Roger Kreuz's "Strikingly Similar"

Roger Kreuz is the W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis, where he serves as an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and as the Director of Graduate Studies. After studying psychology and linguistics at the University of Toledo, he earned his master's and doctoral degrees in experimental psychology at Princeton University. Following that, he was a post-doctoral researcher in cognitive gerontology at Duke University. He has researched and published on diverse topics in the fields of language and communication, but primarily in the areas of text and discourse processing and figurative language. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. He has been a student of German and Old English, but his progress in the latter has been hampered by a lack of native speakers to practice with.

Kreuz applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, with the following results:

Page 99 of Strikingly Similar describes an accusation by The New York Sun, on the eve of the 2004 U.S. presidential election, of plagiarism by the Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry. The senator had published a book about global crime organizations seven years earlier, and The Sun claimed that Kerry had plagiarized a sentence from a 1993 newspaper story, and three sentences from a 1996 magazine article.

The newspaper’s report included the opinion of two plagiarism experts, and they disagreed about the seriousness of Kerry’s alleged appropriation. One claimed that it was a clear instance of plagiarism, while the other expressed doubts that Kerry was even the culprit, since books by politicians are often prepared by their staffs. Neither the candidate nor his staffers publicly commented on the allegations, and the claims seems not to have been investigated by other news organizations.

Readers opening Strikingly Similar to page 99 would get a good idea of what my book is about. As with many other examples I include, it illustrates how accusations of plagiarism can be wielded as a weapon against others: The New York Sun is a conservative publication, and Kerry was a liberal presidential candidate.

The passage also illustrates how even experts on plagiarism can disagree. Such judgments can be affected by how much text was copied, and by whom, and how long ago, and for what purpose. These are the same issues that judges and juries struggle with in reaching verdicts regarding claims of copyright infringement. The result has been an idiosyncratic patchwork of rulings that are not infrequently overturned on appeal.

Strikingly Similar is both a cultural history of plagiarism and appropriation and an examination of the psychological aspects of the phenomenon.

A review of appropriation across two millennia illustrates how cultural perceptions shifted between the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, when the practice was widely condemned, and the medieval period, during which appropriation was rampant and not perceived negatively. I also describe the gradual shift to the modern view, which is inextricably bound up with notions of intellectual property, copyright infringement, and an increasingly litigious society.

At the psychological level, I assess the controversial claim that plagiarism can occur inadvertently, without conscious awareness. (Spoiler alert: several laboratory studies have concluded that this is possible, at least in some cases.) I also explore the varied motivations for why people appropriate, and why some plagiarists seem to get a pass while others are publicly condemned. And of course, generative AI has only served to muddy the waters about what counts as being truly “original” even further.

Visit Roger Kreuz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy D. Grundmeier's "Lutheranism and American Culture"

Timothy D. Grundmeier is professor of history at Martin Luther College, New Ulm, Minnesota.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith in the Civil War Era, and shared the following:

If a reader would open to page 99 of Lutheranism and American Culture, they would find themselves in the middle of the debates about slavery among the Old Lutherans of the Missouri Synod, a Midwest-based church body whose members were almost exclusively immigrants from Germany. Despite having no direct stake in the peculiar institution, several key leaders of the Missouri Synod vigorously defended slavery as biblically sanctioned. I then explain two reasons why. First, they were convinced that the abolition of slavery would lead to societal disorder and the elevation of a false conception of liberty. Second, they believed that the Bible clearly taught that slaveholding was not sinful.

The Page 99 Test succeeds in some ways but fails in others.

This particular page certainly highlights a key theme in my book: Throughout the Civil War era, Lutherans were both distinctive in their outlooks and quintessentially American. So, on the one hand, it is quite surprising that these Midwestern immigrants would be defending the institution of slavery with such vigor. Yet, on the other hand, many of their pro-slavery (or anti-abolitionist) arguments resembled those made by other Christians in the United States.

