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In the wake of a summer of protests against police brutality, the midst of an ongoing pandemic, and the aftermath of a contentious election, this event brings together a panel of Black academic, journalistic, religious, and political leaders to discuss and debate their different definitions of what racial justice looks like - and how it might be achieved - in the twenty-first century.

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This event is co-sponsored by the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies.

Date: February 23, 2021

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Online

Senator Valerie P. Foushee is a Democratic member of the North Carolina General Assembly, representing the 23rd District in the North Carolina Senate, a position she has held since 2013. Before her current position, Senator Foushee served for 21 years with the Chapel Hill Police Department and spent varying amounts of time on the Board of Education for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, the All State School Board, and the Orange County Board of Commissioners. Senator Foushee is a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate, having earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in Political Science and African and Afro-American Studies.

Touré Reed, PhD is a Professor of History at Illinois State University whose research and writings focus on the impact of race and class ideologies on African American civil rights politics and US public policy from the Progressive Era through the Presidency of Barack Obama. Dr. Reed’s most recent book, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (2020), challenges the idea that current racial disparities in wealth, employment, and incarceration are largely the result of liberal policymakers' failure to acknowledge and account for the impact of racism on Black Americans.

Jacqueline C. Rivers, PhD is executive director of the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies at Harvard University and was previously a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Rivers founded and served as executive director of MathPower, a community-based nonprofit in Boston focused on reforming mathematics education in urban schools. She earned a doctorate in African-American Studies and Sociology at Harvard University.

Jamelle Bouie is a columnist for the New York Times and a political analyst for CBS News covering campaigns, elections, national affairs, and culture. Before joining the Times, Bouie was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He has also served as a staff writer for The Daily Beast and held fellowships at The American Project and The Nation. Bouie attended the University of Virginia, graduating with a degree in Political and Social Thought and Government.

This semester's first meeting of the Deliberation Scholars. Prof. Kevin Marinelli will welcome students back, make introductions for the newest Scholars, and let them know about his plans for the coming months.

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Scholars will also begin discussing the semester's Reading Group book, I'm Right and You're an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean it Up by James Hoggan.

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Students interested in attending this event can apply to be a Deliberation Scholar here.

Date: January 21, 2021

Times: 07:00 pm – 08:00 pm

Audience: Deliberation Scholars

Venue: Online

In the second part of our two-part event, the Program for Public Discourse is joined by academic experts for a discussion about the intersecting forces that influence how and whether partisans can have productive conversations in a polarized political climate. We’ll ask where we are as a state and nation and what we must do to improve the quality of our discourse and democratic processes. Additionally, we hope to provide students with academic insights into how they might consider the 2020 elections’ influence on the shape of their civic lives moving forward.

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Date: November 17, 2020

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Online

Dr. Travis Albritton is a clinical associate professor and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work. He currently chairs the School of Social Work’s Diversity Committee and serves on the University’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council. His research interests include educational equity in K-12 education, academic achievement among Black males, and closing educational opportunity gaps for children of all ages.

Dr. Susan Bickford is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. Her research focuses on ancient Greek political thought, feminist political theory, and the impact of conflict and inequality on the practice of citizenship. She has published articles in several scholarly journals and authored the book The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship.

Dr. Marc Hetherington is a Raymond H. Dawson Distinguished Bicentennial Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. His focus is on the American electorate and the polarization of public opinion. Previously, he taught at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Vanderbilt University, and Bowdoin College. Hetherington has published several books and over a dozen articles in academic journals.

Dr. Christian Lundberg is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is also Co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies. His teaching interests include theories of the public and public discourse, public speaking, rhetorical theory, debate and deliberation, critical theory, and cultural studies.

Kevin Marinelli is the executive director of the Program for Public Discourse and an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at UNC. He is a rhetorical scholar who previously served as director of the Speaking Center at Davidson College for three years before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach rhetoric in 2019. He has also taught at Young Harris College, the University of Georgia and San Jose State University. He holds a Ph.D. in speech-communication from the University of Georgia and an M.A. in the same subject from San Jose State. He also holds bachelor’s degrees in both communication studies and political science from the College of Charleston.

