Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
John K. Wilson is identified in the new article below in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHI) as “the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemiesand the forthcoming The Attack on Academia.” In the piece below (access by clicking the headline), Wilson says that the concept of “official” academic neutrality, as embodied in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, has been misconstrued and misapplied.
Here are Wilson’s two beefs about Kalven (his words are indented):
1.) The Kalven Report was a 1967 product of the University of Chicago faculty, yet is adjudicated not by the faculty but by the university administration (Wilson’s words are indented):
The Kalven Report is a monument to faculty power. It was the product of a faculty committee, decreeing restraints on the administration purely in order to protect faculty freedoms. And faculty members were given the sole power to interpret these limits. The Kalven Report noted that “the application of principle to an individual case will not be easy”; it called for “faculty or students or administration to question, through existing channels such as the committee of the council or the council, whether in light of these principles the university in particular circumstances is playing its proper role.” In other words, the administration (like everyone else) is required to go to a faculty committee for any question about how to interpret the Kalven Report. (Unfortunately, the University of Chicago administration has been violating the Kalven Report for decades by imposing its own interpretations of neutrality without faculty consultation.)
2.) Wilson argues that the Kalven Report was meant to apply only to pronouncements by the University administration, not by University moieties like departments or Institutes:
The Kalven Report should also be followed for its approach to what institutional neutrality means, by limiting the term to actions and speech by top administrators on behalf of the entire college. The most dangerous betrayal of the Kalven Report’s principles is the extension of neutrality beyond the central administration to include all sub-units and faculty departments of a college.
Wilson is wrong—dead wrong—on both of these points, and was corrected by my Chicago colleague Brian Leiter (a law professor) in a letter to the CHE that came out just a few hours ago. Click below to read it:
From the letter:
Although John K. Wilson links to the actual text of the Kalven Report, he mischaracterizes it throughout his piece while alleging, ironically, that others “misunderstand” it (“More Colleges Are Swearing Off Political Positions. They’re Getting It Wrong”, The Chronicle Review, March 18). He declares that “shared-governance…is an essential part of the Kalven Report,” although it is not mentioned and has nothing to do with the principles articulated in that document. He says falsely that “the University of Chicago administration has been violating the Kalven Report for decades by imposing its own interpretations of neutrality without faculty consultation,” even though the Report requires no such consultation and even though, in the most recent cases, it was precisely faculty (including myself) who raised Kalven violations with the university, prompting it to act.
and
President Zimmer’s clarification made explicit longstanding understandings of Kalven’s principles; after all, as the report emphasizes, “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student,” not the university or department or school. Kalven cautions that we “cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues,” which is exactly what many departments started doing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Department orthodoxy is, arguably, far more dangerous than university orthodoxy: An untenured faculty member might perhaps ignore the provost’s pronouncements about “systemic racism” but be more wary when her own department issues a statement of an official position.
Brian doesn’t pull any punches, and implicitly accuses Wilson of “lying” (yes, the word is used) about Kalven.
Leiter has also put a note about this on his own website, the Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog. Click to read:
Two bits from the blog (I’ve omitted Brian’s excerpt from the CHI letter):
. . . Mr. Wilson is not as egregious an enemy of academic freedom as Jennifer Ruth or Michael Berube, but he is not an honest broker. (I have corresponded with Mr. Wilson about other academic freedom issues, after being e-introduced to him by Nadine Strossen, and my impression from that is that he was not very smart and not really interested in a principled conception of academic freedom. This latest incident confirms my impression then.)
As you see, no punches are pulled here, either. I’ve worked with Brian on Kalven, and although he can be brusque, he’s also efficient, eloquent, and, by Ceiling Cat, gets things done! Kalven has and is being enforced, and, by and large, it’s worked quite well here. While schools like Harvard, MIT, and Penn get in big trouble by lacking any academic neutrality and unevenly enforcing what speech policy they do have, the University of Chicago hasn’t been hauled before Congress, excoriated in the press, or lost any donors.
Agustín Fuentes is surely bucking for Social Justice Scientist of the Year, as I’ve documented in numerous posts. Whenever there’s an article about how scientists are bigoted, racist, and sexist, including Darwin, or there’s an article to be written that extols social justice in science but will have little or no effect on society, you’re likely to find Fuentes’s name on it. (He’s a professor of anthropology at Princeton.)
In his latest attempt to introduce politics into science, he’s written an “eLetter” to Science that you can read by clicking on the headline below. I didn’t know of eLetters before, but they’re constitute “a forum for ongoing peer review. eLetters are not edited, proofread, or indexed, but they are screened.” Perhaps I should have submitted this as an eLetter instead of posting it here, but I’ve already started writing it, so let’s proceed.
In this eLetter Fuentes argues at great length that scientific journals and organizations should use their expertise to pronounce on political, social, and moral issues of the day. In other words, these organizations should not be institutionally neutral, as the University of Chicago is (see our Kalven Report). But I think he’s dead wrong and that these institutions should strive to be neutral except when pronouncing on political issues that directly affect the science or branch of science that an organization represents. The reasons, of course, are the same ones that created our Kalven Report: official pronouncements on debatable issues tend to chill speech, they require someone to be the arbiter of what is the “right” view, and are often likely to be deeply conditioned by an ideology that’s transitory. This is the problem with many pronouncements on racial and gender disparities in the past; our views have become more moral and egalitarian, as well as more informed by data; and this will continue.
Well, read Fuentes’s view on how organizations should be making the “right” statements about society, and of course Fuentes is the arbiter of what is “right”:
Here are three statements that, says Fuentes, are ones that scientific organizations have made and should have made because they are scientifically true. (His words are indented except when noted otherwise). Only the first lacks obvious social import.
The following are three incontrovertible statements of scientific fact:
“Biological evolution is the central organizing principle of modern biology.”
“Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories.”
“While ‘race’ is not biology, racism does affect our biology, especially our health and well-being.”
While the first statement seems true, it is still debatable, and I have in fact seen scientists take issue with it. I would simply say that “evolution” is the explanation for how things got the way they are, and that the alternative of creationism is false. The sentence “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, a famous pronouncement by my scientific grandfather Theodosius Dobzhansky, is ambiguous unless you carefully explain what “making sense” and “in the light of evolution” means. But I am less concerned with this than with the other statements.
The second statement is true in one sense, in that we cannot divide humanity into a finite and agreed-upon number of populations with big genetic differences, but in fact “race” is not a social construct, either. There’s biology behind it, even in the “crude” races that most of us can name. If it were a purely social construct, companies like 23andMe wouldn’t work, and you couldn’t tell someone’s ancestry with a high degree of accuracy using multiple loci or even morphology. Here’s a bit that Luana Maroja and I wrote on race in our Skeptical Inquirer paper dealing with the erosion of biology by ideology.
Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.
More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.
Of what use are such ethnicity clusters? Let’s begin with something many people are familiar with: the ability to deduce one’s personal ancestry from their genes. If there were no differences between populations, this task would be impossible, and “ancestry companies” such as 23andMe wouldn’t exist. But you don’t even need DNA sequences to predict ethnicities quite accurately. Physical traits can sometimes do the job: AI programs can, for instance, predict self-reported race quite accurately from just X-ray scans of the chest.
As for the third statement, it’s totally debatable. Yes, the idea that “racism affects some people’s biology” is trivially true. But statements like “racism is responsible for the higher mortality of black than of white both mothers and babies in America” (something widely touted in the press) assigns a debatable cause to an undisputed fact. Yes, that difference exists, but there are other explanations as well, including cultural and dietary differences, physiological conditions like liver disease and blood pressure, drug use, and so on, and nobody has bothered to even mention these alternatives in the literature. Taking the default explanation as “ongoing racism” for a phenomenon with several possible explanations is not good science. Fuentes’s third statement is debatable and can’t be taken as prima facie true. It is potentially resolvable by science, but it has not been resolved.
Because of default explanations involving ongoing and structural racism or sexism have now become pervasive in official pronouncements of scientific journals and societies—and not just about society but about internecine matters like promotions, grants, and acceptance of papers—we should be wary of statements like the following, also coming from Fuentes:
As part of this cultural shift over the past 5 years, a range of scientific organizations that focus on human biology, psychology, and health have released powerful, scientifically grounded statements against the misuse, misperception, and misrepresentation of data and analyses on human variation. These include clarifications on why and how races are not biological divisions of humanity, what human genetic diversity looks like, how racism shapes and affects human health, why IQ and economics are not best understood through aspects of one’s biology, and how disease patterns relate to human biological and social diversity. Many of these organizations have also produced critiques of their own historical and core roles in propagating bias, bad scientific practice, and harms, such as eugenics, discriminatory medical and psychological treatment, and miscegenation laws. Such statements have been released by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; the American Medical Association; the American Psychological Association; and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science).
