For the 2025 competition, the Goldfarb Center invites student competitors to select any executive order issued by the Trump administration on or after January 20, 2025 and make a video essay describing their support of or opposition to the executive order as their symposium submission. We encourage students from all majors and disciplines to participate.
Competitors may compete as individuals or form teams of up to 3 people to produce a video essay. Symposium submissions will take the form of short video essays and must meet the following criteria to be considered for the competition:
~Video essays should be no shorter than 3 minutes and no longer than 6 minutes.
~Videos should contain at least two multimedia elements in addition to the video footage, such as graphics, charts, illustrations, photographs, maps, GIFs, soundbites, video clips from other sources, etc. (If any external media is used, it must be clearly identified and credited.)
~Competitors should take a clear position on the executive order of their choice. The audience must be able to understand whether a competitor(s) is arguing for the executive order of their choice to be implemented or rejected. The goal of this competition is to develop persuasive argument skills and convince video viewers to adopt the competitors’ position on the chosen executive order.
~Competitors must present at least two arguments in support of their position on their executive order of choice.
~Competitors are required to present at least two credible counterarguments to their position on the selected executive order, and engage with it in good faith (that is: summarize or describe opposing perspectives in a way that its proponents would find accurate).
~Each essay must contain live video footage of commentary for or against the competitor’s position on their executive order of choice from at least one member of the Colby community who is not part of the competition team. This commentary could come from other Colby students, faculty, staff, or alumni.
~Submissions should include a brief list of credits including the names of any and all team members who supported the video production along with citations for any multimedia content that is not original. These credits can be incorporated into a supplemental document submitted alongside the video essay or could be incorporated into the essay itself in some way. If competitors choose to include credits and citations in the video essay itself, they will not count against the time limit, but should be limited to no more than 30 additional seconds.
~Submissions should be in the form of an unlisted (that is, non-public) YouTube link submitted by email to Erica Buswell and Alison Beyea.
Essay links must be submitted by 9 am on April 17th to [email protected] and [email protected]. Time extensions will not be permitted. A panel of faculty and staff judges will select up to 8 essays as semi-finalists to move forward to the final stage of the competition, which culminates in the selection and announcement of winners at the April 30th In The News Event in Page Commons.
Semi-finalists will submit their final video essays by April 29th at 9am.
The top three competitors will be selected by Goldfarb Center staff and Dexter Thomas and announced at the April 30th In The News Event devoted to this year’s Symposium. Audience members in attendance at the 4/30 event will vote to determine who receives first, second, and third place. All semi-finalists should plan to attend the 4/30 Freedom of Expression event from 6-7pm– or at least have a team representative in the audience – to hear the competition results.
The first place winner receives $1,700; second place receives $1,200, and third receives $700. All semi-finalists will receive $300 for their submissions (shared equally amongst each member of the team). Any teams in the competition who advance to the semi-final round or are selected as a top-three finisher will share their award proceeds equally amongst each team member. In other words, if second place is awarded to a team comprised of 3 individuals, each individual team member will receive $400 in proceeds, etc.
In conjunction with the 2025 Freedom of Expression competition, the Goldfarb Center and Colby College’s Program for Academic Success is hosting Dexter Thomas for a one-week residency in April meant to provide Colby students with opportunities to expand their skills and abilities in multimodal communication. As part of this residency, Dexter has created these 9 training modules designed to enable anyone to develop a baseline knowledge of how to produce a video essay, regardless of previous experience.
Additionally, all symposium competitors who advance to the final round of the competition as semi-finalists will be provided an opportunity to attend office hours with Dexter on 4/25 and 4/26 to polish their essay for the final round of competition.
For the 2024 symposium, students crafted policy proposals aimed at combating misinformation in American politics, a topic of particular and current importance given rapid technological advances in the use of artificial intelligence in the prior academic year coupled with an upcoming presidential election cycle.
Tommy Lowell ’26 placed first in the competition for his proposal to hold social media companies accountable for harm caused by the use of bots that spread misinformation on these platforms. Zani’ah Brown ’24 placed second with her comprehensive proposal to stop misinformation spread through multiple means, including enhanced media literacy education, cybersecurity coordination, and government funding for local newspapers.
Saathvika Diviti ’25 and Louis Weiner ’24 and Erik Holm ’25 shared third place honors for their respective proposals to stop the spread of health misinformation through the establishment of a specialized oversight body to verify the health claims of politicians and legislation to regulate the acquisition and utilization of user data by social media and tech companies. Zaynab Tariq ’26, Aubrey Costello ’27, Sarah Doore ’27, and Peter Ryan ’27 also advanced to the competition’s final round. Find all of their thoughtful and creative proposals here.
The theme selected by the Goldfarb Student Executive Board for the 2022-2023 Freedom of Expression Symposium was healthcare. Each year, the Symposium’s theme is tied to an issue that is newsworthy, has clear ties to public policy, and can engage students across campus.
