Will Brehm  0:13
Neal Hutchens, welcome back to FreshEd.

Neal Hutchens  0:23
Thanks so much, Will. It’s great to be back and join you again.

Will Brehm  1:23
It’s quite amazing. We spoke five years ago, basically to the day, and back then we were talking about free speech and university campuses. And here we are five years later talking virtually about the same thing, but a slightly different emphasis. And so, by way of some context, I should say that we are recording this show on April 30th where you’re sitting, May 1st, where I’m sitting, listeners will hear this on May 5th, or May 6th. So, a lot could change on what’s happening in US higher education by then. So, that’s a little caveat that we’ll start with. But just to start, you know, campus protests in the US since about mid-April, have just spread like wildfire. And this morning, I looked at the New York Times, and they estimate that something like 1,100 students, and some faculty members have been arrested. What on earth is going on here? Can you give us a little bit of context for those who reside outside of the United States?

Neal Hutchens  2:17
Sure. And of course, there are layers of complexity. But at the risk of oversimplifying it, much like the rest of the world after we had the events in October, and certainly we now have happened in Israel, and then we have military action that has taken place in Palestinian territories in Gaza. From the get-go, there were tensions on college campuses. We saw college presidents in the United States actually would stumble an issue and then reissue and then try to clarify statements, because even from the beginning, there have been tensions. And I think we have to, of course, acknowledge that these are incredibly serious matters. We have some viewpoints that are certainly in opposition that are clashing. So, if you were to look at anyone who follows social media, or follows coverage of these issues, we have very real armed conflict, people are being hurt. You have allegations of genocide, for instance, that have been directed toward Israel, you have individuals who are in support of Israel have said that this is an existential threat, and these are necessary action. So, these are very real-world events that have consequences where people are suffering and dying. And there are people that certainly have their passionate views. It’s not something that’s certainly simplistic. And so just as the rest of the world many places are very concerned with this, we have had a similar level of concern and kind of continual ratcheting up on college and university campuses. And so, I think that this has also been not just on campuses, but for instance, we had the testimony that was certainly well covered where university presidents who all happened to be women were brought before Congress for testimony. Actually, the fallout from that testimony led to several resignations. And so, we’ve also seen in the larger societal and political environment, a ratcheting up over these issues and a polarization that has increased. In some of the more recent protests, I think some of the things that we’ve seen had been calls that colleges and universities should divest from Israel in terms of at least investments that might relate to enterprises that have a military application. We’ve also seen calls on campuses from Jewish students and others, that there are threats that are being directed against individuals or that there’s a lot of speech and expression that is anti-semitic, and that calls in reporting that you have students who are Jewish, or individuals who support Israel, that they feel threatened, they don’t feel safe on college campuses. But again, if we look at most of the protests, and they’re certainly counter protesters, we’ve seen again, this polarization that we see in the world that we also see in our larger society; a push to try to get more of a commitment, or to see the realization of demands. Also in recent days, which has really been a dramatic turn at some campuses especially fast, you’ve seen campus leaders, if they’re faced with an encampment seem to have been pretty quick to call out police from outside the campus to respond and to arrest. And we’ve had students certainly and others that have been arrested and including faculty members. The coverage at Emory University is an interesting example -a troubling example might be a better term- because at Emory there have actually been, it’s merged with, but there were a lot of tensions in the Atlanta area based on a police training site that there had been prior protests involving Emory over this. It somewhat has merged with some of the more recent protests, because of at least as I understand the reporting, the police training site was also being used to train law enforcement officials from Israel. And so, at Emory, for instance, we have this most recent wave of protest and dissent that has come from the events after October, but it also merged with some tensions that had been there on campus already. And so that could well be happening on other campuses as well. We’ve seen at University of Southern California; I think it is essentially canceling commencement speakers. So, it’s something that really is occurring across the nation at colleges and universities, both public and private.

