Chicago Principles on Freedom of Expression Adopted by Winston-Salem State University

Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) became the fourth university in the country, the second public university, the first historically black college or university (HBCU), the first university in the South, and the first university that does not offer a Ph.D. degree to adopt the Chicago Principles when its Faculty Senate passed a resolution in favor of adoption by a vote of 36 to 0 with one abstention on September 10, 2015.  Two weeks later, on September 24, 2015, the General Faculty of WSSU reaffirmed this decision, voting 100 to 8 in favor of the Chicago Principles.

I would not have even known about the Chicago Principles were it not for the activities of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and the chance invitation that I received to be a part of the Academic Freedom Seminar in July. Along with that invitation came a recommendation to read up on the Chicago Principles, which I wholeheartedly endorsed though I thought for a while that they were almost self-evident and thus should not require a discussion at all. Indeed, much of the time the nuances of speech codes, trigger warnings, and microaggressions appeared to be more about common courtesy until I discovered to my dismay that they were actually being enforced against individuals in direct violation of First Amendment guarantees at public universities.

For me, the Academic Freedom Seminar awakened a realization that our freedoms are not stripped from us in one fell swoop but rather slowly chipped away and that any restriction needed to be examined with the greatest possible scrutiny and allowed only when it served to ensure the proper functioning of the university or when it fell under the banner of unprotected speech in a legal sense and, even then, such restrictions needed to be formulated so that they impeded such discussions in the least intrusive manner and were not based on the content of the speech itself.  Public universities, even more than private universities, need to protect the freedom of expression as they must be cognizant of the fact that they are instruments of the government and thus actions undertaken by them directly contravene First Amendment protections when they go further than government itself is allowed to go. It is for this reason that passage of these Principles are critical to the survival of the public university.  I still remain committed to common courtesy but one must never forget that common courtesy must be a choice. When it is enforced on others, it no longer is courtesy but is instead a mandate and that mandate silences all who oppose it.  The university must resist this temptation because without freedom of expression and the full and open dialogue on any topic that may come up in polite conversation or otherwise, we cannot advance the state of knowledge.

This is especially true for an HBCU, for was it not only a little more than 50 years ago, when common courtesy dictated that African-Americans move to the back of the bus or excuse themselves from the lunch counter when a white person sought a seat?  What would have happened if Rosa Parks or the Greensboro Four had politely accepted that "common courtesy" and had not uttered that one word that strikes fear into the hearts of all who would oppress, "No"?  The answer is as simple as it is obvious: when we allow common courtesy to become a shackle in such a way that it no longer is our personal choice to do so but rather becomes obligatory, we end up with second class citizenship for those of a different race, gender, occupation, opinion, political party, age, social class, sexual orientation, religion, birthplace , or any other difference of which you may consider, and such a surrender of the basic principle that one person should not be able to dictate how another thinks or expresses themselves leads inextricably to authoritarianism and a complete breakdown of the guarding principle of what has come to be known as Western Civilization.