Courtesy of the University of Chicago

University President Paul Alivisatos.

In an exclusive interview on October 2, co-Editors-in-Chief Kayla Rubenstein and Eva McCord and News Editor Tiffany Li spoke with University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos. In his autumn quarter welcome email to the community, Alivisatos reiterated the University’s stance on free speech expressed in the Chicago Principles. The University announced on September 26, a few days before classes started, that it had received a $100 million donation dedicated towards free speech which it intended to use for the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, and that it was launching a new climate and energy institute on October 30. The University also continues to face the financial challenges that came to light last year.

The Maroon spoke with Alivisatos about the donation, the boundaries of the Chicago Principles, the University’s approach towards reducing its budget deficit, and its progress on the emissions reduction goals in the 2030 climate plan.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Chicago Maroon: What, concretely, is the recent $100 million donation towards free speech going to do to make the atmosphere on campus or elsewhere more conducive to free speech?

Paul Alivisatos: It is an exciting opportunity for us, and certainly the intent is to have these funds available to promote the culture and understanding of free expression and its practice in our community, and also to share with other places that are working on how they’re thinking about how they promote cultures of free expression at their institution. So it’s both an internal- and external-facing gift.

I think some of the internal work, most of it, will be happening at the Chicago Forum for Free Expression, and this will allow us, for a very long time, to have the ability to have events, for example, where we can discuss how the culture is working or talk about aspects of how free expression is actually in practice and so on.

I think what is really important is, we have a long history. We’ve made very clear what our principles are, but the actual practice of free expression is something that comes as a part of culture. The Forum has many ways in which it can allow us to reflect and improve or debate the culture that we have and whether it works well or not.

CM: How much will the donor be involved in implementing the donation?

PA: Not at all. There are no strings attached. It is a gift to the institution, just for us to make our judgements about how to cultivate and curate our own culture for expression.

CM: As we were coming back to school, you sent out an email about the new quarter in which you reiterated UChicago’s position on free speech. In that email, you cited the Chicago Principles and said that we must allow for speech “we find ‘unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.’” Does this mean hate speech is protected by the Chicago Principles? Is there a line for UChicago?

PA: I think what we have practiced for the longest time is that speech itself is just broadly protected. Even the First Amendment keeps cognizant to the fact that there can be, for example, harassment or things of that kind that are very personally directed—there’s certain circumstances like that where there are some limitations. But basically, what I’ve said is that you can say very offensive things on this campus. That doesn’t mean that we’re saying, “please go out and say offensive things.” It just means that speech, broadly speaking, is protected. Actions, on the other hand, have different situations that would govern them. For example, if you’re acting to prevent another person from speaking in some way, then that’s out of bounds.

I do want to share this, though. I think there are people with extremely different points of view here, all over the campus. And the best thing is if we have some measure of wanting to hear from others that we may not agree with, with the thought in mind that that’s part of a reasoned dialogue, that we can approach that in a way with some kindness and some humility, trying to just be in dialogue with each other. That’s something that we can strive towards, but we don’t impose that people create a sense of harmony or something like that. There are real topics on which people disagree very strongly, and we allow that to happen. That’s our environment.

CM: Would you say the University broadly follows the lines of the First Amendment?

PA: By and large, our approaches are derived from it. Obviously the University itself does have, for example, our own time, place, and manner restrictions that relate to allowing the functioning of the University to take place and so on. So the campus environment isn’t identical to the environment that’s at large in the world, everywhere in the public square outside the University. But by and large, I think we acknowledge that there’s a great deal of wisdom in the First Amendment, and certainly the ideas behind it have animated the policies here for a long time.

One of the motivations to have a Forum [for Free Inquiry and Expression] is so that contentious issues can be brought to light more directly. I think it really matters enormously. Obviously, it matters for this university, what kind of university it will be that the students carry that part of the culture. And for me, I think it’s also important for things that we care about in free societies and in democracies, that there be universities where free expression is practiced quite deeply.

CM: To what extent does the University’s protection of free speech extend to community members who may not be affiliated with the University, perhaps while they are protesting on campus alongside students?

PA: I think people come onto the campus, they express their views—that’s all fine. If the question is, should we be restricting people from sharing—or community members from coming onto—the campus and speaking, again, I’ll say words and actions are very different things, and we should be allowing the dialogues to take place as they do naturally, especially out and about on the quads or something.

CM: Has there been any progress regarding the deficit, whether that’s in dollar terms or cost percentage terms, since last year?

PA: There has. Our provost, Katherine Baicker, and our chief financial officer, Ivan Samstein, carried out that series of town halls. In one of them, they explained that we have a four-year plan for dealing with it, and we’re on track [with] that plan. They will be hosting another town hall this quarter, so it’s not like we did that and just stopped doing it.

What I do want to say to your readers is that the deficit arose because of a series of decisions to make investments, and I think those decisions were wise ones. They created a lot of strength in the University that, over many years, will help us to thrive, and our ability to address [the deficit] requires a rather small percentage decrease in the increase in our expenses and some modest increase in our incomes and revenue. I’m confident that we’ll both be able to address that issue and be able to continue to make investments in some new areas that the University needs to go into, or ways in which we can better support students on their journeys here.

CM: Regarding new investments, we’ve seen the University make a couple of investments in STEM areas. Is there a plan or desire to do similar things in the social sciences or humanities?

PA: Oh, absolutely, there’s lots of things happening in those spaces. It was beautiful news yesterday that Ling Ma (A.B. ’05) received a MacArthur [Fellowship]. Wasn’t that nice? I love that one, because it shows the intersection of the arts and the humanities with some of the very best of what the University does. I would say that I see that as a kind of exemplar. There’ll be many more opportunities for arts and humanities activities to be supported, and it’s very important for all of these disciplines to be strongly supported.

