New Academic Freedom Principles Open Door to Outside Intervention

Inside Higher Ed

Ryan Quinn

September 11, 2023

It’s been nearly a decade since the development of the Chicago principles on campus free expression.

In 2014, the University of Chicago’s then president and provost appointed the Committee on Freedom of Expression, a group of professors, to draft the document. Since then, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression says more than 100 other higher education institutions and/or their faculties, starting with Princeton University in 2015, have endorsed either the Chicago principles or something substantially similar.

“The university has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it,” the principles say in part.

Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions has now released the “Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry.” The document says it extends the “scope” of the Chicago principles.

The so-called Princeton Principles—despite the name, they haven’t been endorsed by the university’s leaders—are more extensive, providing some detailed suggestions on what academic institutions should do, and not do, to promote academic freedom and free speech for students and faculty members.

“Universities have a special fiduciary duty [italics in original] to foster freedom of thought for the benefit of the societies that sustain them,” the Princeton Principles say.

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