Freedom of Speech Archives

Education

The Words We Learn to Fear

How authoritarianism begins with the policing of language

December 4, 2025 • by Maria B. Olujic

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz once wrote, “Language is the only homeland.” I didn’t understand that line until my own country broke apart. Now I see what he meant—when people learn to fear their own words, it is its own form of exile. Two of my uncles learned this early: ...

Democracy

Academic Freedom in a Time of Destruction: Reconsidering Extramural Speech

The protection of extramural speech is crucial for understanding the relationship of democracy to higher education

September 4, 2025 • by Judith Butler

In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election, before Donald Trump took office and started to threaten universities with the withdrawal of federal grants, it was already clear that academic freedom had become increasingly disregarded by university administrations. It is difficult to make an argument that will not ...

Academic Freedom in a Time of Destruction: Reconsidering Extramural Speech

Europe & Central Asia

Thinking About Freedom in Wartime Ukraine

The philosophical implications of Zelensky’s decision to stay in Kyiv

September 30, 2024 • by Timothy Snyder

This lecture was delivered as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic ...

Thinking About Freedom in Wartime Ukraine

Democracy

Can Art Reimagine Freedom of Speech?

Curators Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich discuss Studies into Darkness

November 1, 2022 • by Carin Kuoni, Laura Raicovich and Lindsey Scharold

Building up to the Trump presidency in the U.S. and, at the same time, coinciding with the rise of authoritarian regimes in democracies in Europe, Hungary, and Italy years prior to that, it seemed very important to look at the Right and its complete embrace of freedom of speech in ...

Politics

Fox News Accidentally Reveals the Horrible Truth About Republicans

An attempt to advance the Republican party line goes awry

July 9, 2020 • by John Stoehr

Brian Kilmeade is co-host of Fox & Friends, the president’s favorite weekday morning show. Kilmeade is, well -- he’s not that bright. To be sure, he’s very good at advancing the party line. Sometimes, though, he gets mixed up. Wednesday morning, he tried saying something bad about the Democrats but ...

Fox News Accidentally Reveals the Horrible Truth About Republicans

Feature

Antifa vs. Nazis: Where Has All The Violence Gone?

Despite warnings of precipitating a nascent civil war, antifascist violence has ended with the retreat of the far right

June 21, 2018 • by Mike Isaacson

Another weekend has passed with a little noted gathering of fascists away from public view and with minimal confrontation between them and antifa. On a small peninsula in Montgomery Bell Park in Tennessee, two white nationalist organizations: the American Freedom Party and the Council of Conservative Citizens, held a joint conference. Like many ...

Antifa vs. Nazis: Where Has All The Violence Gone?

Feature

Making Room for Democracy

On the beauty of gray, the social condition, and individual and group responsibility

June 1, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

In my Friday posts, I have focused on the beauty of gray, presenting arguments for the good over the ideal and for openness to people and principles other than our own. I have argued, further, that these are preconditions for acting together against the dark forces of our times, and ...

Feature

Bannon at Booth

A conflict between principle and strategy?

March 15, 2018 • by Michael Weinman

Bannon, surely, needs no introduction, nor need we long belabor the reasons why the decision to invite him to speak at the University of Chicago proved controversial. Still, let’s note that in a letter of protest signed by over 100 members of the University of Chicago faculty, the rationale for objecting to ...

Feature

Does Donald Trump Speak?

August 19, 2016 • by Eric Anthamatten

"I am your voice!" booms Donald Trump at the climax of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. “Speech is something different from voice,” writes Aristotle in the Politics. “Voice” (phone) is possessed by both humans and animals, enabling us to communicate basic desires, most especially pleasure and pain. “Speech ...

Education

The Illegal Detainment of Academics for Peace in Turkey

April 10, 2016 • by Academics For Peace and Democracy

INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN – ULUSLARARASI KAMPANYA January 11, 2016: 1124 academics signed a public statement for Peace in Turkey titled, “We Will Not Be a Party to this Crime,” criticizing the Turkish Government’s gross human rights violations in the Kurdish region and calling for restoration of the peace process through political negotiations. ...

The Illegal Detainment of Academics for Peace in Turkey

Feature

Anachronism with a Kafkaesque Touch

February 10, 2016 • by Yossi Gurevitch

Last Thursday, I received a message via Facebook messenger. The message’s author was (so it read) the Chief Censor of Israel’s Military Censor, one Colonel Ariella Ben-Avraham, and in it she demanded that I submit to the Censor’s warrant. Entering Ben-Abraham’s Facebook page showed a page that was almost empty ...