It is the most important right that Americans have.
It's not a coincidence or an accident
that it's named in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Without it, no democratic society
can be democratic for long.
And I'm an absolutist.
That is, I believe that, for example,
people say to me, but what about hate speech?
Well, hate speech is much more important than love speech.
And the reason is, I'm much more interested
in knowing whom I should not turn my back on
than I am interested in figuring out who loves me.
The following is a conversation with Harvey Silverglate,
a legendary free speech advocate, co-founder of FIRE,
the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression,
and the author of several books
on the freedom of speech and criminal justice,
including The Shadow University,
the betrayal of liberty on America's campuses.
Harvey is running to be on the Harvard Board
of Overseers this year with a write-in campaign,
so you have to spell his name correctly, Silverglate,
promising to advocate for free speech
and to push for reducing the size
of Harvard's administration bureaucracy.
Election is over this Tuesday, May 16th, at 5 p.m. Eastern.
To vote, you have to be Harvard alumni,
so if you happen to be one, please vote online.
It's a good way to support freedom of speech
on Harvard campus.
Instructions how to do so are in the description.
As a side note, please allow me to say
that since there are several controversial conversations
coming up, I tried to make sure that this podcast
is a platform for free discourse
where ideas are not censored but explored,
and if necessary, challenged
in a thoughtful and pathetic way.
It's by having such difficult conversations,
not by avoiding them, that we can begin to heal divides
and to shed light on the dark parts of human history
and human nature.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Harvey Silverglate.
You co-founded the Foundation for Individual Rights
and Expression, also known as FIRE,
a legendary organization that fights
for the freedom of speech for all Americans
in our courtrooms, on our campuses, and in our culture.
So let's start with a big question.
What is freedom of speech?
First of all, the organization, when I co-founded it,
in 1999, was called the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education.
It focused on free speech issues on college campuses
in academia, and only earlier this year did we decide
to expand our reach beyond the campuses,
which is why the name, although the acronym, FIRE, remains,
it's now the Foundation for Individual Rights
and Expression.
The E used to be education.
The E used to be education, it's now expression.
And we basically do a lot of the cases the ACLU used to do.
The ACLU now more is a progressive organization
rather than a civil liberties organization.
And we've taken the role of dealing with free speech
in the society generally.
And now this is a particularly,
an era prone to censorship.
Everybody thinks they're right,
and that people who disagree with them
should not be able to voice their views.
It's a very difficult period right now,
both on campus and off campus.
It's about as intolerant an era as I can remember.
I'm gonna be 81 May 10th.
I was born on Mother's Day, 1942.
And I can't remember it being this bad.
I was born during the McCarthy era.
So that says a lot.
And it sort of reminds me of that.
Well, let's start with that almost a philosophical question,
a legal question, a human question.
What is this freedom that you care so much about,
that you fought for so much, freedom of speech?
It is the most important right that Americans have.
It's not a coincidence or an accident
that it's named in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Without it, no democratic society
can be democratic for long.
And I'm an absolutist.
That is, I believe that, for example,
people say to me, but what about hate speech?
Well, hate speech is much more important than love speech.
And the reason is I'm much more interested
in knowing whom I should not turn my back on
than I am interested in figuring out who loves me
or who likes me.
So hate speech is the most important, in my view.
And yet it's banned in, for example, schools.
It's unbelievable.
Kids are not schooled into understanding
the glory of the First Amendment
when schools say to them that they shouldn't say things
that are gonna make somebody feel bad.
I mean, the purpose of speech is to express
honest views that people have.
And so I believe hate speech is as important as love speech,
and my view is more important.
So it should be brought to the surface
rather than operate in the shadows.
Absolutely, absolutely.
What is the connection between freedom of speech
and freedom of thought?
Well, in a free society,
thoughts start in the brain
and then they come out the mouth.
So they're different ends of the same spectrum.
So to you, the censorship of speech
eventually leads to a censorship of thought.
Of course, censorship of the mode
by which other people know what you're thinking.
So there's some aspect of our society
that thinking is done collectively,
and without being able to speak to each other,
we cannot do this kind of collective thinking.
Correct, and out of speech, the theory is
that ultimately out of speech comes truth.
That isn't necessarily so,
but I do think that when there's free speech,
better decisions are made,
because people put their views on the table
in a frank, accurate way,
and then those views mix together and clash,
and out of that usually comes the better decision.
Not always, but usually, or more often than not.
But if somebody is not allowed to sit at the table
of decision making,
then the decision making process is poorer
less robust, less diverse,
and ultimately less successful.
So can you elaborate on the idea of free speech absolutism?
So hate speech can be quite painful
to quite a large number of people.
Does this worry you?
Yep, living in a free society
requires that you expose yourself to some discomfort,
you call it pain.
It's maybe emotional pain, it's not physical pain,
but it's the price we pay for living in a free society.
Every so often we're insulted,
we're emotionally hurt.
Think of the alternative.
All the alternatives are worse.
Nobody ever promised us a rose garden.
We're lucky to be in a country that has the First Amendment.
It's also the most diverse country in the world
because of immigration.
I mean, my grandparents, my father's side
came over from Russia, my mother's side
came over from Poland.
I'm very happy that my grandparents came in from Russia.
I would not want to be in Russia today.
I'd probably be sharing a cell
with a Wall Street Journal reporter.
So I'm thankful that they came in.
And this is a great country, it's got troubles right now,
but our country doesn't.
And we've had, before we had a civil war,
we had segregation, we had the decimation of the Indians,
we're not perfect, but it's the best place in the world
for somebody who values liberty.
So you don't think that hate speech
can empower large groups
that eventually lead to physical action,
to physical harm to others?
No, I don't.
I think that we have developed a culture
in which it's understood that if you don't like
what you hear, you talk back, you write something.
We don't punch each other, we insult each other.
Is insulting great?
Well, I don't know, it's okay.
I used to, as a kid in Brooklyn, where I was born,
I was born and raised in Bensonhurst,
we used to say, sticks and stones can break by bones,
but names can never harm me.
And it's absolutely true, what was true when I was five
is true when I'm almost 81.
So I've lived a long time, I've seen it all.
And I'm talking from experience as well as theory.
It's what happens when you reach your 80s.
I read that you had this line that you cannot be protected
from being called an asshole.
Correct, especially if you're an asshole.
Well, that's, but you don't have to be an asshole
to be called an asshole.
That's correct.
And I think the internet has taught me that.
Well, the internet has posed a particular challenge
to free speech absolutists because of some of the stuff
that's on there is god awful.
But I have no different rule for freedom of speech
on the internet than I have in newspapers or in lectures
or in classrooms or conversations among people.
What do you think about the tension between
freedom of speech and freedom of reach,
as is kind of sometimes termed?
So the internet really challenges that aspect.
It allows speech to become viral and spread very quickly
to a very large number of people.
Well, you know, we've had revolutions
in the modalities of communication.
After all, newspapers were the first challenge.
Radio and television posed a new challenge.
The FCC tried, but ultimately gave up the attempt
to control obscenity, for example.
And the Supreme Court has been pretty close.
The one thing that liberal and conservative Supreme Courts,
right now we're in a conservative era
due to Trump nominations.
During much of my life, the Warren Court,
it was William O. Douglas, Brennan, the liberal court.
One thing they agree on is free speech.
They don't agree on much else,
but they do agree on free speech.
And I think the reason is that they recognize that,
well, my group is in the ascendance today,
but it may not be tomorrow.
And I want to have objective, clear rules
so that when I'm in the minority,
I'm able to voice my opinion.
And so it's one of the few things
that both sides of the political spectrum agree on.
The only people who don't are the people
way over on the right that I call the fascists
and the people way over on the left who are the communists.
But with respect to most people on the political spectrum,
Republicans, Democrats, socialists, libertarians,
they agree on the primacy of free speech
because it protects them when protection is needed.
So to you, even on the internet,
free speech absolutism should rule.
Yes.
Nobody's gonna die.
Remember, death threats are not protected.
Nobody's gonna die.
So people are gonna be a little bit insulted.
That's the price you pay for living in a free society.
And it's a small price, in my view.
People, some people don't have as tough a hide as others.
Well, then develop it.
I hope, I don't mean to sound cruel,
but you're living in a free society, develop a tough hide.
So that's the cost of living in a free society.
Yep, there is a cost.
The thing is that it can really hurt at scale
to be cyberbullied,
to be attacked for the ideas you express
or maybe ideas you didn't express,
but that somebody decided to lie about you
and use that to attack you.
Well, first of all, there are,
there are some exceptions to the First Amendment.
Libel and slander is an exception.
Direct threats are an exception.