That being said, if a browser just read page 99, that person would miss my book’s core argument. In my book, I show how the Civil War and Reconstruction forged a distinctive identity among American Lutherans. This identity had four key components: theological confessionalism, ecclesiastical separatism, political and social conservatism, and American exceptionalism. A reader turning to this page might get a sense of the third of those four ideas (political and social conservatism), but not the other three.

Learn more about Lutheranism and American Culture at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel R. Langton's "Darwin in the Jewish Imagination"

Daniel R. Langton is Professor of Jewish History at the University of Manchester with particular interests in modern Jewish thought and identity in the context of religion and science studies and Jewish-/Non-Jewish relations. He is Head of the Department of Religions & Theology, and also co-director of the University's Centre for Jewish Studies.

Langton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Darwin in the Jewish Imagination: Jews' Engagement with Evolutionary Theory, and reported the following:

Page 99 falls within a chapter on Reform Jewish engagements with evolutionary theory. It focuses on Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf’s late nineteenth-century attempt to reconcile Darwinian evolution with a theistic, even mystical, vision of divine immanence. The page develops two intertwined claims: first, that evolution continues beyond physical death—“the spark of life lives and passes on to a higher and better state”—and second, that intellect itself evolves upward through the animal kingdom, culminating in humanity as a form of divine revelation. Krauskopf presents life as a “spark of the universal Life,” identifying that universal life with God, and imagines biological development as a spiritual ascent toward the “God-like.” The prose is rich in organic metaphors: seed and flower, caterpillar and butterfly, matter returning to earth while the life-principle advances.

Would page 99 give a good idea of the whole?

It would give a partly accurate but incomplete idea of the book. Accurately, it captures one of the book’s central arguments: that many Jewish thinkers did not see Darwinism as a threat, but as an opportunity to articulate panentheistic (the world is contained within the divine) or immanentist (divine presence is found within life, law or natural processes) theologies of evolution. It also reflects the book’s close historical reading of sermons, essays, and theological works rather than abstract theorizing about “Judaism and science.”

However, page 99 might mislead the reader into thinking the book is primarily about Reform homiletics or spiritualized evolution. In fact, the study ranges widely across popular, Orthodox, mystical, secular, Zionist, and even Jewish eugenic contexts from the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century from Europe, the US and Israel/Palestine. It includes fierce opposition to Darwin, internal Jewish polemics, and transnational intellectual exchanges. The tone elsewhere tends to be more analytical and historiographical than purely descriptive, as here.

Darwin in the Jewish Imagination argues that Jewish responses to evolution challenge standard “conflict” models derived from Christian contexts. Far from a simple science-versus-religion narrative, the Jewish case reveals creative adaptation, theological innovation, and strategic boundary-drawing. Evolution became a resource for rethinking revelation, chosenness, human nature, morality, and national destiny. Page 99 shows one vivid instance of that creativity—but it is only one thread in a much larger tapestry.

Learn more about Darwin in the Jewish Imagination at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Sanders's "A Will for the Machine"

Mark Sanders is professor of comparative literature and English at New York University and extraordinary professor of Afrikaans and Dutch at Stellenbosch University. He is the author of four books, including Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, and Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid.

Sanders applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Will for the Machine: Computerization, Automation, and the Arts in South Africa, with the following results:

Page 99 of A Will for the Machine is transitional, summarizing part of what has come before, and part of what comes after. It gives the reader a schematic overview of the theoretical implications of my arguments about how South African writers and artists engaged with technologies of automation and computerization in the context of apartheid and its racialization of labor. Coming a few pages into my book’s third chapter, which is about William Kentridge’s animated films, specifically Stereoscope, page 99 introduces the idea that there is a parallel between the automaticity of seeing and that of technologies such as film—the latter being imaginable because of the former. Chapter three is also historical, analyzing how Stereoscope depicts women telephone operators at the brink of the automation of telephone exchanges—which proceeded apace from the 1920s. Kentridge’s film thus asserts, generally, the indispensability of the human being who interacts with the machine. A century ago, such an assertion was integral to Kentridge’s grandfather’s political career. As a member of parliament for the Labour Party, Morris Kentridge was a prominent advocate for white South African workers. William Kentridge’s politics, often given expression in his art, have, by contrast, been non-racial. Page 99 also anticipates how, in the rest of my book, I show how artists have not only depicted workers interacting with machines, which I discuss in my chapters on authors Miriam Tlali and J.M. Coetzee—the latter produced computer poetry before his career as a novelist—but also bring before the eye what humans and machines have in common, which, I contend, is a condition of possibility for their interaction. This is especially apparent from the work of Handspring Puppet Company, which I discuss in the final chapter of my book.

