President Alivasatos on Free Speech

[marlowe1]

The January 17th edition of the Chicago Maroon contains this statement by the University’s President:

Advancing UChicago’s Distinct Culture of Free Expression

It is President Alivastos’s strongest statement to date on the importance and centrality of free speech at the University of Chicago. There was no balancing of that value against competing values, no “but” to take account of “harms” or to caution civility. What is required, however, is listening as well as talking: “I have shared that, in my experience, every class, lecture, extracurricular activity, and informal discussion also has within it the possibility of being that special moment when we unlock the ability to see some aspect of the world in a new way. We are only able to access that possibility if we have the willingness to engage with others across differences. This requires truly listening to the perspectives of others, and, in turn, being open to sharing our own perspective. This kind of practice is the strongest possible defence of free expression.”

The statement also contained quite a blunt warning: “I am committed to protecting free expression whenever there are efforts to quash it.” There are to be no disruptions of speakers duly invited to the campus, “however controversial they may be… our civil polity has the tools to prosecute those who issue threats of violence, which all too often arise from the fray of heated discourse. Such actions cannot be minimized or ignored, and the University will work with law enforcement when applicable.”

Finally, the President signalled that he has something up his sleeve for the future of the Chicago Principles in the greater world: “At current count, more than 90 universities have adopted or endorsed the Chicago Principles, and in the coming months, I will be reporting more on how we expand our efforts to advance freedom of expression beyond the University.”

I will be watching all this with great interest. Clearly the President, now that he is settled back in to his old alma mater and no doubt with the backing of the trustees, is doubling down on what has long been a feature, one might even say a “brand,” at this University. Of course, there will be plenty of debate and much pushback. Words, arguments, possibly even some choice zingers, will fly thickly through the air… but everyone will have a say, no one will be shut down. Life will be unrolling as it should at the University of Chicago.

[TheVulcan]

As much of an MIT booster as I may be on other topics, in this area Chicago definitely got it right.

Following the well-publicized Abbot affair, MIT has been making some strides at walking back that tightrope, with some ensuing hilarity.

[RichInPitt]

Oh joy……

[TheVulcan]

Apropos of nothing.

We were on a family trip to Chicago the year our older was applying to colleges, and decided to do the official tour of the UChicago campus since we are already there - the only official tour we did (we are really not into playing these games with the admissions committees).

The tour was, as expected, entirely non-illuminating, but we enjoyed walking around campus on our own afterwards, since it is very interesting architecturally (as is the rest of Chicago, our favorite American city in that regard).

I mean, this is their mathematics department:

Pretty awesome, amiright?

On top of our love of architecture, both our boys are big-time math nerds, so of course we couldn’t resist walking in to breathe in the rarefied air of elite mathematics.

As luck would have it, one of the first doors we came across was this one:

Oh, gee, I wonder what kind of abstract beauty will we see on those coveted blackboards. So kind of them to let us peek…

Oh… This looks like… admissions calculus?

No wonder Prof. Abbot is so upset…

[marlowe1]

Ah, good old Eckhart Hall, with carved reliefs of Newton and Gauss above its entrance. As well as Mathematics it once housed Astronomy - there’s an observatory in the turret at the top of the buiding. And there’s a library inside on, I believe, the second floor, where I, a mere humanist, found a congenial setting in which to read the Adventures of Don Quixote. My apartment mate, a serious mathematician, put the library to better uses than me.

It was he who told me, when he took his Ph.D. at Princeton, that John Milnor and the other worthies of that illustrious department used to say that at Chicago they liked their math to be hard but that it was not elegant, that it lacked the spirit of sprezzatura. However, no one accused it, as I believe you are slyly doing, of being trivial. Still, it’s interesting that schools have different cultures in the higher reaches of mathematics as much as they do in their undergraduate styles. In fact those differing mathematical styles seem to mimic the differing undergrad styles. Chicago has always been suspicious of things that are easy and too graceful.

I can only judge the mathematical part of this from a distance. However, it was interesting to me to note in the two new Cormac McCarthy linked novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” that the math prodigy in those novels took all her degrees from Chicago. McCarthy was at work on them for thirteen years during which he made his intellectual home among the big STEM guns of the Santa Fe Institute and seems himself to have become something of a STEM deep-thinker. His choice of Chicago as the school to which to send his genius heroine was hardly an uninformed accident. ln fairness it should be said that this character is also a bit, well, eccentric, another reason to send her to the gothic domain of Eckhart Hall.

In your visit, Vulcan, I hope you went round to the other side of Eckhart and took a gander at Botany Pond. Many a kiss has been exchanged on the little bridge leading to the island on which the turtles sun and the mother ducks lead their broods.

[TheVulcan]

@marlowe1

However, no one accused it, as I believe you are slyly doing, of being trivial.

Oh, no-no, nothing of the sort. Our older’s high school CS research mentor (they ended up publishing a paper together) did his undergrad in Math at UChicago. Similar to you, he shared fond memories of the place.

It’s just that there is, indeed, admissions calculus (or, rather, arithmetic) on that board. I know it’s hard to make out. I’ll take the first stab:

"Keep Stats

#ADM
#MINORITY = ?
#FEMALE

ADMIT = 48
+1 | 49
48 adm
#minority = 3?
#female = 21"

[marlowe1]

Yes, that bit on the board is sort of a smoking gun: someone is definitely keeping track of how well the department is satisfying the inexorable imperatives that dog this and every other field - including Abbott’s own. Indeed, his stated hostility to quotas produced a petition signed by colleagues and students at the University calling for various sanctions against him. So the attitudes he ran in to at MIT and that resulted in the cancellation of his talk there (on a subject unrelated to his views on affirmative action) are hardly unknown at Chicago. The difference is that the administration here is committed to protecting the academic freedom of all concerned - of Abbott to say what he likes, of students to protest his views.

[Lindagaf]

A reminder that per Forum Rules, debate isn’t allowed. Private messages are always an option.