For the past decade or so, universities have been eager to put themselves at the center of American political consciousness, often in barely concealed alignment with “the resistance” to a certain president. But they have apparently decided that some measure of course correction is in order. Recent months have seen several universities, including rich and famous ones like Harvard and Stanford, announce versions of an institutional neutrality policy: statements on public controversies in the name of the institution are now verboten. This is a positive development, one that I expect more universities will imitate, at least de facto if not de jure.
Yet, even as institutional neutrality gains broader acceptance, it continues to have opponents on the right and the left. While these critics are often insightful, the truth is that any effort to reform academic life will require recovering this principle, best articulated in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report. Eloquent justifications of the policy already exist, but it is worth drawing out a few points not often discussed elsewhere.
Some conservative commentators have paired enthusiasm for the recent turn with expressions of disappointed surprise that anyone could have been so stupid as to think that universities pronouncing on social issues was a wise idea to begin with. What this reaction misses is that the institutional opinionizing, misguided as one may consider it, was an almost inevitable result of the conformity of outlook that characterizes contemporary academia. Where little dissent is heard—whether because nobody actually disagrees, or because those who do disagree falsify their preferences for fear of the consequences of speaking out—institutional officeholders can actually forget that their views are contestable (and contested).
There arises a phenomenon whereby many otherwise bright people find statements that any outside observer, even a sympathetic one, would immediately recognize as partisan to be not political at all. Political positions come to be conflated with “being a good person.” Opposition to what an impartial spectator would readily identify as a substantively loaded proposition on a complicated issue—on, say, policing, or the appropriate distribution of social resources like schooling or employment across different demographic groups—gets equated with moral defectiveness. “How can you be against ‘antiracism’?” “Who could have a problem with ‘inclusion’?” “Are you suggesting that black lives don’t matter?”
In such an environment, it is natural that institutional statements would proliferate. An equilibrium in favor of public position-taking develops in which a few zealous but clearheaded members of the academic community openly insist that the university should be a political player, while a larger number cheer on the practice, deaf to its partisan character. Meanwhile, a (perhaps sizable) minority of dissenters stays quiet to avoid professional repercussions.
In short, given the overwhelming ideological skew of faculty and of the expanding, tentacular administrative class, the university could become politicized with many of those within it hardly acknowledging, or at least hardly admitting to themselves, what was occurring. That these same people would instantly have objected that their institution’s prestige was being directed toward partisan gamesmanship if “right-wing” versions of these positions (“how can you be against ‘life’?” “you don’t want America to be great?” “you believe that all lives don’t matter?”) started emerging from the mouths and pens of university representatives makes no difference; it is a predictable byproduct of an ideological monoculture that one can avoid applying to oneself the scrutiny that one applies to one’s enemies. When we deliver vague moral blandishments, we are just calling others to their best selves; but when they do the same, it’s dog-whistling, or worse—an intimation of a coming fascism. All good people—that is, everyone in our professional-social world—know this.
The special irony here is that nowhere more frequently than in universities does one encounter “the personal is political,” and similar shibboleths. Whole careers are made on uncovering the fact that art is political, the family is political, sex is political, and so on—often accurately enough. To the many left-liberals who insist that universities have not gone astray and that the backlash against them is only a matter of Republican opportunism—an assurance belied by their declining support from independents and Democrats—everything is political except the university’s own political utterances.
There is a further problem. Political statements are unbecoming of a university (setting aside for the moment religious institutions committed to confessional identities). A university is supposed to be a place of reasoned debate, furnishing of evidence, and careful consideration of potential counterarguments. But the institutional pronouncement on a heated controversy almost never fits these criteria. This is no surprise: a dean’s or president’s office is not a place for writing substantial essays or doing original research. Rapid-fire messaging, emotional appeals, sloganeering—these are all acceptable in democratic political competition. But they are not the sort of thing that universities are lavishly subsidized and legally privileged to produce. Further, they send the message that moralized bluster is the way their own students and employees should relate to politics. I—and, if the polling indicating universities’ declining standing is to be believed, much of the country, as well—would prefer a university that stands for rationality and reserve in public life, rather than contributing to the agitated enthusiasm of which our politics is already too full.
