When my school, the University of Chicago, makes national headlines, it’s rarely because the news is good. For example, when the dean of students told incoming freshmen that the campus is no place for trigger warnings or safe spaces, or when UChicago alumnus and controversial New York Times columnist (which, these days, is saying a lot) Bret Stephens was invited back to campus as the 2023 Class Day speaker.
UChicago, famously referred to as the place “where fun comes to die,” takes pride in having a reputation for rigorous academics and an unremitting, absolutist commitment to free speech. These values are represented in the Chicago Principles, a report put out by an appointed committee on freedom of expression, which resolves that the university must “promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation” even when the ideas expressed “are thought by some or even by most members of the university community to be offensive, immoral, or wrong-headed.”
Case in point: The first author listed in the statement is constitutional law professor Geoffrey R. Stone, who, in 2019, told the student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, that he had for four decades used the N-word in his classes as part of an anecdote about an argument between former students to better demonstrate the First Amendment’s fighting words doctrine. (He told the newspaper he would stop doing so after students told him they were hurt by his use of the word.)
Nevertheless, the Chicago Principles have been widely successful and influential on college campuses nationwide. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Chicago Principles have been adopted or affirmed by 99 US colleges and universities as of March 2023. Since the introduction of these principles in 2014, UChicago has consistently topped FIRE’s student survey rankings of the best colleges for student free expression and has been lauded in the Wall Street Journal as “the Free Speech University.”
In many ways, Bret Stephens is the perfect face for UChicago’s free speech legacy. After graduating in 1995, Stephens went on to write for the Wall Street Journal (where he received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary), the Jerusalem Post, and The New York Times, inviting controversy wherever he went. He has declared his belief that “all lives matter” (adding “not least Black lives”); that antisemitism is the “disease of the Arab mind”; and, in an attempt to uncover “the secrets of Jewish genius,” once cited a study that, according to an editor’s note at the beginning of the column, “advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews” and led readers to believe “Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior.” (“That was not his intent,” the editor’s note clarified.) Stephens also quit Twitter temporarily after being called a “bedbug.”
So what does it mean that this man — who recently defended his support for the Iraq War on the 20th anniversary of the US invasion — has been invited to speak to graduating seniors? Sure, the discourse about invitations and dis-invitations of controversial speakers on college campuses has long been exhausted. But there is a reason universities, and specifically the University of Chicago, have become the apparent predominant site for contesting free speech. Rather than being mired in the “woke” agenda, as some believe, many American universities are conservatively run institutions that produce and reproduce existing social injustices. Stephens’s invitation is a reminder that those who are loudest about protecting free speech — and who use free speech to share bigoted views — are often the ones whose voices are uplifted and protected. Meanwhile, those who are already among the most marginalized members of society, those who speak up for their very lives and right to exist, have to fight hardest to make their voices heard. For free speech to truly be free, it is important to shift the perspective of “attacks” on free speech to those it most directly harms.
At UChicago, we see the disproportionate stakes of free speech not just during convocation weekend (in 2016, the student body president was threatened with expulsion the day before graduation for his role in aiding a student protest), but every day on campus. My school’s free speech principles may protect hateful ideas in the name of “intellectual inquiry,” but they do little to shield faculty members who are subject to right-wing harassment campaigns or students of color who protest classes they deem harmful. (In an email to Teen Vogue, a UChicago spokesperson says, “The university defends the freedom of instructors to teach any course that has been developed through our faculty-led curricular processes and the ability of students to enroll in courses of their choice.” The spokesperson continues, “As part of our free expression principles, the university is fundamentally committed to upholding the rights of protesters to express a wide range of views. University policies make it clear that protests cannot disrupt the university’s operations or the ability of people in the university to carry out their work.”)
