- [Announcer] And now an Arizona PBS original production - [Announcer] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents the Civic Discourse Project ideological conformity on campus and in American society.

This week- - We're in a moment where we worry about the fragility of our institutions and the fragility of this experiment.

And if that's a serious moment as as so many of us feel that it is, then the question then turns back on us.

What are we gonna do about it?

What responsibility do we have in this moment to step up and say we're gonna do something hard?

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

And now Ronald J. Daniels president of Johns Hopkins University speaks about purposeful pluralism, the future of the university and American democracy.

- My remarks here this afternoon is focused on the obligations of institutions of higher education to liberal democracy which I explore in my recent book which I co-authored with Grant Shreve and Phil Specter What Universities Owe Democracy.

The idea for this book were seated several years ago when it became undeniable that liberal democracy was backsliding.

I'll confess that early in January, 2021 as I was in the process of completing the final revisions to the manuscript I was clinging to a number of hope here in the US.

The 2020 election was according to the Department of Homeland Security among the most secure elections in our history abroad the largest European democracy seemed to be mustering resistance against the forces of anti-democratic populism.

I even allowed myself for a moment to ponder the possibility would my book still be relevant by the time that it was published?

But then, of course, on January 6th we all watched in horror, as approximately 2000 American citizens stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to halt the Senate's expected approval of the electoral college vote.

This was an assault on the symbols of our democracy as well as the very foundations of our democratic process.

And although the insurrection was stoked by those in power it was driven by American citizens who uniformly demonstrated a profound disregard for a profound ignorance of, and in some cases a profound malice towards the peaceful transition of power that is a hallmark of our democracy.

It underscored for me the painful fact that the threats facing democracy were not only palpably real, but potentially growing more dire.

Following last fall's, midterm elections some pundits have once again begun to posit however tentatively that maybe now the fever has finally broken.

Maybe just maybe democracy is on the mend but I'm not so sure.

While anti-democratic populism has been held in a bands in some places and in some elections, I continue to believe that liberal democracy is more vulnerable than many of us ever imagined.

It still remains true over the last past decade.

According to the varieties of Democracy Institute the shares of the world's population living in democracies has plummeted from around 50% to 30%.

That free and fair elections remain in many countries of the world under threat.

And that in countries, from Brazil to Hungary to Russia authoritarian leaders have fueled disinformation campaigns dismantled checks on their power and waged unjust indefensible wars.

Our moment demands that we step up in the defense of the Democratic experiment.

This is, I believe, the responsibility not only of its citizens, but of its core institutions.

Now, over the years, I've occasionally quizzed friends and colleagues what they think those core indispensable institutions are for liberal democracy.

You can imagine a lot of front at parties the answers invariably are the same.

The independent media, the courts, competitive politics competitive political parties and so on and colleges and universities rarely make the cut.

But as I argue in my book, this is a grave oversight.

Colleges and universities are critical, even indispensable to the maintenance of healthy flourishing democracies.

And just as important, liberal democracy is the best soil for thriving universities.

This is in no small part because universities and liberal democracy share so many values.

Each places a premium on freedom of speech and thought on tolerance of dissent, on the free flow of information and on the vigorous exchange of ideas grounded in reason and animated by experience.

Nearly 90 of the top 100 universities in the world according to Times higher education are located in democracies.

And studies have shown time and time again that higher levels of college education make democracies more likely to endure and autocracies more likely to democratize.

Americans, as we know, increasingly regard those with whom they disagree with distrust and those who hold opposing political views, not as fellow citizens with whom they can engage and learn from but moral enemies whose ideas are to be feared and silenced.

For me, this is nowhere better distilled than in the fact that in the United States over the last 60 years, the share of Republicans and Democrats who say they will be upset if one of their children married a member of the opposing political party, has skyrocketed from about 5% of each party to almost 40%.

Perennial rivalries aside, colleges and universities have historically been among the institutions that have offered young people their first opportunity to leave the communities in which they grew up and interact with others from different racial, religious, regional, socioeconomic and political backgrounds.

This has been true for more than two centuries.

Indeed, a key junctures in history.

Colleges and universities have in fact stood at the very vanguard of pluralistic education.

