Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (BOLLI)

In his famous “Four Freedoms” speech, the third of FDR’s “four essential human freedoms” was “freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.” 89 years after FDR spoke these words, here in 2025 are Americans enjoying freedom from want? Does the answer to this question depend on one’s life station on important dimensions such as educational attainment? And, either way, are current U.S. economic policies reducing want or expanding it—both here in the United States and around the world?

On the one hand, generative artificial intelligence is being heralded as a historic new foundational technology that will unleash innovation across all industries and thus usher in rising standards of living. On the other hand, the economic walls that America is building against the rest of the world—most vividly with the “Liberation Day” tariffs announced in early April, the breadth and scale of which have not been seen since the Great Depression—have sparked widespread consternation at home and condemnation abroad. This talk will examine important economic forces and policies to understand what all this means for American workers, families, and communities.

Matt Slaughter is the Paul Danos Dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, where in addition he is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Aspen Institute’s Economic Strategy Group, and an academic advisor to the McKinsey Global Institute.

Now in his third term as dean, Matt has helped strengthen the Tuck School with a widening array of programs that transform lives by creating trust-based, data-informed learning communities—all of which has contributed to Tuck’s recent rankings that are among its highest ever. Matt’s area of scholarly expertise is the economics and politics of globalization. Much of his recent work has focused on the global operations of multinational firms, on the labor-market impacts of 2 of 4 globalization, and on public policies to build economic opportunity. From 2005 to 2007, Matt served as a member on Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President. Matt regularly contributes op-ed columns and longer essays to leading global publications and is a regular guest on many TV and radio programs. And through Congressional testimony and other forums he works, as a lifetime independent, with leaders of both parties.

The many current threats to free speech include: “cancel culture,” which penalizes those who question prevailing orthodoxies; rampant self-censorship about “sensitive” topics; Big Tech wielding unprecedented power to restrict and chill expression; government officials pressuring Big Tech to suppress even more material; campus assaults on academic freedom; state laws that bar the teaching of “divisive” concepts; federal and state laws (including President Trump’s executive orders) that have some positive and some negative implications for free speech, including on campus; federal and state laws that restrict minors’ access to sexually oriented online expression; public officials’ (including the President’s) initiation of defamation lawsuits against their critics; and weak public support for free speech, the media, and universities, according to polls. This presentation will discuss the pros and cons of free speech and censorship, addressing legal principles and policy considerations.

Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen is also the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series distributed on public television in 2023. Her books about free speech include: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (Oxford University Press 2023); HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018); and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (Scribner 1995), which was republished with a new Preface in 2024 as part of the NYU Classics Series. Her many honors and awards include the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech. She serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that do free speech work, including: ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Foundation 3 of 3 Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.

The concept of freedom has evolved over the course of American history from the founding ideas in the Bill of Rights that citizens should be able to live their lives without government interference to the 20th century concept that people should be able to fulfill their potential--if necessary, with the help of government. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms spoke to the contemporary version, although want and fear do not appear in the Constitution. Two obstacles have prevented the full realization of FDR’s vision and hinder those who advocate for it today, however: the persistence of 18th century beliefs with respect to property rights; and the structure of American political institutions.  

The U.S. system of checks and balances was designed to restrain the elected legislature, which the Framers understood from history would be susceptible to demagogues and mob rule. By dividing the legislature and empowering state governments, they inadvertently impeded Congress’ ability to act during times of emergency. Frustrated lawmakers and citizens turned to the presidency to lead. When crises passed, Congress typically would reassert its powers, aided by our state-oriented parties and independent judiciary. The parties today, however, have nationalized and are deeply polarized, and the Supreme Court has begun to empower the person of the president, while disempowering the executive branch. The essence of the American experiment for nearly 250 years has been preserving the best of our constitutional system, while adapting to the current needs of citizens and communities. The way forward is contentious and uncertain, but it must start with restoration of Congress and a more balanced exercise of power.

Linda L. Fowler is Professor of Government and Frank J. Reagan Chair in Policy Studies, Emerita, at Dartmouth College, where she continues to lecture and conduct research. Fowler specializes in American politics: publishing two books on congressional elections (Political Ambition: Who Decides to Run for Congress (Yale 1989) and Candidates, Congress, and the American Democracy (Michigan, 1993)), as well as numerous articles and chapters. She then turned to U.S. foreign policy with Watchdogs on the Hill: The Decline of Congressional Oversight of U. S. Foreign Relations (Princeton, 2015). She is currently publishing articles about the further decline of congressional oversight, most recently the loss of outside expertise in the national security committees.

Fowler holds her BA from Smith College and MA and PhD from the University of Rochester. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005-2006 and multiple awards for research and undergraduate teaching.

