Tony Banout and Tom Ginsburg direct the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, which received a $100 million gift last year. They are also editors of “The Chicago Canon on Free Inquiry and Expression,” a new book that collects foundational texts that inform the university’s free speech tradition.
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Read the transcript.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:31 Origin of book
07:14 UChicago’s founding principles
12:41 Free speech in a university context
19:17 2015 UChicago committee report
32:03 1967 Kalven report
38:02 Institutional neutrality
57:41 Applying free speech principles beyond the university
01:04:21 Future steps for the Forum
01:06:35 Outro
Show notes:
The University of Chicago’s Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression (2015)
Chicago Statement: University and Faculty Body Support (last updated 2024)
Editor's note: This abridged transcript highlights key discussions from the podcast. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Please reference the full unedited transcript for direct quotes.
UChicago’s free speech legacy
NICO PERRINO, HOST: In the introduction, you write, “We assert that the University of Chicago is founded on, has operated through, and continues to extend a tradition of free inquiry and expression.” If you go back to President William Rainey Harper’s speech in 1902, he said, “The principle of complete freedom of speech on all subjects has been from the beginning regarded as fundamental in the University of Chicago.”
Was this unique for a university in the early part of the 20th century or the late 19th century?
TOM GINSBURG, GUEST: I think we were just really lucky in that we are in some sense an embodiment of the progressive era in which we were founded. Harvard and Yale and these other schools were founded for very different purposes, much more as very elite institutions. But the ideas that were crystallizing and what became known as the progressive era included a commitment to science and service of society.
The idea that the university was a democratic space—where it didn’t matter who your parents were, or what race or gender you were, and where you could succeed based on your merits— was a defining aspect of this era. We could also see a whole bunch of concepts crystallize, including the idea of academic freedom, which one might associate with John Dewey, who was one of our early professors, who went on to found the American Association of University Professors.
Legal scholars often point out that the First Amendment didn’t really mean that much in a legal sense until the 1920s and 1930s. Before then, it really wasn’t used to strike state laws very much. There’s a kind of sense in which all these things came together around this progressive era, and our early leaders wrestled with them and adopted, from the very beginning, this idea of freedom of speech as a fundamental constitutional principle.
Constraints on free speech in a university context
PERRINO: What does free speech actually mean in the university context? You write in your introduction that, “It is important to note that in a university context, speech is highly constrained at every turn. We evaluate the speech of students to assign grades. Faculty are required to stay within the bounds of their subject and possibly their discipline, and disruptive conduct is not allowed. These constraints are critical to maintaining the institution of open inquiry itself. And thus, speech here is subordinate to the primary mission of a university, which is discovery and inquiry.”
How do we look at freedom of speech in the university context, given that there are contexts within a university where speech is highly constrained?
GINSBURG: Free speech has a very strong cultural resonance in the United States of America, but it typically means the absence of constraint. “I can say whatever I want, but the government can’t punish me.” However, that meaning doesn’t make much sense in a university context.
What we really mean, or what we really need to maximize, is people’s willingness and ability to challenge each other on their ideas, so that those ideas are sharpened and improved through open debate. There are so many forces that sort of work against that—cultural, institutional, sometimes legal—that that’s really the kind of speech we’re talking about.
PERRINO: What are the limitations on freedom of speech that are necessary to a functioning university?
GINSBURG: There are time, place, and manner restrictions. You can discuss any question you want substantively, but that doesn’t mean that you can show up in my law class and start talking about nuclear physics or something like that.
It also pertains to protest, an American tradition on university campuses. One of the reports states,“We recognize protest as part of what happens on university campuses.” But there’s limitations and a protest that tried to shut down our hospital or something like that to protest a faraway war, that would be something that was interfering with the core function of the university, and could be limited.
But, substantively, it suggests that there’s literally no question that’s off limits. What I think that means is that questions that are unsettled academically can be discussed.
For example, a creation science event could happen here. However, we’re under no obligation to make sure that kind of thing happens all the time. We try to stay at the cutting edge of science, and that’s where the role of challenge is so important. So, just because you can say anything and can discuss everything doesn’t mean you should.
TONY BANOUT, GUEST: Those norms seem to me to be governing pure spaces of academic inquiry such as the scholarly conferences, seminars, and the classrooms.
One of the animating reasons that the late President Bob Zimmer assembled this committee, chaired by Geoffrey Stone, to develop what became known as the Chicago Principles, was the increasing tide of speaker disinvitations in 2013-2014.
