When it Comes to Free Speech, Dark Money Often Speaks Louder Than words

What does it mean when the right wing funds "free speech" work at a university?

This piece originally appeared at the Law and Political Economy (LPE Project). The (LPE Project brings together a network of scholars, practitioners, and students working to develop innovative intellectual, pedagogical, and political interventions to advance the study of political economy and law. You can read more about them at their website.

We thank them for allowing us to republish this at Academic Freedom on the Line

In September 2024, an anonymous donor gave $100 million to the University of Chicago to establish the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, tasked with “promot[ing]…free and open discourse at the University of Chicago and beyond.” Since the donation’s announcement, the Forum’s website credits several conservative billionaires and family foundations for their “leadership support.”

The contribution, believed to be the largest-ever university gift for free speech, was likely made to the University of Chicago because of the institution’s outsized role on issues of campus free speech, including the development of the Kalven Report (1967) on institutional neutrality and the Chicago Principles (2015) on campus free expression. Both documents were created by groups of faculty, at one elite campus, with the intent of addressing thorny issues of campus speech that arose during particular moments of campus unrest (namely, the student protests of the 1960s and Black Lives Matter, respectively). It’s not surprising, then, that these documents have since been promoted by dark money-funded organizations and partisan actors as a one-size-fits-all approach to campus speech.

By the Chicago Principles’ account, acceptable campus speech looks like a seminar room in which we all thoughtfully consider the ideas of others, including those with whom we vehemently disagree (and those who might deny our and our colleagues’ humanity). We debate and dialogue. And then decide to change our mind or go our separate ways, nonetheless enrichened by the experience. But, this vision of speech does not challenge—nor is designed to challenge—existing hierarchies concerning who gets to speak, whose voice is given deference, what language and vernaculars are used, which bodies are in the room, and what underlying norms dictate what form “acceptable” speech takes. Nor does this abstract approach appreciate how democratic movements committed to challenging hierarchies often depend upon disruptive or disrespectful speech.

When the proverbial rubber hits the road, it’s not all that clear that Chicago’s debate-club vision of free expression is actually all that absolute, as seen in the ongoing repression of campus speech over Gaza. These university-led crackdowns have bolstered a new regime of detaining and deporting of students and faculty for engaging in legal speech, canceling student visas, and weaponizing funding to censure certain research.

We should be skeptical about understandings of campus speech funded by billionaires, especially when they replace institutional deliberation with a legalistic absolutism that often leaves hierarchies of wealth and power unchallenged. The political economy of the Chicago Principles reveals a set of free speech norms that uphold elite respectability politics and standing hierarchies of power.

DARK MONEY & THE MANUFACTURED FREE SPEECH CRISIS

Here the broader context of the Chicago Principles is important. They were created not by an elected faculty committee but rather by a group of faculty handpicked by the University of Chicago president. The committee was chaired by Geoffrey Stone, who became known on campus for using the N-word in class. In 2015, the committee released its report affirming a commitment to the idea that “debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”

Today, the Chicago Principles are regularly pointed to as the antidote to the concern, primarily among the right, that institutions of higher education have become hostile to certain—i.e. conservative—forms of campus speech. These concerns are not new—and may be motivated by a decades-old political calculus. As my coauthor Ralph Wilson and I demonstrate in our book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War, as early as 1971 Lewis F. Powell Jr., later a Nixon-appointed Supreme Court justice, proposed that conservatives should pressure colleges and universities for “the right to be heard” to respond to the increasing number of graduates “who despise the American political and economic system.” Powell believed that the academy would capitulate, worried that refusing would brand them as partisan and aligned with the left.

This same strategy was used in the mid-2010s when wealthy donors funded campus tours by Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, Candace Owens, and others. Between 2005 and 2017, the Koch family foundations alone donated more than $256 million to colleges and universities. Media outlets funded by the same group of right-wing megadonors funding campus tours wrote reams of articles decrying the end of free speech on campus. And groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and the libertarian think tank Goldwater Institute drafted and pushed legislation that sought to change campus speech policies in ways that affirmed the narrative that a crisis of free speech existed on college campuses. ALEC and Goldwater used the barrage of manufactured campus crises to generate political will around legislation that made campuses increasingly accessible to provocateurs while, at the same time, punishing protest speech.

Amidst this backdrop, the Chicago Principles were developed. The same groups that fueled and funded the “free speech crisis” have run a sustained campaign to encourage colleges and universities to adopt the Chicago Principles. As of May 2025, 112 colleges and universities have done so.

