Those who hold the positions that most demand impartiality are beginning to openly disregard that responsibility in pursuit of ‘equality.’
When the subject was Israel, the paper abandoned the pretense of free exchange of ideas.
T he University of Chicago is famous for its commitment to free speech and open debate: The law school mailed me a 100-page book affirming it before I started there last fall. Last week, however, the editors at our school newspaper comically failed to uphold that commitment. What’s worse, their actions fit a worrying trend in which those who hold the positions that most demand impartiality are beginning to openly disregard that responsibility in pursuit of “equality.”
In February, UChicago’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine demanded that students boycott classes taught by Israeli visiting faculty. The Chicago Maroon, our student newspaper, published dueling op-eds criticizing and defending the club’s demand.
Accusations flew. Opinions clashed. Perhaps neither op-ed was a paragon of rigorous argument, but the Maroon should have let readers decide for themselves which was stronger. Instead, at the start of this month, the Maroon’s op-ed editors appointed themselves moral arbiters of the dispute. First, they issued an obsequious apology for publishing the pro-Israel piece. The apology was a greatest hits of woke dogma, accusing the authors of racism, “Zionism,” and causing “harm” to students with their words. Unfortunately, this rhetoric has become the new normal at our universities. But the Maroon could not resist the urge to go even further.
The editors then fact-checked the op-ed they had published two months earlier. Abandoning any pretense of neutrality, they defined Zionism by citing a website that contained no definition of the concept, only a litany of reasons to oppose it. Without citing evidence, the editors incorrectly claimed that only “some Jews use” a lunar calendar. They then proceeded to mistake the Israeli holiday Yom Hashoah, established in 1951 and tied to the Jewish lunar calendar, for a wholly unrelated United Nations holiday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established in 2005 and tied to the Gregorian calendar. The mistake, ironically made by “fact checkers,” ignored the disdain many Jews have for the United Nations, a body with a long history of discriminating against the world’s only Jewish-majority state.
Based on their farcical fact-check, the editors decided to erase the op-ed’s original publication page from their website “to prevent further harm.” Their action evokes the protagonist of 1984, who had the job of erasing words from old newspapers because it served the totalitarian government’s ends to pretend they had never been published.
The Maroon’s actions are not groundbreaking radicalism for journalists. Perhaps most notably, the New York Times forced its op-ed editor to resign in 2020 after his decision to publish a piece by Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) led the Times’ theoretically neutral news staff to publicly revolt. At least the Times left the original webpage standing.
It is unsurprising, yet notable, that one of the UChicago op-ed editors majors in critical race studies and has interned for Elizabeth Warren. Like the Times reporters, this editor was unable to check her partisan beliefs at the door when working at a newspaper.
There are certain roles in our society that require one to evaluate facts without bias. Americans expect impartiality from journalists, jurors, and judges, for example. This expectation undergirds our democracy.
But adherents of critical race theory attack it. In our institutions they see no inherent utility, only tools for achieving their political vision. For example, critical race scholar Paul Butler has argued that, to further racial equality, jurors should vote to acquit black defendants of nonviolent crimes regardless of their guilt. Butler freely admits that this scheme uproots the rule of law, and he does not care.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her infamous “wise Latina” speech at UC Berkeley, argued that it is impossible for judges to be impartial when they apply the law. At least she did not argue that they should stop trying. But that speech was 20 years ago.
At a UChicago lunch talk I attended earlier this year on “leveraging cultural affinity” in the legal world, a partner at a major law firm proudly recalled how a judge strongly recommended the parties select lawyers with underrepresented backgrounds to present upcoming arguments
When we renounce a commitment to impartiality, we give up equality for all in exchange for deference to anointed chosen ones. The Maroon’s op-ed editors would make that trade. America must not.