In the 19th century for instance, schools like Oberlin College in Ohio and Brea College and Kentucky vigorously committed themselves to recruiting students across lines of race and gender.

Even when doing so put their very existence at threat.

More than half of Brea's first class in 1866 were Black students and all students lived together, ate together studied together, and debated one another.

A visitor to the campus in 1870 marveled that Bria students were able to discuss, "the most practical and the most radical questions with the utmost freedom."

Other colleges and universities albeit intermittently continue to take up the mantle of inclusion in the decades that followed.

With the advent of the Civil Rights Movement many colleges and university leaders were on the front lines of advancing diversity at their schools.

Many in the face of intense and violet backlash thanks to efforts, efforts like those as well as to the bold advocacy of so many students and faculty across the decades American higher education has made undeniable strides in expanding access, dressing inequalities although that progress has admittedly come too slowly and remains unfinished.

On balance however, our campuses are undeniably far more diverse than they've ever been, and that's something to celebrate.

Yet, for all the colleges and universities have done for representation, they haven't fully cultivated in students that most important capacity in the spirit of Brea more than a century ago to engage with people across their differences.

If anything, colleges and universities in this moment have been doing less and less to draw students together.

And many institutions students are allowed to choose where they live whom they live with, where they dine, what classes to take.

The evidence shows when given these choices students not surprisingly choose to associate with people who look like them and who believe what they do.

We have essentially given our students a pass to opt out of encounters with people dissimilar from themselves.

At Hopkins, we've also found through survey data from graduating students that students are far less likely to engage with peers who hold different political beliefs than they are across other kinds of differences.

This is really worrisome and even when those encounters across difference do occur they're more likely than to be superficial and fleeting presenting little opportunity for self-reflection and reasonable substantive disagreement.

If higher education wants to begin addressing concerns of ideological conformity or cancel culture we first need to ensure that our students understand how to live alongside one another and to speak to one another about sensitive issues in our society.

We need to nurture in them a spirit of civic friendship that now seemingly quaint concept that Aristotle so highly prized.

And when I say civic friendship, I mean something closer to political philosopher Robert Tali's definition which he describes as a capacity of people to treat each other as equals, even when they regard each other as seriously mistaken and misguided in their political perspectives and judgements.

You neither have to agree nor even particularly like your fellow citizens, but you do have to see them as equals worthy of respect and the exchange of ideas.

To my mind, the way to cultivate this disposition is to deliberately rethink how we shape student life on our campuses in such a way that promotes sustained encounters between students from different backgrounds without of course sacrificing necessary opportunity for students to connect with peers who do share similar identities.

One of the first steps that I call for my book is reinstating assigned roommates in the first year for first year student housing.

As you know, it used to be common for universities to decide who students lived with.

Indeed, the experience of meeting your freshman year college roommate for the first time was once a celebrated rite of passage as I'm sure many in this room can attest.

But over the past two decades this practice fell into disfavor as social media made it progressively easier for students to select their own roommates all too frequently.

As I said before choosing peers who grew up in similar circumstances.

Returning to assigned roommates may seem like a small like a trivial intervention but I think it can have an incredible impact on students' lives and attitudes research, and both the United States and South Africa has shown that university students who live with peers from different backgrounds become more racially tolerant.

There's also evidence that students' political attitudes shift in the direction of their roommates over time.

To give one really striking example a low or middle income student who lives with wealthy peers will tend on average to become more skeptical of progressive tax policies.

Clearly, at least for those of my generation the odd couple had a deeper message than we may have granted it, whom you room with matters and can have a lasting impact on your own views as well as your ability to engage with others wholly dissimilar from yourself.

Schools like Duke and Dartmouth have moved to assign roommates with very promising results.

And at Hopkins, we just did the same a year ago.

We're still in the early days of this move but the student response has been largely positive.

Students crave experiences that allow them to encounter difference but we have to give them the opportunities to have such experiences and we should not stop there.

In addition to enabling more diverse encounters for our students universities also need to be modeling the kinds of interaction we want them to have in contending with difficult and contentious issues.

For me, this is a reason to instill throughout our campuses a more robust culture of debate and dialogue.

And part of this actually means hosting debates.

