HWS News
10 September 2024 • Alums Scheines '79 on Freedom of Expression in the Academy By Andrew Wickenden '09
Carnegie Mellon University Dean Richard Scheines '79 returns to HWS to offer an inside perspective on the issue of free speech on college campuses.
Richard Scheines '79, who serves as the Bess Family Dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, returns to campus this fall to discuss academic freedom and freedom of speech on college campuses.
Sponsored by the HWS Department of Philosophy, Scheines’ talk “Freedom of Expression on Campus: An Insider’s Perspective” will be held at 4:45 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 26 in the Sanford Room of the Warren Hunting Smith Library.
As Scheines explains: “After George Floyd, and now the war in Gaza, colleges and universities have struggled to both protect free expression and to keep their campuses free of antisemitism, racism and Islamophobia — not to mention more serious disruptions like tent-encampments and administration-building takeovers. As the dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon, I have had an insider view of several incidents that make these challenges vivid and have been part of what I think is a solution. In this talk, I will sketch the law on free speech, the AAUP’s account of Academic Freedom, and then show the tensions that administrators face through four episodes: a year of events on Karl Marx, a right-wing ambassador on a liberal campus, a faculty member’s social media attack on the Queen of England, and the Gaza war. I will end by describing an initiative that I think will help colleges and universities deal with controversy.”
Scheines graduated from HWS with a B.A. in history in 1979. Inspired by a year-long seminar on the history of science taught by HWS Professor of Psychology Martin Kelly, Scheines went on to get a Ph.D. in history and the philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh and joined the newly formed Department of Philosophy of Carnegie Mellon in 1988. Scheines co-leads an interdisciplinary research group that has created and advanced the theory and practice of causal discovery for several decades. He has additional appointments in two departments in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science: Machine Learning, and Human-Computer Interaction. He was the head of the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon from 2005 to 2014 and has served as the dean of the Dietrich College since 2014.
