Pride and principles

Allow me to preface this letter with a confession: I haven’t always been proud of my alma mater. Not of masochistic students embracing the school’s complicity in the murder of fun. Nor when meeting fellow alums who haven’t quite integrated into civilized society. And never during Scav. I was like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. A man—not an animal —curiously out of step. But those moments pale when compared to the overwhelming sense of pride I felt upon reading about the Chicago Principles (“Opening Inquiry,” July–Aug/15). The University’s unwavering support for free expression is everything it should be.

How rotten has the climate gotten on college campuses? Well, for one thing, proclamations like this are much too rare. There’s no place for trigger warnings, hurt feelings, and sensitivity when promoting the free exchange of ideas. In a year when cartoonists were killed for the unforgivable crime of satire, these principles have particular resonance. Freedom of expression is worth defending without mealy-mouthed qualifications or post hoc “contextualizing.” For a school that famously champions the theoretical, it’s heartening to see an affirmation with a practical purpose. Freedom’s kindling is speech. The more of it, the freer we are. The University of Chicago remains a beacon of open discourse. As an alumnus, I’m delighted. And as an American, I’m thankful.

Oliver Mosier, AB’08
Astoria, New York

Inquiry, opened

The report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression exhibits both the strengths and the weaknesses of classical liberal legalism. It stoutly defends an ideal free marketplace of ideas, while leaving room for several undefined exceptions and failing to recognize the institutional inequalities that already distort that marketplace. In this regard, it resembles the Supreme Court’s fantastical performance in Citizens United.

In the face of nationwide debate, the report affirms the status quo. The University administration will continue to determine what conduct expresses a debatable idea and what constitutes a genuine threat, an unjustifiable invasion of confidentiality, or an undue disruption of ordinary activities. It will still decide which speakers and programs are worthy of University hospitality and support. We must trust in the administration’s expertise, lack of bias, and immunity to pressure from financial donors.

The pursuit of diversity, in viewpoints as well as demographic backgrounds, is conducive to robust debate, but also makes it more likely that some will have difficulty tolerating others’ viewpoints. The report’s rather casual response to student concerns about an inclusive and safe environment—pleas for civility, without stated procedures for enforcement—begs a deeper question about University policy: should students be admitted and retained who cannot be trusted to tolerate the kinds of robust debate and practice the civility to which the University is committed? Or rather, are survivors of personal trauma or disrespected group identity entitled to special accommodations?

Daniel Hoffman, AB’63
Charlotte, North Carolina

Your piece on the Chicago Principles for free expression on campus left me wondering about the limits the drafting committee sees for those principles in two related regards.

First, the committee appears to imagine the “freedom to debate and discuss” as a commitment to something that largely resembles academic debate. But this sort of reasoned “free and open discussion of ideas” is only part of the larger spectrum of protected, and vital, speech in a democracy. What of more raucous forms of protest and civil disobedience? Sit-ins, marches, street theater, even—at the outermost extreme—riots? These are often the forms of protest that the less powerful use (because they sometimes must) to challenge those in power, who would prefer an armchair debate to a massed protest crowd. They may not be civil, nor always be reasonable, but they are one of the ways those who are denied the chance to have a quiet academic discussion sometimes must assert their own voices. To be sure, the balance required to nurture both protest and dialogue is a difficult one, but both have real claims to be valuable speech. What weight do the principles give protests of this sort?

Second, it is hard to miss the principles’ injunction against speech that is “directly incompatible with the functioning of the University.” The other exceptions to speech protections sound in the familiar territory of First Amendment law, but this is a novel carve out. Fair enough, if one thinks of the University largely as a vessel for speech that must be protected in order to carry out that function. But what of speech that addresses the University itself as a political entity? The University of Chicago has a long and sometimes fraught history as an entity itself in relation to the neighborhoods around it, as well as to the larger national and global scene. Do the principles, now being adopted by other universities, work to wall off the universities themselves as targets and sources of legitimate protest?

These questions arise from the dual tradition of speech on campus. As academic institutions, universities do, indeed, carry forward a role as guarantors of free speech and open discourse by their members. Here, it is paramount to protect the rights of all speakers on campus. But as political and economic actors embedded, inevitably, in landscapes of privilege and power, universities as institutions are not immune from challenge; on the contrary, they are remarkably powerful shapers of discourse, economic and racial mobility, and national policy. Too, they are the home of one of the principal groups—students—that can readily build larger social movements.

The Chicago Principles do a fine job of protecting universities and the speech they shelter if one sees universities solely as academic protectors of dialogue. But they do not clearly attend to more disruptive forms of protest and challenge, nor consider the ways those challenges might be directed against universities or the way larger disruptive challenges to social power structures can take form within academic communities and spill out into the larger polity. A full account of academic speech should bear in mind that there is another rich thread of discussion and protest here—a line that runs through Kent State and links the anti-Vietnam movement to the antiapartheid movement to today’s climate change divestment movement, and others. We should remember that a great many moves toward greater justice have begun, or taken strength, from student movements. That tradition, too, is an inheritance of the great universities.

