When the presidents of three important institutions were asked in a congressional hearing whether it was permissible for their students to advocate the genocide of Jews, each answered that it depends on context. That got them in terribly hot water. One of them has resigned, and the jobs of the other two are hanging by threads.
Would it have gone any differently if the question had been put to President Alivasatos? To my knowledge it has not been, but I couldn’t help wondering: Would he answer as these other presidents did? Almost certainly he would, but his answer would have been, as theirs was not, governed by a long-standing history at the University of Chicago of support for free speech, as enshrined in the Chicago Principles and the Kalven Report. I trust he would have spoken with more adroitness and conviction, but, more importantly, he would have been speaking from that history and those principles. Faculty, alumni, students, and donors at this university would not have been shocked as their counterparts at Penn and Harvard were. No whiff of hypocrisy would have been detected, no sense of a tactical pivot toward newly discovered truths that have suddenly become convenient. Chicago has always stood for free speech and, as Dr. Johnson would have said, “that’s an end on it.”
It’s true of this as of all important positions, whether taken by the president of a great university or by the most humble of citizens in private life: to act on principle, especially a deeply pondered one, is good in itself, but it is also likely to be persuasive to others. I believe Aristotle said something like that.
Yes, context does matter, and in this case the context is the principles and the history of an institution.
Very true, @circuitrider . Principles that have been around a long time tend to stay current. They’re perennial. Whereas principles that are trimmed to present exigencies and fashions are not likely to age very well. The present has a way of becoming the past. I believe G.K. Chesterton said something like that.
I’ll keep the thread open for now, bearing in mind that it’s up to CC members to ensure they don’t drift into political commentary. If that happens, the thread may be closed without further notice.
The topic of the post appears to be speculating on what the current president of U Chicago might have said, given that U Chicago has a long history of free speech. So let’s stay on topic and avoid comments about genocide and ethnic cleansing, both being unsavory topics which might be better suited to the politics forum.
@Knowsstuff , did these proposals take the form of statements on the substance of recent events? When you say they were shot down by the President because they were one-sided it seems to suggest this.
At Chicago this situation wouldnt arise. The Kalven Report mandates that neither the University nor any unit within the University may make official pronouncements, whether one-sided or otherwise, on other than the academic mission of the university. This is the principle of “institutional neutrality,” which holds that it is for the individual members of the university community, not the University itself, to advocate, make pronouncements, start petitions and freely take such positions as they like. The University is the home for all such activities, but it does not itself undertake them. The rationale is that if there were officially sanctioned positions on such subjects this would necessarily inhibit the individuals who form the community from the freest exploration and expression of their own views on all subject matters.
@Publisher , such hateful and inexcusable speech as that quoted above puts these principles to their hardest test. No doubt at Chicago as elsewhere there would be and should be consequences for it. As Stanley Fish has said, “there’s no such thing as free speech (and it’s a good thing too).” By which he means, essentially, freedom from blowback to one’s words - disapproval, social ostracism, impairment of employment prospects. But if we are talking about official institutional discipline in the form of suspenson or expulsion, then, at the U of C at least, context does in fact matter. There’s a difference between shouting such words in the face of a Jewish student and saying them in general, terrible as the latter certainly is.
Underlying much of this campus ugliness is the grave deterioration of education itself. Roughly a century ago Max Weber warned of the dangers of politicization within the academies of his day - the great German universities - the loss of the true academic spirit, a sense of proportion, of nuance, the basic facts of human history. We would do well to heed his warning in light of what befell the universities of his day.
The issue you raised in your initial post was a threat directed at a specifically identifiable group. This is not a proper exercise of freedom of speech regardless of the context.
However, it is okay to discuss “genocide” as a general concept in the context of a broadly defined issue. The difference is that there is no direct threat to a specific group of people.
