Free Speech Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime

In the 2025 William Phillips Lecture, Salman Rushdie discusses freedom, defiance, fame, and the lesson of the ham sandwich

April 15, 2025 • by Luis Jaramillo and Salman Rushdie

In March, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie visited The New School to deliver the 2025 William Phillips Lecture, a talk titled “Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime.” Rushdie, the author of 15 novels, including the Booker Prize–winning Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, and nonfiction books including, most recently, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, ...

Literature

Matters of Offense

A PEN America World Voices Festival conversation on free speech, appropriation, and what it takes to be an artist

September 5, 2023 • by Ayad Akhtar and Eboo Patel

In an intimate dialogue, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, novelist, and President of PEN America Ayad Akhtar (Homeland Elegies) and Interfaith America Founder and President Eboo Patel (We Need to Build) explore the climate of self-censorship facing writers, question whether marginalization is a useful category in art, and discuss the dangers of ...

Rats: A Cautionary Tail

The Rat with a Right to Free Speech

For decades, an inflatable rat has defended the rights of U.S. workers. Now, it turns out the balloon known as “Scabby” needs a union

April 4, 2023 • by Cassandra Brey

Scabby remains a fixture in the world of the union—much like real rats are a fixture of New York City....

Uncategorized

Paradoxes of Free Speech

How the amplification of limitless speech acts can silence others

February 21, 2023 • by Peter Nohrnberg

Our culture’s fetishizing of self-expression, apparently without any limits, is paradoxically undermining free speech....

Higher Ed

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t. But the core issue may not be free speech, or even education, but more enduring American fears about the dangers of conformism

March 11, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Free speech undergirds democracy. I am uncompromising on this point and dislike being distracted by concocted hysteria about free speech. All the same, a guest essay in the New York Times by Emma Camp engaged me. Camp, a senior at the University of Virginia, argues that students and faculty on ...

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

History

Larry Flynt

Past Present Podcast, Episode 267

February 16, 2021 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Larry Flynt, founder of the Hustler empire, died this month. Niki recommended historian Carolyn Bronstein’s book Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976-1986 and referred to this Politico article about the GOP abandoning the war on pornography. Natalia mentioned ...

Education

What You Learn When You Talk to Conservative Students

College professors and college administrations have to do better–we are losing these kids to extremism

February 3, 2021 • by Claire Potter

"We have a tough job in the next four years as we try to rebuild a more inclusive and truly democratic national conversation." - Claire Potter...

What You Learn When You Talk to Conservative Students

Activism

On Our Revolutionary Moment

Putting today’s revolt against institutional racism into historical context

July 22, 2020 • by James Traub

Protestors, who had been staging increasingly violent strikes, had assailed City College, CUNY’s flagship school, located in the middle of Harlem, as a racist institution that used academic standards to deny admission to all but a handful of Black and Puerto Rican students. They demanded that CUNY abandon those standards ...

Literature

The Big Cats, Part VIII

On the sharp edge of fragility

July 21, 2020 • by Val Vinokur

Follow your own feet uphill, fix / your gaze on the undeliverable missives / flying back to their return address...

Democracy

Why the Harper’s Letter Got It Wrong

The most serious threats to protest and open debate come not from the left or the right but from the state and powerful political institutions

July 16, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer

So I took a new job in a new city and began again. I have been thinking about my decision to speak up, and its costs, in light of The Letter. You know the one: the open letter in Harper’s magazine that praises the “needed reckoning” of the past few months ...

Why the <em>Harper’s </em>Letter Got It Wrong

Power and Crisis

Why I Didn’t Sign the Harper’s Letter

Meeting our Black Lives Matters moment — and what the letter gets right

July 16, 2020 • by Robert Boyers

The now famous Harper's letter signed by 153 intellectuals has understandably stirred furious debate. Though I declined to sign it when asked, I disagreed with nothing in the letter, and I knew that I would continue to have misgivings about my decision. After all, the letter is informed by a concern ...

Why I Didn’t Sign the <em>Harper’s </em>Letter

Higher Ed

A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor

Freedom to think for oneself is still a right, not a privilege

July 16, 2020 • by Joshua T. Katz

In Congress, on July 4, 1776, came the “unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” Signed by 56 men, many of whom were considered national heroes just a few minutes ago, it opens with a long and elegant sentence whose first words every American child knows, or used ...

Free Speech

Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime

In the 2025 William Phillips Lecture, Salman Rushdie discusses freedom, defiance, fame, and the lesson of the ham sandwich

Matters of Offense

A PEN America World Voices Festival conversation on free speech, appropriation, and what it takes to be an artist

The Rat with a Right to Free Speech

For decades, an inflatable rat has defended the rights of U.S. workers. Now, it turns out the balloon known as “Scabby” needs a union

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t. But the core issue may not be free speech, or even education, but more enduring American fears about the dangers of conformism

Larry Flynt

Past Present Podcast, Episode 267

What You Learn When You Talk to Conservative Students

College professors and college administrations have to do better–we are losing these kids to extremism

On Our Revolutionary Moment

Putting today’s revolt against institutional racism into historical context

The Big Cats, Part VIII

On the sharp edge of fragility

Why the Harper’s Letter Got It Wrong

The most serious threats to protest and open debate come not from the left or the right but from the state and powerful political institutions

Why I Didn’t Sign the Harper’s Letter

Meeting our Black Lives Matters moment — and what the letter gets right

A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor

Freedom to think for oneself is still a right, not a privilege

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