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In this installment of a series on liberalism, Benjamin Klutsey, the director of the Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, talks with Lara Hope Schwartz, a senior professional lecturer at American University’s School of Public Affairs, about different forms of self-censorship, why freedom of speech must be supplemented by the right skills and standards, why hate speech is protected under the First Amendment, and much more.
BENJAMIN KLUTSEY: All right, today we have Professor Lara Hope Schwartz [ [link removed] ]. She teaches at American University in Washington, D.C., in their School of Public Affairs. She also runs the Project on Civic Dialogue [ [link removed] ] at American University. She specializes in campus speech, constitutional law, civil rights, access to justice, politics, communications and policy. She was previously a legislative lawyer and communications strategist. She’s the co-author of “How to College: What to Know Before You Go (and When You’re There) [ [link removed] ]” and “Try to Love the Questions: From Debate to Dialogue in Classrooms and Life [ [link removed] ],” which is the subject of our conversation today. Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Schwartz.
LARA HOPE SCHWARTZ: Thanks for having me.
Origins of Curiosity
KLUTSEY: The title of your book, which I love—it says “Try to Love the Questions”—suggests that we have to engage each other with curiosity. I wonder, is curiosity a learned behavior or is it the kind of thing that some people have and some simply don’t?
SCHWARTZ: I will say that I’m a lawyer, and so I’m not only not trained in human cognition and development, but arguably, if you asked a lot of people who is best equipped to answer questions about human nature, they wouldn’t suggest lawyers. That being said, I’m a parent and a teacher. It’s been my observation that most of us have quite a bit of curiosity baked in. All you have to do is spend any time with a baby or a toddler or a young person and find out, they ask a lot of questions, they explore things. I think that curiosity is probably a condition precedent to deciding to pursue higher education or to keep up with education.
In my experience, I think people are quite curious, and curiosity really helps us be people. We’re not very strong like gorillas or fast like horses. We have a big brain, and so our curiosity maybe is one of the biggest things we have. That being said, I think there are ways that education and culture can perhaps disincentivize curiosity or disincentivize admitting we’re curious about questions. One of the things that I want to do in my work is get people really in touch with how wonderful it is to engage curiously with hard questions.
Expressive Freedom and Self-Censorship
KLUTSEY: Thank you for that. One of the things you’re trying to do is to foster a paradigm shift. You want to challenge readers to shift their paradigms around our current discourse on free speech—or expressive freedom, which I think you prefer—from a national crisis of self-censorship to a matter of skills and competencies. Is the current narrative around the issue a bit too sensational, overblown or perhaps exaggerated, from your perspective? What do most people get wrong when they evaluate the current state of expressive freedom?
SCHWARTZ: I’ve noted that when I do say I think it’s overblown or I think people get it wrong, people who feel really frustrated by our current state of dialogue get really angry when I say that. I think rather than trying to state a quantitative answer like, is it bigger or smaller than people say, what I’ll say is it’s different than people say. I really feel that I’m on solid ground here.
For example, a lot of the surveys that we have that ask students what’s going on in their dialogue ask this question: “Do you ever not say something for fear of how people react?” A bunch of people say yes. This isn’t a useless data point, but it’s not a data point that enables us to fully understand what’s going on.
One of the things that I want to know, and I talk about in the book, I talk about thinking about self-censorship as occupying at least three categories that I think we should consider differently. The first category would be normative self-censorship. This is like, if you’re out in the world with your son or your niece or some small person, and they don’t say, “Why is that lady’s dress ugly?” this is a win for society. Normative self-censorship is that activity that we do that helps us not be gratuitously cruel to people. It’s what helps us in classes maybe not go wildly off topic and be like, “Hey, we’re talking about higher education policy. Let me tell you this thing that happened with my cousin that might not be on point.” Those would be examples of normative self-censorship, just times that we don’t say stuff.
Then there’s what I would call developmental self-censorship. I think my book has a lot to say about that or maybe a solution to that. Developmental self-censorship is what I would describe as, a person has a sense that their contribution might be much more useful than “that lady’s dress is ugly,” but they either aren’t certain whether it truly fits into the norms and expectations of how we do things in college or in civic life. Or they’re not truly sure they have the vocabulary, cultural competency or (some people would say) level of sophistication around the ideas to express it well or to express it in a way that doesn’t bring offense, that doesn’t—“I understand this is a topic that hits on equality and identity and discrimination and things that people care about, geopolitical affairs. I’m not sure I know how to say it in this room. I’m not even sure if the rules of this room are such that this is welcome.”
