Apple Podcasts | Android | Spotify | Email | RSS | YouTube

What is the real purpose of a university—truth-seeking or molding active citizens? 

Are university campuses becoming echo chambers, leading to self-censorship among not just conservatives but liberals too?

Today's guest is Amna Khalid, an esteemed Associate Professor of History at Carleton College and a prominent voice within the HxA community.

Together, John Tomasi and Amna explore this multifaceted question. They discuss the evolving role of universities, the interplay of critical inquiry and citizenship, and the impact of neoliberal trends on campus culture.

Amna brings a wealth of experience and academic insight. She shares her perspectives on the necessity of preserving higher education's autonomy while addressing present-day challenges, such as campus speech restrictions and the contentious implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

About Amna:

Amna Khalid is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She specializes in modern South Asian history, the history of medicine and the global history of free expression. 

Amna is the author of multiple book chapters on the history of public health in nineteenth-century India, with an emphasis on the connections between Hindu pilgrimages and the spread of epidemics. Born in Pakistan, Amna completed her Bachelor's Degree at Lahore University of Management Sciences. She went on to earn an M.Phil. in Development Studies and a D.Phil. in History from Oxford University. 

Growing up under a series of military dictatorships, Amna has a strong interest in issues relating to censorship and free expression. She speaks frequently on academic freedom, free speech and campus politics at colleges and universities as well as at professional conferences. Her essays and commentaries on these same issues have appeared in outlets such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Conversation, Inside Higher Ed and the New Republic. She hosts a podcast and accompanying blog called "Banished," which explores censorship in the past and present. 

Amna was a Fellow at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement during the 2022-2023 academic-year, along with her Carleton colleague Jeff Snyder​. They focused on threats to academic freedom in Florida, the state at the epicenter of the conservative movement to encourage state intervention in public school classrooms. Based on interviews Khalid and Snyder conducted with Florida faculty members, they submitted an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs who are challenging the Stop WOKE Act.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Amna Khalid, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Amna Khalid: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

John Tomasi: It's a special pleasure for us to have you here for a whole variety of reasons that will become increasingly clear as we have our conversation. Just first, when did you come into New York?

Amna Khalid: Last night.

John Tomasi: And you're going on to some more exotic place soon, I think.

Amna Khalid: I am. I'm going back home to Pakistan, and I'm looking forward to it. Though I have to say that it's going to be incredibly hot. And I haven't been in Pakistan during the summer in a long time. So it's going to be a rude reintroduction to home.

John Tomasi: And so you were born in Pakistan?

Amna Khalid: Well, actually, I was born in the Middle East. My parents were working in the Middle East, but we moved back to Pakistan when I was five years old.

John Tomasi: Interesting. So let me ask you. So you're an associate professor of history at Carleton College. What was the path from that early childhood to where you are now?

Amna Khalid: Yeah, it's interesting you should ask. The one thing I was certain I didn't want to be was an academic.

John Tomasi: That was the one thing you were certain you did not want to be?

Amna Khalid: I did not want to be. And so, you know, I grew up in Pakistan. I had the opportunity to come to either the U.S. or the U.K. for my undergrad, which was a very popular thing for people in my circles to do. And I really wanted to go abroad. And the year before I traveled with my father, I came to visit. One of my brothers was studying in Chicago at DePaul University, and the other one was at Manchester University in England.

John Tomasi: How old were you then, roughly?

Amna Khalid: I was 17.

John Tomasi: Oh, you were 17.

Amna Khalid: And so I was just getting ready for college. And I'd taken my TOEFL, and I was all excited and, you know, bright-eyed and idealistic. And I traveled with my dad, and I went back to Pakistan. And, you know, a couple of months later, when it was time for applications, my parents were like, okay, so what are you planning? Because I'd been telling them that I wanted to go abroad. I turned around, and I said, I don't want to go abroad. And they said, why? And this was quite a shift because, you know, in Pakistan, not my family, but in general, the boy child is privileged, and the women are not. And so for me, it was also about making that equal statement, which my parents were very keen for me to make, but I still felt socially I had to make it. And I said, no, I don't feel ready. I feel like I need to bake more, and I want to be in Pakistan. I certainly don't want to be at home, but I definitely wanted to be more grounded in Pakistan. So I went to a private university in Pakistan.

John Tomasi: Lahore?

Amna Khalid: In Lahore. It's called Lahore University of Management Sciences. It started out as a business school, but then expanded and had an undergraduate program, which only had two majors at that point in time. It was computer sciences or economics. And I was doing economics, and it was in my junior year, I'd pretty much done most of my major requirements when they introduced a new major, social sciences, which was very loosely defined. And I thought, you know what? I was disillusioned with what I was learning in economics, and I was like, I want to do this. And I have to say, I credit my professors for just opening new worlds to me. When I first went to college, you know, the only world that was open to me was the corporate world, and that's what I thought I wanted to do. And they introduced me to concepts and ideas and visions that were completely alien to me. So I decided that I did a 180, and I wanted to do development work in rural development. And so I went after my undergraduate to Oxford to do an MPhil in development studies with the express aim.

John Tomasi: That's a two-year degree?

Amna Khalid: That's a two-year research degree. So in the U.S. context, it's something in between a master's and a PhD. And I really enjoyed it, but somehow I kept getting pulled back to history. I'd done some history in my undergraduate, but I didn't think I wanted to be a historian. And for whatever reason, the pull was there, and I stumbled upon the field of history of medicine at that point, which I did not know about. And it just thrilled me no end. So for better or for worse, I decided to just follow my heart and do a PhD. And I have to say, I did not think about whether I'm going to get a job or not. It was just the most naive following of your heart. But I feel like that's how I've always been. So I've been fortunate that I've landed on my feet.

John Tomasi: And so you did an MPhil at Oxford, and then you did a DPhil there, too, I think.

Amna Khalid: Yes, that's correct. That was in history.

John Tomasi: And then how did you end up at Carleton?

Amna Khalid: That's an interesting story, too, because I applied to Carleton. I did not know about Carleton College. And I asked some of my friends, American friends at Oxford. I was like, hey, there's this job at Carleton College. And they're like, oh, that's a good college. And I was like, okay, what are the liberal arts? I had no idea. And unbeknownst to me, you know, I've learned that the liberal arts are really, and this is why I credit my professors, how my professors in Pakistan taught me without really calling it that. So I applied, it was a postdoc, and I also applied to University of Cape Town. And I was offered both positions. And I turned Carleton down, and I went to Cape Town. And I was there for two years, which was a different kind of education. Very interesting place. But it was not the place for me. And I felt like I needed to.

John Tomasi: Were you teaching there?

Amna Khalid: I was. I was a senior lecturer in history. And the department at that point was in flux. And, you know, the country has its own complicated history.

John Tomasi: Fascinating.

Amna Khalid: But it was a difficult place to live, even though it's the most stunning place in the world. And so I decided it wasn't for me. And I wrote to Carleton. And I said, hey, do you remember me? Do you remember me? And I thought they're just going to blow me off. And they're like, well, we have a tenure track post opening up, so you should apply. And I thought they were just popping me off. But then they sent me the job ad. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to apply. And here I am.

John Tomasi: That's fantastic. So how many years have you been at Carleton?

Amna Khalid: So I moved here in 2011.

John Tomasi: So what does that make it? 12, 13 years? Yeah, interesting. And you've been a stalwart at HxA for as long as I've been following these things. When did you first get involved with HxA?

