Original subtitles

This programme contains very strong language

This is not a trigger warning.

You'll be fine.

Just some ground rules before we start.

Everyone in this film is a real person.

You don't have to agree with them, but let's keep it civil.

Because this isn't just a story.

It's a mirror.

We're asking that there be no restrictions

on the content of speech,

and that's an enormous amount of freedom.

I'm confident that the students will exercise their freedom

with the same responsibility they've shown

in winning their freedom.

APPLAUSE

Yeah, fuck free speech, bitches!

♪ School's out for summer... ♪

You need to get out!

You are being racist.

You are being offensive.

Some of the words now forbidden at Stanford...

There has been a flurry of loud and angry debate

about what can be said

and what ideas can be expressed.

♪ School's been blown to pieces. ♪

Fucking apologise!

I want you to be offended every single day on this campus!

And then to learn how to speak back.

The law is a manifestation of white supremacy

that continues to oppress.

When somebody doesn't approve of my views on things like this,

what I am called is a white supremacist.

Fuck you! No, fuck that! Hey!

You're a fucking Nazi.

Get the fuck off campus!

- - By any means necessary!

No fascist USA!

- - The time has come to reclaim

our once-great educational institutions

from the radical left.

Get your fucking camera away from me!

I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed

our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.

The government's response to this problem

has been Orwellian.

Columbia University grad Mahmoud Khalil

was arrested...

...arrested by immigration authorities.

Back up! Back up! Get out of here!

Donald Trump is trying to silence academic freedom.

I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating

the Federal Department of Education, once and for all.

How the hell did we get here?!

These days, even asking that

can get you cancelled, quick... CLOCK CHIMES

...depending on who you are. RECORD SCRATCH

I'm a cisgender, left-leaning

white woman of a certain age.

Not a Birkenstock lefty,

more like a suede Chelsea boot.

Oh, yeah, and I'm Canadian.

I'm also a documentary film-maker.

I've been at the epicentre of an Ebola outbreak.

I've gone undercover in Turkey to find a trafficked woman.

I exposed corruption in the boxing world.

And I tracked down Doctor Frankenstein,

the world's most notorious organ trafficker.

Get on the ground!

This time, I'm heading into a conflict zone

to make what might be the most dangerous film of my career.

Why are you filming this?

I'm going back to school.

SCHOOL BELL RINGS

For me, university was a place where you wrestled with new ideas.

The collision of views and ideologies

is in the DNA of the academic enterprise.

Sex, politics, religion, war -

we argued about all of it.

But somewhere along the way, the climate changed.

Students didn't just disagree with ideas,

they felt harmed by them,

and the only way to feel safe

was to silence the people expressing them...

And now I want your job to be taken from you.

...all in the name of social justice.

Maybe it was, but it felt different...

I am disgusted knowing that you work at Yale University.

...like you had to watch every word.

My kids were heading to university,

and I wanted to understand the world they were stepping into.

I didn't know it then,

but this was the start of a journey that would last nearly a decade

and reveal how clashes over speech and identity put universities

in the crosshairs of a political backlash.

And in 2017,

Evergreen State College lit up my feed.

For over a year,

at one of the most progressive colleges in North America,

students were protesting, well, everything.

Evergreen paints itself as this progressive,

social justice place.

It is very anti all of that.

Dr King stated that the arc of the moral universe

bends towards justice.

The students here have organised

in an attempt to improve student empowerment on campus.

What did you do for, like, the black students on campus?

What did you do for the LGBTQ people on campus?

What did you do for the Latinx people on campus? What did you do?

Safety is more than just being physically protected.

It's... You know, it's being free from emotional harm.

If there are people at our campus who feel unsafe, then it is unsafe.

I quickly discovered that Evergreen reached a boiling point

during an annual campus event.

Every spring quarter since the 1970s,

Evergreen has hosted a Day of Absence event

where students, faculty and staff of colour...

...voluntarily stay off campus

to raise awareness of the contributions of minorities.

But this year, it was turned on its head,

with white students and staff

reportedly asked to leave the premises,

with minority students remaining on site.

However, it didn't sit well with one biology professor.

It is one thing to protest by not showing up somewhere.

It is another thing for one group to tell another group,

"Don't come here."

Some faculty felt as if it was discriminating against white people

to have a role reversal.

There was a couple of inflammatory emails

that were sent campus-wide that students had access to.

It made a lot of students here feel uncomfortable.

Yeah.

"You may take this letter as a formal protest

"of this year's structure..."

I feel like Bret's like a piece of the white supremacy

that exists...

...here on this really shitty fucking place.

When the emails came out

and black people were like, "This has racist coding in it,

"it's racist language. Can we address this?

"Can we talk about this?" People were like,

"Well, we didn't say the N-word, so it's not racism."

I have read that email so many times

and I can't find anything racist about it.

For me, even hearing the word "genes" on anything related is...

Phenotype, anything connected to that kind of thing is immediately,

like, something... Shit's about to happen.

How many times has gene pool, genotypes,

been weaponised in a racist way?

It's a completely uncontroversial biological term

to describe that we are talking about

people's physical characteristics.

English is not a language that black people consented to.

It's a language that's been used to colonise our people.

And so then when people say things like "the definition of" anything,

I'm like, "Good and great,"

- so what - I'm - saying is now I'm claiming this language

that I didn't consent to, and my people didn't get consent to,

that were raped into our mouths, and now we're saying,

"This is actually what I need this word to mean to serve me."

Bret was not very receptive.

He did not try to interact with our statement at all.

THEY RESUME PROTEST CHANT

Yes, Bret is a racist.

All white people are racists

because we live in the white supremacist world,

and colonisation has been, like, still in session.

That was the moment I realised

the word "racism" had been redefined.

Black activists from the 1960s onwards,

who are my accepted experts

in what racism is,

have defined racism as "prejudice plus power".

And so I might be prejudiced against a white person,

but I don't have the power that a white person has

to cause real harm.

In this framework, racism isn't only about intent,

it's about power,

and power was seen as running through

white-controlled institutions.

So, as a white person, unless I'm challenging the system,

I'm racist by definition -

not because I mean harm, but because I benefit from that system.

And Jacqueline can't be racist because she doesn't.

Yeah, send more reporters of colour.

That's the message that I want to put out.

Fair enough. I could see where she was coming from.

And then a student called me a white supremacist -

not in anger, just as a kind of friendly heads up.

And one thing you can do is hold yourself accountable to that

and embrace that, you know, you're racist.

I felt like I'd stepped into a parallel universe

with its own vocabulary.

I just didn't speak the language yet.

At that point,

the protesters moved on to the administration building,

and they confronted administrators and President Bridges.

You're... You're asking me to leave?

This is college president Dr George Bridges.

He believed the students deserved to be heard

and seemed willing to endure almost anything to show he was listening.

The protesters ended up in a meeting,

demanding of the president

that special provisions be granted

to effectively corral professors in science and technology,

professors in the STEM fields.

In fact, they discussed me in that meeting.

It just doesn't make sense to me, why he's still here.

Protesters argued that special remedies are necessary.

Right.

OK.

There was a plan for a meeting in an old cafeteria,

and I felt like the right thing to do was to be at that meeting -

an indication that I was very willing to talk to them

about whatever it is they thought needed to be addressed.

I was first told that I couldn't enter the room

where the meeting was being held because I was white.

That was not OK with me,

so I just, like, kept moving forward towards the room,

and somebody stopped me again and was like,

"We'll allow you to go into the room,

"but you are not allowed to speak, voice your opinions

"or ask any questions, because you're white."

Thank you all for coming.

APPLAUSE DROWNS OUT SPEECH

I was trying to make sense of the student demands,

which seemed to shift by the hour.

Some were reasonable - important, even -

more diverse faculty,

better support for marginalised students.

But it didn't stop there.

They wanted Bret fired.

APPLAUSE

RAUCOUS CHEERING

And then their outrage started to drown out their message.

CHEERING DROWNS OUT SPEECH

Real quick, real quick...

I saw that as very aggressive, not constructive.

I just want to ask you, like,

what do you mean by aggressive?

- Yes. - Well, someone yelling, "Fuck you, you fucking asshole."

- That's... - OK.

I feel like, as a person of colour,

and many other things,

when we are nice,

shit never gets done.

CHEERING

- - Right!

CHEERING

George was clearly not in control of the meeting at all.

LAUGHTER

Moving hands in a situation, like,

where you're already in the position of power...

Using your hands and sort of dismissing things.

That was a microaggression.

The real point is power.

LAUGHTER

"We have the power to make the president of the college

"not use his hands when he talks."

Fuck you, George! LAUGHTER

And he may have been surprised by the degree to which

they were willing to humiliate him publicly,

but I do think it was a monster of his own creation.

This is all security right now.

Students are taking furniture

and putting it in front of the doors.

So we've shut down, like, this entire hallway.

INDISTINCT

It's very hard to know for sure

where Dr Bridges was in all of this.

He describes himself as unconcerned

about having been barricaded in his office by protesters.

LAUGHTER

CHANTING

I was calling the president and I was talking to him,

and you could hear the yelling and the screaming in the background,

and it sounded so chaotic.

So I'm thinking, "Do we have a hostage situation here?"

And I said, "Can we come in?"

And he said, "No, stand down."

- - These racist teachers have got to go.

The world needed to know what was going on,

because the college itself was spiralling out of control.

Time now for Campus Craziness.

Dr Bridges is allowing this mob

to effectively control the campus.

Fox News contacted me.

I agreed to do it, because nobody else had asked.

It's not like the New York Times was banging down my door.

It's not like CNN had contacted me.

I assume you're no kind of right-winger.

If you teach at Evergreen, I'm sure you're, you know...

I'm a deeply progressive person...

The fact that someone who could identify as a progressive

would go on Fox News,

make our school a target for white supremacists.

Thousands of people dispersing from the campus,

shrieking, "This is your fault!"

There was no shooting.

Nobody came to campus.

But after the threat was phoned in,

my wife and I pulled our kids out of school in the middle of the day,

we bought a plane ticket,

and we left the state.

PLANE ENGINE ROARS

CHEERING

Two weeks later,

a right-wing group descended on campus,

and Evergreen became the site of a very different kind of protest.

Making a call on Evergreen State College

to get some real leadership,

to stick up for the professor who was treated like trash.

They're telling you how racist free speech is,

how racist white people are!

YELLING

- Where's the cop? - I got him right here!

YELLING

There's no question that there was a canary in the coal mine aspect

to what happened at Evergreen.

If people are telling you what ideas you are allowed to voice,

there's nothing that is not placed at risk.

And I think it would be a mistake,

just because this looks like confused college students,

to underrate the danger that this poses to civilisation.

Evergreen was my crash course,

a chaotic mix of old ideologies and new disruptive thinking.

I had no idea that over the course of the next decade,

it would spill out onto campuses everywhere,

and I certainly didn't understand what it all meant.

That lesson came later,

in a classroom at York College, Pennsylvania,

where students were studying what happened at Evergreen

like a case study.

OK. I want your initial reaction to the Evergreen story.

I'm sure somebody has something to say.

The people of colour feel that they're being suppressed

by the faculty members and the professor.

All right. So we have two things going on here.

My name is Erec Smith.

I am a Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania.

They're looking through this, a lens of victimhood.

Rhetoric, in its simplest description,

is the study of persuasive communication.

Can we say a narrative of victimhood,

or maybe an oppressor/oppressed?

As a rhetorician,

I'm trying to prepare my students for success here

in a diverse and civil society.

So I give them the tools for that.

How do we create a society with a bunch of different people,

a bunch of different discourses?

How do we all live together peacefully?

Evergreen is the perfect microcosm of

the detriments of what is often called woke ideology

or critical social justice.

So this can be boiled down to the conflict

between classical liberalism and critical social justice.

So a classical liberal ideology emphasises

free speech, equality before the law,

and the idea that we all get together and deliberate

and make decisions that way.

Critical social justice

is perpetuating this oppressor/oppressed dynamic.

So this is the bulleted list of critical social justice,

kind of what constitutes critical social justice.

RECORD SCRATCH Hang on.

I kept hearing "critical social justice",

but I didn't actually know what it meant.

So I started digging

and found a set of four ideas that planted the seeds.

But we have to go back.

CHANTING, DISTORTED SPEECH

Well, I'm not a crook.

The people have the power.

For most of the 20th century,

the university was guided by one big idea,

classical liberalism -

free inquiry, open debate,

follow the truth wherever it leads.

It didn't always live up to it, but that was the ideal.

After the Free Speech Movement of the '60s,

a new set of ideas started to gain influence.

Enter critical theory.

To fight against the oppression...

Philosophers like Herbert Marcuse focused on power -

who has it, who doesn't,

and how the whole system keeps it that way.

The goal - don't just study society,

expose and challenge anything that looks like injustice...

...which, over time, had become a lot of things.

Meanwhile, another fire was burning...

RECORD SCRATCH

...the Black Liberation movement.

America's brutal, racist history fuelled the Civil Rights Movement,

but by the late '60s...

We gonna walk on this racist power structure...

...activists saw that the law had changed,

but their lives hadn't.

...and we're gonna say to the whole damn government...

Groups like the Black Panthers weren't asking any more.

They were demanding change.

Now, here's where it all comes together.

Radical politics meets radical theory,

and it happens on campus.

Suddenly, social justice isn't just a rallying cry,

it's a curriculum -

ethnic studies, black studies, women's studies,

new departments, new reading lists.

The revolution didn't burn the system down,

it rewrote the syllabus.

Next up, postmodernism.

I'll be honest, this one's tricky.

It argues that knowledge isn't neutral -

it's shaped by culture, language and power.

Truth? Subjective.

Language? Tool of power.

Objectivity? Impossible.

Bottom line?

Science, law, history,

even your textbooks, don't just reflect reality,

they also reflect who's writing them.

Then came critical pedagogy -

a philosophy of how teaching should work.

School isn't just a place to learn,

it's a place to challenge injustice.

This is where education...

GUNSHOT ...becomes activism.

And we have the right to peacefully assemble and protest.

CLAMOUR

So you take critical theory's focus

on how society keeps power in place,

add Black Liberation's revolutionary energy,

mix in postmodernism's distrust of objectivity,

stir in critical pedagogy's activist approach to education,

and you get the foundations for what many scholars

now call critical social justice -

not one movement, a set of ideas converging over decades,

influencing how we think about...

It didn't just stay in the classroom.

It slowly reshaped the mission of higher education,

as the pursuit of truth was increasingly filtered

through the lens of activism and social justice,

and it helps explain how we got here.

If you're trying to understand it and get to the nitty gritty of it,

Evergreen is an excellent textbook.

The idea is that there is an oppressor-and-oppressed narrative,

and that narrative drives everything.

"Everything is racist" is a primary tenet of critical social justice.

So if racism is always already there,

you're projecting that onto people you may or may not even know,

you're telling them who they are before they even open their mouths.

Right? This is the opposite of civil conversation.

This is shutting down, this is silencing,

and it's bullying.

SCREAMING

OK.

Why is the student who doesn't see oppressor/oppressed so dismissed?

- Yes. - It doesn't fit into, like,

the argument they're trying to get across.

Right. If we have people of colour who don't feel oppressed,

well, that's weakening the narrative. That can't happen.

My authenticity as a black person

has been challenged my entire life, really.

There's this idea that black people are a monolith -

we all think the same, we all love the same,

we all interpret things the same.

So if I say things that are against the acceptable ideology, right,

then I am not authentically black.

For Erec,

challenging these ideas came at a cost.

There was a keynote address at our flagship conference,

the Conference On College Composition And Communication.

I can say, you know, quite honestly

that I can split my life into two parts -

before that day and after that day.

All right, get ready for 60 minutes of talking.

This is Professor Asao Inoue,

a widely respected scholar in rhetoric and composition,

headlining at the field's biggest conference.

How do we language so people stop killing each other?

And listen closely,

because he's about to connect English grading practices to...

Well, everything terrible.

In a world of police brutality against black and brown people

in the US, of border wall and harmful immigration policies,

of increasing violence against Muslims and LGBTQ,

of women losing their rights, of mass shootings in schools,

a complete disregard of indigenous people's rights

to their lands and cultures,

where do we really think this violence,

discord and killing starts?

If you use a single standard

to grade your student's languaging,

you engage in racism.

You actively promote white language supremacy.

White language supremacy is a supremacy of a single standard

that comes out of elite, white, monolingual, neurotypical

language links in the world.

So that's all the people in power who've made the standards

in schools and professions.

And then it continues to ensure benefits to that group.

We must stop saying that we have to teach this dominant English

because it's what students need to succeed tomorrow.

And a quote from the speech says that there is inherent racism

in teaching students of colour

what's considered standard English, right?

It's oppressive, apparently.

They only need it because we keep teaching it.

Erm, I took some issue with that

for a variety of reasons,

which you can probably imagine,

and I voiced my opinion on the online forum for my field.

If I'm a black English speaker

and I come into a classroom and they say,

"OK, black English is good and you can think in those ways

"and use that, but let's translate it to standardised English

"because you're going to need that down the road,

"because that's what's going to get you successful,"

that still privileges the academic English

and it subordinates that other English,

black English or whatever.

African American English,

or African American Vernacular English,

or Black English, or Ebonics, right -

it is a dialect with its own conventions.

It's not broken English.

It's unbroken African American Vernacular English,

with its own, you know, tonality and magic.

You know, it really is a great, you know, great dialect.

So no-one is saying

that shouldn't be appreciated or respected.

What I'm saying is, go ahead and add to that something

that may come in handy, you know, in certain situations.

And by certain situations, I mean most.

I thought I was walking into a conversation,

a potentially robust conversation about what we're doing as educators.

And the response was not exactly what I expected.

It's a strange feeling to be called a white supremacist

by a white person.

That... I was not expecting that at all.

Standardised English is very much a tool of the oppressor.

The language came from a particular place...

HE CHUCKLES ...and that particular group

of people, historically, have done a lot of racist things -

bad, racist, horrible things.

Language justified it, language explained it,

language made it into a science.

I'm saying you can't ignore all that.

The idea is that to acquire that skill,

that standard English, is to be successful in the world,

and the world's the problem.

You're perpetuating this oppressor/oppressed dynamic,

and therefore it's a bad thing.

This is not good for anyone, especially students of colour.

Thank God these weren't my professors when I was in college.

I would be steeped in negative emotionality

and learned helplessness.

If I had hopes and dreams,

I would not have the courage to chase them.

I don't know if you've all noticed yet,

but I'm black,

and I'm against this ideology.

Why? Because I really like being black.

And this ideology is infantilising,

it's anti-intellectual,

and since I am a mature, intellectual person,

it doesn't align with me.

I am too good for this ideology,

and so are many others.

Folks who might ascribe to a view like Erec's that says,

"This is what my students need,

"they need this to get power in the current systems,

"so they have to do this."

I'm not interested in helping white supremacist systems continue!

- HE LAUGHS - I'm interested in dismantling those.

As an educator,

I want to create self-reliant,

empowered and resilient,

antifragile people,

because I firmly believe that that is the quickest way

to happiness and success.

Not just success - happiness as well.

This was what many theorists would call a degradation ceremony, right?

And with a degradation ceremony,

the point is to ridicule somebody, right? Not listen to them,

but ridicule them, A, so that they shut up,

and B, show other people, "This is what happens when you speak up."

I was called a fascist, but who isn't these days?

So my civil response was deemed an attack, right?

To the point where other people chimed in and said,

"You don't have to respond to him."

It's a heck of a thing

when experts in communication refuse to communicate,

which makes me often conclude that

they're not so much professors of rhetoric doing activism,

they're activists doing rhetoric.

My colleagues of colour, I hope I offer you fuel,

words of charcoal and fire to go back to your schools

and institutions and make things burn.

Melt the steel bars of racism and white language supremacy.

Many people think that academia is a lost cause.

Critical social justice activists will say,

you know, "Tear it all down."

We can go there and figure out how that's going to benefit society,

or we can go in another direction and remind people

that the problem with classical liberal values

aren't the values in and of themselves,

it was our inability to live up to those values.

So if you fix that, you live up to those values,

you allow everybody in this country to enjoy those values,

and now we're getting somewhere.

I don't want to revolt.

I want to reform.

You know, I don't want to tear down the house.

I want to build an addition.

You know, I want to get an interior decorator in there and, you know,

you know, change the colour scheme or something like that.

That's fine. But the house stands.

While Erec's views were dismissed by his colleagues,

Asao's views were spreading,

and I was curious to see just how far his influence extended...

...which took me to Penn State and another writing professor.

My immediate supervisor chose

a sound-noise work for an entire academic year,

almost like an Adopt A Whale could be,

like, a weird birthday gift a kid gets.

This is like an Adopt A Scholar.

He was our scholar for the year.

♪ You, who are on the road... ♪

My name is Zack De Piero.

I'm an Italian American, you know.

These are the laws of dogs and man.

I'm just a guy, you know?

I'm a teacher.

I've been teaching since 2005.

Taught in the Philadelphia School District

for a couple of years as an English teacher,

grades 7 to 12.

I've been a college professor, post-PhD, since 2017.

I accepted a position at Penn State

for Assistant Teaching Professor of English and Composition.

Oh! I gotcha.

Zack's story stood out.

He's suing his university for racial discrimination, and,

well, he's white.

One month, we were required to watch

a "white teachers are a problem" video.

Welcome. I'm Paul Corrigan, here with Dr Asao Inoue,

recently Associate Dean at Arizona State University,

author of several very influential anti-racist books

in writing studies.

You might be wondering, what was the title of the video?

The title of the video was White Teachers Are A Problem.

Um... HE LAUGHS

Erm...

This came out of me needing to tell my white colleagues,

most of whom I love and care about,

that it fucking sucks and hurts

and is hard to be the problem.

- Yes. - So it's a paradox.

It's.. It is... And a paradox cannot be solved.

You spent your whole life trying to get better at this profession,

but now, all of a sudden,

I'm just this vessel of white supremacy in the classroom.

In that White Teachers Are A Problem video,

the teaching of standard edited American English was equated

with the murder of black Americans, somehow.

We can see or understand how white language supremacy

leads to killing people of colour.

Killing black and brown bodies on the streets and in prisons.

If we think that someone who languages in black English

is not articulate enough,

that cannot analyse something well enough,

or just is not appropriate,

the next linguistic step to that is,

"You are dangerous in this place.

"You don't belong in this place.

"You... You... You now threaten me and my existence in this place."

But can you see how linking that

to the killing of people of colour

is just a mental stretch?

I can see that that's a mental stretch for someone

who doesn't teach writing.

I'll tell you, no writing teacher has ever told me that is a stretch.

I used to think of teaching as a calling.

It's very serious to me.

You can take what you do seriously without taking yourself seriously.

Like, that's who I am. You know what I mean?

And if you know what you're doing,

you should be able to just fucking be yourself.

Who gives a shit? You know what I'm saying? Really.

I still... You know, I still love teaching.

So much has changed.

You show up to work

and you're in this identity-politics pressure cooker.

It's different now. It's not...

It's not just about teaching any more.

CLOCK CHIMES

What's up, buddy?

- Here, sit down. - All right.

So, as you know, tomorrow is game time.

Stay humble. Answer the questions.

There's going to be difficult things in any litigation that come up.

Maybe people don't like fighting references,

but you're kind of going into the ring,

you know, and no-one comes out of the ring, even a winner,

without taking a few shots.

FANFARE FROM ROCKY PLAYS

- Time to suit up. - How are we looking here?

- Yeah, it looks good. - Enough?

I did the one knot, not the two-knot thing.

Flip the collars down.

You're like a manager of like a... Like a wrestler.

I'm the wrestler. You're the manager.

- I've got to manage the wrestler... - You're walking me out,

- helping me get my robe off. - You want a walk-out song?

- What do they call those? The entrance song? - Entrance song.

My name is Michael Thad Allen.

I almost exclusively represent

students and faculty against universities.

There is a statute in America that obligates any institution

that receives federal funding

not to discriminate on the basis of race.

Remember, stay calm.

You're ready for this.

You prepared for this.

You can do it.

That's why we're suing

Pennsylvania State University, Abington.

Professor De Piero,

you understand this is a formal legal proceeding today, right?

- I do, yes. - And you're under oath?

- Yes. - And you understand what that means?

I believe I do.

You'll tell the truth, the whole truth,

- nothing but the truth, like you see on TV, right? - Yes.

Deposition is an extension of the court.

You're going to be testifying.

Everything you say will potentially appear before the judge,

appear before the jury.

One thing a lot of people, especially professors,

think is they're smarter than the attorneys,

and they think it's a time to lecture the attorney

- about why their case sucks. - Sure.

That is an extraordinarily bad idea.

I confess to feeling that instinct, a couple...

- Well, don't give into it. - OK.

What happened at Penn State

is illegal, it's racial discrimination,

it's harassment,

it's destructive and divisive,

not both for teachers, but for students, too.

When I started teaching at Penn State, fall 2018,

it was a breath of fresh air, it was cool.

People were normal.

Colleagues were friends.

Training meetings were focused around,

you know, reading strategies or critical thinking.

Fast forward to the spring of 2019...

You were his writing programme coordinator, right?

I was THE writing programme coordinator.

And you weren't aiming to institute

an anti-racism programme at Penn State University?

What do you mean by "programme"?

My immediate supervisor emailed just a handful of us,

and she wrote that...

That's a quote.

And in that same breath,

said that a teacher's good intentions don't matter.

The translation of that is if more,

let's say, black students fail than white students,

racism exists in the results if the results draw a colour line.

OK, that means as a teacher, you're a racist.

That's absolutely terrifying.

It is. I mean, that's like...

Shakes you to your fucking core.

