Fighting for Free Speech on Campus

Jeff Long before October 7th, there have been groups warning about the growing problems of cancel culture on college campuses and that free speech was under assault.

Yeah. MICHAEL and obviously those concerns have landed as the lead story in the mainstream media in recent months. And so today we're going to talk with one of the leaders of an organization advocating for individual rights and expression on campuses, not only about those headlines, but also about potential long term solutions to free speech on campuses. That's ahead on this episode of Future youe.

This episode is brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information policy, and institutional transformation. This episode of Future youe is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org

I'm Jeff Salingo.

And I'm Michael Horn.

As we mentioned up top, concerns about free speech on college campuses and cancel culture have been around for a while. President Obama, for example, has spoken about this on numerous occasions, and that was before the pandemic. But the concerns have obviously been heightened since Hamas's attack on Israeli civilians set off this broader war in Gaza.

MICHAEL yeah, that's right. JEFF and yet before October 7, many were still saying that the concerns over free speech were frankly overwrought. They would look at instances like the one that occurred at my alma mater, Yale, in 2015, where the head of a residential college's wife was forced to stop teaching because she had said that students should be able to get this decide for themselves which Halloween costumes they wore. And people sort of dismissed this as sort of sideshows. But our guest today has been collecting the data and I think convincingly showing that these limitations on free speech through deplatforming or canceling, they aren't some sideshow. It's actually a real problem that's been growing for some time, he argues. These attempts, for example, grew by four times between 2013 and just 2014 alone. And then they've continued to grow since there. And what's more, these attempts to cancel talks and cancel free speech are actually successful at doing so 44% of the time, and that's six times higher than it was from 1998 to 2013. So we're seeing a lot of growth and they've only continued to grow. JEFF and we're only a few months into 2024 and we're on pace for having the most deplatforming attempts in one year, more than even 2023, which was already a record high.

Yeah. So Michael, I think you lay out the issue as it stands today, and I think today we really also want to focus on the solutions. And our guest, as you said, thinking about both. And our guest today is Greg Lukinoff, who is the president and CEO of fire, the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He's also the bestselling co author of the Coddling of the American Mind with Jonathan Hay and the new book the Canceling of the American Mind with Ricky Schlott. Greg, welcome to Future youe.

Thanks for having me.

So we sometimes start off these interviews by asking guests to tell us a little bit about their story. So why this cause of individual rights and expression on college campuses? How did you come to this idea of free speech as your cause?

You know, it goes all the way back to my childhood. I mean, my dad is a Russian refugee who grew up in Yugoslavia. My mother is ethnically Irish and grew up in Britain. And I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of other first generation and immigrant kids. And a lot of them were fleeing either from communism in Vietnam or in China or freeing from authoritarianism in South America, America. So I am one of these obnoxious first generation kids who do sometimes think that America can't quite see itself because it's too close to it. And I actually do think somehow being in immigrant communities or having parents who are immigrants, you can see some aspect of it that sometimes the people who have been there for five generations don't. And free speech is very precious and it's also very, very fragile. So I went to law school to do First Amendment work. I took every single class Stanford Law School offered on First Amendment. When I ran out, I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor Dynasty because I'm that kind of nerd. I interned at the ACLU of Northern California. And, you know, people thought I was a little crazy. I'm putting all my eggs in this, like, basket of, of, of a job that's very hard to find. And when I was first approached by Harvey Silverglate, who found me, which was pretty cool. Harvey Silverglate is a civil liberties lawyer. He's the co founder of Fire along with Alan Charles, which was founded 25 years ago this year, back in 1999. And he found me. And I wasn't really expecting necessarily to focus in higher ed, but I wanted to do First Amendment law. I care a lot about it in higher ed. And even when I started back in 2001, I was like, it is easier to get in trouble on campus for what you say than I thought. And what was one of the first things I learned was that Stanford, my school, had had a speech code produced by Tom Gray, one of my professors that had been defeated in court just two years before I started. And nobody actually would talk about it. So it was weird realizing that there was this kind of like, yeah, maybe we had this. There was a little bit of embarrassment around it at least that essentially, oh, well, we thought it was a good idea and actually thought it was probably silly. And it was as if this had all passed and we are all, we've been foolish and young and censorship seemed nice and you. But so, yeah, I hyper specialized in this and I loved fire from the beginning because it was the weirdest group of people who vote for different candidates.

