Free Speech and Academic Freedom in the University: A Conversation with Michael Meranze

As the war in Gaza rages on, discussions surrounding free speech and the right to protest have surged across the United States, particularly on college campuses. When a pro-Palestine encampment at Columbia University was raided by police, leading to dozens of arrests in late April 2024, university students around the country set up their own protests and encampments, urging for an end to the war and divestment of university funding from Israel.

Join us on this week's episode of then & now podcast as we delve into the history and evolution of academic free speech with UCLA History Professor Michael Meranze. Professor Meranze explores the changing landscape of free speech on campus, the evolving role of faculty in fostering open discourse, and the profound impact of social media on freedom of expression, and considers how the events of October 7th, 2023, have reshaped higher education in the United States. 

Professor Michael Meranze is a professor of History at UCLA, where he specializes in United States intellectual and legal history with an emphasis on early America. He published Laboratories of Virtue, an examination of the birth of the penitentiary in the context of the contradictions of the American Revolution and early Liberalism, and is currently working on two long-term projects: one, an analysis of sensibility and violence in the Revolutionary Atlantic and the other an attempt to rethink the history and meaning of the American death penalty from the eighteenth-century to the present.