Amna Khalid: Oh, when did I first get involved with HxA?

John Tomasi: The day you arrived in the States, perhaps, or maybe you were still.

Amna Khalid: No, I actually, I didn't. When I arrived in the States, I was too busy just learning the American higher ed landscape. So I really wasn't paying attention so much. It was really around 2016 that I started paying attention to these issues, in great part because bias response teams started cropping up everywhere. And it's around then that I learned of HxA, but I think I only really got involved in 2018.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Amna Khalid: I came for a conference. I became a member. And since then, I have been a committed member.

John Tomasi: And one of the things that I remember, maybe the first thing I remember hearing about from you was an intervention you made into a series of arguments that HxA conducts about what the purpose of the university is. And one conception that Jon Haidt, one of the co-founders, made popular was the idea that the purpose of the university is to seek the truth. And as I remember, you challenged that in some interesting ways. What do you think, what is the deal of the university? Is it truth-seeking? How do you see that? Just for our listeners, but also for me.

Amna Khalid: Yeah. I mean, I challenged that very much in the context of thinking about the appeal of organizations like HxA and AFA and FIRE. And all of them stress the centrality of truth to the mission of higher education. And I'm not saying the truth is not part of the mission, but I think it's only part of the mission. In great part because I don't think it speaks to a lot of people who are in the academy. So for instance, I'm a historian and the idea of truth as the driver for historical inquiry is really pretty late 19th century, early 20th century. Things have moved in many disciplines in ways that have expanded and, you know, just extended the scope of what we do. So if you think about people in literature or people in art or music, they're not in the business of truth-seeking. And I know that, you know, a small T truth is different from a capital T truth, but I think it would, for the purposes of our appeal, you know, I look at the membership of Heterodox Academy. It tends to attract a lot of positivists. There are not many humanities people in these organizations. And for a while, I was a faculty fellow at Heterodox. And I was trying really hard to recruit people from the humanities. And I realized...

John Tomasi: I'm sorry, but let me just interrupt. But when you say positivist, you mean people working in social sciences or social psychology.

Amna Khalid: Yes, I do.

John Tomasi: And currently testable fields that could maybe more likely take the truth claim as central.

Amna Khalid: Yeah, exactly.

John Tomasi: That are kind of seeking the truth.

Amna Khalid: And I think that is part of what we do. It's part of what the academy does. But I think we would have a wider appeal if we reframed the mission of higher education to what it truly is, which is now it is critical inquiry and it is training citizens. It's citizenship, a place to practice citizenship.

John Tomasi: So sort of a dual purpose.

Amna Khalid: Dual purpose.

John Tomasi: Something like critical inquiry plus citizenship.

Amna Khalid: Yeah, I think, you know, Kevin Newsom, this judge, put it very well. I think he did put it as the dual mission, which is critical thinking and citizenship training. And I think this is not just me or Kevin Newsom saying this. This has... I mean, if you look at the mission statements of pretty much most institutions, which I did sit down and do for a piece I was writing, it holds true. They emphasize both things. So it's more in terms of the appeal of institutions like HxA. I feel like they would go further and speak to more people in the academy. If they moved away from truth-seeking, truth-seeking sounds very old school and in some ways is old school. And that's not to say it's bad. I think many disciplines are in the business of truth-seeking in that way. But I think knowledge production, critical inquiry, and citizenship are really what we do on a day-to-day level in the academy.

John Tomasi: I want to ask you about the citizenship component because I think it goes to some questions about the role of activism on college campus, which will be one of our major themes today. But first, let me ask you first about the first piece of your dual purpose. So the idea of critical inquiry. I was wondering before, thinking before we came on, does that include things like, it's not just critical thinking skills when you say critical inquiry. What do you mean by critical inquiry?

Amna Khalid: I am going to refer to John Dewey over here. So forgive me for pulling out my laptop in doing this.

John Tomasi: Laptops are always allowed at Heterodox Academy, so it's not a problem.

Amna Khalid: Right. So critical inquiry is, as I see it, and this isn't just my framing, a lot of my work is done in collaboration with my colleague, Jeff Snyder. So this is a piece that he and I wrote together. And we drew on Dewey's four concepts of the four natural human instincts or interests. Conversation and communication, investigation, construction, and artistic expression. And I think that is so much more.

John Tomasi: Do them again, please.

Amna Khalid: Sure. Number one, conversation and communication. Two, investigation. Three, construction. And four, artistic expression. So these, Dewey says, are the four natural human instincts or interests. And I think if you think about it in those terms, you really see that the mission of, so critical inquiry kind of knits these together. And then if we put it that way.

John Tomasi: I'm sorry to interrupt, but this strikes me as a very scholarly approach to the, these are the four purposes of the human experience.

Amna Khalid: No, this is the four pieces that, I mean, Dewey just calls them the four natural instincts or natural interests that humans have.

John Tomasi: I remember my professor at Oxford, Bernard Williams, saying that one of the things that's distinct about human beings is that we mate out of season. That does not seem to be on Dewey's list.

Amna Khalid: Well, we can add it.

John Tomasi: I'm sure colleges do that too. Mating out of season is in style. In fact, the research shows students are having less and less sex these days.

Amna Khalid: I'm aware, I'm aware. I know, and I walked into one of my classrooms and I'm like, what are you guys doing? Why are you guys not having sex?

John Tomasi: Out of season, out of season. What I wanted to ask you about the critical inquiry is, and please elaborate the Dewey point as you like, but what I wondered was, is there, I think part of education is about something like learning to be a person. This is kind of a liberal arts, humanities, non-positivist conception. We're there not only to be citizens, if we are there to be citizens, again, we'll talk about that, but something like to be a less stunted being, a more expansive being, beings who understand the possibilities for our own situatedness and the possibilities for we might be, the roots and our wings, those kind of combinations. Is that in the purpose of the university, to become a person?

Amna Khalid: Absolutely. I mean, to learn about the breadth and depth of the human condition and to situate ourselves within that context is critical. So I think that is part of higher education, but I want to be clear that higher education itself has also, you know, it also includes vocational training and I don't want to leave those people out. So when I think about institutions like Heterodox Academy, I want them to be able to appeal to those two and to stress the importance of open inquiry and academic freedom for those fields as well. So vocational training, I mean, so many institutions do just that. They're not in the business of that liberal arts creation of a person, though there are elements of that and I wish there was more of that. But to me, in order to kind of push for preservation of the autonomy of higher education, we need to create a bigger tent. And for me, critical inquiry and citizenship, they don't preclude or exclude learning to be human, but they kind of make it more kind of concrete in ways that I feel captures the full extent of the enterprises within the academy in terms of inquiry.

John Tomasi: And I was struck by a phrase you used a few moments ago when you were describing about your own experience in college. You said, I think, that your professors introduced you to new visions of what you might be and who you might become and what you might do.

Amna Khalid: It was truly, I mean, and that's what I hold most dear. I think that's in great part why I've gone into a liberal arts institution and I enjoy teaching so much. It's my way of, you know, paying it forward is what they did for me was just, it changed my life. And I hope that I can just be that person who can facilitate those visions for other students.

John Tomasi: Let's start digging in now.

Amna Khalid: Sure.

