HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome my guest today, Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers University, and Jeremy Haefner, president of the University of Denver.

They're members of a new consortium that wants to bring civic renewal to civil society and to their campuses.

The group is called College Presidents for Civic Preparedness.

Jonathan, starting with you.

Thank you for being here today.

Appreciate your time and insight.

What motivated you and Rutgers to join this group of leaders for civic preparedness?

HOLLOWAY: Thanks for having me, and thanks for this conversation.

The way it started was actually sort of happenstance.

I was introduced to Raj Vinnakota, the head of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

And an individual knew we both were of like mind about our concern about civic preparedness, about democracy, et cetera.

We sat down and started talking, and Raj had been really trying to wrestle with how to connect with students, how to connect with universities because he understands, as we both do, this is the future.

This is our vehicle to actually preserving democracy and strengthening our institutions.

So we hit it off from the beginning, and then it's like, well, how do we, what do we do?

So there's a lot of brainstorming, starting small, with an eclectic group of universities and colleges, and then for all kinds of reasons important and perhaps tragic the idea can connect with others.

And we have grown at a really quite remarkable pace since going live about 18 months ago, I think now.

HEFFNER: Jeremy, if you can also share the story of your joining this consortium, if you did from the founding stage and your connection to the work.

HAEFNER: Well, yes, and thank you for including me in this, really important discussion.

And have great respect for Jonathan as well.

So I think it's going to be a delightful conversation that we're going to have.

My story's a little different.

Back in '21, we announced a major effort around civil discourse, freedom of expression, pluralism, and we started kind of organically looking at what could we do to lift up on our campus.

And then I heard about College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, and Raj and of course the Citizens and Scholar group.

And I said, I got to join that, I got to be part of those conversations.

There's great minds around the table, and no doubt they have really great practices that we could learn from.

So I kind of invited myself to the table, if you will, and Raj was gracious enough to invite me in.

So it's been a really delightful organization to be involved with.

HEFFNER: The timing, also perfect to address a constellation of crises, geopolitically, and also they're born out on your campuses.

I don't know if you would call it a crisis, a concern, but this past spring in commencement season, you've seen a resurgence of student activism that we hadn't recognized maybe since Vietnam, possibly on some small scale since 9/11 or the war in Iraq.

And it was important for me to assemble a group of diverse leaders, geographically, because I think diversity is the strength of America fundamentally, geographically, racially, in terms of our civic creed, what makes us distinctively good at what we do as Americans.

So, starting with you, Jeremy, how have you thought about the campus protests in light of your being a member of this group and wanting to respond as a university in a way that is consistent with the values of civic life that you want to foster civic renewal, a constructive outcome ultimately for those protesting and for all members of your institution?

HAEFNER: Look, the way I look at protests and whether they're temporary or these encampments that we're experiencing, done peacefully, done respectfully, done within the policies and the guidelines of what constitutes good behavior, they are definitely a form of free expression.

And so for those of us who really are dedicated to free expression and pluralism and civil discourse, this is what we do at universities and colleges in a big way.

And helping students and faculty and staff who might be involved in these protests find their voice and have their voice heard is absolutely critical in this, in this process.

It is part of our democratic way of life, in my opinion.

The country got founded on disagreement, if you will, and what came out of that was a great government, a great institution, and it's not perfect.

And that's what we're seeing in today is that there's disagreement and we just really need to foster an environment where we can have these civil discourse conversations.

So to me, it's fundamental.

HEFFNER: Jonathan, the same question to you.

How has civic preparedness and your focus on that, predating these protests, informed the way you've responded to protesters, who may be engaged peacefully, those who've in your mind or the institution's mind violated the boundary of what turns from civil disobedience into violent or bigoted, hateful expressions or violence?

Where have you drawn that line and how has your organization, your participation in civic preparedness prepared you for this moment?

HOLLOWAY: A wonderful question.

I'll answer in one second.

I want to go back to a question you framed all of this with, is this a crisis or something else?

I think it's a full-blown crisis, to be honest.

I think that this moment on campuses, as we are seeing the commitment to free speech and discourse and, and civil discourse or civil disobedience running straight into these issues of boundary issues, at what point does something become unacceptable?

And we've already touched on a little bit of that.

Now, I'll jump off from there, but I do think it's a crisis.

