Transcript for “Cultivating Better Dialogue Amidst Campus Division” with Dr. Pano Kanelos
Colleges have become a hotbed of division as students from all walks of life cross paths with each other, and academic agendas shape discourse and student life on campuses. As Gen Z casts some of their first ballots in 2024, how can they learn to have more respectful dialogue about the issues that matter most to them? In this interview, Dr. Pano Kanelos provides his perspective and ideas on how to encourage open dialogue on college campuses and educational settings.
Dr. Panayiotis (Pano) Kanelos is the Founding President of the University of Austin (UATX). Lauded by Forbes as one of higher education’s “academic entrepreneurs,” Dr. Kanelos was President of St. John’s College, Annapolis, the nation’s most storied great books liberal arts college. During his tenure, St. John’s successfully launched a historic initiative that included the most significant tuition reduction at any American college, accompanied by a $300 million campaign. He is widely acclaimed as one of the country’s most powerful advocates for liberal education and believes polarization on university campuses today reflects a “hardening” of empathy within American culture. He and the other co-founders started the school in response to their belief that college campuses were no longer a place where students and faculty could openly exchange ideas.
Thank you to Starts with Us for their collaboration on this series. Starts with Us is an organization committed to overcoming extreme political and cultural division. Check them out at startswith.us.
Dr. Pano Kanelos: We’re looking at very volatile times. We don’t have room for ambiguity. Say exactly what you mean, say it clearly and let people respond to that. But let’s not get cute and hide behind slogans or phrases that are reasonably understood by other people to be threatening.
Don MacPherson: That is Dr. Pano Kanelos. He is founding president of the University of Austin, and he joined 12 Geniuses to discuss the rising division so many of our colleges and universities are experiencing and what can be done to return civil discourse to campuses.
My name is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. Heading into any election season can be divisive, that’s why 12 Geniuses has partnered with Starts With Us on this series to help you navigate the overall 2024 election. Colleges have become a hotbed of division as students from all walks of life cross paths with each other. In this interview recorded in May of 2024, just as campuses around America were exploding with protests not seen in decades, Dr. Pano Kanelos and I sat down to discuss how campuses have become so divisive and how we can bring them back to being places where ideas are created, debated, and refined.
Dr. Kanelos is widely acclaimed as one of America’s most powerful advocates for liberal education. He and the other co-founders started the University of Austin in response to their belief that college campuses were no longer a place where students and faculty could openly exchange ideas.
Thank you to Starts With Us for their collaboration on this series. Starts With Us is an organization committed to overcoming extreme political and cultural division. Check them out at startswith.us.
Pano, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Pano: Thank you. Great pleasure to be here.
Don: Today is May 3rd, 2024. We won’t be releasing this for a couple of months, maybe even a few months until school starts in September. Can you just give us a sense of what is happening today and over the past week or two on college campuses, many college campuses, not all college campuses around the country?
Pano: Absolutely. And, hopefully, by the time this airs, the chaos will be a distant memory and the world will have settled down a bit. But at this moment in time at college campuses across the country, we’re seeing a significant number of in-person protests related to the conflict between Israel and Gaza. These protests started, as everyone will remember, mostly primarily at Columbia University. When there was a crackdown on the protest in Columbia, they spread to other universities across the country, coast to coast. And I think the current university where things are most volatile right now seems to be the UCLA campus. There’s been quite a lot of kinetic activity there between protestors and anti-protestors.
And this moment is sort of impinging upon the end of the school year. So, a number of schools have gone fully online in terms of classes or have canceled or modified their graduation ceremonies.
Don: Yeah. Well, thank you for that. Normally we would start with your background, but I think that for our audience, it’s really important to help them understand the context with which we’re doing this interview. And maybe now we can transition to your background because you have a very interesting and rich background. Tell us who you are and how you’ve journeyed to the University of Austin.
Pano: In many ways, I’m a creature of higher education. I was a first-generation college student. I come from a Greek family, immigrant family, and was the first in my immediate family, and extended family, a very large extended family to have the privilege to attend a university. We’re from Chicago originally. I attended Northwestern University. And it was a transformative experience for me. I went there just as… was completely naive, just kind of a deer in the headlights. I didn’t really know what to expect. It felt disoriented but also thrilled to be there, to be at a place that was dedicated to thinking and reading and talking. It was sort of a wonderland for me, really. And I stayed in higher education.
