What Snowflakes Get Right

In What 'Snowflakes' Get Right About Free Speech, Ulrich Baer draws on jurisprudence, philosophical texts, and his long experience as a senior university administrator to show that debates surrounding free speech on university campuses are not about the feelings of offended students but about our democracy's commitment to equality and the university's critical role as an arbiter of truth in society.

Ulrich Baer was educated at Harvard and Yale and has been awarded John Simon Guggenheim, DAAD, Paul Getty, and Alexander von Humboldt Fellowships. He is University Professor at New York University, and has published, among other books, Remnants of Song: The Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, The Rilke Alphabet, 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11(editor), Beggar's Chicken: Stories from Shanghai, We Are But a Moment, and, as editor and translator, The Dark Interval: Rilke's Letters on Loss, Grief and Transformation, and Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters on Life (Modern Library). His podcast, Think About It, is devoted to in-depth conversations on powerful ideas, including freedom of speech, and language that changes the world. He lives in New York City.

Preface: Disentangling the Free Speech Debate in the Age of Trump, the Alt-Right, and Campus Protests
1. Free Speech and the University: What is at Stake
2. From Skokie to Charlottesville: Tolerating Vs. Condoning Speech
3. Free Speech and Equality: Frederick Douglass and Our Country's Inalienable Truths
4. What 'Snowflakes' Get Right About Free Speech
5. An Unholy Alliance: Why Liberals and Conservatives Agree when Defending Free Speech in the University, but Shouldn't
6. The Slippery Slope, or Who is to Draw the Line?
7. Speech on Campus: How It Can Work