Yesterday I mentioned this interview in the new Sapir quarterly magazine edited by Bret Stephens, who in this article interviews Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University. Diermeier was our provost from 2016 to 2020, but left to take the top job at Vanderbilt. I, among many, miss him, for at Vandy he’s turned the school into a model of academic freedom and free speech, but hasn’t neglected the enforcement of “time, place, and manner” restrictions on speech.
The discussion below shows how deeply Diermeier has pondered all the issues around freedom of expression and the purpose of a university. Combined with Stephens’s probing questions, it’s an excellent conversation.
Here are three excerpts from a longish discussion, which is worth reading in toto. First, the politicization of universities versus social inequality:
Bret Stephens: Until recently, surveys showed that Americans had high confidence in higher education. It was seen as an essential ticket to success in American life. In the past decade or so, that confidence has plummeted. The last survey I saw, from Gallup, showed a sharp decline, and that came out before October 7 and the protests that followed. What happened in the past 10 years to cause that decline?
Daniel Diermeier: We’ve seen the same data, and I’ve been very concerned about the drop in approval and trust in higher education. The decline has been larger among people on the conservative side of the political spectrum, but it’s across the board, from the Left and the Right. My sense is that it comes from two concerns. From the progressive side, the concern is that highly selective universities are perpetuating inequality. And the concern from the Right is that we’re woke factories.
Stephens: Both of them can be true.
Diermeier: One hundred percent. My own sense is that the concerns about the propagation of inequality are, on closer inspection, much overblown. I think the concerns on the politicization of higher education and the ideological drift are much more valid.
The question of the politicization of higher education has come into stark relief after what we’ve seen last year: the conflict in the Middle East and the drama on campus. These developments have elevated into the public consciousness concerns that have been present for years. They now are front and center, much more serious, and they require a course correction by many universities.
The University of Chicago’s “foundational principles“:
Stephens: A historian might say, “Go back to the University of Chicago or Yale in the 1950s and you’ll find conservative critics railing against higher education as hotbeds of radicalism.” Now we look back on that and sort of chuckle. Is the criticism more valid today? If so, why?
Diermeier: Yes, I think the criticism is more valid today. If you look back, there were three pillars of how a university thought about its role in society. If you look at the University of Chicago, one pillar was this commitment to free speech that goes back to the founding and then through a whole variety of presidents, reaffirmed, most recently, by the 2015 report, often referred to as the Chicago Principles. Universities need to be places for open debate.
Pillar two is what we call institutional neutrality, which means that the university will not get involved, will not take positions, on controversial political and social issues that bear no direct relevance to the university’s mission. The University of Chicago’s formulation of this policy was the Kalven Report from 1967, which so eloquently articulates that when the university formulates a party line on any issue, it creates a chilling effect for faculty and students to engage in debate and discourse.
And the third pillar, less appreciated but important, is a commitment to reason, to respect, to using arguments and evidence. Discourse and debate at the university shouldn’t be about shouting. That’s a more cultural aspect. All three have eroded, and they have eroded over the past 10 years in significant fashion. Now we see the consequences of that.
I’m not sure how institutional neutrality has eroded, since it was really only embraced by the University of Chicago until very recently. Now, as FIRE reports, 25 colleges and universities have adopted the position. It seems to me that institutional neutrality has expanded, not “eroded.”
Finally, the ambit of institutional neutrality, how it differs from propagandizing classrooms, and why the question of “affirmative action for conservative faculty” is not a major issue:
Stephens: Let me ask you about the role of university leaders. One thing you sometimes hear from presidents is I have no power. The faculty rule the institution. There’s a limit to what I can do in terms of what happens on my own campus. Tell us about governance structures. How can university leadership effectively use its position within those structures to set a tone, create a culture, have a set of rules and expectations for how the student and faculty behave? If you were speaking to first-time university presidents from across the country, what would you advise them?
Diermeier:
. . . . Institutional neutrality does not constrain faculty or students. It does constrain administrators. So the second concern that you pointed out, which I’m going to call the politicization of the classroom, is a separate one. That, to me, is a question of professionalism. If you’re using your classroom for indoctrination or propaganda, you’re fundamentally not doing your job. You’re not creating an effective learning environment for your students. So I think these are two separate issues that should not be commingled, because the point of institutional neutrality is to create freedom for faculty and students. If that freedom and responsibility are abused, that’s a different conversation.