I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and Creative writing. I was going to be a poet. That was my first career path. Not one that I took for a short while, but then I went back to graduate school and did MA in Political Philosophy and then a PhD in literature, focusing on Shakespeare at University of Chicago. And then went into teaching. I was a professor for quite a number of years, started as a postdoc at Stanford, then University of San Diego, Loyola University. Then I became a dean at Valparaiso University, The Honors College, at Great Books Honors College called Christ College. Went on to become the president of the platonic ideal of a Great Books Education at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
And after spending a wonderful four years there, I was convinced, and a number of people, and I guess also by myself, that starting a university would be a great adventure. And so that’s what I’m doing now, beginning the University of Austin as the founding president.
Don: Well, you and the University of Austin certainly seem to be disruptors in higher education. Do you agree? And what are some of the ways that you’re trying to change expectations around education?
Pano: American universities are unlike universities anywhere in the world. The university system grew with the country. So, as the United States was planted, and as it was growing, everywhere we started new cities or states or counties, we planted universities. And those universities themselves are engines of development, of progress. They were the seed beds for the intellectual life of the country. They were very productive places. They were intended to be places that shaped civic values and civic leaders that played a very direct role in cultivating the spirit of independence and enterprise that was at the heart of the American endeavor. So, radically different than a university like Cambridge or Oxford that is part of essentially aristocratic society, for the most part, of its history, a kind of one church state.
American universities were totally heterogeneous. Everywhere you went, there was a small college, and that college was often denominationally oriented, reflecting the people who had settled in that area, or there was a state land grant university. It was meant to drive innovation and entrepreneurship. I’ll say, just in short, one of the things that I think has happened is that we’ve lost that connection between universities as drivers of, let’s say, civic virtue and entrepreneurship and, let’s say, the engines that drive culture in productive ways. And our institutions have cut themselves off from the culture at large and become sort of beautiful, wonderful, in most cases, kind of arcadian outputs that are detached from, let’s say, the ways in which they could contribute to the country as a whole.
One of the things we’re trying to do is just go back and say, “What if you think of a university as a place that’s meant to foster builders and creators and innovators?" And also engender a sense of civic responsibility and communal connectedness, what would that university look like? And so that’s the university we’re building now.
Don: Well, the word disruptor was my word, and one of the reasons why I used it is because when I go to your website, I see things in big, bold letters like “dare to think” and “fair-minded open inquiry” and “sustained civil discourse.” And you don’t see these things…“fearlessly pursuing the truth.” You don’t see these on other universities. And so that’s why I use the word disruptor. But to your point, it is returning to our roots as educational institutions.
Pano: Look, “dare to think,” I mean that’s, I wouldn’t say our official motto, but it’s the first thing you see on our website. It’s an English translation of Kant’s injunction that inspired the enlightenment, right? Dare to think, dare to know. So, in many ways, by pointing that, we’re saying, “Look, civilizationally, we have been committed to exploring ideas, questioning orthodoxies, engaging in productive disagreement." That’s the whole spirit of, let’s say, enlightenment rationalism that is really what has undergirded the modern world. And recommitting to those principles, I think, is what we need to be doing as universities. Because if universities aren’t the places where we dare to think, where are we going to do that?
Don: The main thing that we’re trying to do with this episode is to understand how we can better cultivate communication online and on our campuses. And I’m wondering in what ways you have seen communication and tolerance of different ideas on campuses changing over the course of your career.
Pano: For me, it’s not so much the set of ideas that’s at play. What’s happened at universities is we’ve created these monocultures where, over time, you sort of see this with each generation of faculty and then each generation of incoming administrators, the aperture for what ideas are, let’s say deserving of attention, is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. That there’s a dominant set of themes that are elevated and said to be the things that everybody should be thinking about and everybody should worry about. If you move in a different direction, you cut these crosswise, you’re at best left out of the conversation, and, at worse, punished or put at risk because you’re introducing ideas into the conversation that are not what is currently considered to be orthodox.
