Robert J. Zimmer, who promoted free speech on campus, dies at age 75

Robert J. Zimmer, a mathematician who, as president of the University of Chicago, championed diversity, not only quantitatively, in the recruitment of students and faculty, but also by protecting freedom of speech on campus with a protocol later embraced by dozens of colleges around the world. country, died Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He turned 75.

His wife, Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, a professor of classical languages ​​at the university, said the cause was glioblastoma multiforme, a virulent form of brain cancer.

Mr. Zimmer, who served as president of the university from 2006 to 2021, was instrumental in leading what became known as the Chicago Principlesa set of guidelines recommended by the Free Speech Committee, a faculty group he appointed in 2014.

Those guidelines have become a bulwark against what critics see as colleges’ stifling of academic freedom where students can self-isolate from uncomfortable viewpoints—practices often lumped together as “cancelling culture.”

“Concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for ending discussion of ideas, no matter how offensive or unpleasant those ideas may be to some members of our community,” the faculty committee concluded.

In August 2016, during Mr. Zimmer’s presidency, the university informed prospective freshmen: “We do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics may prove controversial, and we approve of the creation of intellectually safe spaces where individuals can withdraw from ideas and perspectives that are at odds with their own.”

Some campus critics suggested Mr. Zimmer was motivated by complaints from conservative alumni. But, he said The Wall Street Journalby responding to a national trend, he maintained the university’s traditional values.

“What you see is a kind of discourse,” he said. “You see actions by many people that seem to indicate that they feel they can, in fact, legitimately suppress the expression of others with whom they fundamentally disagree.”

Daniel Diermeier, who served as the university’s provost when Mr. Zimmer was president and is now the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, said in an email: “Whether it’s about speaker controversies, disruptive behavior policies, or its refusing to use the donation for political purposes, the University of Chicago, under his leadership, remained committed to its principles in volatile times and a role model in free speech around the world.

Mr. Zimmer was a great fundraiser. During his tenure as president, the university received six gifts of $100 million or more. He oversaw an increase in student financial aid and the elimination of loans, as a way to enable students to graduate debt-free.

He also started an engineering program; invested in graduate studies in the humanities, social sciences and the arts; founded the Urban Education Institute, which operates a Chicago public school and conducts commissioned research; and opened satellite campuses in Beijing, Hong Kong and Delhi, India.

Applications for undergraduate college more than tripled, to more than 32,000 in 2018 from less than 10,000 in 2006.

Robert Jeffrey Zimmer was born on November 5, 1947 in Manhattan to Dr. Max Zimmer, a West Village family physician, and Harriet (Brokaw) Zimmer, who ran her husband’s medical practice.

He grew up in a diverse neighborhood and learned the value of tolerance. His son Benjamin, who grew up in the McCarthy era, said “when there was a form of cultural oppression, and when he saw a manifestation of it from another direction, he thought it was something he had to stand up for, especially in a university where it was part of its fundamental ethos.

After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Mr. Zimmer received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Brandeis University in 1968 and a master’s degree and a doctorate, both also in mathematics, from Harvard University in 1971 and 1975.

“I actually started college as a physics major,” Mr. Zimmer once confessed. “I switched to math when I spent 45 minutes trying in vain to get an oscilloscope to display a sine wave.”

As a mathematician and author, he specialized in “ergodic theory, Lie groups and differential geometry,” according to a university biography.

He taught at the United States Naval Academy from 1975 to 1977 and began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1977. He was made a full professor in 1980. He also taught for two years at the University of California, Berkeley.

In Chicago, he served as chair of the math department, deputy provost for research, and vice president for research at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, overseen by the university. From 2002 to 2006, he was a math professor and provost at Brown University. He then returned to the University of Chicago as the 13th president.

His 1974 marriage to Terese Schwartzman, former Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Urban Education Institute, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Professor Bartsch-Zimmer, who is the director of the University’s Institute of Knowledge Development and whom he married in 2011, and his son Benjamin, the CEO of a biotechnology company, Mr. Zimmer is survived by two other sons from his first marriage: David, a lawyer, and Alex, a filmmaker. He is also survived by a brother, Richard B. Zimmer; his mother, Harriet (who is 104 and still lives in the West Village apartment where Mr. Zimmer grew up); and two grandchildren.

At the end of the 2021 academic year, while recovering from brain surgery, Mr. Zimmer stepped down as president to become chancellor. He retired and was appointed Chancellor Emeritus in July 2022.

As a private institution, the University of Chicago was under no obligation to abide by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. But, wrote Bret Stephens in a New York Times op-ed in 2017, the real gist of Mr. Zimmer’s advocacy of free speech, offensive or not, was that it was “our salvation from intellectual mediocrity and social rigidity.”

According to Mr. Stephens, Mr. Zimmer opposed the idea that unfettered freedom of expression would jeopardize the cause of inclusion because, among other things, it could upset some people who wanted to be included.

“Recording in what?” Mr. Zimmer had wondered in a speech that year. “An inferior and less challenging education? One that doesn’t prepare students for the challenge of different ideas and the evaluation of their own assumptions? A world where their feelings take precedence over other issues to face?”

For Mr. Zimmer, the mathematician, that kind of education doesn’t count.