Free Speech

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In this age of rapid globalization and heightened cross-cultural contacts, nations, communities, and individuals are working to reaffirm their own identities and values. In the United States, one of the most precious values is free speech, embedded in the First Amendment to the Constitution and regarded as a primary tenet of American democracy. But arguments and controversies over the boundaries, if any, of free speech have become frequent and intense, and all the more so in the era of electronic communication. This seminar will examine the dialogue taking place within the United States and around the world on these issues. We will discuss international and domestic protests over politically sensitive cartoons, controversies over Holocaust denial, whether hate speech should be banned, whether the media can ever be legitimately constrained on national security grounds, whether anti-gay religious activists have a right to disrupt military funerals, whether pornography and violent lyrics deserve protection, and whether campus speech codes have a positive or negative effect. Through court cases, we will examine the debate in this country over what it means to be patriotic and whether patriotism requires Americans to say, or prohibits them from saying, certain things – and look at how the standards have changed over the years. We will also ask whether other countries' attitudes toward free speech and the other First Amendment freedoms should influence US foreign policy toward those countries. Examples of constraints on speech in our daily lives and work, intentional or unwitting, will also be considered, as will the recent trend toward erasing the memory of things in our history that we now find repugnant and removing the names of people responsible for such things, whose reputations are being revised or re-examined, from buildings and programs that long honored them. The sources for our conversations will include both scholarly and popular materials -- writings and statements made by the participants in these debates, a classical treatise on liberty by the political philosopher John Stuart Mill, media reports, commentary by scholars and journalists from different societies and perspectives, as well as your own experiences and conclusions about what you can and cannot, or should and should not, say. A brief essay, analyzing the readings and the issues for each session, will be due in class most weeks. There will also be a major paper and a group project, but no final exam. Sanford J. Ungar is a veteran journalist who wrote for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, and was host of "All Things Considered" on NPR. He served as dean of the School of Communication at American University, was director of the Voice of America in the Clinton administration, and recently stepped down after thirteen years as president of Goucher College in Baltimore. The author or editor of six nonfiction books, he is now a distinguished scholar in residence at Georgetown, a visiting lecturer in Government at Harvard, and a fellow of the Lumina Foundation.