Pamela Paul’s new column in the NYT (click on screenshot below or find the piece archived here) is about “mission creep” in American universities: the drift away from teaching, learning, and doing research to
promulgating social justice. As we’ve discussed so often, there are dangers inherent in this transformation, and some of them are occurring now, including Republican attempts to control universities as well as a decline in public respect for universities among Republicans, Democrats and folks among all ages and socioeconomic groups.
The biggest problem, of course, is the ideological slant that universities are taking, nearly all tilting left with some having more than 80% of the faculty describing themselves as liberal (e.g., Harvard). That in itself is a problem as students don’t get exposed to a panoply of views, but it’s worse because those on the Left—particularly the so-called progressive Left—can’t restrain themselves from making “official” university pronouncements on political, ideological, and moral issues, issues that themselves are academically debatable and whose imprimatur by the university as “official views” chills speech. If a University issues an official statement that there should be a ceasefire in Gaza, what untenured faculty member or student dares buck this position?
To keep free speech going without this kind of “chill”, the University of Chicago was the first to adopt and implement a policy of institutional neutrality, so that no University official or department can make such pronouncements. This principle, which went into effect in 1967, is called the Kalven Report, and you can read it here.
Kalven has worked pretty well here. Departments that couldn’t restrain themselves from taking stands on issues from war to abortion to shootings have had their statements taken down, and the University has issued virtually nothing about the Hamas/Israel war (see here for our anodyne acknowledgment, which basically says “there’s a war on and here’s where to go for help”). The only exceptions we have are for issues, like DACA, which can affect the University’s mission directly.
But so far only a handful of schools, like Vanderbilt and UNC Chapel Hill, have adopted institutional neutrality, though others like Williams and Harvard are contemplating it. But since institutional neutrality is essential in propping up a free speech policy, this reluctance to adopt Kalven is distressing, especially given that the Chicago Principles of Free Expression—the First-Amendment-like policy of free speech—have been adopted by over 100 schools. My conclusion: it’s easy to pass policies on free speech (which, as we see from Harvard’s case, have been implemented haphazardly), but it’s hard to make academics stop proclaiming the views they like as the “values of our school.” (Of course Kalven and all of us think academics have the right to say whatever they want as private citizens.)
And so to the piece; again, click to read.
Here’s Paul’s bit on why universities should shut up about taking official stands on issue that don’t bear on their mission. Sadly, she doesn’t mention the Kalven Report, which I think reflects a lack of historical perspective. But the rest is fine:
Right now, the university’s message is often the opposite. Well before the tumultuous summer of 2020, a focus on social justice permeated campuses in everything from residential housing to college reading lists.
“All of this activity would be fine — indeed, it would be fantastic — if it built in multiple perspectives,” noted Jonathan Zimmerman, author of “Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” in a 2019 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “For the most part, though, it doesn’t.”
Instead, many universities have aligned themselves politically with their most activist students. “Top universities depend on billions of dollars of public funding, in the form of research grants and loan assistance,” The Economist editorialized last week. “The steady leftward drift of their administrations has imperiled this.”
One of the starkest examples of this politicization is the raft of position statements coming from university leadership. These public statements, and the fiery battles and protests behind them, take sides on what are broadly considered to be the nation’s most sensitive and polarized subjects, whether it’s the Dobbs ruling or DACA for young immigrants, the Israel-Hamas war or Black Lives Matter.
At last month’s conference [a meeting at Stanford on civil discourse], Diego Zambrano, a professor at Stanford Law School, made the downsides of such statements clear. What, he asked, are the benefits of a university taking a position? If it’s to make the students feel good, he said, those feelings are fleeting, and perhaps not even the university’s job. If it’s to change the outcome of political events, even the most self-regarding institutions don’t imagine they will have any impact on a war halfway across the planet. The benefits, he argued, were nonexistent.
