U. of Chicago’s Free-Expression Letter Exposes Fault Lines on Campus

When John Ellison sat down to write a letter welcoming the Class of 2020 to the University of Chicago, he very likely had no idea his words would add fuel to the national debate over academic freedom and the use of safe spaces and trigger warnings in higher education.

The letter, in which the dean of students sought to remind students of the university’s longstanding commitment to free expression, tripped itself up with confusing language and a tone that struck some as condescending. And it became a Rorschach test for Chicago’s students and professors, highlighting longstanding tensions on a campus that presents itself to the outside world as a stalwart of vigorous intellectual debate.

To some, particularly minority students and activists, the letter confirmed their belief that administrators there are tone-deaf to their concerns and opinions and that professors are sometimes ill prepared to guide sensitive conversations on social issues. Others, fearing the encroachment of political correctness, applauded the administration for pushing back against what they see as a movement to promote groupthink, where controversial speakers are shouted down and students are overly sensitive to perceived slights and perceptions of bias.

In short, Chicago isn’t much different from many campuses today as administrators and professors debate how to challenge students intellectually, support a range of viewpoints, foster diversity, and deal with larger social and political issues that affect their communities.

In his letter, Mr. Ellison wrote: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces,’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

The university later clarified that it was not banning either trigger warnings or safe spaces, but the letter’s tone is what put many off. “The letter does suggest a self-congratulatory posture on the part of the university that may not be deserved,” said Kenneth W. Warren, an English professor who was a member of the committee that created the university’s 2015 statement on freedom of expression, heralded as a model for other institutions. “There are a number of issues where the university appears to be less than welcoming of robust and uncomfortable discussion.”

In recent years the university, which is located in a predominantly black and lower-income area of Chicago, has been the site of a number of tense protests, with students involved in a range of causes alongside local activists. Those causes include more transparency in the university’s police department, which patrols off-campus neighborhoods and has been accused of racial profiling; higher pay for hourly-wage workers on the campus; and the creation of a hospital trauma center that would serve surrounding communities.

Students have also advocated for higher pay for graduate-students, divestment from fossil-fuel companies, and better programming to prevent sexual assault. They have staged a sit-in, disrupted events, drowned out speakers, and had tense exchanges with administrators.

And students have pushed the administration to do more to promote diversity and inclusion on the campus. In May the undergraduate student government, known as the College Council, passed a resolution calling on the university to diversify the general-education curriculum of the social sciences by including more non-European thinkers and to provide competency training for faculty members. The council also criticized the administration for “failing to support diversity and inclusion in the classroom.”

Eric Holmberg, a junior and president of the student body, said Mr. Ellison’s letter was both an “effort to control the conversation on campus, starting with trigger warnings and safe spaces, and a false narrative of coddled millennials.” By suggesting students are overly sensitive, he said, the administration can undercut the legitimacy of their causes. “A lot of us really buy into the idea that this is a place of rigorous inquiry,” he said, dismissing the idea that students want to avoid being intellectually challenged. “What’s not going well are poverty wages, racial profiling by the police force, and the university investing in companies that accelerate climate change.”

Opposing Ideas and Views

Jeremy Manier, assistant vice president for communications, said that the university had been responsive to student and community concerns on several issues. Last year, for example, it agreed to take steps to provide more public information on police actions, including tracking traffic stops by race and gender. And the university hospital has agreed to open a trauma center in 2018. “There are a number of channels for students to engage regularly with university leaders,” he said.

The university also provided a statement by John W. Boyer, dean of the college and a professor of history whose book Academic Freedom and the Modern University: The Experience of the University of Chicago, was sent to students along with Mr. Ellison’s letter.

“The proposition of the university depends on welcoming people of all backgrounds and experiences,” writes Mr. Boyer. “This idea is not at odds with freedom of expression — in fact, a university that strives to be welcoming to all its members must affirm academic freedom for all. What we can’t do is to shield students from opposing ideas and viewpoints.”

Some people on the campus worry that the climate at Chicago is already changing. Charles Lipson, a political-science professor, said trigger warnings themselves weren’t a concern, if used properly. He has employed them himself. “The bigger problem in classrooms, according to students who come to me, petrified, is teachers who demand you agree with them and their viewpoint, otherwise your views aren’t welcome and you’re going to get a bad grade,” he said. “These are typically the teachers shutting down dissenting views, and the same people are shutting down discordant views on Israel, on the Middle East, on policing, on U.S. military force in the world.”