If you say such and such, I will murder you,
that is not lawful.
If you say that somebody,
if you say about somebody,
oh, you know, you beat your wife,
that is not lawful if, in fact,
the person knows you don't beat your wife.
There are some limits.
Defamation is one, direct threats are another.
So it's not absolute, this is not,
the First Amendment is not absolute,
but it's more absolute than it is in any other society,
and it's pretty near absolute.
For example, fraud, if you sell somebody a car
and you say, oh, this is in great running shape,
and in fact, it's an old jalopy
and it's not gonna make it more than 10 miles,
that's fraud, that's not free speech.
So free speech is not absolute,
there are these limits,
but they're very narrow, specific categories of limits.
But there's gray area here,
because while legally you're not allowed
to defame a person, in the court of public opinion,
especially with the aid of anonymity on the internet,
rumors can spread at scale,
thousands, hundreds of thousands of people
can make up things about you.
You have to defend yourself.
Using more speech.
We're big, we're through freedom of speech,
we're big boys and girls, you have to defend yourself.
You know, in some societies,
if you say something, right now,
if you say something nasty about Putin,
you'll end up in the gulag.
If you say something nasty about Biden,
you end up in the New York Times.
Where would you rather be?
Well, let's talk about the thing you've done
for over 20 years,
which is fight for the freedom of speech
on college campuses.
So why is freedom of speech important on college campuses?
Well, it's important everywhere in the society,
but it's most important on college campuses.
Why?
Because that's where we educate our young citizens.
And if you are educated under a notion
that some dean can call you on the carpet,
because you say something which is considered racist,
or you can say something which is considered
dangerous to social cohesion,
then it's not a liberal arts college, no.
The theory that I used in The Shadow University.
A book you've written, The Shadow University.
1998.
1998.
You were ahead of a lot of these things, by the way.
I'm afraid that as a pessimist,
I always saw the bad side of things.
Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campus
is The Shadow University,
a book you co-authored with Alan Charles.
One of my Princeton classmates, Alan Charles Corz,
who's now an emeritus professor of enlightenment history
at the University of Pennsylvania.
I only taught for one semester,
and I can go into that later,
the reason that I did not continue to teach in colleges.
It was Harvard Law School.
I taught a course in the mid-1980s.
But in any event, the college campuses
are one of the most important for free speech.
This is where people get education.
And if you don't really get a good education,
if certain points of view are not allowed to be expressed,
because education comes from the clash of ideas,
and you then have to decide,
this is how you become a thinking adult.
You have to decide which ideas make more sense to you,
which ones you're gonna follow.
The college experience is transformative.
And if there is censorship on campuses,
it's highly destructive of the educational enterprise,
and ultimately to the entire society.
We have in the sciences, we have a scientific method.
Scientific method is you try experiments,
and you see which ones work,
and then you develop theories
based upon the results of experiments.
Well, this is not much different
from every other aspect of life.
You have to entertain different views on different subjects.
You hear all the views, and you make a decision
as to which one's accurate and which one's not.
So the scientific method I apply to non-science,
to history, to journalism, to all of these things.
So that scientific method includes ideas,
hateful ideas also?
Correct, if you don't allow hateful ideas.
I mean, when scientists do experiments,
nobody says to them, oh, you know,
don't do that experiment, because it would be very bad
if that turns out to be accurate, that outcome.
That's not the way it works.
Every point of view is thrown into the marketplace,
whether it's science or whether it's non-science.
And that includes the kind of ideas
and the kind of discourse that might actually lead
to an increase in hate on campuses?
The First Amendment prohibits speech
which is liable to produce imminent, imminent violence.
So for example, the exception is yelling
falsely, falsely yelling fire in a crowded movie theater.
A lot of people misstate it.
They say, well, the exception is yelling fire
in a movie theater.
Well, if there's really a fire,
you're forming a real important function by yelling fire.
But it's falsely yelling fire.
You can start a riot.
People would be crushed trying to get out.
So that's one of the exceptions of the First Amendment
as the Supreme Court has defined it.
There are very few exceptions.
And defamation is an exception.
I'm not a fan of that exception, frankly.
But if you say something about somebody
that has serious implications in their life,
in their ability to earn a living,
if you accuse somebody of being a pedophile
when it's not true, that person can sue you.
My own view is I think that's an unfortunate exception,
but I'm not, I'm the Supreme Court.
I think that I'm with, a friend of mine was Nat Hentoff.
Nat Hentoff, who wrote for decades
for the Village Voice in New York.
He was a friend of mine.
He was a free speech absolutist.
And he wrote a fabulous book called
Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee.
And he was an absolutist, and I'm with Nat Hentoff.
Even on the defamation aspect.
I mean, I agree with you in some sense,
just practically speaking.
It seems like that the best way in the public sphere
to defend against defamation is with more speech.
Correct.
And through authenticity, through authentic communication,
of the truth as you see it.
Yeah, you know, the Times, the Boston Globe
has said something about me that hasn't been accurate.
They have invariably published my letter to the editor.
I'm also not bashful about getting in touch
with the reporter.
At the end of every column,
they give the reporter's email address.
And I know people say that I have more access
to the media than most people.
But all that means is I get the fame more than most people.
Can we also comment on,
from the individual, consumer speech?
There's a kind of sense that freedom of speech means
you should be forced to read all of it.
Freedom of speech versus freedom of reach.
We as consumers of speech,
do we have the right to select what we read?
We do.
And nobody can force us to sit in a room
and listen to a radio program
that we don't want to listen to.
Nobody can force us to read a book
that we don't want to read.
The whole notion of freedom of speech
means that people have autonomy on their choices.
In order to form a complete mind and complete human being,
there's a kind of tension of that autonomy
versus consuming as many varied perspectives as possible,
which is underlying the ethic of free speech.
On college campuses,
it seems like a good way to develop the mind
is to get as many perspectives as possible,
even if you don't really want to.
Well, that is the theory.
Academic freedom is supposed to be
the highest degree of free speech.
You should be able to entertain
all kinds of hateful, threatening ideas.
And the way I put it is,
there's something wrong when you can say something
with complete abandon without any fear in Harvard Square,
whereas on the other side of the fence,
you can't say it in Harvard Yard.
It should be the opposite.
And what happens is universities,
from the best to the worst,
from the most famous to the least well-known,
have been taken over by administrators.
Administrators do not really subsume academic values.
They know nothing about the Constitution.
They know nothing about free speech.
They know nothing about academic freedom.
They feel that their job is to keep order.
And so they develop speech codes,
kangaroo courts to enforce the speech codes.
And these are very dire developments.
I wrote about them in the Shadow University in 98
and tried to deal with them in 1999 when I started fire,
co-started fire.
And I would fire.
The reason I'm running currently
for the Harvard Board of Overseers is,
what I'd like to do is convince the Harvard Corporation,
so-called president and fellows of Harvard College,
the chief governing board of the university
with the real power.
The Board of Overseers is a secondary body,
but quite influential,
to fire 95% of the administrators.
It would have a salutary effect
on the academics of the university.
It would have a salutary effect on free speech
and academic freedom.
It would cut tuitions by about 40%.
And it would create a whole different atmosphere
on the campus.
And the same could be said of MIT or any other place.
I think administrators are a very bad influence
on American higher education.
Can you elaborate the intuition why this thing
that you call administrative bloat
is such a bad thing for a university?
Well, first of all, just in terms of the cost of maintaining,
there are more administrators in American higher education
than there are faculty members.
The cost is enormous.
Number two, they are inimical to the teaching enterprise,
and they feel that their job is to control things,
to make sure there are no problems,
that nobody's feelings are hurt.
Being called before a dean because you said something
that insulted somebody is something that shouldn't happen
in American higher education,
yet it happens because you have these administrators
who think it's their job to protect people
from being insulted.
You insult a black student, you insult a woman.
There's a disciplinary hearing.
Well, there shouldn't be.
Black people are accustomed to being insulted.
Jews are accustomed to being insulted.
Women are accustomed to being insulted.
And it's very good to know who doesn't like you.
It's useful.
It is essential information to know who doesn't like you.
If everybody is forced to say I love you
and nobody can say I hate you,
you get a false view of what life is all about.
Outside of the university.
I mean, you do graduate eventually.
And that's ultimately the mission of the university
is to prepare you to make you into a great human being,
into a great leader that can take on
the problems of the world.
Correct, correct.
And you don't do it by treating you like a little flower.
But what role does the university have to protect students?
To women, African Americans, anybody, Jews,
anybody who can be a victim of hate speech?
They protect you from physical assault.
If somebody physically assaults you,
then they get punished.