Indeed! Such statements are purely attempts to flaunt virtue and have no effect on social policy. Do you think that any statement by a university or school on the war in Gaza will have the slightest effect on the war itself? Yet such statements are being made everywhere, including from city councils and secondary school boards. Even the city of Chicago issued a call for a cease-fire. I’m sure Israel and Hamas are paying attention!
Paul continues:
As for the cons, Zambrano continued, issuing statements tends to fuel the most intemperate speech while chilling moderate and dissenting voices. In a world constantly riled up over politics, the task of formally opining on issues would be endless. Moreover, such statements force a university to simplify complex issues. They ask university administrators, who are not hired for their moral compasses, to address in a single email thorny subjects that scholars at their own institutions spend years studying. (Some university presidents, such as Michael Schill of Northwestern, have rightly balked.) Inevitably, staking any position weakens the public’s perception of the university as independent.
The temptation for universities to take a moral stand, especially in response to overheated campus sentiment, is understandable. But it’s a trap. When universities make it their mission to do the “right” thing politically, they’re effectively telling large parts of their communities — and the polarized country they’re in partnership with — they’re wrong.
When universities become overtly political, and tilt too far toward one end of the spectrum, they’re denying students and faculty the kind of open-ended inquiry and knowledge-seeking that has long been the basis of American higher education’s success. They’re putting its future at risk.
If you want schools to be Truth Universities and not Social Justice Universities (do see Jon Haidt’s excellent lecture on this bifurcation), then the cons far outweigh the pros when it comes to taking stands. Paul’s last three paragraphs are succinct, clear, and correct. To universities and departments who are itching to take political stands that don’t affect their school’s mission, PLEASE SHUT UP. Members of university communities have plenty of venues, like “X”, Facebook, or websites like this, to express their own private opinions.
After I saw that Paul had left out the Kalven Principles, I posted a comment after her piece—the first time I’ve ever commented in the NYT. Here it is, with one comma that shouldn’t be there:
I’m glad to see Kalven appearing independent of this website out there. Really good that PCC(E) worked a lot to bring it to light. The exercise of discernment and restraint are clear to me. Otherwise, it sounded like an antiquated norm. I’d have never known – and there’s something that capitalizes upon those conditions – the operating system of the Left :
“And so the dialectic continues.”
-Delgado and Stefancic
Critical Race Theory – An Introduction, p.66, 3rd Ed., 2017
“…issuing statements tends to fuel the most intemperate speech…” It’s not the intemperate speech that bothers me so much as the “intemperate” violent actions that they validate. Which is sort of ironic since one of the reasons for the statements has to be to appease the violent extremists, so will they please not occupy the presidents’s office?
Yet again, the benefits of Kalven to protecting the free exchange of ideas should be obvious.
Beyond that, University administrators aren’t clairvoyants with full understanding of every issue at their command. Surely they don’t relish being manipulated into being used as stooge megaphones by zealous student and faculty partisans. Kalven protects administrators from these pressures and gives them the cover to remain silent. Even if they don’t accept the (many) other benefits of silence, surely they recognize that adopting Kalven is in their own enlightened self interest.
RE: “[1]University administrators aren’t clairvoyants with full understanding of every issue at their command. [2]Surely they don’t relish being manipulated into being used as stooge megaphones by zealous student and faculty partisans.”
[2] Many university administrators are woke. They don’t have to be “manipulated into …”
[1] Not knowing what they are talking about, often enough does not stop the highly educated. They tend to think: Because I’m highly educated I can provide smart takes on issues that lie outside the narrow area of my expertise.
