Below is an excerpt from The Philadelphia Inquirer, featuring commentary from Penn President Amy Gutmann emphasizing the importance of open expression for any democracy to survive and flourish.
On Oct. 2, a journalist entered the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. He was an outspoken critic of the Saudi government and wrote for The Washington Post. Once those consulate doors closed, he never came back out.
Government officials of several countries, and most recently the CIA, believe he was murdered on orders from the Saudi crown prince.
Today, around the world, a free and robust press is under assault. Journalists face jail time, or worse. Online forums are censored.
News organizations are dubbed “enemies of the people” and fact-based reporting is smeared as fake news.
I am a moral and political philosopher and an educator, by passion as well as profession. I have devoted my life’s work to better understanding—and strengthening—the groundwork of both American democracy and education. For any democracy to survive and flourish, no single principle is more fundamental than the free and robust exchange of ideas—especially when we disagree.
Unhindered press, transformative higher education, engaged civic and business leaders: These are lynchpins for open and free expression in American society. These stand proudly as the pillars of a free world.
Benjamin Franklin was America’s first great newspaperman and one of the greatest champions of a free press and free speech. “When this support is taken away,” he wrote, “the constitution of a free society is dissolved.”
When you lead the University of Pennsylvania, which Franklin founded, open expression is not some abstraction. It’s the bedrock of all that we do. Diverse and unexpected ideas are as foundational to Penn as they are to the survival of a free society.
OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Google vary widely in identifying hate speech
Neil Fasching and Yphtach Lelkes of the Annenberg School for Communication have found dramatic differences in how large language models classify hate speech, with especially large variations for language about certain demographic groups, raising concerns about bias and disproportionate harm.
Understanding order to disorder at the atomic scale opens possibilities for next-generation electronic devices
A Penn team has developed insight into the chemical and geometric mechanisms underlying the synthesis of new 2D materials, paving the way for next-gen devices, biomedical applications, and cleaner, quicker energy conversion and storage.
(From left) Kevin B. Mahoney, chief executive officer of the University of Pennsylvania Health System; Penn President J. Larry Jameson; Jonathan A. Epstein, dean of the Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM); and E. Michael Ostap, senior vice dean and chief scientific officer at PSOM, at the ribbon cutting at 3600 Civic Center Boulevard.
Reimagined Penn Medicine facility set to usher in a bold new era of Immune Health discovery
3600 Civic Center Boulevard will bring together key researchers and technologies in Immune Health, the Colton Center for Autoimmunity, and infectious diseases to drive breakthrough science.
