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The Chicago Principles: Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression

The Chicago Principles articulate the importance of free expression as an essential feature of the university. They commit the university to allowing the widest possible range of ideas to be spoken and heard, even those that are considered wrong or offensive by many. They stress that the members and guests of the university must not be prevented from expressing their views.

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Thirty-six years ago, Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, calling the crisis of liberal education “an intellectual crisis of the first magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of our civilization.” Bloom viewed the rise of moral and intellectual relativism in the university not only as a threat to the ideal of liberal education, but as a threat to democratic life in America. As he put it, “what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing. … No longer is there a hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life.” Without a positive tradition to pass along to its students, in Bloom’s critique, institutions of higher education invited students to an institutional experience unmoored from any sense of higher purpose. 

The degradation of American higher education was frustrating enough to the liberals who once managed it. The principles of liberalism—“belief in progress and the free market of ideas”—were replaced by “values” that “came on the winds.” These values were remarkable for their “thoughtlessness, the utter lack of need to argue or prove. Alternative views had no existence except as scarecrows.” The old project of the university—the quest to understand the nature and existence of the good—was long gone.

If Bloom’s famous critique resonated with classical liberals and academic conservatives in 1987 and beyond, it failed to reach or persuade millions of American alumni who continued to support their alma maters with massive annual donations, endowment gifts, and named buildings on campuses. Many alumni did read Bloom’s blistering critique—and still continued to give because there was still much to admire about the prestige and dynamism of American higher education. 

Now, this winter—more than a generation after Bloom’s indictment—a nationwide, bipartisan movement of alumni and donors is taking form. Donors from every income bracket and every corner of the country are withdrawing support from colleges and universities.

Since the second week of October, many commentators have tried to explain how American higher education ended up in its current predicament. At issue is not only the extent to which antisemitism and other ideologies have found a home in academia, but the extent to which powerful faculty, administrators, and trustees have built this home. Only now are the American people fully seeing the breakdown that Bloom described, and that was evident to him in the armed student occupation of his own Cornell University nearly forty-five years ago.

The problem isn’t that ideologues hold a monopoly over higher education. Most who work in universities are deeply committed to their disciplines and their professional responsibilities, not to political activism. But according to University of Pennsylvania historian emeritus Alan Kors and attorney Harvey Silverglate, who co-founded the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), “Universities are administered, above all, not by ideological zealots, but by careerists who have made a Faustian deal.” Many parts of campus—the athletic programs, the business department, the physics lab, the medical school, the fundraising office—remain non-ideological. These become the public face of the university in exchange for administrative protection of ideological activities within the institution, according to Kors and Silverglate.

No wonder many alumni and donors speak of feeling misled. Now, the game is up. The question is what donors committed to liberalism, and liberal education, should do next.

Facing financial pressures that were already mounting in the aftermath of the pandemic and growing generational questions about the value proposition of a college degree, university leaders—trustees, presidents, and senior administrators—are at a crossroads. They can set a new course in their institutions and assert the importance of the moral, intellectual, and civic virtues that are critical to the flourishing of a free society. They can commit to the foundational ideals of the liberal tradition while eschewing the rise of intolerant ideologies on their campuses. They can return the quest for truth and the good life to the center of the university’s mission. If they do these things, they may succeed in saving, even growing their universities—and hopefully, reopening the American mind to the wonders of intellectual life in the process.

The opportunity is obvious for an established liberal arts college like Hillsdale College, just as it is for a new institution with big ambitions like the University of Austin.

However, sustainable reform must come through other means as well, and donors and alumni should seize the opportunity to influence the future of higher education at this critical moment.

Donors who seek reform should invest in established universities whose leaders are willing to take a stand for the liberal tradition in higher education. They might choose to support old institutions, including many religious colleges, that are conserving this tradition.

Alternatively, donors might redirect their money to any number of trade schools and technical colleges that are avoiding ideological corruption while providing a reliable pathway to the American Dream. They might donate to nearby community colleges. Such institutions are often well-attuned to local economic needs, focus on a practical agenda of teaching students over professorial research agendas, and serve a variety of learners—from high school students getting an early start on college credits to adults pursuing a degree later in life.