Craig Segall, AB’04
Sacramento, California

Family connection

“Criminal Injustice” (July–Aug/15) provides a fine description of the extraordinary work of Jonathan Rapping, AB’88, the founder of Gideon’s Promise and the driving force behind the effort to strengthen the public defender system in the United States.

It might have been noted that Jonathan Rapping is the son of Leonard A. Rapping, AM’59, PhD’61. Leonard, a brilliant man and a distinguished economist, a warm and wonderful friend, died in 1991.

The author writes that Jonathan Rapping’s “activist mother, Elayne Rapping, had taken him to protests ... since he was small. ... ‘She taught her son to have a healthy dose of skepticism about authority.’” And it might have been noted that Mr. Rapping’s mother met his father when she was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago.

David H. Bennett, AM’58, PhD’63
Syracuse, New York

The writer is correct. Our story failed to mention both that Rapping’s father was a University of Chicago alumnus and that his mother, Elayne Rapping, EX’63, attended the College. We regret the oversights.—Ed.

Library land

The use of Chicago Park District land in any amount for a presidential library should never have been considered (“Bringing It Home,” UChicago Journal, July–Aug/15), and the University of Chicago should be ashamed of its role in this maneuver to build itself up while encroaching upon this precious gift to the people of Chicago from an earlier generation of leaders who were, in this regard, more civic minded than selfish. Whatever benefits to the community might result from this library could surely have been achieved without the expropriation of public open land already in short supply in this city.

Joan Davis Levin, AB’58, JD’72
Chicago

La vie en Paris

Excavating unread periodicals from a living room littered with sports equipment, Harry Potter books, and assorted software (working parents will understand), I came across the Jan–Feb/15 Magazine and was delighted to find Philip M. Semrau’s (AB’85, AM’85) letter about Robert Morrissey, PhD’82, and the University’s outpost in Paris.

It is because of Morrissey that I, after nearly two decades of mostly pleasant meandering far from the French language (which remained demurely tucked away in my drawer of parlor tricks), moved to France to work for a United Nations outpost in Geneva and later ended up in my current position as a UN translator. (To preempt an oft-asked question, translators write; interpreters speak.) Morrissey doesn’t know it, but he set things rolling.

Sometime during my second year at Chicago, I decided to brush up my high school French and walked into a classroom run by one of the most energetic, persuasive teachers I’d ever met. That was Morrissey, of course. Whatever he was teaching had to be the most study-worthy subject on the planet. I ultimately declared my major as French.

During the long years of parenting three young children, when reading a page of the newspaper was a feat, I fantasized about returning to the volumes of Montaigne and Proust sitting patiently on my shelves—and now, with my oldest (fluent in French, croissants, and steak frites, and itching to reform the US political system—bon courage!) applying to the College this fall, I feel that some loose ends are about to be tied up.

Neither the article “Paris at 10” (UChicago Journal, Nov–Dec/14) nor Phil’s letter mentioned one of Morrissey’s major achievements, which doubtless contributed to his receiving the Legion of Honor medal from the French government: ARTFL, a consortium-based service that provides its members with access to North America’s largest collection of digitized French resources. When ARTFL got off the ground in 1982, the idea of being able to search text corpora in sophisticated ways was novel for the average reader. Today, of course, we take such things for granted, but Morrissey deserves credit for his vision, back then, of what was possible.

Talvi Laev, AB’84
Ferney-Voltaire, France

Over the moon

In his recollections and discussion of Harold Urey in his letter to the editor (Letters, July–Aug/15), Roman Schmitt, SM’50, PhD’53, refers to the many University of Chicago students and postdocs who, in their later careers, were involved in the study of lunar samples. He mentions several, including George Wetherill, PhB’48, SB’49, SM’51, PhD’53; Gerald Wasserburg, SB’51, SM’52, PhD’54; Samuel Epstein; and George Reed Jr., PhD’52.

I was also a member of that merry company, as a principal investigator analyzing the first returned lunar samples from Apollo 11 using what was then the relatively new technique of Mössbauer spectrometry. Wow, was that exciting, to be holding an actual piece of our moon in my own hot little hand (very carefully, of course, so as not to contaminate or damage it).

In advance of the return of samples, we had developed a new approach,  Mössbauer scattering spectrometry, so that if only a very few samples of lunar rocks were returned, we could still study and analyze them completely nondestructively. Fortunately, the Apollo 11 astronauts brought back many samples, so various types of analysis were used in many laboratories, including mine at the Illinois Institute of Technology and IIT Research Institute in Chicago.

The spectra that we obtained were elegant and fascinating. The presence of small amounts of metallic iron in the lunar samples showed up as a quite characteristic symmetric pattern of six absorption lines widely spread out beyond most other absorption. And to our delight, the mineral ilmenite, an iron titanium oxide that we had studied earlier and that is relatively rare on Earth, showed up in many lunar samples, not only the rocks but also the fines (the lunar dust or regolith).