Across the country colleges and universities have become far too reliant on single speakers or panels of speakers who are often in broad agreement with one another.

Indeed, one study found that most universities only sponsor about one event per year, in which a public policy issue is debated by people holding divergent views.

When we think of all the whole high profile student protests of the past decade, so many of which are subject of national scrutiny and public hand wringing it is all too often a situation that has risen in the context of a single speaker event.

What would change if we began incentivizing more actual debate and committing ourselves to demonstrating greater disagreement in our public events?

At Hopkins again, we're trying this, we recently launched a debate initiative that will model this kind of engagement for our community throughout multiple debates between intellectual leaders as well as providing resources to student groups that are willing to host these kinds of debates on their own.

Two weeks ago, we hosted our first marquee debate.

The debaters were two political strategists from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum.

On the left was Simone Sanders, who previously served as Bernie Sanders National Press Secretary and the right was the famed architect of George Bush's presidential campaigns.

Carl Rove, the topic being debated was the need for more voting rights legislation.

We pulled the audience for their views on the issue before and after the debate and although Carl was truly fighting an uphill battle with an audience consisting overwhelmingly of Democrats in the heart of Baltimore city, by the end of the conversation, he had actually shifted the views of a considerable number of people in the room.

Thoughtful, respectful debate still works.

In the coming months, we'll be hosting more debates in the hope of continuing to model for our entire community the value of respectful debate and disagreement, and all of this is part of a larger project of seeking to instill in our campus a more purposeful brand of pluralism.

So let me close by saying that I'm not naive to how incredibly polarized our nation is right now and how slowly institutional change seems to come especially, especially at universities.

But I also harbor tremendous hope for the future of our democracy.

And I believe that public and private universities including ASU, Hopkins and so many others have a vital indispensable role to play in the project of restoring a vibrant civil society so long as they are willing to commit themselves to the renewal of civic education and towards modeling a genuine, a purposeful form of pluralism.

Thank you again for the chance to be here this afternoon and to speak with you all.

- Johns Hopkins was the first research university established in the United States, a new model of education.

And 150 years later here you are as the president saying you're you're not suggesting that Hopkins shouldn't be that but you're suggesting the the need to bring back something that perhaps was lost in the transition of the past.

You know, more than a hundred years toward the dominance of research, cutting edge knowledge knowledge production in universities and even in colleges.

Has, has anyone seen this as a paradox?

The way I am seeing it, that's, I'm very glad you're doing it, but it is it is a distinctive voice coming from the the president of a major research university to say this liberal arts core function of universities, let alone colleges needs to be recovered and reprioritized as an important mission.

- Paul, I, the way I see it is that I actually think that these ideas are not intention with one another.

And again, when you think of, you know as I understand what Hopkins and other research universities like the one that we're sitting in is all, are all about, it's really an effort to advance knowledge to be able to interrogate knowledge to bring new perspectives and insights to test received wisdom and so forth.

And I think that enterprise is important in every discipline at the university.

It's an as important in the humanities as it is in the, in the natural sciences.

So I actually think in this case that this need to rediscover this important responsibility that Washington and intermittently as I've described the country and leaders of understand of being important role of the university is indeed fully capable of being integrated into an environment where we're still fully committed to the research mission and to advancing knowledge.

I mean, again, I've always, you know I've always understood as, you know people see the research university as as being framed around that research enterprise but I always add it's research and education.

We can do both of these things.

And indeed that's the case that we make for the research university is the inextricable linkage between the research that our faculty and graduate students and even our undergraduate students do and the education mission of the school.

So I think I don't think these ideas are naturally intention with one another.

I think we've made a series of decisions along the way to depreciate this responsibility around civics education but I don't think it falls inevitably from the character of the, of the research university.

- You mentioned the steps that have been taken during your time at Johns Hopkins to elevate this set of issues, but do you have any insights for us?

I'll mention it here.

Arizona State University has been nudged by the Board of Regents in the state, along with the University of Arizona, Northern Arizona University.

We've all been nudged for several years now to adopt in effect, a core knowledge civics requirement here.

It's been called American institutions, but it's been four years and, and ASU has still not come up with a plan.

