[MAROON] Chicago Principles for the Unprincipled
Free speech must persist despite its worst supporters
I replicate below an article originally slated for publication in the Chicago Maroon, which the executive board ultimately declined to publish.
As is so often the case, the necessary background and internecine drama is longer and more involved than the article itself, and I have elected not to front-load it with a lengthy digression into college newspaper drama. For the time being, I leave it here without further comment.
I thank the numerous editors, fact-checkers, and artists who supported me and the piece through this time.
Chicago Principles for the Unprincipled
Free speech must persist despite its worst supporters.
Originally submitted October 11th, 2024.
Six years ago, when I was applying to colleges, I put UChicago at the top of my list in no small part because of its stance on free speech. As campus controversies flooded the news, a university which explicitly protected student expression was refreshing.
I knew in the abstract that defense of free speech meant defending the idiotic and the vile more often than the righteous-yet-persecuted, but I held onto it as a conviction.
Even so, it galls me that UChicago’s record of defending free speech is most publicly associated with the perennial nuisance known as Daniel Schmidt.
This September, UChicago’s very own aspiring provocateur returned to common awareness through a racist Twitter thread, drawing statements from both the Organization of Black Students (OBS) and the Student Government (SG), as well as a rather less direct statement from University President Paul Alivisatos.
The statements vary in intensity (I find the OBS statement strongest, while the SG’s is generic and couched in defensive wording), but they hit the same broad points: commitments to diversity and a reorientation towards community-building in action, in general or specifically. These are very reasoned and diplomatic, but they don’t satisfy a hunger. There remains a sense that, when a member of the University spews hateful rhetoric online and demeans the community, we ought to do something more.
As for the tweets themselves, some of you may be expecting some too-clever-by-half heterodox take. I don’t have one. They’re just plain racist. You don’t need standpoint theory or a background in Fanon, the Mk1 eyeball suffices.
For the sake of Schmidt, who complains the label “racist” is used as a cudgel, I’ll elaborate: treating racial groups as monolithic, natural categories instead of demographic groups subject to varying historical and material conditions and invoking bad science about group IQ differences to claim lower intelligence and criminality is inherent to Blackness—these suffice to be termed racist by any colloquial definition, in addition to just being vile.
Which is bad enough without being an absolute bore on top of it all. Generally, racism thrives on ambiguity: the dog whistle, the motte-and-bailey, innuendo and insinuation, suggestion and subtext. The more subtle racist can ride the line to go undetected and take advantage of controversy; the smoothest operators have a real finesse to them.
Discussions of subjects like crime statistics or IQ, for example, might be innocuous, or they might be dog whistles. There’s no straightforward process to suss out one from the other; that’s the point of ambiguity. Ambiguous statements can not only spread more widely but also hide among the false positives: not sensitive enough and they fly under the radar, too sensitive and you tag a bystander; controversy and polarization ensue.
But Schmidt’s statements don’t do any of that. There’s no subtext, no dog whistle. And they’re so blandly straightforward, very current, and very conventional.
If UChicago must have outspoken bigots, I would like them to be suitably deranged, with Atlantean origins and taxonomies of lost continents. Alex Jones used to rule the roost with talk of hyperdimensional DMT entities, so there’s certainly an audience. Failing that, a scholarly veneer at least; the phrenologists had such an anatomical passion! Give me something properly scandalous that I can sink my teeth into.
Instead, we make do with Schmidt’s dull rants, bizarrely free of content. No argument or agenda, just a formless blob of hate deploying half-baked racist tropes.
This makes a lot more sense when you remember that the medium is the message, and this was on X (formerly Twitter).
Schmidt proclaims he will “do his best to help" solve problems like campus security and chilling speech. It’s hard to see how this rhetoric could possibly be helpful, even for his preferred policies. For years to come, anyone who advocates policing or expanding the University of Chicago Police Department will have the clammy specter of Daniel Schmidt floating over their shoulder, screeching about IQ. Anyone objecting to the hair-trigger tempers of activist groups will think twice about speaking out lest they be lumped in with him. Every time he touches a topic, he moves it further out of the Overton window by mere association.
