Commentary: Is it time for the University of Chicago to abandon cherished neutrality and join the fight?

Yahoo

06-02-2025

The University of Chicago is marking the 10th anniversary of the 2015 restatement by a faculty committee of the school's commitment to free speech values known as the 'Chicago Principles.' This celebration is a somber occasion, for intellectual freedom is under siege on multiple fronts, presenting higher education with challenges that are likely to test foundational values as never before.
The U. of C. describes its free speech ethos as a tradition extending back to its founding and reaffirmed at various junctures in its history. A key moment in that history is a 1967 report on 'the university's role in political and social action' by a faculty committee chaired by my late father, Harry Kalven Jr., a law professor and First Amendment expert.
Known as the Kalven Report, the document sets forth the policy — the 'presumption' — that universities as institutions should not take positions on the issues of the day. 'The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student,' it states. 'The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.' When a university takes a position on a political issue, so the argument goes, it inhibits the intellectual freedom of those within the institution who disagree with that position.
The Kalven Report has been much in the news since the campus protests last spring calling for divestment from Israel in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the ensuing Israeli onslaught. More than 25 institutions have adopted policies of 'institutional neutrality' modeled on it, in the hope of avoiding the debacles that unfolded on campuses where university leadership was besieged by irate students, faculty, donors and members of Congress.
Although I do not recall discussing the report with my father, I have intimate knowledge of his thinking about issues of intellectual freedom at the time he drafted it. After his death, I spent years immersed in his papers, completing a book on the First Amendment he was working on when he died. (Titled 'A Worthy Tradition: Freedom of Speech in America,' it was published in 1988.)
Perhaps the best single expression of his orientation at the time of the Kalven Committee is an article he wrote several years earlier on New York Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court decision that found 'the central meaning of the First Amendment' in the proposition that criticism of government cannot be made a crime in the United States. He hailed the decision as 'a happy revolution in free speech doctrine' and in the years that followed often quoted the Supreme Court's felicitous formulation that debate on public issues should be 'uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.'
His papers leave little doubt that those were the values he intended the report to serve. Its history over the decades since, however, has been more complicated. The document begins with a modest statement to the effect that it is intended as 'a point of departure' for discussion by the university community. Perhaps it is simply the nature of bureaucracies, but the report almost immediately hardened into institutional dogma, invoked again and again, in the view of its critics, not to ensure space for vigorous discussion about possible exceptions that would overcome the presumption against collective action but to shut such discussion down.
The upshot is that a significant number of students and faculty have come to regard it as a tool of censorship rather than a guarantor of free speech.
With the election of President Donald Trump, the state of play has now radically shifted. In view of what has transpired during his first 10 days in office, it's clear his administration will bring to bear maximum pressure on higher education to enforce ideological conformity and to punish dissent. It has formidable tools for doing so — chief among them, the withholding of federal funds essential to research and operations unless various conditions are met, legal challenges and public humiliations such as were meted out last spring to several university presidents by legislative committees. It is critically important to see this for what it is: a multipronged censorship regime that strikes at the 'central meaning of the First Amendment' — the freedom to criticize government — and at the essence of academic freedom.
Read in this context, the distribution of emphasis in the Kalven Report now falls on this passage: 'From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.'
These words are unequivocal. They state an obligation, a moral imperative. The university today, however, is a significantly different institution than it was when they were written. It is less a community of scholars who have a measure of meaningful participation in self-governance than a corporation, heavily reliant on government funding and mega-donors, in which power is concentrated in the office of the president/CEO and many faculty, students and staff feel disenfranchised. These changes in the character of the university give the Trump administration and major donors with political agendas leverage to impose their will.
The paradox of freedom of speech is that it's like the air we breathe — essential to life but easily taken for granted. Sometimes, repression has the effect of illuminating and making palpable the thing itself. Such moral clarity can provide a basis for resistance and solidarity. The question is: What are universities prepared to risk in defense of their most essential values?
That question is particularly pointed in the case of the U. of C. Will its promotion of freedom of expression and inquiry prove in the end to have been a marketing strategy that can be discarded in the face of harsh political realities? Or will the university assume a leadership role by demonstrating what it means, in the words of the Kalven Report, 'to defend its interests and its values' against threats to 'the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry'?
I don't presume to know the answers to those questions. I know only that the stakes are high and our fidelity to the principles we claim to live by will be severely tested.
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Jamie Kalven is founding executive director of the Invisible Institute, which was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes in 2024. His reporting first brought the police murder of Laquan McDonald case to public attention.
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