Take the example of two recent controversial classes: This year's winter quarter was marked by the indelible absence of one course and the presence of another. Before classes even began, an undergraduate student called on the public to contact cultural anthropologist Rebecca Journey about the supposed “anti-white hatred” in her planned course, “The Problem of Whiteness.” After being subjected to misogynistic and antisemitic vitriol and even death threats, Journey made the decision to postpone the class until the following quarter.
Two months later, the university president Paul Alivisatos published an op-ed — which reads more like a publicity statement to me — in the Chicago Maroon reaffirming the university’s commitment to free expression, citing a few recent controversies. The piece does not mention the harassment of faculty.
At the same time, Meir Elran, a veteran general of the Israeli military, taught a course called “Security, Counter Terrorism, and Resilience, the Israeli Case.” Students for Justice in Palestine UChicago (SJP UChicago) led a quarter-long campaign consisting of several protests, a die-in, and flyers featuring 11 reasons to oppose Elran’s course, culminating in a peaceful February 2 demonstration to commemorate the lives of the Palestinians killed by the Israeli army in 2023.
Before that commemoration began, University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officers crowded the doors of Cobb Hall, where Elran’s class and the SJP action would take place. Security officers attempted to bar protesters from entering the building, although Cobb is open-access to all members of the campus community.
In an op-ed for the Maroon, SJP members wrote that the first protester to be denied entry was a female Muslim student wearing a hijab. When the demonstrators were finally permitted to enter the building, according to the op-ed, they lined the hallway and listened to speeches from organizers, held up posters honoring the Palestinians who had been killed, and held a moment of silence. During this time, UCPD officers stood nearby and in Elran’s classroom.
Protesting Elran’s course exercised the right to demonstrate, a right given to students by the Chicago Principles, and SJP members abided by university policy during their campaign. But the UChicago administration, instead of upholding these values, turned to attempted suppression through the presence of armed police officers and other tactics, thus undermining its own policies on free expression.
As the SJP op-ed notes, UChicago swiftly erased pro-Palestinian chalk on the quad and did not take action against individuals who tore down SJP flyers. When asked about the February 2 protest, a UChicago spokesperson said, “Officers were present as is common for protests on campus. Because the protest took place inside an academic building where classes were being held, it required steps to ensure that students could express themselves without disrupting classes. The protest did not obstruct access to classrooms and classes proceeded as scheduled.” The spokesperson did not address demonstrators’ complaints that they were initially prevented from entering the building.
These two classes tell one story: The University of Chicago will publicly tout its free speech principles while using its private police force in a way that intimidates and silences already marginalized voices. Further, these two classes present only a microcosm of the free speech environment at UChicago. The presence of armed police at the peaceful SJP demonstration is part and parcel of university attempts to silence marginalized voices, often disciplining students of color, community members, and those who advocate for progressive ideas.
Take another example: Members of UChicago Against Displacement, a student organization that demands reparations from the university for its role in gentrification on the South Side, faced disciplinary measures after disrupting Alivisatos’s speech during alumni weekend last year. During the yearslong campaign for a trauma center that would provide lifesaving medical care for South Side residents, nine protesting community members, including a graduate student and an alum, were arrested after barricading themselves inside an administration building at a sit-in protest to demand a meeting with the university president.
The protesters are still banned from campus and have alleged experiencing racial profiling by university police throughout their demonstrations. These protest actions may have violated the university’s policy on disruptive conduct, but in my view they were the rightful exercises of freedom of assembly that are surely central to a university committed to free expression.
If we’re going to continue to insist that college campuses are sites for the battle over free speech, we must remember to center those who are most affected by the disproportionate stakes of free speech in our conversations: those who don’t seek sensational Fox News coverage or national headlines for fear of their own safety. Multiple students on campus, including myself, have been targeted, doxxed, and put on blacklists for voicing their opinions. We need to uplift these voices and lend our own in committing to fight their struggles.
In June, before my peers enter the real world through campus gates, they will likely get an earful from Bret Stephens on the precariousness of free speech. But who knows? Some students may protest his speech in the name of free expression. We should hope that their right to protest is also defended.
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