Latest news with #ChicagoPrinciples
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Commentary: Committing to the Chicago Principles of free speech is the only way forward for higher education
I've been a faculty member at the University of Chicago for 27 years; for 12 of them, I was married to the university's late president, Robert J. Zimmer. Bob was well known for his endorsement of the 'Chicago Principles' addressing academic free speech, which were formulated by a faculty committee he appointed in 2014. Now, in 2025, at a time when opposing ideological forces threaten to rip higher education apart altogether, it's clearer than ever we need to observe these principles if we are to maintain our universities as places for inquiry and learning rather than the nurturing of ideologies. First of all, let's be clear. Academic free speech and public free speech are not the same, and the Chicago Principles refer to the former, repeating a view of speech on campus with roots deep in the university's history. 'There is not an institution of learning in the country in which freedom of teaching is more absolutely untrammeled than in the University of Chicago,' remarked university President William Rainey Harper in 1902. Thirty years later, at a time of tension over a communist speaker on campus, President Robert M. Hutchins wrote that students 'should have freedom to discuss any problem that presents itself.' Today, when being either for or against the position of our national government comes with undue risk and when free speech seems to many to be an insoluble problem, these principles — what they allow and what they do not — offer us simple guidelines as the American university faces two crises, both political in nature. The first crisis is one of free speech — and free thought — under attack. Faculty across the country face constraints on the ability to express a liberal opinion on any controversial matter, especially if related to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) or other 'woke' topics. One of my friends from another university worries that despite her U.S. passport (she's originally Japanese) the ICE men will kidnap her off the street because her work is in gender, disability and health. She doesn't expect her administration to step in if she's detained — too many college administrations are primarily worried about losing additional government funding. My friend is not being paranoid, and that's pretty terrifying in a country known for tolerance and freedom. Professors and students have been shut down or removed (or have fled the U.S.) for their views. Just think of Rümeysa Öztürk, whose great crime appears to have been co-authoring a pro-Palestinian op-ed for her school newspaper while on a valid F-1 visa. Never mind the Chicago Principles, ICE's overreach in her case violates the First Amendment: The government shall not interfere with freedom of expression. Öztürk was not disruptive or violent. She simply published a point of view. Are we willing to let go of this democratic cornerstone that enables public discourse and government accountability? Don't we want to push back even a little? The second crisis is arguably one of pushing free speech too far. Some students and faculty on campuses around the country seem to be confusing vandalism and disruption with the function of learning. Is using a bullhorn an example of academic free speech? If you thereby chill the main function of a university, offering an education, by disrupting classes and students, the Chicago Principles would say it's not. Nor is taking over a campus quad, vandalizing university property, throwing paint or harassing people you disagree with. Free speech on campus is enabled by certain limits of time, place and manner that keep it manageable for all. The university 'may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment … or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the university.' Without such limits a university will have difficulty following its calling. If the future of the university itself is now at stake, as so many seem to agree, it would be a good time to reinstate our commitment to these principles. University presidents need not have to decide whether or not to call in the police if tent cities spring up on campus and administrative buildings are taken over. It should never get to that stage in the first place. ____ Shadi Bartsch is a professor in humanities at the University of Chicago and former director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. _____
Chicago Tribune
3 days ago
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Shadi Bartsch: Committing to the Chicago Principles of free speech is the only way forward for higher education
I've been a faculty member at the University of Chicago for 27 years; for 12 of them, I was married to the university's late president, Robert J. Zimmer. Bob was well known for his endorsement of the 'Chicago Principles' addressing academic free speech, which were formulated by a faculty committee he appointed in 2014. Now, in 2025, at a time when opposing ideological forces threaten to rip higher education apart altogether, it's clearer than ever we need to observe these principles if we are to maintain our universities as places for inquiry and learning rather than the nurturing of ideologies. First of all, let's be clear. Academic free speech and public free speech are not the same, and the Chicago Principles refer to the former, repeating a view of speech on campus with roots deep in the university's history. 