Conversations on the Quad: Naomi Barbour, Elizabeth Foster, Alethea Franklin, and Kaitlyn Holian
Courage, creativity, and commitment. These qualities characterized the inaugural cohort of PEN America’s Campus Advocates Fellows whom I had the privilege of mentoring last year.
In the fall of 2024, I helped launch a new Campus Advocates Fellowship at PEN America, mentoring four exceptional students as ambassadors for free speech and academic freedom on their campuses. For this month’s “Conversations on the Quad” blog, I reached out to these Fellows to hear how they confronted rising challenges in higher education, and to reflect on the lasting impacts of the programming they led educating peers about academic freedom, fostering open dialogue, and tracking legislative threats. What they shared was nothing short of inspiring.
The fellowship gave each student not only the opportunity to deepen their own understanding of academic freedom, but also the tools and language to share that knowledge with others. As their advisor, I met with each Fellow weekly to help shape their ideas into concrete programs and educational resources that fostered dialogue and raised awareness on campus. By equipping these students to act as trusted peer messengers, we worked together to cultivate campus communities that are now better prepared to understand, protect, and champion academic freedom.
Meet PEN America’s 2024 Campus Advocacy Fellows:
- Naomi Barbour, a political science major at Eastern Michigan University;
- Elizabeth Foster, an American studies major at Georgetown University;
- Alethea Franklin, a psychological and brain sciences major at Washington University in St. Louis;
- Kaitlyn Holian, a political science major at the University of Texas at Tyler.
“Free expression isn’t just about the right to speak, it’s about making sure everyone has the tools and space to be heard”– Naomi Barbour
For her campus advocacy campaign, Naomi Barbour hosted a series of teach-ins and workshops to educate attendees about free speech and foster support for academic freedom at Eastern Michigan University. “My project was about creating a campus culture where academic freedom isn’t something you just learn about in a classroom — it’s something you live out.”
To demonstrate this, Barbour invited Demetri L. Morgan, PhD, a Faculty Fellow at the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, to join her in person for a conversation with students about how institutions can uphold free expression and open inquiry amid rising political uncertainty. Dr. Morgan fielded questions about recent censorship efforts, potential post-election tensions, and possible policy shifts that could impact classrooms. “People were surprised by how nuanced these issues are… Some came in with strong opinions but left realizing that defending academic freedom requires real thoughtfulness, not just slogans.” Barbour told me:
“The most powerful part was seeing students stay after the event, still debating and talking with each other… That’s when I knew it had made an impact. A few students told me afterward that it was the first time they’d had a real conversation with someone who disagreed with them politically—and that it didn’t end in shouting. That felt like a win. I also had one student say she finally felt seen—like someone understood her fear of speaking up in class. That stuck with me.”
In a sign that this type of programming is necessary, Barbour shared with me, “The Honors College also reached out after the event asking how they could incorporate more of this programming into future semesters. That showed me there’s a real institutional appetite for these conversations.” When asked how she felt her PEN America Campus Advocates fellowship went overall, Barbour reflected, “This fellowship pushed me to think more critically—not just about what I believe, but how to communicate that in a way that invites dialogue instead of shutting it down.”
“My biggest fear right now is that universities are going to sacrifice some of that [academic freedom]… I hope students are vocal enough that universities feel supported… We’ve built a strong foundation.” – Elizabeth Foster
Just over 500 miles to the southeast, another PEN America Campus Advocate, Elizabeth Foster, was hard at work exploring academic freedom perceptions across her campus. Foster’s multi-pronged project began with a survey to capture students’ attitudes and conceptual understanding of academic freedom. Rigorous tabling and smart incentives like offering free cupcakes boosted Elizabeth’s respondents to an impressive 155 undergraduates.
“My biggest takeaway was that people did not have a super familiar understanding of what academic freedom is as a concept. Only two people referenced academic freedom in relation to professors and teachers… but despite that, it seems like students did value the principle of academic freedom, whether or not they knew to call it that… It really did seem like people were erring highly on the side of academic freedom.”
When asked where students went against the grain, Foster told me, “People got especially touchy on social media for professors [and] professors verbally quoting slurs in the classroom.” On those points, Foster says more students were hesitant to agree on academic freedom protections.
Based on these findings, Foster focused the second phase of her project on enhancing academic freedom literacy in a fun and creative way. “I decided to create informative tote bags that had information about academic freedom and how it pertains to students and professors… The intention was that students would walk around with them on campus, and people would see them and talk about them.” Foster’s tote bag design included a cartoon mascot of Georgetown’s Jack the Bulldog asking “Academic Freedom: Don’t know Jack? Check the back!” and a notebook doodle style design on the reverse explaining the concept. Foster continues to see some of the 250 bags that she gave out around campus.
Based on Foster’s success, I proposed another phase for her project: hosting an Academic Freedom Colloquium event with PEN America on her campus in the spring of 2025. Foster embraced the opportunity. “My intention in having the colloquium was to have students come together and talk about some of these questions that they identified as being difficult to answer or too difficult to understand without context… I wanted us to be able to address the tensions in those questions and to understand why they were difficult and flesh those out with experts and with professors, while making sure this is a discussion that was open and accessible to everyone.”