The events of October 7th and the reactions on college campuses and in the halls of Congress seem to have really boosted many people's awareness of these long smoldering issues that you work on and have documented extensively in your mind. What was the real problem that the resignations of UPenn's and Harvard's presidents highlighted? Was this about them as individuals and their. And their direct responses, or was it the broader issues, in your view?

I think it was the broader issues. I think that by the time they were being, when they were at that hearing, being asked about anti Semitism, which, by the way, I'm not Jewish, but I do think there's a major antisemitism problem, particularly in schools in California and in elite higher education. And that's from personal experience speaking on these campuses. But I think by the time they went into that hearing, unless they were going to open by saying, you know, particularly for Penn and Harvard, we haven't been great on free speech. We haven't been consistent on this, and we're going to do better, and we're going to start doing better by being serious about the free speech rights of pro Palestinians. But we're not going to end there because the reason why they could never win that room over, certainly not Claudine Gay or McGill, is because Penn and Harvard aren't great on free speech. They've had truly ludicrous cases over the past several years. So their credibility was already shot by the time they walked into it. And I mean, I would have opened by talking about the problem of anti Semitism. I would have opened by saying we have had double standards in the past. And then of course, when someone tries to get you to answer a yes or no question on a legal matter. I'd remind people, well, thankfully, we're a common law country and a lot of legal questions don't actually have yes or no. And you're lucky for it. And I think they could have done. I mean, they easily could have done a much better job of actually answering that. Now, when it came to McGill stepping down, it was hard for me to be too pessimistic about that one because, like, two days after her testimony, which she didn't do, great news, she actually made a statement saying, we're going to reevaluate our whole policy of letting Supreme Court and First Amendment norms influence what our policies are at Penn. So we're like, okay, well, that's the worst thing I've ever heard a university say. So by the time she actually stepped down, I was like, okay, you just announced that you might be the biggest threat to free speech I've seen of an elite president. So she stepped down. I couldn't be too pessimistic about it, partially because also the statement that the Alumni association came up with was great. It was talking about a way to rejuvenate Penn. They called it Penn Forward. That had all different ideas about trying to reintroduce the search for truth and to be a better, fairer place. That was free speech and active freedom for all. So that was a case where I'm kind of like, okay, I think, honestly, her stepping down was necessary to actually, even though understandably, people are like, given the circumstances on which she stepped down, that the fear, very understandably, could be that they're going to clamp down on free speech more. There was some reason not to see it that simplistically, in my opinion. Now, when it came to Claudine Gay, I'm a little bit more complex on Claudine Gay. Claudine Gay had a little bit of a not great record on these cases as well. She was involved in the Roland Fryer case, which was a professor who did this really in depth study. He was told not to publish these findings and all this stuff, and next thing you know, he's being investigated for telling dirty jokes. I'm cynical enough at this point in my career that I don't think any of that is a coincidence. He was invited back after a couple years of being investigated, and that was Claudine Gay's department. She did say some good things about free speech and economic freedom. She did reach out to the Academic Freedom alliance at Harvard. And so we had a little bit of Hope for Claudine. But then when all the plagiarism stuff came out, I honestly thought Harvard really embarrassed itself on this. I mean, the percentage of things that she'd published that actually had some significant amount of plagiarism was treating like that's nothing. I was just shocked by it. So I think that by the time she stepped down, she needed to. We were a little bit worried that her stepping down would be an indication that Harvard needs to clamp down on free speech. There definitely is something to the fear that universities are trying to overcompensate for being bad on free speech by being bad on different people's free speech, which is not, not the solution as far as we're concerned. But I will say one good thing about the response to October 7th, after October 7th, and this is something that Bill Maher said when I did his show back in December. It's like a lot fewer people seem to be saying now that there's nothing wrong in higher education anymore.

Well, so Craig, let's talk a little bit then about the solutions, right? Because you public, as you mentioned, you mentioned the vision statement for Penn moving forward.

Forward.

And you've supported that, by the way. We should acknowledge that Michael signed it as well. And it focuses on intellectual diversity and openness of thought, civil discourse, political and institution neutrality, respect and tolerance. So what will it take, in your view, to actually get something like this meaningfully implemented? Because I think we all know that higher ed is big. Institutions are huge, right? We have all these silos, right. We have all these departments and individual professors within departments and a lot of administration on top of that. Like, it's not just like a president could say, this is what we're going to do, and suddenly the next day it's implemented. So what's it going to take?

