FIRE’s Silverglate on a Chicago Statement for America

​Many Americans on the right are upset about a recent letter in which Alphabet/Google acknowledged that YouTube did, in fact, censor conservative speech at the behest of the Biden White House. Meanwhile, many Americans on the left are deeply alarmed by how Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr inserted himself into the Jimmy Kimmel drama, threatening official retaliatory action if the late-night host stayed on the air.

Both sides are right about the other side, which means, of course, that both sides are in the wrong.

Yet somehow, the concept of a neutral principle that applies equally to everyone has become too hard for even highly educated policymakers to grasp. Wait, are you actually saying that free speech means that people who piss me off can say anything they want?

Yes, as hard as it is for some to grasp, that is what the First Amendment guarantees.

A way out of our current national free-speech debacle may, ironically, come from the universities, where the heckler’s veto has all too often prevailed. Universities are adopting the University of Chicago principles for free speech, which include this declaration:

“[I]t is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussions about ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”

Entire state university systems from North Carolina to Texas, as well as Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins, have embraced the Chicago principles, more than 100 in all.

Now Harvey Silverglate, co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) makes a puckish suggestion in a wide-ranging interview with Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal. Silverglate suggests a “Chicago statement for the nation,” declaring “it is not the proper role of the government to shield individuals” from statements and opinions they find objectionable.”
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This is not likely to happen anytime soon, not with the censorship arms race now taking place in Washington, D.C., today. But it took only a few years for the Chicago principles to take hold in academia. Perhaps in a decade, could we see a similar declaration by our government?

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