Fighting Self-Censorship on College Campuses | Gerard Alexander

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Gerard Alexander, a politics professor at the University of Virginia and the founder of The Blue Ridge Center. They discuss the strengths and shortcomings of UVA as an institution. They dive into the rampant self-censorship on college campuses and its effect on campus culture. Finally, they talk about The Blue Ridge Center as a program that allows college students to grapple with underrepresented topics and viewpoints. 

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:02.254)
Welcome back to the Anchor Podcast. Folks, we are here today with Dr. Gerard Alexander, top faculty member from the University of Virginia and founder of the Blue Ridge Center at the University of Virginia. Dr. Alexander has taught at UVA since 1997, has been a tenured professor in the Department of Politics since 2002. He's a specialist in comparative politics, especially Western Europe. In addition to academic writing, he's been published articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post,

National Review and other publications Georgetown undergrad Columbia PhD Dr. Alexander welcome to the anchor podcast. Thank you. Glad to be here with you So as we often do in the anchor podcast love to start off just kind of hearing a bit about your academic journey Did you did you enjoy school as a young boy when you think back about it? Was it painful? What was it like? I couldn't tell you whether as the father of a small child now who has a complicated relationship with school like almost all kids

I can't remember whether I literally liked school as an end in itself, but I was, I loved reading, I loved learning things. I just don't know that, I can't remember whether I liked school in the sense of other people deciding what I should learn. But I was a voracious reader. I didn't know what I wanted to do with any of that knowledge. But I will tell you, I remember very specifically at college at Georgetown, looking around me at professors and thinking, boy, I definitely did not want to become one of them.

You know, it was all kinds of besides Dr. Shaw. Exactly. But I just I knew that that was not what I wanted to do. And no one was more surprised than me when a year after graduating, it finally occurred to me that if I really wanted to research things in depth, if I really wanted to set my own intellectual agenda, if I really wanted to live in the world of ideas and research and so that there were basically there were almost no careers that allowed me to do that. And it was academia or nothing. And then

So there was a pivot that even surprised me at the time. Okay, okay. Why Georgetown? I had wanted, I'd always been interested in international affairs and it was the one school I knew of, even though this isn't strictly true, but it was the one school I knew of where they had an entire undergraduate school devoted to that, the School of Foreign Service. So I didn't come in as a Catholic, I didn't come in because I had Washington DC connections, although that was an attraction. But it was this School of Foreign Service and the international focus that interested me.

Jeremy Tate (02:23.83)
And what I assumed in college I wanted to do was go into policy work. I interned on Capitol Hill. I interned at think tanks while I was in college. But what I didn't like about those experiences was not that they weren't filled with interesting people, not that they weren't consequential, because they were. But what I didn't like about them was that I was always researching or thinking about or tasked to work on what other people thought was important.

It was driven by the legislative calendar. It was driven by somebody else's agenda. And it was in those couple of years that I decided I wanted to work on what I wanted to work on. And I suppose maybe academics in that sense, professors are driven by a certain kind of arrogance, but I wanted to do what I thought was important. So at Georgetown, did you know you were on the PhD route? No, that's when I knew I wasn't. knew I, again, that's when I looked around at my professors. I didn't want to be that. I feel so guilty saying this because they were good people, right? And I learned a boatload from

But I looked at them and I can't even remember now exactly what uncharitable thoughts I had, but I knew I didn't want to do that. And I couldn't tell you now whether, did I not think that they had much impact on the world? Did I not find, I did find a lot of what they wrote boring. And if you, for instance, I'm political science professor. If you look at what a lot of traditional political scientists studied and wrote, it was extremely formal. was extremely, know, bureaucratic isn't quite the right word, but it.

It wasn't exciting, it wasn't puzzle solving, it was just very dry. And we've all taken dry political science courses. And I suppose I looked at things like American Government 101 textbooks and thought, I don't wanna spend my life writing things like that. So take us through this story then into Columbia, and then what did you ultimately focus on for your dissertation? Okay, so I graduated from Georgetown, still assuming that I did not wanna be a professor.

not sure what I wanted to do. And I got a Rotary Club fellowship. do these international fellowships. I had been studying Africa in particular. And I spent a year as an exchange student in Central Africa, in Cameroon. And then I went on to basically a public policy school after that, one that's meant to be a master's degree that gets you into, you know, the kind of thing that would get you hired at a think tank or get you hired in maybe journalism that would get you hired to Capitol Hill or government agencies, policy making jobs.

