Mary Rigdon

University of Arizona, Freedom Center

Jason Brennan

Georgetown University

Introduced by: Kit Wellman, University of Arizona, Freedom Center

Saura Masconale

University of Arizona, Freedom Center

Jane Bambauer

University of Florida

Sam Berstler

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduced by: Sam Mattingly

Daniel Jacobson

University of Colorado, Boulder

Introduced by: Abbie Livingston

J.P. Messina

Purdue University

Introduced by: Alexandra Bacall

Delaney Verjinski

University of South Alabama

Introduced by: Henry Weiss

Steve Wall

University of Arizona, Freedom Center

Introduced by: George Marshall

Hrishikesh Joshi

University of Arizona, Freedom Center

Professor Jane Bambauer is the Brechner Eminent Scholar at the Levin College of Law and at the College of Journalism and Communications. She teaches Torts, First Amendment, Media Law, Criminal Procedure, and Privacy Law.

Professor Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, AI, and predictive algorithms. Her work analyzes how the regulation of these new information technologies will affect free speech, privacy, law enforcement, health and safety, competitive markets, and government accountability. Professor Bambauer’s research has been featured in over 20 scholarly publications, including the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Her work has also been featured in media outlets, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Fox News, and Lawfare, where she is a contributing editor.

Professor Bambauer currently serves as the Chair of the National AI Advisory Committee Subcommittee on Law Enforcement, and she has previously served as the deputy director of the Center for Quantum Networks, a multi-institutional engineering research center funded by the National Science Foundation. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Dr. Sam Berstler is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Career Development Chair and assistant professor of philosophy at MIT.  She studies the structure of everyday interaction.  She has a special interest in the role of pretense, ritual, and non-acknowledgment in conversation.  Currently, she is finishing the first full-length manuscript devoted to the philosophy of the sociologist Erving Goffman.  More generally, she has an ongoing research interest in the connection between contemporary analytic philosophy and the American micro-sociologists of the 1960s-1980s.

Berstler completed her PhD at Yale.  Before her appointment at MIT, she was the inaugural Desai Family Postdoctoral Associate at Princeton.

Jason Brennan (G ’07) is the Flanagan Family Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of 18 books, which have been translated 35 times into 18 languages, plus over 100 academic articles and papers, and many dozens of popular press articles and op-eds. He is the editor-in-chief of *Philosophy and Public Affairs*. In 2025, he was named one of the best business professors by *Poets and Quants*.

Hrishikesh Joshi is an Assistant Professor in the UArizona Department of Philosophy and Faculty at the UArizona Center for the Philosophy of Freedom.

Previously, he worked at Bowling Green State University, and before that was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Hrishikesh’s research focuses on normative issues at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE). He also works on meta-ethics and ethical theory.

Hrishikesh completed his Ph.D. at Princeton under the supervision of Gideon Rosen, Michael Smith, and Philip Pettit. He grew up in India and St. Kitts & Nevis, a small Caribbean country. Apart from “philosophizing,” he enjoys keeping fish tanks and playing Go.

Saura Masconale is Associate Director at the University of Arizona Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science, and Affiliated Faculty in the James E. Rogers College of Law. At the Freedom Center, she is also in charge of the Master of Legal Studies, Law & Economics concentration, which the Center cosponsors with the James E. Rogers College of Law. Saura was also competitively selected for the University of Arizona Academic Leadership Institute in 2021-22.

Her research studies how the intersection of legal entitlements, politics, and economic forces affect society, both as a positive and normative matter. In particular, her scholarship to date has focused on exploring the implications of this intersection in the public corporation context. Saura’s articles have appeared in the Northwestern Law Review, the Texas Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, the Journal of Corporate Law, and Social Philosophy and Policy, among other outlets. Her most recent work examines the evolution of the corporation from a mere economic agent to a new political actor and explores the democratic and political implications of this transformation.

Saura holds a doctoral degree in law and economics from LUISS Guido Carli University (Rome) and a J.D. from University of Bologna. Prior to joining the Freedom Center, she taught at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Notre Dame Law School. Before entering into academia, she practiced law at Clifford Chance LLC, an international law firm headquartered in London.

This essay contends that academic freedom, though indispensable, is not a sufficient guardian of the university’s higher calling: academic integrity. In recent political clashes over higher education—from President Trump’s actions against Harvard to Florida’s “STOP WOKE” Act—universities have invoked the shield of academic freedom. But this essay challenges the assumption that all external intervention is illegitimate. Academic freedom is meant to resist external threats to integrity, but it was never designed to address internal threats arising from within the academy itself. Indeed, internal orthodoxies can flourish when academic freedom is misapplied.

Grounded in a normative vision of the university as a truth-seeking institution, this essay proposes a philosophical and constitutional framework in which the state may intervene—cautiously, and without imposing its own dogma—to restore pluralism, competence, and public trust. The goal is not to defend political interference, but to articulate the conditions under which external oversight can be justified to preserve the university’s foundational mission.

What kinds of practices promote a culture of free expression?  I argue for a seemingly paradoxical result.  If we want to promote the flourishing of free expression, we should extensively engage in “phony” or “empty” forms of talk.  More specifically, we should make extensive use of ritualistic speech.  Ritualistic speech is not insincere.  It is just non-sincere.  Through ritual speech, we build trust, protect our basic social standing, and preserve our relationship.  Our ritualistic practices are in decay and, because of that, so is the free and open exchange of ideas.  I trace this decay to a cultural mistake.  On both the left and the right, we conflate a “free and open” conversation with an “authentic” one.  I show how we can and why we should resist this move.

What are the proper limits of free speech in academia? Many people insist that, at the very least, racist speech and research should be banned. In this talk, I argue the opposite: even racism should be tolerated—not because racism is good or might be true, but because no one can be trusted to decide what counts as “racist” and therefore prohibited. Students, administrators, and faculty already abuse the authority and resources they have, and we should expect them to abuse any greater power to police ideas.

Attempts to mitigate the stark underrepresentation of conservative, and even classically liberal, perspectives in academia are often scoffed at as favoring “affirmative action for conservatives.” This response is treated as a knockdown objection even by defenders of traditional affirmative action, both because it is assumed that conservatives are already privileged and that they can only defend affirmative action hypocritically and selfishly. Yet I argue that the proposed policy is neither absurd nor hypocritical, and is much easier to defend than its antagonists suppose.

This paper proposes the concept of academic neurorights: a new framework for protecting cognitive liberty within institutions of research and higher education. Just as academic freedom expresses the broader right to freedom of thought through protections for expression, I argue that academic neurorights are the institutional expression of our more general rights to cognitive liberty. This includes the right to mental privacy, autonomy over one’s own thought processes, and protection from cognitive surveillance or coercion.

As neurotechnologies capable of detecting, monitoring, and even influencing mental states potentially move into educational and research settings, the ability to think freely and privately is under threat. I draw on the work of Nita Farahany and others who advocate for cognitive liberty. I examine how emerging neurotechnologies challenge not only individual liberty but the epistemic and ethical foundations of academic life. Thought must be free—not just speech—for genuine inquiry, dissent, and intellectual risk-taking to occur.