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| Genoa, Italy, on June 26, 2024 |
This is an established pattern: university professors go out in force and use their expertise to affect public debate about a major issue. Universities practice “institutional neutrality” and say nothing. The justification, as explained by an advocate, Daniel Diermeier, president of Vanderbilt University, is that an institutional position “risk[s] establishing a ‘party line’ and stifling debate among students and faculty.”
The only exception to college presidential silence I could find was Rowan University President Ali Houshmand, interviewed in his capacity as an Iranian-American.
"I'm not a fan of the Iranian government. I consider them as a terrorist government," Houshmand said. "I don't like them, but at the same time, I'm worried about people, I'm worried about the country, I'm worried about both sides."
Worrying about people while not criticizing the US government that started the war. This is good about the people. I’m dissatisfied about the missing other half of the comment, but this humanitarian view does set out an ethical baseline. Yet even on this basic point, Houshmand as a university president is out there all by himself.
Isn’t it strange that in a country with nearly 6000 colleges and universities, one is more likely to find conceptual leadership in late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel than in the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, UNC or the University of California? (Kimmel’s “Lie-A-Tollah” has a superb condensation of the war’s stupidly incompatible rationales @4’40”.)
Maybe it’s not strange. We’re used to the story of universities as institutionally irrelevant to public life. Many may prefer to join Diermeier in calling this “principled neutrality,” but it adds to the public impression that universities do not address, much less solve, everyday problems. As institutions, it seems, they put themselves above the issues that torment regular people. High cost, student debt, and ludicrously high rejection rates drive home this impression of the university’s passive elitism.
Making matters worse, senior managers at universities have succumbed to a chilling effect on their own speech, obviously encouraged by repressive U.S. governments like the Trump-McMahon regime and the state legislatures that have suspended academic freedom (Texas, Florida, Indiana, and North Carolina). The university’s institutional silence is very bad for universities as well as for the country, now in the grip of a government that can’t and won’t think straight, and that scorns the knowledge that universities exist to produce.
Michael has two recent posts about this issue of self-neutralizing management. Discussing “Minneapolis lessons for higher education,” he praised the state’s senior Democratic officials: “At a moment of intense threat they have stood up to the federal government at potentially great personal risk. How many of our college and university leaders can make the same statement?”
In the other post, Michael meant by “Achieving Our University” that faculty must “challenge the managerial class's monopoly on definition and meaning.” He wrote that “it is now up to faculty as faculty to openly defend and define the mission of colleges and universities.”
This is a mild-mannered call for professionals to take back their universities from a floundering managerial elite. I certainly agree.
And taking back is a theme of our time. I’m writing this post just after an ISRF workshop on ”Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice,” which involves taking economic planning back from private equity and related powerful actors, and just before a workshop on “Reframing AI,” which involves taking human learning back from its AI-industry definitions.
Here I want to specify one feature of this taking back of universities, which is taking academic freedom back from institutional “neutrality” or “restraint.”
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Under Trump-turboed pressure from governments and from a loud minority of heavyweight trustees, university presidents have largely muzzled themselves. Looking for a shield, there’s been a national rediscovery of the Kalven Committee report, composed at the University of Chicago nearly 60 years ago, in 1967, and supplemented by UChicago’s “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression” (2014). What are sometimes called the “Chicago Principles” stress institutional neutrality and “free expression” in debate. The core claim is that you can’t have free inquiry without institutional neutrality. The 2014 report added a rejection of downshouting or deplatforming of “controversial” speakers” along with language about “time place and manner” restrictions on protest.
In July 2022, Kalven was adopted by the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees and few other places. More generally, its sensibility has been adapted as “institutional restraint” at prominent universities like Princeton and Cornell, who prefer “restraint” to “neutrality.”
Although Kalven argued that only the “neutrality of the university” could protect free inquiry it noted a “university mission” exception: the institution should speak when “the very mission of the university” was at stake. Kalven is not widely seen as providing criteria for identifying the university’s unique missions. It’s more a prudential principle of restraint—stay out of every fight that isn’t yours.
This is perfectly sound advice, but then the question is begged as to which fight is and isn’t yours. Commentators (Robert Post, Jennifer Ruth, the AAUP’s Committee A) have shown that Kalven did not forbid all university statements and did endorse self-defense of the university’s core values and procedures. It specified that a university could legitimately speak about “situations involving university ownership of property, its receipt of funds, its awarding of honors, its membership in other organizations.”
With its ambiguities unresolved, Kalven concerns were reignited by the national (and international) wave of university statements about the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Did so many official statements mean that racialized police violence affected core university values and operations, including the work lives of its faculty, staff, and students? A very large number of university presidents felt Floyd’s murder was their business, and perhaps that if they didn’t condemn the murder they would be seen as cowardly or complicit. Were they all violating Kalven’s ethos of neutrality or restraint?
University presidents reacted in a similar way to the Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023 that involved the mass murder of Israeli civilians. Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay and other senior managers signed a statement on October 9th: “We write to you today heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend, and by the war in Israel and Gaza now under way.” The statement also noted “an interest from many in understanding more clearly what has been happening in Israel and Gaza,” which of course falls squarely within the mandate of a university.
This was considered too even-handed by some, so the next day Gay herself added, “let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.” The concern was not that Harvard’s president hadn’t stayed neutral but that she had been too neutral.
Princeton’s president Christopher Eisgruber is a leading advocate of institutional restraint. His October 7th comment began, “Even in a world wearied and torn by violence and hatred, Hamas’s murder and kidnapping of hundreds of Israelis over the past weekend is among the most atrocious of terrorist acts.” It went on to discuss multilateral outreach efforts and scholarly analyses and panels to come. It did not strive for neutrality by, for example, describing efforts to understand the politics of the Occupation or the situation of the residents of Gaza.