Jeremy Tate (04:45.992)
And something happened to me between leaving Georgetown and showing up at that master's program. I realized I wanted to study things in greater historical depth than the policy world cared about. I wanted to study my intellectual agenda, not Congress's intellectual agenda or policy agenda. And the only career that allowed you to pick your own topics and study them in the way you wanted to, like historically, was

Academia and so I applied to PhD programs to my surprise. My resume wasn't really built to do that I had a scrounge around for recommendation letters that would make me a plausible candidate for that and ended up at Columbia where I Learned you could study political science in really dry boring ways if you wanted to but you didn't have to You could study it in ways that were genuinely interesting and in my case, for example I started graduate school. I'm dating myself here

in the same semester in which the Berlin Wall came down. And all of a sudden, Eastern Europeanists, students of Eastern Europe at Columbia, and there were a lot of them, were suddenly being handed this opportunity of democratizing societies that set their minds going as to, those become democracies? And of course, most of them have, and thank God for that. And to the good of the people who live there, got out from under the Soviet yoke and were able to chart their own destinies.

I realized that as a Western European, as someone interested in Western Europe, I had something to offer them, which is evidence and arguments about why democracy had once been precarious in Western Europe, but wasn't anymore, was so stable that we now take it for granted. And we don't even ask anymore how that happened and when and why. And so I built my dissertation around the issue of why Western European democracies once so precarious.

became the stable things they are. And the idea was to offer that theorizing to students of Latin America, students of Eastern Europe, who were embarking on an exciting journey of figuring out where self -rule could come from there. Love that. Fascinating journey. Let's talk about the University of Virginia now. I think we share a love for Jefferson's University. My wife graduated in 2000. We've been down there a few times with my kids with a

Jeremy Tate (07:04.174)
They'll try to remind me that I didn't go there as I give them a tour of campus. We dated all through college. And I would sit in on her classes. And there was a notable difference between the average LSU professor, not to hate on my alma mater, and the average UVA professor. Qualitative difference. I remember just being amazed in some of the classes. She had Jonathan Hight and Dr. Elzinga and some incredible professors at UVA. You've been there since 97. Yeah.

What do you love about University of Virginia? So first of all, I'm incredibly grateful to be there, not just because they offered me a job, but because it's, I often joke I'm lucky to have started my academic career at a place where many scholars would be happy to end it. And what I mean by that is, you know, often a young professor will get a job when they don't yet have a reputation for excellence in their research or their teaching at a really tiny, far -flung school that they'll over time work their way up to a better one. And here, instead of ending my career,

at a great school like UVA, I got to start from day one. was an incredibly lucky thing. And I've been grateful ever since. I often, for all of my criticisms of the modern academy, I often refer to UVA as one of the great places on earth. really is a fantastic environment. And a lot of really good students, the school is, I'm probably going to screw this up. It's either 60 or 70 % in state, but a lot of out -of -state students. It attracts a really big, excellent core of students from around the country.

And Virginia itself produces a lot of students. Like all student bodies, it's mixed in many, ways, including in how prepared they are for rigorous academic life and maturity and self -choice -making in their late teens and early 20s. But it is a place that takes education really seriously. It's one in which students

They do like to party and procrastinate and so on, but they also do a lot of them, most of them apply themselves diligently to their studies. Workloads are not what they were many decades ago, but there's a lot of good faith effort brought to bear in all the buildings of that university every day. That said, there are some things that over time started to worry me. Some of them are above my pay grade. They are how good middle K through 12 schools have become in awful lot of the country.

Jeremy Tate (09:23.198)
The intellectual climate nationally has become poisonous in many ways, and some of that affects academia in particular. A lot of intolerance, there's much more intolerance or sensorialness than there was when I first started, and that's very worrisome. But here's something I realized also there were problems that I could do something about. I would say, let me describe it this way. Universities like UVA are really great public universities, state universities.

They are fantastic at doing certain kinds of things. They have great STEM programs. They have great language programs. They have a lot of departments on campus from the med school to the law school to many other units of the undergraduate university are excellent. There's no way that anybody is going to improve on how UVA teaches math and a lot of the natural sciences and so on. But UVA, like many other great schools in America, has also had trouble providing some

other things educationally. They have had trouble coming anywhere near offering students the intellectual breadth or diversity that our society contains. They have trouble, I think, engaging students to consider in good faith and in some depth the differing moral perspectives that populate our society. They have trouble making real to their students.

worlds that are beyond their immediate lived experience, whether those are ancient worlds or historical worlds, whether the world's that are far flung geographically even now. those shortcomings are not, some shortcomings are just inevitable, some may not matter that much. But when you fail to make available to a lot of students at a good school like that, the breadth or diversity of moral and intellectual viewpoints in our society,

you are really ill positioning them for what comes after college. And that was something I could do something about. And so that's the last couple of years what I've been pouring myself into. In the last couple of years, that has been the Blue Ridge Center, which I'm very, very excited about this and something anyone who is considering the University of Virginia should know about. So I want to pick your brain about that. Before we get there, though, I want to share with you just a quick conversation.

