Featured Speaker: Robert M. O’Neil, Director, The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression

NACUA is pleased to welcome as the featured speaker for the opening plenary session of the 50th Annual Conference Professor Robert M. O’Neil, founding Director of The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and Professor of Law at the University of Virginia.

Professor O’Neil is a past president of the University of Virginia and of the University of Wisconsin System. In his distinguished career in higher education he has served as chair of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC, now APLU) and served on the executive committee of the Association of American Universities (AAU). He has also served as General Counsel of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and chaired the AAUP Committees on Academic Freedom and Tenure and on Academic Freedom and National Security in Time of Crisis. He currently chairs the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues Initiative and also serves as a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas School of Law. He is the author of several books, including The Rights of Public Employees (second edition, 1993), Classrooms in the Crossfire (1981), and Free Speech in the College Community (1997), The First Amendment and Civil Liability (2001), and Academic Freedom in the Wired World (2007) as well as many articles in law reviews and other journals.

Professor O’Neil holds three degrees from Harvard University and honorary degrees from Beloit College and Indiana University. A member of NACUA, in 2008 Professor O’Neil was named a Fellow of the Association in recognition of his exemplary service and the distinction he has brought to the practice of law on behalf of college and university clients through the quality of his scholarship and breadth of his service.

Drawing on his extensive career and experience as a university professor, president and counsel, Professor O’Neil will reflect on the evolution of American higher education, major legal issues and trends that have arisen in the course of that evolution, and the emergence and current and future impact of the profession of higher education law.