OUTSOURCING SPEECH NORMS

Imposing the Chicago Principles as universal speech expectations upon colleges and universities fundamentally undermines the ability of faculty, students, and administrators to engage in their own deliberative activity developing campus-specific approaches to speech, through shared governance. Sigal Ben-Porath, for example, notes that the Chicago principles offer a legalistic framework that disregards the role of the campus community in addressing the particularities of campus speech. For example, students at institutions across the country have protested and demanded that their institution do more to address the prevalence of racist and sexist harassment on campus. One result of these demands has been the creation of reporting mechanisms designed to alert campuses to situations where students have felt harassed and intimidated. FIRE and other outfits have challenged these policies in court, claiming they violate free speech.

While by no means a perfect solution, and often containing thorny issues, the real question remains how to balance free expression and campus inclusion. Not an easy task. But even harder when a campus is being sued into embracing a contextless, absolutist understanding of campus speech by organizations that have long engaged in manufacturing a culture war against higher education.

Universal notions of campus speech such as those embodied in the Chicago Principles ignore the fact that many colleges and universities have decided, as a community, to prioritize efforts to address inequality and institutional hierarchy. As Mary Anne Franks reminds us in her new book Fearless Speech, “free speech is a right experienced differently across Americans.” The claim that the best solution to speech we abhor is more speech assumes “that ‘we’ are an enlightened, democratic, liberal society and that misogyny, racism, religious zealotry, and plutocracy are despised minority viewpoints.” The Chicago Principles assume that having a seminar-style conversation is the best, and only, way to challenge speech that denigrates the humanity of those in our community. And, well-funded demands to embrace free speech above all other principles are often used to silence those calling existing hierarchies into question.

This has been acutely visible over the past year, as students and faculty have been punished for speaking in support of Palestine. More than two dozen of the schools or university systems that signed the Chicago Principles also saw the mass arrests of students protesting the war in Gaza last spring, including at Columbia (217 students), CUNY (173), Emory (28), UNC-Chapel Hill (36), University of Texas (136), Virginia Tech (82), and Washington University (100). The Chicago Principles hold that students cannot shout down speakers because it violates free speech. However, the same institutions that adopted these principles nonetheless feel justified sending in phalanxes of police to brutalize and arrest students whose speech has been deemed unacceptable by political partisans and wealthy donors.

One signatory to the Chicago Principles, Columbia University, has capitulated to the federal government’s financial extortion, put a world-renowned academic program into receivership, unilaterally changed campus policy without faculty input, and has continued to retaliate against students and faculty who speak out on Palestine. Today, the worse violations of campus speech are coming not from student protestors, but rather the federal government which is using its financial, legal, and institutional coercion to shut down forms of teaching, research, and campus association that it objects to on political and ideological grounds. Yet, the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression does not even seem to have programming dedicated to this house-on-fire attack on campus speech.

THE FUTURE OF CAMPUS SPEECH

It is up to students, faculty, staff, and administrators to establish campus positions on the complicated issues of campus speech, using the principles of shared governance. This is a far better option than simply adopting the conclusion of the Chicago committee. The University of Chicago, however, is now armed with an ungodly amount of anonymous money, and well-positioned to continue advancing its singular understanding of campus speech.

Those students, faculty, and staff in higher education who commit themselves to the hard work of teaching and research often do so because we share a deep commitment to the underlying proposition that ideas really matter. The ability to freely debate, exchange ideas, probe evidence, critique and assess arguments, and vehemently disagree is how the world of ideas—and therefore the world itself—is continually made and remade. We saw this firsthand in 2020 when ideas about race and racism fashioned over decades within, and in conversation with, the academy literally took to the streets. And we saw it again this past year when students and faculty condemned genocide taking place in Gaza, and demanded that their institutions take concrete steps to address this injustice.

Campus speech should be contested and negotiated. Policy deliberations should be overseen by institutions of shared governance, which reflect on their campus community’s varying tolerance for free speech absolutism, existing hierarchies, and a common desire to make campuses welcoming to all. Where that line exists will change from campus to campus, and context to context. These conversations, however, should not be outsourced to others, especially those who pay undue attention to the preferences of wealthy donors. Promoting a vision of speech that has no account of power and that valorizes the ultra-wealthy creates a “marketplace of ideas” built on protecting elite interests and without democratic accountability.

Hopefully, the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression will not assume that the Chicago Principles represent the end-all-be-all of campus speech policy. Hopefully, they will recognize that norms around campus speech should be deliberated and navigated, not imposed. And possibly even recognize that disruptive protest speech is often a strategy for addressing inequality and institutional hierarchy. However, given that we don’t know the donors, or the terms of the gift, I am not very optimistic. I predict that we’ll see more bemoaning over woke college students who don’t understand some true meaning of what free speech actually means. A meaning of speech that they were never asked to participate in fashioning.

The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.