It’s quite interesting. And I like the way you’re sort of looking generally across the states and looking at universities, but also sort of how local issues within any one university are sort of dovetailing in with what’s going on. And like you said, it’s ramping up. It’s strange to think that the war in Gaza started six months ago and its sort of only now that we’re seeing this sort of acute stage of protesting on college campuses in the US where there are these encampments, and the tent becoming sort of the symbol of these protests, and then the reaction by the universities of calling in the police. It’s the police presence on campuses, the mass arrests that are happening, and that’s the thing that just makes it seem like oh, my gosh, why is this happening now, when it’s been going on for so long, but I think you giving that longer history of, it’s actually different disruptions and issues have been happening since October, and probably even before the war in Gaza, as well, like calls for divestment, for instance, that’s an ongoing sort of call in many universities. But I want to focus in on this more recent period, like in the last two weeks, because it’s so unusual, or it’s just sort of frightening to see police officers on campuses, treating students and faculty in some rather brutal ways and being captured in social media and in the news. So, how common is it for police to be called on to college campuses?

It is something that happens. I think, also something to think about in what we’re seeing is that a lot of college campuses, both public and private, may have some level of police force that actually may be authorized under state law to have certain kinds of police powers. And so, those might be individuals that maybe through the training and what they’re used to on a college campus, they may come out sometimes when there are events that there is a concern or something. Again, the idea that you have a speaker on campus that causes a protest or counter protesters, while not of the scale that we’ve seen in recent days, because just as we know, we were talking about this five years ago, it’s not gone away. This has been a persistent part or facet of higher education now for multiple years. But what’s been unusual about, I think, these most recent wave of protests -and I think there will be a lot of introspection at a lot of campuses- is the fact that at some campuses, it seems like police that were external to the institution -so, it wasn’t actually the campus police force- were called in and in really large numbers to pretty quickly move in and for instance, clear encampments, charged people with trespass. Some institutions, I believe it was Ohio State, for instance, people noted that police snipers were being set up on buildings in response to these protests. So, what people on campus students and faculty and staff and others really viewed as really something akin to kind of militarization of campus. And I think that that’s going to be a point where there’s going to have to be a lot of searching and consideration of, was it the correct call, at least at some campuses to so quickly move to bring in police, especially police, who were outside police forces to the campus. Did that potentially exacerbate the situation? And again, going back to Emory, that’s a campus that you already had tensions between many on the campus community in relation to the local police. And so, I think that is still playing out. We know, for instance, that in Columbia, I think it is in the last day or so we’ve had occupation of a building. Brown University, it looks like there’s been some kind of a negotiation where encampments will cease because there’s going to be the ability to bring a divestment vote before the Governing Board of Brown. So, it looks like in Brown, there was some effort to engage in conversation and negotiation on this process. We’ve seen much more of a hardline approach at other institutions. I think if anyone is seeing the images at University of Texas at Austin, that was a very dramatic response. And I think it happened very quickly as well.

Will Brehm
Who makes the decision as to how a university is going to respond to say protesters? Like the negotiation at Brown University sounds like one avenue  and then there’s other avenues where police officers outside the campus police come on campus to control the issue in a rather harsh way. Where does that decision lie?

