This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 24th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The struggle over the freedom of speech at universities is one that even now isn't particularly

well understood.

In the new book Speak Freely, why universities must defend free speech,

author Keith Wittington argues that the university has a special role

to foster tolerance and the free exchange of ideas.

And contrary to popular opinion, young people aren't special when it comes to support for

free expression.

Why is the freedom of speech valuable in a university and what more broadly, what do you view as

the role of a modern university?

Yeah, so I think modern universities fundamentally are committed to trying to advance human knowledge and then communicate what they've learned.

And for both those tasks having robust free

speech is critical. You need to be able to ask questions that people find difficult.

You need to be able to question things

people take for granted and see how well those ideas hold up.

And you need to be able to teach and also communicate

scholarship to each other in a way that will wind up talking about

controversial ideas in various ways as well.

And so even for that very core function of just doing scholarship and teaching,

robust protections of speech are pretty essential and there's some qualifications

of that and we group it under the idea of academic freedom.

...