Welcome to another segment for the Teach Out on Free Speech on campus.

My name is Kentaro Toyama,

I'm a faculty member at the School of Information at the University of Michigan.

And in this segment I'm very pleased to introduce Professor Tabbye Chavous,

who is the Director of the National Center for Institutional Diversity,

and also a professor of education and psychology at the University of Michigan.

She does research on a range of topics related to racial and ethnic identity,

discrimination, and well-being particularly among

high school and university students. Welcome Professor Chavous.

Thank you.

So there is this children's saying,

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me".

If that were really really true,

we probably wouldn't need to have conversations like this.

Now, in your research you investigate among other things how especially,

for certain groups of people,

the social environments that we live in can have significant negative impacts,

what are some of the more salient examples from research

where speech that is technically protected

under the first amendment might have severe consequences to people?

First of all I will say that research in higher education as well

as a diverse range of

organizations will suggest that our social environments affect all of us.

And so the idea that individuals who experience

their work in educational environments as affirming who they are,

as supporting them personally,

as not devaluing them is actually related to

a lot of positive outcomes from work performance,

to sense of connectedness which leads people to feel more invested in the organization,

it allows them to perform better,

it allows them to want to stay.

And so in contrast then,

people who experience their environments as devaluing to who they are

as characterized by normative experiences,

stigma of devaluation of

marginalization are more likely to not feel connected to their environments,

which can have negative implications for

focused engagement, performance, also persistence.

And yeah, disproportionately we know that individuals

who are from historically marginalized or stigmatized communities,

people of color, people of other social minorities groups may be particularly

likely to have those kinds of stigmatizing experiences in

higher education as well as other organizational context.

And some of those experiences come

about through interactions that would be protected under free speech.

So, offensive language that might be used in an interaction,

discriminatory behavior that involves expressions that might be toxic or offensive,

but are not illegal,

that may occur in students or faculty or staff stated contacts,

may impede their ability to be successful,

it may impede their sense of connectedness to the environment

in ways that affect their learning and engagement in a variety of ways.

So, lots of potential harm and in fact lots of barriers

to an inclusive equitable learning experience may

occur as a function of these types of experiences.

And do you know whether there are instances in which this kind of

devaluation of the person might lead to even physical harm in some ways?

Yes actually. So there is an increasing body of work.

For instance, in the areas of discrimination and health,

there has shown strong linkages between the types of experiences that people have,

some of which include some expressions of offensive language and speech,

and finding that these experiences linked to short term and long term health outcomes.

An area that's gotten a lot of attention recently for instance that

has affected both adolescents, young adults,

and older adults is work in medicine and public health and psychology,

that has linked these types of discriminatory experiences for instance to sleep,

and to sleep quality.

And there's been a preponderance of research that has shown that the quality of sleep,

actually relates to lots of short term and long term health outcomes,

and in the context of students for instance,

relates to cognitive functioning,

focus, fatigue that then impedes the learning process.

So what are the physical manifestations could potentially be in people's physical sleep

and thus their ability to engage in

day-to-day functions that are relevant to learning and thriving at work or at school.

And I believe that there's even research that suggests that

poor sleep can lead to things like early heart attacks,

even shortening of your lifespan or things like that.

Do you have any specific stories of

individuals who might have been harmed through speech?

In my research I would say that the stories that I tell are

through both documenting and honoring the voices of students,

primarily the population that I study

and in their day-to-day experiences and educational context.

So, one of the things that I study focuses on organizational climates.

And climates are distinct from discrete events,

and that climates are how people experience the day-to-day context.

Meaning what's normal and typical in their environment.

And I'm finding that students who have

these types of interactions and experiences sometimes described as microaggression,

sometimes described as discrimination,

sometimes described as incivility or offensive speech,

are more likely to show low sense of belonging,

it has a negative impact on self concept,

it may cause them to engage in avoidant help seeking

behaviors if for instance those messages are

coming from peers or faculty in the classroom.