Funders might also support faculty-led centers within universities such as the 90 “Oases of Excellence” programs associated with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. These institutions and centers like Princeton’s James Madison Program and Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government “share a commitment to educating students for informed citizenship in a free society by maintaining the highest academic standards, introducing students to the best of the foundational arts and sciences, teaching American heritage, and ensuring free inquiry into a range of intellectual viewpoints.” Or donors might support humane fellowships for college students, such as the Fund for American Studies and the Hudson Institute’s Political Studies program.

Finally, funders should support efforts to strengthen the career pathway for university faculty and leadership who value the educational foundations of democratic citizenship. The Institute for Humane Studies, for instance, “supports the achievement of a free society by connecting and supporting graduate students, scholars, and intellectuals.” And the Jack Miller Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational venture where I serve as president, is building a talent pipeline for academic scholars who value the American political tradition in history, political science, and related fields. 

Several years after The Closing of the American Mind, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb described a possible opening for a return to wisdom and order in American universities, prompted by what she perceived as a spreading boredom within higher education. “Bored with trivia, with a specious relevance, with a smorgasbord of courses, with the politicization of all subjects and the fragmentation of all disciplines,” she wrote, “professors and students might welcome a return to a serious, structured curriculum and to a university that is an intellectual and educational, not a political or therapeutic, community.”

If boredom wasn’t enough to prompt a revolt, the outrages of this fall have been. But retreat is not enough. Donors must find alternatives that honor the liberal tradition, a tradition that is vital to the ultimate recovery and resurgence of American higher education.

This article appeared on Law & Liberty on January 16, 2024.

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In stunning irony, the leadership of so many of the nation’s top colleges and universities, initially unable to give a full-throated condemnation of a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians of monstrous savagery, miraculously discovered institutional neutrality and murmured effetely instead. In response to the backlash, they appeal to free expression, but their campuses have only what Penn donor and alumnus Clifford Asness has called “asymmetrical free speech where some have it and some don’t.”

While Penn Carey Law School’s eminent Professor Amy Wax is placed under investigation with serious threat of termination for alleged racial insensitivity, a professor who posted the logo of the military wing of Hamas on Facebook days after that terrorist organization’s horrific attack on Israeli civilians receives nothing more than an email.

Roger Waters, a notorious antisemite, is allowed to speak on Penn’s campus, but young women forced to share a locker room with a biological male are told, “Don’t talk to the media. You will regret it.”

At Harvard, the same President Claudine Gay who was instrumental in punishing gifted African American economist Roland Fryer, who dared to advance a data-driven challenge to the meme of racist policing, says pro-Hamas students will neither be punished nor sanctioned. Carole Hooven, who was canceled for stating a biological fact, might disagree with President Gay’s claim that Harvard “embraces a commitment to free expression.”

When the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) first formulated the principles of academic freedom in its 1915 Declaration, the primary concern was undue pressure on faculty from donors and trustees. Times have changed. Now the greatest threat to free expression comes from within the institutions themselves. Hiring aims at ideological self-replication, and heterodox thinkers who somehow sneak in are punished as heretics if they speak up.

No one is surprised that these schools are ideological silos tilted to the left, but the numbers are still shocking. Only 3% of faculty at Harvard identify as conservative. An astounding 99.7% of political donations made by Penn faculty in 2021-22 went to Democrats.

Our institutions of higher education need reform, and the people inside them have shown little interest in starting the process. Many are in complete denial that anything needs to change. The American people think differently: Only 36% (19% of Republicans) say they have confidence in American higher education.

There are some internal signs of hope, such as the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, but the broader pattern among faculty and administrators is obstinate, self-righteous resistance. Normally, faculty complain that no one reads their work. Now that people are paying attention, the faculty senate tri-chairs at Penn complain that “freedom of thought, inquiry, and speech … are being threatened by individuals outside of the University who are surveilling both faculty and students in an effort to intimidate them and inhibit their academic freedom.” Where were these faculty leaders when dozens of their colleagues and students demanded sanctions against Amy Wax for daring to write that bourgeois values such as being “neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable” are drivers of success? They have been silent while Penn’s tribunal weighs terminating this distinguished professor, who has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court and received Penn’s highest award for teaching excellence.

Unwilling to defend academic freedom when it mattered, the faculty senate speaks now only to insult its donors and alumni. “Let us be clear,” the tri-chairs write: “academic freedom is an essential component of a world-class university and is not a commodity that can be bought or sold by those who seek to use their pocketbooks to shape our mission.” What gratitude! Not to be outdone, the Penn chapter of the AAUP, also silent on matters of academic freedom in recent years, complains about “donors directly contacting academic programs that rely on them financially” and says trustees and donors “have attempted to abuse the power that comes with wealth.” Is Penn holding a competition to see who can chase away the most donors?

