I'm with my friend Jonathan Holloway (a dean at Yale) on this. I understand why the students are upset. You hear their stories and you can't help but be sympathetic.

However, I have a slightly different take on what happened. It is true that there's convulsion in the country and part of the racial aspect that we saw is a result of those convulsions.

But there are other factors at play as well.

One is the growth of administrators. There is an enormous amount of administrators on college campuses now, many of whom, most of whom, they're not trained historians, they don't come from a background of academic freedom, they come from a background of being trained in administration, their job is to damp down problems.

They have no sense of the mission of a university.

There's a huge problem, there are many schools where administration has grown faster than faculty.

The second problem is technology. It is much easier for students to contact one another when they are upset in a way that wouldn't have been true a few years ago. You have a preference cascade, where each student says, I feel that way too, I feel that way too. In some sense, that's a good thing because it gives students a sense that they are not alone. But on the other hand, it can ramp up emotions to the point where any concern about academic freedom becomes, as one student said in the video, it seems like an abstraction, like something that's not very important.

Academic freedom is enormously important, not just for Geoff Stone's reasons, because you're talking about the battle of ideas. You're talking about why The Aspen Institute is here. The notion that we're going to start taking ideas off the table because we don't like them is enormously dangerous and threatens the enterprise.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Since you leveled a fairly serious critique of administrators let me ask an administrator, the president of Wesleyan, who also happens to be an academic, is that right? Is this a problem that's driven by administrators who simply don't understand academic freedom, but understand the needs of their alleged constituency?

Michael S. Roth: I think we agree on part of this. I think we have seen an extraordinary growth of administrators, many of whom have to do the work that faculty members no longer want to do, like advising students. And because of a tremendous amount of regulations from the federal and state governments. Mostly federal. But there is a corporatization of the university. So someone may say, you don't like my decision? You're fired. Which can happen in many places. And if you express disloyalty or insubordination it's a firing offense in many companies.

It shouldn't be, clearly, at a college or university. However, that is not academic freedom. Academic freedom is not the ability to do whatever the hell you want on campus because it's an academic place. Academic freedom is a professional freedom. It's about research and intellectual work. It's not about saying whatever you want.