Higher education in America is undergoing a climate change that threatens free speech and open inquiry. How are we to understand the roots of this problem, and how can we work to protect speech and inquiry as individuals and as institutions?

Alice Dreger, Ph.D., is a writer of books, articles, and essays, a professional historian, and a highly regarded public speaker. Dreger’s best-known book is Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice, which argues that the pursuit of evidence is the most important ethical imperative of our time. Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship and published by Penguin Press, the book has been praised in reviews in The New Yorker, Nature, Science, Forbes, New York Magazine, Human Nature, and Salon.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has called her a “star scholar” and described her writing as “reliably funny and passionate and vulnerable.”  She is also the author of One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal and Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, both from Harvard University Press.

This event is sponsored by UD Department of Philosophy and the Class of '55 Ethics Endowment Fund.