I think a big part of it, frankly, is competition from smaller, cheaper, higher rigor alternatives. Because here's the thing, like Harvard, I mean, okay, I've never fully recovered. I've never fully forgiven Stanford for how differently a certain class of people treated me after I graduated from their law school. It was suddenly like I was a legitimate person, you know, like suddenly I, I was smart. Suddenly I was, you know, okay, at some level. And there was something kind of gross about that. I, you know, I think about like my best friend growing up who, when I was in law school, I think he was still like a mechanic, but eventually went, went back, got his PhD in math, you know, and, and, you know, really smart people I knew who wouldn't even Think of applying to a school like Yale, Harvard or Stanford, and how much sort of like schools like that pat themselves on the back for really being the best and brightest. But now at Harvard, something like 45% of the white students at Harvard are either legacy admits they are kids of professors or athletes, and the average grade is a 3.8. And with all of those problems, it's harder to say with a straight face, you really are graduating the best and brightest. Particularly like when you're producing students who. One thing that's gotten back to me consistently is that they oftentimes create problems for the organizations that they're added to because sometimes they show up thinking it's their way of the highway. So what am I getting at? I think there's an opportunity for smaller, cheaper competitors to higher education that are actually better at telling you who the hardest working, most disciplined, best. Read all the things that employer really wants, and I think there's an openness to it.

Now, before we switch into a different topic, I just want one more question on the free speech one which is I'm just sort of curious where you see the limits of free expression, if at all. Penn's donors being upset about the Palestine Rights Literature Festival that went on, I think you said properly. So genocide, lynching, call for that. Should that be permissible? Where's free speech? Is it really more about the location and not deplatforming people? How do you think about those questions?

Yeah, I'm the rude American that when I go abroad and I talk about the American First Amendment, as a constitutional lawyer, you're supposed to go, oh, we're just fools over here. And you guys have it all, right? And I don't do that. I'm kind of like, no, no, I actually think we have a lot of stuff, right? And I think the First Amendment has a lot of sensible limitations in it. And I think one of the smartest things we do that other countries don't is we use categorical exceptions, not balancing tests. Because balancing tests, you can see them in action as soon as the political attitudes shift. Suddenly, if you have something a little teeter totter, all the weight can be on one side of it overnight, depending on the political passions of the moment. The categorical approach is a little bit more like choice architecture for judges, basically saying, listen, if it doesn't fit inside this little box, and there are strict rules for what fits inside this little box, you can't censor it. So there is no such thing as a free speech absolutist, at least not the one that I've actually met. I am a viewpoint absolutist, though, and I do think that people are entitled to their viewpoint and people should be allowed to play with ideas and engage in devil's advocacy, even if they believe horrible things, partially because it's valuable to know if people think horrible things. And for that matter, if you're trying to actually produce ideas, you have to always be going, well, what if we're completely wrong? What if the exact opposite of what we believe is wrong? How would we even know that? And how rich that area is. So in terms of a lot of things we saw on campus, and we were just to be clear, very clear on this after October 7th, yeah, we've defended a lot of pro Palestinian students in the past couple of months, but we've also seen a lot of unprotected speech on campus in the last couple of months. We've seen a lot of outright assault, which should be punished, not extreme speech. It's the opposite of speech, violence. I always say that you need to be highly tolerant of opinion. You should have no tolerance for violence. And I mean no when it comes to the thing that happened at Berkeley just a week ago where they chased off an IDF speaker and smashed overran where he was speaking. No, the students who engaged in violence, in my opinion, at this point, should probably be expelled. And the ones who organized it, who does the favor of having, in all caps, shut it down when they were organizing it, should probably be punished as well. So things that aren't protected, true threats, aren't and shouldn't be protected. Intimidation, which basically means something similar to true threats, making someone feel like they're being targeted and are in danger. Discriminatory harassment on campus, if severe, persistent and pervasive, singling out of someone on the basis of a protected characteristic, that can also be punished as well. Now that's a high bar, and it should be because otherwise. Otherwise you end up in a situation in which you can just go after opinions you don't like. So I think that the exceptions to free speech as understood on campus actually make a great deal of sense. But as to things like civility, I wish we taught that stuff. I mean, that's one of the things that I think is such a problem. And one thing that we did when we, the research department fire, I couldn't be prouder of. And one of the things that we did was we compared some of the schools that had the worst rankings when it came to free speech on their campus, and we compared them whether or not they'd had more anti Semitic incidents on campus. And we found that, yeah, actually a lot of these campuses that are bad for free speech are also bad for. They're high on antisemitism, at least according to the data that we could put together. And that doesn't really surprise us. I think that one of the reasons why Dartmouth has actually weathered the storm pretty well. And even though Dartmouth did not do very well in the campus free speech ranking, Siam Blalock, the new president of Dartmouth, I have some real hope for. And one of the reasons why they didn't have a major blow up after October 7th is they started the hard work of having dialogue between pro Palestinian, pro Israel students almost like a year before the blow ups. And so by the time the actual blow up came, they weren't having the situation where administrators were kind of giving this oversimplified idea of it's all just about activism, it's all just about oppressed versus oppressor. They already had done the hard work of being like, oh, actually, yeah, no, people who are not stupid or evil disagree on this one. And I think that some of the stuff that they're trying to do at Dartmouth gives me some hope.