And that has happened. And we see it in the data. I mean, 70% of college students say that they hold back in the classroom. Almost as many professors say the same thing. I mean, how are we going to create institutions where ideas can come into contact with each other and flow freely and productive ways if we’re actually not putting those ideas out on the table, to begin with, and if we feel a pressure to parrot the things that we think pe other people want to be heard or will give us some sort of social credit in that? So I was watching over time the conversations that our universities constrict and get smaller and smaller and smaller, and therefore less interesting and then less valuable.
And so finding a way to open up those conversations again so that… I guess I would put it this way that I think the heart… I’m a sort of hopeless Socratic, right? I believe that human beings learn by asking big questions and seeking to disrupt the things that we hold to be true. It doesn’t mean they’re not true, but we’re always seeking a push and challenge the ideas that we hold dearly. One of my mentors said we should have strong convictions lightly held. I think that’s a great way to think about it. So, if this is how we learn, if this is how we grow, if this is how we come to understand the world, we have to create institutions that foster open inquiry and civil discourse.
Don: One of the great ironies, I think where we are today, is that we have made our universities and colleges quite diverse. And so, I’ll just give an example. I read a book a biography of Paul Robeson. Do you know the name? Athlete, Actor…
Pano: Big actor. Yeah.
Don: He was an attorney, a very famous person during the 20th century. And he went to law school, I think at Columbia, and he probably graduated in the 1920s. And there’s a picture in this biography of him with his classmates, and it’s a hundred-some people, all white men except for him. He’s African American. All white men except for him. So all men. And now you look at Columbia Law School, and it’s extraordinarily diverse, but where we haven’t really captured diversity is around this diversity of ideas and the diversity of thought. And so I find that to be a great irony of where we are right now.
Pano: I mean, look, diversity is essential to the function of universities, but it’s intellectual diversity that’s primary, right? Intellectual pluralism, let’s call it. That universities can only fulfill their mission, which is the mission to try and sort out truths or what are better or worse answers, the great human questions. We can only sort this out if we’re continually self-reflecting, if we’re continually pushing ourselves and one another to think more deeply or to think differently than we do. So, other forms of diversity, I think, can flow downstream from that. But if you don’t have that as the source of the fountain, you don’t have that to begin with. Then everything else is just shallow.
Don: Well, that’s a great segue to this next question, which is, in what ways do you see the University of Austin challenging the status quo in order to promote broader communication and diversity of thought on campus?
Pano: One of the great joys of building a university from the ground up is it’s kind of an open sandbox. You’re like, okay, what do we want to build? What is our castle going to look like? Or do we want to make a hippopotamus? Or what do you want to build with this material that you have? At University of Austin, for the first two years, our students undertake, almost exclusively, what we call the Intellectual Foundations program. And that is a series of courses that are designed to look at the great human questions from all different disciplines across the liberal arts — politics, philosophy, history, mathematics, hard sciences, music, etc. And the courses are all taken in common by the students. So, they all take the same courses together in the same sequence.
They’ll be in smaller section. But that means that all of our students in each cohort are reading the same things at the same time. So, they all might be reading The Brothers Karamazov, they might be reading Othello, or they might be reading Jane Austin or whatever it is. And what that does is it means that that group of students has a common intellectual journey. That the questions that they’re thinking about, they’re thinking about as a cohort. And what happens there is that the experience in the classroom spills out to their experience at the university, right? So you have this cross-pollination. You’ll be sitting at the dining table and somebody would be like, “Well, what do you think? Was Antigone right or wrong?"
We’re talking about it in my section. You have the same point of contact. Having that common intellectual journey, I think creates, weaves together a community of truth seekers. They may have different opinions and different ideas about what’s being discussed, but they have a touch point. And what happens at that point is when you start talking about the great human questions and thinking about the big things that matter together, you start to create a community of trust. And in creating that community of trust, when you get to those questions that are really vexing, the things that we’re dealing with today, issues of race or gender or peace, or that, you’ve already built a common vocabulary amongst yourselves and the ability to talk about important things. And so that circle of trust extends both within the classroom outside, and it allows you to have conversations that maybe are difficult to have in the rest of the world where everybody remains fragmented.
