as diversity, statements, and job applicants do. We know that people don't perform to a particular ideology and a particular sense of factual beliefs. There were intellectual kernels back from when I was a student in the 70s, such as Herbert Marcuse and the idea that speech and knowledge are actually just pretexts of the powerful to suppress other people. Wedded to postmodern Islamology, there's no such thing as subjective truth. There's no such thing as subjective truth. You know, all the reasons that I gave for the courage of the freedom of speech mean that's the only way we can attain the truth. Go out the window. There's no truth to be attained from just warring dogmas. And let's just make sure that our dogma has more muscle than the other person's dogma. And free speech has nothing to do with it. And so the ascendancy of those ideas, particularly re-academic humanities, means that they're kind of congenial to repression of speech.

John Tomasi: There may be an external exogenous positive you can identify that perhaps once this idea took hold, started with Cephades, and because academics can acquire their own, out of quite the realm of academia is prestige. What is prestige? It's the Professor X saying Professor Y is okay, and Professor Y saying Professor X is okay. And there can be a self-reinforcing system of a bubble, really, of unchallenged beliefs. Or even a targeting of certain ideals or departments that need to find a channel in a certain direction to make these ideas more found out. And that's kind of a theory of a problem, of course.

Steven Pinker: Yes, and it can be self-reinforcing, as they refuse to file, refuse to admit, going into submission, anyone who disagrees. So the idea of once having gained a total might take over, because of the lack of external inputs to being intellectual content of scholarly inquiry.

John Tomasi: When you and your colleagues launched the Council at Harvard, you mentioned a report from 1990 of the Harvard Free Speech Guidelines as a touchstone for career ideas, and you quoted from the very beginning of that, well, I had to pop these right there with me. You quoted from the very beginning of that report where the report writers say, quote, "Free speech is uniquely important to the university because we are a community committed to reason and rational discourse. Free exchange of ideas is vital for our primary function of discovering and disseminating ideas through research, teaching, and learning. Curtailment of free speech undercuts the intellectual freedom that defines our purpose, defines the purpose of the universe."

Steven Pinker: Yeah, and it's not just because, you know, we like being free. It's fun to be able to say whatever you want. But there is a rationale, which we've spoken about with conversation, namely. That's how speaking is only means of a take.

John Tomasi: In the same report, at the very end of the report, section 7, they talk about, they recommend the creation of something they call an advisory committee on free speech. And they suggest that there should be forward to harbor some kind of a student, I'm reading it now from the report, quote, "A student faculty advisory committee on free speech should be established by the faculty council." And the purpose of that committee would be, they have those two purposes, to discuss ambiguities which may arise in applying the guidelines of free speech through time, and also to introduce these values to new generations of the university community, which are ideas that I think I could put them in and off-head describing the rationale for the creation of the council are similar to these ideas. But was there ever an advisory committee for free speech formed in 1990 or before the council?

Steven Pinker: Not that they know of. I've never heard of it. Yes, no. And we weren't panels to serve that function, but that's, in a way, that is what we're stepping into. And very few people are aware of this policy, which is binding, and it is something that we can point to. We might need to suggest updating it. But it means that even though, as a private university, Harvard is not subject to the first amendment, but if there is a policy, then policy has to be followed, or change.

John Tomasi: And so when the council began on last April, there were 50 members. HxA has always been proud to say that Harvard was, for many years, the place for the most members, 53 members of the Harvard faculty or HxA members. But not all of a member of the council is an HxA member. You are, for example, your co-author, Bertha Madras is not current at the collar after this happened.

Steven Pinker: Yeah, we have a good other side, not on the social side.

John Tomasi: But obviously, you started with 50, but you've grown.

Steven Pinker: Yes, I spent remodeling. And we're 160, perhaps.

John Tomasi: And is that faculty?

Steven Pinker: Yes.

John Tomasi: So that's a remarkable achievement. So 160 Harvard faculty are joining into this council.

Steven Pinker: Yeah, it's still a minority, and there are kind of age and sex and discipline ingredients, which we would like to level.

John Tomasi: Can you describe what those are?

Steven Pinker: More older faculty than younger, more in the sciences and medical school, also there are the humanities.

John Tomasi: Interest them. Interest them. Can you say anything about that?

Steven Pinker: Well, by far, the humanities are the source of, certainly, of the post-modernist mindset that eliminates a wolf or a food speech and a taken truth and there's most scarce truth. And that is more likely to seem in kind of discussion of criteria, of argumentation, of reasoning, as just pretext to power. So naturally, less sympathetic. But also, there's another association that we would take pains to avoid that is in people's lights, and that is between free speech and the political light. I think very few people on the council would identify as conservative. There are a couple of masters. There aren't any professors who identify as conservative, or at least the ones that are all in their 90s, which itself is a problem, as I don't have to tell you. Yeah, we've got a lot of all people. But of course, in academia, as I put it, academia is at the left pole, just as when you're at the North Pole, all directions are south. When you're academic, all directions are left. Or right, I'm sorry. In the left pole, all directions are right. And people who are real classical 60s liberals are now thought of us as conservative by the standards of modern progressive, intersexual, critical theory, social justice, political and correct ideology. That's right. Now, there's also the fact that the threats to academic freedom from within the academy largely come from the left, whereas the threats from outside the academy largely come from the right. So largely in southern states of Florida and Texas. But when it comes to academic censoring academics, these are left academics. And it's censoring because it seems means he did less left.

John Tomasi: And so your experience at Harvard and MIT and before at Stanford and other places, these trends of ideological conformity on the political dimension, political axis, they've been getting worse and worse. At least the imbalance is growing, growing worse and worse. Is that part of the explanation for why this eruption of anti-free speech behaviors happening on campuses?

Steven Pinker: Yeah, I think so. But also, there's another point that I make in our office, that free speech is cognitively very unnatural. It doesn't assert to people. It meets constant defense. Otherwise, we backslide into orthodoxy. Because what is natural, this is well established in cognitive psychology, is the people on my side are self inevitably right. The people who are on the other side are spreading dangerous falsehoods. Therefore, for the good of society, we have to shut up the people who are obviously incorrect and immoral. Now, of course, the people on the other side say the same thing with side switch. And if you have a little bit of wisdom, if you can dislodge yourself from your own advantage points and work down on yourself as a human being, you realize, hey, I'm not an angel. I've got to believe because it's wrong. How will I know I'm wrong unless I hear other opinions? But that does require a campaign of persuasion, which I think we've been remiss at doing. The old arguments for free speech are ones that have been built and no one bothers me anymore. I mean, now we're trying to change that, and it is changing.

John Tomasi: Yeah, I think there's a sense that scholarship is, in some sense, an unnatural practice. That good scholarship, we're actually thinking about ideas, checking our premises, challenging ourselves. It's not an actual team of beings in all kinds of play. If you might have to go with the group, draw it, draw it, draw it. And especially when it comes to scholarship, it meets the idea of disinterest truth that may not be your current pet beliefs. Richard Feynman had a famous saying that above all in science, you must not fool yourself because you are the easiest person to fool.

Steven Pinker: Knowing that, that bit of meta-awareness of oneself as a fallible thinker, which doesn't come naturally, but when that comes naturally is, you know, I'm obviously right, and it looks right to me here inside my skin. I had this cognitive leak to get out of my skin that makes me create space for people with this group.

John Tomasi: One of the things that when an op-ed came out, there was a bunch of responses. Obviously, people were extremely interested in what's happening at Harvard and what motivated the group with you to do this. One of the really striking pieces that I read in the make-up app was an op-ed published by the Crimson editors that was kind of lukewarm, I might say. That's going to be generous, a little bit critical, I think, of the announcement, surprisingly enough. And you may not remember, it's probably a lot gone by since you've published at East last spring. But I wrote down a couple of things that the editors said. This one, they called out a line that you just mentioned a moment ago from the op-ed, you and Bert, that says something like, "When activists shout in the ears of the administrator, we will speak pretty calmly but consistently and forcefully." And the other year, and the editors of the school paper, they called that out. They said, "Activism and academic freedom should be seen as allies, not enemies." Which has become an interesting point, Matt. What do you make of that idea that activism and academic freedom should be thought of as allies rather than adversaries?

Steven Pinker: Well, in fact, they could be allies. In fact, they often have been adversaries because the activists who are trying to shut down the people who disagree with them, obviously not all activism. And many activists have also been free speech advocates. Martin Luther King and many others. I mean, there's a straight of stooped activism. I believe the heart of the activism is to shut down the people who disagree with it. Or to bully and coerce deans and presidents into knuckling under and exceeding to perfect lands. Which all too many presidents and deans haven't done. Because we think it hasn't been an adversarial process of someone speaking to their other ear, right? Saying that this is another contributor to that the throttle of weakening of free speech protections is that it's often been noted that the university has become more corporatized. The person in charge, the president, often has not been a fan barred of university values, but rather of university image and bottom line. How do we associate our builders? How do we stay out of headlines? In fact, it's been remarked that it's the chief council of the university, not the president. And I've been shocked, Eshtal. We will, and that's what we flat ate, and the sponsors of the university president's offer has been to these pressure campaigns, rather than saying, look, just because this is your crusade, it doesn't mean you get to give your ways to to persuade others. No, you can't scream obscenities into a professor's face if there's something being said that makes you uncomfortable. No, we don't have the right not to ever hear an opinion that makes you feel bad. Basic principles of grown-up discourse. But the presidents and deans haven't made them, partly because they just want to make trouble go away as quickly as possible, partly because they've been often promoted from the ranks of their administrative competence. They've produced the ability. They present the chief and department in some particular field. But there's no selection for ability to think clearly of the mission of the university in the 21st century. Why are we having a university? How ought to run this more custodial management, increasing the endowment, keeping him, keeping out the negative headlights. And so that corporatization of the university, it seems like another factor.

John Tomasi: We're collecting factors, you and I, that might be explaining why these things are happening. One might be an increasing demographic drift towards an ideological conformity across the pathway. Another is a set of ideas rising from a new generation of students, taking some of these Marcousian points and postmodern points very seriously. And now there's a third piece perhaps, something like a corporatization on the university and the role of the university president. On that last point, is that a new phenomenon? I mean, haven't presidents always been sort of weak-willed? Or am I not thinking of that correctly?

Steven Pinker: Yeah, I of all people should not be too nostalgic about the past. They used to be highly outspoken for the university presidents of which John Silbert Silbert may have a long-time president of the EU, but Robert Hutchins, the University of Chicago, and Bob Zimmer? Bob Zimmer, who stands out by contrast class, who stands out by contrast. Quite right. But the age of university presidents as intellectuals, I think that the heyday of that was decades ago.

John Tomasi: I recently had Pano Kanelos on the show, who was the president of the University of UATX, to talk about some of these early struggles they had with their announcement and some of the controversy they were involved in very early on. One of the interesting developments at UATX that I've been following, that I'd love to get your take on, concerns this novelty that they're developing something recently, like over the past year, I think, of not waiting for the virtuous president to arrive and fix the university, but rather to try to develop a kind of institutional structure that protects free speech. Yeah, have you followed the Judicial Council idea at Austin?

Steven Pinker: Yes. I think that is a valuable innovation.

John Tomasi: Let me describe it for our listeners who may not know. One of the ideas at Austin is to have a set of basic rights and freedoms established in a kind of a prostitutions structure, and then the innovative feature is to have a quasi-independent judicial board or a judicial body that any complainant who feels that is or are free speech rights or due process rights have been violated can take the complaint to that board, and that board can override the president's decision, override any policy at the university because it's defending the rights. So it's separation of powers based on the American founding. Yes. And I find that, Niall Ferguson came up with that idea as I understand, and whether they adopted fully is yet to be determined, I think. But it's kind of a striking idea. It suggests that what it shows me is that every university in the country is sort of saddled with a situation where we're all relying upon our virtuous president to arrive and to stay virtuous despite all that Austin's taking a different approach of building in this institutional structure. What do you make of that?