Neal Hutchens
In many instances, and I think, for instance, and this is something that we can explore more is this distinction about free speech rights -and there are important legal distinctions between public colleges and universities and private colleges and universities. In practice, they may have some of the same practices, but there are different legal standards that would apply. So, often, unless it’s truly something that the police force external to the campus probably deemed a true security or public safety threat, probably going to wait for an invitation from campus leaders. And so that really may be a crisis team that probably already there’s a plan for those individuals -a communication plan, certainly with campus, presidents, provosts, individuals who are on the police force, again, many colleges and universities have campus police forces, instead of the leadership of the police force, oftentimes will have the leaders of Student Affairs. So, vice presidents or vice chancellors of student affairs, they’ll be key members in managing these kinds of campus events. But it’s gonna be a small team that’s dealing with those issues. I think we also have to acknowledge in this polarization and ratcheting up there’s also an awful lot of political pressure on campus leaders that are coming at the federal and the state levels. And so, I think it’s hard to ignore that you probably in different states have had pressure on university presidents to react very strongly. So, you’re asking about police on campus, well something that I would say is pretty unprecedented, we had the US Speaker of the House of Representatives decide to go to Columbia University. And so, I’m not sure that that really helped to tamp down this very tense situation. If anything, it may be helped to ratchet things up. But it also was very much the Speaker of the House seemed intent on making points and putting pressure on Columbia University and other kinds of institutions. I think that could have been what we also saw in Texas. And you also have to admit, if you read the news coverage, and it is political leaders, but it’s not just coming from political leaders. You certainly have students who are Jewish, who have expressed that they don’t feel safe on campus, and the notion that you’ve had urgings of well maybe you should go home, and you’ve seen conversion. Again, I think it was at Columbia, that shifting to online or hybrid because students not feeling safe. And as we unpack and think about free speech, certainly any kind of behavior or action that truly rises to a threat, you have really wide agreement from the ACLU, Pan America Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, those kinds of actions are not protected. And certainly, institutions can take action to protect the health and safety of individuals. But within this state of unrest that we have on campuses, I think you probably have multiple individuals and groups with multiple messages and so, sorting through that, I think, can be a particularly difficult task for college leaders.

Will Brehm  13:24
Yeah, you’re raising two really interesting issues I want to dig into. One is sort of the politics around it, because it seems like these protests are a forum to fight out some of the political divisions across the wider society. And so, hence why you might see the Speaker of the House go to Colombia for his own gains -his own political interests- rather than actually trying to calm the situation. And then you have this issue of safety and disruption and its connection to academic freedom. And maybe we’ll start with that. I mean, it seems like just reading the news -I don’t live in the States so, I haven’t been to any of these protests or campuses. But it seems like people of all different sorts of stripes, let’s say, are unsafe. It just seems like campuses are so unsafe with the police being there causing a lot of harsh treatment, to Jewish students who felt some of the rhetoric coming from the protesters makes them feel unsafe. So, it just seems like there’s just no safety going on for many of the people on campus.

Neal Hutchens  14:26
I think that what you hit on is really important. And this is where there’s going to have to be -in this current wave of the last 10 to 15 years plus of activism on campuses- a new moment of reckoning or recalibration, because we essentially are faced with these very dueling positions on what is happening. So, for instance, protesters that are in support of Palestine -which one would note that also includes Jewish students, that includes Palestinian students, that includes other students, that may include individuals who work on campus- that you’ll see the position has been that protests are peaceful, they don’t present a threat to health and safety, and acknowledging maybe that on the fringes, individuals might be doing something that goes beyond just protest. But certainly, as what you just said, this kind of dueling, I don’t feel safe. You have contingents of students on campus, you also will have faculty and staff on campus who will say that they feel that they are being targeted and harassed and being made to encounter anti-semitic speech on a daily basis, and that they don’t feel comfortable working or studying. And so, this issue of trying to sort out and to find the space where people can feel safe, and their rights can be respected, it’s incredibly hard. And I also think that it is wonderful that we’re having this conversation, but something that I often talk about when I’m on panels, or other moments that I’m talking to individuals who work on campus, it’s very hard when the temperature is really high, and people are feeling -for instance, if you have students who are protesting what they view as genocide, if you go up and say, “Let’s talk about the First Amendment”, or “Let’s talk about time, place and manner restrictions”. Or if you have a student who may be Jewish, and they feel that they are just running a gauntlet of anti-semitic speech every day, and that they’re being threatened, if you go up to them and say, “Well, you know, we have a campus speech policy”, it’s very hard to have those conversations to set the rules in the heat of the moment. And I think that is some of where we are that our rules maybe weren’t functioning as well as we hoped or thought they were, but then trying to reset and lower the temperature, it’s just very hard in the moment. People are not necessarily -they don’t want to hear me talk about forum analysis for public colleges and universities and about time, place and manner restrictions and those kinds of things. And I think that we’ve moved into that stage where it is those conversations will probably in reflection going to have to come later. Although we do see efforts like Brown. I really do applaud that. I think that was an effort to say let’s don’t really turn to a militarization of the campus or police. Let’s see if we can use dialogue and conversation to move to another space, at least for now.