I absolutely agree with Jeremy that as the US historian by training made me so happy, this is exactly what this country is founded on.

And I think those who are against this kind of civil disobedience or these protests are failing to understand or remember that it is part of the lifeblood of this country.

Now, do I like it at this moment, given my position?

Not at all.

I mean, I'm human, and this what makes it so very difficult.

But the fact is this feels like a profound personal and professional test, in addition to being a civics test, a community test, a democratic test.

So ironically, at the start of this semester in this academic year, and this comes right out of my experience with Citizens and Scholars and the College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, I committed to give a convocation address dealing with free speech, civic discourse in some way.

My speech to 8000 1st year students in the New Brunswick campus at Rutgers University was titled, Listening, making the point like, we're really good at talking in this country.

We're even better at yelling.

Unfortunately, we are terrible at listening.

And so I told these young people, at some point in your Rutgers experience, you're going to find yourself faced with an idea or an expression or a speaker who you find deeply offensive, deeply troubling.

The question is, what are you going to do then?

And I offered my thoughts about we needed to do then.

I didn't know six weeks later things would turn upside down.

What has been very hard for someone who believes deeply in the need for people to raise their voices.

And I'm thrilled that people are awake and they're active.

I think that's a great thing.

Let's not lose sight of that.

But what has been very hard is that as these students have woken up, they seem to have flown by these guardrails these markers, what I'll call decency, a respect for others' opinions, a desire to listen and to learn.

And this is what I think is the seed bed of the crisis, it's not that people are speaking up.

We can check that box.

They're doing that.

Part of the crisis is they're speaking up in the most base ways with vulgarisms.

I mean, this is part of youth, I understand that, but in hateful ways as well, in ways where I don't really think they fully understand what they're talking about.

They aren't fully informed in ways that I think are reckless.

And really, when I think of a community in ways that are fundamentally harmful to a community's ability to recuperate after something is resolved.

So I'm deeply concerned about this, and it's not for me so much about the speech as it is about the conduct.

And that's where things start to veer into, okay, we've crossed a bright line here.

And at Rutgers specifically, we had an encampment like so many other universities, and it was peaceful, although a lot of people didn't like them.

I wasn't a fan of them, but people were being quiet and respectful.

There were some posters or signs that I wish never had been put up, but they were all protected speech, and then they moved into intentionally disrupting the work of the university.

And so now you've gone into a different place where your conduct is the issue, not your speech.

But having said that, we took our action and we don't go down that rabbit hole.

One of the difficult issues is that there is such impatience in our country, such a low tolerance for difference, that looking at my inbox, there's plenty of people who basically, we had conversations with people in the encampment and we reached an agreement in the encampment dispersed.

They wanted us to go in and crack some heads and arrest people.

There's a history of that in this country as well.

I think we can be better than that, and listening is key to it.

HEFFNER: That really helpful, and I'd love to ask Jeremy, where Jonathan left off, this question of decency.

We often talk about standardized testing, testing one's aptitude for reading comprehension.

Maybe if you're taking an SAT 2.

I'm some years removed from this, but you would do listening comprehension, not in the American ethos, or consistent with what we would aspirationally refer to as decency, or aspire for a higher bar of decency.

So is it not the case that, one thing I've been quite bewildered by, from every institution you represent public and private here, that somehow the interview went by the wayside, the importance of discerning the character of a student, and I do wonder if this is a lot of those chickens coming home to roost here in the absence of interviews, the absence of assessing, not some patriarchal sense of decor or civility, but a real pulse when it comes to decency, honor, and pluralistic respect.

You use the word pluralism, Jeffrey.

Is there some soul searching going on in thinking about the enrollment in matriculation of students and how we got to the encampments to begin with?

HAEFNER: That's a big question, but I love to dive in on that one.

I guess I would say a couple of things.

First of all, we, we can't underestimate what the pandemic did to our young people and how they did or didn't learn certain social skills because they were isolated.

We are going to see this for years and years and years ahead, and I think that's just an adaptation that universities are going to have to make on that.

How do we bring them back to a social interaction with that sense of decency and respect when they may have learned habits and behaviors that went contrary to them?

The other one is social media, and that's ongoing.

And I think so much of our challenges today are driven by social media, and we could spend the rest of the time just talking about that, I'm quite sure.