So, Craig, you wrote the Coddling of the American Mind, of course, with Jonathan Haidt six years ago. And that brought some of the themes out that we've talked about today to the forefront of what people are thinking about. And you wrote that these issues aren't just bad for society, but they're actively harming students and making them less resilient. And now your book has been turned into a documentary. Congratulations, by the way.

Thank you for.

Can you talk a little bit more about what the solution is to this crisis of student mental health? Because we've talked a lot about this several times on this show and that you've written them in some ways, we prepared them in many ways to be depressed and anxious. So what's the solution here?

Yeah, and again, I don't think any of it's easy. I think that you have to start rethinking how we're doing almost everything to a degree. So there's two new books coming out, John's next book, Anxious Generation, which I think is Excell, but I'm a First Amendment lawyer, so I'm gonna disagree with some of his solutions. And John knows this cause that's what I do. But also. And talk about fascinate. Talk about someone who you can just dismiss without actually reading her work, because it's like, oh, she's a Right winger. I shouldn't listen to her. Abigail Schreier's new book, Bad Therapy is a revelation. It takes a lot of the themes in coddling and it really narrows in on. Is that the right word? The sort of therapized environment in K. And both literally from therapists, but also from teachers who are kind of sort of engaging in a sort of therapy which has this impact of getting them to ruminate on their feelings all the time. And I really do recommend it to everybody because it just is. It's a really powerful and upsetting book. So I think that we have to really rethink how we're teaching kids from the earliest ages up and try to focus on an empowerment model because we're unwittingly. And by the way, that's what I wanted to call the book. That's what we signed the contract. We signed the contract as disempowered because I've always hated the title Coddling of the American Mind because I want to have a more. And that's one of the reasons why height and I, we're so adamant about things like increased independence, increased outside play. I'm a huge believer in the gap year. I am going to have my first feet. My kids are 6 and 8 and I'm gonna fight for them not to go right to college. I think like the, the self efficacy I had from working as a cook, you know, like before college made such a huge difference to like the whole rest of my life. So I think that I think we need to move away from a therapized model and more to an empowerment model.

So I just want to follow up quickly on that because the other thing that's really changed, it seems, is technology.

Right.

And so what role does technology play in this story? Because. Because as we know now, especially on campuses or in schools or anywhere, right, People just whip out their smartphone and record a faculty member doing something or saying something or airing their griefs on social media. So it seems like a lot of the changes needed could be on shaky ground. If all the well meaning policies can just fall apart with one video that goes viral.

Yeah, no, agreed. But when it comes to the idea of no phones in schools, like you show up and you check your phone at the door and you don't get it back till the end of the day, I. That just makes perfect sense. I think about like, would you have been allowed to have a fax machine and a payphone and like all this stuff on your desk when we were in high school? Of course. You wouldn't. That would be ridiculous. So I think that that's a great solution there. I actually think that we're probably heading to a situation where there'll be better ways to for better tools to help empower their parents to keep them off of social media. But the whole the problem of people taking pictures and it going viral part of that can only be solved from cultural adjustments where essentially we have to reach a point where we're kind of like, yeah, you caught someone in a bad moment. This is not the end of the world. And it's funny because height and I agree on so many things. But one difference between the two of us is I am much more a bottom up reformer. I think that most changes, particularly when technology is involved, come from a process of adapting to the existence of the technology. He's more top down than I am. But I do think that there are lots of things that you can do re establishing different parental norms, not having these things in schools, saying that you can't use your phone in a classroom, even in college. I think that's perfectly fair. But to some degree we're also just going to have to adjust to the existence of these sometimes delightful and sometimes just awful machines.