Michelle Bechtel, Justin Kim, and Helen Wang placed first in the competition for their proposal to address the shortage of rural physicians by removing barriers to and adding incentives for increasing residency positions in remote communities. Sophie Peterson placed second with a proposal to improve healthcare access for marginalized patients through the use of community health workers. Susie Swan placed third with a proposal to address the overwhelming number of opioid overdose deaths through the protected expansion of harm-reduction programs such as syringe distribution programs. Saathvika Diviti, Anna do Rosario, Cliona Kenney, Sonia Marnoto, and Saia Patel were also selected to compete in the 2023 competition. Read all of the inspiring policy ideas presented at this year’s competition here.
In April 2022, eight student semi-finalists presented their policy proposals on Freedom of Speech. Topics ranged from Free Speech at Colby: Problems and Recommendations, to Enhancing Freedom of the Press in the United States.
The winners were decided by a faculty panel, which included Professors Christel Kesler, Aaron Hanlon, and Jin Goh, all members of the Goldfarb Faculty Advisory Committee. The top prize went to Serena Klebba ’25 for her work on Freely Informing Consent: A Plan to Change Mandated Pre-Abortion Counseling, second place went to Amir Jiru ’24 and Chris Ward ’24 who teamed up to focus on Misinfo Ed: Addressing Social Media Misinformation Through Education, and third place was awarded to Anna doRosario ’25 for her compelling thoughts on A Turning Point: Time for an “FDA for Tech”.
As part of the Goldfarb Center’s annual theme on freedom of speech, Colby professors guided us in a conversation on free speech with a global lens. How do policy approaches to free speech vary across countries? Is the US approach to free speech exceptional? What kinds of historical and contemporary factors help us understand different countries’ orientations toward free speech? What global and geopolitical forces shape policies on free speech?
The panel included Jen Yoder, the Robert E. Diamond Professor of Government and Global Studies and a member of the Goldfarb Faculty Advisory Committee, Jun (Philip) Fang, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, and Nazli Konya, Visiting Assistant Professor of Government. Moderating will be Christel Kesler, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology.
How has social media shifted the way we consume and share information? Has the surge of digital platforms driven (or not) America’s growing political divide? What policies can balance the protection of free speech with malicious disinformation campaigns?
The Goldfarb Center hosted a high-level panel discussion, tackling these questions and more and exploring the nexus between social media, political polarization, and free speech. Panelists included Roger McNamee, a tech venture capitalist and author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe; Renée DiResta, technical director of Stanford Internet Observatory; and Chris Vlasto, an ABC News senior executive producer. Kimberly Flowers, executive director of the Goldfarb Center, moderated the conversation.
This event is currently live on our website for 14 days only! You must have a @colby.edu address to watch it.
For more information on Roger McNamee, please visit www.prhspeakers.com
The workshop was led by Andrew Pope and Kristina Mensik from the Scholars Strategy Network. Andrew is the Director of Training at the Scholars Strategy Network. In this role, he works closely with staff and leaders from across the network to develop trainings that empower scholars to use research to improve public policy. Andrew has a PhD from the History Department at Harvard University. Kristina is the Trainings Fellow at SSN, where she supports researchers in the policy process. In addition, Kristina is a policy advocate and researcher largely focused on state legislatures, incarceration, and political participation.
The Goldfarb Center welcomed Lisa Kaplan ’13, founder and CEO of Alethea Group, who discussed disinformation in the digital age. From public policies to social media tactics, Kaplan explored how the general public, government, and private companies alike can protect and mitigate disinformation and social media manipulation in today’s world.
The event was hosted in-person for the Colby community. The recorded event can now be live-streamed at colby.edu/livestream.
The Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs hosted a conversation featuring Jan Plan visiting faculty Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers. The talk was a contemporary conversation about how to respond to the desires, demands, and questions in classrooms today. What contradictions and conflicts, complexities and controversies, emerge when we consider free speech in the classroom? This is part of a series of events the Goldfarb Center has hosted this year in line with its focus on freedom of speech.
Bernardine Dohrn, activist, academic, and children’s and women’s rights advocate, is a retired Associate Clinical Professor from Northwestern University School of Law, where she was the founding director of the Children and Family Justice Center for 23 years. Dohrn is an author or editor of “Race Course: Against White Supremacy”; “A Century of Juvenile Justice” and “Resisting Zero Tolerance: A Handbook for Parents, Teachers, and Students”. Willam Ayers, formerly Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago has written extensively about social justice and democracy, education and the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. His books include “Teaching toward Freedom”; “To Teach: The Journey, in Comics”; and “Demand the Impossible”!
The Goldfarb Center hosted a thoughtful talk with one of the nation’s top First Amendment litigators on free speech issues ranging from protest rights, Black student activism on campuses, and the recent string of state classroom censorship bills. The event was an open Q&A session where Colby students had the opportunity to ask Mr. Sykes anything, which might include discussing his current cases and free speech work, free speech protection trends, or the historical role of student activism.
The Goldfarb Center hosted a conversation with civil liberties leader and free speech expert Nadine Strossen. The event officially kicked off a series of programming related to freedom of speech, the center’s theme this year. Ms. Strossen engaged in a robust Q&A with Colby students, faculty, and staff on issues ranging from how to effectively resist hate speech to free speech on college campuses. She talked about constitutional rights, the role of social media, and much more.
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