Harvard and Princeton both operate in the restraint ethos, and Harvard’s Institutional Voice Working Group recently made it official. Their official statements appear to respond to the strength of outrage in their community—to its affective investment in an issue—under conditions in which no counterweight comes from political and business elites. This seems to me to typify Kalven in practice: not triggered by a stable list of authorized institutional topics, but by an impassioned university community to which donors and legislators are at least not opposed. This lack of heavyweight opposition lasted for only a day at Harvard in October 2023, but the point is that senior managers can’t look to Kalven or to a related principle of restraint for a clear line between university and non-university topics.
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Neutralists haven’t given up, however. A leading advocate, Vanderbilt’s President Diermeier, had advanced “principled neutrality,” and insists a line can be drawn between the university and non-university matters.
According to Diermeier, principled neutrality applies only to issues “that do not affect the university directly”.
Admissions, which is a “core function” of the university, is fair game for him. Abortion, however – another strongly polarising topic in the US, which the Supreme Court ruled on in 2022 – is not. He feels there’s a key difference.
“It affects the members of my community, but not more than other members of the community. We will not comment. That’s the principle.
The problem is that this argument smuggles in a new and unsupported claim: an issue cannot simply affect a “core function” but must affect it more than other communities. This arbitrarily sets aside the connections between academic conditions on campus and existential conditions (social, cultural, political) that shape Vanderbilt people and their professional lives.
In May 2023, Diermeier was severely taken to task by one of his faculty members, Brian L. Heuser, on exactly this point. Since Diermeier’s manifesto, “Principled Neutrality,” Heuser wrote, “the Tennessee General Assembly has eviscerated women’s reproductive rights, maltreated our transgender citizens, persecuted our immigrant population, moved to dismantle our Nashville Metropolitan Council and significantly restricted academic freedom and faculty autonomy.” The refusal of one of Tennessee’s leading dignitaries to oppose any of this had helped to degrade Vanderbilt University’s “core functions” by harming many of the people who perform them. The “very mission of the university” in reality depended on having a non-toxic political environment.
The stakes of this argument are enormous. Institutions that don’t control their environments are prey to them. When universities throw their trans students under the bus, it harms those students while also weakening universities.
I’d make a similar argument for action at a distance. Universities that can’t control their national intellectual environments are prey to them. The mental cratering evident, yet again, in Trumpian war-making harms the people of Iran and the Middle East while also weakening the universities whose intellectual practices these actions suggest do not matter.
I realize this second claim about the knowledge environment is more complicated than those about the university’s immediate environment, and I’ll work through it in other posts. But I believe it’s correct and I’d be more than happy to have help with it.
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I’ll end this post by saying that universities should stop letting the Kalven tradition silence their institutional voices. Robert Post is certainly right that Kalven and its successors have failed to draw a principled distinction between external matters and matters that pertain to “the very mission of the university”—that this distinction is an empirical and, I would add, an affective matter.
But I think the Kalven Inhibition is a bit worse than that. Institutional restraint actively makes universities less valuable and less safe. The tradition has the following effects.
1. Kalven isolates universities from the wider population’s everyday concerns. Without intending this, it deepens the divide between college and non-college sectors of the population.
2. Kalven turns nearly every external or environmental factor in university functioning into a political intrusion on the core mission. It teaches faculty, staff, and students, that even existential matters like state funding policy are outside the purview of their jobs and expertise. For example, Princeton president Eisgruber gave the Clark Kerr lectures this winter, where he analyzed three trends that shape the contemporary university: the rising dependence of higher education on student loans; accelerating nationwide competition; and the role of colleges and universities in addressing issues of racial equality. Having done this research, should Eisgruber not work to persuade Princeton University to issue an official statement favoring (to replace his conclusions with mine) free public colleges, national minimums for per-student educational expenditures at 25% of Princeton’s, and new forms of race-based affirmative action? Factors like student debt directly shape the “very mission of the university,” and yet under Kalven universities should normally remain silent about them.
3. When it claims that a university’s “collective action” comes “at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted,” Kalven grants a minority veto over collective action. The Kalven tradition invents a conflict between academic freedom and democracy. This is not good for an institution that claims to be democracy’s backbone. Also, Kalven in effect endorses the theory behind the Trump Administration’s sole-complainant doctrine, e.g. at Columbia University, in which one affronted person can cause the Department of Justice to bring a federal case. Kalven says academic freedom requires open debate, but then that academic freedom is trampled by a debate that leads to a democratic vote and democratic agency.
4. The Kalven tradition splits the faculty from the university as a part of public life, deepening class conflict between academic professionals and their managers. For example, the main point of the restraint doctrine defined by Cornell’s “Presidential Task Force on Institutional Voice” is that the institution’s voice belongs exclusively to a small handful of top officials: “Only the board, president, and provost speak for the university.” The report spells out that deans don’t speak for the university. Nor in this document, does anyone else below them. In other words, the academic core of the university doesn’t speak. If it does, it speaks at the discretion of the board and top two officials and even then it doesn’t represent the university. This institutional restraint effectively scrubs the university’s institutional voice of its academic life, making it weaker as well as generally boring.
The upshot is that the university’s institutional voice should be co-authored by officials and the members of the academic core the officials claim to protect. This is my variant of Michael’s “challenge [to] the managerial class's monopoly.”
If there’s no progress there, then academics, students included, will need to work the direct public communication channels that do not pass through the president and provost—teaching and protests, both sites of struggle, as well as research publication and “extramural” speaking into all possible media.
Research, scholarship, teaching and lecturing: These things don’t “speak for the university,” but the university does speak through them. And these academic channels should speak directly about the intellectual catastrophes that do so much pointless harm to the world today.
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