The Freedom Illusion

Among the litany of information packs and orientation guides that ultimately find their vocations as fly swatters and shims, newly admitted students to the University of Chicago receive a little red book entitled Academic Freedom and the Modern University: The Experience of the University of Chicago. To some, that book meets the same aforementioned fate. To many others, myself included, it is revered. For us, a UChicago education without the principles it embodies would be worthless. 

Imagine it. Put the case that we did away with academic freedom. Ah—you don’t need to, you know it already. The dis-invitations, the sanctions and terminations, the censorship, the startling hypocrisy of the (now mostly former) presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT. . . this is the sorry state of higher education in America.

Upon reading that little red book, you would be forgiven for believing that UChicago could never fall this way. Its author, former Dean of The College John W. Boyer, describes the university as:

. . . a courageous and fearless place, a place of strong liberty and vibrant convictions, and out of all those convictions, out of all the generations of free and open debate that they have sponsored and protected, has arisen an institution truly worthy of the meaning and the promise of the higher learning.

But we must be frank. This place threatens to fade into fiction. Even here, freedom is growing dull and obscure. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) 2023 survey, 69 percent of UChicago students say that shouting down a speaker to prevent him from speaking on campus is at least acceptable on rare occasions. It also found that 47 percent have self-censored on campus at least once or twice a month, and 72 percent would feel somewhat or very uncomfortable disagreeing with a professor about a controversial political topic. Sixty percent say they worry about damaging their reputation because someone misunderstands something they’ve said or done.

Free expression is being shrouded by a cultural invigilation more suffocating than any statutory restriction: one of unspoken imposition. And its key operator is fear.

“Principle alone offers no immunity to illiberal contagion.”

No one can say that the university has failed in its convictions—indeed, when it has not been fashionable to resist the political vise and preserve free expression, UChicago has shown the way. In the 1960s, it set the standard for institutional neutrality by issuing the Kalven Report amidst a febrile atmosphere of Vietnam War and civil rights protests. More than a hundred institutions have adopted our Chicago Principles or developed similar ones of their own since their articulation in 2015. Last year, the university established the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, a focal point for its commitment to academic freedom.

But for all this, FIRE’s survey shows that principle alone offers no immunity to illiberal contagion.

We have seen it before. The academic freedom born with the American research university was an evolution of the core values of the Humboldtian model of higher education in 19th century Germany, lehrfreiheit (freedom for the teacher) and lernfreiheit (freedom for the student). In the 1930s, those values paled in the face of Nazidom as non-Jewish German intellectuals poured to the totalitarian right. Today, American intellectuals pour toward the other end of the political horseshoe, but they pour all the same.

The point here is simple. Academic freedom is an admission of humility. It’s the humility with which Einstein pioneered quantum theory with the words “it seems to me…” and Darwin began his notebooks on evolution with “I think…” A denial of that freedom, as John Stuart Mill put it, “is to assume our own infallibility.” To take one man’s right to be heard is to take another man’s (not least one’s own) right to hear.

“We’re giving up what is most precious in our society.”

Without free expression, one is left with a campus where one cannot speak his mind, where students denounce their teachers to administrators, and where monopolistic authorities silence dissenting opinions. Such a campus rejects curiosity without compromise. We saw it when students and staff vandalized campus pro-life displays and when students were effectively forced to agree with contestable statements about the COVID pandemic. We see it again with the ongoing erosion of meritocracy by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies.

In fact, the only form of diversity UChicago seems to be neglecting is that of thought. A recent analysis by The Chicago Maroon found that “from 2015 to 2023, 97 percent of all donations [by UChicago faculty] were to Democratic-leaning candidates and political action committees.” How depressing it is for the university that once dared to reject McCarthyism, welcome the Communist presidential candidate William Z. Foster, and boast Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Antonin Scalia in its ranks soon after to be plagued by such homogeneity.

The groupthink is at its worst in the humanities. Try, if you can, to find a break from the reins of critical theory, Marxism, or postmodernism in any of these departments. The scholar Hamza Yusuf put it best when he said that these theories are no longer lenses with which to analyze issues but corneal transplants. Students and faculty have become afraid of thoughts and words; afraid of the workings of the human mind. This is the sterility we face.

There is a strong case to be made, then, for tackling the problem head-on by reforming admissions and recruitment. Select students and faculty who are as opinionated as they are curious and open to debate. Far too many people are unable to detach the academic or political from the personal. One person can ruin another by telling tales about his opinions, and the invaluable ability to play devil’s advocate is vanishing. Some people have yet to learn that you cannot simply shut down a disagreeable argument by accusing your interlocutor of being a bigot.

Finally, for all the good of the Chicago Principles, the university lacks any way of enforcing them. Without formal protection, the sum and substance of our university is left vulnerable to unbridled abuse. Perhaps an independent adjudicative body authorized to hear cases of violations of the Chicago Principles by the University or its members would not go amiss.

For many years now, a UChicago education has been one of a dying breed. It is not intended, in the words of former University President Hanna Holborn Gray, “to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.” The light of academic freedom has already been extinguished in institutions across the country and the depth of the remnant darkness is all too palpable. We’re giving up what is most precious in our society without a fight. There’s everything to lose. We’ll be damned if we let it go.

* The views expressed in this article solely represent the views of the author, not the views of the Chicago Thinker.