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Notebook and Pen

University of Chicago principles on free
expression

Chicago Principles

The "Chicago Statement" refers to the free speech policy statement produced by the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago. In July of 2014, University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Eric D. Isaacs tasked the Committee with "articulating the University’s overarching commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the University’s community." For more information, please click here.

Schools That Have Adopted the Chicago Statement 

 

The Board of Education for New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, adopted the statement above in its Plan for Civil Discourse & Critical Thinking within the Annual Plan at its October 19, 2020 meeting.

"Certitude leads to violence… The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies—people who think that their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma, or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later, by force!"

 

-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes 

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