Join the Tommy G. Thompson Center at the University of Wisconsin for a solutions-focused discussion on the current challenges and opportunities in free speech, viewpoint diversity and climate on campus.
Allegations that universities restrict speech and suffer from ideological narrowness are common, but solutions are harder to find. Broadening the View from the Ivory Tower brings together academic and non-academic experts to consider the psychological and sociological dynamics that influence viewpoint diversity on campus and possible avenues for reform that improve the climate on campus and broaden horizons of students and faculty while also respecting and strengthening free speech and open inquiry.
We encourage leaders and interested individuals, both on campus and off, to attend and help chart the path forward for higher education.
Event speakers
Yoel Inbar
University of Toronto
Inbar researches concerns that interplay between two general mental processes that influence judgment: rational, deliberate analysis, and intuitive, emotional reactions. I am interested in the interaction between these two kinds of thinking and the implications for people’s beliefs, actions, and choices. In my research, I have studied how intuition affects our choices; how our moral beliefs determine our own actions and our judgments of others; and how the emotion of disgust can predict our moral and political attitudes.
Alex Morey
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Morey is an attorney and a journalist whose approach to defending student and faculty rights blends trusted legal strategy and the power of public interest reporting. She leads FIRE’s Campus Rights Advocacy program, a team of attorneys and advocates who help people of all political and ideological persuasions facing civil liberties threats on American college campuses.
Morey is a member of the First Amendment Lawyers Association. She has a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School, a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and has trained at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She attended the University of Arizona in her hometown of Tucson, majoring in journalism and French and graduating with honors. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Madagascar, where she taught English in rural, underserved schools.
See below for links to FIRE handouts:
Adopting the Chicago Statement
AAUP Civility
Model Speech Policies for College Campus
Model Code of Student Conduct
Jenna Robinson
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
Robinson’s work has appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Roll Call, Forbes, American Thinker, Human Events, Carolina Journal, the Lincoln Tribune, the Hickory Daily Record, the Gaston Gazette, the Mountain Express, and the (Raleigh) News & Observer. She has taught courses in American politics at UNC-Chapel Hill, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Wake Technical Community College. In 2013, she testified before Congress on the Federal Pell Grant Program.
She has previously served as a member of the North Carolina Longitudinal Data System Board and the North Carolina Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She currently serves on the board of the Classical Liberals in the Carolinas.
George Yancy
Baylor University
Dr. George Yancey is a Professor of Sociology at Baylor University. He has published several research articles on the topics of institutional racial diversity, racial identity, academic bias, progressive Christians and anti-Christian hostility. His books include Compromising Scholarship (Baylor University Press) a book that explores religious and political biases in academia, What Motivates Cultural Progressives (Baylor University Press) a book that examines activists who oppose the Christian Right, There is no God (Rowman and Littlefield) a book that investigates atheism in the United States, and So Many Christians, So Few Lions (Rowman and Littlefield) a book that assess Christianophobia in the United States.
