What's Happened to Academic Freedom Since September 11?

Thursday, Sep 28, 2006
4-6 p.m.
Room 7, Hulston Hall
School of Law

Listen to Audio of Event (MP3)

Join MU Chancellor Brady J. Deaton as he moderates the eighth of a series of open forums on global topics of interest to the community. This forum is co-sponsored by the Chancellor’s Office and the MU Difficult Dialogues project, which is funded by a Ford Foundation grant. Dr. Robert M. O’Neil, Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and president emeritus of the University of Virginia, will give a 30-minute lecture, leaving the remaining time for discussion with panelists and audience members.

Robert M. O'Neil

Immediately after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many in the academic community feared a resurgence of McCarthyism. While there have been a few adverse actions, university officials and governing boards have been remarkably tolerant of faculty attacks on Bush Administration foreign policy and the Iraq War. In other respects — most notably in the areas of federally funded research regulation and admission of visiting scholars and foreign students to the U.S. — the record has been less reassuring. The academic community, however, is more united and determined to resist serious threats to academic freedom than during the McCarthy era.

O’Neil founded the Thomas Jefferson Center in August of 1990 after serving five years as president of the University of Virginia. He remains a member of the University’s law faculty where he teaches courses in free speech and the press, free expression and the arts, free speech and cyberspace and other courses in constitutional law.

The Chancellor’s forums are free and open to the public.

The Panelists

Paul A. Miller

MU Adjunct Professor of Rural Sociology
President Emeritus of Rochester Institute of Technology and West Virginia University

Vicky Riback Wilson

MU Service-Learning and Fellowships Coordinator
Four-Term Missouri State Representative