PEN America’s new freedom of speech guidelines offer ways to discuss charged subjects on college campuses.

“The PEN America Principles on Campus Speech” were formulated after the recent release of its investigative report, “And Campus for All: Diversity, Inclusion, and Freedom of Speech at U.S. Universities,” in which the researchers wrote: “Free speech advocates face an urgent task to articulate how unfettered expression can be reconciled with acute demands for greater equality and inclusion, and, indeed, how such freedoms are essential to the realization of these goals.”

The PEN report also comes on the heels of recent video footage showing a Kansas City Public Library staffer being arrested for defending a library patron’s free speech rights at a public event. A local writer and activist named Jeremy Rothe-Kushel had asked Dennis Ross—a former advisor on the Middle East to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—about US support for what he called Israel’s “state-sponsored terrorism.” When Ross responded, Rothe-Kushel followed up with a more aggressive question, prompting his ejection from the event. Steven Woolfolk, the library’s director of programming who defended Rothe-Kushel’s right to ask questions at a public forum, was, too, ejected from the event.

Although the library officials ultimately refrained from filing a civil suit, the prosecutor’s office has announced that it will go forward with the cases against the librarian and the patron—an outcome that illustrates an increasing divide between police and citizens, according to Francine Prose in The New York Review of Books.

“[T]hey illustrate the gap that has opened between police and communities in which they work—a divide that, with horrifying regularity, produces far more disastrous and violent results in our inner cities,” Prose writes. “In fact, public libraries are among the very few remaining places where all Americans can meet to exchange ideas and listen to opposing viewpoints for free.”

Image Credit: The Pitch