Thirty years ago, an obscure University of Chicago philologist predicted the closing of the American mind. Looking around today, Allan Bloom’s prediction has come true in spades: the country seems to be slipping into the abyss of a new dark age. The leading edge of this slippage is the college campus.

Here on Ricochet we hear a lot about Hillsdale College and tend to write off the big mainstream research universities — which are completely dependent on federal grants—as hopeless Petri dishes of ignorance, unreason, intolerance, intellectual cowardice, and rage.

Well, maybe so. However, this week The College of The University of Chicago (always capitalize the “The”) sent out a remarkable welcome letter to its entering Class of 2020. The letter contains the following words:

Our commitment to academic freedom 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.

In the totalitarian, anti-intellectual climate of today’s academia, this is both courageous and incendiary. It’s also classic Chicago.

The letter is the product of a 2014 review by the University of its freedom of expression policy, initiated by president Robert Zimmer. The committee that drafted the policy, chaired by first amendment scholar and old school liberal Geoffrey Stone, produced a report that is at once commonsensical and radically refreshing. It states:

Of course, the ideas of different members of the University community will often and quite naturally conflict. But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.

I am a Chicago double-alum, so I am pleased, but not totally surprised, by all this. This is not the first time Chicago has bucked academic trends. In the 1960s, when the Ivies were buckling under to student radicals, gutting their curricula, abolishing grades and creating bogus new fields like “Gender Studies,” Chicago stood firm on its classical Common Core, rooted in the Great Books tradition. When in January 1969 students took over the administration building, president Edward Levi refused to capitulate. He waited two weeks until the radicals gave up, then expelled 42 of them and suspended 81 more. Levi commented, “There are values to be maintained. We are not bought and sold and transformed by that kind of pressure.” He went on to be a consequential post-Watergate U.S. attorney general.

Before that, in 1939, president Hutchins had banned football and gave up Chicago’s Big Ten slot to focus on “the life of the mind”—a phrase one heard used all the time around campus without irony. It’s hard to believe, but Chicago was once a football powerhouse. In 1905 and 1913 the Maroons were national champions.

I went to U. of C. because Allan Bloom had given me a sense that this was a serious place, and I wanted very much to be a serious person. And although there was plenty of left wing undergraduate nuttiness, this was a good place to be a conservative. I never heard the term “Political Correctness” while at Chicago, and was introduced to it only afterwards, when I started hanging out with Ivy League types. The first person I met there was my first year (there are no “freshmen”) roommate, Robert Tracinski, a fellow with a jolly, cherubic face, and a ZZ Top-style red beard down to his navel. Robert was a devout Randian and co-founder of the U. of C. Objectivist Club. Today he writes for The Federalist, among other publications, and is a prominent conservative voice.

Chicago’s commitment to intellectual purity was so rarified, that it refused to grant an honorary law degree to Queen Elizabeth II when she visited in 1959. Bill Clinton was likewise snubbed in 1999. The College didn’t even offer a computer science major until the 2000s—it was deemed too “applied”. You had to settle for a math degree instead. When I inquired about doing a year abroad, like students do at a normal school, I was advised by the study abroad counselor to forget about it – I couldn’t possible get academic credit for something so obviously frivolous.

The law school, which I attended in the late 1990s was a magnet for conservatives and libertarians. In the 1950s and 60s it had given birth to the Law and Economics movement – a school of legal analysis closely linked with Milton Friedman’s economics department, located just across the Midway. This is the school that produced Robert Bork. Scalia taught there before Reagan put him on the DC Circuit and when I was there the faculty included prominent conservatives like Ronald Coase, Jack Goldsmith, 7th circuit judges Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, and Ricochet’s own Richard Epstein (one of the founders of the Federalist Society). John Lott, with his single-minded gun rights obsession, was a lecturer there.

I’m not sure that conservative students and faculty constituted a numerical majority at the law school, but they definitely dominated the intellectual life of the place—and, thankfully, the hiring committee. The student organizations included something called “The Ancient and Honourable Edmund Burke Society,” which served up spectacularly erudite political debate in an atmosphere of excellent booze and ridiculously stuffy sartorial standards.

One time I went to a talk by the indefatigable David Horowitz. On other campuses, Horowitz, who is something of a bomb thrower, inspires violent protests. At Chicago his visit was practically a non-event. The audience, composed mostly of law students, but also some undergrads, was small and polite. “Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of Friedrich Hayek,” Horowitz challenged. Every hand in the room shot up. I think David was taken aback slightly. He shouldn’t have been—Hayek taught at Chicago in the 1950s (at Milton Friedman’s invitation) and wrote The Constitution of Liberty there. The University of Chicago Press was the first to publish The Road to Serfdom when no one else would.

What on earth was Obama doing there? Well, not much, from what I could tell. I was dimly aware that there was an Illinois state senator with a funny name on the faculty, but it never occurred to me to take a class with him. He was an academic nobody and, unlike the much more intelligent and prominent liberals on the faculty—Cass Sunstein, Geoff Stone, Martha Nussbaum—he was utterly disengaged from the intellectual life of the school. I don’t recall him ever participating in any seminars, discussions or any of the other frequent occasions for intellectual give and take. He was simply a non-presence – at the place but not of it.

Of course, this was all back in the Mesozoic era. What the place is like now I can’t say, but that welcome letter is a sign of health. Universities all across the country have been losing their academic purpose for a long time now. This stems from the fact that the academic elite that holds sway over university culture and sets the cultural and academic agenda is essentially nihilistic in its worldview. The nihilism undermines intellectual standards across all disciplines. The decline of freedom of expression and of thought as a value in society is horrifying to watch. My strong impression is that at Chicago the rot is not as deep as elsewhere, but it’s not immune to the larger cultural pathologies.

How Chicago has been able to maintain its distinctive culture of skepticism, empiricism, open inquiry and vigorous debate is a bit of a mystery. Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics states that any organization not explicitly right wing sooner or later becomes left wing. Chicago has been violating this law for a surprisingly long time. How long can this last? In the past universities were insular, inbred institutions, that could maintain their distinctive cultures for long periods of time. Edward Levi attended University of Chicago schools literally from kindergarten through law school. This is extremely rare nowadays. Universities compete vigorously for academic superstars, and this has led to the kind of homogenization and me-too groupthink that has given us those safe spaces and trigger warnings. Every place now looks and feels more or less like every other. In this competitive industry, Chicago’s “we’re different” approach could be a smart differentiation strategy.

Good luck to them. Go Maroons!