But they shouldn't protect you against insult
because that is a violation of academic freedom.
The freedom of the insulter to insult you.
And also, as I said, it's very useful
to know who doesn't like you.
It's useful for the so-called victim.
I think as I said, I want to know who doesn't like me.
It's as important to me as knowing who likes me.
But do you also believe in this open space of discourse
that the insulter will eventually lose?
I think that's true.
I think that the insulter eventually
will wear out his or her welcome.
I do.
But I like to know who the insulters are.
Because it gives you a deeper understanding of human nature.
And usually, by the way, my experience has been
that the insulters have generally not been as smart
as the people they've insulted.
And that's probably one of the reasons they insult them,
because they feel inferior.
I'm not trying to be a psychoanalyst here,
but a lot of the people who are the haters
are pretty low down on the intellectual scale.
Anyway, 95% of administration,
you would fire, you're calling to fire
95% of the administration.
People should know, I think people that don't really think
about the structure, the way the universities work,
are not familiar, I think, with the fact that administration,
there's a huge bloat of administration.
When you think about what makes a great university,
it's about the students, it's about the faculty,
it's about the people that do research,
if it's a research university.
They don't think about the bureaucracy of meetings
and committees and rules and paperwork and all that,
and all the people that are involved
with pushing that kind of paper.
And there's a huge cost to that, but it also slows down
and suppresses the beautiful variety
that makes a university great, which is the teaching,
the student life, the protests, the clubs,
all the fun that you can have in a university,
all the varied kind of exploration,
which you can't really do once you graduate.
It's the place, the university is a place to really explore
in every single way.
So let me just talk about this important thing,
because I'm very fortunate to have contacted you,
almost by accident, in a very important moment in your life.
You're running for the Harvard Board of Overseers.
What is this board, how much power does it have,
and what would you do if elected it?
Okay, first of all, I have a prediction,
that in about five years, they're gonna probably
change the name, because Overseers reminds people
of the slavery era, and we're in such a politically
correct era now, that the English language
is being restricted, corrupted is the way I put it,
because certain words are forbidden.
We have some problems in this country,
and I think part of the problem is the educational system
has lost the sense of what academic freedom
and free speech are all about,
and I think it's essential that the educational system
begin to take more seriously what free speech
and academic freedom really are.
That's why I'm running for the Harvard Board of Overseers.
So let me just linger on the role of the administration
in protecting free speech.
So what often happens, I think you've written about this,
is there's going to be a few, maybe a small number
of hypersensitive students and faculty that protest.
So how does Harvard administration resist the influence
of those hypersensitive protestors in protecting speech,
in protecting even hate speech?
Harvard has done fairly well under the presidency
of Lawrence Bacow.
I have had a couple of meetings with Bacow.
I like Bacow.
I have donated to Harvard a print of my late wife,
took a picture of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg
when the Rolling Thunder review got to Harvard Square,
and it's sort of an iconic photograph.
She called it the music lesson, because it's got Dylan
teaching Ginsberg how to play the guitar.
And I donated one of those to Harvard.
It's hanging in Bacow's office.
The new president, Claudine Gay, is not known
for respecting academic freedom and free speech.
People have said to me, well, give her a chance.
Well, I'm willing to give her a chance,
but she does have a record.
And she's a bureaucrat.
I don't think she believes in free speech
and academic freedom.
I think she's a progressive, not a liberal.
I'm not happy with the appointment of Claudine Gay,
and it has made more essential my attempt
to get on the board of overseers.
So let's talk about the board of overseers
and your run for it, the specifics, actually.
You'd be nice, because I think you're a writing candidate,
and the election is over on May 16th?
Yes.
And I think there's specifics.
I'll probably give them in the intro.
I'll give links to people,
but the specifics are complicated.
Let me just mention that you have to be Harvard alumni,
so I've graduated from Harvard.
You have to, in order to run and in order to vote.
In order to vote, and the process, I imagine,
is not trivial, but this is done online
and if you're an alumni, you should have received an email
from a particular email address,
harvard.mgelectionservicescorp.com,
and presumably there's a way to get some validation number
from that email, and then you go online,
you enter that validation number, and you vote.
To vote for Harvey, you have to enter his name correctly,
Harvey Silverglate, and spell it correctly.
Obviously, I'm imagining this,
because I'm MIT, not Harvard,
so I'm imagining the process is not trivial.
You have to click on things,
you have to sort of follow instructions
that are not trivial, and I'll also provide an email
if the process is painful, it doesn't work for you,
that you can email.
Email Harvard and complain, ithelp at harvard.edu and so on.
I'll provide all the links,
but is there something else you can say
about the voting process, what you're running on?
This is my second run.
The first time I got enough signatures
to get on the ballot.
Then the Harvard Alumni Association
sent out a letter to all living Harvard alums
recommending that they vote
for the officially nominated candidates
that excluded two petition candidates of whom I was one.
I wrote to the Alumni Association and I said,
you have now sent out the curriculum V-ties
and the policy positions
of all the officially nominated candidates.
There are two petition candidates on the ballot.
I would like to be able to send out
my positions to the voters.
They wrote me back saying, our policy is to only send out
the policy positions and the platforms
of officially nominated candidates.
Can you believe that?
Well, this is a liberal arts college, right?
Where from the clash of ideas, truth emerges.
Well, really?
This is what I call Harvard's not so subtle means
of candidate suppression, not voter suppression,
candidate suppression.
And everybody can vote, but not everybody can run.
It ill becomes a liberal arts college
where the clash of ideas will produce the truth.
We'll worry about the clash of ideas
on the board of overseers.
The board of overseas is important.
It doesn't have the same power and authority
as the Harvard Corporation,
the so-called president and fellows of Harvard College,
but it's very influential and very important.
And it would be a great perch for me to try
to exert influence for the university to get back
to where it was before it was taken over
by the administrators.
Well, I'm pretty sure that most of Harvard alumni,
most of the students currently going to Harvard,
most of the faculty at Harvard probably stand behind
the ideas and the ideals that you stand behind.
The people that love Harvard and what it stands for.
See, the alumni were educated in an era
when these concepts were taken more seriously
and before the administrators took over.
So I do think if I get my message out,
I'm gonna win the seat.
And if I win a seat, I will have a great perch
for trying to convince the real power that be,
which is the Harvard Corporation,
to do the things that I'm suggesting.
Get rid of 95% of the administrators,
get rid of the speech codes, reduce tuition by 40%.
All of these salutary benefits.
Can you imagine if Harvard became
the most affordable college in the United States?
Well, the affordability is another aspect,
but I think before that, just the freedom of expression,
freedom of speech, freedom of thought.
Yeah, it would have.
At America's greatest universities,
I think is something that everybody would agree on.
It would have a tremendous effect on the whole country.
And is there something to say about the details
of how difficult it is for alumni to vote?
Well. You have experience with this?
You could vote online or you can vote by paper ballot.
You could request a paper ballot.
And all I could say is that the hard part
is getting the message out.
My name doesn't appear on the ballot
because I couldn't get enough signatures.
Well, Harvey, Harvey Silverglait.
S-I-L-V-E-R-G-L-A-T.
You know, when my grandparents arrived from Russia,
the name in Russian was something like Zilberglit.
And the immigration officer had several choices.
He could have said Silvergate.
Gate is a real, silver and gate are real English words.
He could have said Silverglade, G-L-A-D-E.
Those are real English words.
That's how my name is often dispelled,
either Silvergate or Silverglade.
Silverglade is a nonsense syllable.
And why the immigration officer chose
to transliterate Zilberglit as Silverglade,
I'll never understand.
And it is the cause of endless mistakes in my name.
Well, the fundamental absurdity of life
is also the source of its beauty.
Yes.
Anyway, we shall spell it out and we shall get
yell loud and wide that everybody who has ever
graduated from Harvard should vote for you
if they believe in the ideals
of the great American universities,
which I think most people do.
Let me also ask about diversity,
inclusion, and equity programs.
You've had a few harsh words to say about those.
The idea of diversity, I think, is a beautiful idea.
You've said that Harvard's idea of diversity
is for everyone to look different and think alike.
Correct.
Can you elaborate?
And be comfortable.
And be comfortable.
Yeah.
First of all, it is impossible,
if liberal arts education is taken seriously,
it's impossible for students to feel comfortable.
Why?
Because one of the roles of college is to challenge
all the beliefs that they grew up with,
which mostly are the beliefs inculcated
by parents and by elementary school teachers.
And the idea is to be able to challenge those thoughts,
those ideas.
And if you don't have free speech and academic freedom,
those views get reified, they do not get challenged.
So it violates the fundamental role
of higher educational institutions
to have any restrictions at all.
That's number one.
Number two, as I think I said earlier,
if students are not allowed to be frank with one another,
they don't really learn about one another.
I've given a lot of lectures in which I have said,
and I think students now understand it,
I'm much more interested in hearing from the people
who hate me than the people who love me.
I'm much more interested in knowing who disagrees with me
than people who agree with me.
That's how I learn, and that's how they learn,
the clash of ideas, which is the theory
behind the First Amendment.
That truth will somehow emerge, or if not truth,
at least a better truth, a truer truth,
a more useful truth, if ideas are allowed to clash.
Especially in the structure of a university
where at least I would say there's some set of rules,
some set of civility.
I think I would rather read Mein Kampf
to understand people that hate.
There is also a quality to disagreement
that we should strive for, and I think a university
is a place where when disagreement and even hate is allowed,
it's done in a high-effort way.
Somebody asked me once about what books I would,
what I have is required reading in literature courses,
and I listed Mein Kampf, and they were horrified.
I said, well, it's one of the most important books
of the 20th century.
Six million Jews died, an enormous number
of other people died, because one guy wrote a book
called Mein Kampf and took it seriously.
It's one of the most important books ever written.
How can an educated person not have at least breezed through
Mein Kampf?
It's not a great read, though.
It's not a great read, he was not a great writer,
but you do get a sense for the sociopath
that was Adolf Hitler.
Yes, because he really acted on the words that he wrote.
Yeah.
And it was there, and if people took that work seriously,
they would have understood.
It's one of the most important books of the 20th century,
and it's politically incorrect to read it.
It's crazy.
But can you speak to the efforts to increase diversity
in universities, which I think is embodied
in this DIE effort of diversity, inclusion,
and equity programs?
Where do they go right, where do they go wrong?
Okay, let me tell you, first of all,
this may surprise a lot of people.
I am opposed to affirmative action.
And I think that what it does is it labels people
by their race, by their religion,
and by their national origin.
Precisely what we don't want people to do
is be pigeonholed in those categories.
The reason that affirmative action has become the way
that universities decide on who gets admitted is
historically people in what's called marginalized groups,
blacks, gays, Hispanics, have been discriminated against
in the admissions process.
Now, what I have suggested is that instead
of affirmative action, and by the way, here's a prediction.
The Supreme Court is going to abolish affirmative action.
There's a case pending, a Harvard case.
There are two cases joined together,
one of a public university and one of a private university.
The private university is Harvard.
I predict that the Supreme Court will vote six to three
to abolish affirmative action.
It is, on its face, it is a violation
of equal protection of the law.
Some groups are favored because of race or ethnicity.
It is a classic violation of equal protection clause.
When affirmative action was approved,
the deciding vote was Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
She wrote a very famous opinion in which she said,
I hesitate to vote to keep up,
to affirm the notion of affirmative action
because it's such an obvious violation of equal protection.
But we have an urgent problem in this society.
We are not educating our members
of racial ethnic minorities,
and we have to try to get them into our colleges.
So I think it should be approved for 25 years.
And it will, it should, in 25 years,
it should have performed its role.
Well, it hasn't.
And the 25 years is coming up.
I think it's three or four years left.
The Supreme Court is going to abolish it.
You can take my word for that.
Because it is such an obvious violation of equal protection.
Why do affirmative action come into play?
Because the secondary and elementary schools are so bad.
Public secondary and elementary schools are so bad.
Why are they so bad?
Partly because of the control that the teachers union
has, Randi Weingarten runs the public school system
in the United States.
And what I have suggested is that the effort should be to,
this is an emergency, it's a national emergency,
to improve the quality of elementary
and secondary education.
And one way to do it is to hire teachers
who are fabulous teachers rather than necessarily
members of the union.
I have come to oppose public workers unions.
I am a very strong supporter of unions
in the private sector.
Why do I think there's such a difference between unions
in the public sector and the private sector?
In the private sector, management is arguing,
bargaining with its own money
and with the money of shareholders.
In the public sector, there's only one side.
There is the teachers union and then there's a school
committee that is dealing with the taxpayers money,
not their own.
And so it's a very skewed power balance.
So as supportive as I am of private sector unions,
I am in opposition of public sector unions.
They're very destructive.
And I think without teachers union,
teachers who are really skilled will be able to get jobs.
They would not have to worry about the seniority
of teachers who long since have given up
really creative teaching.
And we have to improve the public educational system.
I had in, my late wife and I had a classmate,
we have a son who's now 44 who went to the public schools
in Cambridge.
He has a friend, first name Eugene,
who was black kid from Roxbury,
whose mother understood that the schools in Roxbury
were terrible, the schools in Cambridge were pretty good.
He lived in our house Monday to Friday
and he went to school with Isaac
in the Cambridge public schools.
Elsa and I would show up the school committee meetings
when there was bargaining between the teachers union
and the school committee.
The teachers union objected to our being there.
We argued with taxpayers.
We have a kid in the school and we have his best friend
lives with us and goes to school with him.
We have a real interest.
And the school committee walked out of the bargaining session
the city council then reconsidered its vote
and they voted that citizens,
taxpayers, parents of kids in the school
could not show up to these negotiation sessions.
I thought that was absolutely outrageous.
But I understood why, because these contracts are crazy.
No sane municipality should enter
into some of these contracts.
And so I have become an opponent
of the National Teachers Association,
the Cambridge Teachers Association.
I don't think there should be unions for public employees
because there's no real bargaining going on.
And I think that the public school system
will never be improved as long as the teachers unionized.
So that to you is at the core of the problem
that results in the kind of inequality of opportunity
that affirmative action is designed to solve.
If the educational system in the elementary
and high school levels is improved,
we wouldn't need affirmative action.
These kids would get good educations.
So from all backgrounds, poor kids in the United States
will get good education if public unions are abolished.
Correct.
But do you more-
And incidentally the postal service
would probably work better too.
That's a whole other conversation.
But do you, at the core of the problem
of the inequality in universities,
that diversity, inclusion, and equity programs
are trying to solve is the public education system
of secondary education?
Yes, correct, elementary and secondary.
Elementary and secondary education.
Well then, is there use, what is the benefit,
what is the drawback of D-I-E,
diversity, inclusion, and equity programs
at universities like Harvard?
It's an affirmative action, basically.
And what it does is it allows the system
of elementary and secondary education to be bad,
because they could say, oh, we got our kids into Harvard.
Yes, but you haven't educated them.
And it covers up the wound.
And I think we will never improve
as long as we're able to cover up the wound.
And as I said, affirmative action is gonna be abolished
by the Supreme Court.
It's a clear violation of equal protection.
It's what Sandra Day O'Connor understood,
but ignored intentionally, but as an experiment.
And I believe it's gonna be abolished,
and that's gonna force the elementary and high schools
to get serious.
Do you see the same issues that you discuss now
at Harvard, at MIT?
We're here in Boston, so I have to talk
about the great universities here in Boston.
You've written about MIT.
I'm the university I love.
I'm a research scientist there.
Do you see the same kind of issues there?
Yes, I do.
Do you remember, can you explain the case
of Dorian Abbott Lecture that was canceled at MIT?
Yeah, well, this is not the only,
it's not the only incident.
There have been incidents all around the country
of academics, professors who have views that don't comport
with the, as the great Lillian Hellman,
another friend of my late wife, said,
she said she refused to cut her garments
in order to fit the fashions of the day.
Dorian Abbott didn't cut his suit
to fit the fashions of the day.
He didn't cut it in his intellectual suit.
And so he was, this has happened at Princeton,
this has happened at Harvard, this has happened at MIT.
The great universities in the country have decided
that the clash of ideas is not such a good idea
because some people's feelings will be hurt.
Well, this is, there was quite a revolt against it.
Fire sounded the alarm.
And then in the end, the universities were,
I believe Abbott was invited to come back.
I think he turned him down.
He shouldn't have turned him down, but he did.
And when the light is cast upon these situations,
the universities back down because they're so embarrassed.
And the newspapers, because newspapers depend
on the First Amendment in order to exist,
newspapers tend to give pretty good publicity
to these cases of censorship.
So they grill the universities?
Yes.
So they really emphasize, they catalyze the embarrassment?
Yes.
So is that one of the ways, is that the best way
to fight all of this?
Yes, sunshine is the best disinfectant.
You've written about MIT's connection to Jeffrey Epstein.
Yes.
He was well-connected at MIT and at Harvard.
What do you, what lessons do you draw about human nature,
about universities, about all of this, from this saga?
Let me say this, I believe that universities,
if somebody wants to, for example, donate to a university
and donates on the requirement
that the building be named after them.