In January 1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s extraordinary State of the Union Address proclaimed his intention to secure and expand democracy at home and promote democracy everywhere in a world then threatened by fascism and imperialist aggression. The Four Freedoms FDR defined in that speech—Freedom of speech and expression, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want, and Freedom from fear—quickly became philosophical and rhetorical foundations for extending his domestic New Deal and using American power to promote global democratic development. They also became justifications for making the United States a global “super power “ that required a massive standing army, navy, and air forces; a worldwide network of military bases, a permanent military-industrial-university complex, and an ever-growing arsenal of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, all of which diverted resources and brainpower away from domestic democratic reforms while promoting fear of communism abroad and at home. This lecture includes discussion of these complications, as well as a review of the sources of FDR ideas about human rights and liberal internationalism, and a look at contemporary public responses to the Four Freedoms speech. 

Ronald Edsforth is a Research Associate in History at Dartmouth. He retired in 2019 after 26 years of teaching at the College. As a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in History Ron offered courses in American political and economic history, American foreign policy, and global peace history. He also led a revival of the College’s interdisciplinary War and Peace Studies Program, serving as its first coordinator from 1998-2004. In 2006 Ron helped to establish the Globalization Studies concentration in Dartmouth’s Masters in Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program. He served as Chair of Globalization Studies in MALS from 2006 to 2016.

Prior to his arrival at Dartmouth, Ron taught American history at Michigan State University, University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Skidmore College, MIT, and Hamilton College. For two decades his research focused on the economic development and political culture of the United States since 1900. He published a series of books about the significance of the automobile industry in the making of America’s extraordinary consumer culture and its transformation of the country’s politics: Class Conflict and Cultural Consensus (Rutgers University Press, 1989); and two edited volumes, Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America (SUNY Press, 1991), and Autowork (SUNY Press 1995). In the 1990s Ron was the chief historian for the PBS documentary series America on Wheels (1996) and a major contributor to another PBS film, Divided Highways: A History of the Interstate Highways (1997). In 2000 Blackwell published The New Deal: America’s Response to the Great Depression.

In this century, Ron’s scholarly work developed in concert with the new peace history and globalization history courses he was teaching. Ron published essays and presented scholarly papers on neo-liberal capitalism and the global proliferation of nonviolent revolution. In 2014 Ron accepted an invitation to be the General Editor of a six volume global peace history, A Cultural History of Peace, Antiquity to the Modern Age. In 2020 Bloomsbury published this collection of original essays by 55 scholars from 13 different countries. Its Volume 6, A Cultural History of Peace in the Modern Age since 1920, includes Ron’s overview of peace history since 1920 and a co-authored essay “Representations of Peace” that reflects his recognition of the significance of new media in our globalizing world. Although delayed by the pandemic, Ron is now completing research for of a book of essays on the early history of Save the Children.

When Senator Edward Kennedy sponsored the Refugee Act of 1980, he urged his congressional colleagues to pass a bill that would “welcome homeless refugees to our shores” and “give statutory meaning to our national commitment to human rights and humanitarian concerns.” The Refugee Act has transformed the United States over the past 45 years. However, the U.S. refugee and asylum system has never entirely lived up to the lofty goals that Senator Kennedy articulated, and the federal government now appears to be abandoning them entirely. In this lecture, Professor Rosenbloom will assess both the achievements of the Refugee Act and its shortcomings, and examine how immigrant communities are organizing to demand a better future.

Rachel Rosenbloom is Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law, where she teaches courses on immigration law, refugee and asylum law, and administrative law. From 2017 to 2020, she was the Co-Director of the Northeastern University Immigrant Justice Clinic. Her scholarship has focused on the immigration enforcement system, the intersection of criminal law and immigration law, and debates over American birthright citizenship since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Prior to joining the faculty at Northeastern, Professor Rosenbloom was a Human Rights Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, where she served as the supervising attorney for the Center’s Post-Deportation Human Rights Project. She has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School and a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Law of the University of Cadiz and at the Center for Race and Gender at U.C.-Berkeley.

America’s best idea, the separation of church and state, is under attack by those who espouse Christian nationalism, which seeks to conflate religion and the state by means of religious symbols and taxpayer support for religious education. This is both bad theology and bad history. Jesus himself declared that his kingdom “was not of this world,” and the nation’s founders emphatically were not, as David Barton and other Christian nationalists argue, evangelical Christians. Painfully aware of the wars of religion in Europe and England, the founders wanted to avoid the entanglement of church and state while guaranteeing freedom of religion. In so doing, they were drawing on the ideas of Roger Williams, a former Puritan who founded the Baptist tradition in America. Williams wanted to separate the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a wall of separation – in large measure because he wanted to protect the integrity of the faith from interference by the state. The First Amendment has worked remarkably well throughout American history, and those who would seek to abrogate the separation of church and state are actually working against their own interests.

Randall Balmer, the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College, is an award-winning historian, a CNN contributor, and commentator on religion in North America. After earning his PhD from Princeton University, he taught at Columbia University for twenty-seven years before coming to Dartmouth in 2012. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, Emory, and Northwestern universities and in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School from 2004 to 2008. He is the author of eighteen books, including Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter and Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. His second book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, now in its fifth edition, was made into an award-winning, three-part PBS documentary. Dr. Balmer was nominated for an Emmy for writing and hosting that series.

He is a columnist for the Valley News and the Santa Fe New Mexican. His commentaries appear in newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Des Moines Register. In 2024, he was given the Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion from the American Academy of Religion.