Will Brehm  17:11
One of the things you mentioned in our interview five years ago, you said something about student protests becoming an educational moment and sort of saying, “Is it possible to see them as a way of growing students’ educational opportunities while they are on campus”? Is that how you see what happened at Brown in a way through that dialogue, was that an educational moment? Or, you know, is there any way to see what is happening on the campuses today, the big polarization and huge protests; is it possible to see them as educational, do you think?

Neal Hutchens  17:43
I think they can be. Again, it may be hard in very heated moments that we lose the educational value. Some of the education may come later, and it may become as we really dissect and think about what happened in the events and how we got to places where we have police that are in their riot gear, and they’re throwing professors, and they’re throwing students on the ground and arresting them. Because I can’t imagine any college president two weeks ago, if you had said, “Hey, would you be really excited about having tactical police come in and start arresting students and your faculty and staff and individuals”. That’s not what they wanted, either. So, I think that this is an ongoing conversation -more than a conversation, but an exploration. Even our conversation from five years ago, that we’re still searching for the tools and the ways that we can have expression in protest on campus and think about essentially, what should we tolerate? What’s acceptable? When does it move into a space that, no, we’re not going to allow it? And also thinking about other ways to think about the tools of engagement? So, I think it can be, but I’m not sure in the heat of the moment, if that’s going to happen as much. And I think from one perspective for students -so much of what we want in our classrooms is for our students to care and be engaged with something besides just themselves. So, you have students who very much are engaged in caring about these affairs of the world that are critically important. So, then do we want to say, “Oh, we were just kidding. We really don’t want you to care, too much. Care, some but not too much”. So, we have to continue, I think, to think as a society -and that’s where colleges and universities can really help us think about these issues, about how we can engage with each other’s humanities, and find a way to work through these points of really sharp -disagreement doesn’t even cover it. These are worldviews that are clashing. And I do think something else that’s changed from five years ago, even though we might have thought it was harsh then; the political environment has become so much more coarse, and it has become so much more of a willingness for individuals just to really seek to eviscerate their political opponents and what they say. So, in some ways, maybe our campuses are also reflecting a larger societal challenge that we have; that how do we mediate when we have fundamental important disagreements?

Will Brehm  20:16
Five years ago, when we spoke, one of the things you mentioned was that at the time, the reason that we sort of talked was because there was all of these sorts of right-wing conservative speakers getting canceled from giving talks at different universities, and that was causing a great outcry. And one of the things you mentioned was that organizations like Turning Point USA was sort of using this moment, and the idea of academic freedom being compromised by canceling some of these right-wing speakers, and you were saying that it was sort of camouflaging some of their other political interests at play. And I just wonder, do you think something similar is happening today?

