I didn’t realize this until I read the article below from the Asheville (North Carolina) Watchdog, but apparently the entire University of North Carolina (UNC) system is adopting institutional neutrality à la the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, put in place in 1967. About two years ago I reported that the flagship school of UNC, the branch at Chapel Hill, had adopted not only the Kalven Principles, but also the University of Chicago’s Freedom of Expression Principles. The latter guarantees free speech on campus, comporting with the First Amendment but also subject to the University’s “time, place, and manner” restrictions that allow the institution to function.
Institutional neutrality, embodied in Kalven, supports free speech by prohibiting schools, academic units, or departments from taking official positions on political, ideological or moral questions—with rare exceptions that involve issues involving the functioning of our institution. (For an example of our Kalvenish restraint, see this statement by the University after the October 7 attack on Israel and the resultant war.)
So far, over a hundred American colleges have adopted a version of our Free Expression principles, but only a handful adhere to Kalven. It appears to be very hard for schools to keep their gobs shut about political issues of the day, and it’s made worse because students, who often don’t understand the purpose of institutional neutrality, put colleges under heavy pressure to issue statements.
The article below is about that pressure, pressure exemplified by students defending the banners below hanging from the library of the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNCA) library. There are three political ones, supporting Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ community, and a land acknowledgment to the Cherokee. The students also don’t understand why UNCA doesn’t take a position on the war in Gaza.
Click any of the items below to read the piece.
What started the debate about institutional neutrality was the removal of the banners above in 2023, along with a Black Lives Matter Mural that was taken down during renovations and not replaced. The Chancellor explained that the banners, and now any statements about the war in Gaza, would be violations of institutional neutrality:
Since University of North Carolina Asheville students began protesting against the war in Gaza in early May, Chancellor Kimberly van Noort has maintained that the university should avoid an official stance on the matter.
“Neither the University nor I, the chancellor, should interfere by taking an official stance,” van Noort wrote in a public update to students and faculty earlier this month. “Institutional neutrality promotes the open exchange of ideas and avoids inhibiting scholarship, creativity, and expression. Compromising this position carries great risks.”
Her adherence to institutional neutrality mirrors other universities’ stances across the country, which have experienced growing protests in the past few weeks. Institutional neutrality also has been applied to other cultural issues on campus, including the Ramsey Library display of Black Lives Matter, Cherokee land acknowledgement, and LGBTQ+ banners – and comes at a time when the university system’s Board of Governors is considering removing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion positions and offices across the system.
In spring 2023, the banners were removed to allow repainting of the library and were not replaced. At the time, van Noort reported in public updates that the banners suffered from “expected wear and tear” from “time and the elements.”
Van Noort told Asheville Watchdog recently that the decision to not reinstate the banners hinged on institutional neutrality.
“For us to make a decision of privileging some over others is really problematic for a university, where we strive to have this neutral state so students can express themselves,” she said in an interview. “They can express opposition. They can express conflict. They can express disagreement in a peaceful, non-violent, respectful manner, but it’s not the place of the university to take a stance in those conversations.”
Or, as our Kalven report states in a brilliant passage:
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.
Here’s more from the newspaper that describes how the whole state system adopted institutional neutrality; it’s a recent development:
The idea of institutional neutrality dates back to the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Committee Report, which argues that university neutrality is important in fostering a diversity of viewpoints. The idea caught steam in 2021 when Vanderbilt’s chancellor Daniel Diermeier advocated for it in pieces for USA Today, Inside Higher Ed, and Forbes, UNCA’s chief university communication and marketing officer Michael Strysick said.
Strysick said it was a 2017 state law involving campus free speech – and UNC policy – that brought institutional neutrality to the UNC system. The law, born from HB 527, stated “the constituent institution may not take action, as an institution, on public policy controversies of the day.”
The law did not include the term “neutrality” until it was amended by SB 195 last summer. SB 195 requires all North Carolina colleges and universities to remain neutral on “political controversies of the day.”
Last summer, the General Assembly passed another bill, SB 364, using language mirroring the Kalven Report, prohibiting UNC institutions from asking employment applicants to describe beliefs around “contemporary political debate or social action.” A few weeks ago, a UNC System committee approved a policy that would remove Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion positions and offices across the system, if approved by the full Board of Governors on May 23. The committee’s decision sparked a student protest in front of the Ramsey Library.
Student protesters met with Chancellor Van Noort in May, and were advised that taking a stand on the war, or even on DEI, was a violation of institutional neutrality. Students and some faculty don’t like that, because it means that the university doesn’t publicize debatable ideas or political initiatives that students and faculty like. (Yes, DEI is debatable, at least the way it’s used in colleges, though of course bias in university treatment or admissions is illegal. But DEI goes far beyond simply “color blindedness,” as most of us know.)
Here’s some pushback:
“A big part of the DEI policy is recruiting and retaining students. The system is shooting itself in the foot if we do this because we are not going to be able to recruit,” said Kelly Biers, associate professor of French. “It’s going to drive away high quality faculty and students.”
But of course they can still recruit, though retention of students with lower qualifications will always be a problem. But you can’t give special privileges to students because of their ethnicity (face it, this is not about “viewpoint diversity” but about race and ethnicity). I suppose Biers means that they can’t recruit on the basis of race, which is illegal anyway because of the recent Supreme Court Decision, but of course UNCA can cast their recruiting net as widely as possible, and by all means cast it over students from different social classes and ethnic groups. But the DEI that gives arrant racial preferences, tries to instill guilt in people who are male or white, taints everyone with “unconscious bias”, or requires applicants for jobs to submit DEI statements, will no longer fly. But truly, I don’t understand how killing the “progressive” DEI while retaining policies against bias and bigotry will “drive away high quality faculty and students.”
