UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Penn State Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences Bradford Vivian recently received two awards recognizing his commitment to first-rate scholarship.
Vivian is the winner of the National Communication Association’s (NCA) 2024 Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression, and the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award in English from George Mason University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
The Haiman Award is in recognition of Vivian’s most recent book, "Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education," published by Oxford University Press in 2023.
The award committee called the book “a meticulously researched and expertly analyzed examination of one of the most pressing contemporary threats to free speech.”
“Through in-depth case studies of college and university controversies surrounding free expression, Dr. Vivian critically evaluates the current assault on and misconceptions of free speech in academia, and offers comprehensive, bipartisan correctives,” the committee wrote. “By achieving this balance, Dr. Vivian advances scholarship on free speech while demonstrating its real-world applicability.”
Vivian is now a four-time NCA award winner, having previously received the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, the Critical/Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year Award, and the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award.
He said it’s “always an honor” to be recognized by his peers in the communication field.
“The Haiman Award is particularly meaningful because it recognizes scholarship in freedom of expression, which is so needed today since that freedom is under threat in many facets of civic life,” Vivian said. “Many people inside and outside of academia seem to have responded positively to ‘Campus Misinformation.’ The exchanges that I've had with various audiences indicate that they've found it to be a constructive analysis, and support inside Penn State has been wonderful.”
Vivian received his bachelor’s degree in English from George Mason in 1996. He and this year’s other award recipients will be honored at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ signature event, Community and Catalysts: Achievements, Awards, and Innovations, which celebrates alumni, faculty and students who have made significant contributions to their fields, communities and the university.
“I truly discovered what I wanted to do in my academic and professional life at George Mason, so it's immensely gratifying,” Vivian said. “My ability to become a professor began there.”
Vivian is currently at work on his next book, an examination of the ways people talked about universities and higher education during different periods of Western history.
“I'd like to help us expand and enrich today's relatively narrow, partisan debates over higher education with frequently forgotten touchstones,” said Vivian, the former director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s Center for Democratic Deliberation.
A specialist in rhetoric and public controversies over collective memories of past events, Vivian’s other books include “Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture,” published by Oxford University Press, “Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again,” published by Penn State Press, and “Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation,” published by SUNY Press. He is also co-editor, with Anne Teresa Demo, of “Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form: Sighting Memory,” published by Routledge.
Vivian’s research has also been published in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, History and Memory, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. In addition, he’s written op-ed columns for The Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among other publications.