The disingenuous administrators and faculty who run our elite academic institutions have had their chance to govern autonomously. We see where they have led us. Now is a time for trustees, donors, and alumni to intervene and give these institutions the gift of reform they so urgently need.

This post originally appeared on RealClear Politics on November 17, 2023.

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Moderator: Douglas Sprei, Vice President of Multimedia & Campus Partnerships, ACTA.

Panelists: Ilana Redstone, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Faculty Director of the Mill Institute at the University of Austin; Pamela Paresky, Senior Research Fellow, Network Contagion Research Institute; and Molly Brigid McGrath, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University.

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Those who attack Jews or Israel are all too often exempt from their excoriation. Hamas terrorists massacred some 1,300 Israelis, took approximately 200 hostages, most of them civilians, and left an additional 3,200 injured, but you would not know it from some university leaders’ missives this week.

At Harvard University, President Claudine Gay has issued three muddled statements, under pressure, on the horrific events. Her first statement was a tepid confession of “heartbreak” that implied an equivalence between the Hamas attacks and Israel neutralizing the terrorists. This embarrassment was signed by all the university’s senior deans. Only after a barrage of online criticism—and threats by donors—did she muster the strength to condemn the child killers. Not content to leave it alone, she has issued another statement, but still without criticizing the 30-odd student groups who professed to “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible” for the murder, rape, kidnapping, and torture of Jews, referring instead to the principle of freedom of speech. Let us be clear that these students have freedom of speech, but so does Claudine Gay. She has the right to condemn their words. In 2022, Harvard denounced in no uncertain terms “the capricious and senseless invasion of Ukraine.” Harvard knows how to speak clearly about Ukrainian victims but not, apparently, about Jewish victims.

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik offered a masterfully slippery statement: “I was devastated by the horrific attack on Israel this weekend and the ensuing violence that is affecting so many people.” While all lives matter, the mention of “ensuing violence” is a reference to Israeli targeting of terrorists—putting it on a par with raping and pillaging by Hamas. She implied moral equivalence. 

The moral lassitude and obscurantism of Shafik’s statement trickled down. Columbia College Dean Josef Sorett emitted the following: “The events in Israel and Gaza over the past several days have shocked the world and impacted many of our students.” Dean Sorett’s “events in Gaza” are, of course, Israeli military operations undertaken in self-defense and in an effort to kill murderers, which he places on par with the door-to-door murder of civilians in Israel. 

The dean of Columbia Law School did not outclass her colleague. Gillian Lester wrote to her students and faculty, “The violence that erupted in Israel and Gaza this past weekend is nothing short of tragic,” again implying a moral equivalence between the enemies of the Jewish people and their victims.

At Middlebury College, the senior leadership wrote to “acknowledge the untold pain, suffering, and loss of life unfolding from the violence happening now in Israel and Palestine.” President Laurie Patton seems unclear about who is making the violence “happen.” She goes on to warn against “hate, racism, ethnic discrimination, antisemitism, or Islamophobia.” The equivalence is complete, and we can move on to meet the real threat: Islamophobia. Compare this muddle to the perfect clarity of Middlebury’s official response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: It “wreaked untold havoc in the lives of innocent civilians. Russia’s aggression against its democratic neighbor is a violation of international law, made only more egregious by its escalation in the face of international condemnation. I join that condemnation in solidarity with our Middlebury community.” How easy it would have been to revise that statement ever so slightly to say that Hamas “wreaked untold havoc in the lives of innocent civilians. Hamas’s aggression against its democratic neighbor is a violation of international law, made only more egregious by its escalation in the face of international condemnation. I join that condemnation in solidarity with our Middlebury community.”  

The University of California–Berkeley, which spends $36 million annually on its Division of Equity & Inclusion, may be the most openly antisemitic campus in the country. Its law school is under federal investigation for discriminating against Jews. Student organizations there expressed their “unwavering support” for the Hamas pogrom. The president refused to condemn this statement. Instead, he expressed his heartbreak at “the violence and suffering in Israel and Gaza,” pointedly comparing Israel’s self-defense to the terrorist attacks themselves, gesturing, like too many others, to the “complex history” of the situation. 

