Harvard Committee apes the University of Chicago, recommends institutional neutrality

One of the reasons Claudine Gay didn’t come off so well in the Congressional hearings was that Harvard had no concrete policy on free speech, and thus applied it unevenly, in an almost hypocritical fashion.  Further, it was unclear what the university’s own stand was on issues like genocide.  Were they officially against it, or did calls for genocide of the Jews constitute free speech? In this case Gay answered using Constitutional principles, and her answer, “it depends,” was technically correct.

But the whole mess, including the involvement of MIT and Penn, could have been avoided had these universities adopted two policies that we have at the University of Chicago: the Principles of Free Expression (in effect, First-Amendment-like freedom of speech), and institutional neutrality, as embodied in our Kalven Report. This report mandates that, with very few exceptions, neither the University itself nor its units, including departments and centers, can make official pronouncements on moral, political, or ideological issues. (The exceptions include rare issues that affect the very working of the University itself.)

Indeed, in his Boston Globe article, “A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself,” Steve Pinker’s first two points were free speech and institutional neutrality:

Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions.

and

. . . university pronouncements are an invitation to rancor and distraction. Inevitably there will be constituencies who feel a statement is too strong, too weak, too late, or wrongheaded. The resulting apologies and backtracking compromise the reputation of the university and interfere with the task of administering it. For this reason a stated policy of institutional neutrality would be a godsend to university administrators. Such a policy would still allow them to comment on issues that directly affect university business, just like any institution.

I’m not sure what Harvard is doing about its free-speech policy, but I was glad to hear that an eight-person committee has recommended that the school adopt a policy of institutional neutrality. They’ve confected a provisional policy that you can read by clicking on the link below. It hasn’t been formally adopted yet, but some version surely will be.

This policy is an obvious attempt to copy Chicago’s Kalven report, and two of its creators publicized the Harvard policy in a NYT op-ed, an archived version of which you can read by clicking on the archived headline below.

The problem with the Harvard policy lies not in its specifics above, but how it appears to be interpreted by the creators/op-ed writers, who seem to misunderstand the principle of institutional neutrality, try to diss our Kalven Report (perhaps to say, “Hey, Harvard has its own report, and a better one”), and then suggest that Harvard’s policy can in some cases be applied in a non-neutral way. In other words, what we get is a decent policy whose authors (at least two of them) have described for the public as a dog’s breakfast. This does not bode well for any future “institutional neutrality” of Harvard.

Click below to read the archived op-ed, which might have been called of “Harvard’s Very Own Kalven Report.”

Now I’m a big fan of universities adopting institutional neutrality. It would, as Pinker pointed out, save them a lot of trouble and buttress free speech as well. And the official report at the top is pretty good at that. It’s the NYT article, which might reflect how the report is interpreted in action, that seems problematic.

One of the big problems of the NYT piece is its claim that Chicago’s Kalven report wasn’t really institutionally neutral because it embodies the values of a university, and supporting those values is not “institutional neutrality.” I quote from Feldman and Simmons (their words are indented):

This policy might remind some readers of the Kalven Report, a prominent statement of the value of academic “institutional neutrality” issued in 1967 by a University of Chicago committee chaired by the First Amendment scholar Harry Kalven Jr. But while our policy has some important things in common with the Kalven Report, which insisted that the university remain silently neutral on political and social issues, ours rests on different principles and has some different implications.

The principle behind our policy isn’t neutrality. Rather, our policy commits the university to an important set of values that drive the intellectual pursuit of truth: open inquiry, reasoned debate, divergent viewpoints and expertise. An institution committed to these values isn’t neutral, and shouldn’t be. It has to fight for its values, particularly when they are under attack, as they are now. Speaking publicly is one of the tools a university can use in that fight.

This is arrant misinterpretation of the Kalven Report, which of course is not value free; it’s based on assuming the overweening value of free speech and open discussion in a university’s search for truth. Indeed, it’s hard to conceive of a university that isn’t based on those values. Greg Mayer, in an email to me, expressed this faulty comparison very well when writing me about a new interview with Feldman and Simmons in the Harvard Gazette:

[Feldman and Simmons] strain mightily, and unsuccessfully in my opinion, to distinguish what they propose from the Kalven report. Kalven never said the university has no values, just that those values are seldom relevant to current affairs or politics, and thus current affairs or politics will seldom be fit matters for the university to take a stand. There might be disagreement about exactly when the university’s values are implicated, but Kalven does not advocate a value-free university. Far from it, the ability to have open debate without an institutional thumb on the scale, as advocated by Kalven, is one of the most central values of the university.

The second problem is that Feldman and Simmons’s op-ed raises several issues that do seem political, and at best tangentially relevant to the mission of a university, be it Harvard or Chicago. This makes me worry that “Harvard’s Kalven” will be applied erratically.  Here are a couple:

In brief, the report says that university leaders can and should speak out publicly to promote and protect the core function of the university, which is to create an environment suitable for pursuing truth through research, scholarship and teaching. If, for example, Donald Trump presses forward with his announced plan to take “billions and billions of dollars” from large university endowments to create an “American Academy” — a free, online school that would provide an “alternative” to current institutions — Harvard’s leadership can and should express its objections to this terrible idea.

