May 1, 2019: Disinvited Dinner

The Disinvited Dinner celebrates and affirms a culture of free speech and First Amendment principles, the importance and meaning of academic freedom, and the search for Truth by offering a platform to someone whose speech has been suppressed elsewhere.

Heather Mac Donald, 2019 Disinvited Dinner speaker

The CSLD is pleased to announce Heather Mac Donald as the keynote speaker for the 2019 Disinvited Dinner on Wednesday, May 1, 2019.

Heather Mac Donald is a bestselling author, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor of City Journal. Her work touches on higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. She is the author of The Diversity Delusion (2018), as well as New York Times bestseller The War on Cops (2016).

She graduated from Yale University in 1978, earned an MA at Cambridge University, and her JD at Stanford. She has clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt, Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, was a legal adviser in the EPA’s Office of General Counsel, and was awarded the Bradley Prize in 2005. Heather Mac Donald had the honor of having a 2017 lecture at Claremont McKenna College substantially disrupted by protests. She was forced to deliver her lecture via livestream.

Heather Mac Donald’s writing at City Journal »

Why a Disinvited Dinner?

Necessity of free speech

First Amendment freedoms and a robust culture of support for them lie at the foundation of liberal democracy and especially the mission of higher education, which is teaching and pursuing Truth through intellectual excellence and freedom of inquiry.

Suffragists Protest Woodrow Wilson's Opposition to Woman Suffrage, October 1916

Free speech challenged

On campuses across the country, however, university students and leaders often abridge this freedom. Pressure and threats from both the left and the right turn speaking engagements into disinvitations.

Photo: Middlebury College

Charles Murray is protested at Middlebury College.

Dozens of disinvitations

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education documents 43 disinvitations in 2016 alone. From Mumia Abu-Jamal to Ben Stein, from Jeff Sessions to Joe Biden, none seem safe from what Alexis de Tocqueville calls “the tyranny of the majority.”