Perspectives on Academic Freedom: A View From the Top

The Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law invite you to a special event in honor of the publication of Professor Stanley Fish's recent book, Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution.

Perspectives on Academic Freedom: A View From the Top

Thursday, January 15, 2014

6 p.m.

Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

55 Fifth Avenue (at 12th Street)

New York, NY 10003

Academic freedom is a value universally celebrated in the abstract, but highly contested in its application. Recent controversies have highlighted these different conceptions of academic freedom. Stanley Fish finds just about all of them wrongheaded.

Join us as Cardozo Law Dean Matthew Diller moderates a conversation on academic freedom between Professor Stanley Fish; Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University; and John Sexton, President of New York University.

Stanley Fish

Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law, Cardozo School of Law

Stanley Fish is one of this country's leading public intellectuals and a world-renowned literary theorist and legal scholar. Professor Fish is a prolific author, having written over 200 scholarly books and articles, and he is a contributor to "The Opinionator" blog for the New York Times. He began his academic career in the English department at the University of California at Berkeley, then became the Kenan Professor of English and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, where Professor Fish taught from 1974 to 1985 before becoming Art and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke. He was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1999 to 2004. He also holds an appointment as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University.

Lee Bollinger

President, Columbia University

Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University's 19th president in 2002 and is the longest serving Ivy League president. Under his leadership, Columbia stands again at the very top rank of great research universities, distinguished by comprehensive academic excellence, an innovative and sustainable approach to global engagement, the largest capital campaign in Ivy League history, and the institution's most ambitious campus expansion in over a century.

Bollinger is Columbia's first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Law School faculty, and one of the country's foremost First Amendment scholars. His most recent book
is Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century.

From 1996 to 2002, Bollinger was the President of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He led the university's historic litigation in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, Supreme Court decisions that upheld and clarified the importance of diversity as a compelling justification for affirmative action in higher education. He speaks and writes frequently about the value of racial, cultural, and socio-economic diversity through columns, interviews, and appearances around the country.

John Sexton

President, New York University

John Sexton, the fifteenth President of New York University, also is the Benjamin Butler Professor of Law and NYU Law School's Dean Emeritus, having served as Dean for 14 years. He joined the law school's faculty in 1981, was named the School's Dean in 1988, and was designated the University's President in 2001. He is an author of the nation’s leading casebook on Civil Procedure. He also is the author of Redefining the Supreme Court's Role: A Theory of Managing the Federal Court System (a treatment of the Supreme Court's case selection process) in addition to several other books, numerous chapters, articles and Supreme Court briefs. His latest book, Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game, published in March 2013, is based on an undergraduate seminar President Sexton teaches at NYU each spring. President Sexton received a B.A. in History (1963) from Fordham College; an M.A. in Comparative Religion (1965) and a Ph.D. in History of American Religion (1978) Fordham University; and a J.D. magna cum laude (1979) from Harvard Law School.

Matthew Diller

Dean and Professor of Law, Cardozo School of Law

Dean Matthew Diller, the sixth Dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, is a prominent scholar of social welfare law and policy. He has lectured and written extensively on the legal dimensions of public assistance, Social Security, disability programs, and on disability law and policy. His articles on these subjects have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review and Michigan Law Review. Dean Diller served as a member of the board of directors of Legal Services NYC, from 1999 to 2009, serving as vice chair from 2003 to 2007. He was a member of the executive committee of the poverty law section at the Association of American Law Schools and was chair in 1999-2000. From 2000 to 2008, he was a member of the board of directors at The National Center for Law and Economic Justice. Prior to being appointed dean at Cardozo Law, Dean Diller was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Fordham School of Law from 2003 to 2008. He received an A.B. in 1981 and a J.D. in 1985, both magna cum laude from Harvard University, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.