As the summer of 2016 wound down, the University of Chicago’s dean of students sent a letter to the school’s incoming cohort of freshmen telling them not to expect the sort of coddling that had become worryingly commonplace at elite American colleges. His welcome to the class of 2020 aimed to introduce them to the school’s climate of unadulterated academic rigor and heady debate—the Chicago brand. This dean, John Ellison, didn’t mean to bring down the full weight of a national conversation about campus politics on his university.
“My letter was meant for our students and was not really meant to garner so much attention,” said Ellison via email, when he politely declined my request for an interview. He hadn’t wanted the letter to go viral or to inspire—and require—reactions from alumni, academics, and administrators, many of them stooping to defend these censorious habits, most of them actually critical of just one incendiary sentence: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where intellectuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
Really, Ellison’s missive was just a cover letter for a monograph: a history of Chicago’s commitment to academic freedom by Dean of the College John Boyer. Ellison sent another similar letter atop Boyer’s brief history this month, making no mention of “trigger warnings” or “safe spaces” but pledging an “unwavering commitment to academic freedom and free expression” all the same. In the summer of 2016, when the Christakises of Yale and Mizzou’s Melissa Click loomed in recent memory, the Ellison letter proved a salve for some, a shock to others. Last year’s buzzwords— those tools of an over-sensitive undergraduate seeking to shield himself from minor discomforts—became shorthand for how the hell’d these kids get so soft. And then at some point they lost their buzz.
For 2017’s college administrator, fear of physical violence overwhelms the theoretical concerns that made that first letter famous—according to constitutional scholar and University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone. “Now, you’ve got Nazis marching around. The concern about things like trigger warnings has been eclipsed by a much more serious threat,” Stone says. His 2012 “Statement on principles of free inquiry,” known to Chicagoans as the “Stone Statement,” clarified the university’s commitment to free speech before preempted the current crisis-level aversion to free expression. Between those too easily offended and those too happy to offend, Stone perceives a stalemate. Both sides, to borrow a phrase, are to blame: Conservative students’ escalating impishness has risen, over the years, to meet campus leftists’ corresponding oversensitivity, Stone says.
He compares them—these progressive student protesters, notably bolstered at Berkeley and Middlebury by anarchist interlopers—to Southern segregationists whose violent rebukes made national news out of peaceful civil rights demonstrations. And by 2015, college students’ distaste for debate likewise drove the day. Stone co-authored a “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression”—known as the “Chicago Principles,” which Princeton, Purdue, and American University adopted later that same year. And it’s clearer than ever now that the underlying principles Ellison’s letter extolled, a respect for free speech and civil engagement, need to be explicitly taught, not just agreed upon by faculty or practiced and preached by a far-sighted president.
Princeton’s president Christopher Eisgruber, another constitutional lawyer, penned a commencement address and corresponding article last spring on the cultivation of civil discourse and free inquiry—virtues that are thriving, contrary to elsewhere, on the Ivy League campus. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum told Eisgruber after a lecture and some verbal sparring with Princetonians, “This is what should happen on college campuses.” (The same Santorum decried a “crisis-level plague of indecency on our campuses” in a candid interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD last year.) There was a time when Eisgruber wouldn’t have found a civil exchange between undergraduates and a former U.S. senator—even a conservative Republican—quite so remarkable. “If you had asked me a little more than four years ago, when I took office, ‘Do you think free speech is something you need to speak up and defend?’—I would have said, well, it’s our common heritage, so fundamental to what we do at universities.” Since Eisgruber assumed the post in 2013, “It’s become apparent that we really do need to be talking about it.” And, today, he tells me, “It can feel precarious. It doesn’t take a lot of people to heckle a speaker or shut someone down.”
Princeton professor Keith Whittington, author of a forthcoming book on campus free speech, found the outbreak of mob violence at Middlebury in March a turning point, and inspiration to finallywrite book that had been brewing in the back of his mind. “The extreme to which that went was shocking,” Whittington says, noting their fearsome persistence: Protesters pursued Murray and his interviewer from one venue to the next and swarmed their car as they tried to leave campus. “But the fact that students were trying to shut down a speaker? That should no longer be surprising, which is why we ought to take it more seriously.”
Letting the air fill with words and ideas you oppose or dislike, and waiting your turn to rebut, or respectfully declining to react—these are skills even the rowdiest student protesters must have mastered at some point. “What you learned in kindergarten can be a useful guide for what you ought to be doing right now,” Whittington says, when I ask him what advice he would offer undergraduates. There’s a place for instruction in the virtue of free expression, he believes, at freshman orientations, right alongside inevitable warnings against binge drinking and sexual assault.
Not a new idea, this.
At Indiana’s Purdue University, where President Mitch Daniels tells me freshman orientation is under way, they’ve offered a unit of instruction to practice—and “unpack” in silly-serious skits—the principles of free speech Purdue pledges to uphold.
Thanks to its president—the popular two-term governor of Indiana and, per columnist George Will (not to mention most every right-thinking Republican), “the president America needs”—Purdue University leads the pack in tackling every excess and affliction of a typical American university. (It’s a rare higher-education story that doesn’t call for some example of how Purdue, and Daniels, does it better.) Their income share agreements permit market-friendly loan repayment at rates predetermined by different majors’ likely future earnings; their purchase of reputable for-profit Kaplan U savvily preempted higher ed’s inevitable “tech disruption,” out ahead of the otherwise squeamish industry; their remedial orientation module on the indispensable principles of free expression is the envy of many a college currently waking up to a generation’s dangerous aversion to free thought. Daniels is cautiously hopeful, he tells me. “Excesses of authoritarianism,” he says, reflecting on the last year and a half, “got the attention of folks who hadn’t paid much before.”
“We detect a lot more interest than a couple years ago in other schools trying to establish—or reestablish—a climate of openness and freedom of expression,” Daniels tells me. “We’ve been asked to share [the orientation module] fairly widely, especially in the last year.” It’s even the envy of the University of Chicago, I’m told. At multiple conferences this summer where colleges administrators presented their orientation materials and borrowed each other’s ideas, representatives from other universities approached Purdue’s student life directors about their free speech program—and Chicago was among them.
“There’s a market for it,” says Daniels, who also helmed the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush and worked, before that, as a business executive—“and I think a growing one,” he adds. Purdue may offer a model for the survival, and growth, of the American university but it’s a model dependent, as ever, on the unfettered exchange of ideas, the bedrock principles a youthful appetite for censorship threatens with extinction. (Purdue modeled its own “Statement of Commitment to Freedom of Expression” on the Chicago Principles, recall.)
A growing awareness there’s something amiss when universities, of all places, undermine the free exchange of ideas is in itself a promising development. Just how far the public’s attention to Ellison’s letter surpassed his expectations, for instance, suggests a certain civic resilience in the knowledge that our self-government’s at stake. “If individually colleges and universities want to disgrace themselves by allowing this basic freedom to be trespassed, then that’s their problem,” says Daniels, presidentially. “But if we’re raising a generation of young people with an inverted view of the First Amendment, that’s everybody’s problem.”