I think my book and my program have a lot to say about, well, if dialogue is a skill, as I believe it is, we can address developmental self-censorship by doing really good work on our campuses and classrooms and the platforms that we have for dialogue to make sure everybody understands. And make sure everybody knows that as they’re developing their skills and competencies in this way, we’re going to show each other a lot of generosity and grace because the freedom to make some mistakes and stumble toward excellence just has to happen so that we can learn to do things.
The last is what we call chilled speech. What I would say is that the national narrative is that there’s a lot of chilled speech going on. In other words, people are afraid to say something for fear that there will be consequences of a kind. The problem is, we don’t know what that consists of to the extent that it’s happening. The surveys don’t tell us which categories are happening.
Then, even within this idea of chilled speech, usually the questions are framed as about being liberal or being conservative. They’re often self-contradictory because they’ll say the terms liberal and conservative, but then they’ll even use examples of speech that might not be about liberal or conservative; it might be about our current partisan moment, which is different. There’s a little bit of a mish-mashing. There’s a difference between having opinions about vaccines and being conservative. There’s a difference between having viewpoints around election 2020 and being conservative, but the questions ask them as a blob.
The Discourse We’re Losing
SCHWARTZ: What I’d like to see asked instead and considered instead of, “Are people not saying things they want to say because it will upset people?” is, “Are we losing some of that discourse that your center is trying to train grad students and train civic actors in? Are we losing some of that thing that we wanted, that we value, that we’re about, either as higher education spaces or as a democratic republic?” It’s not, did somebody in your class fail to note a conspiracy theory about vaccines because they thought people would react badly? Because it might not be a bad thing if people have the impression that in an institution of learning, some of this stuff is in the work.
I want to be really clear, I’m aware that a lot more speech than that is being chilled. People just really don’t have a sense of what they can do, what they’re welcome to do, what it’s safe to do without being ostracized. I still think a lot of this comes to the developmental. What I’d like to see is a paradigm shift from this idea of education as the show “The View,” where they’re like, “Don’t worry. We have somebody from each of a few pre-cut perspectives, and they get to talk for a bit,” to what we really are, which is a space where we engage deeply with tough questions, including when it’s rough sledding.
I don’t want to say to people who are really troubled by the direction academia has taken, “Oh, I just don’t care about your feelings. I just don’t think your experiences are right.” I think it’s different than the media narrative. We in higher ed, I feel like, have some work to do in saying, “We’re actually not super worried that people can’t use a slur in front of each other. That’s not what we’re talking about.” Although as a free speech lawyer, I’ll try and make sure that protected speech remains protected, so we don’t have to be sitting around in litigation all the time. We can be learning instead.
We have to be crystal clear about why we have dialogue in schools, why we gather and engage with questions collaboratively, instead of just taking a correspondence course. What we want to protect, like the speech that we don’t want to lose—that hasn’t been studied by the existing research whatsoever. I think this is the vocabulary we need to use when we’re speaking with one another about our commitments to dialogue, because I think it’s incumbent on us to make clear that we’re not here for the trolls. We’re here for the scholarship.
Free Speech Is Not Enough
KLUTSEY: Right. I really appreciate your focus on skills because I think being part of this effort, civil dialogue and so on, and working with students, many times you find that they are interested in engaging. They just want to learn how to do it, and how to do it well. Your book really just highlighted for me what I’ve been processing for a while now. On that shift toward skills development, I’d love for you to unpack some of the items that you mentioned in terms of how we might think about this shift. You say that expressive freedom should be contextualized in the responsibility framework, right?
We, maybe, are overemphasizing freedom of speech rather than responsibility to engage. Also, focusing more on a restorative response rather than a punitive response when someone violates civility, and also having a sense of inquiry rather than being focused on debates all of the time because those put us in the binary frame. I’ve heard you say, I think it was a talk yesterday [ [link removed] ] or a panel discussion yesterday, where you really emphasized the idea that multiple things can be true at the same time. Yes, I would love for you to unpack those things for us, the focusing on responsibility, restorative response and a sense of inquiry rather than debate.
SCHWARTZ: Sure. One thing—when I wrote this book, the current wave of censorious policies on campuses had not yet happened, where a number of campuses have cut back on student, faculty and staff expression rights in what they’re saying is a response to a need to be inclusive, particularly amid rising antisemitism. One thing that I want to say, before I talk about the rights-to-responsibilities pivot, is that we need expressive freedom. We cannot do this without it.