For me, you're absolutely right.

The interview process that was traditional in higher education, particularly at my institution, this is decades ago, was a great way to really help students understand the fit that they were coming into the University of Denver.

Today, we can't do those because of the scale of our operations, the number of applications and so forth.

And I'm not sure that that is a model that works for us today, because in a certain sense, what we'd like to do is welcome everyone, be inclusive, have them all come to Rutgers University or the University of Denver, and then help them understand, we have some rules of conduct.

We will help you develop those skills of how you listen across differences of how you make persuasive argument when you're confronted with other individuals that you vehemently disagree with.

Right?

And why is that important?

Not just today, but tomorrow when you leave our universities and engage in the corporate world workforce or engage in your communities, or even at Thanksgiving dinner.

So I guess I'm a believer that you can kind of have conversations about character, that you can use reflection to slow down the thinking.

And we're kind of focused on that in our approach around our educational paradigm at the University of Denver.

HEFFNER: Jonathan, likewise, can you reflect on that, the flip side of the democratization of education?

And this question of constructiveness, Jeremy rightly alludes to social media, and he responded to my point about the interview process or the lack of an interview process.

But just when it comes to constructive versus destructive outcomes, perhaps the pandemic explains that and frankly the lack of constructive public policy steps that we took, and that was a bad model.

But what explains, if you see part of the crisis emanating from a destructiveness as opposed to a constructiveness in the dialogue, an insertion of oneself to be a provocateur, not to be a problem solver, where does that come from, and why does it at least seem to be the dominant portrayal we've seen lately of the protesters?

HOLLOWAY: I will go back to social media actually.

I mean it's a technology, , designed to divide people, and ideally, I mean, ideally it's to create little communities where you find like-minded people.

But it has been, I'll just say taken over by different kinds of forces that see paths to revenue by dividing people, and creating echo chambers that are deeply unhealthy.

I don't want to sound like a Luddite, I mean, I understand the transformative and positive power of social media can play.

But it is really kind of out of control.

And we talked about the word character has already come up in the conversation or decency.

It's always cool for a young generation to dismiss an older generation.

We all do this sort of thing, but I just deeply believe that there are some fundamentals, decency, kindness, grace, respect that transcend time, place, and circumstance, transcend generations, and it seems to me that we are in a civic culture now where those things are diminished as far as their value set, or at least they're ridiculed and mocked.

And that has been metastasized by social media.

It has also been metastasized by, let's face it, politicians on the extremes.

I'll simplify the right or the left, both extremes, who see opportunities to gain a vantage point, that goes beyond their actual constituency putting them in office, but puts them into a higher larger audience and that really is fueled by very short term thinking.

How many points can I earn?

How many likes can I earn in this moment?

How many retweets can I earn in this moment?

Which may feel good from an adrenal standpoint, but when you wake up tomorrow, usually havoc has been is the result of it.

So I think technology has changed so quickly and we as a species change much more slowly and we haven't adjusted.

And that is made worse with the generational divide where the adults are looking at the kids like, we don't understand what you're talking about.

We don't understand how you're talking.

And the kids roll their eyes.

HEFFNER: Let me ask this question, as we conclude, and I want you to give ample time to it.

The protesters were after some actionable results.

I think they recognized that the dysfunction that they were causing either violence or disruption of classes and the behavior of universities could not stand.

But it occurred to me, in keeping in part with what the University of Chicago president said, you know, that these encampments were militaristic in the way they formed, as opposed to saying to a community, we want to deliberate, we want to legislate, we want to change public policy outcomes.

The protestors seem to be after divestment from Israel as a principal critique of the country and an indictment of its behavior, vis-a-vis the Palestinians and humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

You represent one public institution in Rutgers one private institution, the University of Denver.

I want to ask you if you have sympathy for that position of divesting from Israel.

I suppose you would have to then divest from a lot of countries that are engaged in widespread human rights abuse or some scale of human rights abuse.

But moreover this point that I hadn't heard from any of the university presidents, that if ultimately you want to conduct a new foreign policy, then the encampment would be outside of the Pentagon, the White House Congress, right?

And I don't know if that point was driven home enough.

I think it could have been in the form of many universities have rigid policies about leaves of absence, right?

