Where free speech goes to thrive

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The bedrock principle of free speech is under siege at some of our nation's leading law schools as U.S. News & World Report unveils its latest law school rankings. Leaders of the very places where constitutional law is taught, where reasoned debate over contentious issues is supposed to be encouraged, are flinching in the wake of internecine discord on campuses.

Consider two of the nation's leading law schools: Stanford and Yale. Both are embroiled in extreme examples of curtailing speech for political views. Yale has earned derision for several recent incidents of students shouting down speakers with whom they disagreed; also, administrators threatened a student based on what they considered inappropriate speech. Stanford made waves with an extended shout-down of a conservative federal judge that culminated in a dean chastising the judge for his rulings.

Some federal judges were so appalled they took the extraordinary step of declaring they would no longer recruit their law clerks — an essential step for ambitious law graduates — from Yale or Stanford.

Similar affronts to free speech have occurred at Pennsylvania, Georgetown and Columbia law schools. In some cases, administrators have watched passively as self-righteous students trampled their school's own standards. In other instances, the leadership took the lead.

An exception to this disturbing trend can be found at another leading law school: the University of Chicago Law School. Maybe it's the exception that proves the rule, but we hope the university's tradition can represent a return to sanity. Since its inception in the 1890s, the U. of C. has been crystal-clear about the primacy of free speech to academic freedom and excellence and continually reasserted the proposition. Those ideas have been distilled in a brief document called the Chicago Principles, widely adopted by other universities.

Stanford Dean Jenny Martinez thoughtfully referred to those principles when she published a detailed defense of free speech in an effort to undo the damage at her school. "Our commitment to diversity and inclusion means we must protect the expression of all views," Martinez writes. "The First Amendment does not give protesters a 'heckler's veto.'"

We experienced this stifling of free speech when the deans of Yale and Harvard launched a campaign to undermine U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings and excluded our company from a conference paradoxically focused on data transparency. They seek to suppress the exchange of information by no longer providing us with commonsense data — such as measures of student debt and job placement at graduation. With a tuition cost of nearly $100,000 annually and opaque admissions processes, prospective students need to know this information from these universities and be able to compare easily among all law schools. Several top law schools quickly followed.

Our journalists try to do the work of evaluating important institutions with the best available information. For reasons that remain unclear, the leaders of schools that have a disproportionate impact on American society — eight of nine Supreme Court justices, more than half the law clerks and a significant number of law school deans went to Harvard or Yale — are ultimately voting for less transparency.

It was reassuring, then, to see that the University of Chicago Law School, grounded in the most robust support of free speech, viewed our rankings as a matter of the First Amendment.

"Fundamentally, a ranking of schools is an opinion," Law Dean Thomas Miles said. "As our university is dedicated to the free expression of ideas and to questioning viewpoints, our aim is not to suppress opinions. Rather we should encourage prospective students to apply critical thinking and reach their own conclusions about what value the rankings add."

We hope the leaders of the top law schools are listening to all this. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote more than a century ago: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." His words espousing transparency remain as important today and entwine a powerful fabric of a vibrant academic community.

More speech, more data, more discussion. Not less.