We talk about context. This book, I think, exists in conversation with some of what we might call a panic or a media narrative that is like, “Free speech is so much under threat.” I wrote this in part because a lot of the friction that I’ve seen, it doesn’t fall into the question of whether there’s speech regulation of a kind. It has fallen into how we deal with this moment where there are a lot of cultural changes, and there’s a disconnect culturally and politically between young students and older donors and administrators and faculty and people in the world and even journalists. A lot of what I see as this concern of dialogue on campus, it’s not really a First Amendment or expressive freedom issue; it’s a dialogue-across-difference issue.
That being said, today it is. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time this year talking about how censorship is never the answer to issues of inclusion, and I believe that. I think that remains true. I think expressive freedom is an idea that is time-tested, and there certainly have been rockier times than this that it has survived.
That being said, free speech isn’t enough. I’ve talked about this in other talks where if you say that you want to become an acclaimed and beloved pastry chef and study in France or Vienna and learn how to make these beautiful things that bring people joy, and they just give you a sack of flour, you’re going to be deeply dissatisfied. It’s true that you will need that flour to make the beautiful things. It’s also true that’s not cooking. That’s not cheffery.
That’s absolutely the case with dialogue. It’s absolutely the case with expressive freedom. Expressive freedom, it’s in the Bill of Rights. It’s an element—we think about the why. It exists so we can govern ourselves. It exists so that we can learn. That’s what it’s there for. My favorite quotation about this comes from Lawrence v. Texas: “Times can blind us to certain truths.” In my experience, it’s these conversations across difference that are the best thing that we have to unshackle ourselves from these perspective-limiting cultural norms. We talk it out.
Skills and Standards
SCHWARTZ: Expressive freedom is necessary for this, but expressive freedom—we can see this if we look at social media. We can see this if we can look at the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories out there. Expressive freedom is an ingredient of great conversations that enable us to govern ourselves, but it is not the sole one. We need these skills. We need to have some standards. In higher ed, it’s easy to have standards. You’re like, “Well, economists have standards. There’s a way this discipline works.” I think once we become literate enough in these standards, we can seek to break them down in the way that modern painters could learn to paint photorealistically but then say, “I’m doing Cubism.”
There’s this literacy of, what is the system? We can challenge it and critique it. We can have a shared vocabulary for how we address problems. Without responsibility coming into the room, whether it’s having done the reading, having learned a bit about the other people in the room and the things that might make it profoundly unpleasant to be in dialogue with you, we’re not going to have that civic dialogue. This is what I want. I want people to say, “I’m here to protect your rights, but you have to really lift your game. You have to come into that dialogue ready for it the way that you would come into a basketball game, having done sprints and stretched and lift weights and done dribbling drills.” We have skills right before we get in a game.
I think the restorative rather than punitive—it’s completely necessary in the context of ongoing relationships. Classroom relationships generally last a few months. In the context of a classroom, we have to figure out, how can we, 15 to 50 of us, work together and stay in conversation from September to December, or from January to May? How can we do that? Out in the civic world, we’re going to keep having these conversations. We’re not going to move. We’re not going to leave town every time the city council gets something wrong. We can’t. We’re not going to leave town every time our neighbors transgress.
We have to figure out a way to be in community with one another after we fail. I like to say this after the responsibilities component because I think this idea of a more restorative approach, it depends on people trying. You should show up and try and take efforts not to make my life harder or force me to educate you about the things in my experience that are different from yours, but assuming that good faith. If we’re really acting in good faith and we’re trying every day to be good civic actors, to be good neighbors, to be good discussants and scholars, then I think we have to have something other than punishment as a way of dealing with one another’s misses.
Then I think, finally, from the debate to inquiry thing—this is in the title of the book, “From Debate to Dialogue in Classrooms and Life”—to me, this is the most important. If people remember one thing, other than to buy the book and get one for a friend, but if they remember anything else, I think it should be this idea that particularly—and I’d say this for your fellows that you’re training to be, to go off into academia and civic life and the professions, even doctoral students—we don’t come into classrooms as experts. We’re not lobbyists. We’re not members of the trade association of Bens or the association of Laras and we’re trying to get our policy enacted in the classroom. We are learners.
