Higher education is supposed to be about the free exchange of ideas. That can’t happen without free speech.

From the FIRE blog.

Scientist: Demotion of Free Speech at Yale Imperils Intellectual Advances

Scientist Steven Benner was one of the student signatories to Yale University’s 1975 Woodward Report, which articulated the university’s commitment to free expression. Amid recent controversies over free speech on the Ivy League campus, that report is being revisited. Earlier this month, Benner addressed what the Woodward Report means for today’s Yale students in a Yale Daily News op-ed.

“Censorship is the exercise of power by the empowered,” he wrote. “Free speech is how the disempowered become empowered.”

When I talked to Benner on a recent morning, he expounded on the ideas in his Daily News op-ed, discussed his reliance on free speech as a scientist, and provided FIRE with his take on a troubling cultural shift underway at Yale.

Steven Benner is a research scientist credited with pioneering entire scientific fields.

Dynamic combinatorial chemistry? He invented it. Synthetic biology? His lab, The Benner Group, was among the first to work in that field. Paleomolecular biology? Evolutionary bioinformatics? Both Steven Benner productions.

He spends his days running a nonprofit research foundation and several biotech companies. He’s got his hand in quite a few beakers. Molecular diagnostics—particularly detecting infectious agents—is what pays the bills. His work is being used in diagnostic tools that detect bacteria and pathogens as diverse as HIV and Ebola. And when the confines of Earth prove too limiting for Benner, he’s also making advances in astrobiology, discovering the origins of life in the solar system. His laboratory is working to define how life would look on Mars.

Benner credits for his many innovations a rather surprising phenomenon: a culture that values freedom of speech.