If the university is taking donations
and the person is funding a building
and wants the building named after them,
the building should be named after him, Humber, or them.
Harvard is facing this now with the Sackler Building
because the Sacklers have become now persona non grata
because of their role in producing the opioids
that caused a huge scandalous opioid addiction.
There are people who want to remove the name Sackler
from the Sackler Art Museum at Harvard.
Larry Bacow, the president of Harvard,
to his credit, has refused to do that.
And if it reminds people that the money was earned
through selling opioids, that's good.
That's good that people understand
that that's where the Sacklers got their money.
They should be reminded.
In my undergraduate alma mater, Princeton,
there's a movement to remove the name Woodrow Wilson
because Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton
before he became governor of New Jersey,
before he became president of the United States.
How he got to be governor of New Jersey
was he was so insufferable that the trustees of Princeton
got him the nomination to run for governor of New Jersey.
They had said, we gotta get this guy out of here.
And not because he was anti-black and anti-Semitic,
because the trustees were as well,
but because he just was insufferable,
he drove the faculty crazy and they got him out.
And so Princeton was thinking of changing the name.
I wrote a letter to President Eisgruber at Princeton
saying, you know, this is part of the university's history.
You don't wanna, you wanna rewrite history falsely?
Woodrow Wilson was the president of this institution.
He was one of your predecessors.
He never answered me either.
I think these people, you know,
they know they have no answer.
The reason I didn't get a response from President Eisgruber
is the same as the reason I didn't get a response
from the headmaster of Milton Academy.
They understand that what they're doing is violative
of the fundamental precepts of academic institutions.
They're ashamed that they feel they have no choice
because they feel that they would be criticized
for racism, homophobia, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Criticized by how many people?
Well, they feel that they would be criticized
by students and parents and donors.
I disagree with that.
I actually think there are more people out there
that agree with me than agree with them.
Yeah, by a large margin.
By a large margin in what I call the real world,
which is the world outside the campus.
But academics are afraid they'd be criticized.
They're incredibly thin-skinned.
When I say academics, I mean academic administrators.
They're very thin-skinned, politically correct,
holier than thou.
As I said, I would fire 95% of them,
and I would be more careful in who I elected
to lead these institutions.
I said Pauline Gay is probably gonna be
a disaster at Harvard.
So it takes guts, it takes courage
to be in the administration when the task
of protecting the freedom of speech is there.
I also, which in part requires you to admit
and to uphold the mistakes you have done in the past.
Correct.
Not to hide them.
Correct.
And that to you, I mean Jeffrey Epstein
for Harvard and for MIT is a very recent mistake.
Well, there's a debate whether it's a mistake.
They took money from him.
Yes.
Okay, is it a mistake to take money from bad people?
Do you have to do a morals test of a potential donor?
I don't think so.
It's complicated because.
If there are no conditions attached to it,
I think it's emotionally complicated.
I don't think that it is rationally complicated.
It's emotionally complicated.
It's particularly complicated if they want naming rights.
Yes.
The Jeffrey Epstein biological laboratory.
That would be a problem for most universities.
I don't think that naming rights have to be given
to somebody that you don't think is worthy
of having their name.
I think the university has the right to say no.
We'll take your money, but we will not name
the building after you.
I think they have a right to do that.
There's some degree in which you whitewash the name though.
Not with naming rights, but if you take the money,
it allows the person in public discourse to say
that they're collaborating, they're working together
with Harvard and with MIT.
I have a problem with universities making
morals tests of donors.
Because not every donor is as bad as Epstein,
but some of the donors made their money in industry
by being rapacious, by paying low wages,
by exploiting people.
You can make the case that accepting money
from the Department of Defense, from DARPA,
from the United States organizations that contributed
to waging war and killing hundreds of thousands
of civilians over the past few decades.
Correct.
Folks like the tenured professor Noam Chomsky
make the case that that is far more evil
than accepting money from Jeffrey Epstein.
Yes.
Still, Jeffrey Epstein is a known pedophile.
Yes.
So that's why I say I would not give him naming rights.
I think the university has the autonomy
to not give naming rights.
But I think that giving morals tests to donors
is a Pandora's box.
What do you think about the aftermath
of the Jeffrey Epstein saga?
It feels like, I'm not familiar with Harvard's response,
but MIT's response seemed to fire a few scapegoats,
and it didn't seem like a genuine response
to the evils that human beings are capable of,
sort of rising to the surface,
the description in a fully transparent way
of all the interactions that happened with Jeffrey Epstein,
and what that means, yeah,
what that means about the role of money in universities,
what that means about just human beings in power.
Money is essential to run a university.
One of the reasons it's essential
is because the university is artificially,
artificially requires huge amounts of money,
and that's partly because of the administrative army
that they support.
They would be less dependent
on the Jeffrey Epstein's of the world
if they didn't have,
so it's sort of all part of the same circle.
But there's a tension here.
You're saying we shouldn't be putting a morals test
on money, but actually if you make,
if you expand the amount of money needed
to run the university, you're going to make
less and less, more and more unethical decisions
of accepting money.
And this is, I am flexible enough to say
that I don't think I would name a building
after somebody who was truly evil.
I think the university has the right
to limit the naming rights for a donor.
If I was an absolutist, I would not even say that.
I'm not an absolutist.
I have my limits, and that's one of them.
The Jeffrey Epstein Biological Laboratory,
it's a little bit much.
It feels like there should be a requirement on,
there should be moral requirements
on who to accept money from.
But the question is, the concern you have
is about who gets to decide, and what's the alternative?
Correct, I think there is no alternative.
I think that turning down donation,
because you don't approve of the conduct of the donor,
is a Pandora's box.
But I'm just sickened by the fact that an evil human being
was allowed to walk in the halls of a university I love.
So what do we do with that?
Well, are you telling me that none of the students
are evil, are you telling me none of the faculty members
are evil, are you telling me none of the administrators
are evil?
But that doesn't, sure, sure.
So saying, scapegoating, saying that Jeffrey Epstein is evil
can help us forget, can aid us in forgetting
that there is other evil in the world,
and some of it might be roaming still
the halls of MIT and Harvard.
Hey, listen, I won't tell you the name,
but I represented somebody in the MIT administration
a few years ago who was charged with sexual improprieties
against students, and as a lawyer I represented that person.
People say, how could you represent,
some of the people I represent are bad people.
See, how can you represent them?
I say, well, if I was a cardiologist and this person
had a heart attack on the street and I didn't deliver CPR,
I would have my license taken away.
I'm a lawyer, the only difference between my obligation
and the doctor's obligation is the Constitution
gives people the right to assistive counsel.
They don't have, the Constitution says nothing
about the assistance of cardiologists.
I have a very high duty to represent unpopular people.
Well, I think I apply the same test to college donors.
The university should not have a morals test
whose money to take.
I do draw a line about naming rights of buildings,
and I say that's an inconsistency with my absolutism,
but I just, emotionally, I just can't deal with having,
as I said, the Jeffrey Epstein Biological Laboratory.
Well, for me, emotionally, there's nothing that sickens me
more in the university than the abuse of power.
Right, and there's an awful lot of people
who abuse power at the university.
And especially when it comes to abuse power over students.
Correct.
So sexual harassment, so in the realm of sexual
abuse of power, and all kinds of other.
Well, it's a crime to use one's power position
in order to take sexual advantage of a student.
It's a crime.
Yeah.
This is not a close question.
Yeah, but there's a legal crime,
and there's a deeply ethical crime,
and there's an emotional response that I have.
You are a good lawyer, and perhaps a good man,
to want to defend some folks who are evil in this world.
I don't think I have that emotional fortitude.
Well, then you shouldn't be a criminal defense lawyer
or a cardiologist.
I think you're right.
I'm still deeply sickened by Jeffrey Epstein,
and the faculty, the administration,
that still might be in these great American universities
that are abusing their power, in small ways and big ways.
But that's human nature.
You get a little bit of power,
and you're a bad man or a bad woman,
and you take advantage of it.
Yep.
We see that in the smallest of ways
and in the biggest of ways,
in institutions and regimes all across the world.
Boy, Harvey, it's a complicated situation.
Well, it's a complicated world,
and it's complicated to be a human being,
and this is nothing new.
And we should talk about it without restriction.
All right, just to linger on liberal arts.
In 2014, and probably still today,
you wrote that liberals are killing the liberal arts.
Yes.
So can you explain?
Yes, the problem with, I'm a political liberal.
The problem with the political left
is that it has divided
between what's called progressives and liberals.
Liberals are people of the left
who believe in the First Amendment,
an absolute First Amendment, and in due process of law.
And the problem with what progressives now,
in the pursuit of equality, what they view as equality,
they're willing to bend those rules.
And this movement actually started in Brandeis.
The critical race theory, it started Herbert Marcuse,
was a professor at Brandeis,
and he came up with this theory.
The theory was this.
This is right out of Orwell.
In order to create true equality in a society
where you have some downtrodden
and some who are the uber mentioned,
in order to create real equality,
you have to reduce the rights of the upper classes
and artificially increase the rights of the lower classes.
And that will produce, out of unequal treatment,
true equality will be attained.
This is nonsense.
The idea of discrimination,
producing true equality is nonsense.
My view is, as I've said earlier in our discussion,
that the way to increase the opportunities
for the lower classes is to give them real educations.
And until we do that, it's not gonna happen.
And in order to do that, we have to overcome
the problem of the teachers unions
at the elementary and secondary school levels.
Until we're willing to do that honestly,
and improve those schools,
we're gonna have a problem of a large number
of uneducated people who need a boost
because we haven't given them proper educations.
What do you think about some of the more controversial
faculty in the world?
So an example of somebody I've spoken with many times
on mic and offline is Jordan Peterson.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work.
Yes.
But he is an outspoken critic of,
or proponent of free speech on campus,
and he's been attacked quite a bit.
He's a controversial figure.
What's the role of the university
to protect the Jordan Petersons of the world?
I think the university has an absolute,
absolute, not relative, not more of that,
absolute role or obligation to protect academic freedom
of even the most controversial faculty members.
And you can imagine, out on a university campus,
you have more people who are outliers
than you do in the general population.
That's the hope at least.
Hopefully, yeah.
And those outliers have to be protected.
They can't be pressured, they can't be fired,
they can't be disabled from spewing their views
whether they're considered racist,
whether they're considered to promote an idea
of human society that's considered obnoxious.
It doesn't matter.
If you can't have freedom of thought
on the college campuses, where can you?
Then we're lost as a society, we're lost.
And as an educational institution,
educational institutions no longer educate,
they will indoctrinate.
That we have to avoid at all costs.
And we should also remember that the outlier
might also be the only bearer of truth.
So in Nazi Germany, speaking against the fascism,
fascist regime, and communist Soviet Union
speaking against communism, they might hold the key
to solving the ailments of that society.
Absolutely.
And some of the most important discoveries in science,
for example, were mocked at the beginning.
I mean, think of poor Charlie Darwin.
Charlie, I see he is on nickname levels with you.
Because we're talking about these big topics
of sexism, racism, and hate,
we should not forget about the smaller topics
which might even have the much bigger impact,
which is what you're speaking to,
which is outlier ideas in science.
So basically welcoming controversial ideas in science.
And by controversial, I mean just stuff
that most of the community doesn't agree on
and doesn't actually harm anyone at all.
But even then, there's always pressure.
One of the things I'm really concerned about
is how little power young faculty have.
That there's a kind of hierarchy, seniority,
that universities have, empowered by the administration,
where young faculty that come in,
they're kind of...
Pre-tenure.
Yeah, there's a process in chasing tenure
where you're kind of supposed to behave.
And there's an incentive to kind of fit in
and to not be an outcast.
And that's a really huge problem
because oftentimes the youth is when the craziest,
the biggest ideas, the revolutionary ideas come.
And if you're forced to behave and fit in
and not speak out, then even in the realm of science,
the innovation is stifled.
Well, now you trigger my...
Happy to tell you this story.
That you're triggered, this is good.
In the mid-1980s, I decided to take a four-month sabbatical
from my law practice.
Yes.
Professor James Vorenberg, who was at the time
Dean of the Harvard Law School, heard about it.
Heard about it from his wife, Elizabeth Betty Vorenberg,
whom I was very friendly with
because we were both on the ACLU,
the ACLU of Massachusetts board at the time.
And Betty told Jim that Harvey was taking a sabbatical.
Jim called Harvey and asked Harvey if he would like
to teach a course at the Harvard Law School
because there was nobody who had teaching criminal law
from the perspective of somebody
who actually was in court, litigated.
It was all theoretical.
I said, sure, I'll do it.
So I taught a semester at Harvard Law School.
The student evaluations were fabulous.
Why?
Because it was really interesting.
They were hearing a lawyer who was talking about real cases.
I actually brought in a few of my clients
to some of the classes.
So Jim called me and said,
Harvey, the students love this course.
I'd like to offer you a tenure-track position
at the law school.
You'd have to give up your law practice.
I turned him down.
He said, did you just say no?
I said, yes, I said no.
He said, how come?
He says, nobody has ever, in my administration,
has ever turned down a tenure-track offer
at Harvard Law School.
I said, because I could see that I'm not a good fit,
that the administrators overrun the place,
that faculty members, especially untenured,
who are afraid to say things
that might not help them in the tenure quest,
it's not a good fit for me.
You saw this in the mid-1980s already.
Yes, 1985.
I went back to my law practice.
I did not want to get into this meat-grinder that I saw.
After all, I started to see it
before the turn of the century,
because I co-authored the Shadow University in 98,
and then co-founded Fire in 99.
I'm an early student of this phenomenon.
What are some other aspects of the book,
The Shadow University, that we may have not covered?
Well, let me tell you a story.
I believe I tell it in The Shadow University,
because it was part of.
I'm loving these stories, Harvey.
The stories are fabulous.
Let me tell you a story of,
I did a tour of the country visiting campuses.
I visited a college called Hamline University.
I believe it was in Indiana or Illinois,
somewhere in the Midwest,
and I attended a freshman orientation.
Now, listen to this.
This was a freshman orientation.
The administrators, the deans and the deanettes
and the deputy assistant deans and deanettes,
third deputy assistant deans and deanettes
lined the students up according to their skin hues.
Oh, boy.
The blonde, blue-eyed white folks were at one end.
The darkest African-Americans whose bloodlines
had not yet mixed with any of the whites on the other end,
and the exercise was you had to tell
how your race affected your success in life
up until that point.
I thought it was the most demeaning thing
that white could imagine, demeaning.
I thought to myself,
they could do the same about sexual orientation.
They could do the same about religion.
They could do the same about national origin.
It would be demeaning no matter what.
And the students actually verbalized
how their race had either been a plus or a minus.
They did.
They did.
And I thought it was so demeaning,
it just confirmed all of my distaste
for this kind of approach.
Let me ask you from the interviewer seat.
So I get to do this podcast,
and I often have to think about giving a large platform
and having a conversation with very controversial figures.
And the level of controversy has been slowly increasing.
What's the role of this medium to you,
this medium of speech between two people
and me speaking with a controversial figure,
me or some other interviewer?
What's the role of giving platform
to controversial figures,
say members of the KKK or dictators,
people who are seen as evil?
Well, we want to face the world with reality.
And the reality is that there are some unpleasantnesses
in the world.
Running from genocide
right through to ordinary discrimination
to offensiveness,
it's the real world as we know it exists.
Are we afraid to say it?
Do we want to make people think that we live in a world
where those words are not used,
where those animosities don't exist?
The answer is no.
But you can whitewash,
you can normalize the use of those words,
and you can whitewash the acceptability of certain leaders.
So for example, interviewing Hitler in 1938,
1935, 1936, 1937, 1938,
those are all different dynamics there.
But you can normalize this person
and in so doing create enormous harm.
Well, see, I don't see it as normalizing.
I see it as exposing.
If more people had taken Moncom seriously,
Franklin Roosevelt would have acted much sooner.
He only got us into the war,
asked Congress to get us into the war
when the Japanese made the mistake
of attacking Pearl Harbor.
But there were some people in the State Department,
there were some people in the administration
who were trying, trying to get Roosevelt
to see what Hitler was really like,
and he was blind to it.
And this was one of the greatest presidents
the United States ever had.
He was blind to it until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
So I think that words, unpleasant ideas,
as expressed by Rhodes, are essential
for communicating fact and truth and reality.
And that's why I think that we should not
whitewash language, we should not whitewash the fact
that Jeffrey Epstein was pretty close to MIT.
And Harvard.
And Harvard.
Harvard.
And reality, reality actually means something.
Yeah, but from the role of the interviewer,
that's something I have to think a lot about,
whether interviewing Hitler, you said exposing.
I think it's hard to know what Hitler's like in a room,
but it's also hard to know, I've never met Jeffrey Epstein,
it's hard to know what Jeffrey Epstein's like in a room.
But I imagine to some degree they're charismatic figures.
So exposing them in the interview setting
is not an easy task.
Well, interviewing is not an easy job.
It's not a good idea to have an interviewer be an idiot.