We were all grateful to Harold Urey and others who convinced the US Congress and NASA to support the analysis of lunar samples with all available techniques.

Caroline Herzenberg, SM’55, PhD’58
Chicago

Population control

Since College I have been taken by how the Christian notion of an apocalypse has maintained its emotional force in an increasingly secular age. It may well be that the Reverend Thomas Malthus significantly contributed to this secularization when he published “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798. By using available data to buttress his arguments on sustainable limits to population, he employed scientific reasoning rather than references to scripture. Although the specifics of his argument have been discredited, the general claim of human population being subject to natural limits remains logically appealing. However, while the specifics of contemporary discussions on those limits differ from Malthus they inevitably remind the reader of an impending apocalypse if the suggestions presented are not followed.

A good example is the recent letter from Jane R. Shoup, PhD’65, and Stefan P. Shoup, AM’64 (Letters, July–Aug/15). They decry attempts to solve the growing water problem and suggest the money would be better spent reducing demand. In describing the problem the Shoups write, “there are five billion too many people on this planet” rather than a more neutral “current estimates suggest that a global population of around 2.5 billion is the maximum the planet can sustain.” The solution to the overpopulation problem is implied: let’s get rid of five billion people, the quicker the better.

Almost 70 years before Malthus, the irrepressible Reverend Jonathan Swift published his “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents, or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.” Swift was rather more open in his proposal than the Shoups. However, their concern for “a meaningful future for our children” suggests that Swift’s proposal needs to be revised for our times.

Swift concentrated on the lamb end of the spectrum. Perhaps the Shoups could have “A Modest Proposal” revised to concentrate on the mutton end of the population. Such an approach would provide an appealingly straightforward way to attain a population sustainable within the limits of the planet as we currently imagine them. It would have the added benefits of taking care of some of our most intractable contemporary political issues such as funding public pensions and, as most occur toward the end of life, the high costs of health care.

H. Stuart Cunningham, AB’64, MBA’68
Warrenville, IL

Jane R. and Stefan P. Shoup refer to an estimate made by David Pimentel of Cornell University that “there are five billion too many people on this planet.” That caught my eye and started me thinking.

Just as the Reverend Thomas Malthus was wrong, who knows or can reliably predict how many are too many? Science has a way of finding ways to extend that number. However, most people would agree that at some point there is a maximum number, whatever it may be (to use an extreme example, when people have to stand on others just to have a foothold). Science fiction readers, such as I, have hoped this conundrum could be solved by sending many representatives of Homo sapiens to the stars. Maybe that will eventually happen, but economically and technologically it is probably a long way off.

Thus, for argument’s sake, let’s assume there is a finite number of people in the world who can be sustained, whatever that number might be, and that it may not be that far in the future (a few hundred or thousands of years). The question is then how we maintain that number, and I have no answer.

Abortion might be one way, but I find that morally reprehensible because at some point, at least in my view, a fetus becomes a person. I do not pretend to know at what point in a human pregnancy this becomes so. Contraception is another possibility, but what if people choose not to observe that solution? Many people want to produce progeny to perpetuate their personal genetic code. China has tried the one child solution, but that doesn’t work either (on a trip to China people with whom I spoke told me how easy it was to evade that rule—“we had twins,” even though these ‘twins’ were several years apart in age).

However, assuming governments could not only find a reliable way to regulate births, but could also enforce it, then what? Many economists believe that if a country’s birthrate is below a certain number per family (I have seen 2.1 and 2.2 children per family used a number of times, and most developed economies are well below that today) there will not be enough people of working age to sustain a gross national product needed to support its population, and as people live longer this number has to increase. Do we sanction euthanasia of the older population? I find this equally reprehensible, and as a member of the older generation obviously personally distasteful. What if an attempt is made to control the populations of certain national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups? Wars begin over such issues. Of course, wars, lack of food and other essentials, or plagues might solve the problem for us.

I don’t have a solution. The phrase in their letter simply initiated a chain of thoughts and implications. I would be interested in other thoughts on this issue.

Peter O. Clauss, AB’55
Newtown Square, Pennsylvania

70th celebration

Preparations are being made for a birthday dinner for Anna Linchevskaya Linden, PhD’05, who taught in the Slavic Department from 1986 to 1996 and will turn 70 in April 2016. If you are interested in attending, please contact me at lindvicjul@gmail.com or at 312.608.5827.

Julia Linchevskaya
Linden New York City

Corrections

In “La Vie Est Belle” (the Core, Summer 2015), the address of Renee Granville-Grossman Residential Commons was misstated. The correct address is 6031 South Ellis Avenue. We regret the error.

The University of Chicago Magazine welcomes letters about its contents or about the life of the University. Letters for publication must be signed and may be edited for space, clarity, and civility. To provide a range of views and voices, we encourage letter writers to limit themselves to 300 words or fewer. Write: Editor, The University of Chicago Magazine, 5235 South Harper Court, Suite 500, Chicago, IL 60615. Or email: uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu.