Hebrew Union College’s mission includes a commitment to “advancing the critical study of Judaism and Jewish culture in accordance with the highest standards of modern academic scholarship.” Essential to this mission is a concomitant commitment to academic freedom. Academic freedom has a particular resonance with this institution. Its founding in 1875, a critical part of the encounter between Jewish tradition and modernity, occurred at a significant time in the history of American higher education that led to the development of American academic freedom doctrine. The doctrine was less of a break with normative Judaism than it may have been for secular leaning, serving as more of a continuation of a millennia-old approach.
Frederick M. Lawrence is the 10th Secretary and CEO of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the nation’s first and most prestigious honor society, founded in 1776. Lawrence is a Distinguished Lecturer at the Georgetown Law Center, and has previously served as president of Brandeis University, Dean of the George Washington University Law School, and Visiting Professor and Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018 and the American Law Institute in 1999.
An accomplished scholar, teacher and attorney, Lawrence is one of the nation’s leading experts on higher education law, civil rights, free expression and bias crimes. Lawrence has published widely and lectured internationally. He is the author of Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law (Harvard University Press 1999), examining bias-motivated violence and the laws governing how such violence is punished in the United States. Lawrence has testified before Congress concerning free expression on campus and on federal hate crime legislation. He frequently contributes op-eds to various news sources and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News among other networks. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 1999 and the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
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