Freedman Lecture Series
Funded by Robert Rosen ('69) and Nancy Rosen ('70), the Freedman Lecture series is named for Ms. Rosen's parents, Max and Ruth Freedman. Since its initiation in 2016, the Freedman Lecture series has brought scholars and practitioners to the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences to discuss contemporary societal issues from different vantage points, leaving the audience with a richer appreciation of differing viewpoints and an example of how reasonable people can disagree without being disagreeable. Freedman lectures have tackled issues including immigration, universal basic income, and free speech.
The Certainty Trap: Democracy's Existential Threat
April 1, 2024
When it comes to both aspiring and established democracies, our tendency to underestimate the damaging power of certainty can be dangerous. Certainty makes it possible to kill in the name of righteousness, to tear down in the name of virtue, and to demonize and dismiss people who simply disagree. The collateral damage that certainty creates has been hiding in plain sight for years. It is the practically unavoidable consequence of the way certainty drives contempt, which is itself an accelerant for culture wars and political polarization. When it comes to heated issues in particular, certainty leads us to view our ideological opponents as, at best, ignorant and, at worst, subhuman. The solution to this problem lies in changing how we think and communicate.
Ilana Redstone is a professor, writer, and academic entrepreneur. Her focus is on understanding and addressing the way certainty drives the tendency to judge harshly, demonize, and dismiss people with whom we disagree. What we consider to be a problem of political polarization, a lack of civil discourse, or a lack of viewpoint diversity is often a fundamental problem in how we think.
Past Freedman Lectures
The Paranoid Style in Campus Politics
April 20, 2023
The difficulty in discussing "cancel culture" is talking about something that is not there, an absence: of voices, arguments, contestation – in other words, an intellectual vacuum. On U.S. campuses, DEI functionaries call the shots on allowable inquiry under the banner of progressivism, with conservatives taking up the mantle of free speech and due process. The familiar left-right distinctions have broken down, leaving ideological minefields and political paralysis. Self-censorship has become the norm and it's an increasingly treacherous landscape for ironists or intellectual iconoclasts of any political stripe.
Author of the provocative Unwanted Advances and Love in the Time of Contagion, Laura Kipnis will speak on the culture of campus politics, free speech, and how well-meaning yet hastily enacted campus bureaucracies related to Title IX and DEI climate improvement sometimes carry unwanted consequences.
Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic/essayist and former video artist whose work focuses on sexual politics, aesthetics, shame, emotion, acting out, moral messiness, and various other crevices of the American psyche. A professor emerita in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University, Professor Kipnis previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan. She has also been a visiting professor at NYU (Performance Studies department), Columbia University School of the Arts (MFA Nonfiction program), the University of British Columbia, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Staying Real: The War on Truth—and How to Win It
April 20, 2022
Trolls. Disinformation. Canceling. Conspiracy theories. If America's grasp on reality seems to be under attack, that's because it is. Epistemic warfare—the use of powerful psychological manipulations to divide, distract, and disorient our society—has come into its own in the 21st century as never before. In this dramatically illustrated talk, the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth explains the goals and tactics of the war on truth. He shows who's behind it and how it works. Most importantly, he reveals the inner workings and hidden strengths of our precious Constitution of Knowledge—and how to capitalize on them to fight back.
Jonathan Rauch is one of the country's most versatile and original writers on government, public policy, and gay marriage, among other subjects. A senior fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and a contributing writer of The Atlantic, he is the author of eight books and many articles and has received the magazine industry's two leading prizes: the National Magazine Award (the industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) and the National Headliner Award.
Climate Crisis: Transitioning Away from a Carbon-Based Economy
April 22, 2021
Speakers: MIT Professor Jacopo Buongiorno, Brookings Institution Fellow Samantha Gross, and UMass Amherst Professor Robert Pollin of the Economics Department and Political Economy Research Institute
On January 27, 2021, the White House issued an Executive Order declaring a climate crisis and committing to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, placing climate change at the center of US foreign policy and national security. Yet, despite a pause during the pandemic, carbon emissions are projected to rise above their pre-COVID levels as governments attempt to jumpstart their economic recoveries in 2021. How will the United States—and the world—transition from a carbon-based economy to one that is greenhouse gas emissions neutral in order to avert this crisis?
Words Matter: Speech on Campus
April 12, 2019
Speakers: Lucy Dalglish, Dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland; Jeannine Bell, Richard S. Melvin Professor of Law at Indiana University Bloomington; and Ryan Owens, Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
One of the central tensions facing colleges today is balancing free speech rights with the need for respect and inclusion in a campus community. This roundtable features three leading scholars of hate crime, the First Amendment, and law and politics as they discuss their diverse perspectives on rights and responsibilities in a campus community, with the goal of better understanding how to balance this delicate tension.
The discussion will be moderated by Paul M. Collins Jr., Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science and Director of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Collins is an award-winning researcher whose scholarship focuses on the role of courts in American democracy. His commentary has appeared in a host of popular media outlets, including CNN, the New York Times, National Public Radio, Time, USA Today, and the Washington Post.
Universal Basic Income—History and Theory of a Utopian
October 16, 2017
Speakers: Connie Razza, Seth Ackerman, and Elizabeth Rhodes
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a form of social security that has been gaining traction worldwide as a means of providing income to those unable to work and thereby reducing poverty, improving equality, increasing quality of life, and providing economic security to citizens. Proponents of UBI have theorized that putting such a system into place could potentially even eradicate poverty altogether while reducing the bureaucracy associated with current methods of social welfare assistance provision and also boosting economic growth.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and related technologies challenge the notion that plentiful jobs will be available for those seeking work. Self-driving trucks, for example, could spur the elimination of hundreds of thousands or even millions of jobs, many of which will not be replaced. If many citizens are unable to find traditional work, both individuals and society will need to adapt to a new social and economic reality. How should society support those who cannot find work because technology has displaced jobs?
In this moderated panel discussion, UBI experts Connie Razza, Seth Ackerman, and Elizabeth Rhodes will discuss the history of this theory and the implications of putting such a system in place. Razza is the director of strategic research at the Center for Popular Democracy and the co-director of policy and research at Demos, a public policy organization. Ackerman is a member of the editorial board of Jacobin, where he has published prominently on Universal Basic Income reform. Rhodes is research director for the Basic Income Project, Y Combinator Research.
Unraveling the Immigration Narrative
September 28, 2016
Speakers: Jennifer Hunt and George Borjas
Economists George Borjas of Harvard and Jennifer Hunt of Rutgers will deliver the Max and Ruth Freedman Lecture: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative on Thursday, Sept. 29 at 5 p.m. in the Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Hall.
Borjas will discuss main arguments from his book, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative. Hunt, who holds the James Cullen Chair in Economics, previously served as chief economist to the U.S. Secretary of Labor. Her research on immigration has been influential in immigration reform legislation and is currently under consideration by the U.S. Congress. Both Borjas and Hunt will speak and take part in a panel. This event is part of the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences Social Science Matters series "Perspectives on Migration."