John Tomasi: So, I want to talk with, I'd like to have you, I'd like to talk with you about cancel culture, about restrictions on campus speech. There's a dominant narrative that I think is accurate in many ways that says that it's mainly people in the American context, people in the North American context, people on the conservative right whose speech has been most threatened. And there are some demographic trends that seem to support that or at least would support that. In 1960, according to one study, the professoriate self-described themselves as being two to one, leaning left to right. Yeah. That ratio has been widening dramatically in the decades since. Is it true that the main threats to campus speech are directed at conservatives on campus?

Amna Khalid: I would disagree. I think the threats are much broader. I think what we're seeing is that many people who lean liberal left are also finding themselves being censored or they're self-censoring rather. That's what's going on. So, I think this construction of campus climate as only silence and conservatives is actually not accurate. It gets partially, it's partially true, but I think it's much broader than that. And I think they're very narrow ideas that are acceptable on campuses these days, which are very progressive ideas. So, to give you an example, Sam Abrams and I wrote a piece for the HxA blog, in fact, looking at the political leanings within the academy. And yes, they lean left and liberal. But that doesn't mean that the divide is captured by that binary, first. The second thing is that I find, even with predominantly progressive and liberal students in my classrooms, there are so many students who come to me in my office hours and will say, I couldn't say this in class, but I want you to know this is what I do. And I say to them, I say, I ask them, how do you identify politically? And they're like, oh, you know, Democrat. I'm like, so why do you think you couldn't say it? So, to me, it's even those people who see themselves as liberal, Democrat, left of center, who find themselves self-censoring. And in great part, and the research shows this, I mean, FIRE's data shows this, is that what they're scared of is their peers. And it's a social censure piece. So, to my mind, I think climate on elite campuses in particular is restrictive, and it's a little suffocating. In great part, I speak out on these issues precisely because of that.

John Tomasi: And when you, but the trend, so if you're saying it's not just conservative versus, say, progressives, but is the censoring coming mainly from the far left? Is that an accurate way to describe it? How do you, or can you locate the source of the censoring? Or is that ideological spectrum not even the right way to think about it?

Amna Khalid: I mean, I don't like calling it the far left, you see, because I think it's a very, I don't know what the right term is. The closest I can come is a very strident progressivism, is where it's coming from. I think at times when I'm being sloppy in my speaking, I also call it the far left for ease of communication. But it's not the far left, and the left requires a connection with class. And this is an entire politics of identity, which is detached from the material conditions of existence. So, to me, this is a very symbolic, posturing, identity-based politics that is not part of the left-right spectrum.

John Tomasi: And so, there's something about stridency, perhaps, which can be found wherever it might be located, that could be a challenge to these things. I want to ask you about your views about DEI, or DEI Inc., as you've called it in the past. What is DEI Inc., and what do you think of DEI?

Amna Khalid: So, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, are values that I think are really pretty noble values. And institutions need to be working to diversify both their faculty and their students. I think it's imperative. But what diversity means is something that is never talked about on college campuses. So, it's reduced to demographic diversity. Whereas, what we need in higher education for robust critical thinking is diversity of thought. And that doesn't exclude identity diversity. In fact, it includes it. Because usually people who look different have been in different socioeconomic conditions because of the ways in which history has played out. And so, they come with different experiences which allow them to see things differently. So, it's not just about what you feel and your experience, but it's also about how that informs your perspective and things. And to me, I'm very committed to these values. But I think what's happening in higher education today is we have a dogmatic institution of DEI Inc. Now, DEI Inc., to me, is a very particular rendition of these concepts, which is really just a bastardization of them, frankly. It's this dogmatic approach towards thinking about diversifying and towards making things equitable on college campuses that is morally bankrupt and intellectually vacuous.

John Tomasi: Allow me to read a quotation from you on this.

Amna Khalid: I love being quoted. Go ahead.

John Tomasi: So, let me, this is, I'll just quote. So, quote, this is the conventional campus diversity, equity, and inclusion framework that treats education as a product, students as consumers, and diversity as a public relations enterprise that needs to be managed from the top down, close quote. So, education as a product, students as consumers, and diversity as a top-down public relations enterprise. Can you say more about that?

Amna Khalid: Well, I can say so much about that. Let me begin by saying, I mean, these are quintessentially neoliberal values. It's framed in those terms. So, I think the first thing we need to understand is that diversity, how it's happening, or DEI Inc., as it's happening on college campuses, is completely dyed in neoliberalism. And I know neoliberalism gets bandied around a lot. And what does it really mean? It's this kind of corporate logic, to put it pretty simply, which the quote captures, you know. So, if students are treated as customers, then the customer is always right. And what we're doing, we as faculty are service providers, and we have to, customer satisfaction is the goal. And if customer satisfaction is the goal, then you really have moved out of the business of education into the business of hospitality. And that is not what higher education is supposed to be about. So, there is a contradiction over here. If you're stressing the importance of students to be comfortable, you're no longer doing education. Education fundamentally happens through making people uncomfortable.

John Tomasi: So, on the comfort point, so we think of students as consumers. One, maybe this is too neoliberal, but I live in the neoliberal world to some degree, so let me just play that out. A consumer is a person who's a self-directed decider. They make choices about what their values are, and they interact in the world based on those choices, and they consider prices, and so on. Comfortable might mean that they want to have really nice dorms and gymnasiums with skylights and pools and all that kind of stuff. And there is that element of comfort being provided on campuses. Part of the reason why campuses are so expensive is that they include those kinds of comforts. A little too much. Is that what you mean by comfort? Are those the comforts you have in mind?

Amna Khalid: No, those are not the comforts that I have in mind, but I do think that that is part of it, right? I do think that we've gone overboard in terms of providing this kind of hospitality, and that kind of then goes into the whole issue of administrative load on campuses, which I think is a huge problem. So, and not disconnected from the adjunctification of faculty. So, sorry to be kind of connecting all these dots in one go.

John Tomasi: But focus on the comfort part. I'd like to hear you talk about students as consumers, and then the role of comfort and all that.

Amna Khalid: So, students as consumers means that they're entitled. And when we talk about that kind of entitlement, we're talking about students coming to class saying, I don't want to read this because it makes me uncomfortable. Let me, you know, indulge me a little, and I'll talk about the problem with what underpins DEI, Inc. and speaks to comfort, is there is a reigning ideology of this discourse of harm. Discourse of harm underpins all DEI efforts, and harm is used very loosely. And when we're talking about harm, we're not talking about physical harm over here. We're very much talking about what I think is essential to a learning experience, which is this. So, students no longer feel like they should be made to feel, they should be made to feel uncomfortable. To give you an example, I used to teach this course on women in South Asia, histories, representations, and narratives. And as part of that, representations, we look at cinematic representations. So, we're looking at the treatment and representation of women. And I showed movies which were extremely problematic, but that was the point. The point is that we sit there, we watch them, we see what the problem is, and learn to identify it, and understand how stereotypes are created. And some of these films are very hard to watch. When you say problematic in what sense, because they're showing women in a certain role. Objectification of women, you know, the kind of valorization of sexual violence, caste violence, colonial violence. Like, there's a whole genre of problems in representation that we cover in that course. And I just remember that there was this one point, this entire film, which was very interesting in some ways and very problematic in others. And that's exactly what I wanted to kind of, I wanted to tease out the complexity with my students. She just came to me, a student came to me, and she's like, I just don't know why I had to see that. And I said, well, you can't read a critique of that film if you don't know what the film is. So, you have to see it in order to do that. And I had warned them in advance that, you know, this is a tough film to watch. So, just get in the right frame of mind. And it's that kind of entitlement. It was like, I should not have had to watch that film. So, when a student makes that, and an institution or the administration then says, well, they are right, or we need to take this into consideration, which my administration did not do, let me be very clear. But many institutions have asked for mandatory trigger warnings and syllabi, biased response teams are another iteration of this kind of safetyism that is being promoted on campuses. Then what happens is, you water down the educational experience. And what you're treating, you know, customers in your neoliberal logic is they're making choices because they're in a position to make choices. Students are young adults in development. They do not, they get to make many choices, but they don't get to make choices about the curriculum. They don't have the expertise. So, to my mind, this kind of approach towards harm is, in effect, an attack on expertise, much like the attack on expertise that we see coming from legislators in red states right now, which we can go into later.

