Good afternoon, everyone. I am the dean of the harvard graduate institute and is my pleasure to welcome all of you, whether you are joining us in person or online, to todays discussion on free speech on campus. We plan to this discussion some weeks ago, but i bet it has become an increasingly crucial conversation. Before i introduce those on todays program, allow me to express my gratitude to the Radcliffe InstituteLeadership Society and our donors whose generosity keeps our program free and open to the public. I also want to thank todays distinguished speakers for sharing their expertise and perspectives, and i thank everyone who is joining us this afternoon for engaging in this critically important conversation. As i moved to an introduction of the substance of the program, i have a request for you. During this fraud period of understandably strong opinions and strong emotions, i ask that we engage with one another as generous listeners. With open minds and open hearts. Thank you in advance for doing so. We must begin the session by acknowledging the devastating and continuing effects of the october 7 hamas terror attack on israel, the ensuing humanitarian crisis in gaza following israels counterstrike, and the impact of these events around the world, including in our country, on our college, and University Campuses. In the wake of these terrible events, we have witnessed protests and counter protests expressing a range of political viewpoints in support of israelis and all jewish people, in support of the palestinian people, and in support of justice and peace for all. Meanwhile, many are grieving and afraid for themselves and their loved ones. And i want to say that whatever is your political viewpoint, we must not harden our hearts to human suffering. Anywhere. Including on our campus. We also must acknowledge that in the wake of this crisis, Law Enforcement officials in the u. S. Have noted a sharp increase of antisemitic, antiarab, islamophobic speech, harassment, threats, and assault. And they have included traffic online Death Threats and grievous, even fatal, assaults. These terrific horrific events include the increased violence against jewish, muslim, and arab communities in the u. S. Since the israelhamas war broke out. Yes, these are tumultuous and disturbing times. And it is my sincere hope and my expectation that we stand against all hatred, realizing that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. As dr. Martin luther king jr. Once said, during his leadership of the American Civil Rights struggle, the movement that was predicated on nonviolence and one aided by the First Amendment freedoms. This movement helped produce the rights laws that enabled us to be here together today. United in the search for knowledge across lines of race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, religion, ideology, and so many more categories. The questions which we engage today on how to reconcile hate speech and political speech at colleges and universities are far from new. The current moment joins the long history of contested speech in our education and beyond. For decades, University Communities have such to establish the boundaries of protected speech and protest. Flashpoints have erected at many points, perhaps most famously during the 1960s and 1970s, during the civil rights, free speech, and antivietnam war protest. Students engaged in Political Activities and protest and insisted that universities honor their freedom of expression. Society and colleges at University Campuses were deeply divided on domestic and international issues. Around the same time, federal state authorities passed laws that banned discrimination and harassment, including title vi and title ix of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And students from all walks of life, diverse from multiple identities, matriculated to college and University Campuses. Campus communities became more diverse than ever before, and administrators such to create positive learning environments, sometimes by regulating speech and conduct deemed hateful or otherwise harmful. But critics have long argued that some of these oncampus efforts infringe on Academic Freedom and freedom of expression, as we will discuss momentarily. In short, todays political and societal context is unique, but the tensions surrounding speech on College Campuses are not unprecedented. Todays challenges underscore enduring questions about the appropriate role of institutions of Higher Education during times of political and social conflict, and how the mission, policies, and values of universities intersect with constitutional and statutory law. Our panel seeks to address these complex questions, and we ask these experts to do so because our ability to whether deeply emotional challenging periods as a Community Requires us to know about our rights and responsibilities. And it demands dialogue, even and especially when we strongly disagree. And now i am pleased to introduce our panelists. The full bios of our distinguished panelists are available on the event page for todays program. I will provide highlights of the many accomplishments that makes them so well suited to todays discussion. Jeannie suk gersen is the John H Watson junior professor of law at Harvard Law School. Before joining the faculty, she served as a law clerk to Justice David sutter of the u. S. Supreme court and to judge Carrie Edwards of the u. S. Court of appeals for the d. C. Circuit judge. The recipient of numerous awards, she is the author of at home in the law, and is a contributing writer. Nadine strossen is the second professor of law emerita at Harvard Law School and the senior fellow for individual rights