The Chicago Principles Are Undemocratic

The University of Chicago, where I teach philosophy, presents itself as a champion of the freedom of expression. By now, more than 90 universities have adopted its framework for thinking about campus politics and speech, known as the “Chicago Principles.” This includes many universities, like Columbia and Emory, whose repression of student protests have made international news. In what would seem to many to be a flagrant violation of freedom of expression, the University of Chicago’s president, Paul Alivisatos, has threatened to break up an encampment of nonviolent student protesters.

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There is something extremely puzzling about this entire issue. The freedom to express one’s political ideas, a traditional cause of the left, is now associated with the right. And self-professed defenders of free expression are unleashing police violence on peaceful demonstrators. Given the national scope of the protests, and of the widespread dissemination of the Chicago Principles, it is worth trying to understand the underlying issues, which, unfortunately, are coming to a head.

The Chicago Principles equate freedom of expression with freedom of discussion. The problem with this equation is that discussion is not the only mode of rational public speech: it differs from deliberation, on the one hand, and from protest, on the other. Discussion is truth-seeking speech; deliberation is decision-making speech; and protest is disruptive speech. All three are hallmarks of democracy, but only the first is protected by the Chicago Principles.

If a university only acknowledges expression aimed at discovering truth, then all campus speech is measured by the yardstick of a seminar discussion, and basic democratic values are sacrificed. It is important to insist that, contrary to the Chicago Principles, deliberation and protest are fundamental forms of free expression.

The kind of speaking we do in a classroom — conversing, lecturing, debating, arguing, disagreeing, exchanging ideas, inquiring — is what brings us together into scholarly community. But, once in community, it is reasonable to want to have a hand in shaping the conditions under which our discussions are held. That’s where deliberation comes in.

Deliberation is a decision-making process. Mere discussion is not. In public deliberation, we speak, not merely for the sake of discovering truth, but specifically for the sake of action. If it isn’t aimed at doing something, it isn’t deliberation.

The adoption of the Chicago Principles at the University of Chicago, as at most other institutions where they have been taken up, was not the result of any deliberation by the faculty or students. The principles are based on two committee reports, the 1967 Kalven Report and the 2014 Stone Report, whose authors were selected by the president. Neither document was ratified by the faculty Council or the student government. Nor do they have any other democratic credential. The ordinary members of the university community are related to the Chicago Principles in something like the way that the employees of Procter & Gamble are related to the “values” described on its corporate website.

The political content of the Chicago Principles is itself undemocratic. The most celebrated line of the Kalven Report states that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” The central opposition here, between individual and institution, appears twice in the Kalven Report and a third time in the Stone Report. It presents a false dichotomy. Why should “the instrument of dissent and criticism” be either the individual or the institution? Those are not the only two possibilities. Why shouldn’t the instrument of dissent and criticism ever be, instead of the individual faculty member, the collective faculty, and instead of the individual student, the student body? This is not some radical idea. It is a basic principle of democratic governance. The Chicago Principles erase this possibility.

This erasure of the collective faculty as a critical or dissenting voice reflects the absence of institutions of meaningful faculty governance at the University of Chicago — a point that is worth stressing to faculty at other universities, which are considering adopting the Chicago Principles. At the University of Chicago, our faculty Council — which formally excludes non-tenure-track faculty, students, and staff — is the “supreme academic body of the University.” But it is not a deliberative body. I know this because I have served on the Council for four years, including one year as the elected spokesperson of its central committee. The Council at the University of Chicago does not have the power to censure the president, nor to call even a merely symbolic vote of no confidence. We do not have authority to constitute a committee, or to draft and vote on a resolution. Nor do we have the right to stipulate that an item be on the agenda of our own meeting. Our Council has two main powers: to approve new academic programs, and to approve the minutes of the previous meeting. In my time on the Council, those are the only two questions we have ever voted on, and the vote has almost always been unanimous.

Another important idea associated with the Chicago Principles is that of institutional neutrality. But this is an issue that only arises in the absence of meaningful public deliberation. The University of Chicago, for example, has a history of opposing the unionization of its graduate students. Recently, for the second time in a decade, our graduate students voted to unionize. This time around, under legal constraint, the university is abiding by the results of a fair democratic process. This is not a political statement in favor of unions. Students and professors who opposed unionization have no reasonable complaint that, by recognizing the results of a fair democratic process, the university has chilled their speech. The entire problem evaporates in the presence of democracy.

The University of Chicago continues to maintain that it cannot consider divesting from companies who profit from genocide, as protesters are demanding, because it needs to maintain a posture of institutional neutrality. If neutrality is the problem, then why not let us vote? By “us” I mean the students, staff, and faculty who perform and support the scholarship that is the core mission of any university. Were the University of Chicago to administer a fair democratic process, as occurred around unionization, it could easily maintain its institutional neutrality. No matter how things played out, it would be clear that the institution itself was not making a statement on the substantive matter in question. In that case, no individual’s speech would be chilled. If neutrality is the problem, democracy is the solution.

When students, staff, and faculty are denied a meaningful role in deliberation, protest is our only means of shaping the university community. But protest is essentially disruptive; if it’s not disruptive, it’s not a protest. While not all protests are equally disruptive, all aim to disrupt normal life to at least some extent. A ban on “disruptive protest” is a ban on protest tout court.

The Chicago Principles are not intended to protect protest; they are intended to protect discussion — against protest, if necessary. But disruption is an indispensable part of social and institutional change. The civil rights movement was not a classroom debate. It disrupted all institutions of society, including universities. At the University of Chicago, in 1962, university-owned housing, where many faculty lived, was still racially segregated. Students working with the Congress of Racial Equality protested, picketing outside the administration building, and then occupying the hallway outside the office of the president. Their occupation continued in a modified form for a week. In its negotiations with the students, the administration agreed to end racial discrimination in the rental of university-owned apartments.

Retrospectively, one can see that the civil-rights protesters — the agents of disruption — were the ones speaking rationally. Disruption was necessary, above all for the dignity of the victims of injustice. But it was also necessary for the well-being of the institution. The University of Chicago owes those protesters a debt of gratitude. There is no way to acknowledge such a debt in good faith except by incorporating some tolerance of disruption into one’s understanding of what is acceptable behavior.

What is easy for us to see when we look back at the anti-war protesters of the ’60s, and at the anti-apartheid protesters of the ’80s, is more difficult to see when we look at the protesters encamped on university quads across the country now. But of course, now is the time when we need to be able to see it.