Over the past several years, the University of Chicago has built a national reputation as the bastion of free speech and political neutrality in higher education. Its “Chicago Principles,” establishing the central importance of freedom of expression, not only govern activities on our own campus, but also serve as a blueprint for conduct in over one hundred academic institutions across the United States. In a move sure to further solidify its free speech brand, UChicago launched the “Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression” this fall with initiatives that “promote the understanding, practice, and advancement of free and open discourse.”
Unfortunately, as these shiny outward-looking efforts gain acclaim and recognition among our peers, the state of free expression on our own campus is looking substantially more dim: currently, like Brown, Brandeis, and the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago is criminalizing its own students for engaging in pro-Palestine acts of expression.
In the last few months, a vibrant coalition of campus organizations named UChicago United for Palestine has coordinated campus demonstrations, rallies, vigils, art builds, and teach-ins. At the center of these activities has been a call to scrutinize the University of Chicago’s investments in Israel and in the weapons companies that sustain Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The University has met these efforts with bureaucratic repression and arbitrary crackdowns. On November 9, University of Chicago Police arrested nearly thirty students and two faculty observers at a peaceful sit-in inside a University building, told other faculty members that they could be arrested for trying to access the building after-hours, and entered a faculty member’s office in the middle of the night to remove students’ private property without advance notice. While the Cook County State’s Attorney Office later dropped the charges consistent with policy guidelines that discourage prosecution of peaceful protesters, the University has initiated its own disciplinary hearings against the students for their protests.
UChicago administrators have defended their crackdown by pointing to statutes against “disruptive conduct,” policies that they say impose a limit on tolerable protest. But their interpretation of disruptive conduct goes against the University’s declared valorization of protest and its recognition that protest is inherently always disruptive “to some degree.” The University’s current punitive measures also ignore the positive contributions of disruptive protests to the UChicago community in recent memory, most notably sit-ins that pushed the University to open its now-celebrated emergency medical adult trauma center. More broadly, none of the work we do as intellectuals, and none of the free expression we so celebrate in the abstract, would be possible without the histories of principled struggle that have shaped modern civic society.
As is so often the case, the acts of protest now deemed unreasonable and even criminal came to the fore only after the University doggedly ignored outreach toward more “reasonable” forms of civic discourse. Student protestors have long demanded a public meeting with President Paul Alivisatos to discuss UChicago’s military investments– ties that they argue enable and normalize the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. These students are not the only ones demanding financial accountability. In April, Amnesty International criticized the University of Chicago, along with several other wealthy American universities, for failing to ensure that its investments respected the United Nations’ Guiding Principles of Human Rights. The Amnesty report faulted the University’s lack of transparency around investments and its refusal to consider human rights as a criterion in making investment decisions. Rather than addressing these critiques with the thoughtful exchange of ideas for which we are known, University leaders have used the harshest possible instruments of power to silence some of the least powerful members of our campus community.
For decades, such calls for accountable, principled discussion have been shunted off via the University’s invocation of the Kalven Report, a 1967 document drafted in response to student protests against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid. In citing Kalven– which has become doctrinal on our campus at this point– the University argues that political neutrality is necessary to protect free expression. The Report claims, in effect, that by taking a position on apartheid and divesting from South Africa, the University would create the illusion that the matter had been settled and thereby chill free inquiry on campus. This precedent has been used to rebuff decades of divestment demands, from fossil fuels to weapons manufacturers to apartheid and genocide. Critics have faulted the Kalven Report for equating institutional neutrality with academic freedom, and for reproducing the status quo through a disingenuous disavowal of politics. Others have accused University administrators of inconsistent application, and of deploying the report as a public relations gimmick calibrated to shield the University against criticism.
Caught between these two doctrines, it seems we are at an impasse. Are we politically neutral, or are some forms of speech politically unacceptable? Are we a “marketplace” of free ideas, or are some ideas beyond the scope of reasonable discussion, and instead worthy of sanctions and arrest? Is the matter of our investments not inherently an expression of a politics? These are the kinds of discussions a university truly committed to free expression– in all its forms, from debate and discourse to principled civil disobedience– could rightly take up.
Instead, we find ourselves working within a university that loudly proclaims its commitments to free speech and open discourse and yet mobilizes those same commitments to evade serious discussion of how its institutional partnerships are making the world a more vicious place. We have an administration that rhetorically supports students’ rights to protest, but uses the bureaucratic tools at its disposal to curtail and punish their free expression.
We applaud the principles of free speech. But when those principles are espoused publicly amidst a reality of campus repression, criminalization, and selective silence, we have to call it what it is– hypocrisy. The University of Chicago, and our peer institutions that have taken up its principles, should live up to them– not just in word, but in action.