DFTD's mission is promoting free speech and expression, open debate, viewpoint diversity,
and ideological balance at Davidson College.

The free-speech recession must be resisted by people around the world who have benefited from the revolutionary acts and sacrifices of the millions who came before them and fought for the cherished right to speak one’s mind. It is up to those who already enjoy that right to defend the tolerance of heretical ideas, limit the reach of disinformation, agree to disagree without resorting to harassment or hate, and treat free speech as a principle to be upheld universally rather than a prop to be selectively invoked for narrow, tribalistic point-scoring. 

Jacob Mchangama, “The War on Free Speech,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2022

I think it’s a profound problem that it’s much more difficult on university campuses to venerate excellence, to celebrate accomplishment, to assert that there are greater and lesser truths, and to welcome iconoclasm. This is not a new phenomenon. In the 1950s, McCarthyism ran rampant…. The new McCarthyism around a different set of subjects is no less troubling, and it is a profound threat to American universities. When something profoundly threatens American universities, it, in turn, threatens the formative experiences of the people who will be leading our country a generation from now. It threatens the ability to develop the new ideas and conceptions that ultimately shape society…. It’s very dangerous for universities to become epistemically closed communities dedicated to social comfort.

Larry Summers--former president of Harvard and former US Secretary of the Treasury—in interview on Honestly with Bari Weiss, 8-18-22