and education. From 1991 to 2008, she served as president of the American Civil Liberties union. She is the recipient of many honors and the author of several books, including free speech what Everyone Needs to know, released in october. Keith whittington is the professor of politics at princeton university. He is the awardwinning author of numerous books, including speak freely why universities must defend free speech. His writing has appeared in media outlets, including the New York Times and the wall street journal. Later in our discussion, we will be joined by erica chenoweth. Erica is a susan and wallace professor here at radcliffe, economic dean of economics and first professor of amendments at the kennedy school. Erica directs the Nonviolent Action Lab at harvard, and does the author of several books including civil resistance what Everyone Needs to know. Erica also chairs the Harvard University antibullying committee group. The universitys new antidiscrimination and antibullying policies took effect this september. And i will moderate todays discussion. In addition to leading radcliffe, i am a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School with expertise in constitutional law and postwar american history. Now, please join me in warmly welcoming our panelists to the stage. [applause] thank you all again for being here. We have a big task in front of us and i am looking forward to modeling civil dialogue with you. I would like to begin with you, nadine strossen. You have an extraordinary depth of expertise on the subjects we will discuss today, and i would like you to start us off by explaining the constitutional and legal roles following expression and protest on public and private campuses, what kind of speech and activities are protected, and any exceptions to the general rule, in five minutes. Prof. Strossen [laughter] if you want the first story, you will have to read my new book. Thank you so much and thanks to my distinguished copanelists and everybody for organizing this really important seminar. So the United StatesFirst Amendment freespeech standards, which by the way, are only directly binding on public universities, but which the vast majority of private universities, including harvard, have voluntarily decided to adhere to as a matter of economic Academic Freedom and pedagogical excellence, so i will refer to the First Amendment, but please be aware we are not literally talking about the First Amendment. We are talking about harvards own rules, private universitie own rules which mirror the First Amendment. For all of the disparaging commentary we tend to hear about First Amendment exceptionalism, in fact, the more you know about the rules, the more they make plain common sense. And not surprisingly, they are echoed in the laws of many other countries and International Human rights freespeech law as well. What the Supreme Court has said is the bedrock principle underlying our whole system of free speech is the best starting point. If i can only give you one principal, lets start with the bedrock principle. It starts what we also call content neutrality. Government and universities must remain neutral with respect to the ideas, viewpoints, the message, the content of the expression. They may neither favor nor disfavor particular expressions because they agree with, disagree with, even loathe or generally fear the content of the expression. However, governments and universities may and indeed should restrict speech when they do so for reasons that get beyond thoroughly disfavoring the content. Those fall into two basic categories. One is content neutral time, place, and manner restrictions. So no matter what you say, you may not disrupt the class. A matter what you say, you may not interfere with peaceful studying in the library and so forth. The second situation in which government and universities may and should restrict speech because of the concerns going beyond more disfavored context is when the speech considered in its overall context imminently directly causes or threatens certain specific serious harms. This is often referred to as the emergency concept. The Supreme Court has recognized several subcategories of speech that, considering all the facts and circumstances, may well constitute a punishable, restricted will emergency. These may sound familiar to you. Intentional incitement of that is likely to happen in imminently, targeted harassment or bullying, hostile environment , whether it is pervasive climate of intimidation that may include inspection expression that is so unwelcomed, and actively offensive, severe and pervasive that it deprives a student of an equal education opportunity or an employee of an equal opportunity. One of the examples is a genuine threat, a true threat where the speaker intends to or recklessly instills a reasonable objective fear on the part of the targeted person that they will be subject to physical attack. Note that the speaker does not have to intend to actually carry out the attack. Merely instilling a fear that is reasonable already does harm because if you are subject to that fear, it is going to impede your freedom of speech as well as your freedom of movement. Sadly, we have heard many accounts coming from harvard and other universities that much of the expression that is taking place could and should be subject to restriction for violating these content neutral rules in the case of time, place, and manner restrictions or because they satisfy the emergency concept of targeted harassment or genuine threat or hostile environment harassment. If i can make one other point, it is that those of us who strongly support these freespeech principles and, far more important