Catherine J. Ross, Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor, was interviewed by The Chronicle of Higher Education on the First Amendment and the challenges of free expression on college campuses. These campuses are frequently seen as "free-speech battlegrounds" and with the recent events that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, experts from all over the country are weighing in on free-speech issues and solutions. Earlier this year, UC Berkeley cancelled Milo Yiannopoulos's talk due to protests erupting ahead of his appearance. Professor Ross is one of seven experts, who shared her thoughts on the actions colleges and universities can consider to meet these challenges.
Professor Ross predicted that one of the questions that everyone will be focused on is "Is Charlottesville a game changer?" For many leaders of academic institutions, there is a concern of outside groups renting a space and bringing in a speaker and the result of that is a violent protest erupting. Another concern is that lives are now at risk because there are individuals who arrive armed and are mixing with unarmed people, which raises new public safety concerns. According to the Chronicle, "experts on campus security say colleges need to rethink how they can keep public demonstrations and appearances by controversial figures from leading to tragedy." Professor Ross said campuses are beginning to make some changes to their speech codes. "Two of the developments that we are going to see will be additional efforts by outsiders to book really controversial speakers," she said. "The second piece of that will be a lot of universities reexamining their rules about who can speak, when, where, and under what conditions."
In the video, Professor Ross also discussed free-speech solutions and spoke about what the path is moving forward for colleges.