Learn more about A Will for the Machine at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Learning Zulu.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie L. Reed's "Land, Language, and Women"

Julie Reed is associate professor of history and anthropology at the University of Tulsa.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Land, Language, and Women introduces readers to the three major themes of the book (Cherokee girls' and women's educational worlds, the role of Cherokee language in educational settings, and the power of land to shape and inform community). Readers learn about Cherokee girls' access to Cherokee language education and enrollment numbers at Dwight Mission, a school opened in Arkansas Territory that served Cherokees who had removed to the west before forced removal. Dwight Mission later moved to Indian Territory from Arkansas after the United States and Western Cherokees negotiated the Treaty of 1828. Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee written language and whose daughter figures prominently in the book, assisted in these negotiations. Page 99 also describes how Cherokee people re-established and (re)organized their families and agricultural endeavors in the west during what I have been referring to for over a decade as the Long Removal Era. This longer period of study forces us to consider what led some Cherokee families to remove west before the event we refer to as the Trail of Tears and it corrects an incomplete understanding of the Removal Era to better reflect Cherokee peoples' actual family histories of removal, my own included.

Page 99 does discuss the three key themes of the book, but my disappointment with the test as it applies to my book is that it does not introduce readers to any named Cherokee women. I have encountered so many unnamed "Indian women" in the archival record and in published histories; my goal in writing this book was to offer a methodological approach and a corrective to what I see as a continued erasure of wide swathes of everyday Cherokee women in histories written about Cherokee people. Each chapter of the book (and within original artwork in the book created by Cherokee artist Roy Boney, Jr. ) foregrounds a Cherokee girl's educational world in order to launch a much larger conversation about systems of Cherokee education over 400 years that continually relied on Cherokee women to function. This page doesn't introduce readers to a single girl. In part, I judge books on Cherokee history based on whether I meet Cherokee people I have never met before or get to know someone I have met before, but in a far more intimate and nuanced way. Reading this page, I fail my own test even though I haven't completely failed the Page 99 Test.

Land, Language, and Women extends my exploration of the subjects covered in my first book (social welfare, education, public health policies, and the development and implementation of institutions). It also reflects my continued desire to explore questions related to hybridity and the durability of Indigenous-centered models of social welfare and pedagogy. To accomplish this, I drew upon a far more rich and creative set of primary records. I read mollusk collections, archaeological site reports, Cherokee writing in caves, textbooks used in mission and Oklahoma public schools, oral narratives, the oral histories of friends/teachers, artists' experiences, the experiences and records gathered by my family, and records from my own childhood archive to draw out more nuanced and complicated understandings of Indigenous history, Cherokee history, social welfare policies, educational history, regional histories, and women's history.

Learn more about Land, Language, and Women at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lytton N. McDonnell's "Counterpoints of Ecstasy"

Lytton N. McDonnell is Associate Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, University of Victoria.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Counterpoints of Ecstasy: Music, Mysticism, and the Enchantment of Modern America, and reported the following:

Page 99 appears just before the conclusion of Chapter 2, “The Naturalization of Numen.” It describes how certain nineteenth-century musical cultures promoted disciplined self-restraint as the proper expression of ecstatic experience. The page focuses on Theodore Thomas, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who modeled and enforced strict standards of decorum for both orchestra and audience, including synchronized bowing of instruments, prohibitions against talking or moving chairs, and carefully controlled bodily comportment.