Steven Pinker: Yeah, I think that's one of the, that is a truly constructive role of startup universities and our mental universe of government structures and everything else in the universities because universities have gotten locked into a particular bottle of governance and everything else, partly because they all are a part of this self or reciprocally grooming community where the criterion for your so-called excellence is just a subjective judgments of other so-called excellent people. And we can get a, have a solution. So we have a bunch of people all saying how we, everywhere, the arms is prestigious. And anyone, anyone who disagrees is the opposite, they just need to keep them up. They're not up to our standards. So some way of just breaking that, breaking into that, that crystal, that bubble, have some kind of same kinds of checks and balances that we do have legal situation. I think it's a great idea. And, and others. I think the, you know, I did have some criticisms and Bob Zimmer was also on the board, also was only during the same time. And I never, I never, I think they are, and more say about it, both because I've been, the, the, the rod of the legacy universities become more apparent to me recently and to, any alternative ought to be encouraged, but also because I think they have been, dealing with some of the initial growing. I mean, what on is he must not allow, the ideal, free speech to be coflaming the political right. God, they stacked it much to measure the right way, figures. I think that providing a kind of life bar for canceled academics is not the same as building program of the best possible, academics. That's right. I think, problem with all startups, educational startups is what to do about science. In fact, I don't think you can be an educated person in the 21st century without science. How do you attract the smartest students? Science think labs. Labs need a lot of infrastructure, government grants, committees for the protection of human subjects, animal subjects. So there's the problem of how you find a science education, without having to replicate a lot of free apparatus, established university. Yeah, it's certainly, financially it's a formidable undertaking to start in the university, especially a great university like they're trying to do. Maybe in partnership with the science, with these, nearby universities. But anyway, I do wish that well, and I've been involved in other startups like the, new college with the humanities of Wyndon. my friends took costume, and they're of a project in San Francisco. So, I think it's good for there to be competition. I think they're good to be alternate models and fly out.

John Tomasi: Nice. I want to go back to the Council on Academic Freedom and, and, and talk a bit more, about what you're doing there. So, Harvard launched the Council for Academic Freedom in April. Heterodox Academy, a month or two earlier, started organizing a new initiative of campus communities. So, as you know, we're a membership organization with one of our members, one of our active members, with now over 6,000 professors all around the world who share these values of growing, we're a broad organization. One of our innovations over the past year is to start these, to start gathering our professors on campuses together into communities. We call them communities, you call yours a council. We will probably be working on a network that connects various councils and communities across the country and beyond in the near future. I'm just interested in the kind of activities your council might undertake. And I wrote, I read the op-ed last night in preparation for this interview, and you were just beginning it, but I wrote, I, I found five different activities that you mentioned in that op-ed as things you might, the council might undertake at some point. I'll just read them out as I, as I read them. So, among the things the council might do, the UCEDD, include workshops on academic freedom, orienting new faculty to the importance of free speech I've hargored. Three, adopting and enforcing policies that protect academic freedom. Four, providing collective support for individuals who are targeted for protected speech. And five, during moments of crisis, speaking to the administrators, other year, calmly, deliberately, and firstly, as you, as you've got it. have you begun any of these things? What, what's happening on campus? Actually, you've been building, which is just remarkable. And that just, I just want to really emphasize this, that then you were able to go from an initial group of 50 to 160 within a half a year.

Steven Pinker: Yeah.

John Tomasi: It's truly a remarkable and, and, and, newsworthy accomplishment. Beyond the, beyond the building the numbers, what have you done to build the numbers out, out, out to teach me?

Steven Pinker: Yeah. We did have a lecture on academic freedom by my colleague, Nepal.

John Tomasi: Oh, nice. faculty?

Steven Pinker: No, no, open to community. And that we plan to have one a semester.

John Tomasi: We have, you had that last spring or other than last, earlier in the fall. And, and so was that, was that, that was, it was for the, for the purpose of making, of understanding the approach of free speech, of course. Was it also a recruiting tool? Were you thinking of it that way?

Steven Pinker: indirectly. In fact, we do want, we, we don't, since we are academics, we might go beyond just saying, you know, free speech rocks, you know, free speech. Yeah. What is free speech? and it isn't just free speech in the sense of, you know, you should get mouth off about anything, but also a culture of civil discourse. And that's one of the things that, that all emphasized in this lecture. And that's another one of our aims, that you should be able to have a conversation, over matters in which you disappear without calling me up and still bigot or calling a censor.