There may be times when a revered institution has managed to step outside its conventional purview and deliver remarks on public affairs that are moving in their weight and dignity. But for the university, this is not one of those times. It is one thing to preach from the mountaintop, another from the gutter. Universities’ performance in their core functions has been worrisome, to say the least, for some time. The official position of the party to which nearly all academics belong and which bills itself as the defender of higher education appears to be that attending a university is for millions of Americans a decision of such disastrous imprudence that the taxpayer must bail them out. Academics and Democratic politicians seem unaware that a clear subtext of the push for student-loan forgiveness is that higher education has behaved predatorily toward students.
Universities are churning out students who not only reject the spirit of the First Amendment, but do so without having any real idea of what the amendment says. Further, they are staffed by a striking number of people willing to admit that they would discriminate against colleagues on political grounds. They were found by the highest court in the land to have engaged in unconstitutional racial discrimination. Grade inflation is so acute at top universities that, in many majors, it is harder not to get an A than to get one.
Conservative critics tend to focus on what they regard as the ideological capture of the “-studies” fields; but even longstanding disciplines are rife with misinformation. The replication crisis in psychology has been amply covered, as several discoveries that fed the American people’s seemingly insatiable appetite for pop psych and self-help fixes turned out to be founded on nothing. Questionable research practices and fundamental methodological problems bedevil untold proportions of quantitative studies, while qualitative social-science research is now producing invaluable methodological innovations like “autoethnography.” Even the supposed citadels of scientific integrity, with implications for life and death right around the corner, are unreliable: much cancer research is simply fraudulent. Venerable scientific journals announce that they will vet submissions for conformity with progressive social doctrine, and defend making election endorsements. A felt need to self-censor is widespread among students and professors; now even left-liberal pundits of impeccable standing are openly drawing the connection between this phenomenon and the untrustworthiness of these institutions as producers and disseminators of knowledge.
On Covid, many universities displayed little capacity for deliberation and flaunted their ostracism of good-faith skeptics of the blue-state approach to the pandemic; shut down in-person teaching for a year or more, while charging students full freight for the privilege of staring at their computer screens; proceeded to implement burdensome protocols for even longer; and imposed pharmaceutical mandates on students and employees in contravention of established tenets of public health. My own employer, despite being a relatively small institution compared with many research universities, imposed crippling social isolation on age cohorts at little risk of the virus; encouraged students to report on their peers for socializing during the pandemic through an anonymous ethics hotline; and even banned students from leaving the county—as if it possessed some special jurisdiction that superseded the right to freedom of movement within the United States.
Elite universities devoted astronomical amounts of money to asymptomatic testing programs, whose efficacy in constraining the virus was dubious; in several cases, they persisted with these programs even after they had already required all present on campus to be vaccinated. Harvard reports spending $136 million over the 2020–21 and 2021–22 academic years on “Covid-19 safety measures,” $22 million of which was reimbursed by the federal government. Imagine what a community college, or a struggling public school system, could have done with such sums! And yet, no university that I know of has established anything like a blue-ribbon commission to reckon with its handling of the pandemic or give an accounting of what good, if any, was done by its massive investment in non-pharmaceutical interventions, its shuttering of core functions, and its significant violation of previous social norms. Nor have the universities exhibited a modicum of humility and self-reflection about the excesses they indulged and the psychological and educational harms they inflicted.
When an institution suffers from such profound failings, it is perhaps fitting that it get its own house in order before it tells the rest of the country what to think. Institutional statements are never a good idea, but they are especially ill-advised when the university is faring, and perceived to be faring, so poorly in its own proper work.
One thing I’ve often heard in support of institutional proclamations is that if the university does not speak out in denunciation or affirmation of certain things, it could signal to various constituencies that it does not regard them as important. To those who genuinely feel this way, the proper stance for the university to take is not acquiescence but education. Its spokesmen should point out to the complainants that for a school to refrain from speaking in its corporate capacity on a public controversy is not to suggest that the issue is unimportant, but just that the university is, after all, a university and not the State Department or the Treasury or the UN.
It is indicative of the self-referentiality all too characteristic of contemporary educated America to think that everything that passes under the sun requires commentary by one’s school, employer, or favorite consumer brands. I suspect, though, that these calls for statements come from a much smaller population than academic administrators think. Most people, certainly outside but probably inside the university, too, do not need a missive from the desk of the president of an Ivy League institution to know that war, climate change, or race relations are pressing concerns.
