Purdue is making news for its excellent attitude on free speech.

The FIRE Blog reports.

Purdue President and Students Join Forces for Free Speech on Campus

urdue University President Mitch Daniels had found what he was looking for.

Since late 2014, Daniels had, with the help of FIRE, been taking a hard look at the university’s written policies to ensure they didn’t infringe on speech rights on campus. But Daniels wanted to do more.

“We were already busy trying to make certain that we had clear and forceful protections of First Amendment rights in place here at Purdue. In the process, I read the Chicago principles,” Daniels said of the statement on free speech authored by the University of Chicago’s Committee on Freedom of Expression.

The principles, he said, took the words right out of his mouth.

“I thought they were tremendous,” Daniels said. “It was a crystal clear statement that captured what we were trying to do.”

What exactly Daniels was trying to do was more than simply eliminate Purdue’s speech codes. Through the Chicago principles—which champion “a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation” on campus and boldly proclaim that “without a vibrant commitment to free and open inquiry, a university ceases to be a university”—the former governor of Indiana saw the opportunity to make a bigger statement about the importance of free inquiry on America’s campuses.

“Anyone paying attention knows about the erosion of respect for First Amendment principles,” Daniels said. “You’d really have to be trying not to be bothered by the steady stream of trespasses of those principles on way too many campuses.”

FIRE can attest to that.