If you're serving minority students

who might come from under-prepared,

underfunded backgrounds,

and if they don't meet the task,

for whatever reason -

whether they're not willing,

they're not able, they're working too many jobs,

they're taking too many courses -

I find it repulsive and disgusting that a teacher

could be painted to be a racist

because their students fail,

despite their best intentions.

That's appalling.

Does Dr Naydan say that the teacher is a racist,

or that the results are racist?

Objection.

I believe that this line of thinking

gets you a soft bigotry of low expectations,

that they somehow think black students aren't capable

of achieving success on their own,

which of course they are.

It's just... It's exhausting,

and it just took away from the foundational mission of a school,

which is teaching and learning.

That anti-racism mission took over the entire university.

All of a sudden, now,

the high priests of this movement are emerging.

You understand what I'm saying?

This cult is taking shape and these figureheads are appearing -

this Asao Inoue clown,

your DiAngelos...

I believe that white progressives

cause the most daily damage to people of colour.

In case you don't know,

Robin DiAngelo is the author of New York Times bestseller

White Fragility.

And I'd like to be a little less white.

...your X Kendis...

What's the problem with being not racist?

Ibram X Kendi is the author of the mega-hit

How To Be An Antiracist.

The claim of not-racist neutrality is a mask for racism.

And everybody bows down to these people

as if they're somehow these moral overlords

that have some kind of enlightened wisdom

about racial dynamics

and who can say what and who should believe what in the world.

We need to eliminate the concept of not racist.

We're either being racist or anti-racist.

I set out to understand what that actually means,

especially on campus.

Anti-racism shifts the focus from individual prejudice

to racism embedded in systems

we once wrongly assumed were neutral.

That's the problem.

Kendi had a solution.

In other words,

discrimination can be justified to correct historical wrongs.

So, add anti-racism to the critical social justice mix

and entire disciplines start to change.

History, math, music, and, yeah,

even writing and composition.

On the University DEI site,

there is a subtab called anti-racism.

On the Anti-Racism Resources tab,

you see nothing but books, articles, podcasts that attribute

negative characteristics to white individuals,

which is the textbook definition of discrimination. OK?

So you had things titled...

You know, they would tell you these things required discomfort.

"We need to sit in the discomfort...

"..feel the pain, you know,

"have these uncomfortable conversations."

Through that, I guess you'll come out on the other side

as this enlightened individual.

I didn't buy that.

Fast forward to George Floyd's murder,

which was late May 2020.

Cities across the United States

remain in a state of high tension tonight.

The outrage comes after and over the death of George Floyd.

Protests tonight in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and Philadelphia.

After that, in hindsight,

it's almost like seeing this big tidal wave coming.

You know what I'm saying?

Do you recall, on June 5th, 2020,

someone named Alina Wong leading

a Zoom session called Conversation On Racial Climate?

Yes.

In the meeting,

she said that she wanted attendees

to hold their breath -

white employees to hold their breath -

until they felt pain,

to commemorate George Floyd's murder.

As a challenge for all of us today,

and especially for white and non-black people of colour,

is to hold our breaths just a little bit longer,

to not give in to our privilege,

to not give in to our ability to release, to exhale.

Hold it in for as long as you can

to feel the pain just a little bit,

knowing that it is nowhere near the pain.

It is metaphorical at best.

So let's do that now.

What's so egregious to you about that?

I watched the George Floyd clip when it happened,

just like everybody else did.

It was disgusting. I welled up.

It was awful, hearing him cry out for his mother in his dying breaths,

you know? Like...

Why do I, in the workplace,

all of a sudden,

need to feel like I bear the sins

of that somehow happening?

And, you know, I...

I think it's disgusting that they weaponised that moment

and they used it for radical political purposes.

And find that exhale.

Later in the meeting,

that same individual, an administrator -

we're talking, like, top-level brass...

...characterised what some people refer to as looting

as really just getting what you're due.

You know, and I think, you know, what we call looting,

I think of just getting what...

Getting your due,

because we, as a capitalist country,

prioritise material goods and property,

over lives, over... over humanity.

I mean, like, Spidey senses went.

Like, that's...

Something's up. You know what I'm saying?

That's a call for illegal activity

and anarchy and destruction.

Again, what I'm interested in doing is staying in the disruption

and actually disrupting more.

Looting and violence,

rioting in the name of self-imagined social justice.

You know, one of the things that I hear from faculty sometimes

is, "I teach calculus, there's no racism in calculus."

Yes, there is.

The racism is everywhere. The sexism is everywhere.

The homophobia is everywhere. The classism is everywhere.

Classism is built into our higher education system.

We are founded upon white supremacy.

You either accept this dogma,

or if you push back against the dogma, well, guess what?

"We found you. You're the white supremacist."

White Supremacy by Michael Trevor

♪ You talk about white supremacy... ♪

At De Anza, my colleagues wanted us to believe

that America is founded on white supremacy

and that no matter what we did,

we would always be surrounded by racism.

Turns out Zack wasn't the only one taking on departments

built around anti-racism.

They said, "We're tired of being oppressed.

"This is a white supremacist nation.

"It always has been.

"It's still, you know, not right,

"and we just need to tear it down."

Zack's lawyer had another client on the West Coast.

Dr Tabia Lee...

I go by Lee.

...could give me an inside-department perspective

on where all these ideas were coming from.

I'm a lifelong educator.

I taught teacher training,

teacher support, teacher mentoring, teacher development.

And so I saw this position pop up at De Anza.

It was for a faculty director

for the Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education.

When I read the job description,

it aligned with everything that I had experienced and done,

and I applied for it immediately.

Faculty director for

the Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education -

or in plain terms,

another version of diversity, equity and inclusion - DEI.

Depending on who you ask,

DEI is either a threat...

We've ended the tyranny

of so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

...or a force for good.

DEI is not a threat. It's a gift.

So how did three feel-good words

become ground zero in a culture war?

Here's what I learned.

It started in the '60s.

Back then, DEI didn't exist -

not as a term, anyway -

but the essential groundwork was being laid

through new offices meant to deliver

on the promise of civil rights.

They had names like Office of Minority Affairs

or Educational Opportunity Programmes,

and eventually Affirmative Action offices.

Over time, their scope widened

to support students who were gay, lesbian,

queer, neurodivergent, disabled -

essentially, anyone who didn't see themselves reflected

in the old-school ivory tower.

And the purpose of these offices

is to help those historically marginalised students succeed.

These offices started out doing real, necessary work -

challenging old biases, making universities more inclusive -

but somewhere along the way,

the mission got interpreted a little more broadly.

And so as we were having our first team meeting

that I was going to be facilitating -

so it was my first time, "Batter up!", you know -

I said, "So how do you all keep notes for your meetings,

"or do you set agendas," you know?