Indeed, it is only when a university has gotten into the practice of speaking on public affairs that its silence can be taken as indicative of a value judgment. It has often been noticed that when a university or other institution censors or punishes speech of a certain sort, this implies some degree of approval for the ideas it allows to be spoken; whatever expression goes unsanctioned, one infers, is at the least less bad than what is penalized or forbidden.
The same logic holds when it comes to institutional declarations. If a university chooses to pronounce on certain questions, it ineluctably implies that those on which it does not speak up, or does not speak up as vociferously, are lower down the value chain. Over the past year, one thing that got the universities into so much trouble was precisely the perception that where they did not issue a statement, or not the right kind of statement, they must have been sending a message much disliked by large constituencies, since they had issued statements on other matters recently. The truth is that an institution like the university does not have the luxury of picking and choosing its battles when it comes to public controversies; if it enters one fray, it enters them all. Best to steer clear altogether.
That universities have had to beat a hasty retreat to the policy of abstention from institutional statements in the face of jeering from their conservative opponents happened only because they lost the habit of handling open disagreement in the first place. The explosion of ill-considered politicization in the 2010s and early 2020s, and the universities’ related difficulties in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, stem from a common problem: a loss of an understanding of itself as a community in which deep divides were present. It had become the universities’ practice to regard those who were outspoken in favor of “right-wing” views as unfortunate oddities at best and deserving of sanction at worst.
The extent of the universities’ erosion of knowledge about their own internal divisions was obscured by the presence of boisterous activism and protests since the onset of the Great Awokening. But it is important to understand that, in contrast with previous iterations, these demonstrations and disruptions had little that was genuinely oppositional about them. The critical theorist Paul Piccone coined the phrase “artificial negativity” to refer to the idea that a system (in his case, that of state-managed consumer capitalism) could embrace certain kinds of protest activity, to which it would then “concede” policies toward which it was already inclined, with the added bonus of creating jobs for administrators in response to the crisis to which the protesters were, supposedly, bringing attention. Whatever one thinks about it as a component of a general social theory, the concept is apt for the recent spate of campus activism, which was as seamless a part of the apparatus of university life as deans of faculty.
One can see who stands in actual opposition to an institution by whom that institution punishes or reprimands. And in the case of universities, it was not the activists demanding radical change—they were often rewarded with formal honors and positions as well as general social approval, not to mention with the establishment of bureaucratic entities to meet their demands. For those not already convinced by the new orthodoxies, an air of unreality persisted, like watching bankers march on Wall Street; the protesters were pushing on an open door. The ready embrace of those who explicitly presented themselves as hostile to the university’s traditional core priorities and who gave the most full-throated denunciations of the history and mission of the university stands in stark opposition to the often quite cruel punishments handed out for minor Covid infractions.
By contrast, those who stood up for the university’s honor—who denied that it was a tool of white supremacy or structural injustice and insisted that, however flawed, it pursued the noble mission of the production and dissemination of knowledge—were frequently targeted for personal and professional reprisal. What looked like years of ferment and contestation were in reality years of ideological consolidation, as activism itself was feted by and in some cases incorporated into the academic bureaucracy.
Rather than reacquainting the university with the deep ideological cleavages that mark our pluralistic nation, the upheavals of the last decade entrenched the hold of an identity-focused left-liberalism as the regnant worldview on campus. The university came to encourage attacks on itself, presuming that they would always come from a progressive direction. That it not merely tolerated but fostered such activism became part and parcel of the university administrative class’s self-understanding as a steward of beneficial social evolution. Issuing statements on public affairs came naturally to an institution that took for granted a rough homogeneity on the big questions. The events of last fall and since, however, have reacquainted the universities with the extraordinary differences that persisted among their members beneath the apparent consensus.
Playing host to demonstrations at once regarded by large swathes of their own members as expressive of ideals of justice and solidarity with the oppressed and as emblematic of bigotry and terrorist sympathies revealed how ill-equipped universities were to acknowledge ideological cleavages that ran through their own constituencies. When one sees the ham-fisted way in which universities have conducted themselves in the past nine months, it seems that their leaders had forgotten that salient political issues might split their own membership not 95-to-5 or 99-to-1, but 70–30 or even 50–50.
