Is Free Speech Threatened on College Campus?

John Donvan (Host and Moderator): The moderator of Intelligence Squared U.S. debates since 2008, John Donvan is an author and correspondent for ABC News. He has served as ABC’s White House Correspondent, along with postings in Moscow, London, Jerusalem, and Amman. John is the coauthor of In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (Crown, 2016). In addition to premiering his first one-man show, “Lose the Kid,” in 2013 in Washington, D.C., John is a four-time Emmy Award winner and was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2010.

John McWhorter is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He earned a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. He is the author of several books, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language; Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter; and Word on the Street, a book on dialects and Black English. He has also been published in outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he has appeared on Dateline and Good Morning America, among other platforms.

Wendy Kaminer, (For the Motion) an author, lawyer, and civil libertarian, has been writing about the intersections of law and culture for the past 30 years. Her subjects range from feminism, free speech, religion, and the personal development tradition to criminal justice and the post 9/11 surveillance state. She has published eight books, including Worst Instincts; Free for All; Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials; It's All the Rage; A Fearful Freedom; and I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional. Her articles have appeared in publications including The Atlantic, theatlantic.com, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The American Prospect, Free Inquiry, spiked-online.com, and in numerous anthologies. Her commentaries have aired on National Public Radio. A former Guggenheim fellow and Smith College medalist, she is an adviser to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and a member of the Massachusetts State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Shaun R. Harper (Against the Motion) was recognized in Education Week as one of the 12 most influential professors in the field of education. He produces groundbreaking research on race, equity, and students at U.S. colleges and universities. He teaches in the Graduate School of Education, Africana Studies, and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and serves as executive director of the Center for the Study of Race & Equity in Education. He is author of over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and other academic publications, and recipient of nearly $12 million in research grants. Johns Hopkins University Press is publishing Race Matters in College, Harper's 13th book. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Higher Education, and over 11,000 other newspapers have quoted Harper and featured his research. He has been interviewed on CNN, ESPN, and NPR, and is president-elect of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

Jason Stanley (Against the Motion) is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has also been a professor at the University of Michigan and Cornell University. Stanley has published four books, two in epistemology, one in philosophy of language and semantics, and one in social and political philosophy. His first book is Knowledge and Practical Interests, published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. It was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize. His second book, Language in Context, published in 2007 by OUP, is a collection of his papers in semantics on the topic of linguistic communication and context. His third book, Know How, was published by OUP in 2011. Stanley's fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015. Stanley earned his PhD from MIT.