Greg, huge thanks for shedding light on all these issues. Really appreciate the work you continue to do.

Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

You bet. And we'll be right back on Future you.

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welcome back to Future. You and Michael, let's just jump right into this because this has been a burning topic I know for you probably for some time, but certainly top of mind. Since October 7th we've talked about this a few times on the show as well. So we don't have to rehash too much. To me, a lot of this runs through the faculty. And that's really hard to address easily in many ways because of shared governance, tenure, and other things where the faculty have a lot of control over the workplace. So what do you think about what Greg had to say about answers to the challenges of free speech?

Yeah. Well, let me first hearken back to something you said, Jeff, to me on a few episodes ago, where you said some of this is also through administrators and not faculty. And so to address that part of it, I think you do really need leadership at the president level and that president to have a real commitment to free speech and a real commitment, frankly, to the rules that a lot of these places already have on the books about not being permitted to interrupt classes or shout down speakers or clear lines where protests are appropriate, which goes beyond just free speech when, say, it's convenient. And look, that might mean, I think, some tough conversations with students, saying to some students, hey, you want to continue with this behavior, that's fine, but it's not going to be at this institution. You can leave. But we're staying true to the principles and that's going to take real leadership. I think, number one. Number two, to your point on the faculty, I think it's interesting for me from my vantage point at Harvard to see this because there's a real conversation going on in if adjunct faculty like me are an answer to this, or are we the problem? And I'll lay that out, some people have pointed out at Harvard, look, there's all these centers that have grown up around different institutions. They have people who are teaching and leading them who are not tenured, they haven't gone through the discipline of the field. And to really understand what academic freedom means and how to publish with rigorous ways. And so a lot of the problem stems from there. And then on the other side, obviously people are saying, look, we have all these discipline specific ideological traps that have been set up that you can't get tenure unless you go through them. And so that's sort of the debate. Is it the tenured faculty that are the problem or is it the adjunct faculty that are the problem? Honestly, I'm not sure I have a clear answer on that one, Jeff. I think it's an interesting debate and it's also one that I suspect might be more relevant to those rejective or selective higher ed institutions and perhaps less so as you go out the rungs of higher ed and serving the bulk of students, but I don't know that. So that's a question I have. And then I guess the last thought I have is, to me, Greg's most interesting answer perhaps was that he sees the real solution being in the form of new, less expensive colleges or faster and cheaper, as our friend Ryan Craig would say. But I think his big point is you need entrance, right? As Stig Leshley or Preston Cooper would argue, they would say we need disruptors to come in here that really shake up the status quo. And look, as you know, I'm a trustee at Minerva University. I agree it's a heck of a lot easier to launch something new from the outside and do it differently than from the inside. It's hard to launch anything in higher ed, but once you do it, it's easier to set up new rules. But at the same time, I think there has to be a both and conversation here, because the purpose of a Minerva University obviously is around great teaching and learning and preparing leaders who can work on globally significant problems. But Minerva is not going to be the place where we build new knowledge, where we create knowledge. And that's the role of a place like a Harvard. And I think it's vital for that. And so I think we need a both and answer, even as you know, I love the disruptive entrants coming in, but I don't think that they're enough to really solve this. I guess the last question, though, that I've been thinking about, Jeff, on this, and it's something I wanted to ask Greg, but I slipped on it. So I'd love your take because you might have a more informed view because it's your area, which is this part of the reaction I had when I saw some students saying some of the frankly, inane stuff that they've said since October 7th, or see some of the crazy acts of deplatforming at UC Berkeley and other places more recently was this, which is, do these institutions have a more fundamental problem in their admission processes? Are they letting in people who maybe fundamentally are illiberal in some respects and maybe not actually good fit for the mission of these institutions that should be devoted to uncovering truth and delving into what are sometimes difficult conversations? Is there an admissions component to this on the front end, perhaps?

