(Will Burgess/Reuters)

Readers may remember that I had a conversation with, and piece about, Mitch Daniels a couple of months ago. He is the president of Purdue University and before that he was governor of Indiana. Before that, he was many things, including an aide to Ronald Reagan in the White House. We were talking about political correctness and all that on campus. And Daniels said, among other things, that Purdue had adopted the “Chicago Principles,” pertaining to free speech.


The principles say, in short, There will be freedom of speech and of inquiry, and those who wish to impede it will not succeed.

Daniels said that the principles had been chiefly authored by a “lion of the Left,” Geoffrey R. Stone, the veteran legal scholar at the University of Chicago. Not long after, I went to see Professor Stone, and the result is a podcast here and a piece on the homepage today: here. We talk about life, the law, higher ed, and the health of our democracy. A very interesting fellow, this lion. He has time for us — not all of them do, you know — and we have time for him.