Don: One of the things that I think is really problematic in our society today is how much we know — know. And it’s really not knowledge, it’s beliefs. So we carry our beliefs and turn that into what we think is knowledge. And I see you peeling that back. It’s like, no, you don’t need to know. You just need to explore, be curious, and you have this safe environment with which to have these conversations with other people.
Pano: Yeah. Look, the groundwork for these kind of conversations is, let’s say loosely, what we think of as civil discourse. And civil discourse is not two people coming together, shouting, but not quite killing each other. That’s not civil discourse. Civil discourse is the discourse or the conversation that builds civil society. So it’s a productive way of thinking about conversation. It’s not a debate, it’s a discussion. And I often say that when you come together with people who have different ideas, one idea and another idea should not equal two ideas. They should equal better ideas. And the keystone for developing civil discourse is intellectual humility. That’s the starting point. If you can begin and say, “Look, we are all human beings. We’re all trying to figure the world out. We make more mistakes than we’d ever care to admit about most things.”
We know some things. We think we know a lot more than we actually know. I’m here, I’m at this institution to learn how to fill the gaps in my knowledge, and maybe to learn whether or not my knowledge is actually as stable as I think it is. If you begin with that sense of intellectual humility, again, this goes back to Socrates, you begin with intellectual humility, you open yourself up. And in opening yourself up, you allow yourself to come into contact with ideas that may be persuasive or may sharpen your own ideas. I think that’s the kind of environment, and I would say it’s not necessarily that you’re psychologically safe. Because in many ways, it could be really distressing to have your ideas upended. It’s not about psychological safety, it’s more about the idea that you have confidence that everybody in the conversation is a good actor.
And therefore, if you make mistakes, you’re not going to be penalized for that in some disproportionate way. And so I think it’s psychologically risky to allow yourself to be open to other ideas. And that kind of risk is what sharpens who we are. The mind is a muscle, and muscles can only be strengthened with tension, with resistance. If our mind only meets things that are already, or things that we already agree with, the muscle goes slack. So we need that tension.
Don: So much of our lives are lived virtually and online. And what can universities do to encourage free speech and safety online?
Pano: Look, I think the primary problem with online communication is that it’s ultimately detached from the human experience, right? So, when people are responding to each other online, they’re not envisioning a fully three-dimensional human being who has all the worries and hopes and angst that they have themselves. They’re looking at a kind of caricature of a human being that is just represented by an opinion that’s posted somewhere. And so, in order for us to, I think, let’s say reclaim what fully human conversation online, we have to have fully human conversation in person. The more that we actually interact with other people, the more that we dive into deep ideas together. The more that we trust other physical, real human beings in the world, the less likely we’ll be able to forget that everybody at the end of whatever chat room you’re in or whatever comment area you’re in is everybody is a fully dimensional human being.
What the internet is, is I often call it the internet is sort of society’s id, right? It’s the place where all the kind of stuff that we should be pushing down swells up. And it is supposed to be superintended by the superego, which says, “Hang on, that goes too far and that don’t do that.” But there’s no superintending force on the internet because it’s mostly anonymous. There’s no consequence for letting that darker stuff swell up, at least not most cases. We have to self-regulate. We have to be able to remember that every voice is ultimately a human voice that we come in contact with, and that our words do have consequences.
Don: Boy, that’s a lot of muscle memory to overcome. Just to add a little levity here, but my goodness, we got to retrain our entire society. It’s not just a generation.
Pano: No, I mean, as we obviously know the impact on younger people is extraordinary because they’ve never lived outside of this ambient social media environment. And this is why my friend John Haidt has recently published this book, The Anxious Generation.
Don: I just finished it this week.
Pano: Which is amazing. Pointing out to us that this issue is going to metastasize over time, it’s going to become even worse if we don’t intervene. If we just don’t say like, look, we need to protect young people from the sonic miasma of social media by just keeping them away from devices or using them responsibly or educating them about the perils. I think we will see more and more of it. I mean, I think it’s so self-evident to parents. I have teenagers. It’s so self-evident how destructive social media is to human relation that I think we will start to see, you know, a kind of pushback, and hopefully over time, we will start to unlearn some of the habits that we’ve learned.
Don: Well, listen, Pano, we’re the same age. I was a freshman in 1987 as well, and I have a five and an eight-year-old, and I’m already conditioning them — no smartphone until 13, no social media until 16. I would love a phone-free school and they have all sorts of opportunities to play outside. I love the things that John says in his book. I think it’s an incredibly important book for parents.
Pano: Absolutely. It’s a shame that he even had to write the book. It’s just so obvious, right? We should know these things, but we get wrapped up in conventions, right? I mean, the case that your kids will make to you someday, as my kids did, it’s like, “Well, if I don’t have the smartphone, I’m not going to be able to connect with the people in my group and I’m going to be sort of alienated. I’m going to be the outside.” And as a parent, that’s the last thing you want for your kid is for your kid to be alienated from their social circles. So, there’s that impulse to give in. And as John says in the book, the most effective strategy will be collective action. If a whole school, for example, says, “Look, we’re out.” Or if a group of a friend group or parents or neighborhood just say like, “Look, we’re going to shift the paradigm here.” I think ultimately he’s right, we can’t do it alone or in isolation.
Don: I’m wondering what advice you have for Gen Z. So, many of them are going to be casting their first ballots in the presidential election this fall. How can they learn to have more respectful dialogue about the issues that matter most to them? What’s your advice to them?
Pano: Look, I think the first thing is to be as informed as you can humanly be. The sad thing is we know that we are at a point where the media presents to us extremely biased one-sided views, whatever part of the political spectrum you’re on. We know, like we’re self-aware that the information we’re getting is limited, that it’s self-selected, curated. And yet we get such a dopamine hit from reading things that we already agree with. We’re like the gerbils with the little snack things coming out of them. We just keep pulling on the bell or whatever they do to get those things. It’s like, give another one, give another one. And so be self-aware. Say, “Hey, I need to look at sources that disagree with the narrative that I’m comfortable with.” And do that purposefully.
And then take that to the human level and say, “Look, you know, I might be a Democrat and I’m inclined to vote for Biden, but I really am humanly curious about somebody who is interested in Trump. Let me go find a conversation. I have to have a friend or a relative that…” or vice versa. I think the kitchen table conversations, the kind of mythical kitchen table conversations have to be recovered. Probably would be really helpful is loosen up a little bit and talk. Let your guard down and express yourselves and be respectful. But I find this with the younger generation in particular, this sort of sense like the game is rigged, and some people think it’s rigged by one side, some by the other, whatever it is. The game is rigged. That they have no voice, no ability to contribute to the conversation.
They’re sort of overwhelmed with information overload. And it just creates this sense of despair and checking out. It takes away the agency that they should have. And that’s tragic.
Don: Well, one thing I will add to that is when I get into conversations with people who have different ideas from me, I can focus on trying to win or trying to learn, but I can’t do both. So if I’m focused on winning, then I’m just going to try to minimize that individual’s ideas or perspectives. But if I really want to learn from that person, I have to put aside this idea that I have to be right. And that can be hard for me to do. I’m a competitive guy.
Pano: And we’re all like that. We want to be right. And I’ve experienced this personally with my best friend from my college years, we’re still very close. And we’ve sort of drifted to sort of opposite sides on many political issues over the years but we still care about each other deeply. And so we’ve cultivated our own practices. One of the things we’re doing, we’re almost overly talk on the phone because we live far apart, is the sort of 30 second rule. Like, you just have to shut up for 30 seconds and let the other person say it. And believe me, my buddy will pull out his phone and time it. And just give them their 30 seconds, don’t interrupt. Listen to what they’re saying. And sometimes what we’ll do is be like, “Okay, let’s flip it around. I’m going to tell you what I think I hear you saying. Tell me if I’m right.”
And that’s a really interesting exercise. Another thing is to employ something, these are small techniques that you could do that actually help the conversation become, let’s say more pliable. The old technique that you’d find in improv comedy, which is yes and, right? So, rather than say, “Oh, that was interesting, but…” Say, “I hear you, yes, and…” and try to say things that are additive to it. And if you can create these kind of disciplines, then after a while, you actually stop thinking about them consciously. That’s one of my own areas of discipline is trying to listen better. Because what we often do is, and this happens at a seminar table, it happens in conversation with friends, somebody is speaking, we’re not really listening to them.