Candice Basterfield et al: The Nobel Disease: When Intelligence Fails to Protect against Irrationality. Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 2020
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2020/05/the-nobel-disease-when-intelligence-fails-to-protect-against-irrationality/
Michael Shermer: Why smart people believe weird things. Skeptic, 2003, 10(2), 62–73
Michael Shermer: Why do people believe weird things. rev. & exp. ed., W.H. Freeman/Owl Book, 2002
Irina Dumitrescu: The Frenzied Folly of Professorial Groupthink. Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4, 2022
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-frenzied-folly-of-professorial-groupthink
“by training and nature, academics have a tendency to conform, and to do so quickly, without reflection. This can mean signing a group letter or petition in favor of people or causes they do not have enough information to judge, or accepting the hand-me-down opinions of their peers without question.”
Keith E. Stanovich: The irrational attempt to impute irrationality to one’s political opponents. in: Michael Hannon & Jeroen de Ridder (eds.): The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology. 2021, 274-284
“The highly educated professoriate seems to have a hard time accepting the fact that voting is largely a matter of value conflicts and not differential rationality, intelligence, or knowledge. The thinking seemed to have been that ‘well, as an academic, I am a specialist in rationality and knowledge, and therefore expertise confers on me a special wisdom in the domain of politics.’ Lupia (2016, p.116) terms this stance the error of transforming value differences into ignorance – that is, mistaking a dispute about legitimate differences in the weighting of the values relevant to an issue for one in which you opponent ‘just doesn’t know the facts.’ Cognitive elites think that if a dispute can be resolved by reasoning about facts, then they will always win because they are the experts on facts and reasoning. This leads them to overestimate the extent to which political disputes are about differential possession of factual knowledge and underestimate how much they are actually based on a clash of honestly held values.” (p.281)
+1
“Many university administrators are woke.” The president of my university and her two black friends lament anti-black racism.
https://www.sfu.ca/edi/updates/news/2022/supports-and-resources-addressing-anti-black-racism.html
But not at our university or in our city, rather in a city that’s in a different country, has a vastly different cultural and demographic and political history, and is 4000 km away.
“Black flourishing requires Black healing.” Well, sure, we want everybody to flourish, including our black brothers and sisters. But that’s not the mission of the university.
I’m not sure that mission creep is to blame for this problem; rather, it’s the individuals hired by universities who are the issue. These are low-quality thinkers who conflate their personal beliefs about social justice with institutional matters. They are literally unable to separate their personal views from their professional roles, assuming that their perspectives are inherently correct and shared by their organization, and viewing dissenting opinions as morally wrong. I believe this problem is caused by a variety of selection effects, with universities hiring narcissists and cowards.
Could be. Narcissism would certainly explain why administrators resist Kalven even when it is in their own interest. Those who think they’re infallible would insist on retaining their bloviation platforms no matter how destructive they might be.
I agree with Emily part of the problem is hiring and admitting university members who conflate their personal beliefs with institutional priorities.
But that’s not sufficient. A really important factor in hiring or admitting such folx (ha ha) in the first place is that the institution has redefined scholarship and research to include the pursuit of social justice.
When an obscure assistant professor writes a piece of fluff for Scientific American disputing the binary nature of the sexes, or arguing that ecological research is racist and ableist, s/he is adding to a CV that will be used for salary review, promotion, tenure, and grant funding. The institutions have decide that this kind of bollocks is not just a personal pursuit, and instead that it constitutes important professional scholarship worthy of recognition. The system rewards this kind of behaviour and activity, so we get more of it: more people who say they will spend their working days on this kind of bullshit, and more bullshit. Lots more.
Great take. The quotes from Diego Zambrano from Stanford Law School really sum up the problem well. I’m so glad you (Jerry) left your comment about the Kalven Report. If only more universities would instate it.
Want our host to know that I’m still so bummed by the decay of higher education in the U.S. that I cannot comment coherently. But I read others’ views here and want all to know this. You and PCCE are important to me!
One thought: the decay is metastatic: from the ‘mission creep’ often mentioned, all the way to the marketing of college as a hedonistic ‘experience,’ one focused on and driven by athletics / sports, with the benefit of a (nearly guaranteed) credential at the cost of, say, $200k after four years of fun.
Alma mater indeed.