The Chicago Canon on Free Inquiry and Expression
Edited by Tony Banout and Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago Press, $26, 228 pages)
The University of Chicago is justly famous for its defense of freedom of expression and free inquiry against the censorious barbarians at the gates of academia, and within it. Over the past decade, as many universities set out to provide a protective cocoon around students to prevent them from being upset from opposing points of view, the University of Chicago upheld the right to free expression of professors and students and free inquiry of scholars. This is simultaneously nothing new and against the grain: nothing new for the University of Chicago and against the grain of most universities in the United States and elsewhere in the West over the past decade. As a report by the University of Chicago’s faculty committee on “Freedom of Expression” said in 2015, “From its very founding, the University of Chicago has dedicated itself to the preservation and celebration of the freedom of expression as an essential element of the University’s culture.” As early as 1902, University president William Rainey Harper insisted that the principle of freedom of expression “can neither now nor at any future time be called into question.” Unfortunately, it often has been called into question and The Chicago Canon on Free Inquiry and Expression is a collection of 19 speeches and reports upholding the principles of free expression and inquiry at the University when these freedoms have been threatened. Whether it be defending unpopular guest speakers, hiring controversial scholars, pursuing uncomfortable lines of scholarship, or permitting free debate, there have long been questions about the extent to which free expression and inquiry should be tolerated, and time and time again the University has sided with freedom. The benefit of this collection is not only to demonstrate how free inquiry and expression are “explicit in the University of Chicago’s founding DNA” as the editors state in their introduction, but to show the importance of these freedoms to all institutions of higher learning. University president Robert J. Zimmer said in a 2017 speech that being exposed to uncomfortable discourse permits “escape for thought being submerged by an on-going state of self-deception.” That is, education is supposed to open new vistas of understanding and thus all education should be uncomfortable. Protecting students from discomfort does them no favours. University president Robert M. Hutchins told a Congressional hearing in 1949 that “the policy of repression of ideas cannot work and has never worked” and “the alternative to it is the long, difficult road of education.” Such education, Hutchins said, “requires patience and tolerance,” virtues that seemed in short supply 75 years ago just as they do today.