One could attribute this to mere incompetence, but when someone repeatedly and publicly fails to accomplish their ostensible goals while continuing to gather attention, we should assume it’s intentional, not accidental.
Actually solving problems and carrying on a controversial cause is difficult: it requires some contact with the world, figuring out why the problem exists and why it is difficult to solve, and confronting the gaps and falsehoods in one’s own understanding of reality. It takes concerted effort over long periods and the spirit to endure repeated setbacks.
Schmidt has shown little interest or aptitude to this end. Rather, his goal has always transparently been to gain a position in the firmament of right-wing media. He’s made stabs at long-form writing in the Maroon (from which he was terminated after a disruptive interview with David Axelrod), in the Chicago Thinker (from which he was fired six months later, apparently for a series of insulting tweets), on a (now deleted) Substack newsletter, a (now defunct) group blog, and even interviewing Tucker Carlson on a (now deleted) YouTube channel , but his successes seem to come from controversies: they get him on cable news, on radio shows, and even in the New York Times. This is mainly negative attention, but that’s a feature, not a bug; complaining about people trying to get him expelled is his bread and butter.
None of this requires him to advocate effectively for any actual policy, or even to not damage it in the process. He just has to make noise and bait criticism, rinse and repeat.
The problem of Daniel Schmidt is that his speech, clearly within the boundaries of University policy, is not just bigoted and ignorant, but empty. President Alivisatos’ statement encourages us to “allow the fullest extent of dialogue possible” so that the quest for truth may proceed. But speech like this doesn’t even pretend to be involved in the quest for truth. If he were trying to construct an argument, or at least string together some Carl Schmitt quotes, there would be something to actually criticize, but he doesn’t. It’s just a blast of resentment, pre-masticated, pre-interpreted.
What does the University do with speech which is not only objectionable, but which doesn’t even attempt to seek the truth?
I think it’s clear that, in this particular case, expulsion is not the answer, nor did any of the aforementioned statements call for it. It may well have been the answer earlier, with his actions leading to harassment of instructor Rebecca Journey, but, as the administration decided his actions then did not meet any requirement for disciplinary action, his speech now certainly doesn’t.
But I also doubt expulsion would help. It would remove him from campus, yes, but his speech isn’t objectionable just because it’s coming from a student. Whatever harms he commits now, they won’t be any less harmful afterwards; they’ll just be pointed at other people.
What does someone like Schmidt get out of UChicago? Certainly not an education. He, writing in his own publication, deems an elite university education “useless,” and his time in the economics department has clearly failed to make him numerate. Instead, according to his own writing, it’s a signaling tool, a way to enter the halls of power.
You might want to deprive him of that by denying him a diploma, but consider that he, personally, would be much better served professionally by expulsion than by graduation. He dwells in the online attention economy, and his schtick is “UChicago student whose speech is so free it causes scandals.” But if he’s expelled, he becomes a martyr: he gets to posture as a free speech warrior, but his fame is built on squawking bigotry while sheltering under UChicago’s policies.
Every disease has its treatment, and for the pox, you must resist scratching the itch; the satisfaction will be fleeting, and the bleeding does you no favors.
Instead of cooperating in the quest for truth, Schmidt repeatedly defects against it to his personal gain under an administration that explicitly limits its own power to silence and discipline. It’s the discursive equivalent of a child waving his hand in front of an adult’s face yelling, “I’m not touching you!”, knowing they can step right up to the line with impunity. We should not take this to mean that the Chicago Principles are failing: a permissive and constrained system being abused by provocateurs is part of the package. Nobody, least of all the University, wants to police what is and is not a part of the quest for truth.
So what are we to do?
While the administration’s punitive powers are tightly bound, it has no such restriction on giving succor. Its single best decision during the harassment of instructor Journey was to affirm her right to hold her class by providing enhanced security, in effect protecting speech in the face of a mob intent on smothering it.
When an abuse of its policies cannot be punished, the University should raise up those who would otherwise be silenced. As for the rest of us, we can take a hint from the OBS statement. Turn this outrage into fuel for action that connects with another human being, not just social media performance. UChicago’s community outreach programs are a good start.
The University has better things to focus on than one student who speaks more than he thinks.