University of California system professes institutional neutrality, but screws it up

Do I need to explain once more the principle of institutional neutrality in academia, whereby a university is prohibited from making official statements about politics, morality, or ideology in its announcements or on its website—except in rare situations when such statements are made to further the mission of the University? This principle was originally devised at the University of Chicago, codified in 1967 as the Kalven Report.

The reason for the principle is to avoid chilling or impeding free speech (we have a separate Principle of Free Expression) by making people fearful of angering authorities and endangering their own status at a university. If a department’s website opposed Israel’s war on Hamas, for example, such opinion (or its opposite) would have to be removed here, for it has nothing to do with the mission of the University. (Of course, there are always Pecksniffs who, by judicious word-twisting, can make any position seem relevant to the mission of a university. But really, our mission is teaching, doing research, and promulgating debate and searches for truth.)

While our Principles of Free Expression were published in 2015, they’ve already been adopted by 110 schools, which adhere to them in varying degrees. However, the Kalven Principle, published 48 years earlier, has been adopted by only a handful of other schools, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University.  Some other schools are contemplating adopting institutional neutrality, but haven’t seemed to push it through.  I’m not sure why, given that freedom of speech and institutional neutrality are mutually supportive, but I suppose schools (and departments, also included in our Kalven Principles) simply can’t resist weighing in on the issues of the day. In fact, even departments at the University of Chicago sometimes can’t resist making statements that seem to violate Kalven, and the administration polices and adjudicates putative violations.

Now the University of California system, as reported by the L.A. Times, is considering adopting institutional neutrality, too, but has gutted the meaning of that principle by watering it down. Click the link below to read, or, if it’s paywalled, find it archived here

Here’s an excerpt from the July 17 article showing how the UC system’s “neutrality” works:

University of California regents voted Thursday to ban political opinion from main campus homepages, a policy initially rooted in concern about anti-Israel views being construed as official UC opinion.

Political opinions may still be posted on other pages of an academic unit’s website, according to the policy approved at the regents meeting in San Francisco. It will take effect immediately.

The main homepage of a campus department, division or other academic unit will be reserved for news about courses, events, faculty research, mission statements or other general information.

Opinion must be published on other pages specifically labeled as commentary, with a disclaimer that they don’t reflect the entire university or campus. Those who want to post statements on their department websites must follow specific procedures and allow faculty members to weigh in through an anonymous vote.

Regent Jay Sures, vice chairman at United Talent Agency, has pushed for such action for the last few years, previously saying he has been troubled by “abuse” and “misuse” of departmental websites featuring anti-Israel sentiment and other opinions that do not reflect official university views.

After initially proposing a more restrictive policy, Sures said the final draft reflects a better balance between free speech and acknowledging both those who want to make statements and those who oppose them.

“This reflects that we value academic freedom, and it provides a very inclusive environment for the individual departments to put out statements and reflecting minority opinions within those departments,” he said.

Sorry, but I find this deeply misguided.  What purpose is served by institutional neutrality on a departmental or division homepage that is violated if you simply click a link on that page?  After all, in California a department or a division can always weigh in on the war, affirmative action, gun control, politics, and so on, on other pages. Suppose the chairman of a sociology department puts up a post condemning Israel for its conduct of the war against Hamas. Even if it’s labeled as “commentary”, who would be foolish enough to think that this will have no effect on the speech of that department? Grad students, junior faculty, and others who are vulnerable will be inhibited from speaking otherwise, even at faculty meetings or in public. After all, your counterspeech could anger the chair, who could then exact retribution, damage your tenure and promotion, and so on.

There are other venues for expressing your opinions as private individuals: they are called “social media.” Or you can write letters to the editor, publish papers, write books, and so on. There is no need to bawl out your political or ideological views on a university website. (As for chairmen and University presidents and provosts, the line is blurred between their private speech and official unviersity speech, and in my view they’d best keep their views on nonacademic stuff to themselves. This is indeed the case at Chicago).

The best course of action is simply to tell people not to use any parts of university websites opinions other than those very relevant to a university’s or a department’s mission. Let us have none of this mishigass about taking votes or putting up disclaimers. That stuff can still chill speech.

A bit more from the article:

Sean Malloy, a UC Merced associate professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies, asserted that regents were trying to “gag faculty speech” and that the proposed policy reflected efforts to repress the growing movement for Palestinian solidarity across UC campuses.

He noted that regents never tried to intervene in faculty statements on the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s killing, on climate change or in defense of immigrant students.

“It is only when faculty speech threatened to upset support for Israel and Zionism that the Regents saw fit to enact such a policy,” Malloy said in a statement to The Times. “It must be seen along with the dispatch of police against UC students, faculty and staff, as well as the newly adopted measures aimed against encampments as part of an effort by a group of Regents to hold the UC hostage to their own commitment to Zionism in the midst of a genocide against Palestine.”

No, the purpose of such statements is not to “gag faculty speech”, and should certainly not be to profess commitment to Zionism! The principle is meant, again, to allow faculty and everyone else to speak freely without being nervous about revenge from the university.  You just can’t put your speech on official university web pages.

Now Dr. Malloy is right in saying that if there is such a policy, it has to be applied fairly and uniformly: statements not affecting a university’s mission should all be banned from official websites and statements. You simply can’t allow university members to approve of Black Lives Matter or weigh in on George Floyd on one hand, but then then prevent others from writing about Israel on the other. The fair and just solution is simply to tell people to publish all their personal opinions in other places.  After all, there are plenty of such places! This website is one of them: it’s private and not at all connected to or supported by my university. My opinions are, of course, my own, and not that of my school.

Sadly, the regents of the University of California don’t seem to understand either the meaning or the import of institutional neutrality.