John Tomasi: I very much want to talk with you about those issues. Let me just pause just a minute more on the comfort. I was thinking when you were speaking a few minutes ago that there might be some connection between the two kinds of comfort we're talking about. One kind of comfort that students are, we think about students as consumers, one kind of comfort is a nice, nicer dorms, skylights in the gym, those kinds of, you know, comforts.

Amna Khalid: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And then there's something about creature comforts. And then there's a demand for comfort in terms of ideas that are compatible and reinforced to them. So I was wondering whether maybe those two trends are connected and connected to this idea about the student as consumer. But then as you kept speaking, and especially the student you described, that I have to see that film, I'm not sure why I need to see that film. That sounds more like there's a moralized element for that claim for comfort. When the person says, I want a skylight in my gymnasium, or I'm going to choose my college, depending on which gym has the nicer skylights, whatever it might be. That's a simple, kind of a simple, straightforward comfort claim with no moral element. But when people, students I know, when they say, you shouldn't have shown me that film, they add something like, you are being insensitive.

Amna Khalid: Yeah.

John Tomasi: You are being morally defective. What do you, so that sounds very different. Can you say anything about that? Those are moralized claims, I think, that the student's been forward.

Amna Khalid: There are moralized claims, and this is my problem with it. There are moralized claims that seem to presume that they know what the educational experience is about. And that's precisely the point. They do not know what the educational experience is about. Now, let me be very clear. Like, if a professor is harassing a student, we have policies for those, and that is not okay. But curricular choices, for instance, the use of this film, and why I'm making you see it, it's not, you cannot moralize on that because you don't have the expertise to moralize on that. And so for me, that, and giving the student the right to do that, or saying that they are, that this is an appropriate response, and that I need to now accommodate it, is essentially deeply disrespectful to the years of training that I have undergone to be able to curate the syllabus for someone to enable an educational experience. So to me, this kind of, it's, it's, it's, it's moral, morality, which is misplaced. It's, this is not the domain for it to be playing out.

John Tomasi: And that's what you meant a minute ago when you talked about expertise. That expertise is what allows or authorizes the professor to decide, these are the experiences, these are the readings that I think you need to do to understand some important concept in this course.

Amna Khalid: I mean, how can anyone else do it who doesn't have the expertise, right? What would be the metric or what would be the yardstick for them to determine what goes in a syllabus or not? Then they are going to reach for what is fun to read and not fun to read, what is pleasant to read, what is unpleasant to read, but that's not going to serve an educational purpose. The educational purpose is served by pushing students to think beyond what they think they are capable of, because it's about those expectations. It's about introduction to new avenues and venues that cannot happen if you just want to read what you're comfortable reading. Think about it in terms of basic literacy and how we train little kids to read and step by step, we raise the bar and lo and behold, they can read after a while complex things. Why? Because we've pushed them to do it. But if we just keep letting them feel comfortable with the picture books, that's the level they'll stay at.

John Tomasi: And so then going back to your first comments about the telos of the university and what we're here for when we convene on a campus, why are we there? You said there were two main purposes, a dual purpose perhaps, critical inquiry and citizenship. And now you sort of cashed out critical inquiry more. It's very much connected to some class of people being experts and then making decisions as to what this thing, critical inquiry, might mean.

Amna Khalid: Precisely.

John Tomasi: So let me ask you, let's turn to the, I'll talk about the citizenship part, which I think is going to be, it may be a little spicy, so let's go there.

Amna Khalid: Oh, good.

John Tomasi: So I wonder about citizenship, the role of citizenship training on the college campuses. And let me just, let me just situate it to see what you think about it in the, in the context of this, of the campus protests that we saw so much in the spring, the spring semester of last year. Did you see, did you see, did you see those, what, what, what was your take on the college protests? Was that civic engagement? Was that part of the telos of the university? What was your, what was your reading on the protests?

Amna Khalid: Protest is political action and students protesting is very much within the telos of the university from my point of view. So I think, and in fact, most institutions say that very clearly, most institutions like Columbia, I believe there was this excellent piece by Tyler Austin Harper. And I, did you have him on? I think you had him.

John Tomasi: He was on the podcast just, yes, this, this, this summer.

Amna Khalid: Yeah, he was. He was fabulous.

John Tomasi: He is fabulous.

Amna Khalid: And I think his analysis was spot on about Columbia, that it touts itself as this place, which is all about, you know, activism. And then yet when students are actually out there doing activism, suddenly we've got to call the cops. So I think.

John Tomasi: I should just say for our listeners that Tyler Austin Harper is an assistant professor at Bates College, just a really interesting thinker. He was on the podcast just recently. So please.

Amna Khalid: Yeah. So, you know, I do think that citizenship is part of our mission and protest is part of learning how to be a citizen. Raising your voice, learning how to use it effectively, that requires practice. And I really do believe that higher education institutions are labs of democracy. And if we see them as labs of democracy, then you've got to give the students the space to be able to practice it. Because it doesn't, you know, it's not just one day after you graduate, you're going to learn how to be a citizen, turn a switch on. You've got to practice it. And that's why we have student government. That's why we have these kinds of various democratic processes in institutions to train our students to learn how to be good citizens.

John Tomasi: In the past academic year, when we saw so much conflict on campuses over the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Gaza, there were many claims and many reports about Jewish students feeling unsafe on campus, being attacked on campuses. Those were connected. Those experiences and reports were part of the protest movement. How do you sort that out? What do you think about that situation?

Amna Khalid: Listen, I'm not going to deny that some students may have felt unsafe. I think there were moments when there were things that happened during these protests that were beyond the pale. But I think in the vast majority of cases, these protests were peaceful. Yes, they broke certain rules. But I think on the whole, these were peaceful protests, which should have been allowed and should have been allowed to continue. And there is an immediate...

John Tomasi: I'm sorry to interrupt.

Amna Khalid: I'm sorry, forgive me.

John Tomasi: So many of them were allowed to continue. Some reached certain points and crossed certain lines, or so we were told by the administrators. And that's when the protests were stopped. Are you saying that the ones that the protests that were stopped should not have been stopped?