We’re thinking about what our rejoinder is going to be. We’re sort of crafting it. Like, it’s just going to be beautiful. Just as soon as they stop talking, it’s going to be so beautiful. Sometimes we can’t even wait for them to stop saying. It’s like it just comes out. If we could just like push that down and be like, okay, I’m really, really listening… I’ll tell you one thing, when I was at St. John’s College, again, which is sort of this Great Books College with a common curriculum, totally discussion based. It had 300 years to perfect the art of conversation there. They started in 1696. And one of the things that was most disorienting to me when I started, I was there as president, but I did get a chance to teach in the classroom on occasion, was most disorienting to me was you’d go in the classroom, and every class would begin with an opening question.
The tutor, which is the professor, would start opening question and then sit back, and then students would begin conversation. Oftentimes, after the opening question, or even at other parts of the conversation, somebody would say something and there’d be dead silence for a long period of time. Somebody would make a point, and you’d have 15 people in the room, it’d be like really quiet. My inclination as a teacher was like I got to jump in. Something’s wrong. They’re silent. This is terrible. I got to keep it going. It doesn’t have energy. I tried to jump in and then I had to discipline myself for time to realize, like, no, they were thinking. They had listened and they were thinking about their response before they said anything back.
And that, that silence, that gap in the conversation was more valuable than rushing to fill that gap.
Don: Well, that’s really exciting, and it’s cultural.
Pano: Yeah.
Don: Right? That leads me to this next question, which is, what are the ways that you as a leader and the other leaders on campus can demonstrate effective communication or encourage effective communication on campus?
Pano: I think too often we think that leadership is a leader is somebody who has all the answers — that that’s the purpose of being a leader, right? Everybody’s kind of confused, and then the leader ascends to the podium, and then boom, clarity. Like, here it is. This is what everybody needs to know. That’s wrong. Leaders sometimes have good answers, but more often than not, the way to lead is to lead in conversation. Say, “Here’s what we’re thinking about. Here’s what’s important. Here’s the mission of the school, here’s the challenges that we face. Here are the things that are on my mind. Here are my ideas.” And then allow that conversation to bloom from that. I think a real leader, at least in this setting, in a university setting is one who models and exemplifies a mode of dialogue.
You’re not absolved of having to make decisions. You’re not absolved of having responsibility for what happened. But you are absolved of having to be right all the time. And so I think modeling that is key. Again, I think of the leadership at universities. It used to be that college presidents were expected to be exemplars of the life of the mind, right?
Don: The life of the what?
Pano: Life of the mind. So, in the 19th century, for example, at the typical liberal arts college, the final class that you would take was a class on sometimes moral philosophy or civic responsibility taught by the president. That was like your capstone. The idea that the president sort of exemplified the intellectual life of the institution. That’s very rare these days. Presidents have become cogs in a managerialist industrial complex, running around chasing dollars and putting out fires. And I understand that universities are very complicated organisms. It’s very busy. But I think university presidents and university leadership at large has to exemplify the… talk about things that are not practical or political. For example, my field is Shakespeare. As often as I can, I will give a lecture on Shakespeare or other things. I love Dostoevsky. I mean, whatever it is. I’ll share my ideas and thoughts with the community, or I’ll lead a seminar.
Or every Friday, here at the University of Austin, we have what we call the Provost Brown Bag, which is everybody gets together — staff, faculty, everybody or everybody who’s available. And we sit around the table, we bring a lunch and somebody leads us in discussion. I mean, we had a discussion recently about music theory from Plato to Britney Spears or something like that. And it was just an open discussion. We share ideas. And those ideas have to, let’s say, simmer across the entire institution. And so leadership in an institutional setting is leading by, I would say foregrounding the mission of the institution as truth-seeking and modeling that.
Don: I’m curious to know what you think that the college campuses are getting right about these divisive issues and what you plan to emulate.