Foster was thrilled about the impact her programming made on her campus community. “Now we have more students who are able to identify academic freedom and to understand it as an important value. We’re now able to have those conversations more openly without shutting each other down out of fear… My hope is that we are able to build upon the traction of what we’ve already been able to accomplish at Georgetown… to keep having these conversations and getting into as many spaces as possible.”
“Dialogue events are just a stepping stone in the training of students to talk to other people… to examine their own beliefs critically … and engage with topics that are new to them or controversial.” – Alethea Franklin
Back in the Midwest, Alethea Franklin, a student at Washington University in St. Louis, brought the spirit of academic freedom to life through a bold student-led dialogue event. Recognizing the importance of student agency in free expression, Franklin decided to center students, rather than faculty or guest experts, as the panelists. Franklin recounted to me, “I wanted to get different beliefs together and I was inspired by Jubilee [a digital media company] and their Middle Ground series [which explores whether people of opposing beliefs can come together empathetically] … I wanted to host something engaging and entertaining.” To accomplish this, Franklin set up a panel with students holding diverse political views and backgrounds. She then crafted prompts to spark discussion, not just for the panelists to address the audience, but also to challenge one another in real time. The packed room of 60 students experienced a lively discussion:
“‘I am satisfied with the campus’ handling of student protests’ was a very popular statement offered to the panelists to agree or disagree with. Some people who, for example, attended protests, had a more negative opinion, but they were still so optimistic. People who had attended events like DxD… which is Dialogue Across Difference… had more positive views. Overall I think optimism was still a through line for everyone.”
Creating a space where disagreement could occur without censorship or backlash was itself a powerful demonstration of academic freedom. Franklin shared with me, “What people told me afterward was really positive. The panelists also had great things to say. They were really happy… and surprised—pleasantly—about how everything ended up winding down.”
Franklin accomplished her goal of creating an engaging and honest forum, but she also wants her campus community to continue these programs and opportunities. Franklin told me she wanted to keep the momentum going by publishing an opinion piece titled “Free speech events on campus are just a stepping stone for action” for her school’s newspaper in January. In the article she wrote:
“These events lay the groundwork for further learning and eventual political action and should not end at mere academic postulating of problems and theoretical solutions. As agents of social change, we must be wise about how we invest our time and energy, and hosting events like the one I put together has proven to be an effective way of cracking open questions that apply to our globe, our country, and our direct campus involvement in political controversy… Still, there must come a point where learning turns to action and we justify the energy and resources we consumed to get us here.”
“Students have pushed the most important civil rights that we’ve really gained in our country. I think that programs like these really empower students to impact things.” – Kaitlyn Holian
At the University of Texas at Tyler, Kaitlyn Holian used her Campus Advocates fellowship to research and understand legislative threats to academic freedom in Texas so that she could inform and empower her campus community.
Holian describes the greatest impetus to her project as seeing chilling anti-DEI legislation pass in her home state, piquing her interest to tune in to broadcast meetings of the Texas Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education to learn about how the laws might be interpreted and enforced.
“I thought it would be interesting to start tracking what the legislature was doing … so I started watching their hearings to see what topics they were focused on. One of the discussion topics was faculty senates, which caught my attention. … We’ve already seen at Texas A&M, for instance, they already undercut their faculty senate to get rid of the LGBTQ program as a minor. I started to worry this could happen to my institution.”
As the subcommittee convened multiple times in the fall to discuss enforcing Texas anti-DEI laws and oversee faculty senates, Holian began documenting the meetings. “I transcribed all of [the meetings] so that I would have a much better accounting of them and so that I could go through the testimony with a more fine-toothed comb. I then went through all of that, summarized each point, looked into who was speaking and what organizations they were a part of. … I think being able to take this information and distill it to smaller facts was helpful.”
Holian’s next step was to reach out to her school’s faculty senate to present her findings. Holian told me, “Initially the plan was for me to go through the executive summary for a 5- to 10-minute presentation and I ended up meeting with them for an hour, because they just had so many questions.”
Following her presentation, attendees asked Holian for permission to share and disseminate her findings to other faculty senates in the state. Holian told me she felt a sense of urgency, which inspired her to continue her research beyond her fellowship period. “This semester, I’ve been continuing to track the legislation as part of an extra study through my university… This is the area that I want to work in once I get my degree… I see it carrying forward through research and advocacy work.”
She’s also producing original research informed by her fellowship that is winning top awards. Holian shared with me, “Looking at this micro level has also given me a lot of interesting information to use in my research, and I actually won Best Graduate Student Lyceum presentation for my most recent report on ‘Silenced Narratives’, exploring the connection between attacks on academic freedom and devolving into authoritarianism.”
The work of PEN America’s first four Campus Advocates Fellows demonstrate a powerful reminder that the responsibility of defending academic freedom need not only rely on the advocacy of faculty and institutional leaders, because students themselves can also serve as powerful influencers. Each of the four fellows I mentored last year took bold, creative steps to lead critical dialogues, challenge censorship, and educate their peers despite complex polarized landscapes. Although our work is far from finished, these Fellows laid a meaningful foundation for others to build upon, and as new threats to academic freedom continue emerging, student voices like theirs will remain essential in defending free expression in higher education.
