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I should disclose what some folks call one’s “priors” when it comes to the notion of institutional neutrality as applied to our colleges and universities.
I don’t get it. I mean, I get it. I understand what people mean when they invoke the term, but I don’t know how it’s workable in today’s world. Higher education institutions are built upon a foundation of actual values, values that are meant to be instantiated by the work of the institution itself.
These values are, by definition, not neutral. Universities exist to do more than collect tuition and confer degrees. They have missions. Here’s a description of the university mission that I find compelling:
“The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.”
I like this because it suggests a few things we should be cognizant of.
One, no topic is off-limits. Two, challenges are endemic to the work of living up to the mission. Three, those challenges may cause upset, and that upset should be seen as a desirable by-product of the university doing its mission.
The status quo must expect to be at least occasionally rocked, otherwise, what good are these university things?
The same document tells us who is responsible for making this good trouble:
“The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.”
I’m a fan of this framing because it embraces an ethos of maximum individual freedom within the context of being part of a larger community of shared goals and values. At its heart, this is small-D democracy in action.
I’ll give away my own game now and tell everyone that those quotes about the mission of the university and those responsible for the mission come from the Kalven report, the Rosetta Stone of institutional neutrality, produced by a faculty committee at the University of Chicago in 1967 and now viewed by groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Heterodox Academy as the linchpin of preserving academic freedom on college campuses.
Reading the Kalven report and then doing some reading about the Kalven report has caused me to realize that I had a misconception about institutional neutrality. Unfortunately, I think lots of institutions, some of which have formally adopted the principles of the Kalven report, also misunderstand what is meant by institutional neutrality in the context of the document itself.
As John K. Wilson wrote back in March at The Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a core irony to the calls for institutions to adopt the Kalven report: “These efforts to externally impose the Kalven Report on colleges violate the most important, and overlooked, aspect of its creation. The Kalven Report was a document created by the faculty. Actions by legislators, trustees, or administrators to impose the Kalven Report’s doctrines, without any faculty control (or even input), violate the shared-governance process that is an essential part of the Kalven Report.”
I would like to put the emphasis on “process” in what Wilson is saying. The Kalven report is clear that it is important for university administrations to remain neutral so that the university community can engage in free (and potentially contentious) debate without fearing disfavor or negative consequences from administrative authorities.
The Kalven report is not a call to make all work emanating from an institution “neutral,” but is instead a call to make the atmosphere for scholarly inquiry and debate as free as possible. Part of this freedom, as Wilson points out, is to ignore the influence of outside actors who seek to police the work of the individuals in the institutional community.
Is anyone else’s irony meter pegged at the limit over FIRE acting as an academic freedom watchdog in a way that violates the very principles they want institutions to follow in adopting the Kalven report?
I think the authors of the Kalven report would agree with Wilson, who says, “Colleges ought to embrace the spirit of the Kalven Report by opposing all legislation compelling neutrality, and by rejecting the call by FIRE, the AFA, and Heterodox Academy for unilateral action by trustees to impose institutional neutrality without any faculty voices in the discussion.”
The only actors who are constrained by the principles of the Kalven report are the upper administrators, who in a very real sense have the responsibility to speak for the university. Everyone else should be free to speak their minds without constraint.
This is perhaps the motive behind a recent AAUP policy change that removed its opposition to academic boycotts against universities in any country. A committee of scholars recognized that “when faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, they can legitimately seek to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights. In such contexts, academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom; rather, they can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”
The committee determined that there may be cases where a boycott of another institution is an expression of academic freedom consistent with the underlying values that institutions are meant to embody. It’s notable that this right is extended to individuals, not institutions, and that the policy makes clear that individuals should face neither coercion or punishment for involvement (or noninvolvement) in a boycott.
This is obviously controversial. FIRE believes that all boycotts of academic institutions are de facto violations of academic freedom. These are not easy questions—nor should they be—but we can note that the new AAUP policy grants greater freedom to individual actors than FIRE’s position.
There is another key passage to the Kalven report worth highlighting in the midst of our present reality:
“From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.”
This is of particular concern as the vice president–elect that has declared that “professors are the enemy” and expressed admiration for Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orbán’s takeover of his country’s universities in the name of purging them of left-wing dissidents. I don’t know about you, but ending the independence of the university sounds like a threat to the mission!
Attacks on universities that invoke the Kalven report’s requirement of self-defense have been happening in various states across the country for quite some time.
In one recent example, as reported at The Chronicle, faculty at the University of North Texas at Denton have seen their research “curtailed” by administrators pre-emptively acting to comply with a Texas bill banning anything “DEI”-related, even as the original text of the law makes exceptions for teaching and research.
Universities should be politically nonpartisan, but when it comes to their missions, there’s no room for neutrality. As Wilson said at The Chronicle, “Neutrality can be more repressive than liberatory when it is externally imposed rather than freely chosen.”
There’s no easy way to navigate these difficult questions, and our current political climate makes it harder than ever. The Kalven report reminds us that this work will always be a work in progress, and institutions must first respect the rights of their own community rather than bending to the barks of watchdogs or the bites of hostile legislators.