This ethos of self-control also extended across the Atlantic. The American journalist George Gladden, for example, praised European audiences for their absolute silence during Wagner opera performances: no applause, no cheers, no visible emotional display, even when a singer delivered a deeply moving performance or “poured his whole soul into the darkness.” When audiences did become noisy or expressive, Gladden condemned them as “savage,” “diabolical,” and violent. In this way, musical elites—conductors, critics, performers, moralists, and audiences alike—framed silence, self-restraint, and internalized experience as virtuous markers of refinement and as the proper form of self-transcendence in the concert hall.

If readers open the book to page 99, they would gain a strong sense of one of its central arguments: that certain nineteenth-century cultural authorities redefined musical ecstasy not as visible excess or collective frenzy, but as disciplined interiority. The page also illustrates the book’s broader concern with how musical experience was reshaped, regulated, and naturalized within modern institutions, including the concert hall. Gladden’s quotations reinforce this point, employing moralizing language that highlights the book’s recurring attention to the ways ecstasy became entangled with hierarchies of class, race, and cultural authority.

However, page 99 offers only a partial—and potentially misleading—impression of the whole. Its emphasis on elite European art music and cultivated restraint might lead readers to assume the book focuses primarily on concert etiquette or bourgeois moral order. What the page does not reveal is the book’s wider comparative scope, which encompasses forms of ecstatic expression in contexts as varied as religious revivals, racialized performance traditions, psychological discourse, and the popular entertainment industry. Here, ecstatic experience often diverged from the ethos of self-restraint, embracing physicality, improvisation, and collective participation. Nor does the page foreground one of the book’s more distinctive contributions: its exploration of how ambivalence, contradiction, and countercurrents shaped—and at times destabilized—interpretations of ecstatic experience.

To encounter these other dimensions, readers might turn ahead a further 99 pages to the introduction of Chapter 6, which opens with a first-person account by Gustav Kuhl, a German writer describing his overwhelming reaction to a ragtime performance in Georgia in 1903:

“Suddenly I discovered that my legs were in a condition of great excitement. They twitched as though charged with electricity and betrayed a considerable and rather dangerous desire to jerk me from my seat. The rhythm of the music, which had seemed so unnatural at first, was beginning to exert its influence over me.”

This example is just one of dozens of historical accounts of intense subjective musical experience examined throughout the book. Together, they create the foundation of Counterpoints of Ecstasy and illuminate its central concern with the shifting interpretations of musical transcendence in America.

Learn more about Counterpoints of Ecstasy at the State University of New York Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick J. Connolly's "Newton's Metaphysics of Substance"

Patrick J. Connolly is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on issues at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences in the early modern period. Connolly has published a number of papers on John Locke, Isaac Newton, and related figures. He earned a PhD at the University of North Carolina and has previously held positions at Iowa State University, Lehigh University, Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Connolly applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Newton's Metaphysics of Substance: God, Bodies, Minds, with the following results:

If you flip to page 99 of Newton's Metaphysics of Substance, you’ll be plunged into my analysis of a dispute between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. These are both towering figures in seventeenth-century mathematics and physics. But the argument I’m adjudicating on page 99 is about something more fundamental: metaphysics. Specifically, Newton is responding to some of Leibniz’s criticisms of his theory of gravitation. And Newton is suggesting that there is a way of thinking about gravitation that makes it not much more mysterious than solidity. For him, these can both be understood by appeal to God’s immense power and providential design of the world.

Does page 99 give a good sense for the work as a whole? While no book can be captured in a single page, I’m inclined to say that page 99 is representative of much of what is on offer in my book. Let me give just a few of the reasons for that claim.

First, some of the most fundamental issues in Newton’s metaphysics are foregrounded here. What, at the most basic level, are bodies? How should we understand their features? And how should we think about bodies in relation to God, as things created by and depending on God? These are absolutely essential questions in my exploration of Newton’s larger metaphysical system, and much of the book is an effort to answer them.