Jeremy Tate (11:42.83)
another professor probably within a few years of you, I said, what's the difference? You've been in the university now for 20 something years. What's the difference in students now compared to when you arrived on campus? she said, I think the main difference is you kind of feel a sense of walking on eggshells now. And that really stuck with me. I'm wondering if you would agree with that. You use something maybe poisonous in the air.

Can you unpack that a little bit? Here, I think it really matters which school you're talking about. First of all, it's always hard to describe what's going on at an institution or in a community that you're not part of every day. So I'm going to be tempted in the next minute or two to say something about it. know. I'm as listed. Should I start picking on it? If I was a professor at Berkeley or Oberlin or Evergreen State, I bet you my answer would be somewhat different than a professor at UVA.

But on my campus, there is definitely self -censorship. Students report in surveys, for example, done by the free speech organization FIRE, that they regularly censor what they will say not only in class, but in conversations with their peers outside of class. When you think of people late at night in a dorm just brainstorming ideas and exchanging thoughts about how the world works and what's right and wrong, there are a lot of environments in which UVA students, like students at other schools,

report that they and other people they know are, there are topics they avoid, there are viewpoints of their own that they will not share with others or express, and those are not random. There is a very predictable distribution of them. In surveys, the most progressive, politically progressive students,

express the lowest rates of self -censorship. And basically the further rightward you go, but starting with moderate liberal students, they start to say in significant rates that they self -censor. now again, that's going to be, think, much worse in certain environments than in others. We know that, for instance, some of that pervades the nonprofit space and the political organizations in America, but it's going to hamper some much more than others. And I think in this case, it's going to affect campuses much more than others.

Jeremy Tate (13:59.414)
Mine, I'm very grateful for this. University of Virginia is in a very purple state politically. That means its population and therefore the student body of the university are very politically diverse. The faculty and administration share some of that. The Board of Trustees reflects that fact. And I myself do not find myself self -censoring. I'm not saying I'm gonna say stupid things. I hope I don't usually have stupid thoughts that I have to censor. But I don't find myself walking on eggshells.

But I know students do. And sometimes they may over, when I say overstate that, I don't mean they're getting it, that they are exaggerating. I think it may be the case that they're erring on the side of being more careful than they have to be. But students tend to learn things like that the hard way. Let me give you an example. When you ask students, do professors like you to parrot back their views to them on exams and in papers, at a very high rate they will tell you yes.

I don't know for a fact that that's true, at least in all cases, but that is a very entrenched student belief and it leads them to often be very strategic in what they write on exams and quizzes and essays. So the conversation with a Princeton graduate, former CLT employee a few years ago, and he said, we were having this conversation and he said, even the ivies are not like that crazy woke.

like some people think, the reality on campus is that you've got five or 10 % of faculty and students who are super, super far left progressive, and then you have a huge percentage that are kind of scared of them, are scared to get out of line. Is that fair? I think probably the percentages vary from school to school. Again, I bet you it's different, and I don't know why I keep picking on Oberlin today. Sorry, Oberlin and Oberlin alums. But my guess is that

The ratio might be very different at an Oberlin and a UVA or a Yale and then a UVA. I also think that the loudness and the afraidness that you were just alluding to, those vary also from school to school. But the basic notion that the energy, the self -confidence, the decibel level is mostly among the most censorious, the most intolerant, the most ideologically rigid.

Jeremy Tate (16:24.748)
That is definitely out there. Now, at some schools, that's just going to be a smaller or more compact percentage of the overall student body, faculty, administrators. But there are schools where that's going to be bigger and more aggressive, more assertive. And here's a great example of where school leadership matters. There are schools whose administrations, I think of Johns Hopkins, for example, have made very clear to the most sensorious people on their campus, on that campus, don't even think it.

