Where Do We Go from Here?

The concluding post in a series summarizing my new book Lawless.

This isn’t rocket science. University officials know how to set campus culture. Whether it’s entrepreneurship, public service, environmental consciousness, or anything else, they instill values in their students all the time. It wouldn’t be that hard to do with commitments to academic freedom, intellectual diversity, civil discourse, and returning to the core educational mission of truth-seeking and knowledge-creation. Fixing campus cultures seems like a management issue.

Indeed, the University of Chicago has largely avoided cancel-culture issues even in the last five years of campus upheaval. Former president Robert Zimmer was a rarity among his peers in standing up to all sorts of moral panics, most notably in defending geophysics professor Dorian Abbot’s right to criticize the university's affirmative action programs.

UChicago’s law school, which is where I got my JD, has similarly avoided shoutdowns and the like. For example, when a student facilitated the disruptive protest of an event regarding Israel in April 2019, he was effectively expelled and there haven't been any incidents since.