The classroom—and I would argue civic life often—the classroom is not an advocacy space. It’s an inquiry space. So much of what I hear about conversations being hard to have, they sound like conversations that aren’t what higher ed or any ed was designed to do. They sound like television or social media or podcasts. I quite like being on podcasts, actually, but a class isn’t one. This pivot: No, we inquire.
For me as well, just to wrap this long answer, we come into our classrooms with so many different experiences, religions, backgrounds, races, things that you can capture on a census, but so many things you can’t capture on a census. One thing we all come together into a classroom with is our status as learners. This is the thing. I actually feel dialogues that lean into that learner concept are among the best designed and the most productive and useful and rewarding dialogues.
KLUTSEY: Thanks for that response. As you’re talking about responsibility and restorative approach and inquiry, it just reminded me of John Inazu’s book, “Learning to Disagree [ [link removed] ].” John Inazu [ [link removed] ] is a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and he just wrote a book called “Learning to Disagree.” In the book, he talks about how he gives a lecture to first-year law students every year. One of the points he makes in the lecture is, he tells them not to be First Amendment heroes.
He loves the First Amendment, obviously, but he says that good dialogue happens when civic responsibility and civic grace intersect. You express, but express with kindness. I think he puts a finer point on it in that statement. Thanks for that.
Hate Speech
KLUTSEY: Why do many think hate speech is not protected? I think I saw a survey a couple of years ago that indicated that millennials in particular think that the First Amendment is excessive, and so they’re open to cutting it back. I think a lot of that is due to concerns around hate speech. I’m just curious as to why some people might think that hate speech is not protected or should not be protected.
SCHWARTZ: The primary reason people don’t know is, it’s not taught. We know as we’re working with students or even graduate students or working with higher education institutions, that civic education in the U.S. is really limited in the K-12 space. I don’t have the stats off the top of my head, but it’s just not most of us that are learning that. It’s actually not even present in most higher ed orientations, something about this. Around the why, it might not be intuitive in a pluralistic society as well.
Now, in terms of what people think about speech and hateful speech, I’ve looked really closely at a lot of the polling around this. And I think it’s good—we should be generous to the people we’re talking to—but I think we should also be really self-reflective, which is another of the dialogue skills I include in my book, like engage in self-reflection, thinking about our own approaches. And what I found looking at polling and research across generations is that a lot of us have an inner censor for something. For college students, they’re much more likely to say it should be legal to censor using hateful slurs, for example, but among older cohorts, there’s significant support for banning burning a flag.
I don’t know if it is now, but when I was a professional lobbyist, I think every Congress during which I was a lobbyist, there was a flag-burning amendment introduced. And a bunch of organizations had it on their scorecard, meaning you can’t be 100% our best friend as our advocacy group if you are not co-sponsoring this flag-burning amendment. I’ve seen a few of the different surveys [ [link removed] ] that delve into what would people ban, and there’s a really significant percentage of older Americans and more conservative Americans who would want to ban the way that the survey phrases it as an anti-American Muslim cleric.
What I find is that those of us who are deeply committed to First Amendment or First Amendment-like protections across the board are maybe not the majority. But as you noted, a lot of people don’t know that hate speech is protected. One of the things that I’ve seen is that not knowing that it is constitutionally protected, and not being familiar with the principles behind how the First Amendment does distinguish between protected and unprotected, tends to increase people’s likelihood to say, “Yes,” normatively as opposed to descriptively, “I’d like that to be banned.”
I think if we’re people who think the idea of speech protection, which is closely connected, I think, to liberalism—your kind of liberalism, not red versus blue—if we like that, if we agree with that, we should, I think, be really committed to education around that at the K-12 and college transition level. Because what I have found in teaching a lot of free expression-related stuff in my classes is that when people start to really think through why we don’t do speech regulation of that kind, it’s not just that they’re better educated about, well, what should my civic action look like? What should I be asking people for in response to society’s problems?
Also, I actually see this question of speech regulation much differently than before I really learned it, which to me is obviously quite logical. We do tend to engage more deeply with things that we’ve had an opportunity to study and explore.
Protected vs. Unprotected Speech
KLUTSEY: Yes, very interesting. Now, the Brandenburg [ [link removed] ] test [ [link removed] ], how does it work? How do we determine when a limitation on expressive freedom is legally justified?
