An Open Letter to the University of Chicago History Department
As an alumna of your department, I was both surprised and saddened to receive this letter. Although I am no longer based on campus, it was not difficult to guess the target of your message as Professor Fulton Brown’s recent comments in support of Milo Yiannopoulos.
I appreciate the commitment to free speech expressed in your email, as well as your avowed intention to foster an inclusive environment for education and reasoned debate. The email makes less clear, however, as to your — and the department’s — stance when a supposed exercise of the former threatens the viability of the latter.
The Trump administration and the rise of the alt-right have demonstrated now, more than ever, the disingenuousness of claiming that speech-acts circulate in spaces free from the machinations of material power. The administration’s persistent unwillingness to recognise this inconvenient truth has long been a source of frustration to many of my fellow students and alumni. A recourse to ‘free speech’, and a blanket claim to a curious ‘neutrality’, seems to be the standard response to when they have challenged issues regarding the unethical grounds of the University’s investments, its treatment and payment of University staff, or the role of the University in guaranteeing the safety and well-being of all its students. ‘Free speech’, in these instances, have been curiously weaponised as a rhetorical carte blanche that serves to shut down mutually productive speech, rather than to promote its flourishing; a blanket claim that one has the ‘right’ to articulate something has supplanted any meaningful attempt to respond to its resultant criticisms.
I appreciate that it would be difficult to attempt to coalesce the many different and diverse strands of thought and personal histories in your department into coherent intra-departmental message. I am surprised, however, that your email seems to divest the department of any responsibility or sense of shared values, diluting the body merely down to its parts. It is undeniable that, at the very minimum, your department functions as a body, organises teaching as a body, and, more pointedly, has your continued functioning made possible by the very students who grant your department legitimacy as a part of a degree-conferring institution. Would it be too much, at the very minimum, to assert the inherent sanctity of the humanity of all the students you are positioned to educate? And if the pendulum of political rhetoric has swung so far such that it becomes controversial to affirm (to pervert Arendt) that there is indeed something sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human, perhaps clinging to the talisman of a watered-down notion of ‘free speech’ ought not be our primary aim.
Rebecca
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in response to:
At the request of many faculty and students and in light of recent controversies, the Chair and the Advisory Committee of the Department of History issue the following statement:
Individual faculty members are entitled to express and publish their opinions on any public issues of concern to them, and when they do so they speak only for themselves. As a faculty body, the Department of History does not endorse or defend the political or personal views expressed by any of its members. Nor as a collectivity does it take critical positions on matters of individual faculty opinion, be they personal or political. Other faculty members are, of course, also free to express their own countering points of view, to criticize or repudiate publicly whatever they disagree with or find offensive, and when they do so they likewise speak only for themselves.
More broadly, the Department of History is committed both to fostering an inclusive environment for teaching, learning, and reasoned intellectual debate and to furthering the exercise of free speech.