You know, you have to keep in touch if you were to simply give students as much latitude as they want with an absence and say, if you want to constructively protest outside of the House of Representatives or the State Department, do so.

The university is not capable of changing the American funding of Israeli weapons or Ukrainian weapons, but those bodies are.

So I just want to give you each a chance to reflect on this basic question of do the students and protestors have a fair point when it comes to divestment?

And regardless of whether you say yes or no, would there be any encouragement of protesting outside of the bodies that would have greater influence in changing the trajectory of war and, and instead shifting towards peace?

Starting with Jeremy and then Jonathan.

HAEFNER: A couple of things.

Look, I consider the whole question of divestment a question that should be part of freedom of expression, and so we should put it on the table.

Absolutely.

And it could be the kinds of divestment in certain countries like Israel that we could be talking about.

It could be climate change, which is another one that is very popular on university campuses and so forth.

So it absolutely should be talked about.

That being said, here's the University of Denver and a private university.

We are very tuition dependent, and as a result, that endowment is extremely important to financial aid.

So those students that may be protesting, chances are they have received a generous financial aid package from the University of Denver that has come from the earnings of our endowment.

And so I know I speak for my trustees that say our single principle in managing the endowment is to maximize the return so that we can offer more financial aid to these students so that access is possible of all walks of life to the University of Denver.

So that is really a, a critical piece to it.

As to the other part of your question, where are they really going to have an impact with this idea?

Is it with universities or is it with organizations?

I would offer the example, first of all, take climate change, which they have come and in separate kind of protests, we would like you to divest from fossil fuels.

And it turns out, of course, our endowment has very little investment in fossil fuels if you actually dig down into it.

But more importantly, what we have said is your impact on that is going to be infinitesimally small, but think about what you do individually, what you can control.

And so the university has stepped in and said, look, we're going to accelerate when we're carbon neutral.

We said it was going to be 2050, but now we're working very hard to make it 2030.

And we just announced a major step forward in that regard.

So I think it's an important message that they can hear about, what can they control and really have an impact.

HEFFNER: Jonathan, as we close, same questions to you.

Do you sympathize with the divestment movement?

And then do you suggest members of your community channel their energies, as broadly or specifically as possible as would, would be recommended to enact change?

HOLLOWAY: I'm going to parrot a little fairly much of what Jeremy had said, although coming from a very different perspective of a massive public institution.

We have some different resource base, different ways in which we fund support for our students.

When I think about this, any divestment call, truly anyone, I think it's important to welcome the conversation always.

I mean, this is about civic learning, fundamentally, and any call for divestment, no matter the topic, is also a call for those from those issuing it about moral clarity.

Like there is there is an issue here, which we are morally clear, and that the university should adjust for that.

What often happens in these kinds of situations though is that any kind of clarity, but moral clarity here is very issue specific, like very sort of narrow casting on a very particular topic.

That's fine.

But there's little regard often for what are the ripple effects?

If we do X today, what does it mean that we're going to do?

Does it mean Y and Z come next?

So there's always these implications.

So we have a process like many universities where people can petition to have a conversation about divestment.

It goes before a review of a committee, and it goes through a normal regular process, the University Board of Governors makes the final decision.

There's a process behind it.

Actually, I have very little role in the whole thing.

So I welcome the idea of divestment and calls for that on any topic.

I think it's important to test things, and it's important to address the student's moral clarity where it is and also trouble the waters.

Ironically recently there was a call for divest to divest from Google, for instance, you know, megacorporation, and the request for divestment came through on Gmail, which is Google.

So there's a way in which people are, I mean, can be morally righteous, but not quite understand the tools with which- HEFFNER: Absolutely, and forgive me, sir, we're just about out of time.

If I can give you 30 more seconds on the question about where to protest and why to protest and can you give your students an unlimited leave of absence so they can bring justice to this earth and then welcome them home?

HOLLOWAY: They can bring justice to this earth by becoming better educated and being better citizens locally.

If they feel the need to go to Congress in the White House, I'm all for it.

But that needs to be done on their time or they need to negotiate it.

That's about accountability, that's about management.

And I would support them to follow their passions and the universe will be here when they're ready to come back and complete their education.

HEFFNER: Thank you Presidents and Chancellor for your insight today.

HOLLOWAY: Thank you so much.

HAEFNER: Thank you.

I appreciate the conversation.

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