We don’t disinvite speakers. I think the norms that are operative in that are not necessarily the adjudication and inquiry around, for example, “Is phrenology debunked? Or is it worth rethinking?” They have the right to hear from controversial figures like Steve Bannon and we want a climate in which we’re not going to isolate or say some things that are off the table in terms of what speakers can come here.
Bannon didn’t end up coming. But if and when a speaker comes, that speaker ought to be challenged and interrogated. If you’re so moved, protest is also a part of the tradition of free expression. But students can’t prevent the speaker from actually speaking because that would impinge on the privileges of the speaker, and it would prevent the community, the co-citizens at the university, other members of the university, from actually hearing what that speaker has to say. I think it’s useful to draw the distinction between the different spaces within the university in which these things unfold.
The Second Red Scare and the principle of institutional neutrality
PERRINO: Let’s talk about the Broyles Commission testimony in 1949, when University of Chicago President Robert M. Hutchins testified before the State Assembly against bills mandating loyalty oaths for public school teachers and civil servants, as well as the firing of those deemed subversive. This was during the Second Red Scare, a time when many academics faced accusations of disloyalty or communism. Hutchins strongly defended academic freedom and free expression, taking a stand on behalf of the university.
BANOUT: Hutchins is focusing his comments during the Broyles Commission testimony on the purpose of the university itself—emphasizing open inquiry and free discourse as a long and arduous road, but essential to adjudicating differences in opinion and fulfilling the university’s mission. That testimony is a full-throated defense and certainly is the central animating value and purpose of the university.
GINSBURG: One thing we discovered while researching for this book is that this principle [of institutional neutrality on social and political issues] goes back to the very founding of the university. William Rainey Harper convened a body called the Congregation, which was like all the faculty, senior faculty, senior administrators, and everyone who had had a PhD from the university.
They adopted this principle in 1899 that said the university will not take positions on the issues of the day. It is kind of constitutional to the university from the very beginning. Position-taking has become much more popular in the last couple of decades, the virtue signaling, the Twitter-ization of everything. Everyone must speak about everything all the time now. That wasn’t true in 1910. But it has been an enduring principle since the beginning. I think it’s served us well in recent years, but that’s my particular bias.
The Demosthenes-Feynman Trap and FIRE’s strong student model
PERRINO: I want to talk about a speech by the late University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer in October of 2017. The title of the speech is “Liberal Arts, Free Expression, and the Demosthenes-Feynman Trap.”
The trap Zimmer refers to is perhaps most easily encapsulated by Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate theoretical physicist, who’s paraphrasing the great Athenian orator Demosthenes: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The idea here is to overcome the delusions of confirmation bias, for which a community of discursive partners is an absolute necessity.
President Zimmer encapsulates the overall argument and says, “Because education can help liberate us from the Demosthenes-Feynman trap, and because this trap is defined by an easy and comfortable state, it follows that an effective education is in fact intrinsically uncomfortable at times. Without discomfort and the challenge that stimulates it, there is no escape for thought being submerged by an ongoing state of self-deception. The argument for avoiding discomfort, therefore, is an argument against liberal arts education itself and against the empowerment that such education brings.”
FIRE has long argued vociferously for what we call the “strong student model.” That is the idea that students are not too weak to live with freedom, that they are not too weak to hear ideas and arguments that might strike at their core beliefs. FIRE was put in a weird position halfway through its history where students were making the argument that they were too weak to live with this freedom of expression. In reading the speech from Zimmer, I happen to think that he made the most eloquent case against the sort of safety-ism that has been a thread through college and university educations for about a decade.
Tony, what’s your perspective on President Zimmer’s speech? Why did you include it in the book, and what, if anything, does it say about the current moment?
BANOUT: I think it is an elegant statement about the very purpose of liberal arts education. That’s why we included it. To liberate each of us from our own blind spots and implicit assumptions, which it’s perfectly human to have. The technical term for this is “homophily.” Like we tend to associate with people who agree with us and who are like us, and then we tend towards creating spaces in which confirmation bias is rampant. The whole point of a good education is to develop the habits of mind and the skills to challenge your own assumptions and thinking so that you can grow, which is inherently uncomfortable.
It ought to be said, that’s uncomfortable for everyone, not just for certain groups. It’s uncomfortable for everyone. So, I think what Zimmer is so good at in that speech is emphasizing that if you diminish free expression, you diminish the quality of education, you diminish what you’re all about. And that is too high a cost to assume.
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