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Bravo to the University of Chicago for its $100 million gift in support of free speech.

The donation, which comes from an anonymous source, will strengthen the university’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, allowing it to expand quintessential college programs like fellowships and conferences.

President Paul Alivisatos is no doubt correct when he says UChicago’s “principles and policies” on free speech “are widely seen as global exemplars in our quest to be a place of truth seeking.” Indeed, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression reports that “faculty bodies, administrations and institutional governing boards” at more than 100 colleges and universities have adopted the Chicago statement on free speech. Chicago has become the free speech university, offering a clear alternative to what Jonathan Haidt called the emergence of the “social justice university” over the last decade.

I firmly believe that the leftward ideological tilt within the academy has done damage to higher education’s reputation and is corrosive to the mission, but I don’t think free speech is the best way to frame the alternative.

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Frankly, I don’t even think my friends (and they are genuinely friends) at the University of Chicago believe it.

Virtually every university—including Chicago—takes pride in gathering a diversity of identities and ideologies for common activities. They devote special effort, and spend lots of money, to bring low-income and first-generation students into the fold.

You can of course say that these efforts ultimately benefit truth seeking, and I do believe that involving people with a range of identities in philosophical discussions or laboratory experiments results in stronger ideas emerging. But there are other social goals being accomplished as well, including cooperation across difference and social mobility. The university’s own publications highlight these goals as ends in and of themselves.

Why not name a telos that captures all of this?

Starting from William James and continuing through John Rawls, John Inazu and Danielle Allen, the term that has been used in the American intellectual tradition for this range of social goods is “pluralism.”

Amid the growing number of higher education institutions effectively declaring themselves, alternately, social justice universities and free speech universities, we need a critical mass to declare that they are a pluralism university.

A pluralism university would excel in four interrelated areas.

  1. Intellectual pluralism. This is the aspect that most covers the truth-seeking function of universities. Unique among institutions, universities are environments where we explore the universe through multiple disciplines (astronomy and anthropology) and methods (qualitative and quantitative). We then generate, and discuss, a diversity of intellectual frameworks to make sense of the patterns in observable data. Free speech is necessary for truth seeking, but not sufficient. No university would celebrate faculty members constantly screaming at one another, or student groups chanting, “Two plus two equals three.” In addition to free speech, intellectual pluralism requires both civil dialogue and rigor.
  2. Identity pluralism. This is the gathering of Black and white, Muslim and Jew, northerner and southerner, Chinese and Mexican, rich and poor, etc., etc., for the purpose of both cooperation across differences and social mobility. A diverse democracy cannot function without both. The university brings people from a wide range of identities—including segments of communities that are in conflict elsewhere in the world—together in close quarters and facilitates their engagement in common activities, from chemistry labs to club soccer.
  3. Value pluralism. A concept most associated with 20th-century British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, value pluralism is the recognition that the ultimate goals in any society— say, equality and freedom— are in tension with one another, and we need spaces that train people in thinking through these tensions.
  4. Agonistic pluralism. This notion is most associated with the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe. Agonistic pluralism recognizes that there are not just differences between people, but fundamental disagreements. Pro-life versus pro-choice. Israel as a Jewish state from the river to the sea versus Palestine from the river to the sea. In a diverse democracy, people with opposing views on significant issues live in the same neighborhoods, work for the same companies, even teach in the same schools. We need a place where such people can learn, in Mouffe’s terms, to be adversaries rather than enemies. In our society, that place is the university.

Let’s remember that, like free speech, pluralism has a hallowed intellectual history, memorably detailed in Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. The tradition can be traced back to the Hibbert lectures in Oxford in 1908, where William James, arguing principally against Hegel’s theory that the universe was one thing, countered that the universe was many things. Hegel’s theory was known as monism. James called his view “pluralism”:

“Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the doctrine that it is many means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related … Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes … However much may be collected, however much may report itself as present at any effective center of consciousness or action, something else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity.”

James felt so strongly that reality was many rather than one that he wanted to rename the universe the “multiverse.” And he proposed an intriguing metaphor: “The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.”

This is precisely how universities are organized. Whereas a private company is like a kingdom, the range of business units all reporting to the CEO and geared toward generating profit, a university employs a wide variety of academics, all of them pursuing their own intellectual goals and, famously, reporting to their broader disciplines rather than the university president. In James’s terms, they are “with one another in many ways”—sharing the same location, teaching the same students— but “nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything.”

While James was a professor at Harvard University, one of his key interlocutors on the subject of pluralism was a famous early-20th-century professor at the University of Chicago: John Dewey.

Dewey once said, “Only a philosophy of pluralism … justifies struggle in creative activity and gives opportunity for the emergence of the genuinely new.”

If the University of Chicago is not going to follow in the footsteps of one of its earliest luminaries and declare itself the pluralism university, other institutions should.

Eboo Patel is founder and president of Interfaith America and host of the Interfaith America With Eboo Patel podcast. His most recent book is We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy (Beacon Press, 2022).

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