And they said, "Oh, we just meet, you know...

"Like, we meet once a week and we just chat about things."

And I said, "Well, we're going to need to have a little more structure

"than that. Like, how about if we, you know, I started up a Google Doc?

"And we're all editors on it,

"it's open, anyone who goes into it can type into it,

"and maybe we can put ideas up for agendas."

And that's when the person said, "Stop what you're doing right now."

And I was like, "OK!"

And they said, "What you're doing is you're white-speaking

"and you're whitesplaining,

"and you're supporting white supremacy."

And I said, "Pardon me?!"

I'd never in my life been called a white supremacist.

And I told them, "For you to call me that,"

I said, "where is that even coming from?"

Hi, I'm Judy Blair,

and I'm an anti-racism consultant

specialising in working with white folks.

In this series, we're taking a look at 15 different aspects

of white supremacy culture.

What I'm actually talking about

is not white supremacists or Proud Boys

or white nationalists.

We are talking about white supremacy as the idea that elevates whiteness,

that whiteness is the default,

it's the assumed, it's the ideal.

I still didn't know about this alternative definition

of white supremacy until many weeks later,

as I went to their workshops,

and I kept seeing a slide pop up, and it said...

♪ You talk about white supremacy... ♪

Every meeting, that's what was a focal point,

and whatever the speaker talked about,

they related it to that graphic.

The bottles said things like objectivity,

either/or thinking,

individualising of learning,

setting agendas, writing things down,

mindful of timeliness -

because when you talk about being on time,

that's a characteristic of white supremacy culture,

according to them.

Then I said, "So what are they expecting of me as a black woman?

"Are they expecting me to be lazy,

"to not be on time, to not take notes,

"you know, to never be objective?"

I said, "That's what you're saying,

"that BIPOC people are not these things."

And that's the only framework that's allowed to be used, you know,

because as I started to bring in alternative ways

of thinking about things,

that's when the clamp-down on me really happened.

This wasn't the diversity, equity and inclusion I imagined -

about access, fairness and support.

It had become something else -

less about expanding opportunity

and more about enforcing a set of beliefs.

When Dr Lee pushed back on that framework, she was fired.

The fact that I was saying that there is this other perspective

made me an instant enemy that needed to be neutralised,

silenced and eliminated out of the space.

At many universities,

DEI had become a bureaucracy,

with real influence over hiring, firing, research and curriculum.

And it looked like, for many faculty jobs,

being qualified was no longer enough.

You now had to submit a personal pledge explaining

how your work advances diversity, equity and inclusion,

even in physics, engineering, math.

If you couldn't show how your work aligned with DEI goals,

you might not make it past the first round.

That might sound harmless,

but these aren't always statements about teaching fairly

or support for struggling students.

They often read like affirmations of a particular worldview

grounded in identity, power and oppression.

Getting the job meant ideological conformity.

And on campuses, the DEI bureaucracy kept growing.

The University of Michigan alone spent around $250 million

on DEI initiatives and brought them into some surprising places -

like their botanical gardens.

A 37-page DEI strategic plan... for plants,

with ideas like...

...or...

This doesn't feel like a support service any more -

more like an engine for institutional transformation,

with a mission to challenge the status quo...

That's a lot to ask of a garden!

Is there maybe DEI done well...

...that brings people together?

I imagine there could be.

I certainly never experienced that in my trainings

at Penn State Abington.

I tried to communicate with my supervisor multiple times

to express my...

...I think, informed opinion about

the shortcomings of what anti-racist pedagogy

would mean for writing students.

Didn't work. I tried. I tried hard.

So I filed a complaint that got sent

to the Penn State Affirmative Action Office.

Ms Borges, do you remember,

in September of 2021,

- Zack De Piero submitted a complaint to your office? - Yes.

Why did you record that meeting?

It struck me as a way to protect myself.

- - Our programmatic focus was on attributing

negative characteristics to white teachers.

And in my position, I'm hearing this nonstop,

I'm a problem cos I'm a white teacher.

What am I supposed to do about that?

That is not my question to answer.

That's his. I mean, when he says,

"What am I supposed to do with me being a problem?"

Well, welcome to my world.

Like, that is the question I asked, my entire...

All the way through into college.

I... Somehow I'm the problem.

Every freaking place I'm at.

Why am I always the problem?

Now, I'm not trying to suggest that we, you know,

we have a politics of, like, you know,

"I'm going to get you back,"

because that's not what I mean.

But I do think it is important for writing teachers,

regardless of who we are,

to investigate our problem-ness.

It feels awful, every single day.

I've thought about it.

"White teachers are a problem." I wake up,

I think to myself, "I'm a white teacher.

"I'm a problem."

I go to bed. I think to myself,

"My colleagues think I'm a problem."

- - It's not about you.

We don't carry the burden of our race, of our people.

We don't carry it individually.

We don't.

How is it not about him?

Yeah, well, it is.

It is about him, and it isn't.

He's primed to see it as an attack on his own person,

and I'm more primed to see it as an attack on a system

that sets up people like him to think of himself

as an individual who's doing the right thing, who's the hero.

So I'm doing what I'm being told to do, you understand?

To keep going to this shit until I get it.

So Grace and I collaborated on this together.

So it's from Performing Anti-racist Pedagogy.

They presented excerpts from this reading,

and the first one was something like...

- - I have a question, I'd like to jump in here.

I wasn't gesturing, I wasn't raising my voice.

And I asked,

"Can you help me understand what you're asking me to do?"

- - What does it mean to attend to issues of inequity?

Because if I'm not doing that,

then I open myself up to accusations that I am,

quote, "reproducing racist discourses and practices."

I think, like, 45 seconds passed.

That's a long time in a Zoom meeting.

I mean, that...

That's heavy, you know?

Grace, this is... I don't...

I don't know how to respond to this

because it's your segment of the meeting. Um...

I also feel very uncomfortable right now,

and I just want to say that.

I was not happy to be made to feel uncomfortable

by Dr Zack De Piero.

So, Affirmative Action office call me back in.

I thought...

...they were going to rule on my bias complaint.

I thought they were going to say,

"Zack, what you reported is extremely concerning.

"This is a civil rights violation."

I bullied and harassed

two of my female colleagues,

because I asked questions about how to teach with equity.

I felt that throw-up feeling.

It was a... A soul squash.

It was a destruction.

It was a...

"We need to, like, make you evaporate or something."

I'm going to introduce into the record Exhibit 43.

It's the recording of the meeting.

- - What does it mean to attend to issues of inequity?