SCHWARTZ: The Brandenburg test is one way. I think an important thing for people getting this through audio or through an eventual article to bear in mind is that the distinction between protected and unprotected speech—it’s not a matter of turning a dial. Everybody agrees that whatever Mr. Rogers says or “Sesame Street” says is quite lovely for everybody; you turn the dial, and somewhere between there and being an actual Nazi or Klan member, speech ceases to be protected. That’s not how it works. We increase the hatefulness . . .
The way it works is, the presumption is, if I’m engaging in political speech, if I’m saying this is what I abstractly prefer to happen in the world, there’s a presumption that this is protected. Speech can cease to be protected if it’s targeted in a specific way. In other words, the difference between me saying, “I generally think people who run institutes for classical political economy are the worst,” which is just what we call in First Amendment law “abstract advocacy.” Even if I say, “Someday the classical political economy folks are going to get their comeuppance.” That sounds maybe a little more ominous. It’s still abstract advocacy.
The Brandenburg test says it has an exception to our presumptively free speech. That’s for something called incitement. Incitement is conduct that consists of trying to get other people to commit imminent lawless action. I’m going to convert my abstract advocacy. I have this gripe with classical political economy and training people to understand it. I don’t like that. I actually think it sounds quite nice, but I don’t like it in the abstract. “To listeners, tomorrow, we ride at dawn. We’re going to go get them. Do it. Let’s do it.” That’s incitement. I am intending to, and likely to be understood to, incite people to imminent lawless action. I’m not trying to abstractly build a movement of, I don’t know, another economist to rise up against the classical school. I’m saying, go and act violence on this person. That’s the Brandenburg test.
Brandenburg was about the KKK marching. This is a group—and I think one thing that trips up a lot of people. The KKK is, A, founded around profoundly hateful and eliminationist ideas. In the abstract, the things they have to say are repulsive to every decent human being. They’re also the terrorist group responsible for the most deaths on U.S. soil of any terrorist group ever in U.S. history. They are a group with a history of profoundly lawless action.
Yet the First Amendment approach says their identity and purpose, in general as a terrorist group, doesn’t take speech of an abstract nature—“We’re going to have a march, and we’re going to be in our outfits that we wear, and we’re going to go through town in places where people are allowed to go and do things that other people are allowed to do, like say what we’re about or gather as a group.” The fact of who you are and the fact that most of what you say is just horrific isn’t incitement.
I think that’s a really tough part of the First Amendment to swallow. I will say, if people want to be beloved, being a First Amendment lawyer is not a great path. I think that really illustrates the difference between simply being hateful and using your speech as a mechanism for attempting to perpetrate physical harm and law-breaking on a specific group.
The Paradox of Tolerance
KLUTSEY: Thank you for that legal lesson. I really appreciate that. Now, in the book, you talk about the paradox of tolerance by Karl Popper [ [link removed] ]. How does the First Amendment address the paradox of tolerance?
SCHWARTZ: The First Amendment is a really interesting thing with the paradox of tolerance. The paradox of tolerance, for listeners or readers who don’t know it, it’s this idea that in a limitlessly tolerant society, the intolerant will eventually swallow up the tolerant. My understanding was that Popper was like, “Okay, we might need to enact violence or structurally address that.” That’s not what the U.S. Constitution does. The U.S. Constitution accords just nearly unlimited tolerance for hatefulness, as long as it’s abstract.
There’s one little thing that it does, and this isn’t just the First Amendment. This is constitutionalism in general. It stops the conversation about whether you can censor. I don’t know if you know Louis Michael Seidman, who’s a professor at Georgetown Law School, probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. He’s a professor at Georgetown, and he has written a book, “On Constitutional Disobedience [ [link removed] ],” which is excellent, that I recommend to everyone. He’s also written a law review article called “Can Free Speech Be Progressive? [ [link removed] ]” His argument is that it can’t.
One of the really profoundly interesting and provocative ideas that Seidman has introduced, that I think about really often, is that constitutionalism shuts down certain conversations. The First Amendment shuts down certain conversations. If you have a First Amendment, your legislature just cannot debate silencing the press, silencing critics. Maybe they can debate a constitutional amendment to do that, like a flag-burning amendment. I think there’s an inherent paradox of tolerance idea built into constitutionalism, but it’s structural.
