MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Four speakers will examine the
precarious intersection of free speech, hate speech and academic freedom at a
special Tuesday, Oct. 25, public panel discussion at Middle Tennessee State
University.
“Free
Speech on Campus,” which is planned for 4:30 p.m. Oct 25 in the James Union
Building’s Tennessee Room at MTSU, will feature College of Media and
Entertainment Dean Ken Paulson, a
First Amendment scholar; Joseph Cohn, legislative and policy director of the Foundation for Individual Rights
in Education, or FIRE; cultural critic and Northwestern University media
studies professor Laura Kipnis; and Jayla M. Jackson, an
MTSU student journalist.
The free
public discussion is sponsored by the John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in
First Amendment Studies at MTSU. A searchable, printable campus parking map is
available at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParkingMap.
Paulson,
who also is president of the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center and a
former editor-in-chief of USA Today, speaks and writes often on the issue of
free speech on campus, calling in particular for more effective teaching of the
fundamental freedoms.
Writing
about a petition to repeal the First Amendment that allegedly circulated at
Yale University earlier this year, Paulson noted a “flurry of campus incidents
in which protesters claimed a right to be free from exposure to hateful and
insensitive speech. That’s not how America works. At its heart, the First
Amendment says you’re free to say rude and stupid things, but you have to be
willing to let other people say rude and stupid things.”
Cohn, a
veteran attorney who worked for the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and as
interim legal director for ACLU affiliates in Nevada and Utah before joining
the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based FIRE, said an April U.S. Department of
Justice order instructing the University of New Mexico to establish what he
called an “unconstitutional definition of sexual harassment” would force
complaint investigations that would “silence huge numbers of students and
professors who have better things to do than attend inquisitions.”
“The DOJ,
like the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights before it, is
counting on the unpleasant connotations of the term ‘sexual harassment’ to keep
the media and public from noticing that it is defining an enormous amount of
everyday speech as sexual harassment. Did you overhear someone retelling an Amy
Schumer joke about sex that you found unpleasant? According to the DOJ, that
makes them a harasser — even if they only did it once and didn’t do it again
after you asked. If that’s harassment, the term is devoid of meaning,” Cohn
wrote at www.TheFire.org.
Kipnis, a
former video artist who received Guggenheim, Rockefeller Foundation and
National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, has written for Harper's, Playboy,
Slate and The New York Times. She joined Northwestern’s School of Communication
faculty in 1991, and her books include “How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in
Bad Behavior” and “Men: Notes from an
Ongoing Investigation.”
In February 2015, the Chronicle of Higher Education
published Kipnis’ column, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” which criticized Northwestern’s
revised sexual conduct policy and mentioned sexual assault claims involving a
professor and two students, calling the policy “feminism hijacked by melodrama.”
That column led two students to file a Title IX
complaint against Kipnis, saying that her essay essentially retaliated against
the original students and made reporting sexual misconduct more difficult on
campus. Northwestern cleared Kipnis of any wrongdoing after a 72-day
investigation.
Jackson, a Nashville sophomore majoring in
multimedia journalism, is a reporter for the student TV station, MT10 News, and
regularly covers student activism news.
She obtained a behind-the-scenes interview with
civil rights pioneer Diane Nash during MTSU's recent Constitution Day 2016
celebration and covered this month's silent protest at a campus bus stop by
students opposed to police shootings of unarmed African-Americans.
Jackson's news videos are available at her Facebook
page: http://www.facebook.com/jaylajacks/videos.
MTSU
established the John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment
Studies in 1986 to honor the iconic journalist’s lifelong commitment to free
expression. The Seigenthaler Chair supports a variety of
activities related to topics of concern for contemporary journalism, including
distinguished visiting professors and visiting lecturers at MTSU, research,
seminars, and hands-on training for student journalists.
You can learn
more about MTSU’s John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment
Studies at http://mtpress.mtsu.edu/firstamendment.
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