Provoking Policy

Thank you for reading my posts on Provoking Policy. It has been a wonderful journey as a writer to be able to share my rants on issues that matter to me at various points in time. From now on, I will be writing on Medium as Ruth C. White, PhD . I have chosen Medium as a platform because it gives me more of an opportunity to read, write and share stories that matter.

Fall is here and students are back in the classroom and free speech is back on the agenda. Just a few weeks in and already the hottest topic on campuses across America is free speech. In particular, my alma mater - the University of California, Berkeley (UCBerkeley) - is at the heart of the controversy to bring 'conservative' speakers to campus  in what is being billed as Free Speech Week. It can either be seen as ironic, or a full circle revisit, that UC Berkeley is in this place, given its role in creating the free speech movement which grew out of a series of protests during the 1964-1965 academic year. It is now focused on right-wing ideas while back then it was focused on the protest speech of the left. It was as a place for radical ideas that I got to know most about UC Berkeley as a young girl growing up in Jamaica, and one of the primary reasons I chose to attend. The flood of articles that focus on the issue of free speech in the academy almost seems reminiscent...