Alumni Free Speech Advocacy at MIT: Wayne Stargardt and Peter Bonilla

Higher Ed Now

For the past several years, ACTA has collaborated with the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA) to defend free expression, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity on college and university campuses. With hundreds of alumni advocates across 27 institutions, AFSA represents a national movement empowering alumni to exert positive, meaningful influence on their alma maters. One of the most active groups to emerge from this movement is the MIT Free Speech Alliance (MFSA). As they support activities from on-campus debates to off-campus mobilization, MFSA members have proven to be both friends and ardent critics of their alma mater.

In Fall semester 2024, ACTA's College Debates and Discourse Alliance curricular fellow, Dr. Bryan Paul, attended MFSA's annual conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he moderated a panel discussion with senior administrators from several institutions on the strategies that can improve the free speech culture on college campuses. Immediately after that, he recorded this interview with MFSA’s president Wayne Stargardt and executive director Peter Bonilla to further discuss the state of American higher education and MFSA's reform efforts at MIT and beyond.