'There is not an institution of learning in the country in which freedom of teaching is more absolutely untrammeled than in the University of Chicago,' remarked university President William Rainey Harper in 1902. Thirty years later, at a time of tension over a communist speaker on campus, President Robert M. Hutchins wrote that students 'should have freedom to discuss any problem that presents itself.' Today, when being either for or against the position of our national government comes with undue risk and when free speech seems to many to be an insoluble problem, these principles — what they allow and what they do not — offer simple us simple guidelines as the American university faces two crises, both political in nature. The first crisis is one of free speech — and free thought — under attack. Faculty across the country face constraints on the ability to express a liberal opinion on any controversial matter, especially if related to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) or other 'woke' topics. One of my friends from another university worries that despite her U.S. passport (she's originally Japanese) the ICE men will kidnap her off the street because her work is in gender, disability and health. She doesn't expect her administration to step in if she's detained — too many college administrations are primarily worried about losing additional government funding. My friend is not being paranoid, and that's pretty terrifying in a country known for tolerance and freedom. Professors and students have been shut down or removed (or have fled the U.S.) for their views. Just think of Rümeysa Öztürk, whose great crime appears to have been co-authoring a pro-Palestinian op-ed for her school newspaper while on a valid F-1 visa. Never mind the Chicago Principles, ICE's overreach in her case violates the First Amendment: The government shall not interfere with freedom of expression. Öztürk was not disruptive or violent. She simply published a point of view. Are we willing to let go of this democratic cornerstone that enables public discourse and government accountability? Don't we want to push back even a little? Eli J. Finkel: Can universities take the fear out of debate in our hostile climate?The second crisis is arguably one of pushing free speech too far. Some students and faculty on campuses around the country seem to be confusing vandalism and disruption with the function of learning. Is using a bullhorn an example of academic free speech? If you thereby chill the main function of a university, offering an education, by disrupting classes and students, the Chicago Principles would say it's not. Nor is taking over a campus quad, vandalizing university property, throwing paint or harassing people you disagree with. Free speech on campus is enabled by certain limits of time, place and manner that keep it manageable for all. The university 'may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment … or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the university.' Without such limits a university will have difficulty following its calling. If the future of the university itself is now at stake, as so many seem to agree, it would be a good time to reinstate our commitment to these principles. University presidents need not have to decide whether or not to call in the police if tent cities spring up on campus and administrative buildings are taken over. It should never get to that stage in the first place.
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Commentary: Is it time for the University of Chicago to abandon cherished neutrality and join the fight?
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. ____ 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. ___
Axios
04-02-2025
- Politics
- Axios
How free speech on college campuses is being challenged
Last week, UChicago celebrated its famous "Chicago Principles," a policy adopted by more than 100 colleges and universities that codifies free speech for students and scholars while urging institutions to remain neutral on political matters. Why it matters: New developments are testing these principles of campus free speech in Chicago and beyond. The conversation is reheating even as the war in Gaza and accompanying protests appear to be winding down. The big picture: In the past few days, tenets of the Chicago Principles have been challenged by President Trump and local writer and activist Jamie Kalven, whose father, Harry Kalven Jr., created the policy on which they are based. Driving the news: Last week, Trump signed an executive order to deport foreign students deemed "Hamas sympathizers" and "pro-jihadist" protesters. The order asks officials to show universities how to find grounds to "monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds." "We put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you," a White House fact sheet about the order says. The latest: The Trump administration upped the ante late Monday, announcing that the Department of Education will investigate five universities, including Northwestern, for "cases of antisemitism" during the Israel-Gaza war. NU officials say they will "fully comply" with investigators. Meanwhile: Jamie Kalven pushed back on a different aspect of the principles in a Sunday Tribune op-ed, saying that the time for university neutrality is over. He predicts the Trump administration will pressure universities "to enforce ideological conformity and to punish dissent" by, among other things, withholding federal funds for research and operations. Yes, but: Kalven doesn't think this contradicts his father's 1967 Kalven Report, citing one part that warns when "society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry," the university must "oppose such measures and actively defend its interests and its values." Zoom in: Axios reached out to Northwestern, University of Illinois, DePaul and UChicago to ask how they plan to respond to Trump's order. DePaul officials wrote:"DePaul has a robust Anti-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment policy and reporting mechanisms in place, and we investigate every complaint. We denounce antisemitism and will continue to do everything possible to ensure DePaul is a safe and welcoming space for every member of our diverse university community." University of Chicago representatives did not directly respond to the Kalven op-ed but said: "We are still assessing the executive order's potential impact." U of I officials said: " We continue to evaluate all directives and policy changes to understand and assess their impact and our responsibilities as more guidance becomes available." Northwestern representatives wrote:"Free expression and academic freedom are among our core values, but we have made clear that these values provide no excuse for behavior that threatens the well-being of others."
