Are we at a moment of crisis when it comes to the censorship of speech on college campus? The end of 2023 saw the resignation of UPenn President Elizabeth Magill after appearing in front of congress over her response to pro-Palestine protestors on campus and the termination of UW-La Crosse Joe Gow over porn videos. The new year rang in with the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay who also appeared in front of congress and received significant public scrutiny.

Host Carousel Bayrd is joined by a couple of First Amendment experts to discuss to what degree colleges and universities are responsible for preserving free speech and how we are seeing that play out today. Our guests are attorney Dillon White and Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Executive VP Nico Perrino.

Nico Perrino is FIRE’s Executive Vice President and the creator and host of FIRE’s So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast. Prior to his current role, he led FIRE’s Communications department for nearly a decade, most recently as its Senior Vice President of Communications.

Dillon Michael White is an attorney, constitutional law professor, and former scholar with the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law, where his work focused primarily on the First Amendment. He also boasts upwards of a million followers on TikTok with his account @dadchats, where he posts about parenting, marriage, and, most pertinent for our conversation today, the law — most recently with several viral videos about what free speech actually means, both on campus and off.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

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