Talking It Out

Campus speech debates have become heated, and even violent, in recent years. Like a number of other institutions, Brown has seen student unrest over on-campus race relations since students at the University of Missouri at Columbia staged protests on their campus in 2015. While it wasn’t seen as a national hotbed of such protests, as a famously liberal university, Brown still was taking something of a risk in attempting to tackle today's campus speech issues head-on.  Geoffrey R. Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, delivered a speech at Brown called “Free Speech on Campus: A Challenge of Our Times.”