Free speech on campus will be the focus of this fall’s 2024 Constitution Day Debate: “‘Snowflakes,’ Truth, and the Future of Academic Freedom,” featuring Keith Whittington of Yale Law School, author of You Can't Teach That!: The Battle over University Classrooms, and Ulrich Baer of New York University, author of What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus.
The annual debate will take place from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Sept. 12 in Love Auditorium and is sponsored by the Forum on Constitutional Government and the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization. Zoom information will be available before the event.
Debate moderator and Professor of Political Science Stanley Brubaker: “It’s been a challenging time for higher education. War in the Middle East has found its echo in campus demonstrations, occupations, counter demonstrations, and charges of anti-semitism. Progressives have called for boycotts. Conservatives bemoan political correctness and the lack of intellectual diversity. Legislators in many states threaten to ban the training and teaching of what they call ‘divisive concepts.’ Donors ask whether their funds are being properly used. Parents question whether a college education is worth its price. Caught in the crosscurrents, presidents of several Ivy League schools have been forced to step down.
“At the heart of these controversies is the issue of the mission of higher education, and within that, the question of the proper character and scope of academic freedom. For the modern academy, no question is more pressing or more fundamental. With Keith Whittington and Ulrich Baer, we are fortunate to bring to campus two of the leading voices on these issues.”
Colgate celebrates Constitution Day each year by bringing to campus seasoned experts in their fields to debate topics facing the nation and encourage informed discourse among students. Since 2005, Colgate has hosted a debate on campus focused on a variety of constitutional issues, including the constitutionality of the administrative state, abortion, affirmative action in college admissions, NSA surveillance, and free speech vs. hate speech. There will be a limited number of books from each speaker available for guests, and a book signing will follow the debate.
Keith E. Whittington is the David Boies Professor of law at Yale Law School. In addition to You Can't Teach That!, he is the author of Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (which won the Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize), Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (which won the PROSE Award for best book in education and the Heterodox Academy Award for Exceptional Scholarship), Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy (which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and courts as well as the J. David Greenstone Award for best book in politics and history), and several other works on constitutional theory and law and politics.
Whittington has spent most of his career at Princeton University, where he served as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of politics from 2006 to 2024. He has also held visiting appointments at Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, and the University of Texas School of Law. He is the founding chair of the Academic Freedom Alliance’s Academic Committee and has served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. A graduate of Yale University and the University of Texas at Austin, Whittington has written extensively for a general audience. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Reason, and Lawfare. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy and hosts the Academic Freedom podcast.
Ulrich Baer is university professor at New York University, where he teaches literature and photography and serves as director of NYU’s Center for the Humanities. A recipient of Getty, Humboldt, and Guggenheim fellowships, he has twice been honored with NYU’s student-nominated Golden Dozen Teaching Award. His analysis of free speech in the 21st century university in What Snowflakes Get Right deepens his widely debated defense of the university’s obligation to use free speech as a tool to create knowledge by the greatest number of participants first made in 2017 in the New York Times.
As a writer, translator, and scholar, Baer believes passionately in the transformative power of ideas and books and that real conversations play a key role in our evolution as conscious, responsible, and compassionate people — hence, his publications, including single-authored and edited books, his commitment to higher education, and his podcasts. Baer’s published oeuvre includes books on a range of topics, including poetry, photography, free speech, September 11, Holocaust testimonies, as well as a dystopian novel (We Are But a Moment, 2017), and a collection of stories (Beggar’s Chicken: Stories from Shanghai, 2012). Baer was born in Germany, moved to the United States as a teenager, and attended college at Berkeley and Harvard (where he reports concentrating in varsity crew). He received his MPhil and PhD in comparative literature from Yale. He is the father of two children, an avid urban gardener, and an eternal beginner in Shaolin kung fu.