Faculty at Yale are hoping to restore the university’s past commitments to free speech and true tolerance. This is exactly what people have prayed for for years!

From The Wall Street Journal. … Last month this column noted the efforts of two Yale professors, Nicholas Christakis and Kate Stith, to help the Ivy League university focus on the search for truth, not political conformity. Now the dynamic duo have inspired more than 70 colleagues to join them in a new organization called Faculty for Yale. The principles they’re advancing could do a world of good — and not just in New Haven. Members of the new group hold that “Yale must rededicate itself to its fundamental mission: to preserve, produce, and transmit knowledge.” They’ve committed themselves to the following, which could serve as a useful to-do list on any college campus today:

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insist on the primacy of teaching, learning, and research as distinct from advocacy and activism, and on the centrality of the faculty to these core activities;

confirm Yale’s commitment to robust free expression, including affirmative efforts to foster more open campus and classroom discourse, coupled with institutional neutrality; …

urge greater administrative transparency and increased faculty oversight of all pedagogic and academic activities.

One important corollary is that Yale as an institution should not prescribe any moral or political positions as institutional orthodoxy or treat the failure to endorse such a position as grounds for sanction or exclusion, whether formal or informal. Doing so thins our collective knowledge and experience and diminishes the truth-seeking enterprise in which we are all engaged.