The University of Chicago this week announced it had received an anonymous $100-million donation aimed at a single purpose: to advance free expression. The university says it’s the largest single gift ever given to a college to that end.
The money will pay for more events by the university’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, a new fellowship program for free-speech scholars, and research projects across the university.
Tom Ginsburg, faculty director of the forum, said the fellowship program will invite “prominent intellectuals and dissidents” to host events and conduct research — scholars, he says, who are pursuing “unusual lines of inquiry” that are “outside of the mainstream.” He also hopes to invite scholars who have faced attacks for their speech.
“It’s really important for students to understand the stakes of free expression,” Ginsburg said. “A lot of us take things for granted in this country, but there’s so many parts of the world where you can get in big trouble for very minor utterances.”
Such cases have attracted ample attention in recent years. Some scholars who have posted online about their political views have faced discipline from their institutions. In some cases, their teaching has come under fire. In 2022, Hamline University did not renew a lecturer’s contract after she showed two images of the Prophet Muhammad in an art-history course, upsetting at least one student in the class.
Ginsburg said the University of Chicago invited the lecturer, Erika López Prater, to present her work and discuss the free-speech issues at hand. “We tried to serve as a beacon where people who have been wronged in censorious environments know that there is an institution where their work is respected,” he said.
Ginsburg said the $100 million will act as an endowment for the forum, but will also flow to other parts of campus through research grants and even impact those outside of campus through the forum’s Academic Freedom Institute, a three-day workshop for academics and administrators. This year, scholars from 20 colleges attended, and Ginsburg says he hopes to expand the number of attendees and sessions at the institute in future years.
The gift has raised some eyebrows. Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, expressed concern about the lack of transparency and accountability that comes with an anonymous donation. “A donation like that shapes programming. It shapes hiring. It shapes the priorities of the institution,” she told The Chronicle. “There’s no way to hold anyone accountable for how this donation might shift campus policies and campus priorities.”
Ginsburg said the university has mechanisms in place to prevent donor influence. “An anonymous gift is actually an incredible thing,” he said. “It’s very rare for people who have the capacity to make these gifts to prefer the focus on the institution rather than their own name.”
The university styles itself as a longtime promoter of free speech. In the late ‘60s, it produced the Kalven Report, an oft-cited document that supports institutional neutrality. In 2015, the university published the “Chicago Principles,” a philosophical document on campus speech that has been adopted by more than 90 colleges.
The document has its skeptics, and the university has faced criticism for its handling of protests. Police dressed in riot gear cleared an eight-day-long encampment on the main quad this spring, which some viewed as a chilling of free expression.
“I don’t think we have really been living up to that promise in the last year,” said Callie Maidhof, an assistant professor of anthropology and director of the global-studies program. “We are part of that wave of new campus regulations and antiprotest measures that are going on at universities all across the country.”
The Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression hosted talks last year about the war in Gaza, and on its website it lists three upcoming talks called “What Might Peace Look Like.”
“I view this gift as a chance for one university to demonstrate that we can keep our own house in order with regard to free-speech issues and the ultimate mission of constructing environments where students can converse across differences,” Ginsburg said.