than myself, are all aligned with justices of the Supreme Court, going back to the second half of the 20th century when the court began to adopt these speech protected standards, not coincidently in the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement that he referred to, because the leaders of that movement recognized that their advocacy absolutely depended on these robust speech protected principles. And for that reason, we are very supportive of them. But the Supreme Court justices have acknowledged that even speech that does not satisfy the emergency test may well still cause a lot of harm. I really appreciated your reference to, we have to be compassionate and sympathetic to all the ways that people are hurting on campus, students in particular, but also faculty members and others. And even if the remedy is not to censor certain speech, first of all, one remedy which you alluded to is to make sure to punish and restrict actual violence and threatened violence , of which we have sadly too much. Also to punish the expression that transgresses the generous but still finite bounds of protected freespeech. But even with respect to core constitutionally protected speech that is advocating ideas that we consider offensive and load some and people, our remedy is not just to say, do not censor it. Our remedy as educated in particular is to do something more. It is often called counter speech in the law. The Supreme Court justice set the first phrase, the concept of the emergency standard, louis brandeis, interestingly enough the first jewish justice on the Supreme Court. He first framed that content concept in a dissent. He said the fitting remedy to People Councils is good ones. People councils is good ones bid it is not good enough for those of us who opposed censoring speech and his content we find load some, we have the responsibility to firmly raise our voices to down provide the kind of education and support that will deepen understanding and ultimately hopefully eliminate or reduce the hateful attitudes of which the speech is just a symptom. Dean brownnagin thank you so much. Let me go to keith, who is a political scientist. You have argued that free speech is under attack on campus and you have made the important point that these attacks have come from across the political spectrum. You also argue that these attacks are corrosive to the very mission of our education. I wonder if you can say more about your diagnosis of the problem. Prof. Whittington i appreciate the opportunity to participate in the panel and i appreciate the initiative of the institute to do a panel on this important topic at this important time. Obviously, speech issues have been front and center on University Campuses than the last couple months, but fortunately they have been front and center on University Campuses the last several years. This is an issue that i mostly tend to take for granted. And i was drawn into thinking about speech, disputes and the relationship between speech and universities in particular, because of the way that knowledge sheds a light on fundamental purposes of universities in the first place. Why we value universities and how we often conduct ourselves within those universities and what kind of policies and practices we ought to engage in. Central to me is the vision of the university as a place that is about advancing human knowledge, sharing what we gained to others. Those others include not only our colleagues in scholarly professions, not only our students in the classrooms, but people in the wider world. Society benefits from having institutions like this that can push on the frontiers of human knowledge, trying to expand knowledge frontiers, trying to expose weaknesses and flaws in conventional wisdom, and share those lessons as a whole. We have made a bet that we are better off as a society if we know things that are true, and we can reveal things that are false or flawed or week and can be undermined. It is sometimes a painful process of exposing those weaknesses. We are better at the end of the day exposing those weaknesses and trying to build on firmer foundations. That is what universities are all about, but if universities have already performed that task, they also have a great deal of intellectual freedom for those in the Campus Community to engage in the process of ringing skeptical and wary bringing skeptical inquiry that is held firmly on campuses or scholarly disciplines. Orthodoxies that those outside the particular disputes may not understand the content of, let alone the alleged importance of them, but sometimes those orthodoxies are centrally held by society at large. They have fundamental social, political, and other questions that people hold ideal, which means we need to insulate scholars and universities from pressures that will prevent them from raising those questions, probing those kinds of orthodoxies to expose those kinds of weaknesses to build up stronger and tougher arguments that can survive going forward. We have tried to do that at american universities, somewhat fitfully over time, and really only for the last 100 years or so. These are relatively modern innovations, the universities that have become what they are now. They have principles they are committed to, that they dole out protections of and rules they are now committed to, but these are centrally important to the kind of solutions over the course of the last century. The one hand, that includes policies and principles concerned with intellectual freedom, which are core to protecting the kind of research and scholarship that faculty scholars on University Campuses are doing but also the teaching they are doing, the faculty engagement with s