Everyone in cyberspace is blathering about this, so I will add my own brief blather:
1. Academic freedom protects the right of faculty to utilize trigger warnings if in their professional judgment it is important for the pedagogical mission in a class. To the extent the letter implies they are forbidden, it is nonsense. ("Trigger warnings" are a popular blather topic in their own right, but there's not much more worth saying than this.)
2. Insofar as the letter is meant to send a message, the message is that all ideas can be discussed at the University of Chicago, subject to norms of civility essential for learning. So, for example, if some faculty or students here tried to suppress discussion of Germaine Greer's views about gender--as happened in philosophy cyberspace not long ago--they would be unsuccessful here. If anyone interfered with the expression of such ideas, they themselves would be subject to discipline for disrupting the mission of the university. By contrast, criticism of Greer's views on gender would enjoy the same protection at the University of Chicago.
3. #2 is obviously the only way for a serious university to run--even Herbert Marcuse argued that in the famous essay on "Repressive Tolerance." Here the Marxian left, the traditional liberal and the libertarian right should all be in agreement. Only that consumerist phenomenon of elite universities and their narcissistic students--roughly "identity politics"--is the outlier here.
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