What about Zack's tone in that clip was hostile?

Nothing about his tone in that clip was particularly hostile.

Erm...

But what he's doing there is questioning

the whole premise of the scholarly conversation we're trying to have.

So, to you, it's hostile to question the scholarship?

No, I think scholars question scholarship in scholarly ways.

Is there anything that was unscholarly about his question?

Not there. No.

I think, um, he is asking me...

...to justify and explain a piece of writing that I did not write.

We got, formally, the two conclusion letters

from the Affirmative Action office.

One about my bias complaint, one about the one filed against me.

My bias complaint...

"We see no wrongdoing.

"This is your supervisor's academic freedom."

Conversely, the complaint filed against me -

while it didn't rise to a criminal level,

I violated the university values

of a professional employee

and I bullied and harassed two of my colleagues.

- Are you worried? - Well, of course I'm worried.

It's my job to be worried,

because it's your job as an attorney to be paranoid

and try to figure out what's coming at you.

You write, "You've heard about all the crazy anti-white bullshit

"they've pushed at Penn State."

Did I read that correctly?

- Yes. - All right.

And Josh writes, "Yep."

And then what do you write in response to his "Yep"?

"So, even after I report it

"to my top supervisor twice,

"my other supe, this department chair,

"crazy woke cunt just won't stop."

And who's the department chair,

the "crazy woke cunt", that you're referring to?

My department chair was Naydan.

- Do you want me to read all three texts? - Yes, please.

"But here's this piece-of-shit bitch saying,

"Fuck up more people's shit."

Here's the quote.

Quote, "What we call looting,

"I think of as just getting what you're due.

"And so how do we continue that disruption?"

And the "piece-of-shit bitch", that's Wong?

- Yes. - OK.

All right, you can put that aside... for now.

Ridiculous.

What's ridiculous, Professor Di Piero?

That you had a Penn State administrator

calling for more looting in the name of social justice

when you had minority small-business owners' own businesses

getting looted, their own livelihoods getting destroyed,

and she's calling for more of that.

It's disgusting. It's absolutely sick.

How about calling her a "piece-of-shit bitch"? Is that OK?

Is that illegal? OK? Is that calling for more looting?

That wasn't my question.

Well, that's my question.

- Do you want to answer my question? - What's your question?

My question is, is calling Dr Wong a "piece-of-shit bitch"...?

It's a private conversation with a friend

whose private small business got looted twice.

And my senior administrator at the university

is calling for that to happen a third time.

So, yeah, whatever I said there stands.

This question has been answered,

and I want to call for a break right now.

- Sure. - We're now going off... - Ridiculous!

♪ You, who are on the road

♪ Must have a code you try to live by

♪ And so become yourself

♪ Because the past is just a goodbye

♪ Teach your children well

♪ Their father's hell did slowly go by... ♪

What happened today is now on the public record.

On the public record,

I now have called my former supervisor a woke cunt.

I now called the DEI director a fucking bitch.

My career as a teacher is probably done.

I mean, if they've got all this dirt on me now...

I hated these people for what they were putting me through,

but, all right, I'm fucked.

I'm going to have to...

Not find a new job, find a new industry.

♪ Don't you ever ask them why

♪ If they told you, you would cry... ♪

Absolutely brutal.

Yeah?

Was it worse than you expected?

Yes, it was worse than I expected.

- I guess I started yelling. - You started yelling? - Yeah. - Oh, shit.

They got you.

And that's what they were trying to do.

It's not a game. It's, like...

This is life, and these so-called anti-racist missionaries,

they've fucked with people's lives so bad

and they made people fearful to articulate their thoughts,

hate themselves, hate each other.

They've divided people - like, they are the enemy.

♪ Don't you ever ask them why

♪ If they told you, you would cry

♪ So just look at them and sigh

♪ And know they love you... ♪

Watching Zack, what unsettled me wasn't just what happened to him.

It was the feeling that campuses were being pulled apart

by something meant to bring people together.

To me, the goal of diversity, equity and inclusion is just saying

we're acknowledging that everybody has not been included

in every space.

So, I took the job at Stanford

because it felt like there was a real commitment to addressing

historic and current inequalities

based on identity.

My gosh, to think that federal funding is going to a university

where you've got a highly-paid staffer who takes the stage,

after a mob shouted down a judge,

and instead of saying, "Show this man respect regardless of whether

"or not you agree with him," joins in with them.

♪ Lately I've become aware that you

♪ Are bugged by everything I say and do

♪ I could mind my Qs and Ps

♪ But the juice isn't worth the squeeze... ♪

She wasn't invited to be the speaker,

yet, nevertheless, she took to the stage and questioned

the notion of free speech and said, "Is the juice worth the squeeze?"

♪ We could sit and disagree all night

♪ About who's wrong and about who's right

♪ Let's not waste time down in the weeds

♪ Cos the juice isn't worth the squeeze

♪ Baby, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. ♪

Free speech is under fire on college campuses in America.

A federal judge was shouted down and heckled

during his speech at Stanford Law School.

LAUGHTER

How did you come to inviting Judge Duncan to speak at the school?

Judge Duncan's on the Fifth Circuit.

He's the court in between

the District Court,

which is the initial court,

and the Supreme Court.

He oversees Louisiana,

Mississippi and Texas.

Any case going from those states to the Supreme Court

is going to go through him.

And in the past year, a lot of interesting things

had happened in the Fifth Circuit.

There had been big decisions on gun control, on social media regulation.

And so, for all those reasons, he seemed like a great guest,

so we invited him.

Mr Duncan has spent his career

working to restrict, not expand, but to restrict civil rights.

Kyle Duncan is a gun for hire,

targeting LGBTQ people.

He has absurdly denied that contraception

is health care at all.

His values are grossly out of touch

with a modern and inclusive America.

I would respectfully suggest

all my colleagues put aside

whether they like President Trump or not

and look at this man for himself.

So, leading up to the Judge Duncan event,

there was a coalition of students

who came to the administration and said,

"The Federalist Society is inviting this federal judge.

"We don't want this speaker to come to campus,

"who has been an advocate for policies and practices

"and legal interpretations that are harmful

"to the communities in which they are affiliated."

It was LGBTQ students, it was student of colour identity groups,

it was political identity groups.

It was a kind of full range of student groups.

I do fit into some of those identities, right?

I mean, I think, particularly in gay identity,

like, I think I have had more drama

in my life because of my sexual identity than most people

who are identifying in that group, and...

You know, an unhappy separation from my childhood church

when I came out as gay.

