The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will celebrate its tenth-annual First Amendment Day on Tuesday, Sept. 25. This campus-wide, daylong event is designed to both celebrate the First Amendment and explore its role in the lives of Carolina students. Students and other members of the university community will read from banned books and discuss the public university’s special role as a marketplace of ideas and the need to be tolerant when others exercise their rights.
The 2018 First Amendment Day Keynote speaker will be Siva Vaidhyanathan, the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. Vaidhyanathan will talk about his new book Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018). After five years as a professional journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Vaidhyanathan has also taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia University, New York University, McMaster University, and the University of Amsterdam. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Vaidhyanathan will speak at 7:00 P.M. in 111 Carroll Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
There will also be other events all over campus, ranging from a panel discussion on Public Art, Public Memorials, and the First Amendment to readings from Banned Books conducted by faculty and students at the School of Information and Library Science.
You can check out all of the day’s events here: https://medialaw.unc.edu/first-amendment-day/
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