ESU Celebrates National Constitution Day/Week

constitution day

Posted by: Elizabeth Richardson on September 9, 2026, No Comments

East Stroudsburg University will be celebrating National Constitution Day with a keynote presentation by M. Ryan Tsapatsaris, Ph.D. on Monday, September 14 and a celebration on Thursday, September 17 with Kemp Library’s 60th Anniversary as a Federal Depository Library including exhibits and free pocket constitutions.

Dr. Tsapatsaris’s presentation, “On the Origins of Institutional Neutrality: Academic Freedom in British North America,” will be held at 6 p.m. in Lower Dansbury (the Green Street entrance of number 19 on the campus map) and is free and open to the public.

Dr. Tsapatsaris is a Master of Law Candidate at Penn Carey Law and an independent researcher working with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). His primary areas of interest are digital culture, intellectual dispute, and higher education. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, as well as an MPhil in Liberal Arts and an M.A. in American Studies.

Ryan’s dissertation research focused on “academic cancel culture” – the contemporary practice of scholars using social media to attack their colleagues. Continuing this scholarly trajectory, Ryan just concluded in-depth interviews with 25 cancelled/sanctioned scholars for FIRE. An analysis of the interviews will appear as a short form blog post and a longer form report in the coming months. Other recent scholarly contributions include a methods framework for evaluating temporally-distant media artifacts (2025) and theory of “platform counterpublics” in the International Journal of Communication (2023). More public-facing work includes a short piece criticizing ideological uniformity for “Queer Majority”, as well as appearing as a guest on The Dissidents podcast and presenting his research to the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism’s (FAIR) National Chapter meeting.

The Celebration on September 17 will take place in Kemp Library (number 36 on the campus map) from 2-4 p.m. and will include exhibits, free pocket Constitutions, cake and refreshments.

For more information about Constitution Day at ESU visit our website.