EAD 949-001
Spring 2021
Mondays 4:10 – 7:00 pm
Professor Kristine Bowman
Controversies surrounding free speech on American college and university campuses have become intense and prominent. This seminar will engage scholarly work, applied work, and individuals whose policy creation and
implementation bring to life assumptions and theories that animate these issues. The course will be open to graduate students from the Colleges of Education, Arts & Letters, Social Science, and Law. Students will attend1
part of the LeFrak Forum at MSU April 8-10, which will bring together many of the leading scholars in the field.
We will explore questions such as:
- What is the state of education policy regarding free speech on campus?How did it come to be this way?
- Which specific issues and policies comprise the range of free speech on campus regulations?
- What are campus speech conflicts about from the perspectives of various stakeholders and disciplines?
- What is “hate speech” and why is it powerful? How does law view it?
- How do free speech and equality interact in the literature and in actual situations?
- What information and assumptions undergird normative choices about free speech policy?
Our course materials will include:
- American Council on Education, Inclusion and Freedom of Expression Tools, (2018-present)
- Ulrich Baer, What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality (Oxford University Press, 2019)
- Sigal Ben Porath, Free Speech on Campus (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018)
- Erwin Chemerinsky & Howard Gilman, Free Speech on Campus (Yale University Press 2017)
- Nadine Strossen, Hate: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford Univ. Press 2018)
- PEN America Campus Free Speech Guide (2018-present)
- Think About It, Free Speech Series podcast (2018-present)
- Keith Whittington, Speak Freely (Princeton University Press 2018)