Yeah, an interesting question, Michael, but I think we have enough difficulty ensuring diversity in the broken college admissions process that we have have. I'm not sure we want to add another element to it. Plus I'm not sure how it wouldn't be just yet another part of the admissions process that could be gamed. Maybe institutions can ask an essay question on this front, but then applicants would write essays that they think the admissions offices want to hear rather than what they actually think. That said, Michael, fundamentally, yes, I think the admissions process allows this because we have turned the admissions into one of these places. And, and when I say these places, I'm thinking of the highly rejected places, the Ivy plus and other highly selective institutions. We've turned it into a game. So high school becomes the prep for that game, becomes the practice for that game. How does one practice for the competition that is senior year and getting into one of these institutions? By jumping through various hoops, by taking a specific sequence of classes across the disciplines. Not because you want to or because they might challenge your thinking on an issue, but because, you know, that's what colleges want on the transcript. You also do it by filling your resume with clubs that show a diversity of activities again, rather than trying out things that challenge you. And then the college search becomes one where you can get in, rather than one where colleges are perhaps a good fit for you. You know, it's interesting, Michael, as part of the reporting for my new book, I've been talking to admissions offices and institutions I outside the US and I'm really struck by how different the process is. Their goal, unlike in the US isn't to generate as many applicants as possible. And indeed, when I start asking these admissions deans outside the U.S. these questions, they're kind of curious about why I'm acting like admissions is such a business where you try to get as many applicants at the top of the funnel just so you can reject most of them. And you really focus a lot of your business processes on yielding a very specific number. It really seems foreign to them, right? They focus on fit of the students. They basically say, here's who we are and if you want to be part of this community, then apply. And if we think you're a good fit for this community, we'll take you. Don't apply if you don't like it, and we'll choose applicants who we think are a good fit for our missions and style of education. In the end, I think we've made admissions to these places in the US that perhaps have the biggest problems on free speech. So much of a game that these students really weren't challenged in high school to what they thought or if they did, they ignored it to focus on getting into the right college. Then when we get into the right college, we focus on that next set of hoop jumping, which is getting the right job. Undergraduate education, to me, is about thinking of the world in a new way and your place in it to challenge your values and ideals from high school and from where you grew up. Think about what fits during college, from where you grew up or from high school and what doesn't. I know that's what my undergraduate education did for me. And it's really a shame that many of these students, actually, especially at these highly selective colleges, really aren't getting the chance to do that. They just come in feeling that they're fully formed adults. One other thought, Michael. A few years ago, I moderated a panel on free speech at the Bowen Forum in New York. And the Bowen Forum at the time, they don't do it anymore, but it was named after Bill Bowen, who's the former president of Princeton. And you might recall that Bill Bowen gave the commencement address at Haverford a decade ago, and he gave that address after the Chancellor, Berkeley, who was supposed to give it, declined an honorary degree after students had protested his selection because of what some of the stuff that he did at Berkeley. And after his speech was over, Bowen went off script and he called some of the protesters inclinations immature and arrogant. So it's interesting that this is not new, right? This has been going on in college campuses for. For several decades now. But anyway, back to the Bowen form in New York, because on my panel there was Marvin Krisloff, who's the president of Pace University in New York, and he previously was president of Oberlin, where he said he faced a lot of protests, and he said it wasn't the case at Pace. And as he said, my students at Pace, they don't have enough time to protest.

Right?

They are focused on their studies and when they're on campus, and then they have families and jobs that they're focused on, on, you know, perhaps, Michael, as I think about this, the Economist recently noted that if elite universities work their students harder, then they would have less time and energy to fight battles over campus speech. I don't know what you think about that.

Well, first, everything you said before is making me more and more excited to read your next book. So I'm looking forward to you writing it so we can all read it. But I guess that last thought is a really intriguing place, I think, to leave this conversation, perhaps. And maybe there are two interpretations for that. One, the workload we know at colleges and universities has fallen precipitously over the last several decades. That's from reported studies and so forth. So that would add ammunition, perhaps, to what you're saying. And second, maybe when you're at a place with resources, that creates a privilege, you have the time for this stuff. But when it's about making ends meet, or you're perhaps lower down on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you're thinking more about the things that directly impact you and your family and your immediate community, and maybe not all this other stuff. So I don't know. But I think it's an intriguing point. And let's wrap it there. And we'll just say thanks again to Greg Lukinoff of FIRE for joining us, and thank you all for tuning in once again to future you.

Sam.