In reality though, no complexity is so great as to obscure the distinction between the intentional slaughter of innocents and targeted strikes against terrorists. Some schools eventually issued careful statements—but their initial reaction—or lack of reaction—is most telling, especially when contrasted with quick and decisive past declarations of outrage.

At Stanford University, the administration has covered itself in special disgrace by adding dishonesty to cowardice, despite finally acknowledging the horror. Criticized for its silence about the weekend’s slaughter, Stanford claimed in an unsigned statement that it “does not take positions on geopolitical issues and news events.” But when Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s president released this statement: “The unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and the attack it represents on democracy, is beyond shocking.” He continued, “It has been remarkable to witness the courage and resilience of the Ukrainian people.” Stanford also commented when a child’s skipping rope was found in a tree in 2021, where it had been tangled for some years, officially denouncing it as a “a potent symbol of anti-Black racism and violence that is completely unacceptable under any circumstances.” Stanford discovered the principle of institutional neutrality, it seems, just in time for the Sabbath assault on Israeli civilians.

Under the principle of institutional neutrality, colleges and universities should indeed refrain from speaking corporately on contemporary social or political issues, unless they transcend the institution’s values as a whole (such as the wanton taking of innocent life by terrorists). Higher education’s mission is to encourage diversity of thought. But condemning brutality and savagery, whether the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a policeman, or the civilian carnage Hamas wrought, is not a political statement. No one has asked presidents to endorse Zionism or the two-state solution or anything vaguely geopolitical. They needed only to affirm human decency without which the university is a place of moral chaos.

However serpentine the ongoing contortions of these administrators, what is revealed in these official reactions by colleges is a cancerous moral rot and intellectual confusion. Bothsidesism is a symptom; the root cause is worse.They were perfectly able to rush to condemn the murder of George Floyd, the seedy depravities uncovered by the #MeToo movement, and the brutal invasion of Ukraine—as they should. They pronounce vocally and volubly on the events of January 6, 2021, and on horrible killings at houses of worship. They take flamboyant public positions on everything from affirmative action to climate policy to marriage equality. So why is it so hard to condemn the slaughter of Jewish babies? Why is it so hard to offer proper support and empathy to their grieving Jewish students?

The University of Pennsylvania’s president had no word of censure for Penn’s Palestine Writes festival, which ran between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and featured Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, notorious for exhibitionist antisemitism. Then came the anemic initial response of Penn’s president to the Hamas atrocities. Jon Huntsman, a Penn graduate and donor and a former governor of Utah, pinpointed the cause of his alma mater’s failure: “Moral relativism has fueled the university’s race to the bottom.” If only Penn’s administration possessed such moral (and pedagogical) clarity.

To be fair, some universities have offered proper statements that unambiguously condemn the pogrom of Hamas. But these are few and far between. The United States used to lead in higher education, but now we need to look for leadership abroad, for example in the exemplary statement of the German Rectors’ Conference that noted quickly, clearly, and unambiguously, “We are deeply shocked and appalled by the terrorist attack of Hamas on Israel, the terrible massacres, and the kidnappings. On behalf of all German universities, I would like to express our sincerest condolences and heartfelt sympathy. We are deeply saddened by the senseless loss of life. Our thoughts are with those killed and injured, those still in danger, and their families and friends. As the German Rectors’ Conference, the voice of German universities, we stand in solidarity with the Israeli universities and academic colleges and all their members. We would be grateful if you could share this message of sympathy and solidarity with your member institutions.”

Educational institutions have a responsibility to educate and lead—not only in subject matters but in basic issues of morality. Those who fail to condemn the slaughter of children and fail to show empathy to their students who identify with this slaughter, are failing their mission at the most basic level. 

This article appeared on ReaclearEducation on October 20, 2023.

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On October 17, 2021, Princeton University alumni Stuart Taylor, Jr., and Edward Yingling published a call to arms in the Wall Street Journal, decrying the illiberal intolerance gripping academia and heralding the rise of a grassroots alumni movement aimed at restoring free speech and academic freedom on American college campuses. Their article, titled “Alumni Unite For Freedom Of Speech,” sounded the alarm about the censorship and indoctrination engulfing higher education and put cloistered faculty and administrators on notice that alumni are no longer content to be passive bystanders or automatic cash dispensers. The piece was the catalyst for the establishment of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, an organization that is inspiring alumni nationwide to force a reckoning at their alma maters.

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