In the first part of our two-part event, the Program for Public Discourse is joined by Democratic and Republican operatives for a discussion that utilizes the 2020 elections as a window into the broader ways in which Americans talk about politics. Additionally, we hope to provide students with political insights from the ground level of the campaign trails, so they can better understand the choices campaigns make, along with the strategies behind them.

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Date: November 16, 2020

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Online

Brett O’Donnell is a political consultant for the Republican Party and President of O’Donnell & Associates, Ltd, a strategic communication consulting organization. He has served as a message and media strategist for several members of congress and for-profit and non-profit corporations. In the past, he worked on the presidential campaigns of Michelle Bachman, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush. Before becoming a consultant, O’Donnell served as the Director of Debate at Liberty University for 18 years.

B.J. Rudell is a field organizer for the Democratic Party and the former Associate Director of Polis: Center for Politics at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He has written dozens of political op-eds for publications like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Dallas Morning News and has shared political insight on CNN and Fox News.

Kevin Marinelli is the executive director of the Program for Public Discourse and an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at UNC. He is a rhetorical scholar who previously served as director of the Speaking Center at Davidson College for three years before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach rhetoric in 2019. He has also taught at Young Harris College, the University of Georgia and San Jose State University. He holds a Ph.D. in speech-communication from the University of Georgia and an M.A. in the same subject from San Jose State. He also holds bachelor’s degrees in both communication studies and political science from the College of Charleston.

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A panel discussion about the current state of free expression on college campuses featuring Greg Lukianoff, Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath, and Dr. Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill. Moderated by Prof. Kevin Marinelli, Executive Director of the UNC Program for Public Discourse. A part of #UNCResearchWeek, our panelists will discuss the "Free Expression and Constructive Dialogue at UNC-Chapel Hill" report composed by UNC Profs. Jennifer Larson, Mark McNeilly, and Timothy Ryan. You can read more about the study’s conclusions and find a link to the full report on The Daily Tar Heel. Profs. Larson and McNeilly also discussed the report with the James G. Martin Center earlier this year.

Date: October 20, 2020

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Online

Greg Lukianoff is President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, and co-author of the New York Times best-seller, The Coddling of the American Mind. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. He has also testified before the U.S. Congress regarding the state of free speech on college campuses.

Sigal Ben-Porath, Ph.D., is a professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. She is an executive committee member of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy and is the Penn Press faculty advisory board chair. Her published works include Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice is Really About, Free Speech on Campus, and more.

Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill, Ph.D., is Director of the Campus Free Expression Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. She has served as a faculty member at St. John’s College and the College of William & Mary and taught at Duke University, the University of Calgary, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and the college program at Maryland’s only women’s prison. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including Society, Law & Liberty, and Philanthropy.

Kevin Marinelli is the executive director of the Program for Public Discourse and an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at UNC. He is a rhetorical scholar who previously served as director of the Speaking Center at Davidson College for three years before joining the Massachusettes Institute of Technology to teach rhetoric in 2019. He has also taught at Young Harris College, the University of Georgia and San Jose State University. He holds a Ph.D. in speech-communication from the University of Georgia and an M.A. in the same subject from San Jose State. He also holds bachelor’s degrees in both communication studies and political science from the College of Charleston.

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Cornel West: "What I mean by 'the left' is I am talking about the tradition, both secular and religious, that pushes back against the logic of the market, that pushes back against corporate power..." Robert P. George: "The form of American conservatism that I am attracted to is old-fashioned liberalism in the tradition of James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville. A tradition that views freedom as important, not as an end in itself, but as a means to other ends."

Date: September 10, 2020

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Online

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is also frequently a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. In addition to his academic service, Professor George has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He has also served on the President’s Council on Bioethics, as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.

Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He has taught at Yale, Harvard, the University of Paris, Princeton, and, most recently, Union Theological Seminary. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his MA and Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span, and on Tavis Smiley’s PBS TV Show.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Harper’s. Williams is the author of two memoirs, Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White, which recount his struggles with racial identity as a teen-ager and as an adult. The son of a Black father and a white mother, he describes himself in his second book as "an ex-black man." He is known for his critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom Williams believes overemphasizes race and racism, creating "a fantasy that flattens psychological and material difference within and between groups.

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Terry Rhodes, Dean, UNC College of Arts & Sciences invites you to join the UNC Program for Public Discourse & UNC Center for Bioethics. What Principles Should Guide our Lock-Down Strategies for COVID-19, Now and in the Future? Thoughtfully exploring perspectives with leading experts in the protection of civil liberties, economic security, and public health priority in a time of COVID-19.

Date: July 28, 2020

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Online

George Annas, M.D., MPH, Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University, is director of the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights of Boston University School of Public Health and professor in the Boston University School of Medicine and School of Law. He is the author or editor of 20 books on health law and bioethics, and for 25 years wrote a regular feature in the New England Journal of Medicine on “Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights.” He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a former member of the National Academies’ Committee on Human Rights.

Kevin M. Murphy , Ph.D., is the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and a MacArthur Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, as well as a faculty research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. He primarily studies the empirical analysis of inequality, unemployment and relative wages as well as the economics of growth and development and the economic value of improvements in health and longevity. A fellow of the Econometric Society and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Murphy is the author of two books and numerous academic articles and research papers found in prestigious publications.

Audrey Pettifor, Ph.D., is a professor of epidemiology at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on determinants of HIV/STI infection in sub-Saharan Africa and interventions to prevent infection and link individuals to care and treatment. She is currently leading a study to examine COVID-19 among faculty, staff and students involved in and supporting research on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.

Myron S. Cohen, M.D., is the Yeargan-Bate Eminent Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, and Epidemiology; the associate vice chancellor for global health; and director of the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases, IGHID, at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Disease Society of America. While Cohen focuses on the transmission and prevention of transmission of HIV, recently, he has played an active role in development of the COVID-19 prevention activities. He serves on the NIH ACTIV Committee, a public-private partnership to organize COVID-19 research, and on the executive committee of the NIAID COVID Prevention Network. Cohen has led research on the use of monoclonal antibodies for the prevention and early treatment of COVID-19.

On February 19th, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Program for Public Discourse will convene this forum on "Meritocracy in Higher Education." The event will be hosted by Sarah Treul, a political scientist at UNC, and feature the New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, the anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom, the philosopher Anastasia Berg, and the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Date: February 19, 2020

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Howell Hall

Caitlin Zaloom is a cultural anthropologist and an associate professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. She studies the cultural dimensions of finance, technology, and economic life. Her latest book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, explores how the financial pressures of paying for college affect middle-class families. Zaloom is also author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, Editor in Chief of Public Books, and co-editor of the recent volumes Think in Public and Antidemocracy in America. Zaloom’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and her work has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, NPR, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Times Higher Education.

Ross Gregory Douthat is an American conservative political analyst, blogger, author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of conservative topics, including the state of Christianity in America and "sustainable decadence" in contemporary society. Douthat attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut. He graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 2002, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While there he contributed to The Harvard Crimson and edited The Harvard Salient.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Harper’s. Williams is the author of two memoirs, Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White, which recount his struggles with racial identity as a teen-ager and as an adult. The son of a Black father and a white mother, he describes himself in his second book as "an ex-black man." He is known for his critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom Williams believes overemphasizes race and racism, creating "a fantasy that flattens psychological and material difference within and between groups.

Anastasia Berg started as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the fall of 2020. She spent the previous three years as a Postdoctoral Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, the University of Cambridge. She holds a BA from Harvard and an MA and joint degree Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought and the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. Her academic research interests lie at the intersection of contemporary moral philosophy, metaethics and moral psychology and the history of moral philosophy, especially Kant and post-Kantian German Idealism, but also Aristotle and Heidegger.

