The upcoming Civil Discourse Pilot event takes its format from the Friday Forums, established in the 1980s by Al Denman. Pictured above, Denman was a longtime Antioch professor who valued dialogue as a means to understanding, empathy and social change — the foundations on which the Friday Forums were built. (Submitted photos)
Speak out, listen at upcoming Friday Forum
- Published: August 19, 2025
Local organizers are reviving a local tradition of civil discourse with a new Friday Forum event, “What Happens When Voices Are Silenced?” set for 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 22, in McGregor Hall, Room 113, at Antioch College.
The event is the second half of a Civil Discourse Pilot project that launched in July, organized by villagers April Wolford and Marianne MacQueen and supported by the YS Community Foundation. As the News reported in June, the pilot is aimed at encouraging respectful dialogue on divisive issues and ultimately strengthening the community and its understanding of the democratic process.
The upcoming Friday Forum event will feature a panel of four speakers: George Hall, treasurer of the Dayton Student Chapter Federalist Society; recent YSHS graduate Jane Chambers; Laila Shaikh, founder of Students for Justice in Palestine at University of Cincinnati; and YS News Publisher Cheryl Durgans. The panelists will present their perspectives on topics including book bans and censorship in schools, punishments imposed for protesting or speaking out, online shaming and “doxxing” and crackdowns on student demonstrations on college campuses. The panel discussion will be followed by small-group discussions.
A youth program, facilitated by the local chapter of the National Conference for Community and Justice, or NCCJ, will run alongside the event with age-appropriate activities focused on freedom of speech. Youth participants will then join adults for small group discussions at the end of the evening.
The upcoming event draws its inspiration and format from the Antioch College Friday Forums established in the 1980s by longtime professor Al Denman, who died in 2019. Between 1983 and 1987, Denman moderated 100 weekly forums aimed at encouraging respectful debate on pressing public issues, with both students and members of the wider community in attendance.
Denman, who spent 28 years at Antioch College teaching religion, philosophy and law, wrote in an outline for the program that he wanted the forums to be “regular, sustained and capable of handling the most controversial issues” — and the Forums didn’t stray from that expressed intent, centering wide-ranging and sometimes provocative issues of both national and local importance.
In January 1986, the forum tackled “The Abortion Deadlock: Is There Room for Compromise?” The following year, in November, “Ten Speed Ahead” centered around the pros and cons of building the bike path that now runs through the village on a former railway line; now generally accepted as a vibrant feature of village life, in 1987, there was widespread debate about the pros and cons of the bike path.
One of the most notorious planned Friday Forums aimed to invite the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan to speak; read more about the reactions to that suggestion in a page 4 letter in this week’s issue from Jim Malarkey, who is set to moderate the upcoming Friday Forum event.
MacQueen told the News last week that Denman, who studied theology, sociology and social ethics at Boston University, Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Law School, was committed to diversity and tolerance, and saw dialogue as a powerful tool for social change.
“As a person, I think, and in his professional work, he exemplified an interest in saying, ‘What do you think? I want to listen to you,’” MacQueen said. “We want to continue that tradition; we’re standing on his shoulders.”
At the foundation of the forums, Denman wrote in his outline that there would be an “internalized norm among students, faculty, staff and townspeople that would be unswerving in dedication to treating everyone with dignity, no matter how repulsive their points of view.”
Noting this foundational statement, MacQueen and Wolford acknowledged that hearing opposing or conflicting viewpoints can be fraught. That’s why, they said, mutually agreed-upon ground rules, which set a baseline of respect and don’t allow folks to denigrate or dehumanize one another, are crucial for events like the Friday Forums.
“Jim Malarkey sent us something that [former Antioch College President] Douglas McGregor wrote that said, ‘We will listen to people, we will be respectful,’” MacQueen said. “But he also said, ‘We have ground rules, and if you don’t obey our ground rules, you’re out of here.’”
MacQueen referred to a 1952 statement from McGregor, in which he affirmed Antioch’s commitment to “the central values of the American way of life.” The statement was written during a time when McCarthyism was at its peak, and Antioch College faced intense scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, over its alleged harboring of students and faculty with Marxist leanings.
McGregor, who later testified before the Ohio HUAC, wrote in the Antioch College News: “We believe in the inherent worth of the individual, and in his and her freedom to disagree. … We believe in freedom of inquiry and of expression. … Such values can be relied on only within a system of commonly accepted ground rules. The ends do not justify any means.”
“Which is the heart of what we’re trying to get at,” Wolford said, noting the upcoming forum’s focus on silencing and suppression, and pointing to the ways polarized environments can make folks both reluctant to hear others out or to speak their own minds.
“When there’s a contentious issue, there’s an effort almost to silence each other — through online harassment, accusations or other means,” she said. “Creating a culture in which people can’t speak their thoughts does not change the opinions people are holding.”
After the conclusion of the Friday Forum event, the YS Community Foundation will assess the two Civil Discourse Pilot events and decide if more programming will be offered in the future. MacQueen said the first event in the pilot, “Running for Local Office — It’s Important,” was attended by about 30 participants, who showed up to hear panelists representing each body of local government discuss the ins and outs of being an elected official.
“It was a brief 101 on running for local office, but I felt like the presenters were authentic and honest about the value of local office and even the stress of being criticized; it really went very well,” she said.
“And it does seem like it encouraged people to run,” she added, noting that two local residents present at the event later filed petitions with Greene County to run for local office.
Whether the Civil Discourse Pilot develops into a long-running program or not, MacQueen and Wolford said they hope Yellow Springs will continue to have conversations that employ elements of civil discourse — and importantly, that villagers will continue to talk and listen to one another.
“People have differing opinions — that’s a good thing,” MacQueen said. “But if our reaction is to reject or silence, then we can’t deal with the issues we have to face together.”
“And we’ll only understand each other’s perspectives if we engage,” Wolford added. “If we want to stay divided, we can already see the path to that.”
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