Gift Commemorates Lifelong Reverence for First Amendment

Constitutional scholar establishes endowed chair and fellowship for freedom of expression

Richard D. McLellan took classes in Caribbean history and canoeing while a student at Michigan State University in the early 1960s. But it was the study of words and his reverence for the First Amendment that charted his course, inspiring him to establish an MSU endowed chair and fellowship focused on freedom of expression.

A respected attorney, constitutional scholar and lobbyist, McLellan earned his bachelor’s in advertising from the College of Communication Arts and Sciences in 1964, then his law degree from the University of Michigan in 1967. His career has involved consulting on fair and free elections in emerging democracies, political transitions, and private law practice. He has served in a range of public service positions in Michigan and on advisory and leadership boards in higher education—including the MSU Quello Center and MSU College of Law. Despite a varied career that has taken him around the globe, McLellan has never forgotten his roots in southwest Michigan and his first love of journalism.

“I was always interested in journalism,” he said. “When I was in high school, I was the editor of the yearbook and school newspaper. I took some assessments before college, and they said I would either be a journalist or a lawyer. Both focus on words and language. I guess that’s my thing.”

In late 2020, McLellan affirmed his regard for language and free speech by creating the John M. Engler Endowed Chair in Freedom of Expression. He also jump-started the Richard D. McLellan Graduate Fellowship Fund to support graduate student research in freedom of expression, including the legal and social implications of digital and social media.

“Richard is a passionate supporter of free speech and believes in the importance of high-quality, rigorous research to inform policy,” said Johannes Bauer, Quello Chair in Media and Information Policy. “The gifts enable MSU to recruit top scholars to research and teach important and controversial issues related to free speech, and to educate the next generation of citizens and scholars.”

For the love of words

McLellan was born in Peoria, Illinois. He lived in multiple countries and U.S. cities before his family settled in the Michigan village of Paw Paw. His father was in the food business, running a pineapple factory in Hawaii when McLellan was 2 years old. After that, his parents relocated to Long Beach, Indiana, Mexico City and New York before moving to Michigan.

When it came time for college, McLellan knew he wanted to go someplace other than the small Mid-Michigan college where his mother and father met. He picked MSU, and started out in journalism, buffered by several financial scholarships.

“I switched to communications after a while, and my adviser placed me in the honors college when he saw I was having a hard time deciding what to do,” he said. “I took anything and everything that started after 10 a.m. and ended before 3 p.m. before graduating and deciding to go to law school.”

McLellan said his passion for freedom of expression ignited at MSU—primarily through his activities with student government and political groups. When a student socialist group was barred from bringing in a speaker from the Communist Party, McLellan fought for the right for the speaker to be heard. He also helped transform regulations that made it difficult to bring speakers to campus, but not without putting up a fight and rallying diverse political points-of-view outside his own.

“As a student, I felt you should be able to listen to anyone,” he said. “I might not have agreed with what they said, but I felt it was wrong to ban free speech.”

That early involvement in free speech shaped McLellan’s lifelong quest to uphold the First Amendment and civil discourse. A believer in education, he shared his knowledge through state-wide political leadership programs, and taught and lectured at MSU in the College of ComArtSci and the College of Law.

Fostering Freedom of Expression

About three years ago, McLellan was undergoing rehabilitation related to an illness and was visited by MSU colleagues. He told them he wanted to contribute to programs that fostered principles he had cared about his whole life. Through conversation, he arrived at the idea of establishing the endowed scholarship and fellowship devoted to free expression.

McLellan said his primary intent is to institutionalize free speech as a value during a time when many principles of free expression are being challenged. He remembers the events he saw unfolding in emerging democracies in the 1990s that hadn’t had free speech in decades, and how the principle flourished and transformed nations.

Often, he reminisces about his times at MSU, and the days when he worked with other students to ensure all points-of-view could be heard.

“I figure that every year, there is a whole new group of people like I was,” he reflected. “They are young and interested in free speech. My hope is they go to MSU and find a platform to explore their interests through communications arts or through the law. I just know the issue of free expression never goes away.”

In addition to McLellan’s recent gifts, McLellan has supported MSU by contributing to programs that support the exchange of ideas between law students and high school journalists through seminars and lectures on freedom of information and expression. To date, McLellan has gifted or pledged more than $3 million to the university to support research and education in the communication arts and sciences and law areas.

By Ann Kammerer

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

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Gift Commemorates Lifelong Reverence for First Amendment