John Tomasi: So using, so you used the word civil, then you would use the word constructive. Those are different things, right?

Steven Pinker: We can have, it isn't our aim in the universities to have a special kind of speech. It's not just free speech for any purpose. There's these reasons why the first amendment protects all kinds of speech, speeches that's intemperate, sometimes false, misleading, all kinds of speech can be, can be directed by the first amendment.

John Tomasi: But other universities who care about a certain kind of speech that is aimed at pursuing truth, the civility, the civility and important, how important is value civility? Yeah. Is it the season's destructiveness?

Steven Pinker: I'm not sure. It's not identical to it. It's, you know, arguably a means to the end, in that some things, the ideas that we're pursuing, that we are primates, and we inevitably engage in dominance, clenicists, and, and as it displays, that kind of get in the way of pursuing the truth. So it's being said that we keep it civil. which has its own virtues. but that is also a way to, make sure these prominent, trying to help in this display so we can get in the way. Now, you know, it can't be, right in emphasizing they're not the same, because at some point, you don't want to be so-so that it's just rude to dispute with someone. and yeah, and as we well know, that's right, even academic debates that we, that we don't want to disperse can get, as I say, heated. They can get, personal. There's nothing that we're going to be able to do, you know, about that in terms of legislation or policy. You can, you know, pass a law saying, you've got to be nice. I think that's something that Heterodox Academy can, foster and, you know, and, and encourage. But when it comes to that policy and, they have enforcement, if, obviously very hard to enforce.

John Tomasi: Does anybody need to say that HxA, we have something called the HxA way, instead of norms, that cultural norms, we want to encourage in universities. Being nice is not one of our norms. It's fine to be nice. We, we try to be nice and evil. I'm Canadian. But, but, but, but among the norms are things like, make your case with evidence.

Steven Pinker: Yes.

John Tomasi: Social, social, show some humility.

Steven Pinker: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Be aware you might be being, all those kinds of norms that, that again, are compatible with sometimes, sometimes, you know, kind of tough conversations. I've, I've heard many and been involved in some myself that are in the, in the heat of the conversation, trying to make a point, you don't always, different. I remember when I first arrived at Brown, we invited Martha Nussbaum. I invited Martha Nussbaum to give a talk and I was, and I was talking to Alfred Pauly at the time. And I said, so who should be the respondent to give critical remarks to her, her paper? And the respondent who was a generation ahead of me, he said, well, that would be rude to have someone criticize her, to see where speaker asked about winning it. That's why we're here, right? We're, we're not here just for civility.

Steven Pinker: Civility should be part of it. We do, of course, but we're here for, you know, robust challenges and there's nothing wrong with that. That's a kind of respect to show it.

John Tomasi: Yes. And civility has to allow for that. That's a strong, strong disagreement. But without the distracting personal invective, ad hominem arguments, arguments with some authority, and, and so other distractions from the overarching goal of, understanding the world of truth. And so when we think about HxA and the communities that we're building, we talk about talk to our leaders to think of themselves on these across three terms. So we want them to be experts about open inquiry, exemplars of open inquiry and advocates of open inquiry. And we think of those as kind of a stage evolutionary process. So we, our idea is you don't hook the academics who you want to have meeting your communities, your campus to councils, by trying to get the advocates out there first and foremost. Some of them will be effective, but that's also a certain personality type who wants to go out there and, and challenge people, but rather the first and the easiest step perhaps is to encourage people to be experts, to become experts. And so the experts then exemplars, and then more perhaps publicly, they can add like that. Does that resonate with you? Is that, yeah, how many you said a few minutes ago about not getting people to go out there? You didn't say bang pots and pans, but that's kind of what I heard you say. You're not, you're not trying to get rabble rousers. You're trying to attract people of seriousness who want to learn more about open inquiry, who want to renew the tradition. Is that?

Steven Pinker: Yes, absolutely.

