The U.S. Supreme Court increasingly leverages a rigid interpretation of the Free Speech Clause to strike regulations that address campaign financing, health care warnings, tax disclosures, collective bargaining agreements, and consumer protections. History has become little more than a slogan that the majority periodically invokes but seldom accurately evaluates. That lack of nuance augments the justices’ authority to articulate absolutist-sounding rules to the detriment of legislatures’ exercise of traditional governmental functions. Jurists would do better to rely on a more proportionate and less categorical approach to decide whether laws impose direct or peripheral burdens on communications. The level of safeguards enjoyed by expressions should be gauged by their value to political self-determination, personal development, or informational contribution. The degree of protections that speech enjoys should be balanced against countervailing government interests, alternatives available to speakers, fit between law and public ends, and relevant history.

I examine the dynamics of implementing at-scale reforms to provide meaningful educational opportunities to disadvantaged students in Mexico. To effectively reduce social inequality and exclusion, education policies need a mix of system-wide and targeted efforts that are implemented at scale and sustained long enough to become institutionalized. The resiliency of those policies requires an elusive balance between system-wide and targeted efforts, alignment between federal and state initiatives, and supportive politics. However, the politics of implementing system-wide reforms are more contentious than those involving targeted efforts because they disrupt entrenched interests, making such efforts harder to sustain. Targeted policies, while easier to implement, reinforce the segregation of students into different educational tracks of varying quality.

A newly founded, small-scale research university geared toward international standards and competitiveness, ShanghaiTech University has three STEM divisions (information science and technology, physical science and technology, and life science and technology) and three HASS divisions (creativity and arts, entrepreneurship and management, and the humanities). The university’s undergraduate education receives its inspiration from the whole-person approach, and gives particular weight to a “broadly based and in-depth” pedagogical framework, in which the liberal arts make up an indispensable component. Through interdisciplinary curricular planning, small class sizes, emphasis on interaction and openness in learning, and international exchange programs, I explore effective measures to grow general education at ShanghaiTech as well as address challenges that are unique to a Chinese tech university.