A historic test of free speech at the University of Chicago Law School

 At my 50th  reunion of my University of Chicago law school this past weekend, the new dean gave a state of the law school speech in which he kvelled – correctly in my view–  about the Chicago Principles developed under the leadership my friend Professor Geof Stone, requiring the law school to allow free speech even when the speech is hateful or deeply unpopular.  But this made me curious to follow up on a story I had heard long ago about how the law school’s commitment to free speech was sorely tested back in the early 1970's.  The tale related to our law school classmate, the late Staughton Lynd, and how he had come very close to being denied admission because of his political activism.  Luckily, over the course of the weekend I was able to talk to someone who had had a front row seat for these events, who confirmed the following story.

Staughton was, of course, a highly principled leftie, who had taught history first at Spelman College and then at Yale University, where his activism in Students for a Democratic Society, and his travel to North Vietnam with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker, led to denial of tenure.  He then moved to Chicago, initially to teach at Roosevelt University; he became active in various radical projects, including support for radical unionists, as well as some support for students who conducted a two-week student occupation of campus buildings by undergraduates at the University of Chicago.  His suspected fomenting of the latter controversy eventually threatened his chances for admission at the University of Chicago Law School when he decided that becoming a lawyer would, as he said to me, add another arrow to his quiver in helping radical workers.  

When his application was received, his extraordinary intellectual ability and unusual background made his application stand out, but although applications were mostly reviewed by the Dean of Admissions, Richard Badger, there was a faculty admissions committee that had the ability to review potentially controversial candidates; Staughton’s application fell into this category.  Eventually, the application was discussed at a full faculty meeting, where a very conservative constitutional law professor, Phil Kurland, announced that he felt so strongly that Staughton should not be allowed to attend the law school that he was going to resign his position and go teach elsewhere if Staughton were admitted.  Apparently, one of his lines of attack was to contend that, because of Staughton’s past radicalism, it was uncertain whether he would be admitted to the Bar.

That stance provoked a different professor, Harry Kalven, well known both for his work on tort law and for his work on the First Amendment (the Kalven Report prepared under his leadership was in some ways a predecessor of the Chicago Principles) that if Staughton’s admission was rejected for these political reasons, then HE would resign from the faculty.   It was Kalven’s position that carried the day.  The faculty decided that the question whether Staughton would be admitted to the Bar was not relevant to the admissions decision.  Of course Staughton did come to the law school and was graduated in 1976.  He practiced first in Cleveland with a union-side law firm, and later in Youngstown with Northeast Ohio Legal Services, for about forty years.

And, nobody resigned from the faculty.  I took classes from both Kurland (Constitutional Law III, Equal Protection) and from Kalven (first year torts).  But my source added one detail on which I had not previously focused as being connected to this controversy.  Phil Kurland had been teaching constitutional law to undergraduates, and it was apparently reaction to this controversy that Kurland closed his office at the law school and moved to an office on the main campus.

The following year, my 1L year, was Harry Kalven’s last at Chicago– he died the following summer.  I was lucky to have had Kalven even for a year, and to have formed a lifelong friendship with Staughton, who died in 2022.  Staughton was, indeed, a huge influence in my life.  As I explained at his memorial service, it was Staughton who helped me get my summer 1L public interest job, and Staughton who persuaded me that rank-and-file struggles were politically significant.  That is how I came to Public Citizen Litigation Group, where I have spent almost the entirety of my career.  Hence I owe my career as a public interest lawyer to him

Long-time (but former) Washington Post reporter Sari Horwitz, discusses why we should still subscribe

 My old friend Sari, who took a buyout a couple of years ago, recalled her career in a recent Facebook post and explains why we should still subscribe.  Reprinted with permission

 When he was a little boy in the late 1950s, my husband Bill Schultz delivered The Washington Post newspaper with his brother John. It cost $1.95 a month. He went from house to house in his Virginia suburb of Hollin Hills, carrying copies of the Post in a canvas bag. He also carried a roll of nickels with him when he collected for the subscription because nearly everyone paid him $2.00 and expected a nickel in change.

We were destined to be together.

By the time Bill and I met on a blind date in 1986, I had been at The Washington Post for two years beginning as a summer intern in the Post’s business section. But the Post had touched my life more than a decade before when, as a high school student in Tucson, I devoured Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate stories. They inspired me to become a journalist.

Inside the Post’s old headquarters on 15th Street in the 1980s and 1990s, I was surrounded by journalism legends: Bob Woodward, Katharine Graham, Don Graham, Ben Bradlee (who hired me), Morton Mintz, Rick Atkinson, David Maraniss, Sally Jenkins and David Broder. And people who would become legends: Peter Baker, Kevin Merida, Kara Swisher, Jeffrey Goldberg and David Remnick.
 

I reported for nearly every section of the paper, including National and Style (where I wrote a story about my daughter Rachael.) But I spent nearly half of my career in the Post’s Metro section covering night cops, the schools and the city of Washington. One of my editors on the night police beat was Eugene Bachinski who taught me the importance of getting out and making sources. He had street cred — back in the day, one of his police sources had showed him the address book of a Watergate burglar that had an entry with a White House number, which Gene then shared with Woodward.
 

Even though the Post was famous for its big national scoops like Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, to me the Metro staff was the place to be. Publisher Don Graham cared deeply about Metro. He had spent time on the streets as a D.C. cop and saw the Post as first and foremost a local paper. His mother, Katharine Graham, also cared about the city. When I covered the struggles of the DC schools in the 1990s, she invited me and other education reporters to her conference room for lunch to discuss possible solutions. Later, Don started a college scholarship fund for students from D.C. schools. In those days, the Post devoted significant resources and its best editors to holding local leaders like Mayor Marion Barry to account. Two of the year-long investigative series that I was part of were local — a probe into shootings by the DC police force and an investigation into more than 200 children who died in the District of Columbia foster care system.
 

Fast forward to this week when it was Metro that suffered among the most severe layoffs on what former executive editor Marty Baron called one of the darkest days in the Post’s history. Nearly the entire staff was laid off, including legendary and beloved Marty Weil — who was at the paper for 60 years — and  Paul Duggan, one of the greatest writers and reporters in the newsroom. The contract was not renewed for Michael Ruane, another of Metro’s beautiful writers and excellent reporters who wrote a book with me about the terrifying 2002 Washington Sniper case. More than 300 journalists were laid off, including the Photo staff, the Sports department and nearly all the foreign correspondents. 
 

Over my 40 years at the paper, many of us knew we could find higher-paying jobs elsewhere. But it was our loyalty to the Post, a sense that our work was a public service and the tremendous amount of fun we all had together that kept us there. It is hard to describe the thrill of working in the same newsroom alongside the likes of Anne Hull, Kate Boo, Dana Priest, Cameron Barr, Vernon Loeb, Michael Powell, Julie Tate, Peter Finn, Gene Weingarten, Mike Abramowitz, Alice R Crites, Bill Hamilton, Peter Perl, Christine Brennan, Keith Harriston, Ted Gup, Nikki Kahn, Carol Guzy, Mike Semel, Nell Henderson, Matea Gold, Carol Leonnig, Elsa Walsh, Ruth Marcus and Michel du Cille. And there were the little things that made the place seem like family. The way Don Graham, who often roamed the newsroom, sent us notes, which we called  “Donny-grams,” when we wrote a story he liked. Or reporter Marty Weil walking by all our desks in the newsroom to say hello to us by name after he arrived for his late afternoon/night shift. 
 

When Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013, the Post, like many newspapers, was losing advertising and hemorrhaging money. The days when my editors would urge me to spend more money taking sources out to dinner or encourage me to travel more across the country for stories were long over. Bezos met with a group of us, along with Publisher Katharine Weymouth (Katharine Graham’s granddaughter) when he first arrived and said all the right things about how much he cared about rescuing the Post. We were hopeful he would.
 

In the early years, Bezos seemed like the ideal owner. He didn’t interfere in the newsroom, infused the paper with money, increased the staff and oversaw important improvements in technology. Much has been written about how all of that sadly changed in the last several years. Two years ago, many of us, including legendary Investigations Editor Jeff Leen and my longtime colleagues Scott Higham, Valerie Strauss, Marc Fisher, Kimberly Kindy and Lynda Robinson took a Post buyout. We did so with broken hearts. We never stopped loving the Post or being reporters and editors there. We hoped the Post would find its way and somehow recover from its death spiral.
 

We don’t know what the Post will become now. But I do know this. Despite the failure of its leaders and as painful and devastating as this week has been, the Post is still breaking important stories and publishing impactful investigations. The enormously talented journalists who remain are working hard to bring the most accurate and comprehensive news to readers around the country and the world.
I am going to keep subscribing to the Post and reading the stories by those dedicated reporters/editors still 

in the newsroom and I hope you do too. They are continuing to dig deep and push forward against tremendous external and internal pressures. And they make me proud. They include my friends and former colleagues Dana Hedgpeth, Jenn Abelson, Amy Brittain, Nicole Dungca, David Fallis, Caitlin Gibson, Joe Heim, Peter Hermann, Meryl Kornfield, Joyce Lee, Ellen Nakashima, Hannah Natanson, Robert Samuels, Paul Schwartzman, Ian Shapira, Lena Sun, William Wan, Debbi Wilgoren and so many more.