As Protests Mount, U. of Chicago Plans for a Visit From Steve Bannon
By Emma KerrFebruary 6, 2018
The University of Chicago is standing by its plans to host an event with the former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon on its downtown campus, despite protests and petitions calling for administrators to revoke an invitation he accepted in January.
Luigi Zingales, a professor in the Booth School of Business, planned the event, which was first announced as a debate between Bannon and faculty experts to be moderated by Zingales. Zingales said in a statement explaining the invitation that he disagreed with Bannon’s politics. But, he said, “the current problems in America cannot be solved by demonizing those who think differently, but by addressing the causes of their dissatisfaction.”
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The University of Chicago is standing by its plans to host an event with the former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon on its downtown campus, despite protests and petitions calling for administrators to revoke an invitation he accepted in January.
Luigi Zingales, a professor in the Booth School of Business, planned the event, which was first announced as a debate between Bannon and faculty experts to be moderated by Zingales. Zingales said in a statement explaining the invitation that he disagreed with Bannon’s politics. But, he said, “the current problems in America cannot be solved by demonizing those who think differently, but by addressing the causes of their dissatisfaction.”
Zingales defended his decision to invite Bannon during a town-hall meeting on Monday at which he fielded questions from faculty and students. The professor said he continues to believe the debate will be productive. He noted that Donald J. Trump’s presidential victory in 2016 was a surprise to people at the university, and said that Bannon sold a “pretty explosive combination of nationalism and a lack of democracy against globalization,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
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Asked at the town hall if he would support Hitler coming to speak on campus, Zingales said he “would distinguish early Hitler from later Hitler.”
“I think it would have been very useful to know ahead of time what he was about,” Zingales said. “If the world had known earlier what Hitler was standing for, I think there would have been a better fate, no?”
‘Upholding Academic Freedom’
Critics of the invitation have felt differently. Students began protesting the debate shortly after its announcement; one group held a sit-in at Zingales’s classroom, which prompted the professor to appear at Monday’s student-run town hall. Another protest — titled “No Hate, No Fear, Bannon Is Not Welcome Here!” — is planned for Friday.
Meanwhile more than 100 faculty members signed a separate petition calling for action against the debate. “The defense of freedom of expression,” the professors wrote, “cannot be taken to mean that white supremacy, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Catholicism, and Islamophobia must be afforded the rights and opportunity to be aired on a university campus.”
More than 1,000 alumni signed a letter to the university’s president, Robert J. Zimmer, and its provost, Daniel Diermeier, calling for the institution to block Bannon from speaking. While Bannon has a right to free speech, the letter argued, his voice does not need to be elevated beyond platforms that already broadcast his perspective, like the White House and Breitbart News, where he was executive chairman until a month ago.
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“Hosting Bannon may hamper the University of Chicago’s ability to recruit and retain a diverse student body,” the letter continued. “A Bannon visit to campus will be a distraction from, not an enhancement to, that learning environment which we all cherish.”
The alumni letter also noted that the University of Chicago would foot the bill for Bannon’s travel expenses, and it argued that security costs and other expenses were not worth the “few benefits” Bannon’s visit would provide.
The university released a statement in January, affirming its commitment to “upholding the values of academic freedom, the free expression of ideas, and the ability of faculty and students to invite the speakers of their choice.”
“Any recognized student group, faculty group, University department or individual faculty member can invite a speaker to campus,” the statement read. “We recognize that there will be debate and disagreement over this event; as part of our commitment to free expression, the University supports the ability of protesters and invited speakers to express a wide range of views.”
‘Something to Mitigate the Harm’
The alumni letter doubles as a fund raiser in which alumni will pledge money to organizations that “empower and protect marginalized people on the South Side” for every minute Bannon speaks in the debate, using the Twitter hashtag #SouthSideNotSteve. Rachel Lazerus, who drafted the petition, told The Chronicle she was dismayed to see the university invite a “racist bigot” to speak. She said the letter helped her and other alumni channel the anger and frustration they felt into something positive.
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“At some level, this is about what the University of Chicago wants to show support for in its local community: Does the university care so much about having the outdated, racist, bigoted, and anti-intellectual views of Steve Bannon aired that it will actively cause harm to the local community to do so?” she said. “Then we should do something to mitigate that harm and provide the good that the university won’t.”
Lazerus said she drafted the letter in collaboration with other alumni, structuring it as a cost-benefit analysis “because that’s one of the ways I was trained to analyze issues from the University of Chicago, and I also thought it might be more appealing to professors from the business school if structured that way.”
An employee of the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State — a university research institution that Zingales directs — stepped down from her position as senior editor after her objections to inviting Bannon were not acted upon,The Chicago Maroon reported. Samantha Eyler-Driscoll, the editor, said in a public statement that the case demonstrated how “the de jure notion of an absolute right to freedom of expression conceals a de facto reality in which the right to free expression of the powerful is enforced at the expense of that of their subordinates.”
Though most of the students are against allowing Bannon to come to campus, said Victoria Koffsky, a student and member of the University of Chicago Democrats, a small number of students held counterprotests advocating for free speech.
“There have been a greater number of students with that mind-set coming to U Chicago ever since U Chicago released their now-infamous free-speech letter,” Koffsky said. (In that letter, sent to incoming students in 2016, John Ellison, the dean of students, stated the university’s opposition to trigger warnings and “intellectual safe spaces,” and added that “we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial.”) “Having Bannon come will likely increase that. And as far as how it will make students already here feel, it will only exacerbate how students of color feel unsafe on campus.”
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A University of Chicago spokesman said on Tuesday that the date, time, and list of participants in the Bannon debate had not yet been set, but Zingales suggested at the town hall on Monday that he might issue an open call for students to act as debate moderators.
“I think it would be very sad if somehow I were to be forced to disinvite him,” Zingales said at the town hall, “and certainly that will play on the narrative that there is no space for other ideas on campus.”