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Monday, October 23, 2017

Why Difficult Discourse Matters

An excerpt from the NY Times -

America’s Best University President
By Bret Stephens

Several years ago Robert Zimmer was asked by an audience in China why the University of Chicago was associated with so many winners of the Nobel Prize — 90 in all, counting this month’s win by the behavioral economist Richard Thaler. Zimmer, the university’s president since 2006, answered that the key was a campus culture committed to “discourse, argument and lack of deference.”

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“Our commitment to academic freedom,” he wrote, “means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/opinion/robert-zimmer-chicago-speech.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

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