Second, page 99 is focused on an effort to find continuity between De gravitatione and other claims Newton makes. De gravitatione is a fascinating, unfinished, and unpublished manuscript essay written by Newton. Lost for centuries, it was only rediscovered and published in the 1960s. I see it as offering the basic framework for Newton’s metaphysical thinking. So this page in my book can be seen as a microcosm of my larger effort to make sense of many of Newton’s otherwise confusing claims by leveraging the more systematic perspective on offer in De gravitatione.

Finally, one of the goals of the book is to present Newton as a systematic metaphysical thinker. Page 99 shows him considering and responding—I argue in a principled way—to the claims of another systematic metaphysical thinker. This showcases something important about the book. I argue that Newton can rightly be placed alongside figures like Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz as an important early modern philosopher. Accordingly, the book seeks to put him in dialogue with those three thinkers as well as with others. And page 99 is one instance of the book doing this.

Learn more about Newton's Metaphysics of Substance at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Casey Tieken's "Educated Out"

Mara Casey Tieken is professor of education at Bates College. She is the author of Why Rural Schools Matter.

Tieken applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges-And What It Costs Them, and shared the following:

The 99th page comes midway through the book, which follows nine rural, first-generation-to-college students as they enter and navigate an elite college that I call Hilltop. In a passage entitled “Access…” the page outlines the many opportunities and resources that Hilltop has: renowned professors, state-of-the-art science labs, an observatory, a new boathouse a few miles from campus. And it explains how the nine students take advantage of many of them, joining clubs, taking compelling classes, and competing on varsity teams.

The main point of the passage—and much of the book—comes a few pages later, though, in a section called “… with Limits.” As I write, “… the students work hard to capitalize on every opportunity, but oftentimes, their ‘Hilltop experience’ isn’t the same as their classmates’.”

Ultimately, the students find that their access to Hilltop’s numerous opportunities is quite limited; the resources exist, but many—the unpaid job shadows, the study abroad programs, the pricey textbooks—remain out of reach. And, as I describe in detail in the book, the students are navigating a world remarkably different from home. Home, with its different politics and different culture and different values, doesn’t feel very welcome at Hilltop.

So, the 99th page reflects part of the book’s core argument well: elite education is a thing of abundance. But these rural, first-generation students are only near that abundance. They remain on the outside, looking in, and that proximity likely makes the exclusion even harder.

Despite their limited access, these rural, first-generation students do well at Hilltop: they all graduate, some with honors and double majors. But, as they watch their wealthier, more urban classmates leverage connections to find jobs and apartments in large cities—where most jobs for college graduates are located—they realize that an elite degree may not open the doors they’d hoped.

These students were pushed to college by their parents, who understood the weakening rural economy and wanted them to have the stability and mobility they never did. An elite education should just raise their children’s chances of getting “a good job,” they reasoned. They knew that college would likely mean that their children would live adult lives far from home, and these parents made that sacrifice. So much hope and expectation rides on this college degree—and it’s not clear if the cost is worth it.

I bookend Educated Out with the current debate about college: is it worth it? Watching these students navigate Hilltop, I found my own faith in college waning. But when I asked the students, “Should everyone go to college?” they told me plainly that that’s the wrong question. “The controversy should be whether everyone has access to it or not, not whether everybody should go,” one said. “That is the issue we should be focused on: giving access to education—a good education.”

And right now, rural students don’t yet enjoy that kind of access.

Learn more about Educated Out at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert D. Priest's "Oberammergau"

Robert D. Priest is Associate Professor of Modern European History, Royal Holloway, University of London. He studied at University College London and Oxford, and was then a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is the author of various studies in nineteenth-century European culture and ideas, including The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France.