There’s more pushback:
Alondra Barrera-Hernandez, student government president and protest organizer added, “It’s important to advocate for this (DEI) on our campus especially because UNC Asheville is a very diverse campus, especially for DEI. It can impact a lot of marginalized students.”
Again, DEI is construed, I suspect, to mean students marginalized because of their race or ethnicity, not because they’re conservatives. But remember that an important part of campus diversity is viewpoint diversity, yet the implicit assumption for “etbnically marginalized” students is the patronizing notion that they all share a common viewpoint. They don’t, of course, but campuses are looking for the ones that do. They don’t want young versions of Coleman Hughes or John McWhorter.
One more misguided criticism of institutional neutrality, dealing with a student’s reaction after the banners and the BLM mural was removed:
Alumna Lauren Brasswell was the student government president at the time.
“By choosing not to take a stance, the institution is taking a stance on ignoring the historical significance of the harsh realities that marginalized individuals face,” said Brasswell. “This reality does not and should not go against any universities’ mission or values. And, if it does, that institution is and will be a hostile, discriminatory and unsafe environment for any black or brown student, faculty, or staff.”
No, that’s not true at all. Saying that if a university doesn’t take an explicit stance on a historical or present-day controversy, it’s favoring one side of that controversy is wrong. It’s like saying that if you don’t declare that you have a hobby, you still have one, which is “not having a hobby.”
Again, the University is not the critic but the sponsor of critics. Students and faculty are welcome, nay, encouraged to publicize their personal views about anything, and the rejection of centuries of bigotry is now enshrined in rules that prohibit academic and personal discrimination in colleges. With such recognition, the claim that the environment is “unsafe” seems overblown , though of course people may feel unsafe without actually being unsafe. I wonder how many students of color at UNCA live their lives in fear of constant attack or discrimination? We don’t know; all we have are these assertions.
The only statement by the Chancellor which seems a bit off is this one:
The chancellor would like to see a local art piece instead of the banners and clarified that UNCA has “no intention of lessening or eliminating the University’s commitment to the [Cherokee] land acknowledgement, but to the contrary exploring ways to more permanently honor it.”
If UNCA really wants to honor the commitment that their university stands on lands stolen from the Cherokee, they should either reimburse that group or give the land back. Anything else is performative virtue-signaling that costs nothing to the University oppressors.
At any rate, the article ends with the pro-Palestinian students promising to continue their activities in the fall while planning strategy during the summer. More power to them—so long as they don’t violate University regulations. I disagree with nearly all of their views, but hey, it’s free speech, and they’re welcome to say what they want, even “Globalize the intifada”, a call for violence that’s legal so long as it doesn’t incite imminent and predictable violence.
And short-term banners or displays from student groups are also okay, but once they’re made permanent they can be regarded as an official position of a university, which is a violation of neutrality.
I had the privilege of studying Torts under Harry Kalven at the University of Chicago in 1960. He was primarily a First Amendment scholar, who was the (probably unpaid) general counsel to the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” with its Doomsday clock. He no doubt would be troubled by what’s going on today, but pleased that his work is providing guidance for more universities than his own. He was an admirable man, who died much too young.
A good university provides the arena for the intellectual combatants and if necessary it is the referee to ensure fair play…it is not one of the combatants itself.
Or if you prefer a less “combative” analogy, a good university is the moderator, not one of the debaters.
If Columbia U or some of these other “woke” colleges were judged in their performance as referees of intellectual debate, they’d be rightly accused of being “homers”.
Wrt fair play, woke activists don’t play fair. At my university the faculty union recently held a vote by members to adopt a specific political stance on Gaza and Hamas and to insist that the university itself also adopt the same stance (divestment, boycott of Israeli institutions and collaborations). The vote closed last week, but about the time an announcement was expected the union informed members that apparent irregularities in the online voting meant a result would not be announced. It’s suspected that the activists who forced this vote upon members also tried to manipulate the outcome.
Maybe more likely that the vote didn’t go the way they wanted and expected rather than manipulation!
An hour ago the union executive informed members that on the day the vote was to close hundreds of identical votes were cast from a single IP address. I sort of hope any professor(s) at my university who would try to commit that fraud would be smart enough to use a burner phone or a VPN. If not it should be possible to identify and fire that person. Either way it’s pretty awful.
Good!
Whom do the Cherokee think stole “their” land from them? The UNC or the U.S. Government? If the former, and the university agrees that they (or whoever it was that donated the land to create the university) did steal it and they don’t want to rely on squatters’ rights, the governors of the university can simply deed the property over to the Cherokee Nation, who would then own and govern the university…which they could tear down and build a casino and condo complex if they wanted to, subject to the municipality’s zoning rules. If it’s a matter of simple private land theft, the University ought to get on with making it right. The Attorney-General of the state of North Carolina should be insisting on it.
But if the Cherokee think as a nation that Uncle Sam “stole” their land, it’s a whole ‘nuther matter. Now we are talking about sovereignty. No private landowner, no matter how guilty he feels, can transfer the sovereign control of his land to a foreign nation. Only the federal government can do that (as when the United States purchased Alaska from Russia.). For the university to be advocating that the United States should surrender American sovereign territory to an Indian Nation that styles itself a foreign power is pure virtue-signalling at best and frankly disloyal to the Republic at worst.
Universities all over the continent seem to have signed on institutionally to one side of the partisan “1492 Landback” movement so much so that it is a core academic mission and Kalven-exempt, as in Chancellor Van Noort’s mind. Strange.
That lengthy quote from the Kalven Report never ceases to be inspirational. There are quite a few academic institutions in the UK that could do with reading it. In fact, I might well be sending it to some of them (with due attribution).
Excellent! The whole NC university system. Now this is what institutionized change looks like. Hope it can be sustained.