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Free speech is usually described as a right one either has or does not have, relative to the laws of one’s residence. But a right, like a muscle, is only as strong as its use. When my family flew to the United States in 2018, I naively thought that I had escaped the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) systematic suppression of free speech. I believed that I would access Google, YouTube, and Winnie the Pooh without any need for a VPN to circumvent the “Great Firewall of China,” a term used to describe the CCP’s firm control on online content. But I was clueless: I unknowingly carried a part of the repression within me. 

In April 1995, University maintenance crews spent two days cleaning “walkways, benches, plazas and walls on campus,” working to remove not dirt or debris, but simple sidewalk chalk. The chalk drawings, according to a report from The Daily Princetonian, consisted of “pro-gay messages” written by hand during Pride Week. After the removal, advocates were rightly in uproar. Following the incident, the University, claiming that the discrepancy had transpired because of “cross-office confusion,” clarified its chalking policy — it was henceforth banned, in all cases.

Three decades on, chalk at Princeton has found itself relegated to dusty trays in classrooms and lecture halls. Hardly anyone — students, activists, artists, campus organizations, candidates, schoolchildren — chalks University grounds anymore. Simply put, the University’s ban has worked. But the question remains: Why is Princeton so afraid of chalk?

There is exactly one kind of institution in the world whose product is “thinking” — the university. This is an existential challenge for every university, Princeton most definitely included, now that nearly all artificial intelligence is purpose-built to offload the hard work of thinking.

Universities need to return to the foundations of learning with trust — and verification — at the heart of their relationship with students. They also need to be far more prescriptive about what learning looks like so that students who arrive with limited capacity for deep reading have the time and space to develop their critical thinking skills.