On March 21, the Program for Public Discourse Agora Fellows will host a public student forum on the topic of abortion. The event will be facilitated by Braver Angels ambassador Leah Sargeant who will also serve as a panelist for the Abbey Speaker Series event on Faith and Abortion on March 22.

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This debate will utilize the Braver Angels format. As described on their website: "A Braver Angels Debate is a highly structured conversation in which a group of people think together, listen carefully to one another, and allow themselves to be touched and perhaps changed by each other’s ideas. When done well, everyone walks out a little closer to the truth, more aware of the validity in opposing views, and with tighter community relationships."

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Students can register to participate at go.unc.edu/PPDBA. Space is limited.

Date: March 21, 2023

Times: 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Audience: Students Only

Venue: Room 3408 in the Carolina Union

Join Professor Ifeoma Ajunwa for a fireside chat with Professor Nita Farahany as they discuss Professor Farahany’s new book, “The Battle for Your Brain: Defending Your Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.” The Program for Public Discourse is co-sponsoring this event with the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program.

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March 21, 2023 from 12 – 1 pm in Room 5042 at UNC School of Law (Van Hecke-Wettach Hall)

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Lunch will be served so please RSVP to ensure an accurate head count.

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For those who can’t attend in person, a Zoom webinar link will be sent at the time of registration.

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Nita Farahany, author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending Your Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology(St. Martin’s Press 2023), is the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law & PhilosophyandFounding Director of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society. She is a widely published scholar on the ethics of emerging technologiesand frequent commentator for nationalmedia and radioand keynote speaker at eventsincluding TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the World Economic Forum, and judicial conferencesworldwide.From 2010-2017, she served as a Commissioner on the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study ofBioethical Issues. She currently serves on the National Advisory Councilfor the National Institute for Neurological Disease and Stroke, as an elected member of the American Law Institute, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, immediate past President of the International Neuroethics Society, ELSI advisor to the NIH Brain Initiativeand to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, member of the Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disordersand the Standing Committee on Biotechnology Capabilities and NationalSecurity Needsfor the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Global Future Council on Frontier Risksfor the World Economic Forum. She is the Reporter for the Drafting Committee on updating the Uniform Determination of Death Committeefor the Uniform Law Commission(ULC), as well as a ULC Commissioner. Farahany is a co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law and the Biosciencesand on theBoard of AdvisorsforScientific American. She also serves on scientific and ethics advisory boards for corporations. Farahany holds an AB (Genetics) from Dartmouth College, an ALM (Biology) from HarvardUniversity, and a JD, MA, and Ph.D. (Philosophy) fromDuke University.

Dr. Ifeoma Ajunwa, J.D., Ph.D., is an award-winning tenured law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law where she is the Founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law. She is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University since 2017 and a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School (2022-2023). She was a 2019 recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and a 2018 recipient of the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Professor Ajunwa's book, The Quantified Worker, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in April 2023.

Date: March 21, 2023

Times: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Audience: Public

Venue: Room 5042 in Van Hecke-Wettach Hall

On February 24 at 3:00pm, the Program for Public Discourse kicks off the spring semester with an Abbey Speaker Series hybrid event on the future of affirmative action. A panel of educators and scholars will discuss what is next for affirmative action in higher education after the Supreme Court’s ruling. This event is co-sponsored by the UNC General Alumni Association.

Glenn C. Loury is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University. He holds the B.A. in Mathematics (Northwestern) and the Ph.D. in Economics (M.I.T). As an economic theorist he has published widely and lectured throughout the world on his research. He is also among America’s leading critics writing on racial inequality. He has been elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association, as a Member of the American Philosophical Society and of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, and as a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

John McWhorter, teaches linguistics at Columbia University, as well as Western Civilization and music history. He specializes in language change and language contact, and is the author of The Missing Spanish Creoles, Language Simplicity and Complexity, and The Creole Debate. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, The New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and has been a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. For the general public he is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, Words on the Move, Talking Back, Talking Black,and other books, including Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast, has authored six audiovisual sets on language for the Great Courses company, and has written a twice-weekly newsletter for the New York Times since August 2021.

