To the Editor:
My colleague Anton Ford appears to misunderstand both the Chicago Principles, and their application to the recent protest encampment on our campus (“The Chicago Principles Are Undemocratic,” The Chronicle Review, May 6).
Professor Ford writes that, “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” (he did end the encampment the day after Professor Ford wrote). Yet the Chicago Principles, themselves, note that the university “may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the University,” i.e., teaching and research. The encampment, which was located proximate to many classrooms, was alleged to be interfering with teaching. It was also in violation of a longstanding and pre-existing rule prohibiting encampments on university grounds.
Professor Ford implies that the real reason for ending the encampment was that, “The Chicago Principles equate freedom of expression with freedom of discussion.” This is also not true, and rather obviously so in this case, since in his very first statement about the encampment on April 29, the university president stated that, “Given the importance of the expressive rights of our students, we may allow an encampment to remain for a short time despite the obvious violations of policy,” i.e., the policy regarding encampments on university grounds. The free expression principles here explicitly trumped the content-neutral prohibition on encampments as a form of protest, at least until the point of alleged disruption of core university functions.
There is too much one could say about the relevance of majority-rule democratic procedures to universities, but let me at least observe that the University of Chicago is not a political community, but, as the Kalven Report says, a “community of scholars.” That fact (I hope it is a fact) would require a bit more nuance in thinking about the relevance of majority-rule procedures to such a community than is in evidence in this essay.
Brian Leiter
Professor of Jurisprudence
Director, Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values
University of Chicago
