Singaporean teenager Amos Yee will be giving his first ever public talk at the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts next week.
Entitled ‘Jailed for Dissent: An Open Conversation with Amos Yee’ the event is to be held on Monday, 13 Nov. It will be free and open to the public.
The talk is organised by the Harvard College Open Campus Initiative, which seeks to “encourage a diverse discourse on Harvard’s campus, and to push back against ideological forces in academia, and in society more broadly, that hinder open discussion and freedom of speech.”
The initiative said that it is excited to host Yee this coming Monday. It added:
“Yee first came to international attention in 2015 when he was sentenced to jail in Singapore after releasing videos that were critical of the country’s late prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Only 19 years old, he self-identifies as an anarcho-communist.
“In September of this year, Yee was granted political asylum in the United States. We look forward to a brief discussion of Yee’s background and story, followed by an open conversation with students.”
Announcing the talk on his YouTube channel, Yee indicated that Harvard representatives will pay for his travel and accommodation expenses during his trip.
He also stressed that the talk will not just be a speech, but it will be a conversation with attendees, featuring an “80-90 percent Q&A.”