Pano: Look, I think there’s an increasing self-awareness that universities have that they have to circle back to intellectual freedom, open dialogue, intellectual pluralism. I mean, I hear this all the time. I get calls all the time from other college presidents, boards of trustees. Like, “We love what you’re doing at the University of Austin. Will you come talk with us about it, meet with our faculty, talk to our board.” And as much as I can do that, I do it. I’m sort of evangelical about these things, right? I think we need to spread the word. And so I see, and maybe this is just from my sort of vantage behind the scenes, a sense that we do, in general, need to restore the first principles of higher education. And the more that that takes root, I think the more that we will see these kind of volcanic eruptions of illiberalism start to disappear.
Don: Well, hopefully you won’t have to deal with this, but what’s your policy toward protesting on campus, and how would you handle the situation that’s playing out with Gaza and Israel?
Pano: Look, I mean, I’m not original in our policy. I mean, I think there’s absolutely clear lines. And it is yes, people have a right to express their strongly held convictions about anything. They don’t have a right to do it everywhere at all times in every manner possible, right? So, you create an opportunity for people to express what they want to express, whether it’s an area of campus or a time, or you put boundaries around it. And then with the goal in mind that the operations of the university can’t be disrupted, and you allow people to speak freely there. The other limits on speech I think are I think self-evident that speech that directly calls for the harm of anybody is completely impermissible.
And speech, I would say we’re at a point where speech, it obliquely calls for the harm of other people. It kind of hides behind slogans or catchphrases, but can be understood by people to be calling for harm. I think is, let’s call it dangerous adjacent, and should be, if not prohibited, confronted and strongly discouraged. The way that I say is like, look, we’re looking at very volatile times. We don’t have room for ambiguity. Say exactly what you mean, say it clearly, and let people respond to that. But let’s not get cute and hide behind slogans or phrases that are reasonably understood by other people to be threatening.
Don: What advice do you have for college students or soon-to-be college students related to what they should be expecting from a higher education experience?
Pano: I think what they should be looking for in an experience at universities is they should be looking for places that are serious about the life of the mind. That are places where ideas are taken very seriously, that allow for intellectual pluralism that welcome dissent and, in fact, encourage intellectual risk taking, because those are the kind of institutions that are going to produce the leaders and builders and creators that we meet. If our elite institutions attract students and there’s this history of attracting the “best and brightest” if we take the best and brightest in elite institutions and we tell them when they’re there, “Keep your opinion to yourself. It’s a little dangerous if you argue against what other people are arguing against, if you feel uncomfortable with the things that you believe, it’s better just to suppress them.”
If what we tell the best and brightest students that the only way forward, the only way to success, and success through elite institutions is really about power, the only way to power is to conform and to keep quiet and not to take risks, we are causing ourselves civilizational harm, right? So, what universities should be doing and what students should be looking for are places that are going to encourage them to think outside the box and reward them for having a innovative or entrepreneurial mindset. They’re going to ask them to push against subtle truth and incentivize them to do so. That’s what I would be looking for if I was a young person.
Don: That’s great advice. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t?
Pano: No, I mean, I’ll just add at the end here because we’ve been talking about the University of Austin. We started this project less than three years ago. We announced it in November of 2021. And at that time, we promised that we would have our first freshman class matriculate within three years by the fall of 2024, which was pretty much the stupidest promise I’ve ever made in my life because I really… None of us knew all the obstacles that would be in our way, but we were hopeful. And we’re keeping that promise. We’re now rounding out our first freshman class that will join us in September of 2024. And to me, that just makes me very hopeful. That we can create new institutions. That just wonderful, brilliant risk-taking young people are eager to jump into these new institutions.
To me for all the things that we hear in the news or all the things we read about that have this kind of declensionist narrative that things are getting bad and they’re always going to go bad, and they’re always going to go in the wrong direction. You spend a day with our incoming freshman class, and you’ll be very, very hopeful about the future.
Don: Wow. That excites me. Thank you for sharing that. Pano, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for your time, and thank you for being a genius.
Pano: Thank you. It’s been a great pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thanks.
Don: Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. In our next episode, I interview Jesús Mantas, a global leader at IBM, responsible for driving innovation and embedding artificial intelligence into offerings and services within IBM’s global business services. Jesús and I discuss how AI is being used to disrupt elections and what voters can do to better identify when something is real or fake. If you are learning from and enjoying the podcast, please share it with others who might find value in it, and please consider rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.