Dean Jim Glaser’s recent decision to repeal Tufts’ punishment of The Primary Source has garnered praise from journalistic, academic, and political sources around the country. Tufts' change of heart is an encouraging indication that the university does know how to respect free speech after all, they say.

Larry Bacow is receiving especially warm responses for his campus-wide email, in which he restated his disgust with the Source but emphasized that the way to deal with disturbing opinions is to respond to them, not silence them.

One particularly eloquent salute came from David Chambers, the grandson of famous communist-turned-defector and journalist Whittaker Chambers.

David Chambers wrote a letter, published on Thursday, to Editor and Publisher, a journal that covers the North American print-news industry. In the letter he recalls his grandfather’s experience with a similar situation at Columbia University. Whittaker Chambers wrote a brief script called “A Play for Puppets” satirizing Christianity and published it in the school’s literary magazine, “Morningside.” The university expelled him.

David Chambers makes the case in his letter to Editor and Publisher that his grandfather would have supported Bacow. “On the one hand,” the grandson writes, “he would have supported the right of publications to withhold bylines. On the other, witless parodies or mock advertisements aimed at African-Americans or Muslims would never have made ‘Morningside’ under his editorship."

Hear, hear. It looks like Bacow's words have the capacity to make us proud of Tufts in ways that our football team will never be able to.