Amna Khalid: I think some of them should not have been stopped. And I think the way in which they were stopped was heavy-handed. I mean, the minute you call in riot police, it is immediate escalation. And in most instances, the violence that we've seen that happened at these campuses where protests were stopped, it's police violence initiated by the police, not by students. And I understand that. You know, police are trained to do that. They were doing their telos, but their telos should not be intersecting with ours. It was only in very extreme situations. And I don't think this was that situation. And I think, and this is why, allow me to revert to the discourse of harm, why it's so dangerous. It doesn't just underpin DEI, Inc. It can be weaponized in any which way you want. And we see it being weaponized by legislators on the right. I'll come to that later. But in this instance, once again, because harm is now currency, it was like we are feeling harm. And again, I think there were certain instances in which students, both Muslim students and Jewish students felt unsafe, quite legitimately so. But I don't think that that was the vast majority of cases that took place. Having said this, there is a lot more that is yet to happen. I'm sure we'll see it happen in the fall, and we'll be able to shed more light on that.

John Tomasi: But let me push in a little harder on this now. So think about that, the telos of the university, which you describe as being a critical inquiry and also citizenship. One of the points that Jon Haidt makes when he talks about telos is that there has to be just one. Because if there's more than one, you're going to have some conflicts between them. And so now I'm just thinking about what you were saying a few minutes ago about expertise and the importance of expertise. So students are on campus just for a little while, four years, very short parts of four years. And here they are to learn arcane things from these strange creatures they call professors and their areas of expertise. But on a lot of the campuses in the past year, we heard students reporting that ordinary functioning of the university that is quietly doing your homework in some abstract topic, learning the expertise in some field that you've never heard about before and I can't imagine you're actually studying it now from some medieval historian or a quantum physicist or a poet, whatever it might be. That that kind of ordinary functioning of transmitting expertise to students was disrupted and maybe made to take a second, a backseat to the exercise of these students, let's say lawful protests on the campus. Keeping people awake at night, making them uncomfortable on the quad, maybe just distracting them in a straightforward sense of saying maybe what I'm doing in my classroom is not that as important, not as important as seizing this moment to go out in the quad and spend my semester protesting in a tent rather than going to my classes. Is there a tension between these two core values of yours? And did we see that last fall? And how do you, why do you think of that?

Amna Khalid: Yeah, that's a really good question, actually, because it allows me to dig into something that I think has been really missing in the discourse about the protests, which is that, you know, this is a violation of the norms of campus in that this is speech that should not be allowed, right? That this is speech that is making people uncomfortable, that is disruptive. So let me be clear. I think, you know, one of the problems is that people seem to gloss over the fact that there are different rules that apply to different spaces on campus. So in the classroom, what you have is academic freedom. You do not have free speech in that you can't just say something without evidence. You can't, you have to base it in some kind of disciplinary grounding, right? Some kind of disciplinary expertise. So you're not allowed to just mouth off, whereas on the quad, which is more like a public square. I mean, there may be professors who do that, but that's an abuse of academic freedom because academic freedom comes with academic responsibility. But just mouth, I like your expression, mouthing off. But to me, the quad is much more like a public square where, you know, you have to have a thicker skin, where we have to be able to listen to things we find highly distasteful. But as long as they're not threatening, I think, and threatening the bar should be high for threatening because we want students to be able to learn how to engage even with very, very distasteful speech. So I think there are different rules that apply. So if someone comes into my classroom and starts protesting, that is a violation of my expertise and of the mission. But I think we can hold both spaces and we can hold, you know, we can stay true to the dual mission. We're not just about expertise. If we were just about expertise, then we would just do classroom stuff. We wouldn't have anything outside the classroom. But the fact of the matter is that we provide spaces for students to engage outside of the classroom because we think learning is, goes beyond the classroom. But there are different kinds of learning. That is practice. And that's a space for you to practice your citizenship, which includes protest.

John Tomasi: Well, that's good. So you're challenging the way I think about this. Let me just try one thing with you and see what you think about this. So one of the things that I'm struck about, I've been struck by, in the way you describe the purpose of the university, you have those dual purposes that I mentioned, critical inquiry and citizenship. But you also do the dual spaces. So as I read you, you say that the critical inquiry is a classroom located primarily, not just there.

Amna Khalid: Yeah.

John Tomasi: It's homework, but that's the center of it. And that the quad is where citizenship happens.

Amna Khalid: Primarily.

John Tomasi: Primarily, yeah. All right, good. Primarily. So let me just try something with you and tell me why it's wrong. And I'm tempted by this view sometimes, so I really need your help to help me disabuse myself a bit. Maybe all the university is for is critical inquiry. That, in fact, on the quad, too, protests that don't have an educative function in some central way don't even belong there. And on the wall across from us right now here in the Segal Center, as you can see, I have a poster with a heterodoxy head of me way. Five principles. Make a case with evidence. Be intellectually charitable. Be intellectually humble. Be constructive. Be yourself. Very high ideals to achieve anywhere. Are they achieved in classrooms? I don't know. Is humility achieved by many professors you and I know? Probably not. But these are lofty ideals. I take those to be, in some way, a pretty accurate formulation of the best, highest ideals of the university. But I see those as ideals for the classroom more than what I see when I visited protests on campus last spring. So, protests seem to have a political action. They seem to have a whole different set of imperatives. They don't value make your case with evidence. They value simple slogans. Intellectual charitability? Not going to build in the political movement on that. Being humble? No, we need solidarity. We need commitment. We need certainty. Be constructive. Well, maybe. That's a more complicated one, perhaps. Be yourself. I'm not sure about it. Be yourself. It actually may be...

Amna Khalid: I was going to say, that's the one that captures the citizenship piece, right?

John Tomasi: Well, I thought that was intention. Because I thought the protest... Maybe the protest and citizenship are different. But protest, I think, means don't just be yourself. Join this army. Join this group. Wear this clothes. No. Chant with us.

Amna Khalid: I don't see it as that. Solidarity. This is an imperative of solidarity here in the green now. Chant these slogans with us. But that is yourself. That is your values that you believe in.

John Tomasi: So, tell me more. Tell me more. Tell me. Tell me.

Amna Khalid: Being yourself, if you fundamentally believe that Palestinians have a right to have a state, you would go out and protest. To me, being yourself is being true to your values. So, to me, I don't see that as being intention. It's not be yourself in isolation. You can be yourself in community, in solidarity. So, I don't see that as a... In fact, that's the one that I think perhaps captures some of the citizenship piece.

John Tomasi: Be yourself.

Amna Khalid: Yes.

John Tomasi: Nice. Nice. Whereas I say... And maybe it'd be number four to some degree, but it doesn't...

Amna Khalid: Yeah, it's not true to activism. But I do think that number five makes some room to accommodate. Yeah, be yourself. But you were saying, your question was, shouldn't it just be critical inquiry?

John Tomasi: Well, I wonder that sometimes. I sort of wonder... I think, for example, about an experience I had when I was an undergraduate at one of the schools I attended called St. John's College, which is a great book school. And they read great books. But they also... A lot of what goes on outside the classroom is people sitting around and talking about the great books they just talk about in their class. And so, it's a strange thing where they go to a seminar on a Thursday evening, then afterwards everyone retires to the coffee house. And the place is just full of people, nerds, hanging out talking about Thucydides or Descartes or whatever they're reading. And they're really doing the work of scholarship. If they were doing a campus protest, again, every college is going to have their own ethos. And maybe St. John's has part of your telos, but not the rest of your telos. And maybe you would think that's a defect. I don't know how you... What would you think about that?