. . . .If [faculty are] using their classroom for political propaganda, it’s a different conversation. The right way to think about hiring and promotions is that they should be based on expertise and merit. I’ve cited a couple of these University of Chicago reports before, but there’s one called the Shils Report that makes that very clear: We do not want to have political litmus tests for whom we hire and promote.
That said, there is an important role for the university, including its curriculum, in a society that investigates and reflects on itself, its values, its history. A lot of that is in humanities, the social sciences, divinity schools, law schools, and so forth. There are multiple perspectives, and to have them in the classroom is vitally important. If you have a class on ethics, you want the students to deal with virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequential ethics. You want these perspectives well represented, so that they are challenged, and then students can make up their own mind about what they think. If that does not happen because of the ideological capture of a department or program, we’ve got a problem.
I’m very doubtful that the solution is affirmative action for conservatives. I’m also not convinced that these movements to create new centers are the solution, either. I think the challenge goes a little deeper than where people are on political orientation — it has to do with how fields of study are structured and how certain fields have evolved. But we cannot have an ideological monoculture in these types of classes. It’s a disservice to our students.
And, if you don’t want to read, here’s a 45-minute conversation between Diermeir and Dan Senor (Senor’s “Call Me Back” show) that covers much of the same ground as the Sapir article. Senor notes how happy Vandy’s students are compared to students at other places, and Diermeier tries to explain it (note: it has something to do with football, too). Diermeier does credit a lot of Vanderbilt’s academic policies to what he absorbed at the University of Chicago.
Note at about 30 minutes in, Diermeier describes the sit-in in the administration building which led to disciplining the pro-Palestinian protestors. The University of Chicago doesn’t go nearly this far in disciplining protestors that do exactly the same thing. At Vandy, there was suspensions, probation, and even arrests for assault. Diermeier also explains why he would not accede to the demonstrators’ demands for divestment of the university’s endowment from Israel, and explains why he considers encampments a violation of the school’s policy. At the end, he muses about what to do free speech crosses the borderline into illegal harassment or threats.
In my view, Diermeier is the best university President in America, for his policies are the best and are based on considerable thought (and of course, his experience at The University of Chicago).
Stanley Fish: A note to university administrators. April 26, 2024
https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/a-note-to-university-administrators
“colleges are not in the free speech business or the democracy business.”
I am reasonably amenable to that statement. As a college student it never entered my mind that a college should be in those “businesses.” At the same time, I have a problem with maximally privatizing whatever possibly can be privatized. For sure, private corporate tyrannies are not democracies, and apparently the powers-that-be find that peachy keen. I find the terms “human resources” and “human capital” infuriating. Does the most ardent capitalist think of his own children in those terms? If not, how is he possibly justified in viewing the children of others that way?
I think at the time it became biz-speak, “Human Resources” was a kinder, gentler honorific than calling it “Personnel”, just as “garbagemen” morphed into “sanitation workers” and “employees” and “hired-out contractors” became “partners” even though they obviously aren’t. I wouldn’t read too much Marxist (or anti-Marxist) ideology into biz-speak. It’s just what business people do to fit in with other business people, like a secret handshake. They change the lingo every so often to sound au courant with fashion. Like wide or narrow neckties.
As for human capital, better human capital than human debt.
I like Dan Senor’s podcast. I recently listened to the one you link to.
I am profoundly grateful that I do math and some mathematical physics rather than a more controversial academic discipline. We get very little of the political nonsense that afflicts so much of academia. So far I have not been accused of either a liberal or a conservative approach to differential equations, or electromagnetism, or stress energy tensors. Perhaps that day will come, but so far we are mostly left alone.
I think it can be ok for some of this social justice interest to enter STEM departments (like yours in math and mine in biology). It’s at least possible that we all have something to learn from the social justice strivers.
But it’s hard to have the kind of debate that Diermeier is talking about. Instead the exchange is typically one-sided: It’s considered ok to invite someone to give an hour-long research seminar on decolonization and systemic racism in ecology, but to disagree with the speaker is considered racist or at least v. impolite. So if you can I’d say try to keep the camel’s nose from getting under the edge of your tent.
Diermeier: “If you have a class on ethics, you want the students to deal with virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequential ethics.”
Gad Saad, who otherwise has made it inescapably clear that he is a most exacting stickler for the truth, has made a big deal of distinguishing between deontological and consequentialist ethics. IIRC, his favorite example of the latter is the wife asking the husband the question, “Does this (attire) make me look fat?” This is a rather minor and (in the Great Scheme of Things) less than earth-shattering example. I reasonably assume that the CIA (and Congress and the White House and corporations) significantly hews to a consequentialist view of ethics.