Free Speech in the Classroom: Conflict and Contradiction

The Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs will be hosting a conversation with Jan Plan visiting faculty Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers. The talk will be a contemporary conversation about how to respond to the desires, demands, and questions in classrooms today. What contradictions and conflicts, complexities and controversies, emerge when we consider free speech in the classroom? This is part of a series of events the Goldfarb Center has hosted this year in line with its focus on freedom of speech.

Bernardine Dohrn, activist, academic, and children’s and women’s rights advocate, is a retired Associate Clinical Professor from Northwestern University School of Law, where she was the founding director of the Children and Family Justice Center for 23 years. Dohrn is an author or editor of Race Course: Against White Supremacy, A Century of Juvenile Justice, and Resisting Zero Tolerance: A Handbook for Parents, Teachers, and Students. Willam Ayers, formerly Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago has written extensively about social justice and democracy, education and the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. His books include Teaching toward Freedom, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics, and Demand the Impossible!

Click to view the Livestream.