I will be interviewing assistant director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, Maria Servold today at the top of the11:00 hour.

In addition to teaching journalism classes and advising the campus’ three official publications, Maria works as a freelancer writer for publications like The Federalist and The Detroit News.

It was in the Detroit News that I saw her article titled “Free speech isn’t just a quaint idea”.

In the article she wrote:

What once seemed like an obvious point — that we should defend our neighbor’s right to speak freely, even if we disagree with them — has now become a quaint idea, replaced with the notion that only speech we agree with is worth defending. Take the University of California, Berkeley as an example.

One fact she pointed out was a Brookings Institution poll which was recently released and found that 1 in 5 college students believed that violence was an acceptable response to prevent speech they believed was offensive to them.

Can you believe that 20% of college students think it was ok to commit acts of violence against people because they felt their speech was “offensive”?  I would have asked them is it ok for people to commit acts of violence against them if those people thought their speech was offensive?

Let’s find out more of what Maria found and her thoughts on journalism today.

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