So what insights do you have from the Hopkins case study of of how a faculty could be moved beyond skepticism for different reasons to say this is a priority?

- So I guess several things, and again I think the story is still being written.

I think that within the academy and I think as indeed more generally in our society I think there is a sense that this is a serious problem.

That, again, I go back to January 6th that is a serious moment for this country.

And I think, again, wherever you fall on the political spectrum, it's really striking.

You see the polls and the extent to which people both on left and right really worry about the durability of American democracy.

Now, they may have different views as to what ails our democracy, but we are worried and increasingly larger percentages expressing that concern over a host of other more temporal issues than in the past have commanded our attention.

So that's, that to my mind is a good place to start is to say we're in a moment where we worry about the fragility of our institutions and the fragility of this experiment.

And if that's a serious moment as so many of us feel that it is, then the question then turns back on us.

What are we gonna do about it?

What responsibility do we have in this moment to step up and say, we're gonna do something hard?

I think a lot of people would say that that's so that's where we are.

And if that's, so then I think it opens up to the discussion about how you respond to that.

And to my mind, I've always found my role as president to play a role in sort of challenging in raising questions and looking to my faculty colleagues to help me figure out answers and to help the institution to figure out answers.

But I do so with a great deal of respect and deference to the nature of the collegial enterprise.

And to my mind I'm gonna take a somewhat ecumenical approach to this.

That is to say, I think that we should be firm on our determination that we resolve with or respond to with some resolve the seriousness of the moment with with a set of perturbations to the way in which we tackle these issues.

My view is that this is a challenge we all share, and I look to my colleagues to help me figure this out and to figure this out for the institution.

- You talk about promoting democracy and a purposeful engagement with diverse ideas.

I'm curious about what happens when you encounter ideas that seem dangerous to democracy.

One of the things that can complicate campus conversations is accusations of being anti-democratic.

So how do you balance the need for purposeful pluralism with a focus on democratic values?

- So like, it's a, it's, again it's a question that we're all continually confronting.

You know, we confront in these various moments with really provocative speakers and when are lines being crossed?

And again, you know, there's different institutions will draw those lines differently, but I think, again I come back to the liberal democratic experiment and the sense that, at least to my mind, the conception of liberalism is that there is not one central truth and there's a sense of modesty in the claims that we make.

And so to, you know, for me I think it's just really important, and particularly as I like to say, the university is a place apart.

It is again, a place that has to take so seriously this idea that received wisdom may be wrong and you've gotta open up and find space, even if it you know, creates risk of unsettling or angering people.

You've gotta find the space and the habits to let those arguments play out.

And so, you know, I, again, it's like, it's I think the distinct calling of the university as a site for this kind of role that we play in liberal democracy that you gotta be particularly attentive to according as as much scope as possible for this vigorous contestation.

- There was a lot of talk about civic education and debates on campus.

So I was wondering, does an emphasis on civic education distract and distort from the first core purpose of the university?

That being the pursuit of truth?

Or does the pursuit of truth come second to the political?

- I guess I just don't see these as fundamentally intentioned with one another.

You know, I think we're capable of, of creating of sustaining a culture of skepticism.

And that's what universities we're skeptical about claims to truth, we interrogate them, we challenge them we're contrarians by nature.

That's the, you know, that's the magic of a university.

I think we're capable of doing that.

I think we're capable of doing deep interrogation of claims of producing new knowledge.

I think simultaneously, while we are capable of actually saying to our students these are ideas around which this organized which we have organized our society, this set of ideas has been particularly important in terms of resolving the kinds of very bloody battles and strife that has confronted society plague society for generations.

And to talk about the survival value of these political arrangements and what's required to be able to sustain and nurture them.

I think we can do all of that together.

I just, I just don't see a deep conflict in these roles.

We're constantly thinking about, you know the multiple goals of a university.

You know, we educate, we research, we do tech transfer we provide services to communities near us that are in need of healthcare or social services.

I mean, we're just we're complex institutions and we're capable of doing a number of things simultaneously.

That's what makes us such interesting places.

And I think this is I think this is actually not that difficult to do.

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project, ideological conformity on campus and in American society is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and economic thought and leadership and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

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