John Tomasi: At the Center of Act and Equalism here in New York, we do a weekly seminar for residential fellows and visitors come together to talk about issues of open inquiry. And today's session, Steve Pinker came and talked about his new book manuscript called Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage. We just finished that conversation. Can you tell, tell us a bit about what common knowledge is and how it plays into this?

Steven Pinker: Yes, common knowledge in the sense that I'm, I've been studying and I'm writing about for my next book, is a technical concept from logic and game theory that refers to everyone knowing that everyone knows something, which is logically and many ways different from merely everyone knows something. So, It's social, it's deeply social. Yes, it's so- So we have to steam it. Yes, it is social epistemology in the sense that you are aware of other knowers and you know what they know. So, and in particular, ad infinitum, you know what they know about what they know about what others know or what others know. It sounds like an exotic concept, but I have argued that it corresponds to our, our gut intuition that something is public or out there, that the difference between something that is whispered about on the QT or hinted at through euphemism in your window, and something that is blurted out that's in your face that everyone knows about. And yeah, a lot of phenomenon in economic and political life, or by common knowledge, like our conventions, like using paper currency, driving on the right, are all things that work out because we can expect everyone else to expect, everyone else expects to obey, like driving on the right. Or accepting a piece of paper in exchange for something of value. You do it because you know other people will in turn accept it. Why would they do that? Because they know that other people in turn will accept it. Unless you have hyperinflation, where common knowledge that it's valuable, this is challenged, and then we become rebeasts of paper all over again, worthless. So that's an economic phenomenon, and I suggest that it underlies a lot of our interpersonal social phenomena. It's why we use so much euphemism in the window, connecting with dots with blinds rather than blurting something out. We want to prevent something from becoming common knowledge. We know that other people know it, but we don't know that they know that we know that they know it. That often preserves social relationships. And it also drives cases where people can collectively recognize that something exists or is a problem and act together to deal with it.

John Tomasi: So common knowledge allows for cooperation and coordination.

Steven Pinker: It is what is necessary for coordination, defined as people making complementary choices that benefit both. So common knowledge can have dark sides and bright sides.

John Tomasi: Can you connect common knowledge, the phenomenon of common knowledge, to cancel culture?

Steven Pinker: Yeah, I think that a lot of the cheating mobs that result in cancellations, either by pressuring a leader to accede to the mob, and make the mob go away by canceling the person that has caused the outrage, and what happens to the person who's being canceled and everyone knows they're being canceled, comes from the fact that alarms in a community are all engineered and enforced by common knowledge. That is, there are some things that decent people don't do. That only works if everyone knows it, but everyone knows it. If someone reaches that norm, particularly in public where it's common knowledge, they insult a racial minority, they violate a sexual taboo, then that challenges the norm if it's done in public, that is, it's common knowledge, and it sparks the need to punish it, to safeguard the norm. The punishment also has to be common knowledge, so that you know that everyone knows that it has been punished, and therefore, the norm survives that breach. And so, in academia, we have, unfortunately, a number of beliefs that have become moral norms. That's not what we're in the business of doing, is papermaking. It's moral to believe some factual matters in the world to believe other factual matters. You know, what's true is true. The truth can't be racist. But we have slipped into a norm system that depends on affirming certain factual beliefs. Triggering this urge to punish people who challenge it. And this very human response, and by the way, challenges means, as you know, what you could, in fact, in the case of what we call principality of justice, what it means is censoring the expression of the opinion, punishing the person expressing it. So, this whole dynamic of reinforcing social norms by collective punishment, that runs afoul of the norm of challenging beliefs in order to find out which ones are true or false. Because some of the beliefs you challenge may be ones that are symbolic talismans or world talismans in a community. Such as, you know, that it used to be that they're instublishable, that they're all black slain, so that all sex do, it would just come from socialization. Someone bizarrely, how we now have a different one, that there are no such thing, as they're nothing but the stereotypes that the last generation tried to eliminate, that a woman is someone who wears long hair and a dress, and that being a woman has nothing to do with chromosomes and hormones and gangbites, which is the set of issues that Carole and others have had such difficulties with.