Yeah, I’m not sure how much I would lean into this idea that the three Ivy League presidents are being hung by their own petards. Nuance is nuance, whether it was practiced in 2013 or “at the present moment” through the course of a 5 hour cross-examination. The Chronicle of Higher Education which, presumably, reaches an audience somewhat beyond Cambridge, and Philadelphia, says the problem was that “they acted like academics - which is a good thing.” Why the Presidents Couldn’t Answer Yes or No (chronicle.com)
Well, @circuitrider ,why is it bad in principle for academics to act like academics? That seems an odd complaint to come from the Chronicle for Higher Education. The problem for me is that they weren’t acting very much like real academics. This was in part due to their personal limitations but also very much that they didn’t appear to be speaking sincerely. That was what made their language in praise of free speech seem only legalistic and opportunistic, not founded on principles deeply held and previously applied. If these institutions have now suddenly seen the light - and the light continues to shine on them, which I highly doubt - it will be a good thing, at least in my book, but color me skeptical. I am at least ready to watch and wait. There’s more to this than the inadequacy of particular leadership.
@Publisher , the test in these hard cases is always where one stands on “the speech we hate,” as I believe Holmes put it. It is easy enough to be in favor of free speech when it’s speech whose content we approve. Speech directed at a group is a terrible thing, I agree. If someone with a megaphone is saying these particular words to a group of Jewish students - or addressing them directly on the internet, for that matter - this would not be protected speech as I see it. If the speaker was a U of C student, the Chicago Principles wouldn’t save him, and that student should be disciplined. However, I think you are referring to utterances made to the world at large, or to whomever chooses to listen, in which those words are being said. They are only in that sense “directed” to the group. They would be ipso facto vile and would be, yes, “hate speech,” but they would also be protected under either the First Amendment or, as I understand them, under Chicago Principles - at least until they crossed the line of intending to incite actual violence. Of course, this latter determination is notoriously a hard one to make, as is, in most cases short of this extreme one, what constitutes “hate speech” itself. And there is this consideration too: Young people are passionate and excitable and have a tendency to performative over-the-topness. In my own observation, little violence has arisen beyond the so-called violence of words, a doubtful category often used to suppress more legitimate dissenting speech. But making determinations on facts and principles rather than dishing out palm tree justice depending on how the wind is blowing is what we ask the wise leaders of our institutions to do.
Well, people are entitled to their opinions. But I am a little disappointed that here, on the UChicago forum of all places, there should be so much support for and reliance on selective soundbites and gotcha moments played and replayed across social media.
Taking the quote which was the focus of your opening post {whether it was permissible for their students to advocate the genocide of Jews] in the context of current events, it is hate speech which could be reasonably viewed as an attempt to incite violence.
And the three university presidents (U Penn, Harvard, & MIT) should have stated that in the context of current events such a statement would not be permitted.
I believe the Chicago Principles are beginning to have an impact on this national debate. A guest essay in the New York Times yesterday (December 13th) by James Kirchick entitled “Campus Speech Codes Should Be Abolished” concludes as follows:
‘“The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” declared the Kalven Report, a landmark statement of the value of academic institutional neutrality issued by the University of Chicago in 1967. The report noted that a constructive university experience would necessarily be “upsetting.” The test for a liberal society is how we deal with that upset, not how we avoid it.’
That piece is well worth reading for a strong and succinct iteration of the case I was attempting to make above. I have to say, however, that I am pessimistic that the right lessons will be learned from the present moment. Free speech is more likely to be a casualty than a beneficiary of the ham-handed assertion of it made by the three university presidents. Maybe we believers need to face the possibility that it’s no more than a hothouse growth suitable for special environments. It is my hope, in any event, that the University of Chicago will always be one of these.
So…basically, what we’re left with is the question of which of two equally esteemed American institutions would Chicago have its peer institutions listen to: the ACLU or the ADL?
Listening to opposing views of almost any issue is never a bad thing, @circuitrider . That’s an attitude a liberal education ought to foster. But the mission of an institution of higher learning is not advocacy. Neither of those organizations, however admirable, can instruct or serve as a model. A school ought to formulate its policies (what Aristotle would call its efficient causes) in conformity with its special nature as an educational institution (its formal cause) and its scholarly mission (its final cause). Politics is no part of its mission and should be no part of its policies. Yet politics has crept into and corrupted many great American universities as it once corrupted the great universities of Germany. The specter of that corruption, as foretold by Max Weber, looms as a cautionary example informing the Chicago Principles and the Kalven Report. A university seeking guidance could do worse than consult those documents.