I know exactly what you're saying,
and I know why you're looking at me directly as you say it.
I appreciate that, Harvey.
All right, let me ask about your friend,
your colleague, Alan Dershowitz.
And I'll also ask about your review of his most recent book.
But before then, it'd be interesting to ask
what you think of him as a human being, as a lawyer.
He's quite an interesting case.
He's represented some of the most controversial
figures in history.
Including Jeffrey Epstein.
Including Jeffrey Epstein.
Mike Tyson, Julian Assange, Jim Baker,
and Jeffrey Epstein, and even Donald Trump.
So he's an interesting figure.
What do you think about that?
Clarence von Bulow.
What do you think?
What do you think about him as a human being,
as a lawyer, what he represents
in terms of values and ideals?
Well, he's a criminal defense lawyer.
And the job of a criminal defense lawyer
is to represent accused criminals.
He is a lifelong Democrat.
He didn't represent Trump
because he agrees with him politically.
Voted for Hillary, I believe you wrote.
He voted for Hillary, yes.
That's what he says, and I absolutely believe it.
He's a liberal Democrat.
But he's a criminal defense lawyer as well as a professor.
And I've represented some very nasty people in my career.
I wouldn't go out for coffee with them.
But they have constitutional rights to representation.
And you take that very seriously.
You notice something that people
don't understand about Dershowitz.
He was asked by Trump to represent him
in the second impeachment as well.
He turned him down.
Why do you think he turned him down?
So people should know he represented Trump
in the first impeachment.
He represented him only in the first.
And he was successful,
and when Trump was impeached the second time,
they asked Allen to represent him.
Allen has had a lifelong policy
of only representing somebody once, never twice.
Why?
Because he never wanted to be house counsel to the mafia.
And so he, early on, had this position.
He only represented somebody once.
The mafia wants a lawyer who's an in-house counsel
who represents them in all their cases.
So that's the reason.
And Allen never publicly explained it.
I know it's a fact, because I've known him
from the day that we met at Harvard Law School, 1964.
He was a first-year professor.
I was a first-year student.
We both had Brooklyn accents, and we hit it off.
We've been close friends ever since.
So there's some kind of unethical line
that's crossed when you continuously represent a client.
Yeah, he thought it was not so much an ethical one.
You have a right to represent mafia.
But he didn't want to be house counsel.
He didn't want to have them ask him for advice
in advance of what they were doing.
He was willing to represent somebody once,
no matter how awful.
Klaus von Bülow was accused of killing his wife.
These are pretty nasty people.
But he didn't want to be house counsel to any of them.
So you wrote a review of Alan Dershowitz's new book
on Donald Trump.
The title of that book is Get Trump,
The Threat to Civil Liberties Due Process
and Our Constitutional Rule of Law.
Can you summarize this book and your review of it?
Yes, by the way, I co-authored it
with my research assistant, who's sitting right here.
Emily.
Yes.
And I thought that the book was another example
of the fact that everybody is entitled to a defense
and that Alan's being involved with Trump
was purely professional.
It was not political.
It was not philosophical.
And I thought that the fact that he was being criticized,
he was being shunned because of his connection to Trump,
I found very interesting that this is a guy
who represented such, I call them distasteful figures,
as Klaus von Bülow, as Mike Tyson, as O.J. Simpson,
as Sheldon Siegel, and when he was considered
to be a skillful lawyer, made his reputation.
And then he represents Donald Trump,
who to my knowledge, never killed anybody.
And he's suddenly shunned.
I thought the hypocrisy of it, the political preening,
was very distasteful to me.
And it was not only because he was my friend.
If he wasn't my friend, I think I'd have the same view.
The holier-than-thou nonsense, the hypocrisy of it,
they wouldn't talk about Martha's V in no.
Alan and I are different.
I'm not so sensitive.
Someone doesn't want to talk to me, no problem.
No problem at all.
But Alan is considering how controversial his life has been.
He's somewhat sensitive.
He's somewhat sensitive.
And I'm telling Alan, Alan, don't let it get to you.
I can relate, I can definitely relate.
Taking on some controversial conversations,
still wear my heart on my sleeve, it hurts.
All of it hurts.
But maybe the pain makes you a better student
of human nature.
Maybe that's the case for him.
Nevertheless, the book makes a complicated
and I think an interesting point.
He opens the book with,
now that Donald Trump has announced his candidacy
for reelection as president, the unremitting efforts
by his political opponents to quote, get him,
to stop him from running at any cost will only increase.
These efforts may pose the most significant threat
to civil liberties since McCarthyism.
So is he right?
He's absolutely right.
Because these attempted, for example,
the prosecution, the one prosecution that has been brought
now with Alvin Bragg in the Manhattan,
I have looked at that and I don't believe
that Trump has committed a crime.
And yet, Bragg was pressured to bring that.
People in his office were threatening to quit
if he didn't indict.
Wholly improper, wholly unethical.
And he's gonna lose the case.
Has Trump committed crimes?
Yes.
Most of their tax crimes.
He has cheated on taxes his whole career
as far as I can tell.
He could easily be indicted for state and federal taxes,
but they're not as sexy.
And I think that he's become a target
by ambitious politicians, ambitious prosecutors.
He has gotten some sympathy, which he doesn't deserve.
And a lot of it is, pardon the phrase,
political correctness.
The better people are not supposed to be Trumpers.
I had an interesting experience about Trump.
I had two interesting experiences.
The more recent one was I was in the house
of Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard,
who was driven out by political correctness, by the way.
He insulted women biologists.
I was in his house when he was still president of Harvard,
when the Trump-Hillary Clinton contest took place.
And I was with Elsa.
We were invited to Summers' house in Brookline.
And it looked like Hillary was gonna win.
And the Harvard faculty members, they were all celebrating.
They were all figuring out what their cabinet positions
were gonna be, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then about 1130 at night, all of a sudden,
it was announced that in terms of electoral votes,
Trump had just eked out a victory,
that Hillary beat him in the popular vote,
but he had won the Electoral College.
There was an immediate depression.
Meaning it was quiet over the room.
The room became absolutely stone-silent.
And they were all disappointed.
Well, that was a memorable moment.
And it told me that they were a little bit too overconfident.
They were savoring being part
of a presidential administration.
Ambition had been thwarted.
I'm not a great fan of preening ambition.
I think it blinds people to realities.
And the resulting arrogance from such ambition.
And the arrogance, yes.
It's one of the reasons I didn't accept
Jim Vorenberg's offer to be part of the academic community.
I mean, I represent professors.
I have friends who are professors.
I represent students.
I have friends who are students.
And I have a great regard for universities
and higher education.
But I was not about to become part of the culture.
I thought that it was not good for me
and not good for the institution either.
That can, a culture that can breed arrogance.
Yes.
Self-importance.
Yep.
And I, in a sense, the election of Donald Trump
was a big F-you to such.
Correct, which is why I think he,
why I think he managed to pull it off.
To jump topics a little bit,
what do you think about something you've written about?
What do you think about the mass surveillance programs
by the NSA and also probably by other organizations,
CIA, FBI, and others?
And broadly, what do you think about the importance
of privacy for the American citizen?
Okay, I believe that the FBI should be abolished.
Because I believe that its culture was so corrupted
by its first director, John Edgar Hoover,
J. Edgar Hoover, that it is impossible to reform the FBI,
to make its agents honest, to force them
to obey the Constitution, the First, Fourth,
and Fifth Amendments especially.
And it's a culture that cannot be changed.
Hoover established the culture,
and no FBI director since has been able to change it.
If you go online, I did on YouTube a video
for the ACLU of Massachusetts.
It was when I was on the board.
It was probably when I was president of the board.
I was president of the board for two years.
I was on the board for 20 years.
And I did a video about advising people
to never, ever, ever talk to an FBI agent
when they come knocking on your door.
Can you briefly explain the intuition?
Yes.
Why not to talk to an FBI agent?
They have a system.
When they come in and interview you,
two agents show up, never one.
One asks the question, the other one takes notes.
The note-taking agent takes notes,
and it goes back to the office and types up a report
called a Form 302, which is the official record
of what was asked and answered.
So when I have a client interviewed by the FBI,
I show up, and I always agree,
almost always agree to the interview,
but I bring a tape recorder,
and I say, all right, I'm gonna tape this.
And they say, well, by regulation,
we're not allowed to do the interview of this tape.
The record is the 302, the agent is taking notes.
I say, well, I have a policy too.
My policy is to never allow a client to be interviewed
unless it's recorded.
So it's unfortunate, but we're gonna have to end
this meeting, and the agents get up and leave.
And I have never seen a Form 302
that I consider to be accurate.