Find another hobby. If you want to shut down speakers and exclude major points of view, you're going to have to go somewhere else to do that. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but that can have a massive effect on the dynamics on the campus. And if you do not send a clear message to that effect, as in so many things in life like this, every parent will understand the basic concept here. If you don't offer clear guidelines, you are inviting the worst possible behaviors. And once they start, they became much harder to shut down.

just ask Columbia University's leadership what it's like when you allow rampantly aggressive, intolerant, offensive, predatory behavior on your campus. The longer you let that go on, the uglier the eventual shutting down of it looks. Let's talk Blue Ridge Hunter. Someone who's never heard of it. What is the Blue Ridge Hunter? Never heard of this before. What is it? How would you describe

difficult to start things within universities. Universities are complicated. They have lots of stakeholders, lots of decision makers. Funding within them is often complicated. I chose not because UVA was hostile to this at all, but I chose to create an independent nonprofit. It operates alongside UVA. And it is designed, it's an intellectual diversity project. The goal of Blue Ridge is to bring to university students, to UVA students, UVA undergraduates in particular,

Viewpoints and topics that they think they might just not get elsewhere and let me give you one symbol of that Our very first reading group. It's like a mini course Which met seven times across the very first semester we were in existence was devoted to Thomas Sowell Thomas Sowell is Originally, I think an economist or economic even historian Became a very prominent public intellectual and yet there is an amazing gap

Jeremy Tate (18:42.348)
between how prominent he is, has been for the last few decades as an intellectual historian, and how completely absent or invisible he is on college curricula. mean, every student in that class who took that reading group with me had never been assigned a page, a single page of Thomas Sowell up until then. Whereas a ton of Americans would have read his columns and other things, in newspapers and books, right? And the goal was not to do...

a hagiography or glorification of Thomas Sowell. No one was more scrutinizing in the discussion than I was. We read one really extensive critique shredding a lot of Sowell's work. But what we were doing was going to engage in the conversation that Thomas Sowell had wanted Americans to engage with. We were going to read the evidence he had compiled and thoughts should be put in front of Americans. And we were asking, is this persuasive? Does this answer big questions we have? The students were politically diverse themselves. Some of them were very critical of him, were not persuaded by him.

But for a semester, seven nights for an hour and a half each, we talked about what Thomas Sowell wanted us to talk about. Notice that doesn't mean we agreed with him, but it does mean we were having the conversation he wanted to have. And that's the kind of, that meant bringing entire topics into the students' lives that they otherwise just wouldn't be exposed to in their normal coursework. And that I think is a pretty good symbol of what we've done ever since, right? In the four semesters now, now we're just starting our fifth semester of activity where the

We bring topics to bear that just do not appear in your coursework or other contexts and points of view, even on topic, and then in the case of topics that are discussed routinely, points of view on those topics that are unrepresented or underrepresented in the intellectual climate already on campus. And we do that with speakers, we do that with panels and debates, public events. We do that with reading groups, which are small group activities. We do that with workshops, which are like a single two hour session with some readings ahead of time.

to deep dive into some topic. do that in all kinds of ways. And there's a diversity of views in everything we do. We always have competing points of view and authors represented in our reading lists and topics. We have very intellectually diverse students in the room. But what we are determined to do is have conversations about topics and about viewpoints that just don't typically make their way into classrooms and other intellectual conversations on one of today's modern campuses.

Jeremy Tate (21:04.338)
We share a friendship with Dr. Robbie George and the great work he's been doing at the James Madison at Princeton University. Dr. George was the first anchored podcast guest, of course, three or four years ago when we started that. Dr. George relayed to me that sometimes Princeton students will feel a bit jaded and kind of ripped off that they went through three or four years of their undergraduate at one of America's top universities.

and they never heard a different point of view. We've seen the statistics that many sociology or religion departments are 100 % or close to it of self -described progressives. Why does, I love what you're doing, but in some ways this is saying something about the University of Virginia that students in droves now are going to the Blue Ridge Center to get something they're not getting in their classes on campus.

Don't, let's not overstate this. There are definitely topics that I don't feel the need to tackle because they do get addressed on my campus. There are definitely viewpoints on some topics that I don't feel the need to offer programming because there is a professor who does that. So for example, people interested in literature said, can you do programming on Shakespeare? And I went to the English department's website and looked over their course offerings and they do a lot on Shakespeare.

There are things I just don't feel the need to do. So I'm not trying to say that it's sort of the systematically that there's something hollowed out about UVA's intellectual offerings because that's just not true. There's a lot that's being done and done well. It's just that there are some really important gaps and our goal is to fill them. And let's not also not mistake, there are diversity of views. It's just that they are too limited. I mean, the joking way to put it would be that, you

their views on politics range all the way from very left to moderately left to centrist or something. mean, I'm just, you and I are both chuckling as we say that. I'm overstating that somewhat, but it is true that there are, you know, raging interesting debates held with among American liberals and progressives, and those are often well -represented on university faculties. The problem is whether those viewpoints extend to, you know, center -right and conservative.

