On Wednesday, May 21, Professor Amna Khalid hosted a mock classroom session in the Weitz Center for Creativity. The majority of students were participants in Professor Khalid’s class, Nuclear Nations: Pakistan and India. The session was filmed by PEN America, an organization focused on protecting the right of free speech in the United States and beyond.
The original PEN International organization was founded in 1921 to promote cooperation between writers. In 1922, the foundation established its first branch in the United States. As years progressed, PEN America continued to develop and received recognition from the United Nations. Recently, PEN America has taken on more initiatives to promote free speech, especially among younger generations.
Annanya Sinha ’25, who has worked with PEN America in the past, said, “to me they’re like the hyper-focused ACLU-like organization that protects and promotes free speech, expression and open discourse.”
As part of this goal, PEN America is filming a documentary that will be shown to a number of colleges across the US. The documentary focuses on the experiences of students at three colleges to tackle the issue of free speech in an educational environment. At Carleton, the documentary focuses on Sinha’s experience with free speech.
The PEN America documentary team filmed students participating in a multitude of classes, then filmed a mock class session intended to illustrate a typical classroom discussion at Carleton. The main goal was to show how students respond to disagreements.
Participating students prepared by reading an article about “The Life of Washington,” a mural located at George Washington High School in San Francisco, CA. The article discussed a committee at the school advocating for the mural’s removal due to its illustrations of violence against Native Americans and slavery. The article ties the protest against this piece to the prevalence of censorship in modern society, highlighting how the “calls to censor ‘offensive’ art by committees, petitions or the Twitterverse are especially dangerous.” Students were also told to listen to an accompanying podcast that questions the impacts that erasing pieces of history have on our perception of the truth. The discussion eventually moved away towards the nature of disagreements in class for the purpose of getting students to disagree.
One of the participants in the mock class session, Becky Reinhold ’25, discussed her experience at the event. During the filming of the mock classroom session, Reinhold said the filmmakers made it clear that “the goal was to get people to disagree and to show what conversations where people disagree look like.” When describing the flow of the session, Reinhold said, “I think one thing that happened was a lot of students agreed, and so there was a little bit of prodding needed to get students to disagree.”
In regards to the wider impact of the documentary, Reinhold said, “I think what they’re doing is admirable. I think there is fear of disagreement on college campuses, and I think any attempts to normalize respectful disagreement should be encouraged. I don’t know if one documentary is going to be enough. I think showing students that what respectful disagreements look like still leaves out some of the issues that I think exist around free speech. I’ll be curious to see what happens with the documentary and what effect it has.”
Some students, however, had different opinions on the impact of the documentary. “I’m skeptical of the overall value of the [mock session],” said one anonymous student. “I don’t know of a single classroom discussion that looks like what might be shown in the documentary. I also think that it’s unrealistic to expect conversations about dicey topics to not devolve. A lot of these conversations carry emotional weight, and expecting that people don’t get offended is kind of insane when you think about it. I know the subject material was hard for some of the people in the room, especially those with a personal connection to the topic.”
The release date for the documentary has not been announced, but it will be shown on college and university campuses across the United States. PEN America’s goal of promoting meaningful discussions continues to be relevant in a changing global landscape.