Nor is such division peculiar to the Israel–Palestine question. If universities truly strive to live up to the values of diversity and inclusion, the norm will be for them to harbor differences of opinion that cannot be papered over by broad moralistic generalizations or subsumed under official pronouncements with which one can presume that nearly all academicians sympathize; and the past decade in which administrators, faculty, and activists looked to be in harmony will be seen as the exception. These high-profile adoptions of institutional neutrality are a small step back toward recognizing that deep disagreement should be the expectation at a modern university in a pluralistic nation.
In addition to its left-wing critics, institutional neutrality garners a few right-leaning objections as well. Some conservatives argue that no institution can really be neutral, that one cannot teach students well without upholding substantive commitments. Policies like the Kalven Report, on this view, are thus a kind of mystification.
This is a kind of right-wing version of the “everything is inherently political” mantras one usually hears from the left. It’s not that there isn’t a deep philosophical truth to it (as there is to the left-wing version), but just that it is irrelevant to the issues at hand. If one wishes to stipulate that because every word said or left unsaid by a major institution like a university might ultimately have implications for public policy or social morality, and that the university must make choices that involve tradeoffs and exclusions about what is worth teaching, whom to hire and admit, and so on, academia is necessarily political, then that is a perfectly fine use of the word.
No institution, of course, is neutral in the sense that it presupposes that what it does is worth doing. In the case of a university, that means that the search for knowledge in organized disciplines according to established canons of evidence accessible across lines of religion, race, and creed is worth pursuing at the individual level and worth subsidizing at the social level. The comparative value of this enterprise does not exist as a self-evidently objective fact about the world; there are plenty of other good things one could do with one’s life, and plenty of other goals to which the nation could devote its scarce resources. As a result, no university can be noncommittal about the value of truth, nor any department within it about the value of the subjects it teaches and researches; and institutions of higher education must be populated by those who can make an eloquent case about the worthwhileness of these endeavors.
But none of the preceding resolves the question: “How much ought these institutions to be weighing in on the hot-button issues of the day?” That the university should be prepared to make a full-throated defense of the pursuits of knowledge and teaching has nothing to do with whether it should make pronouncements on war and peace, or on the proper rate for the capital gains tax. Recognizing, as they claim to do, the need for a civil society constituted by various institutions dedicated to specific purposes, conservatives should avoid getting sucked up in abstract argumentation about the impossibility of neutrality. And given that conservatives tend to stress the fragility of institutions, they above all should be sensitive to the problems of political position-taking from university spokesmen, given how vital it is, if institutions are to fulfill their essential functions satisfactorily, to avoid mission creep. In sum, the university is not neutral on such values as academic freedom, research integrity, and the worth of its disciplines. But it is for that very reason that it should not insist in its corporate voice that it has the right answers to the great moral or policy questions of the age.
An alternative to institutional neutrality proposed by at least one prominent left-leaning academic is academic democracy: to let “the students, staff, and faculty” vote on such issues as the university’s stance on Israel. In many university domains, such as hiring, appropriately delimited democratic procedures may be appropriate. But to turn the university into a position-taker on public affairs through the mechanism of a majority vote of the whole community is not just more troubling than institutional neutrality; it is also worse than administrators speaking in the university’s name, bad as that phenomenon has been. For it would formalize politicking as essential to professional activity of the faculty.
If a vote were potentially held on any geopolitical or cultural issue that gains saliency, it would become incumbent on faculty to evaluate job candidates partly based on their political views, as it would then be an official expectation that the role of faculty member involves contributing to a democratic verdict on public controversies. In fact, instead of faculty having the responsibility to set aside political creed when carrying out their obligations in evaluating peers and potential peers, it would become irresponsible to ignore politics, since partaking in political pronunciamentos would now be part of the professional obligations of every literary critic and physicist and tort-law specialist on the payroll. Political convictions would get enshrined as being as legitimate to consider as publication and teaching record in decisions about the career progression of academics.
Where deans and presidents and department heads speak, values central to higher education are jeopardized; but it remains possible to hold that, in principle, the university recognizes the difference between academic excellence and partisan affiliation in its evaluation of candidates for professorships, postdocs, Ph.D. slots, and so on. In a university that not only enters the political arena but does so on the basis of internally democratic arrangements, however, the already-too-feeble wall between partisanship and scholarship will have officially come down. It is precisely this wall that the university must fortify if it is to restore the public trust it has lost.
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