Amna Khalid: Look, I think institutions... I think there is room for more than one kind of institution. And let me just be clear, right? In the US, there are so many colleges and schools. I think they just need to be very upfront about what their mission is. So, there is a distinction when we talk about the mission of higher education as a whole versus... We have religious schools. They have a certain slant. And I think we should make room for those places. I just think we need to be very clear. Those places need to be clear about what their mission is. But I think there's something that is central to all higher education. And I do think that's where the dual purpose comes in. Whereas citizenship... I think it would be a problem if a college said we would never allow protests on our campus. And that's... I'm going to...

John Tomasi: That's what I was playing with. I was thinking, well, why do we allow that?

Amna Khalid: Well, we allow that in great part. I mean, look at... Just bear with me. I'm going to come at this obliquely. But look at the confidence in higher education in the United States right now. What does the data tell us? It's been dropping dramatically and it's going to drop again since last year. And why is it dropping? There's a whole variety of reasons. But part of it over the past year is a concern for hypocrisy, I think, among the college leaders.

John Tomasi: Right. Hypocrisy.

Amna Khalid: And I think there is this claim that we are disconnected from the concerns of people. So if you see law of institutions to be purely about great books, which I love and I'm strongly committed to, then you are even disconnected. That perception will get even more stark.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Amna Khalid: And I don't think that is a good way to train students.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Amna Khalid: And that's why I think you can have different spaces on campus to do both things. Because we are essentially training students to introduce them to the wider world, to live as human beings. And being a human being in this time of nation states requires you to know what it means to be a citizen. And to think about citizen even more broadly, right? Like not just in nationalistic terms, but to think about a citizen of a community. Because we do want to teach our students to live in community. We do want to teach them how to contribute to community. We want them to know that they are more than themselves, that they can transcend themselves. And I think that is a big part of what we do. I mean, the whole idea of public funding for higher education is based on the idea of the public good. So it's not just about training people to read great books and have these esoteric conversations, which are extremely important. But we must not do that in isolation, because then we're siloing ourselves off from the rest of the world and concerns. And that's what leads to people being shocked when Donald Trump first comes into power. I remember walking to my class the next day, and it looked like all the mothers of all my students had died. And I was like, what's the matter? And they're like, oh, didn't you see the election? And I was like, I did. And I come from a country where we elect idiots all the time, and life will be okay. But just the kind of standstill that higher education came to and the shock of the liberals. I was like, well, you've been living in some other kind of world because you've not been paying attention. So our aim is not to create the kind of ivory tower that detaches people from the real world or the realities of life. Our aim is to provide some kind of insulation that allows us space and time for ideas and thinking to brew so that we can go out and be more integrated human beings. So that's how I see it.

John Tomasi: That's beautifully put. That's really beautifully put. Are you going to change the mission of HxA?

Amna Khalid: I'm not. I'm not.

John Tomasi: But I want to stay with it just a minute more. Yeah. I love this idea that you're pushing that part of the disenchantment or the distrust of higher education stems from a concern that it's disconnected from the real world. Let me just try a different interpretation about over the past year in particular, last year in particular. My sense is that many people were upset about what happened on college campuses, not because they thought campuses were disconnected from the real world, but because they were connected to the real world in non-intelligent ways. They were adopting simplistic narratives, whole cloth, and not developing new ideas to help us understand this complicated situation better, rather just sort of lining up and very predictably being on one side or the other. And in this case, which side they were going to be on was also predictable in advance. So I just wonder if you can say something about that. Can you add anything to that? What's your view of that?

Amna Khalid: I mean, I think, you know, when I say about being the need for us to be connected to the real world, I mean, there are many ways to be connected. And let's say taking political positions on controversial issues is not a way that a university should be connected to the real world. That's not what I mean by connection. And I think people are right to be pissed off about that. I think, you know, this started a while ago, perhaps at its peak during the George Floyd, in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, when institutions departments started making statements. And I remember having the struggle at my own school, in my own department, that was keen to make a statement. And I pushed very hard for us not to make that statement. And then eventually, after being able to tailor it in ways that I could somehow live with, so it wasn't as bad, I agreed to put my name on it. But it was an extremely reluctant thing that I did.

John Tomasi: And we're talking now about the issue of institutional neutrality.

Amna Khalid: We are talking about the issue. And I don't think institutions should be making political statements. And I think they've gotten themselves into a mess by doing that, precisely because, and it's shocking to me that they thought it was going to be simple. Like, it wasn't good. It was just a matter of time when we would have an issue that is so morally contested. It's going to be hard to take a stand on. So institutions, this is not what they need to be doing. This is going against the telos of the institution. The telos of the institution is to provide the space for critical thinking and citizenship, not to dictate what that critical thinking and citizenship looks like, right? And once you start pronouncing, have pronouncements on political and social issues, then you're actually dictating. You're chilling speech. You're essentially undermining the mission of what you're supposed to be doing. So when I say being connected to reality or the real world beyond the ivory tower, it's not to intervene in political areas as an institution. Rather, it's to provide the space so that individuals in their capacity as faculty and students can intervene. They have the freedom to speak on political matters.

John Tomasi: Let me ask for more still, still more. I would think we'd want to, I love this idea that we should be thinking about how students should be connected to the real world and that there might be a defect or at least something we can see as narrow for an education system that does not pick up that citizenship part. But I would think that we'd want them to be, universities, that's distinct kind of institutions, we'd want people to be connected to the real world in scholarly ways, in ways that brought to bear the insights of history and social science and psychology and international relations to bear on these questions, on these pressing issues. And for universities, for example, considering the conflict between Israel and Palestine in the past year of Palestinians, thinking of that conflict, we need, I think, some of these virtues like being intellectually charitable, being intellectually humble, making your case with evidence. If universities are going to help our societies make progress in these areas. So I'm not disagreeing with you, I don't think. I'm just trying to, I'm sort of...

Amna Khalid: You're pushing me, which I love.

John Tomasi: I think your two theses, here's a strong version of what I'm thinking. We can imagine a university, which is too disconnected from the real world. All it does is some version of the great books, and that's all they ever talk about. They don't even know what's going on. They don't even know who Donald Trump is. They're just doing it. On the other side, and maybe this is what I think would happen, in my views, would happen on many campuses, but I might be wrong about this last year, is we went the other way. We left behind the academic virtues of scholarship and are trying to think new thoughts. We saw large groups of students have the conclusion right at the beginning of the protests.

Amna Khalid: I'm going to disagree with that.

John Tomasi: Please do.

Amna Khalid: I'm going to disagree with it to say that I think, you know, on the quad, we saw activism. And that is the space for it. I don't think we veered off the rails. Maybe a few professors did. But within our classrooms, I think we adhered. And I think this is the conversation we need to, like, the quad is not dictated by academic freedom. This is the fundamental disconnect, right? When people talk about, oh, universities are allowing things to happen. These are essentially public squares or should be treated as such because we're creating full human beings. So to me, I mean, if we veered off in our classrooms, if we reneged on our mission of training scholars, then yes, I would say, you know, we've gone off the rails. But I don't think we did. I think most professors were in there. In fact, most professors were even out there doing teachings. So to my mind, no, I think. And I think there has to be space for people to learn how to be citizens. That is crucial. I really do think that the dual mission can be served and is served, has historically been served. And now we're suddenly trying to constrain it and straightjacket it in a way that actually, and I understand, listen, let me be very clear. I'm a strong supporter of Heterodox Academy. Why? Because there is a problem in the academy and it's been brewing for a long time. So I'm not denying the problem. But at the same time, I think that there are ways in which things can be blown out of proportion and distorted to fit another kind of narrative. And I think there are bad faith actors right now who are distorting the narrative. So, yes, there were students out there, but not every student in every university was out there doing this. A lot of them were attending their classes and those who chose to go to the protest chose to go to the protest. That's OK. But I think we're blowing it a little bit out of proportion. And I'm not surprised that we're blowing it out of proportion around the question of Palestine, because there has been a Palestinian exception to speech in higher education.

