FIRE Conference Begins Tomorrow; Yours Truly is Speaking

I apologize for not blogging this sooner, but I'll be leaving in a few hours to fly to Philadelphia from Kansas City. My gracious co-workers at the Kauffman Foundation have given me a few days off to participate in a conference put on by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). The conference begins Friday morning and it will be broadcast live on the Internet. It looks to me as if there is a star studded cast descending on Philadelphia and I'm very grateful to be a part of it.

As cliched as it sounds, it actually is a dream come true to speak to FIRE, the only truly non-partisan civil liberties organization devoted to freedom of speech, assembly, and thought in American higher education. In part, I decided to come to Claremont McKenna because of its commitment to free speech and because I had the Leonard Law to protect me if things got bad. I only knew about that stuff because of FIRE.

My topic is new media and how censorship can be defeated on campus. I will be on how the internet is proving William F. Buckley Jr. right. In God & Man at Yale, Buckley argued that getting the trustees onboard could change the culture of the college.

With the advent of technology like Facebook and YouTube, we're proving him right. Exhibit A is Kyle and David.