The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:17:06 · Scott Galloway
I've interviewed countless politicians, and if there's one thing we all find disconcerting is when they butcher the facts with some biased half truth. Give us a break already. So when I had the chance to debate conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, our natural response was bring it on. Why? Because it was sponsored by USA Facts, and each debate segment started with a presentation of government data and facts, employment, government spending, income data, housing, and more. The topic, the American dream. Is it still within reach? We argued. We found some common ground. We actually debated, and there were no personal attacks. Watch the full debate on The USA Facts YouTube channel. We think you'll find it unlike any other debate. That is entertaining and informative. We hope you check it out. FIRE, which is your organization, it's the foundation for individual rights and expression. So most recently FIRE released its college free speech rankings. You surveyed nearly 63,000 students across two sixty two schools, analyzed school policies, and tracked various free speech controversies and outcomes at certain schools. We have a tendency to just say higher education. Mhmm. But but Bob Jones University is just much different than NYU. Absolutely, Jeff. Tell us what trends you saw as it relates to free speech across different the different universities. What observations would you make?
00:18:28 · Greg Lukianoff, Scott Galloway
[00:18:28] S1: I would say one of the most positive observations is how much leadership matters, and how schools like Vanderbilt, where Daniel Diermeyer, you know, takes the search for truth incredibly seriously, and he knows that requires conflict. He knows that requires structured friction. And they they went from having not a great rank... Ranking to being, I think, number five, nationally. Same thing with Dartmouth. Dartmouth, you know, rocketed to the top because of leadership. And how much difference a good leader who gets the centrality of the search for truth can actually make even in a relatively short period of time was something that gave me some genuine hope. On the other side, the schools in New York City aren't doing so hot. [00:19:13] S0: Yeah, let's talk about that. My employer, NYU, is it fair to call my employer? Anyways, the the campus I'm affiliated with finished dead last. Yeah. Below little... Below every other school you ranked. How did that happen? Or what what earned them dead last?
00:19:13 · Scott Galloway, Greg Lukianoff
[00:19:13] S0: Yeah, let's talk about that. My employer, NYU, is it fair to call my employer? Anyways, the the campus I'm affiliated with finished dead last. Yeah. Below little... Below every other school you ranked. How did that happen? Or what what earned them dead last? [00:19:33] S1: A lot of the New York schools has been been to a degree mishandling the Israeli Palestinian stuff, you know, sort of vacillating back and forth between protests that they tolerate at one point and then crack down on another, punishing some pro Palestinian groups and professors have been pretty common in in Manhattan, you know, for example. And what's interesting is I remember when our Columbia ranked dead last, I think, a couple of years ago, and there was a kind of surprise that UVA does as well as it does. When UVA came out and said, listen, we support freedom of speech. We do not allow you though to have indefinite camp outs here. [00:20:15] S0: Yeah. Encampments. [00:20:16] S1: And they're like, how could that possibly be? They just strictly said you couldn't do those. And I'm like, no. Because students can understand that. They're like, well, yeah, sure. You can't indefinitely camp out. But if you try to split the baby in this way and be like, well, we allow it to a point, and then we'll enforce it. We don't really know when. It might be when the president is testifying before congress has happened, you know, at Columbia. They're not gonna trust you after that. Being consistent and honest is always gonna get you more credibility than being wishy washy and mercurial.
00:20:16 · Greg Lukianoff, Scott Galloway
[00:20:16] S1: And they're like, how could that possibly be? They just strictly said you couldn't do those. And I'm like, no. Because students can understand that. They're like, well, yeah, sure. You can't indefinitely camp out. But if you try to split the baby in this way and be like, well, we allow it to a point, and then we'll enforce it. We don't really know when. It might be when the president is testifying before congress has happened, you know, at Columbia. They're not gonna trust you after that. Being consistent and honest is always gonna get you more credibility than being wishy washy and mercurial. [00:20:49] S0: Do you think we as faculty or as institutions should discern between students and faculty in the sense that I was quite frankly horrified by my alma mater, UCLA, when kids were passing out bands to everyone but Jews and then basically sequestering Jews from certain parts of the campus. And my thesis, and I stand by this, is that if me and my fraternity brothers in the eighties had started passing out bans to white kids and then blocked black kids from coming on campus, I think they would have called them the national guard. [00:21:19] S1: Yeah.
00:21:19 · Greg Lukianoff, Scott Galloway
[00:21:19] S1: Yeah. [00:21:19] S0: And there seemed to be a certain tolerance for this type of intolerance that I found very upsetting. And I think you can grant... I think we should cut a pretty wide berth for an 18 year old. I am really glad a camera wasn't following me around when I was 18. They deserve to make mistakes. They deserve to get punished, but they deserve, in my view, a lot of leniency and grace as they try to push the boundaries of what's acceptable and what isn't a culture. I have less empathy and I've gotten pushback, sympathy from my colleagues. And while I respect their free speech rights, when they say things that in my view are hateful or supportive of disruptive of the class or of the educational setting, or just say things in my mind that any critical thinker would go, this just reflects really poorly on our faculty, that we as a private organization have the right to fire that person. And they can go to Washington Square and exercise their free speech. But I felt that the use of quote unquote free speech rights was used to create cloud cover for people who would not be employed in most organizations if they showed up in the lobby and started saying any of these things. That was a bit of a word salad.
00:22:32 · Greg Lukianoff
[00:22:32] S1: Your thoughts, I'm sufficiently obsessed, even though fires extended beyond higher ed these days. Mhmm. I'm sufficiently obsessed with higher education reform that I started on my vacation this summer writing a book about it, which is just gonna probably be a very long substack thing about it. But when it comes to the actual standards of free speech, academic freedom, professionalism, the standards are different for professors and students, and and in a way that actually makes perfect sense. Students have the highest, you know, level of free speech rights of of any constituency on a college campus if it... If it's a public college. When it comes to professors, they have very strong what are called extramural free speech rights, which basically means that they can, you know, spout... Talk about, you know, other topics off campus or in their expertise or not. They have very high intramural speech rights, which basically means they can criticize the university. But, you know, in the classroom, they're expected to be professional, and they're expected to be germane. And that means that if you... And and I and I may have called with a case that I got wrong many years ago. That was at a... At Forsyth Technical Community College, there was a technical writing class, you know, something about, like, how to write for engineers. And of a fifty minute class, a professor spent ten minutes, on her opinion about the Iraq war. And at the time, I think it was my own political bias that made me want to take that case and defend Elizabeth Ito at at that school. And it took me a while to realize I was wrong. That essentially, if you're teaching a technical writing class and you go so far afield to spend a substantial chunk of it talking about your opinion on something that's completely unrelated to technical writing, they can punish you.