And the thing about climate is that it's not just an individual event,

it's that it's even more harmful if people view

those experiences as representative of what's typical at the institution.

So having an offensive discriminatory event or viewing a racist flyer,

and viewing it as not just a discrete event,

but as typical of what's normal at that institution,

leads people to think that not only is it explicitly or implicitly kind of condoned,

but potentially supported by the institution.

So, people's day-to-day context along with those higher profile,

but less frequent kind of overt events,

can cumulatively have a negative impact on students engagement,

their performance, and as the research is showing even physical health outcomes.

So, based on what you're saying it sounds like there are certain kinds

of speech especially if they're prolonged and create a climate,

a negative climate that eventually learned to potentially experience perceived harm,

but also mental health and long term physical health problems,

it seems like some kinds of speech could even be considered

violence. Would you agree with that?

I would agree with that. I would agree with the current times will push us to

expand our conceptualization of violence to not

only include direct immediate physical harm,

but other types of harm that we know have

well-being mental health and physical health implications.

And do you think that especially if we could

identify exactly what kind of speech might lead to some of this harm,

that if possible that we should start considering laws against

that kind of speech under the argument that it's violence?

That's a great question and I grapple with that a lot.

So I guess one of the kind of complexities in immediately saying yes,

is that many of us might agree that such a movement would

be very very positive if we got to be the ones to decide what that speech was.

I will say, historically and

I'm a student of history in the U.S. and even in other societies,

that we've learned that here when institutional structures-.

Decide kind of what the parameters of dangerous speech

are that they tend to be used

pretty immediately against the most marginalized communities.

And if you look historically at the way that dangerous speech claims were

used to squelch some movement in the civil rights movement if ever,

then the idea that is central kind of definition of what

constitutes hate speech is most often used against those that are most marginalized.

And I guess I don't have as a person

from a historically marginalized community that I don't have

enough yet institutional trust in not only the decision making,

but the complexity of thought around what constitutes

hate speech and what constitutes other types of speech.

And I would say lest we think that that's

just a historical artifact that we can't even see in our contemporary times,

what is deemed as dangerous expression varies according to who is doing the expressing.

So we are in a current context where black men who nonviolently kneel to protest

police brutality are somehow painted as more threatening and more dangerous than

Neo Nazis who are actually engaging in speech and

action that advocates for genocide and other kind of harms.

And that's not accidental,

it's a function of kind of where we are socially and politically and culturally,

the ways that we are not yet great at

handling issues of race in our history around race and culture.

So until, I think we grapple with that a bit more.

It feels very dangerous to move towards saying

this constitutes hate speech and this doesn't constitute hate speech.

And then I guess the other thing that I would add to that would be

that focusing on those particular forms of speech may make

us a little bit too comfortable that we've eradicated the issue when in fact some of

those forms of speech are really

socially unacceptable ways of expressing white supremacy.

But we also need to be just as attentive to

the socially acceptable ways of engaging in white supremacy too.

So for instance, more palatable language that

advocates for a superior group over an inferior group or

that advocates for treating one group as less than human in

the ways that we do for instance with

immigration or the ways that we deal with police brutality,

like they may come in more well packaged language,

but some of that language is still grounded

in white supremacy in ways that have day-to-day immediate harm.

And those are the types of experience sometimes that happen on

our college campuses where some of the language that's

used may not necessarily fall under the Richard Spencer of the form of hate speech,

but may signal devaluation

and inferiority in ways that really affect students' day-to-day life.

So, what I'm hearing is that you're suggesting that even if we

could carve out certain kinds of very hateful speech,

it might be that all that will happen is that people start learning how to

package what they really want to say and what seems like a less hateful language,

but which would still have the same content.

Yes and we've seen that a little bit in some of

the strategic work of the old frighten for instance instead of

going from posting flyers that talk about blacks being more

violent and eradicate Jews and blacks too.

It's okay to be white which you couldn't obviously kind of mark as hate speech,

but it's very clear what the underlying motivations are and it can

still feel just as threatening to members of our community,

students, faculty and staff of all backgrounds.

It's amazing how quickly this kind of language

becomes decoded and everybody starts to understand the underlying intentions are.

Recently we heard Charles Murray on campus to speak.

You know he's a very controversial speaker in that he has expressed views that

genetic differences can contribute to social issues like poverty

and particularly that those differences may be linked to race or gender.

Critics of course have questioned the supposed science behind some of these claims.

But putting the accuracy of them behind,

one question is whether we should even allow the asking of that kind of question.

Also at a university we believe in academic freedom and of course the idea is that

we should be able to ask any kind of question in the pursuit of greater knowledge.

But maybe we shouldn't be allowed to ask certain kinds of questions. What do you think?

I'll actually say that the accuracy in the Murray example is part of the picture,

but I'll talk about that in a moment.

I don't think that asking questions in and of itself is a negative thing.

I think that we as

higher education institutions both have the skill and need to be better

at supporting our learners in

interrogating questions though and interrogating the motivations around questions.

I would say especially in science,

there's often this view that questions

our objective that oh we're just asking the question because we're interested in

learning truth when in fact the motivation for a question can

still matter and be rooted in social and political and cultural factors.

In the case of the Murray work in that kind of that area of work on intelligence,

the motivation for the question was actually to advance a white supremacist agenda,

and the reason that's important is because

that motivation led to the use of certain types of methods,

very flawed methods by scientific standards that were intended to find the answer that

was intended to be found versus actually searching for so-called truth.

And so in asking the question,

I think there needs to be still interrogation on

what's the motivation and the assumptions underlying

the question and that we are not as scholars just

these neutral beings and that matters too.

And in fact a part of the issue,

I think part of the continuing challenge in

that area is that we can go into the accuracy issue is

that despite evidence from scholars all over the world,

and many types of disciplines of

social science and physical science and biological sciences,

that the idea of inherent differences has been debunked.

But despite that, the forces in our society that

want to kind of justify hierarchies of race allows that to be a continued truth.

So even when people are still working on that question,

they're starting from the premise that it's true,

and that we need to disprove it which is

actually very inconsistent with the scientific method.

And I'll give you another example from

my own personal experience around this topic about the ways that

higher education institutions can play

a role in helping students think about hard questions.

I teach in psychology and I was teaching a course

in psychology and human development in education,

school of education, and in that work I cover cognitive development and intelligence.

And when the topic of race came up,

I had one African-American student in my class which is an issue in

itself in terms of how students experience the college environment.

But before we even got to the content,

the student expressed stress and emotion about even taking up the topic,

and I'm new, actually a new system Professor.

And so I really had to stop and engage with the student and

this student was a former teacher and of course a former student and had

had to grapple with these assumptions that there were race differences in intelligence

that were true and was treated as such in both her students and in her teaching context.

And so she brought that history to the classroom.

And so a part of what I had to learn in a very clunky way,

but in a very quick way was that even the question,

the topic wasn't unusual one for many students

and that part of engaging in it was to engage

with students around the history of the topic

as well as what the data show around the topic.

Knowing that the meaning of that question may

be very different for students who have different histories,

who have different social identities.

And I point that out just because I'm

an African-American woman didn't mean that I had facility in engaging with that.

So it really points to a really strong potential

for intervention in our institutions that we can better prepare

our faculty and our staff to support

students in instructional context by presenting topics as not neutral,

and by having some understanding of

the different students that are on our campuses and how the different topics

that we cover may have different meanings and histories for those communities,

and to incorporate that in the way that we both introduce and cover those topics.

Well thank you. I think that story captures in

a nutshell some of the issues around speech and safety on campus.

But that's terrific.

Thank you so much Professor Chavous for your time today

and we will be continuing with other segments of the Teach-Out.

Faculty Opinion, Professor Chavous: The Social Environment and Individual Outcomes

Free Speech on Campus Teach-Out

Meet the Instructors