It’s not actually a barrier against a degree of intolerance such that you’d say, “You can’t talk about on your podcast how some people are vermin” or something, which is a speech that’s been studied as likely to lay the groundwork for civil wars and genocide. The place that it stops the limitless tolerance is for tolerance for censorship. I read Seidman’s ideas about constitutionalism—myself, I read them to say, “Yes, this is how we answer the paradox of tolerance in a constitutional democracy. We take some policy ideas off the table constitutionally.”
Listening To Understand
KLUTSEY: Very interesting. How can we be better listeners? You talk about dialogue facilitators in your book, and I think that there is perhaps an approach that can help people to improve their ability to listen, because listening is an important part of dialogue and conversation.
SCHWARTZ: Listening is really important. The book is called “Try to Love the Questions.” Here’s one of my favorite questions: What would you do if you wanted to understand? I like to sit with that question, and sometimes, maybe for some audiences or readers, it might spur the question like, “Do I want to understand?” That’s okay. I do want to understand, and I have some reasons that are really humanist. I sometimes see things happening in our society, and I think I really need to understand because I can’t bear the possibility that this is all born of hate or just being terrible, so I want to understand more.
Sometimes it’s a little bit transactional. In my experience, I’ve known that understanding is a key component to being able to do the things that I want to do around making change in the world, doing the things I want in the world. Right now, it includes protecting my school from censorious policies, and so it’s incumbent on me to understand the people who are saying they want some censorship. I cannot, by force, get things done. If you think about it and you say (for whatever reason; we could have all kinds of reasons) “I do want to understand,” one is relationships. If we want to continue to be in relationships with one another, that is easier to do if we understand.
I think if you say, “What would I do if I wanted to understand?” quite often, becoming a good listener is critical. Methods of becoming a good listener that I encourage in my teaching, in my actual teaching—I talk about this in the book, this idea of lovable questions. I really believe that well-designed questions are the key ingredient to robust and exciting, joyful inquiry. I try and use really well-designed questions that force my students to engage with nuance. I also tend to assign people to take a particular position or come up with the best good-faith arguments for a particular approach or position or role-play.
I have students later this morning in my 11:20 class doing an exercise where they’re going to explore possible limitations on police authority to do suspicionless searches called Terry [ [link removed] ] stops [ [link removed] ]. I have them role-playing a police union, victims’ advocates group, civil society group, a bunch of different, if you’d like, stakeholders in this question of what authority police have to come and be the star of our day as we’re going through the world. I think this is a really great way to get people listening for the things that a person in that position would care about. I hope that they take that into their other work.
KLUTSEY: Sorry, curious. Have you been in a situation where a student might say, “I’m having a hard time role-playing because I find this view so abhorrent, or I find the position that this person is playing in this role so abhorrent, I just cannot role-play”?
SCHWARTZ: That has never happened. I’ve been using this teaching in my classes for 60 to 90 students a semester since 2014. That being said, I don’t design questions that are like, “You be the KKK.” There’ll be much more nuance. Examples will be, I just did a First Amendment moot court where there was a student who intentionally violated a speech restriction to make a point for the First Amendment, but someone actually got hurt. It was misinterpreted, and someone got harassed because of it. I have people representing him and people representing UCLA.
I tried to get people representing positions they might not like. I’ve had a fact pattern where I have people who own a family farm that hosts weddings and a gay couple who wants to rent it for their wedding. I have not had anybody refuse to do that moot court. I’ve done things about reproductive choice, about guns.
I like to design questions that aren’t lazy red-blue binaries. One of my favorite fact patterns I’ve done, it relates to a gun restriction that the Obama administration implemented that had certain disabled people barred from purchasing guns, and the ACLU opposed it. The disability community opposed it. Trump rescinded it. A bunch of people got mad, like, “You’re giving guns to these crazy people. You don’t care about anything.” I repurposed that regulation as a California law, and I have people arguing against that gun regulation. This is the Parkland generation of students arguing against that gun regulation as a matter of disability rights on behalf of an intellectually disabled man who wants to do target shooting with his family.
It opens people’s eyes to, you can be profoundly supportive of gun safety regulations, and you could see why a regulation that stigmatizes unduly disabled people is not a good regulation. Or have students who are very supportive of gun rights have to argue for the state, like, “No, we need a bit of power to just ensure community safety in this way.” Right? These aren’t questions like, “Hey, is racial group B inferior or not?”
A great thing about the law as a vehicle for this kind of dialogue is that you can come up with legal questions that aren’t at the very core of people’s humanity but are still in hot and contentious spaces. It produces an enormous amount of empathy. This duty of zealous advocacy is a great way to start thinking about, “Why does it matter if this dude has free speech rights?” It’s been very successful. I have never ever had someone say, “I just won’t do this.”