The agents write down what they wish you had said
rather than what you said.
It is a wholly corrupt organization
that has not gotten any better since Hoover died.
And fundamentally, the corruption is in the culture
that is resisting the Constitution of the United States
the first and fourth and fifth amendment.
Correct, it's not financial corruption.
It is corruption of the mission,
and I think it should be abolished.
And if we need a federal investigative agency,
it should be a new name, a new culture,
wholly new members, a new director,
and it's impossible to reform the FBI.
Can you elaborate on what exactly is broken about the FBI?
Is it the famous saying from Stalin's KGB head,
Barry, show me the man, and I'll show you the crime?
Right.
Is it that kind of process?
It's that kind of process.
They decide who's guilty, and then they go about
concocting a case against the person who they wanna get.
So the goal is not to find the truth or?
It's to solve the case and close it
and enhance their reputations.
But to show that an innocent man is guilty
is also solving the case from their perspective.
So to falsely convict or falsely imprison
an innocent man is also solving the case.
Well, it closes the case if they
falsely imprison an innocent man.
They're interested in closing cases.
So that's the FBI, but broadly speaking
about the surveillance aspect of this,
what are your views on the right
that an American citizen has to privacy?
Well, wiretapping and electronic surveillance
are very, very intrusive.
And I think that the circumstance
that these tools are used should be narrowed.
For example, they're used in a lot of drug cases.
Since I don't think drugs should be illegal in any event,
I certainly think that it's a terrible violation of privacy.
To use wiretapping in a drug case,
I could see it in cases of murder,
possibly in cases of serious extortion,
but on other kinds of crimes where they wiretap,
especially drug cases, I believe
drugs should all be legalized anyway.
I think the price we pay as a society is not worth it.
There's, on the Wikipedia page for nothing to hide,
you're cited, in fact, your book that you gave me today,
Three Felonies a Day, is cited.
So nothing to hide argument, that's an argument
that if you're a well-behaved citizen,
you have nothing to hide and therefore
your privacy can be violated.
Well, the problem is that under the federal criminal code,
particularly the federal criminal code,
it is very easy to be charged with a crime, now why?
Under the Constitution, the federal government
does not have plenary criminal jurisdiction.
That's up to the states.
How is it that the feds indict
in so many areas of American life?
It's because the Supreme Court has allowed the following
absolutely insane situation to prevail.
Anything can be made a federal crime
if, in the course of the commission of the crime,
the means of interstate communication
or travel are used.
That means that if you commit a crime,
which ordinarily would be a state crime,
and you use the telephone or you send a letter,
it suddenly becomes federal.
That means that the limitation that the founding fathers
who wrote the Constitution intended
to keep the feds out of daily life
and to give that jurisdiction to the states
has been completely thwarted,
because I can't think of a case
where somebody doesn't use the telephone
in the course of planning,
discussing something that's arguably criminal.
And so this limited authority, the federal government,
to bring charges in criminal cases is illusory.
The feds can indict a ham sandwich.
So basically everybody's guilty,
and if the feds wanna bring you in, they can.
They can find a way.
Correct, and that allows them
to terrorize people who are dissidents.
Yeah, what is broken, what works
about the American criminal justice system
from your perspective, from all?
The jury system.
The jury system.
Yes.
You like the jury system.
Everyday citizens representing.
12 ordinary people have to agree unanimously
in order to convict.
What do you think about the highest court in the land,
the Supreme Court?
What works and what is broken
about the Supreme Court as an institution?
What are its strengths and weaknesses?
The Supreme Court is unfortunately fairly political,
and the current Supreme Court is overruling precedents,
which are, it's really improper.
I mean, precedents should not be overruled so easily.
It's about to overrule affirmative action.
Now, I'm opposed to affirmative action.
I think I made that clear earlier in our discussion.
But still, it's a precedent,
and it should be given some respect.
But in order to propagate a more conservative agenda,
the court is treating precedent
as if it doesn't have any role, and that's a huge mistake.
Some of the congressmen on the Democratic side
are looking to enlarge the court
in order to basically do what Franklin Roosevelt
was not able to do, and that is change the court's philosophy.
But I think that's very short-sighted,
because this is a long game.
This is a republic we have here.
And anyone who tries to, for example,
enlarge the court from nine to 12
in order to get more liberals on the court,
then some other administration will try
to enlarge it from 12 to 15
to get more liberals on the court.
You'd have a constant fiddling
with a very important institution.
So the law should have more lasting power
than the political bickering of the day.
Correct.
Let me ask you, you've lived one heck of a life,
and fought a lot of battles, and you continue to do so
with the Harvard Board of Overseers.
So first of all, thank you for that.
But we're all human, we're all mortal.
Do you ponder your death?
Do you ponder your mortality?
Are you afraid of it?
Well, let me say this.
My father died at 48.
He died because he smoked,
he died at 48 because he smoked four packs of camels a day.
He got a massive heart attack at 43.
He continued to smoke despite that he died at 48.
So I did not expect to live this long,
because I thought it was genetic.
It turns out it was cigarettes.
So here I am, I'm gonna be 81 on May 10th.
I was born on May 10th, 1942,
which is Mother's Day, coincidentally.
And I realize I'm not gonna live forever.
I also take pride in the fact that I have demonstrated
that a lawyer does not have to go with a law firm
in order to manage to make it.
You can make your own, write your own,
what's the word, write your own ticket.
I've done that.
I agree that I've had an elite education.
I went to Princeton and Harvard Law School.
But I don't think you have to necessarily
go to elite institutions in order to really make it.
You need to work hard.
But you shouldn't put yourself in a place
where you're not gonna feel comfortable
and, what's the word, empowered.
Like I refused to take Jevor and Berg's invitation
for a Taylor-Shrek position at Harvard Law School.
I'll tell you one other story that illustrates this.
I was originally pre-med.
My freshmen sat four years at Princeton.
I was in the pre-med program.
Why?
Because my parents wanted me to marry
the daughter of our family physician.
And the idea was, I was going to go to medical school.
I was gonna go into medical practice
with him in Hackensack, New Jersey.
We had moved from Brooklyn at the time.
Long story why we had to move from Brooklyn.
It had to do with my father's having a problem
with the fur reuse union and having his life threatened.
And we moved to May with New Jersey
because he got a job in a fur shop in Passaic, New Jersey.
And a family physician, they had three daughters,
the oldest of whom was my age.
She went to Hackensack High School.
I went to Bogota High School.
They're both in North Bergen County.
And the idea was that she and I were gonna marry.
I was gonna become, I was in her medical school.
I was going to take, become a partner of her father
in his medical practice in Hackensack.
When he retired, I was gonna inherit the practice.
This scenario was concocted by Carolyn's mother
and my mother.
In my sophomore year at Princeton,
I won a fellowship to spend that summer
between my sophomore and junior year in Paris.
I was fluent by then.
I had taken accelerated French course
my freshman and sophomore year.
And I went to Paris.
It was my first time out of the country.
And I spent the entire summer working,
supporting myself, participating in the airfare,
and I earned money for room and board.
And I thought about my life and I decided,
number one, I didn't wanna be a physician.
I wanted to be a lawyer.
Number two, I didn't wanna marry Carolyn.
And I came back, I changed from pre-med to pre-law.
I broke up with Carolyn, who was by that time
in school at Douglas right down the road from Princeton.
She had followed me, or I had followed her.
And my life suddenly took a wholly different turn.
So that summer in Paris, Paris had a outsized effect
of my life.
Every year, the Bravo Theater shows Casablanca,
where Bogart has this great line.
He says, we'll always have Paris.
And I think to myself, I always used to say to Elsa,
we used to see Casablanca every Valentine's Day,
because it was such an important movie to me,
because Paris was transformative in my life.
And we went to Paris every year during my vacation.
We went to Paris.
That was where she took some great pictures.
But basically, it's this high and this high.
They were hanging up in the house.
And so I always, even after Elsa's death,
I've seen Casablanca twice now.
She died in 2020.
And I always think we'll always have Paris.
We'll always have Paris.
Well, Harvey, like I said, I hope you're very successful
in your run for the Harvard Board of Overseers.
I think what you stand for
in the realm of freedom of speech
is I think the thing that makes these universities
great institutions in American culture.
And I'll do everything I can to help you succeed.
And I just am really grateful for all the work you've done.
And I'm grateful that you would talk with me today.
This is amazing.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Harvey Silverglate.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
Let me leave you with some words from Harry S. Truman.
Once the government is committed to the principle
of silencing the voice of the opposition,
it is only one way to go.
And that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures
until it becomes the source of terror to all its citizens
and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Thank you.