Rachel F. Moran is Distinguished and Chancellor’s Professor of Law at UC Irvine. Previously, she was the Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law and Dean Emerita at UCLA and the Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law at UC Berkeley. Moran is past President of the Association of American Law Schools, and in 2012, President Obama appointed her to the Permanent Committee of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise. As the American Bar Foundation’s inaugural Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law, Moran launched “The Future of Latinos in the United States: Law, Opportunity, and Mobility” with Robert L. Nelson in 2015. Moran has published extensively on issues of educational equity, racial equality, and Latinx law and policy, including three recent articles on affirmative action in higher education.

Theodore M. Shaw (Ted) is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights. Shaw teaches Civil Procedure and Advanced Constitutional Law. His research areas include the Fourteenth Amendment, affirmative action, housing policies regarding fair housing. Shaw attended Columbia University Law School, practiced as a Trial Attorney in the Honors Program of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. He joined the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) where he worked for over 26 years. Shaw directed LDF’s education docket and in 2004, became its fifth Director-Counsel. Shaw previously taught at the University of Michigan Law School, where he played a key role in initiating a review of its admissions policy that was later upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 by the Supreme Court.

Date: February 24, 2023

Times: 03:00 pm – 04:30 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue:

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Date: February 10, 2023

Times: 1:00pm – 2:00 PM

Audience: Public

Venue: The Carolina Club

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How can the United States try to make amends for its original sin? What is owed to the ancestors of slaves and the inheritors of structural inequality? Which policies might best serve those endeavors? The Program for Public Discourse’s Debating Public Policy Series invites Duke public policy professor, William Darity, and Harvard law professor, Randall Kennedy, to deliberate these and other questions related to the theme of reparations, moderated by UNC law professor, Osamudia James.

William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke. Previously he served as director of the Institute of African American Research, director of the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, director of the Undergraduate Honors Program in economics, and director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Randall Kennedy is Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina. For his education he attended St. Albans School, Princeton University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Osamudia James joined the UNC School of Law faculty in 2021. Her writing and teaching interests include education law, race and the law, administrative law, and torts. James is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and popular press commentary exploring the interaction of law and identity in the context of public education. Her work has appeared in the NYU Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, and the Minnesota Law Review, among others, as well as in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post.

Date: December 8, 2022

Times: 03:00 pm – 04:30 pm

Audience: Public

Venue: Zoom

The Center for Faculty Excellence and the Program for Public Discourse are excited to present a new workshop series aimed at engaging with “Wicked Issues” in the classroom. Wicked issues, or wicked problems, are characterized by their complexity, their lack of clear solutions, and their tendency to place our highest values in competition with each other.

Join us on December 7 for the last session of the three part workshop series. In this interactive session for instructors titled "Working on Wicked Issues in Your Classroom", participants will work individually and with colleagues to troubleshoot the wicked issues that arise in their own classrooms. We will also begin to develop classroom activities that will push students to engage in more nuanced, complex thinking around divisive topics in their disciplines. Participants should come with a wicked issue in mind to discuss with the group.

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Register for this event here.

Date: December 7, 2022

Times: 03:00 pm – 04:15 pm

Audience: Educators

Venue: Zoom

On November 30, the Program for Public Discourse, UNC Global, and the UNC Department of Communication hosted a speech competition at the Nelson Mandela Auditorium in the FedEx Global Education Building. Twelve students entered the competition and presented their arguments to a public audience on how the university could better shape UNC students to be more globally minded. Each student presented their ideas of how best the university could achieve that goal, drawing on both their education on speechcraft and their personal experiences of living in an increasingly globalized society.

The winners of the speech competition were those students that presented the best constructed and most persuasive speech:
1st: Parker Roy for his speech, International Interactivity
2nd: Christopher Williams for his speech, All Consuming
3rd: Vivian Kaye for her speech, Difficult Conversations

Date: November 30, 2022

Times: 05:30pm – 06:30 pm

Audience: Public

Venue: FedEx Global Education Center, Nelson Mandela Auditorium

The Program for Public Discourse is proud to be cosponsoring a symposium hosted by the First Amendment Law Review and the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy. On Friday, November 18, there will be an in-person symposium at the Carolina Club with virtual access on Zoom. The symposium will focus on the First Amendment rulings written by Justice Stephen Breyer over his 28 years on the Supreme Court.