Maybe you recall from last year, for example, that we had another very nice gift. Richard and Amy Wallman made a gift last year to support faculty, and that was a gift that is allowing us to create many new faculty positions, and many of those are now going to be in the arts, humanities, and the social sciences. So we’re going to continue to invest in those areas. They’re very much on my mind.

CM: In addition to Ling Ma receiving the fellowship and the Wallmans’ gift towards the University, are there any internal University investments being made towards the humanities and social sciences?

PA: We do all the time. For example, I was just getting an update on what’s happening at the Neubauer Collegium. That’s a place where lots of humanists are getting support from inside the University to be able to go and collaborate with others and so on. Dean [of the Division of the Humanities Deborah] Nelson is just starting her second year, and we’re really excited to hear what kind of thinking is coming forward there about what types of new activities or initiatives they’ll be doing. So I expect this to be a year where there’s a lot of thinking about what kinds of things might really advance the humanities further here. I personally think we’re really very fortunate to have such an excellent humanities faculty.

CM: How do you decide which programs to invest less resources in or which to sunset, and which areas you want to keep at the same level of funding or grow?

PA: First of all, let me say that, as we’ve managed through this first part of this budget challenge, we did make some reductions in our expenses, and by far, most of that was actually in the central administration. That’s not easy either. My experience is that the staff here really love this place and that they are as important in our functioning and future as any other part. But we did do that more than others.

When it gets closer to the academic programs, we really are much more deferential to the areas themselves to try to sort what they should be doing, to the deans and the faculties in those areas to think through how they’re going to manage their local budgets, rather than from on high in the center, saying this and that. We obviously have some responsibility, particularly for helping to form plans around topics like climate and energy—that’s an area where the University, over some years now, has made a decision to have some growth in programs there. That’s an example where the University makes decisions to go into something because it’s important for the future, it’s important for society, it’s important for many scholars here, and that’s an area where we should be trying to grow. There’ll be a discussion this year, continuing from last year, around computing and AI, trying to understand what’s the best way for the University as a whole to be approaching those issues as well. On the growth side, those are the ways those kinds of dialogues take place—bottom up, lots of faculty involved, administration gets involved trying to think about how to support that, and, over time, we develop a plan.

On the dialing-back front, it’s certainly a lot easier to do that in more administrator [or] support areas than it is in academic ones, because there’s just a lot of broad excellence across the University, and we’re not trying to prevent areas from being able to continue to thrive.

CM: Regarding the University’s new plan for distributing undergraduate tuition to academic units based on the number of students enrolled in a unit’s classes, is the University concerned about whether that will incentivize departments to use more adjuncts and non-tenure track instructors to increase the number of students who are taking their classes and thus be allocated more funds?

PA: Well, I could ask you as students. Don’t you pick your classes based on what you’re really interested in, mostly? Or, I suppose, what’s required for a major? I think student populations can flow some. There’s a lot more students studying computer science today than 20 years ago. Those kinds of flows are kind of natural when they follow where the students go.

Again, I think most units give careful thought, and for the undergraduates, they work closely with the College, trying to think about what the right balance is of instructors and the faculty and tenure-line positions. They give a lot of care to that question, and I think they do that predominantly on what they think will allow them to both honor student demand and offer the kinds of experiences that students want to be getting. I do think there’s a certain logic to having some of the support—not all of it—but some support flow where students are going, because it helps those units to be able to make sure that students are going to get a good experience. You don’t want to carry it to an extreme where that’s precluding us being able to have certain important academic subjects at the University, so we try to keep a balance.

CM: Coming off the announcement of the new Climate and Energy Institute to be launched October 30, what are some of the things that have been implemented so far to reach the goal in the University’s 2030 climate plan of reducing emissions by 50 percent by 2030?

PA: We have a lot of work to do there, to be honest. I think the number that kind of sticks out in my head is that, during a period when the University has grown by almost 20 percent in terms of its size, our carbon emissions have been relatively flattish, but we still have a ways to go to do real reductions, and I think the 2030 plan is still moving along. We just had Mike DeLorenzo join us as our new Vice President for Operations, and that’s going to be one of the top topics for him to come in and try to really think hard again about.

We did adopt the Via program. The considerations around carbon emissions were part of several factors that led us to doing that. That’s an example where, whenever we’re trying to figure out how to do things at the University, that’s one of the considerations. And I do think the new institute will have a broad set of programs, some of which will help us think more clearly about these problems.

CM: Are there any initiatives or plans to be implemented in the near future aiming to reduce the University’s emissions?

PA: What we’ve been doing is essentially what amounts to power purchase agreements, or things that allow us to bring in more renewably sourced electrons, and that’s one of the several strategies that can be deployed. But the bigger issues of how to actually replace entire sources—those are much more complicated issues that are infrastructural, that we’re going to have to really take a deeper look at.

CM: How is the new institute going to help on that front?

PA: We’ll see. That’s going to depend a little bit on how the faculty go down that road, but there’s a significant portion of it that will relate to energy technologies, and a significant portion that will relate to policies and how various other local governments or institutions are reducing their carbon, so we’ll learn a lot about what others are doing.

CM: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

PA: I’m just really excited that there’s a new quarter here. I felt a lot of very good energy on the campus the past few days, and I love that. So I hope everybody has a good quarter and has a lot of learning opportunities, and that that spirit carries through the whole quarter.