Sarah A. Treul is an Associate Professor specializing in American political institutions, with an emphasis on the U.S. Congress and courts. She earned her B.A. in Political Science and Psychology from Wellesley College and her M.A and Ph.D., both in Political Science, from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include the voting behavior of U.S. senators, bicameralism, and state delegations in Congress. She is currently working on a project analyzing how a decline in state economic interests has contributed to polarization in Congress.

Join CNN’s principal legal analyst for impeachment and UNC law professor Michael Gerhardt and presidential historian William Leuchtenburg as they discuss everything you need to know about the law and history surrounding impeachment in the United States. The discussion will be moderated by Dean of the Law School Martin Brinkley and will take place in the Nelson Mandela Auditorium. A reception with food and beverages will follow.

Michael Gerhardt is the Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the UNC School of Law. Gerhardt’s extensive public service has included his testifying more than a dozen times before Congress, including as the only joint witness in the Clinton impeachment proceedings in the House; speaking behind closed doors to the entire House of Representatives about the history of impeachment in 1998; and serving as special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee for seven of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices. He has written two leading books on impeachment and has been CNN’s principal legal analyst on impeachment for the proceedings against Presidents Clinton and Trump.

Date: December 3, 2019

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Nelson Mandela Auditorium, FedEx Global Education Center

William Leuchtenburg is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at UNC-Chapel Hill. A scholar of the life and career of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Leuchtenburg has written more than a dozen books on 20th century history, including the Bancroft Prize-winning Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. In 2007, he received the North Carolina award for literature. Leuchtenburg is a past president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Historians.

Martin Brinkley is Dean and the Arch T. Allen Distinguished Professor of Law at UNC School of Law. He has research interests in American legal history and the legal history of ancient Greece and Rome. Brinkley was elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 2003 and served as president of the North Carolina Bar Association from 2011 to 2012. In 2017, he received the Bar Association’s H. Brent McKnight Renaissance Lawyer Award.

Join us on November 12 in Murphey 116 for a panel discussion on ideological package deals and heterodoxy within political movements. Our panelists for the evening will be Justin Giboney and Jonathan V. Last, and the conversation will be moderated by Dr. Molly Worthen. The event will begin at 5:30 PM and last until approximately 7:00 PM.

Date: November 12, 2019

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Murphey Hall

Justin Giboney is an attorney and political strategist in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also the co-founder and president of the AND Campaign, a coalition of urban Christians who are determined to address the sociopolitical arena with the compassion and conviction of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Giboney has managed successful campaigns for elected officials in the state and referendums relating to the city’s transportation and water infrastructure. He served as the co-chair of Obama for America’s Gen44-Atlanta initiative, and in 2012 and 2016 Georgia’s 5th congressional district elected him as a delegate for the Democratic National Convention. A former Vanderbilt University football player and law student, Giboney served on the Urban League of Greater Atlanta Board of Directors. He has written op-eds for publications such as Christianity Today and The Hill.

Jonathan V. Last is an American journalist and author. Last currently serves as executive editor of The Bulwark and co-host of the popular Sub-Beacon podcast and previously worked as a senior writer and later digital editor at The Weekly Standard. In addition, Last contributes to the Wall Street Journal and other major publications and is the author of What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, a book on the under-population problem facing the United States. He has also edited three books on virtue: The Christmas Virtues, The Dadly Virtues, and The Seven Deadly Virtues.

Molly Worthen is an associate professor of history at UNC and a freelance journalist. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her most recent book, Apostles of Reason, examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945, especially the internal conflicts among different evangelical subcultures. Her first book, The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost, is a behind-the-scenes study of American diplomacy and higher education told through the lens of biography. Her current book project focuses on the history of charisma in America. Worthen teaches courses on North American religious and intellectual culture and global Christianity, and she won the 2017 Tanner Award for Teaching Excellence. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has written about religion and politics for The New Yorker, Slate, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy, and other publications.