The academic who protected campus free speech
Robert Zimmer 1947–2023
Robert Zimmer had no patience for cancel culture. As president of the University of Chicago from 2006 to 2021, the mathematician was a strong proponent of diversity and freedom of speech. In 2014, in the wake of a series of demonstrations against right-wing speakers, he created a Committee on Free Expression that developed standards of academic freedom, and the resulting “Chicago Principles” were eventually adopted or adapted by more than 80 other schools. The guidelines said the university must remain open to all speakers and all points of view, even those that most students found “unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” The university, Zimmer said, “creates an environment for the most imaginative and challenging work of faculty. Confrontation of multiple ideas and ideas that are different from one’s own is critical to this.”
Born in New York City, the son of a doctor, Zimmer grew up in the diverse neighborhood of Greenwich Village, where “he learned the value of tolerance,” said The New York Times. He studied math at Brandeis University and earned his doctorate at Harvard, specializing in geometry and ergodic theory. After teaching at the U.S. Naval
Academy for two years, he moved to the University of Chicago in 1977, where he spent the bulk of his career except for a brief span at Berkeley and a four-year stint as provost of Brown University. He returned to Chicago as university president in 2006 and remained in that post for 15 years.
There, Zimmer successfully “managed that most important role for university presidents— courting well-heeled donors,” said the Chicago Tribune. During his tenure, the university received six gifts of $100 million or higher, while undergraduate applications more than tripled. But with the Chicago Principles, Zimmer was “thrust into the crossfire of a polarized nation,” said
The Washington Post. While he became something of a hero to conservatives, he faced backlash from other scholars and students. Many of them said the guidelines gave no clarity on what constituted hate speech, seemed to forbid campus “safe spaces” for minorities, and set back the cause of inclusion. Zimmer, though, rejected the very concept. “Inclusion into what?” he asked in 2017. “An inferior and less challenging education? A world in which their feelings take precedence over other matters that need to be confronted?”