Priest applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Oberammergau: The Passion Play and Its Audiences from the Enlightenment to the Nazis, and reported the following:

On page 99 we find ourselves in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau in 1871, immediately after the Kingdom of Bavaria has fought alongside other German armies in the Franco-Prussian War that ended with the creation of a unified German nation-state. At the outbreak of war in 1870, the village’s long-running passion play had been interrupted so that its performers could fight in the war. Given Bavaria’s strong regional identity and the village’s Catholic history, Protestant Germans from the North arrived at the resumed season of performances in 1871 expecting a degree of hostility and alienation from the local population. Page 99 presents the surprise of northern Protestant journalists when they discover the opposite: the Oberammergauers seem to be sincerely invested in German nationalism. The local politician is a pro-German Liberal, apparently elected by unanimous vote of the village. He hangs a portrait of the Kaiser in his study alongside his bust of the Bavarian King Ludwig II, and bursts into tears recalling the opening of the Reichstag. A chauvinistic poet who sees Germany’s war victory as a triumph over the Catholic spirit even celebrates the play as ‘purely Protestant’ in its meaning.

The Page 99 Test works remarkably well for Oberammergau. One of the major arguments of my book is that the passion play attracted an increasingly and remarkably wide range of audiences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crucial was the play’s capacity to attract from across Germany’s sectarian divide and to present itself as a site of national significance, rather than Catholic and Bavarian. The 1870-1 season is the culmination of the first part of the book, ‘Making the German Passion Play’, and page 99 presents some of the strongest language from Protestant admirers. My book also seeks to focus on interaction between the local community and its audiences, which is directly represented by their encounters with journalists on the page.

While Oberammergau passes the Page 99 Test, of course it only tells part of the story. The final two-thirds of the book explore Oberammergau’s development of an international audience, the debates they had over the passion play on issues ranging from commercialisation to antisemitism, and the ultimate sponsorship of the play by the Nazi government at its tercentenary performance in 1934. The path from 1871 to the end of the book is indirect, but without Oberammergau’s successful presentation of the passion play as a national site, as described on page 99, it is impossible to imagine the paths that follow out from there into the twentieth century.

Learn more about Oberammergau at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Soucek's "The Opinionated University"

Brian Soucek is a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis. A scholar of free speech and equality law, Soucek has shaped national policy on academic freedom, nondiscrimination, and campus speech through his work with the American Association of University Professors’ “Committee A” on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the University of California’s Academic Senate.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Opinionated University is unusual, because most of it is consumed by the longest block-quote in the book: a statement my chancellor at UC Davis released in 2019, after I’d pushed him to recognize that the campus blood drives he so often publicized discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation and gender. In his statement, which I quote almost in full, the chancellor recognized the importance of blood donations, explained the history of the FDA’s ban on blood from men who’d had sex with another man in the previous year, decried discrimination, and called for “evidence- based policies” that would stop unnecessarily depriving members of our community from “joining in this important and generous community effort.”

Unusual as the page might be (since most of the writing there is attributed to someone else), page 99 actually encapsulates my book perfectly. Instead of stating the book’s central arguments—that institutional neutrality at our universities is an illusion, that taking sides on political issues is often unavoidable, and that well-chosen institutional statements can alleviate some of the harms our universities sometimes cause—page 99 exemplifies those claims.

For years, as a gay man, I’d experienced announcements of our campus blood drives as a slap in the face. I didn’t think we should abandon them, even though they violated our non-discrimination policies. But sometimes universities choose, or our forced, to do things that harm part of their community. (Think for example of the hate speech public universities are forced to allow on campus.) Even if choice might be the right one, that doesn’t make the harm they cause any less real. If the institution can alleviate some of that harm by speaking out, I think they have a duty to do so.

Doing so, however, flies in the face of the neutrality pledges that universities have increasingly made, or been forced to adopt, within the past couple years. Following the University of Chicago’s famous Kalven Report of 1967, as many as 150 schools have recently agreed to stay silent on political and social controversies. Most of my book is spent showing that, whatever they might pledge, universities often can’t avoid taking politically fraught positions in everything from their diversity and campus speech policies to the names on their buildings and the art on their walls.

Page 99 does something different: countering a widespread feeling that institutional speech just isn’t worth the trouble, Page 99 offers an example of a time it mattered. The statement mattered not because it led the FDA to change its policies (as it eventually did), but because it educated people about those policies and, for the first time, allowed those of us affected by them to feel that we were fully part of our institution too.

Learn more about The Opinionated University at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue