The University of Wyoming (UW) is hosting a three part lecture series to promote free expression, intellectual freedom, and constructive dialogue as part of its response to concerns about a lack of diverse viewpoints on campus.
Even though the lectures are promoted by the UW Presidential Office’s principles initiative, each speaker was invited by other campus departments or student organizations. This separation is meant to protect the University's commitment to neutrality.
According to Martha McCaughey, the special assistant to the president who led the promotion of the lecture series, UW is “not trying to push a particular approach.” Instead, the talks are meant to motivate students to explore ideas without having to agree with them and to give students an opportunity to build the skills to sieve through information to come up with their own opinions and interpretations.
On Feb. 25, Nadine Strossen, a New York Law School (NYLS) professor, will give the first lecture on the impact of free speech on civil rights movements.
The talk will dig into Strossen’s expertise as a First Amendment lawyer. McCaughey hopes Strossen “will give people a chance to really ask tough questions.”
Later in the semester, Strossen will lead workshops for UW faculty members to teach them how to navigate free speech boundaries in the classroom while knowing their and others’ rights. McCaughey hopes this will allow the faculty to feel more confident when discussing controversial issues in class because she wants to protect the honing of ideas through disagreement.
“It's not like they teach you that in grad school before you become a professor,” she said.
The next installation of the series will be Colorado State University’s (CSU) Martín Carcasson. He started and runs the CSU Center of Deliberation, which collaborates with local governments and the Fort Collins community to build a space for dialogue on local issues moderated by trained facilitators.
Carcasson’s lecture will show how to address complex or controversial issues through constructive discussion across lines of disagreement. The following day, he will lead workshops to practice the collaborative dialogue techniques from his lecture.
McCaughey hopes Carcasson will show people they don’t have to “feel threatened when someone challenges an existing view,” which can allow knowledge to evolve.
The final speaker will be Paul Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein professor of science at Princeton University, who will share his journey of co-creating a theory that he believes explains the formation of the universe better than previous theories.
It’s known as the “big bounce theory” instead of the more familiar Big Bang Theory. He believes the universe has gone through a series of expansions and contractions, like a balloon filling with air and then releasing it over and over, instead of a single expansion.
The big bounce theory is not widely accepted by the scientific community and is criticized by other prominent physicists. But, to McCaughey, this debate is why he fits into the series so well. To her, it shows how differing viewpoints are healthy and important in the formation of knowledge even at the highest degrees of science.
“Here's this famous physicist who's known for his own embrace of the Big Bang Theory of the origin of the universe, yet he's come to believe that that doesn't explain the origin of the universe,” she said. “ He's a great example of how scientific knowledge actually progresses and how it depends on that freedom to question each other.”
Leading up to Steinhardt’s lecture, the UW Physics Department will hold talks to help nonspecialists learn the basics behind the theory.