Neal Hutchens  20:55
I think there are many actors involved in current protests, or their view that speech on campus is threatening that they’re coming from a place of good faith. But I definitely think that we have some actors in some organizations that they’re seizing on this as a moment, instead of really providing state personship to provide leadership they’re seeing it as a place to score points. And I’ll pick on someone. I’ll pick on Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. I talked about earlier, after the events of October were unfolding, you had some college presidents that would issue statements, reissue another statement, they were struggling with balance. DeSantis was very quick to come in and try to ban pro-Palestinian student groups. And this is the same DeSantis, along with others, who had used anti critical race theory sentiment to try to ban speech and expression. I think in a vein similar to Turning Point -I don’t think that this is engaging in these issues of speech and expression in a way of what I would really term is good faith. I think in DeSantis, this case, he was running a losing political campaign against Donald Trump, Republican primary, and was trying to find things that would resonate and bring in voters. And so, I do think that we have had this use of speech and this idea of free speech and even academic freedom, that it really is hiding or camouflaging political interest or points that I’m not really sure that the supporters necessarily are that concerned about free speech and expression as much as whatever ideological viewpoint that they’re wanting to push, or whether they’re wanting to get voters, that really has tended to motivate them. And I think that the rush, for instance, it was noted by many people that when university presidents were called in front of Congress, I think they’ve all been women. We had several women of color, we weren’t necessarily getting -even though the majority of probably leaders would be male, and probably still white male at many colleges and universities- it didn’t really seem that those hearings were meant to get us to think and reflect as much as to attack and to score political points. So, I think that leadership on these issues has not necessarily been focused on always, again, trying to build those bridges across humanity and lower the temperature. It’s been about this is something that’s in the headlines, and I can latch on to this, and I can get political gain from this.

Will Brehm  23:22
And so, then universities, they’re responding within this really politicized environment. One of the things that I was reading about preparing for this interview was there’s currently a bill going through Congress, I think it’s passed the House of Representatives, and it’s in the Senate now. And when it passed the House of Representatives, I should say it was by a huge majority. I think only 11 people voted against it. But the bill basically gives the Treasury Secretary the right to revoke the tax-exempt status of a nonprofit organization if that organization is deemed to basically support terrorism. You know, for me, this was quite surprising, because FreshEd is technically a nonprofit organization, and when we fill out all the paperwork, we actually have to agree in the paperwork that we won’t support terrorists in the paperwork. So, now all of a sudden, there’s this bill that might become law that is giving a huge amount of power to the Treasury Secretary to basically revoke nonprofit status. And I wonder if university presidents are worried about this, because so many universities are nonprofit, and I would imagine losing their tax exemption would be really problematic to that institution. And so, to what extent is that perhaps dictating how presidents are responding and administrations are responding to these encampments?

Neal Hutchens  24:40
I think that the pressure -I do think it’s very real. I think that’s one of the reasons in some states at least, we saw a very quick reaction to mobilize police to respond to demonstrators. Even in this legislation, you will see members of Congress may say, “We’ve got to be careful though”. Because let’s think about this from a political framing. As you said, there’s a pretty big continuum between supporting terrorism. So, actually supporting the killing and destruction of people in a country versus a political standpoint that, for instance, if one believes that actions that Israel has taken in Gaza are not appropriate, that even can rise to genocide. I mean, that’s often been the statement. That is hard to square that that’s not speech that’s protected by the First Amendment. So, I think one of the things that’s happening in this kind of rush in this environment is we’re conflating and piling a lot of different ideas and speech together. So, for instance, let me be very clear, while I’m an advocate of free speech, if you have individuals who are targeting students, or faculty or staff or others and threatening them and saying that you don’t deserve to live because I think you’re Jewish, or because you support Israel. That’s clearly not permissible. But again, I think in this environment, things have gotten conflated but also jumbled together. So, I do think -going back to your point about this legislation- I think at the federal and the state level, you have leaders who are very sensitive to the pressure that they’re getting. We know that that’s a very public expression of lawmakers and their views on this issue. But we know behind the scenes, there have to be a lot of phone calls, there has to be a lot of messaging. Another component in this and I think that we have to acknowledge that this is very important, and we’ve seen this play out in institutions; colleges and universities, both public and private, are very much reliant on donors, especially large donors. And so, the pressure that the donor community and donors can play. In some ways that may be a concern that a college or university president might could see more likely to materialize than, for instance, loss of tax-exempt status under federal legislation. If you have a donor who’s maybe committed $100 million but communicates to the President very well, maybe directly, you know, “I think they’ve just got anti-semitic speech and episodes running amok on this campus. So, I’m gonna pull my donations”, that’s a very powerful message that a college or university president is receiving. And so, while we like to say, perhaps, or imagine that colleges and universities have certain purity about the First Amendment or speech. No, there are a lot of other signals and messages that university leaders are going to have to sort through and respond to.

Will Brehm  27:23
And I think this is where some of the hypocrisy sort of emerges, because as we sort of talked about before, like Black students on campus who feel unsafe because of some threatening speech towards them, they aren’t treated in the same way, as some of the students today sort of saying they feel unsafe because of anti-semitic speech. And both might be true, but the way in which universities respond seem to be different.

Neal Hutchens  27:48
I think that that’s an important point. And I think that’s where we’re going to have to have a lot of reckoning about. And I think piracy is an appropriate term. When we spoke several years ago, and in the intervening years, often a scenario that will happen is that you will have, for instance, a white nationalist, or group of white nationalists, if we think of what happened near the University of Virginia campus, or Richard Spencer, who was essentially a white supremacist, neo Nazi type would travel around to campuses and students would talk about feeling unsafe, and the response would often be, “Well, we believe strongly in the First Amendment. Free speech principles are important. Just because you may find something offensive, or you subjectively may feel uncomfortable, that’s still protected speech”. Not so many years ago, students who were complaining and they tended to be Black students and students of color complaining and talking about feeling unsafe for campus, we used terms like snowflakes to describe that position.

Will Brehm
Which means what for our international listeners, what would snowflake mean?

Neal Hutchens
Well, snowflake just meant that they thought that they were very special, and that they were unique, but that they were very fragile, and really any kind of challenge could make them crumble. And so, our conversation from five years ago, and the intervening years, we saw for instance, there were a number of states that enacted campus speech laws with the notion that too many colleges and universities were tamping down on unpopular speech. And so, in addition to the First Amendment at many public colleges and universities also may have a state law that can govern access to campus for students and others who didn’t seem to necessarily be from some quarters that maybe now are rushing in to say that we need to police literally speech that is anti-semitic. That some of those same individuals, I think it would be interesting to go back and look at their statements when, for instance, Black students were saying, “We’re not comfortable with the Neo Nazis being on campus”. I know that my own former institution, University of Mississippi several years ago -University of Mississippi was a place, Mississippi in general but University of Mississippi, was a point of focus of civil rights movements and desegregation in the United States- it has tended to be a place where Neo Confederate as  they’re termed, or Neo Nazi types loved to march into the town or the campus. We had an incident one time when I was teaching and I had students, they were graduate students, but many were students of color, and we were very much processing this fear. Because similar to now, you had groups that were very savvy on social media. So, would say things about what they thought should happen to people of color, etc., etc. But you didn’t have -part of the pushback was, “Well, we’ve got the First Amendment, we’ve got free speech, you’ve got to allow even speech that makes you feel uncomfortable”. So, I think that is going to be one of the most important points for reflection  and reckoning is to think about that if we have a standard, for instance, if we think that individuals or if they’re feeling unsafe and uncomfortable on campus, and that’s a standard that should be able to censor certain kinds of speech, we have to be really careful to make sure that when we’re moving forward that we’re going to apply those standards in the same way. Because I can tell you, or almost predict with great certainty at some of these campuses, it may be six months, or it may be a year, there’s going to be a group that’s going to show up on campus that is going to make students feel uncomfortable. And they are maybe not Jewish students, but students of color or another student population, and what is the university president going to do when those students show up and say, “I feel uncomfortable because this group is on campus, and they say things that make me feel unsafe”?

Will Brehm  31:26
Right. Will the police be called? And then is it just going to be the police being called every time there’s any disruption?

Neal Hutchens  31:32
Well, think about a state like Texas, which very much has open carry laws, I think it even has concealed carry laws. And so, what happens in Texas, when you have a group that shows up and they’re armed because they’re allowed to be armed and students are like, “I don’t feel safe”? Are the leaders in Texas and at the public colleges and other institutions in Texas going to say, “Well, based on what we did in the previous protest, I guess we need to call out outside police and have them in their SWAT gear, essentially, or their riot gear to make sure that these students feel safe”. So, that’s going to be ongoing conversation, I think, at a lot of campuses, and it’s going to be hard for some institutional leaders to articulate well, we were able to call out the police and do these things during the most recent protests, but we can’t do it now because they’re gonna have to probably do some self-reflection. Is it because you don’t have the governor or a senator or other people calling and saying you have to do this.

Will Brehm  32:28
So, by way of conclusion, what you’re mentioning now is a lot about these future issues that are going to have to be worked out. And I think you’re right; there’s some big issues that are both legal and political, that are going to have to be worked out on campuses, and will probably look differently in different states and in different campuses. And that public and private divide probably will come in quite clearly there. But I want to maybe reflect on history because I know you teach about student activism in the US. Many people have connected these current protests to the student protests from the 1960s -1968 in particular, during the sort of height of the Vietnam War, and students trying to get more voice on campus. What can we learn by looking at, say, those protests from the 1960s? What can we learn today that might help us shape that future that you are sort of pointing to?

Neal Hutchens  33:18
I think that there are probably multiple lessons that we can draw. I think that one on reflection that we’re going to draw from, and I suspect this is going to be true on multiple campuses, is mobilizing police to remove truly peaceful protesters, even for instance, if it is an encampment that is a technical violation of a campus standard; that really needs to be your last resort. While safety of individuals is paramount, I think that we’re going to see a general recognition that quickly pulling out armed police and snipers and other things that what you do, the dissension that you create on the campus community, the ill will that it creates between students and administration and also between faculty and staff and leadership, that’s going to be a long-term issue at a lot of college campuses. And so, this may be a lesson that we have to relearn about when do we call this out. I think a lesson that a lot of institutions had engaged in in recent years, but also that it shows clearly some refinement along similar lines is that in those protests of the 60s, if we think about the free speech movement, for instance, at UC Berkeley. Initially, again, we did kind of call out this mobilization that would happen with student protests. You do have a lot of institutions that have instituted teams, maybe we’ll call them some kind of a free speech and expression response team to not immediately go to police and kind of more regimented responses. But we’ve probably seen that there’s a gulf between that level of response versus when we call in law enforcement. And I think that’s a lesson that we can take from now and we can also take in reflection, is that I think just like if we again with Berkeley that was really a new time for campus speech. And that was not just at Berkeley, it was at other institutions. I’ll put in a plug, we often forget, for instance, HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities, they were key to the demonstration movements and free speech and expression in the United States. And colleges and universities had to learn to view students as adults, as having voices, that they weren’t children. I think that some of the lessons that we now need to take are when our students enter our campus, how are ways that we engage them as those adults? We want them to care. We want them to be involved in world events and local events, and not just to be focused on themselves, but how do we help them understand what are the norms of standards for our campus that are applied in a truly fair and even-handed manner. Where we don’t have privileged groups that one set of rules are going to apply to because the Speaker of the House has shown up on campus. But that we truly honor those rules and those standards for all groups and individuals on campus. And really, I talked about earlier, it’s so hard in the heat of the moment to have those kinds of discussions. Maybe it’s a lesson we completely didn’t learn even from what happened then, but this is another moment to think about -with civic engagement, with when students are coming into campus before we have the protests- can we really talk as a community about what our standards are. And while we value speech and expression also use that as an educational moment, then, to really think about our shared humanity and treating others as we want to be treated. That would be my hope. Maybe I’m being too idealistic there. But I would hope that those are some of the kinds of lessons and looking at the past but also through the lens of the past, but thinking about how we’ve maybe replicated some of the same mistakes and issues.

Will Brehm  36:51
Well, Neal Hutchens, thank you so much for joining FreshEd again. Always a pleasure to talk and I’m looking forward to what’s going to happen on university campuses in the coming days, in the coming weeks, in the coming months.

Neal Hutchens  37:01
Thank you so much.

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