John Tomasi: I want to ask about, in the seminar just now, we were talking about cancel culture and the connection to common knowledge. Let me just turn it, as we close here, I want to invite you to think about, think with me about common knowledge, harnessing common knowledge for the cause of academic freedom on campuses. Is there a way to build a culture of, I'm going to try to formulate this, I'll need your help, to formulate a common knowledge culture of academic freedom, on the idea that there's a common sense understanding what a university is, I know what it is, you know what it is, I know that you know that I think it's this thing, that is a place that, a special place where you come to have conversations and to learn and to grow and to experiment. Is it possible to use some of the common knowledge machinery and insights to help us think about how to reform these universities? What do you make of that?

Steven Pinker: I think so, in the sense that, you know, a lot of the cancellation campaigns seem completely innocent of the very idea that there is a virtue of academic freedom. It just doesn't, it's, you know, self-evidently doesn't occur to them. Otherwise, they think twice, so at least they would justify it in terms of why the cancellation outweighs the value of academic. In case they didn't even do that, because of knowledge, I mean, academic freedom just isn't there as a concept. So just making that, I mean, it'd be huge I'll get everyone to sign on to it as a supreme value. But at the very least, they'll know that it is widely held, it is nominally what universities are committed to. Therefore, if they're going to try to load it, they better articulate their needs, which in the past, they haven't done it. I mean, most often you can't do it. And so why they haven't done it? But in addition, they haven't done it because this has an approach in that it's an idea I think that has to be acknowledged.

John Tomasi: So I'm just interested in this idea that we could try to think about, I'd basically say we care about culture, academic culture, but not just having free speech rights, important, those are on campuses, but also building the habits of mind, the kind of policies that encourage these ways of thinking. Are there ways to, does the council at Harvard, for example, have on its agenda or its radar screen that you're trying to change the culture of Harvard over time, slowly? And do you have any thoughts about that? It's obviously harder to do because a culture is a grassroots phenomenon. It's a wiki that anybody can contribute. It has a network effect. Sometimes things can ripple for you and become viral. But institutions matter. Institutions and other policies or institutional changes that might support the kind of culture, the kind of common knowledge culture that you might like at a place like Harvard?

Steven Pinker: Yeah. So there certainly are policies, and I think they can give a nudge to their culture. Policies like we were advocating for the Kalven principles from the University of Chicago. These are the principles of university neutrality.

John Tomasi: Kalven. Kalven with a K.

Steven Pinker: We would like to get rid of mandatory diversity statements or at the end of job applicants, which can serve to either turn a whole generation of job applicants into liars or weed out anyone who disagrees with a certain narrow orthodoxy.

John Tomasi: As soon as they don't form a forced political speech.

Steven Pinker: Exactly. I mean, now, you know, and what happens is now that there's a post-ops that are on the job market, they're getting to chat GBT, you're right, their university statements. At least that way, we're fine. They'll have to feel guilty about SEP actually composing something. They don't believe it. That's another policy. But you're right that not everything can be done by policy. Some things have to be done by evolutionary achievers in the culture, which are difficult to engineer from the top down.

John Tomasi: Yeah. This morning, when we talk about our leaders of the Campus Community Network being experts, exemplars, and advocates in that directional movement, that's what we're really thinking about. They have the power of a professor to show young people by his or her manner in the classroom. Yeah. The way they go about interacting with fellow professors in a debate or in their writings. That's the kind of example that we hope will shine through and compete with the existing example of the existing paradigm and the existing culture, which just seems so dending to so many students. Because it's just an avoidance of conversations. It's a closing down of questions you would like to ask and hopefully you can ask. We hope that there could be competition in that.

Steven Pinker: Yeah. And that is, I will be working well. It's something where you will catch results overnight, presumably. I think it is a, as well, cultural changes.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Steven Pinker: Sometimes it can creep in a bit at a time and then simply I take over.

John Tomasi: So let me just say for HxA, we're all, we're just watching great interest as many people are with the Council's activities at Harvard, as you, as you grow and develop. Just, we really rep, we're just so happy for you for having you watch this. And I just want to thank you for joining me on Heterodox Out Loud today.