Stephen G. Breyer served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 until his retirement in 2022. Over his nearly three decades as a Supreme Court justice, Breyer cultivated a reputation for pragmatism, especially with regard to the First Amendment.

The Symposium will consist of a keynote address and three panels:

Justice Breyer and the Freedom of Expression

Justice Breyer and the Religion Clauses

What does Justice Breyer’s jurisprudence tell us about future First Amendment challenges?

Lunch will be provided for all attendees who registered to attend in-person

You can read more about the event here.

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Registration is available here!

The link to watch over Zoom can be found here.

CLE participants – $35 (5.25 CLE Credits)
General Admission – $0 (using promo code NOCLE)

Date: November 18, 2022

Times: 8:30 am – 3:30 pm

Audience: Public

Venue: The Carolina Club

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The Abbey Speaker Series continues on November 10th at 5:30 p.m. with a conversation between Senator Thom Tillis and former NC State Senator Cal Cunningham on how to build and maintain friendships across the political divide. This event is co-sponsored by the UNC Institute of Politics.

Cal Cunningham is founder of Cunningham Law, PLLC, where he represents clients in complex civil litigation across North Carolina.  He is also manager of Axiom Property Development, LLC, where he works to deliver workforce housing in the Triangle.  Cunningham obtained his BA with Honors and JD from UNC Chapel Hill and MSc from the London School of Economics.  He currently serves as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve and recently completed a fourth active duty tour.  He is also a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.  In 2020, Cunningham was the Democratic Nominee for United States Senate in North Carolina.

Senator Thom Tillis was first elected to represent North Carolina in 2014 and is currently serving in his second term after being re-elected in 2020. Senator Tillis is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Veterans’ Affairs Committee, Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and Judiciary Committee. Before serving in the Senate, he was Speaker of the House in the North Carolina General Assembly where he played an instrumental role in enacting job-creating policies and reforming North Carolina’s tax and regulatory codes. He lives with his wife Susan in Huntersville, North Carolina, and they are the proud parents of two grown children and grandparents to two grand-daughters.

Sarah Treul Roberts is a Bowman and Gordon Gray Term Professor of political science at UNC. She is currently working on a book project analyzing the rise of inexperienced candidates and anti-establishment rhetoric in congressional elections. She also serves as faculty director for the Program for Public Discourse and as a co-editor for Legislative Studies Quarterly.

Date: November 10, 2022

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:30 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue:

The Center for Faculty Excellence and the Program for Public Discourse are excited to present a new workshop series aimed at engaging with “Wicked Issues” in the classroom. Wicked issues, or wicked problems, are characterized by their complexity, their lack of clear solutions, and their tendency to place our highest values in competition with each other.

Join us on November 3 for session 2 of the 3-part workshop series “From Wicked People to Wicked Issues,” a collaboration between the CFE and the Program for Public Discourse. We will model one facilitation technique for grappling with wicked issues, using the topic of free speech and inclusion in classroom deliberation as our lens. Participants will work together to think about how important and sometimes competing values define wicked issues—and how to move dialogue forward.

While we recommend participating in the entire series, we will provide online resources for those who cannot attend all three sessions.

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Participants of Session Two will be able to:

Define the wicked issues lens and apply it to the issue of classroom deliberation

Develop strategies to overcome psychological tendencies toward polarization and demonization of the other

Practice utilizing values to navigate wicked issues

Consider ways to implement a wicked issues approach in your classrooms

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Register for this event here.

Registration requires an ONYEN account. If you do not have an ONYEN, but would like to join the workshop, please email Kevin Marinelli at kmarinelli@unc.edu.

Date: November 3, 2022

Times: 03:00 pm – 04:00 pm

Audience: Public

Venue: Zoom