Dialoguing Across Differences
KLUTSEY: Interesting. Now, on the skills, on developing the kinds of people who can engage effectively in dialogue across differences, are you optimistic that we will get to a place where the narrative on national crisis around free speech becomes more and more about, hey, people are developing the skills, and they’ve become much better at engaging across differences? Are you optimistic?
SCHWARTZ: It hasn’t gone great so far. I love higher ed; I love education. Higher ed isn’t great at talking about itself. We’re not great at talking about what we do. I think we’ve really let this narrative proceed in a way, and a lot of people have thought, “Well, I do great scholarship. What they’re saying in the press doesn’t look like what I do, so I’m just going to keep doing what I do.” I actually really think higher ed has to do a better job of telling the world what we do and why and how that works. I’d like to be a part of that.
I think there are wonderful initiatives where people who care about civic dialogue and democracy are talking too about how we elevate this work and support each other’s work and support shifting that narrative. I hope we can do that. I think people are starting to see the need. I absolutely have optimism about students’ capacity to do this. One of the main concerns I have right now is my capacity as one professor to keep up with the demand among students for more opportunities to do dialogue programming. We’re going to expand things at AU this coming year. I’m really excited about it.
My students sign up for mediation classes. They sign up for facilitator training. They come to the disagree-with-the-professor events that we hold. They speak up in class. They do their moot courts. They come find me in office hours. They really want to do this, and they can do it really well. I don’t think my students are more different and special than students at other universities. I think that young people who sign up for higher ed really can do this. Higher ed needs to be clear with everyone, “This is what we’re about.”
If you read my book and you go, “Oh, congratulations, Lara. It looks like you invented liberal arts,” it’s like, okay, thinking across multiple disciplines to engage with challenging texts and problems from a bunch of different conceptual frameworks—yes. “Socrates already said that, Lara,” right? We have this capacity. This is what we do. We really need to communicate with our students about what’s wonderful about that component of it. We often don’t. We say, “This is the waiting room in front of your career,” or, “This is an incredibly expensive thing that you should already be worried about paying for.” We say a lot of things that aren’t this, that aren’t “we are here because we love questions.” But it’s very much in reach, and they do love it. They do.
People Like Us
KLUTSEY: As we bring this to a close, what’s the call of action, or call to action, I should say, from your book? What would you like readers to take away from this and perhaps act on going forward?
SCHWARTZ: We have this way of thinking in our society. I actually do think this is my No. 1 critique of the intellectual-diversity approach to higher ed and what might ail it. We have this approach in society, many of us, to what I’ll call partisan identity formation. The way that works is, people increasingly—the density of the census tract you live in or what your parents vote, you pick that one of the two choices for your partisan identity, and then quite often we form our opinions or approaches to significant important policy questions about how to run our world, how to run our communities and society, on that basis.
That’s not what education is. Dannagal Young, who teaches at University of Delaware, has written in her book, “Wrong [ [link removed] ],” that it’s a way of thinking. It’s like, “People like me think X.” My call of action is, don’t look at it that way, including don’t say, “Okay, what we need to do is have a certain number of red and blue marbles in our classes or in our faculty lounges” or anything like that. I would say, instead of “people like me think X,” what we’re trying to do is, “people like me think, period.” We want to have identities as people who inquire and come into scholarly spaces with an inquiring mindset.
Because so much polarization is false. It requires us to be 100% in opposition to each other, when in fact, on most of the issues, we are a very mixed and nuanced bag. What I say to people is, I want students and all of us to think, “People like me can. People like me can understand challenging questions. People like me can sit in uncertainty.” Or, better yet, people like us. People like us can figure this out. People like us can understand things previously unknown to human society. People like us can listen. People like us can collectively and collaboratively figure out a way forward.
That’s my call to action. The people that we have in our universities can collaboratively problem-solve. We can be committed to inquiry. We can find it joyful and beautiful. That’s why we’re here. That’s my call to action: to move from this “people like me think X” to “people like us can do this together.”
KLUTSEY: On that very inspiring note, Professor Schwartz, thank you so much for joining us for this delightful conversation. Really, really appreciate it.
SCHWARTZ: I’m so glad to be here. Thank you so much.
KLUTSEY: Thank you. All right.

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