Jeremy Tate (23:24.706)
Viewpoints that are just not well represented on campus on most faculties. Let me give you a great example and I I Didn't come up immersed deeply in debates about religious faith in life But I can't help but notice that one of the most underrepresented, you know presences on any modern University faculty are social conservatives religious conservative religiously conservative points of view and there's just there's something wrong with that when

We are all having to speculate about what people like that would say or think. Why not just have them there saying it and thinking it and participating in the conversation? There are just so many conversations on universities that would be improved by expanding the breadth of people in the room at the time. Now you've done this in a really powerful way. Over lunch, you shared some of the speakers that you've already had just in your first two years. Who have been some of the highlights?

had federal judges and you've had students fascinated to hear. Let me back up a little. One thing for all of the arrogance of youth or whatever that phrase is about young people thinking that they know everything and have all the answers. The fact is an amazing number of college students today are well aware of all the things they don't know. And among the things that they know they don't know are how to chart their own lives and careers in life.

They love to talk to people five, 10 years older than them and ask, how did you get where you got? Because they're in effect saying, I don't know how to do that and I'd love to do something like that, can you offer me advice? So they will come, when you have someone like a successful federal judge come in, they do flock to that because they wanna hear how they do that, what the job involves, what judging really means, what it would be like to be a lawyer in front of a judge like that, what different theories of the Constitution are and their consequences.

There are a lot of things like that. So we've had some excellent federal judges, appellate and other judges. We've had policy makers of various kinds. We've had very few elected officials for whatever reason. We just had in the spring the attorney general of the state of Virginia speak, but mostly not elected officials. A lot of what we've had are actually scholars and writers. Jason Riley, the Wall Street Journal columnist.

Jeremy Tate (25:44.014)
James Bennett, now with The Economist, but who was famously a longtime editor of the Atlantic Magazine and longtime journalist at and then op -ed editor at the New York Times. Jane Costin, a columnist and writer for the New York Times. We've had several dozen. This academic year, the 2024 -25 academic year, we're on track to offer to mount something like, I don't know, between 50 and 60 public events like speakers or panels alongside our reading groups and workshops and book clubs.

So it's a lot of activity and in there are typically not gonna be celebrity voices. I can't afford them and they're often hard to book and so on. But there are fascinating people. Last night we had Greg Lukianoff who is the president of FIRE. He has gotta be from an organizational point of view, the premier advocate for and defender of free speech in America tonight. And co -author of Coddling in the American Mind. And co -author of The Coddling in the American Mind, one of the great books of the last decade.

with a decade and a Dr. Alexander, we always end the Anchor podcast talking about books. I'm wondering, just kind of given our conversation, given the great work the Blue Ridge Center is doing at the University of Virginia, and by the way, I think Thomas Jefferson would be a huge fan of the Blue Ridge Center. I mean, this is why the university You'd have to land him as a guest for the Anchor. What is maybe one book that you feel like all college students should read? I'm not going to be good at that.

The last, I mean, I get the importance of the question. My best advice would be to read biographies. I know it's a kind of lazy and obvious thing to say, but I'm very historically minded, I'm very empirical, I'm not as philosophical as some people are. I find biographies incredibly engaging and they bring you a lot of history, but they also force you to think about what you can try to accomplish with your life. Okay, so you're not gonna be Napoleon, but.

There are things to learn from great historic figures, whether it's business and military stuff and politics and statesmanship and lots of artists. I just started a very respected biography of Marc Chagall, the painter. There are things to learn about lives of excellence and lives of impact that I think can inspire all of us, even if we're not gonna paint some of the greatest paintings in history.

Jeremy Tate (28:06.048)
Again, we're here with Dr. Gerard Alexander, professor at the University of Virginia and founder of the Blue Ridge Center. Dr. Alexander, thanks so much for being with us today. Thank you.

Jeremy Tate (28:27.63)
Gotta get this.

Jeremy Tate (28:36.782)
I have a couple of times.

Jeremy Tate (28:42.318)
Typically it doesn't take this long, don't know why it's still doing that. But we should get it in a minute.

But good job, you don't need any prep at all. The question is how long before all the emails from Oberlin start pouring in? It's funny because it's a moving target for us, right? If you're going to hold up as an epitome of the worst, the most intolerant, the most... But it's a moving target of which school of the month. For a couple years there it was Evergreen or whatever the school was, But every six months we get offered a new school where it seems to be the worst of all.

This is starting to concern me. This takes five seconds.