This plan, almost certain not to be enacted, seems just a way to diss Trump. I doubt he can take billions of dollars from University endowments, and only if this plan looks like it actually might happen should the University express an opinion about it.  Here’s another dubious case:

Take the use of affirmative action to achieve diversity in higher education admissions. Harvard argued in defense of this idea in the Supreme Court on several occasions — starting in 1978, when the court’s controlling opinion allowing diversity in admissions relied extensively on a brief that Harvard filed, through 2023, when the court rejected the use of race in diversity-based admissions. Harvard’s advocacy all along was far from neutral and would arguably have violated the Kalven principles. On our principles, however, Harvard was justified in speaking out forcefully in support of the method it long used to admit students, because admissions is a core function of the university.

Again, Harvard trumps Chicago! Well, yes, admissions is a core function of the university, and so is the elimination of bigotry, bias and harassment. But it’s stretching the meaning of Kalven to say that affirmative action is something that should be endorsed because it’s a vital part of the functioning of a university. That is a debatable question, not a given principle essential for a university to function as it should.

Affirmative action, at least when instantiated as race-based hiring or admissions preferences, is a debatable topic, not a moral given. At Chicago, as in all schools, race-based admissions has now been made illegal (at least when used explicitly), and our Shils Report explicitly mandates that hiring and promotion must be based solely on research, teaching, service, and contribution to the intellectual community.  There have been attempts here to use ethnicity as part of the hiring, I’m told, and I’m trying to find out if that happened, and if so whether it violated the Shils report. Official endorsement of affirmative action, or of certain tenets of DEI, regardless of whether they’re enacted sub rosa within the University, would not generally fall under Kalven. On the other hand, the University did endorse the continuing of DACA, for we would have lost students we already admitted were DACA rescinded. Less arguably, that hurts the working of the university. This shows that not all issues are clear cut.

Finally, there’s the contentious issue of divestment, a can that the new report (and NYT article) pretty much kicks down the road.

In formulating its recommendation, our faculty working group struggled with some challenges that don’t have great solutions. For example, we didn’t address, much less solve, the hard problem of when the university should or shouldn’t divest its endowment funds from a given portfolio. The Kalven Report claimed that a decision to divest is a statement in itself and so the university shouldn’t do it. In contrast, we saw divestment as an action rather than a statement the university makes. We therefore treated it as outside our mandate, even though symbolic meaning can be attached to it, just as it can to other actions (including investing in the first place). Our report encourages the university to explain its actions and decisions on investment and divestment — much as Harvard’s President Larry Bacow did in 2021 when the university decided to reduce its investments in fossil fuels, and much as President Derek Bok did when the university didn’t divest from South Africa in the 1980s — but that’s all.

The idea that divestment or investment are actions rather than statements is rather disingenuous; they are certainly regarded as statements by opponents of various investments (to mention a recent one, Israel). The University of Chicago’s policy is not to divulge investments nor to respond to those who call for divestments, a policy that’s held since at least the Vietnam War.

Yet although the Harvard statement doesn’t get into the mire of investment, it does urge the university to take positions on it: “explain its actions and decisions on investment and divestment.”  What is that but a justification of how a University allocates its money? Indeed, disinvestment from fossil fuels is a political “statement”. You might think it’s a good idea, but some people don’t.

In the end, I heartily approve of Harvard’s official proposal, but think that the NYT article is misguided—a recipe for a mushy policy on institutional neutrality. Sure, that kind of neutrality is not always clear-cut, but Feldman and Simmons’s interpretation leaves too many stumps sticking out.

UPDATE: My colleague Brian Leiter also has a note and brief analysis of “Harvard’s Kalven” on his Leiter Reports website, and I agree with his sentiments. His piece is called “Harvard to adopt Chicago’s Kalven Report, after getting burned by pontificating administrators this past fall.” I quote:

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that two Harvard professors (including philosopher Alison Simmons) felt the need to try to pretend what their committee recommended was different from the Kalven Report.   Just reading the latter makes clear how inapt their characterization of it is–it stood for a lot more than “neutrality.”  It was predicated precisely on a statement of the university’s values and missions, and made clear the University and its officers and units should always be free to speak in support of those (including the university’s admissions policies).  Even if Harvard narcissism prevents them from acknowledging it, I am glad they have adopted Kalven principles–the university’s leaders, but also its faculty, will be better for it.

And here’s a tweet that is itself debatable (h/t Eli):

I’m marveling at the fact that Harvard adopted part of institutional neutrality because it couldn’t condemn a terrorist attack on Israel, but not all of it because it still can’t foreclose the possibility of divesting from Israel.

Just incredible. pic.twitter.com/rwWqiybDOE

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) May 28, 2024