John Tomasi: Say more about that.

Amna Khalid: Well, I mean, to my mind, I think it's interesting that all of this should be blowing up at the moment when people try pushing for Palestinian rights. This is something that has been at the heart of. I mean, you've seen it happen over the course of history that professors who are pro-Palestinian get silenced or are pushed out. We've seen that happen. I mean, right now at the University of Minnesota, this is fresh. They were hiring a director for a center who was actually Israeli, scholarship on the Holocaust, but critiques the Israeli state. And guess what? The offer was rescinded. So this is not, I'm not putting out something new. This is a trend, a pattern that we're aware of. And I think there is no place for this kind of pattern in the academy. And at this moment, that's really being put to the test. But at this moment, we see how the discourse of harm has been weaponized to silence certain voices. So I'm not in favor of institutions making political statements, but I do think that it smacks of hypocrisy and a different agenda when this is the issue that they decide not to make a statement on. I think it would be, suddenly they've discovered the Kalven report, which I'm a big supporter of, but I think they're disingenuous ways of reaching for Kalven, which is what we've seen happen in most campuses. Because they're like, fuck, we don't want to make a statement. Sorry, I don't know if I was supposed to say that word. We sometimes call it the Kalven of convenience. The Kalven of convenience, right. But I'm just really struck by what you said about Palestinian speech and pro-Palestinian speech. Because it sounds like an example of what you were saying earlier in this conversation about the directionality of restrictions on free speech. The patterns are more complicated than the simple narrative that it's only in the conservatives being shut down. There are other kinds of voices and concerns that are being threatened as well, you would say it that way. Absolutely, and you see it in this case, right. If pro-Palestinian speech is being shut down, then it's not just conservatives who are being shut down. This is more complex. The issue is fundamentally not about Democrats and Republicans or conservatives or liberals.

John Tomasi: And just to be clear, you're certainly, I'm not hearing you say that pro-Israeli speech was also not being shut down.

Amna Khalid: It was shut down in some cases and it should not have been.

John Tomasi: Right. It seemed like it was widely, but it's interesting. You're pushing it on both. You're doing this multidirectional.

Amna Khalid: I am. And I think.

John Tomasi: You're HxA, though, you're doing this.

Amna Khalid: Well, I mean, I think, you know, I would want pro-Israeli speech on campus as well. It has a space, right. But I think in most instances, the reason I'm stressing the Palestine one is because that's what the vast majority of cases have been. And so that's why, and historically, there has been this trend. So I do think there's an institution where Jewish professors who are pro-Israel have been silenced, and that's not okay. And this is why I'm very, very concerned about the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism being adopted by institutions. And we know that in Texas, the governor has adopted it and told all universities and colleges to abide by that definition of antisemitism. It will fundamentally destroy any kind of intellectual inquiry about even the Holocaust. You will not be able to do it.

John Tomasi: We're coming toward the end of our conversation, but this is a topic that I really want to talk with you about. So let's just stay on for a little bit longer, if you don't mind.

Amna Khalid: I would love it.

John Tomasi: So the topic is legislative interference or legislative oversight. It depends on the eyes of the beholders see this in different ways. And as you know, and as many of our listeners know, there's a classic statement from the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, from 1915, which sets out this doctrine that says that, as I read it, that open inquiry is best defended by academic self-governance. And some people worry that, in fact, that doctrine is now outdated. The physician can no longer heal itself. If you leave professors to govern themselves, we're just going to have this terrible reproduction. I know, we're going to have revolution after revolution. That's what we do on campuses, don't we? Well, so tell me what you think about, you can talk about the AAUP statement if you like, but what I'm really interested in is what you mentioned, the Texas case. What do you think about, we're seeing so many state legislatures getting involved now. Now, in university politics, HxA is increasingly interested in these issues, too. What's your view? What's your view on that?

Amna Khalid: Okay. The year before last, last academic year, my colleague Jeff Snyder and I, we had a grant to look at anti-CRT bills that were coming up. At that point, they were just beginning to crop up across the country. And as it happened, by the time we got to doing our work, what was coming out of Florida was so intense that it was, we just decided to focus on that. It was the Stop Woke Act. The Stop Woke Act. And not just the Stop Woke Act, there's SB 266, there's a whole host of them, right? But Stop Woke Act was the center of it. And we ended up writing an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs because the state appealed the decision of the judge who granted the temporary injunction. So I've looked into it at length. And I think that there is no place for legislatures to be dictating what can and cannot be taught in American higher education, higher education in particular. So the single thing that has made American universities the envy of the world is the fact that academic freedom has been fiercely protected. And we are at a moment when it is under threat from across the political spectrum, but it's especially under threat by these legislatures, right? Like this is coming with teeth because it takes centuries to make institutions, but only decades to ruin them and probably not even decades, just a few years. So what we're seeing in Florida and places like Florida is that the outlawing of what are considered divisive concepts, which the Stop Woke Act outlines, is essentially forcing professors to commit educational malpractice. So you cannot teach with integrity if you abide by the law. And I think this is extremely dangerous. And I think we're now seeing something that has gone a step further in these states where PEN America has a great term for it, jawboning, where political actors are getting things done the way they want them done without actually making recourse to law. So it's withholding, threatening that they will withhold funding. It's like unless you abolish all your DEI offices, we're not going to give you funding anymore. And that is what happened in Wisconsin. So there are other ways of strong-arming institutions to comply with political positions, and I cannot get behind it. This will make a political football out of higher education, and it's all downhill from there. As I say often, take it from someone who comes from a country where we've done that and ruined our education system. And it's not just public education that's going to get ruined, but also private education in the United States. So those who think they're sitting cushy in private institutions better wake up, because this is the time to stand up for academic freedom. And we need to defend it across the political spectrum.

John Tomasi: Let me ask you about that critique, though, of the AAUP statement, the people who say that unless the professors protect self-governance, I'm sorry, unless the professors use their self-governance, this privilege of self-governance, privilege, I would add, within the context of a democratic society, or the professors are being empowered to make decisions, unless they use those positions of power and authority to hire faculty with diverse viewpoints, to teach in ways that are open-minded and respectful of students' own self-direction, then someone else will come in and do the job for them. And in fact, as you know, in the AAUP statement, the authors even say, if we don't do this, someone else will come in to do it for us. They don't endorse that, but they say it will happen.

Amna Khalid: It will happen.

John Tomasi: That's right. They say it will happen.

Amna Khalid: I can't tell whether they endorse it, but they say it will happen.

John Tomasi: They don't endorse it. I read it as the, this is the danger. Well, so there was a piece by Eric Kaufmann, Eric Kaufmann, who was on this podcast recently, he's very well known, as you know Eric, Eric's work, I'm sure. Working on the, he thinks there needs to be a legislative solution. The problem is personnel on some basic level. And he was very involved in working with the UK Higher Education Reform Act. And Eric has, Eric's argued that there's a distinction between two ways the state could get involved, one he doesn't like, one he does like. The state should not get involved with banning certain topics. He agrees with you on that. But he thinks the state should appropriately get involved or could appropriately get involved, or I think he might even say must get involved, given the current situation, in the way it directs resources. What do you make of that distinction? Is that what you were talking about before? Is there a role for legislatures in the direct resources?

