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Universities have a distinctive and important mission in American society. They assemble and nurture an open and diverse community of scholars, teachers and students dedicated to the production and dissemination of knowledge. The robust protection of free speech and civil discourse is essential to that mission. Better understanding the relationship between the critical functions of the university and the principles of free speech can help guide us in resolving the difficult challenges that confront the members of modern universities.

Keith E. Whittington is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech. His other books include Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History, which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and courts and the J. David Greenstone Award for best book in politics and history, and the co-authored casebook, American Constitutionalism, which won an award for innovative instructional materials in law and courts. He received a B.A. and B.B.A. from the University of Texas and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University.

Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz is a professor of law at Georgetown and a senior fellow in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. Before joining the faculty at Georgetown, he also served as an attorney-advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and he clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy at the U.S. Supreme Court. Rosenkranz is currently developing a new theory of constitutional interpretation and judicial review. The first installment, The Subjects of the Constitution, was published in the Stanford Law Review in May of 2010, and it is the single most downloaded article about constitutional interpretation, judicial review, or federal courts in the history of SSRN. The second installment, The Objects of the Constitution, was published in May 2011, also in the Stanford Law Review. The comprehensive version is forthcoming as a book by Oxford University Press. He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Federalist Society, the Rosenkranz Foundation, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He holds a B.A. and J.D. from Yale University.