If I have time I may say more about this odd and very misleading essay by my colleague Anton Ford (it's a shame we did not have an opportunity to discuss this before he published it, since I might have saved him from some obvious errors). He writes:
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....
The encampment, as we discussed the other day, was alleged to be interfering with teaching in the surroudning classrooms; it was also, in any case, in violation of a pre-existing, content-neutral prohibition on encampments on university grounds, which exists for all the obvious reasons. It's central to the "Chicago Principles" and any sensible rules on freedom of expression that such expression can be restricted in a content-neutral way for the sake of the ordinary activities of the university (teaching and research). But Anton suggests, instead, that the encampment was broken up because, "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 trumped the content-neutral prohibition on encampments as a form of protest.
I may say a bit more about this curious piece, but let me note 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-vote procedures to such a community than is in evidence in this essay.
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