Amna Khalid: I think there is a role.

John Tomasi: Is this hands off entirely?

Amna Khalid: No, there is a role for legislatures, but it's a very circumscribed role. And I'll tell you why, right? I don't think legislatures should be coming in and saying DEI officers need to go, because that's ideological. It smacks of ideology, right? It's not viewpoint neutral. Intervention, if there is going to be any, must be viewpoint neutral. So the places where I think legislatures could intervene, right, is, listen, we know about the administrative bloat in higher ed. They could say X percentage, not more than that, more than that will be spent on administrators. We don't see them doing that. That's not the tack any of them are taking, right? I would love it if they came in and said there is an adjunctification problem in higher education. We want to scale back what is spent on student hospitality and administration, and we want to renew faculty lines and have more tenure. That's not what they're going for. They're cutting tenure in places. They're attacking tenure directly. So to be very clear, I think legislatures have a space. I think they can intervene, but it has to be very viewpoint neutral. And it has to be about, it has to be, there's not that much room to intervene, right? Public good is best served when institutions are left to themselves. Now, does that mean that it is, they're working perfectly? No. Is there a problem in the academy? Yes. Do we need reform? Yes, but it has to come from the inside, which is where HxA becomes important. I would love for a world in which HxA became irrelevant, right? Because that's what we want. We want institutions to not be at fault because this is not a corporate institution that's trying to create a brand and reproduce itself. Our ideal vision would be that there is no need for HxA. But this is exactly what HxA can be doing right now and needs to be doing right now, which is reforming from within. And I read Eric's piece and, you know, I have great respect for Eric, but I think he's making some false connections. You know, the changes that have happened at institutions like MIT and Harvard, he credits them to the kinds of pressures that the Republicans applied. And I don't think that's the case. I mean, if you look at the ways in which there have been bodies of faculty for academic freedom that have formed in these institutions, they have worked so hard behind the scenes to take away these diversity statements. They're the ones who should be credited for it, not the Republicans who engaged in, frankly, what was a circus and disingenuous inquisition. There were many HxA members at both those universities, MIT and Harvard, working on those very policies. Precisely. In fact, some of the advisors and board members at HxA, Jeff Flier, was instrumental at Harvard.

John Tomasi: Let me go back to the Eric piece for a minute because you've added another level of complexity to his model. And I just want to say it to you as I heard it and see what you think about this. So Eric says there's two ways the legislatures could get involved, the government could get involved in university reform. One would be banning topics. He opposes that. You oppose that. And the other one, he says, it could be in directing resources. On the directing resources side, I think he has in mind programs that advocate Western values, things like that, let's say. But you're adding a little twist there. You're saying, okay, agree, we shouldn't ban topics. And they can direct resources. But then you say, but only in a viewpoint neutral way. So what that does, it means that, for example, a legislature might say, okay, state university system, you can spend no more than 15% of your budget on administration, some number.

Amna Khalid: Okay.

John Tomasi: But now in your view, that would leave the professors to decide how they teach with the remaining 85%, what they teach, how they teach. Is that how you would see it?

Amna Khalid: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And so I guess I'm just thinking if Eric were sitting here, he would say, well, we have professors who are so much on one side of the ideological spectrum. They won't give a fair points to the others.

Amna Khalid: Listen.

John Tomasi: How does that, what do we do here?

Amna Khalid: Again, there is a problem in the academy. But you know how big the academy is in the United States? It's massive, right? The vast majority of professors are doing a fine job in their classrooms. There is a minority in certain fields. I will grant that. They're a loud minority. They've had a disproportionate influence on campus culture, but the academy is not rotten. We are still producing excellent people in all walks of life. And I think there is this kind of, it's a ginned up charge, not entirely. I grant there are problems, but those problems have to be fixed from the inside. The academy has periodically been through crises like all institutions do. And that's the natural state of existence. We will always be solving some kind of problem, right? And that's okay. But we cannot have heavy-handed intervention. Reform comes from within, and it is happening. Like I said, there are these faculty who've managed to get a lot done at these institutions within the last two years or less, 18 months. And I think there are many, look at your HxA communities that have sprouted across the country and beyond, and they are committed. I think it's a matter of time, and it's a matter of just things will change, and things are changing. So I'm not worried about reform from within. I am very worried about attacks from the outside. I'm confident that the academy will reform. It'll take time, right? This problem wasn't made yesterday. I put a lot of blame at the feet of tenured professors who shut their eyes and locked themselves up in their ivory towers and got disconnected from reality. I think a lot is to be, they have a lot to answer for. But I think there is space and room for change, and it's happening. But I do not think we can shut our eyes to the attacks from outside because they're coming, and they're coming in very, very coordinated and planned ways.

John Tomasi: And one of the things that we've been noticing when we think about these legislative interventions is that there's an instability about them because politics is so unstable. So in the UK, they passed the Higher Education Reform Act, and yet it's already, we're seeing it not being implemented with any kind of enthusiasm, it being watered down in various ways. Before we came into the studio this afternoon, you and I were talking about the AAUP statement, nerding out, as it were, on these classic documents. But you said something about it that really struck me that I'd never thought about before. And you said that you thought that statement is not far from being outdated.

Amna Khalid: It's visionary.

John Tomasi: It is. Can you just say about, will you remember that for our listeners?

Amna Khalid: I absolutely adore the 1915 AAUP statement. And I will take on anyone who wants to argue with me about that, whether they're from DEI who say that this was white men in a room, and therefore this does not reflect what the academy should be doing, or from their right who say that this is giving too much autonomy to professors to do whatever they want. Both interpretations are wrong. And I seldom come out this strong on something, but I will on this one. And I'll tell you why. Because they anticipated the various pressure points that can be a source of undermining the mission of higher education, both from inside and outside. And like you said, they say that if we don't do this from within, people are going to come from outside. They have thought three steps ahead. These were true visionaries. This statement actually enshrines academic freedom, but it does it so beautifully because it says academic freedom entails academic responsibility. So within it, as a document, as a guide, it has built into it a self-correcting mechanism. It doesn't give you that right without any responsibility. It's a very responsible way of thinking about education. So you can't, academic freedom is not free speech. And this is what I think people get confused about often. Faculty members get confused about this. I think everyone needs an education in the distinction between the two. And so to me, the way they've enshrined academic freedom in that document is the most responsible, well-thought-out, and most forward-looking way. This is not an outdated document. And also, for those who say, oh, this was written by white men. I mean, I just had this argument with someone recently. Just look at the number of times that document has been revisited. It is revisited regularly. And they're like, oh, it was this in 1940. I'm like, no, it was again in the 1970s, periodically. And look at the people on Committee A who are reviewing this. These are not white men who are reviewing them. And also to think, if you think that you cannot rise above your identity, you shouldn't be in the business of education. Because I like to teach my students that they're more than what they look like. And that's what we should be empowering them with. We shouldn't be reducing them to what they look like. That is a flawed approach to education. It's not education.

John Tomasi: Amna Khalid, it's been a pleasure to have you on Heterodox Out Loud.

Amna Khalid: It's been so much fun, John. I love this.

John Tomasi: Thank you.

Amna Khalid: Thank you.