From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is the best of Free Expression with Jerry Baker, 2022.

Welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

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Very happy and privileged to be joined this week by Condoleezza Rice, of course, who was former Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration before that national security advisor to President George W. Bush. One question, Madam Secretary. It's a personal question, really, but also about the broader politics of our time in America today. You are very prominent, African-American woman. The Hoover Institution is the the sort of conservative cuckoo in the fairly kind of, I think it's fair to say, sort of liberal nest of Stanford University. And sometimes as some, I'm sure you have perfectly good relations with everybody at Stanford, but I know there are sometimes some question marks specifically on the part of the people, many of the faculty of Stanford about Hoover, given your own personal history, your own personal identity, and the climate that we're seeing in this country,

particularly on university campuses, which I think it's fair to say is progressive, if you can

call it that, very hostile in many respects to free speech. How concerned are you about the state

of free speech in America, but particularly the state of free inquiry on the major university campuses? Stanford University, all these major universities, great universities with genuine global standing. And yet you hear so many cases of people whose views don't conform to the kind of liberal orthodoxy in these places

being challenged, being silenced, some cases actually being thrown out of some of these

universities, or attempts to throw them out some of these universities. How much of a problem do we

have right now in terms of free speech and free inquiry at our major universities?

Well, I do think we have a problem of, let me call it, ideological diversity in our universities. And that means that when people exercise the right to

say things that are not popular or that are not a part of the orthodoxy, they don't always find

a very hospitable environment. One of the things we do at the Hoover Institution is provide some of that

ideological diversity, actually, although we are within

ourselves. Do they like it at Stanford? Well, actually, you know, about two-thirds of our senior

fellows are actually jointly appointed at Stanford. And we have a lot of students who come to our

midst. I think that it's really important if you're going to, as the Stanford president says,

search for truth, you're going to have

to do that in a way that people get to raise arguments that might be uncomfortable. And we have

gone to a place where we talk so much about the comfort of one group or another that we forget,

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