And I've never felt more welcomed or safer

than in the confines of a college campus,

and I think that they are some of the most

gay, queer, whatever, friendly places in the entire universe,

and that's the message we should be giving people,

not, you know, "Let us make this place more insulated for you."

It was something about how the judge's presence on our campus

is violence, or his work is violent,

and so it's traumatising.

Great. We'll tell you when and where Judge Kyle Duncan

will be visiting us and you can just not be there.

So there was a flurry of activity of the administrators at every level.

It was decided that I would write a message back to students,

so I drafted a response that fundamentally said,

"We're a school and an institution

"that firmly believes in free speech

"as a fundamental pillar of our democracy,

"and that means having to make what for some will be

"a hard decision, which is to not cancel this event."

As I walked up to the classroom with the Federalist Society president,

probably 100 yards off, we heard the protest.

There was chanting, there was jeering, there were signs,

there was banging, there was stomping.

CLAMOUR

They formed this gauntlet,

and as we walked through it,

were, you know, yelling at him

and waving signs in his face, and...

I mean, I think he heard it independently.

I was walking with him, I heard it -

"I hope your daughters are raped."

Like, that is...

That was one of the things yelled,

and I don't think anybody should be subjected to that.

The students weren't, like,

explicitly shouting him down.

They were just throwing out barbs,

in a disruptive way, no question.

And he was throwing out barbs back.

LAUGHTER

There's sort of this crosstalk and he's somewhat engaging with it,

but somewhat trying to do his prepared remarks.

But he can't...

He never really can get traction.

And I stepped up and said,

"I'm an Associate Dean."

Which was solely for the purpose of deescalating the room

so that Judge Duncan could speak.

That really was the goal.

That was the only goal for me.

I didn't know who she was ahead of time.

She didn't identify herself to me before the speech.

She came in with a portfolio,

she opened the portfolio, she had a printed out speech.

I did have my folder with me

with the printout of the email that I had sent that morning.

APPLAUSE

Part of me was really reacting to feeling protective.

These were students that I feel like were part of the community

that I was there to serve.

My hope...

...was to get to a point where he could just give his remarks,

there could be a Q&A, and we would be done with the event.

My intention in asking the question, "Is the juice worth the squeeze?",

I was asking, is this worth the fallout

of break in community that we've been trying to build?

I understood why the students were saying what they were saying,

and, to me, I want to be empathetic to it and also help them reframe,

because it does not serve them not to be able to handle people

saying words that feel harmful to us

and not be able to navigate it.

Our job should be, if you disagree with it,

then gain the legal skills

and argument to persuade people to a different argument.

Why didn't you say that in the room?

That would have escalated them more, right?

Going to the students and being like, "Your outrage is outrageous",

does not serve.

They can't hear that. Why would they care?

All they can say is, "Thanks, Boomer. Cancelled!"

And that's not useful.

That's the end of the conversation.

I was not happy with what Tirien said in the room.

You know, the insinuation that Judge Duncan

had done something wrong. That's not how I view the law.

I feel like it's not an appropriate debate

for one of our deans to, like, weigh in in that way,

in that space.

And, two, it really bought some sort of theories

that your presence is violence, your decisions are violence.

I don't think that's true at all and I really don't think

that can be true in the context of a law school.

I think that we need people to discuss,

we need people to come and give talks and answer questions.

APPLAUSE

CHEERING, APPLAUSE

And the judge could have said his remarks,

but he didn't take that opportunity.

And he immediately kind of just started, again, yelling...

Essentially yelling at the students, being like,

"You all are so disrespectful.

"You're idiots."

I literally left that day thinking,

OK, there is going to be a lot of work to do.

What can we do to kind of move past this and learn from this experience?

That evening, an email went out, and it was like,

"We know this day has been very traumatic for many students.

"If you need any help, you can contact psychiatric services

"and our in-house counsellor, and here's their information."

It was pretty clear that, as far as Stanford was concerned,

as of that point, we were done, this problem was abated.

I sort of didn't feel that way about it, and it seemed like...

...to get that conversation moving within the walls of Stanford,

it needed to be moving outside.

Joining me now, Tim Rosenberger.

Tim Rosenberger joins us right now.

Tim Rosenberger was there.

Someone who described herself as the Dean of Diversity,

one of the dumbest people we've ever seen on camera,

showed up. Were students applauding her?

Did anyone say, "Who are you, and please leave"?

No-one had the temerity to say,

"Who are you?" and "Please leave."

Did I say out loud,

as long as I don't end up on Tucker Carlson, then I'm...

Like, that's a baseline.

Like, you know, I'm doing my job OK.

That Dean was a... seemed barely literate to me.

The administrator at a law school telling law students

that they should be scared of ideas that threaten them.

Instead of getting up there and saying, "Put down your sign

"that suggests this judge can't find a woman's clitoris" -

forgive me, audience, that's what the sign said -

she encourages them.

So then I started getting hate mail.

Horrible things. Racist, sexist...

Like, just horrible things.

I didn't sleep for days.

What does this mean for my family and our safety?

What does this mean for a reputation that I spent 25 years building

as being someone who shows up with integrity?

So, for me, that time was just, like,

the most stressful,

scary thing I've really ever experienced.

So, the university sent Judge Duncan an apology letter

claiming staff and students acted inappropriately.

"What happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech,

"and we are very sorry about the experience you had

"while visiting our campus."

What I really didn't anticipate is a response that effectively

threw me under the bus.

In response to this incident,

school administrators made the decision

to suspend that Dean of Diversity.

And I think for conservative Americans, there is a perception

that there are kind of hostile winds blowing through academia.

That's the paradox.

Tirien was hired to create belonging,

then suspended for trying to do exactly that.

But maybe the real question is,

does DEI as it's practised today

clash with the mission of a university?

I think this is, like, an ill-conceived job.

What she thought this job was, which was fostering real diversity

across dimensions, maybe would have been a really life-affirming

and fulfilling thing to do.

I think what it really turned out to be was create a law school

that feels hyper-inclusive, and we've now decided that inclusive

does not mean inclusive of all viewpoints.

It means sort of very comfortable,

and this therapy-tised language of safety

and non-trauma and insulation, or whatever that is.

And so it was a horrible job and she's above it.

I resigned on August 20th.

I don't want to have contributed to a narrative that says

that advancing greater diversity

is antithetical to the values of free speech

and academic freedom and democracy.

♪ Baby, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. ♪

I kept seeing the same pattern -

initiatives that began with good intentions pushed to extremes,

leaving many people alienated and resentful.

There are many more stories you'll never hear

because people were too afraid to speak.

And while these tensions played out on campus,

a backlash was brewing,

ready to turn these moments into political firepower.