Conference set on academic freedom

A conference on the rights and responsibilities of academic freedom, including the issues of free speech and intellectual property rights, will convene Thursday and Friday, Feb. 22-23.

The free conference will be held in the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St. It is sponsored by the departments of history and educational policy studies.

“Threats to academic freedom continue to come from all directions,” says W. Lee Hansen, professor emeritus of economics and one of the conference organizers. “This conference gives us a chance to reassess those threats at a university noted for its dedication to sifting and winnowing the truth.”

Speakers will include faculty, staff and students as well as outside presenters. Topics include the use of segregated fees by universities, “corporatization” of universities, freedom to publish research results, and disruption of presentations by campus speakers.

Keynoters are Robert O’Neil, professor of law at the University of Virginia and founding director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, and Alan Kors, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

O’Neil teaches courses at Virginia in constitutional law of free speech and church and state, the First Amendment and the arts. He is a former president of the UW System and vice president of Indiana University. He will open the conference Thursday, Feb. 22, at 8:20 a.m. with an address on “Academic Freedom and Intellectual Property: Contentious but Compatible.”

Kors teaches European intellectual history and is editor-in-chief of the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. He is co-author of the 1998 book “The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses.” He will speak Thursday, Feb. 22, at 7:30 p.m. on “Selective Campus Enforcement and the Betrayal of Liberty.”