Michael Sitver, a sophomore who is a member of College Republicans and is active in pro-Israel events, said he had encountered such hostility directly. “There are definitely some people who are beyond sensitive about issues,” he said. “I’ve had students come up to me and say, Why do you think you have the right to ask a question when you’ve oppressed the rights of Muslim students?”

He said he was “ecstatic” to read Mr. Ellison’s letter. “It sets a tone for what people should expect.”

But some members of minority groups said Mr. Ellison’s call for students to engage in rigorous debate rang hollow at times on a campus where only about 9 percent of the undergraduates are black and 15 percent are Latino.

Mary Blair, a sophomore who wrote the resolution to increase diversity in the social-science curriculum, said she got the idea during a first-year course in which the racist views of thinkers like Adam Smith were often left unchallenged in a class where she was one of only two black students.

The course, “Self, Culture, and Society,” she said, “wasn’t equipping students to talk about issues that are very real and relevant and important right now.” She later reviewed about 200 course syllabi in the social sciences. On average, she said, only two of 15 texts listed in a syllabus were not written by white men.

She and other black students said they’d had mixed experiences with professors, with some being very effective at amplifying minority voices in the classroom so they don’t feel so alone, and others mishandling important conversations.

“I don’t think professors are necessarily well equipped to teach in multicultural classrooms,” said Stephanie Greene, a senior and immediate past president of the Organization of Black Students. Sometimes, she said, professors let stand callous comments by students; other times they treat her and other black students almost too seriously, as if they were representatives of all black people. “When you get to readings about slavery,” she said, “it gets weird, it gets to be really awkward.”

Malloy Owen, a junior, has another concern. In an essay for The American Conservative, Mr. Owen writes that in its pursuit of elite status Chicago has drawn “a pre-professional” class of students from across the political spectrum who are far more interested in networking than in being intellectually challenged. “They are unsympathetic or even actively opposed to calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces,” he writes, “but, crucially, they also seem uninterested in the kind of abstract, freewheeling debate that the campus left is trying to constrain.”

In an interview, Mr. Owen said that while he fully supports the ideals espoused in the letter, it is “super-hypocritical given the corporatization of the university.”

“Given that the university is not protecting liberal education in other ways,” he said, “it seems odd for them to zero in on this one attack.”

Practice and Principle

How the university will reconcile those various tensions on its campus remains to be seen.

In June 2015, following a sit-in at the administration building and disruption of an awards ceremony, Eric D. Isaacs, then the provost of the university, and Robert J. Zimmer, Chicago’s president, wrote a letter to the campus condemning such tactics. This past May, students staged another sit-in in the administration building.

Some on the campus think those and other events prompted the administration to set the tone for incoming freshmen with Mr. Ellison’s letter.

The university also announced in June the creation of a Faculty Committee on University Discipline for Disruptive Conduct. It will recommend how to handle disruptions of free expression from within and outside the university community, and suggest programming on the importance of free expression.

Mr. Lipson, the political-science professor, said the university needed such clarity on how to handle disruptive behavior. He is particularly disturbed by a decision of the student government last spring to shelve a resolution, which he and 50 other professors had signed, that would have condemned the disruption or obstruction of free speech. “There was clear evidence to me that we not only were having some problems on the campus, but that our students did not understand or appreciate the reasoning behind the principles of free speech.”

Mr. Warren, the English professor, expressed some concern about the committee’s focus. While he disagrees with activists who try to shut down speakers, “it’s important for us to be mindful that we are an educational institution and to reaffirm what these principles are and how they are upheld, rather than fix what kinds of punishment are appropriate.”

Adam Green, an associate professor of history and chair of the Diversity Advisory Council, said his group would present recommendations in a couple of months on how to create a more diverse and inclusive campus. A campus-climate survey taken last spring will also be coming out with reports in the coming months. What the campus would do well to reflect on, said Mr. Green, “is whether the practice of the exchange of ideas at Chicago matches the principle.”

On the issue of curricular diversity, he said that professors are exploring a proposal for a class that looks at issues of race and power, but that revamping the curriculum is a more ambitious challenge. “Thus far not a great deal of innovation has happened at this university when thinking about issues of diversity,” he said, with the exception of work on gender and sexuality. “There are a number of faculty now who hope to change that, and we’re eagerly looking forward to their ideas.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.

Corrections (9/6/2016, 12:46 p.m.): This article originally misstated the date of a letter from the university’s president and provost. It was sent in June 2015, not 2016. The article also misstated Eric Holmberg’s post. He is president of the student body, not of the College Council. The article has been updated to reflect those corrections.