The University of Chicago is marking the 10th anniversary of its widely embraced principles for campus free speech by convening a review led by sceptics of academia’s involvement in the US’ major political debates.
The Chicago Principles were created in 2014 after a nationwide series of incidents involving students trying to bar controversial commencement speakers, as a way of making clear that free expression should be an essential part of campus culture.
The principles – encouraging students to robustly debate campus speakers but not shout them down – have since been adopted by more than 100 other US colleges and universities. Yet they’ve also encountered recent challenges by groups of faculty and leadership around the US who question whether the principles do enough to calm campuses in a nation of sharpening and coarsening political divides.
With the 10th anniversary of the principles coming next year, Chicago is inaugurating a new Forum on Free Inquiry and Expression, with a choice of leaders that suggests sympathy for conservative critiques of academia’s political voice.
For the forum’s first executive director, the university has selected Tony Banout, an expert in religion and philosophy who serves on the board of the Heterodox Academy, an advocacy group that aims to promote conservative viewpoints in higher education in the name of “ideological diversity”.
And as faculty director of the forum, Chicago has appointed Tom Ginsburg, a professor of international law and political science who argues that US university leaders have been speaking out too much on matters of public policy that don’t directly concern their local institutional interests.
A central role of the forum, Professor Ginsburg explained in an interview, would be the creation of in-class teachings and extracurricular events that are designed to help students absorb and embrace the underlying concepts of the Chicago Principles. As at many other US colleges and universities, he said, such courses and gatherings would not be mandatory for students, but strongly encouraged.
“We want to make sure that we’re giving them the options,” Professor Ginsburg said.
The forum will also play a role in marking the anniversary of the Chicago Principles with a major conference on the question of updating them. That comes as at least two other nationwide groups in recent months have started alternatives to the Chicago framework.
One of those efforts is led by scholars at Princeton University who caution institutional leaders against taking positions on controversial policy issues, but then welcome outside parties, including donors, getting more involved in improving “the vigour of inquiry on campus”.
Professor Ginsburg said he shared the concern that university leaders could have a chilling effect on non-tenured faculty and other staff if they were to issue policy pronouncements on topics beyond a realm “that affects our community directly”.
He cited such examples as the numerous US university presidents who condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying that this kind of statement could influence a young researcher in global policy who might fear being seen as challenging institutional authority. He even questioned the wisdom, in some instances, of protesting violence against minority populations.
“We should be very active on anything involving those issues when they affect our campus immediately,” Professor Ginsburg said of university leaders. “But we don’t necessarily want the president of the university commenting on a hate crime that occurs 3,000 miles away.”
A University of Chicago spokesman said: “The Chicago Forum and its leaders are committed to the non-partisan work of strengthening the understanding, practice and advancement of free and open discourse, as reflected in the wide range of views and ideologies of speakers at the Chicago Forum’s launch event.
“Promoting viewpoint diversity is vital for free and fruitful inquiry. It does not imply sympathy for any particular ideology.”
