After more than a week of protests, University of Chicago professor Luigi Zingales agreed to a town hall meeting on February 5 to discuss his invitation to former Breitbart executive and reactionary demagogue Steve Bannon to a debate at the university. However, rather than accept protesters’ demands to rescind the invitation, Zingales doubled down on his decision, arguing that giving a platform to Bannon’s extreme white nationalism would be “productive.”
The original announcement on January 24 caused immediate backlash, with numerous student and other groups organizing a protest for 8:30 the following morning. In the days following, more than 1000 university alumni signed a petition to the university president, Robert Zimmer, demanding the invitation be rescinded, and students have held sit-ins on Zingales’s classes demanding Bannon not be allowed to speak.
In response to these demands, the University of Chicago released a statement deflecting any responsibility for the proposed event, saying “The University of Chicago is deeply committed to upholding the values of academic freedom, the free expression of ideas, and the ability of faculty and students to invite the speakers of their choice. Any recognized student group, faculty group, University department or individual faculty member can invite a speaker to campus.”
However, the university has already shown its tacit support for Bannon over the students, organizers and faculty speaking out against him. When a group of university alumni arrived at the Levi Hall building to deliver their petition urging an official rescinding of Bannon’s invitation, they were barred from entering the building by administrators and security. University of Chicago Police attempted to discourage further sit-in protests during Zingales’s classes by claiming that protests are only “allowed” outside of campus buildings.
This claim by UCPD is especially ironic considering the official stance of the university’s Dean of Students, John Ellison, who wrote in a letter to incoming freshmen in 2016: “We do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” Restricting dissenting voices in the form of organized protest to outside classrooms and academic buildings only reveals this ethos for the smokescreen it is. Rejecting spaces sheltered from “ideas and perspectives at odds [with another]” would preclude rejecting protesters from protesting inside academic buildings.
This smokescreen of defending free speech as a tool to suppress dissent and support reactionary rhetoric is a long-standing tradition at the University of Chicago, and it has not been limited to students. In 1969, the university declined to reappoint Marlene Dixon, a Marxist feminist professor, to her teaching position in what was widely seen as a political move. Over 400 students organized a sixteen-day-long sit-in at the administration building demanding Dixon be granted an extension of her contract. Although the university was forced to grant Dixon a one-year extension of her contract, it did not hesitate to take revenge on the students who had supported her. The university expelled 42 of the students involved in organizing the sit-in and suspended another 81 who had participated.
Nor has the University of Chicago shown any qualms about silencing outside voices—so long as they are not wealthy reactionaries like Steve Bannon. For nearly six years, community groups including the campaigned and protested for the university to reopen a Level-I adult trauma center at University of Chicago Medical Center, after an 18 year old youth activist, Damien Turner, died after a drive-by shooting.
Although the University of Chicago Medical Center is the most well-resourced hospital on Chicago’s South Side, the university had refused to invest in the medical resources necessary to gain accreditation as a Level-1 trauma center, requiring patients of acute, serious trauma such as gunshot victims to be transported to other accredited hospitals in the city or suburbs surrounding Chicago. Although the University of Chicago has a nearly $8 billion endowment and sits on a lush campus, it is surrounded by poor neighborhoods with majority Black populations. The university’s neglect in this area of medical care meant higher rates of death for gunshot victims, like Damien Turner, who would have to be transported as far as 10 miles by ambulance.
Community activists greatly increased the militancy of their protests in 2015, including die-ins at university fundraising events, downtown street protests, and, ultimately, occupying the administration building to demand a meeting with the university’s president to discuss the trauma center. The university responded to the sit-in, where protesters used bicycle locks to barricade the doors and prevent their removal from the building, by calling the Chicago Fire Department to cut through the barricaded door with power saws, smash through exterior drywall with axes, and break open windows with crowbars. Nine of the activists were arrested by police after the CFD smashed their way into the building, which the university justified as necessary because the locked door posed a “safety” concern—as if axes, power saws, and crowbars are harmless.
The Trauma Care Coalition and other groups were ultimately successful in their fight, with the new trauma center scheduled to open this year, but the dramatic repression they faced shows exactly how much the University of Chicago values free speech and, more importantly, for whom the university values it. The track record is clear: letters of support and prestigious platforms for rich white nationalists like Steve Bannon, and handcuffs, axes, and chainsaws for poor Black activists.
In a particularly illuminating moment during the February 5 town hall meeting, Luigi Zingales let the mask of free speech slip off the face of reaction when asked if he would have supported giving a platform to Adolf Hitler. His response? “I think I would distinguish early Hitler from later Hitler. I think it would have been very useful to know ahead of time what he was about.”
Hitler’s famously reactionary, anti-Semitic screed, “Mein Kampf,” was first published in 1925, eight years before he occupied any government position. How much earlier does Zingales suggest we look? This inane deflection is a perfect encapsulation of the meaninglessness of Zingales’s, and the University of Chicago’s, supposed commitment to the ideals of “free speech”.
At the time of writing, the proposed debate with Bannon has still not been scheduled.
