Campus Protest

Many posts have discussed deliberation, argument, and the value of viewpoint diversity.

Princeton President Theodore Eisgruber:

Confrontations at Columbia, Yale, and other campuses around the country have highlighted the importance of “time, place, and manner” regulations to universities’ academic and educational missions. Because the enforcement of these rules is essential to our community as well, I wanted to offer some observations about their role at Princeton and their relationship to other free speech principles.

Princeton’s free expression policy, like the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, protects a strikingly broad range of speech. It “guarantees all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.” It specifically protects even speech that “most members of the University community [deem] to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”

Over the course of this academic year, we have seen again just how broad these rights are. In August and September, for example, I resisted calls to censor or condemn a controversial book that criticized Israel in harsh terms. In subsequent months, the University repeatedly protected the right to protest even when those protests included chants offensive to many members of the University — including to me personally.

Despite its breadth, Princeton’s free speech policy — again, like the First Amendment to the Constitution — contains exceptions. For example, it prohibits genuine threats and harassment. It also explicitly recognizes that “the University may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the University.”

The University thus may, and indeed does, limit the times and places where protests can occur. It may, and indeed does, prohibit tactics, such as encampments or the occupation of buildings, that interfere with the scholarly and educational mission of the University or that increase safety risks to members of the University community.

These time, place, and manner regulations are viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral. They apply to any protest or event, regardless of which side they take or what issues they raise.

Time, place, and manner regulations are fully consistent with — indeed, they are necessary to — Princeton’s commitment to free speech. The purpose of our policy is “to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation,” not simply to maximize expression in all its forms, no matter how disruptive.

Dialogue, debate, and deliberation depend upon maintaining a campus that is free from intimidation, obstruction, risks to physical safety, or other impediments to the University’s scholarship, research, and teaching missions.

Princeton’s time, place, and manner regulations include a clear and explicit prohibition upon encampments. They provide that “camping in vehicles, tents, or other structures is not permitted on campus. Sleeping in outdoor space of any kind is prohibited.”

Encampments can obstruct others from moving freely or conducting University business. They can create health and safety risks. They require significant staff time to keep occupants and bystanders safe, thereby diverting people and resources from fulfilling their primary purpose. They can intimidate community members who must walk past them. There is no practical way to bar outsiders from joining the encampments.

As recent events vividly illustrate, encampments are also prone to become sites of confrontation. Columbia University moved classes online because of concerns about the safety of its students. At Yale University, a student reportedly had to seek medical attention after an altercation at an encampment.

At ordinary protests, our Free Expression Facilitators, in partnership with the Department of Public Safety, work assiduously to minimize or de-escalate confrontations before they become harmful; the 24-7 nature of encampments makes that assignment nearly impossible.

Our ability to discuss difficult, sensitive topics depends partly on the culture of our community. I am grateful to everyone who has helped Princeton to talk constructively about hard questions during this very challenging year.

Our success also depends on the consistent application of our policies protecting free speech. Princeton will continue to enforce those policies resolutely, including both this University’s expansive protections for the expression of controversial ideas and the time, place, and manner regulations that enable us to engage in thoughtful dialogue, debate, and deliberation about those ideas.

FTC Bans Noncompetes

A Tuesday release from the Federal Trade Commission:

Today, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule to promote competition by banning noncompetes nationwide, protecting the fundamental freedom of workers to change jobs, increasing innovation, and fostering new business formation.

“Noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism, including from the more than 8,500 new startups that would be created a year once noncompetes are banned,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s final rule to ban noncompetes will ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to market.”

The FTC estimates that the final rule banning noncompetes will lead to new business formation growing by 2.7% per year, resulting in more than 8,500 additional new businesses created each year. The final rule is expected to result in higher earnings for workers, with estimated earnings increasing for the average worker by an additional $524 per year, and it is expected to lower health care costs by up to $194 billion over the next decade. In addition, the final rule is expected to help drive innovation, leading to an estimated average increase of 17,000 to 29,000 more patents each year for the next 10 years under the final rule.

Last year, the Authors Guild supported the proposed rule:

The FTC’s proposed rule would deem clauses that prohibit workers (including independent contractors) from working with others after the conclusion of their current engagements to be a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act. Clauses that prevent authors and journalists from publishing similar works with others, or from working with competitors, are common in writing agreements, including book, journalism, and freelance contracts. In most cases, courts have found these clauses to be invalid, but authors often lack the resources or desire to get into a legal battle with their publishers and are unlikely to sue. If the FTC’s rule is enacted, authors could simply reject such clauses as invalid, pointing to the FTC rule.

The Authors Guild has long objected to non-compete clauses and advised their removal in our contract reviews. These clauses, which are purportedly designed to protect publishers’ investments by preventing authors from selling the same or substantially similar work to another publisher, are often too broad. Authors are routinely asked to agree not to publish other works that might “directly compete with” the book under contract or “be likely to injure its sale or the merchandising of other rights.” Even more broadly, they may be asked not to “publish or authorize the publication of any material based on the Work or any material in the Work or any other work of such a nature such that it is likely to compete with the Work.”

House GOP Woes

Axios: Never before has the party in control of the House of Representatives knowingly and willingly castrated its own power so thoroughly as today's Republicans, Axios' Juliegrace Brufke and Justin Green report.

Why it matters: Republicans blew years of potential authority by weak leaders surrendering to keep power. So with a razor-thin GOP majority, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had to depend on Democrats to muscle through the $60 billion Ukraine bill over the weekend.

Two mistakes haunt House Republicans, both dating back to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy's fight to win the gavel in January 2023:

• Letting any member call a vote on removing the speaker. This gives insurgents like Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) extraordinary power to threaten to oust the party leader any time.
• Surrendering authority of the Rules Committee, which sets the terms for how legislation will be handled during votes. After allowing non-loyalists onto the committee, leaders can't depend on getting their way.

Zoom in: The new Rules Committee — with McCarthy-appointed hardliners, including Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) — has become a roadblock. Seven bills were defeated in the past year during the rules process.This is an unprecedented collapse in control: Former Speakers Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan and John Boehner never lost a rules vote.

Brendan Buck, a top staffer to Ryan and Boehner, wrote in a New York Times op-ed: "A party unable to bring its agenda to the floor for a vote is no longer a functional majority."Former Speaker Ryan told Axios that Johnson "found his footing, and his voice. ... [H]e did it as a statesman, risking his own personal political fortune for the greater good that he believes in."

Earth Day and Net Zero

Many posts have discussed energy and the environment.

 On Earth Day, note Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot:

Is it really possible to hit net zero by 2050? Is it really possible to eliminate fossil fuels that fast? The answer is that, for both technical and political reasons, it is not possible (outside of edge “solutions” like crashing industrial civilization or world authoritarian government to ration energy usage).

The insistence on trying to do so anyway is why “be realistic—demand the impossible!” is, astonishingly, not so far from the guiding philosophy of much of today’s mainstream left, including dominant sectors of the Democratic Party.

Consider the technical feasibility of this program. As the polymath, Vaclav Smil, universally acknowledged to be one the world’s premier energy experts, has observed:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

Smil backs his argument with a mountain of empirical evidence in a new and hugely important paper, “Halfway Between Kyoto and 2050: Zero Carbon Is a Highly Unlikely Outcome.” The paper is a gold mine of relevant and highly compelling data. Smil outlines the realities of the net zero 2050 challenge:

The goal of reaching net zero global anthropogenic CO2 emissions is to be achieved by an energy transition whose speed, scale, and modalities (technical, economic, social, and political) would be historically unprecedented…[T]he accomplishment of such a transformation, no matter how desirable it might be, is highly unlikely during the prescribed period….In terms of final energy uses and specific energy converters, the unfolding transition would have to replace more than 4 terawatts (TW) of electricity-generating capacity now installed in large coal- and gas-fired stations by converting to non-carbon sources; to substitute nearly 1.5 billion combustion (gasoline and diesel) engines in road and off-road vehicles; to convert all agricultural and crop processing machinery (including about 50 million tractors and more than 100 million irrigation pumps) to electric drive or to non-fossil fuels; to find new sources of heat, hot air, and hot water used in a wide variety of industrial processes (from iron smelting and cement and glass making to chemical syntheses and food preservation) that now consume close to 30 percent of all final uses of fossil fuels; to replace more than half a billion natural gas furnaces now heating houses and industrial, institutional, and commercial places with heat pumps or other sources of heat; and to find new ways to power nearly 120,000 merchant fleet vessels (bulk carriers of ores, cement, fertilizers, wood and grain, and container ships, the largest one with capacities of some 24,000 units, now running mostly on heavy fuel oil and diesel fuel) and nearly 25,000 active jetliners that form the foundation of global long-distance transportation (fueled by kerosene).

Gallagher Says Goodbye: "Drink More, Tweet Less"

Many posts have discussed civility in Congress.

 The closing words of Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), just before his resignation took effect:

It’s typical at moments such as these to say ‘‘I have no regrets.’’ This is true legislatively and professionally. I accomplished my mission and got to chair the most significant committee in the 118th congress. Yet I have a lingering personal regret. I wish I had devoted more time to building personal relationships with my colleagues. Our time here is frenetic: filled with overlapping committee hearings and constant fundraising events. It’s hard to carve out time just to get to know your colleagues, to understand their background and motivation, and thereby develop trust. 

Where I was able to do that, with Senator ANGUS KING my co-chair on the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, and with RAJA KRISHNAMOORTHI on the China committee, it produced the biggest legislative successes of my 8 years. Put differently, my effectiveness as Congressman wasn’t primarily a function of intellect or op-ed writing prowess and certainly not fundraising, it was a direct result of forging friendships across our caucus and maybe more importantly across the aisle. 

So if there’s a lesson in that for my successor or any of my colleagues it’s after a grueling day of a thousand meetings, still make the effort to get that beer with a member you don’t know that well. Drink more, tweet less. Get to know your colleagues in real life before trashing them on social media. At the end of the day, Republicans and Democrats, we’re all Americans, citizens of the greatest country in the history of the world. Even on our worst day the world is looking to us for leadership. God bless America. 

Tom Cole on Smoking and Politics

 At Politico, Ryan Lizza talks to Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), new chair of Appropriations and a cigar aficionado:

I’m a big believer in open humidors and open bars because they bring people together. I used to tell this to Boehner. I said, “Quit the cigarette stuff. That’s an addiction.” I mean, you’re sitting *makes sucking noises* for three minutes or something.

With a cigar, you’re going to sit down for 30 to 45 minutes, and if you’re doing it with somebody, you’re going to talk, you’re going to have a relationship. You’re going to find something in common with one another. It’s a lovely way to build a relationship and to socialize with people in a way that the cigarette generally isn’t. You never see a 15-year-old kid standing outside a building with a $20 premium cigar, sucking it up. They don’t do that. This is an adult product that leads to adult conversations and can quite often lead to some really interesting relationships and, frankly, good relationships between people that don’t often get along.

One of the worst things Pelosi ever did, and I know she did it for health reasons… You guys won’t like this, but…

I know where this is going.

… When you quit smoking in the Speaker’s Lobby and when you let in the press, you just destroy one of the places where bipartisan relationships are built. That’s how I got to know Barney Frank. That’s how I got to know Jesse Jackson Jr. when he was up here. Sit down, have a cigar, build a relationship. They were smoking cigarettes and in Frank’s case I don’t think he was ever a big cigar guy, but Jesse was.

There’s got to be some spaces where people can get together. We used to do this in the Rules office — one of the best smoking venues in the Capitol. But you’d get members from different generations there. I mean, Hal Rogers is there all the way to freshmen. There are different committees and most people live their life within their committee. I don’t know what the hell’s going on over in Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce until they produce a product and head it toward the floor. But it’s really interesting when you sit down and hear, “This is what we’re doing in Science, and this is what we’re doing in Ag. This is why we have ag crop insurance or whatever.”

If you’re not in those committees, you don’t know. Over a cigar people talk about their work. Even their questions are interesting. Their observations are interesting. It’s an enjoyable thing, but it’s also a great way to learn information, build relationships and frankly in some ways, educate people because most people learn politics by listening to stories. They’re not reading political science books for God’s sake. They talk to real politicians and they hear real stories and that’s interesting.

Garfield on Congress

A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity, legislative productivity, and deliberation.

In April 1877, Representative (and future President) James A. Garfield wrote at The Atlantic:

And this leads me to say that now, more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand those high qualities to represent them in the national legislature. Congress lives in the blaze of “that fierce light which beats against the throne.” The telegraph and the press will to-morrow morning announce at a million breakfast tables what has been said and done in Congress to-day. Now, as always, Congress represents the prevailing opinions and political aspirations of the people. The wildest delusions of paper money, the crudest theories of taxation, the passions and prejudices that find expression in the senate and house, were first believed and discussed at the firesides of the people, on the corners of the streets, and in the caucuses and conventions of political parties.

The most alarming feature of our situation is the fact that so many citizens of high character and solid judgment pay but little attention to the sources of political power, to the selection of those who shall make their laws. The clergy, the faculties of colleges, and many of the leading business men of the community never attend the township caucus, the city primaries, or the county convention; but they allow the less intelligent and the more selfish and corrupt members of the community to make the slates and “run the machine” of politics. They wait until the machine has done its work, and then, in surprise and horror at the ignorance and corruption in public office, sigh for the return of that mythical period called the “better and purer days of the republic.” It is precisely this neglect of the first steps in our political processes that has made possible the worst evils of our system. Corrupt and incompetent presidents, judges, and legislators can be removed, but when the fountains of political power are corrupted, when voters themselves become venal and elections fraudulent, there is no remedy except by awakening the public conscience and bringing to bear upon the subject the power of public opinion and the penalties of the law. The practice of buying and selling votes at our popular elections has already gained a foot-hold, though it has not gone as far as in England.