On October 8th, 2018 Dr. Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School visited the department to discuss the state of our political system, free speech, and the media. He spoke to Dr. Varacalli’s constitutional law class about “disinformation on social media” and its impact on our political discourse. Dr. Patterson also met with a group of faculty and political science majors over lunch to discuss the stage of the discipline.
Dr. Patterson is author of the books Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism and The Vanishing Voter. His earlier work, The Unseeing Eye, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century.
