Today I have the honor of speaking to Colgate University on the erosion of free speech in the United States. I will first address a class on the separation of powers before giving a lecture as part of the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization at Colgate University. The lecture is entitled “The American Anti-Free Speech Movement from Anti–Sedition to Anti-Fascism.” The program is designed to run from 4:30 – 6:00.
Here is the description from Colgate:
“In his lecture, Professor Turley will explore the evolution of free speech in the United States from the Early Republic to the current times. He will address how anti-free speech sentiments have remained part of our country like “a dormant virus” that emerges in different forms from anti-sedition to anti–fascism causes. In his view, the threat to free speech has never been greater in the United States with a growing anti-free speech movement emerging on our campuses and streets.”
I regret that with the pandemic I am unable to visit Colgate, which has a stunning campus in Hamilton, New York. I did want to note one connection between our schools. What Colgate (the Hamilton) was still developing in 1844, degrees for 45 B.A. students and one Master’s candidate were awarded by George Washington University (then known as the Columbian College).
Center for Freedom and Western Civilization at Colgate University.
NB, the “Center for Freedom and Western Civilization” does not exist as such. It’s a grant money vent pipe. It was created during Rebecca Chopp’s administration and may actually be financed with dedicated endowment money courtesy a concerned alumnus. It’s been administered in that time by Robert Kraynak, the rare Republican on Colgate’s faculty. Dr. Kraynak is 74 and has continued working for nearly a decade past the institution’s customary retirement date. When he leaves, he will indubitably be replaced by someone who will add no diversity at all to Colgate’s arts-and-sciences faculty. Ditto Dr. Barry Shain, who at 70 is facing another campaign on the part of campus woke-tards to get him fired.
The institutions inept admissions office has made the place a collecting pool of rather loosely-wired youths, and they’re incited sub rosa by enablers in the faculty and administration. So, they can hardly process the work and words of someone as dispassionate as Heather Mac Donald
Here’s the first installment of Mac Donald’s talk last winter. She’s faced worse elsewhere.
Good luck! You’ll need it.
I’m thrilled that one of our wonderful upstate New York universities has taken this important step, and that you have been invited to speak on this important topic. Please let us know if a webcast will be available. It would be nice if the administration and professors at nearby Syracuse University could benefit from your expertise on the topic.
You can register for this webinar on Colgate website, https://calendar.colgate.edu/
I registered for the program. Professor Turley’s presentation was excellent!
Colgate is a teaching institution that limits its book to acadmics and the arts, not a research university. The actual universities Upstate are SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Albany, SUNY Binghamton, Cornell, Syracuse, the University of Rochester, and (in some measure), RIT and RPI.
All the best with it, Turley!
Colgate makes toothpaste. That is all they can clean.
We need free speech. Not rich teachers.
I hope you can provide the text of your lecture/presentation here. I would like to read a more thorough discourse of your philosophy on the topic- particularly where you draw the line at which the government may censor and private companies and universities may refuse to grant a platform for certain speech. No doubt, we will not all agree on the location of that line in individual cases, but surely there are limits though Turley, to my knowledge, has never defined them.
Is this event available on line live?