But, as Luana and I showed, scientific organizations are still propagating bias, misconceptions, and misunderstanding by trying to hew to a “progressive” ideological agenda. The sword of non-neutrality cuts both ways.
True, many of the statements to which Fuentes refers are “scientifically grounded” in that they invoke science and sound scientific, but they’re often based on assumptions that have not been scientifically tested. In other words, they’re debatable, and that means that promoting them as if they’re “incontrovertibly true” is wrong.
Here’s what Fuentes thinks we’re doing wrong: being politically neutral:
There are, however, individual scientists, politicians, and members of the public who decry public statements by scientific organizations as “political,” asserting that the only reason they weigh in on societal issues is because of partisan pressures. Their core argument is that science should be neutral and forays into the political realm damage scientific integrity. It is true that some organizations’ statements endorsing political candidates or particular human rights stances are intentionally political and not exclusively tied to the organizations’ focal areas. In such cases, the organizations should be extremely careful and fully consider the impact, negative and positive, on their standing and credibility. Simply put, not all organizations should weigh in on all, or even most, societal topics. But it is also true that science as a field of practice, and scientific organizations as entities, have never been neutral.
Of course scientists have never been completely neutral on political, ideological, or moral issues, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to be neutral. And that means avoiding making political, ideological, or moral pronouncements that don’t affect the progress of science (or of the branch of science promoted by a journal or society). If there are important social issues whose outcome depend critically on science, then perhaps scientists can weigh in, but the science has to be nearly irrefutable, and people have to be careful. Far better to comment as a “private citizen” scientist (even writing op-eds like Fuentes’s, properly labeled as “personal opinions”) than for scientific organizations and journals to make official statements.
Equally important, although Fuentes pronounces early on that “science, as a human undertaking, cannot be neutral,” he’s wrong. Science is a set of tools to find out truths about the world: observation, experiment, replication, hypothesis-making and -testing, doubt, double-blind tests, and so on. It is scientists who break neutrality, not science itself. Just because science is a human endeavor doesn’t give us license to go around making official statements about human society. Of course scientists are free, like all Americans, to give their personal views, so long as it doesn’t involve harassment, false advertising, or defamation.
If you want some examples of where this non-neutrality goes wrong, Fuentes supplies them, though inadvertently:
Case in point: As of March 2024 there are there are more than 490 legislative bills in consideration in 41 states seeking to criminalize the use of public restrooms that match one’s identified gender for some individuals, limit or deny access to gender-affirming care, and a range of other legal restrictions targeting transgender and nonbinary youth and adults. These legislative actions fly in the face of contemporary scientific understandings and the recommendations from the major medical professional organizations, including the US National Institutes of Health. At their heart, the bills have little to do with evidence-based research, science, or data, relying on decidedly unscientific contentions to support their agendas. Recently, seven professional scientific organizations that focus on human biology, human evolution, and human genetics released a joint statement in support of trans lives, including transgender, nonbinary, gender and sex diverse, and queer communities. The statement affirms the power of all persons to make the ultimate decisions over what happens to their own bodies, and based on contemporary scientific understandings opposes legislation rooted in biological essentialism affecting reproductive justice and access to health care, especially the discrimination and denial of health care for youth and adults, including care that is gender and life affirming. Although this is a small act, the reaction that it stimulated, and the likelihood of more professional science organizations acting as well, such as the American Psychological Association’s recent statement, illustrate that such organizations can, and should, effectively contribute to critical societal issues. Scientific data and analyses matter, even when their public presentation can be considered “political.”
Seriously? What can science tell us about restroom use? That is a social problem that is at best minimally informed about science, and science journals and organizations best stay well away from it. In fact, the “science” of gender-affirming care also consists largely of subjective evaluations or statements lacking evidence, and, at least in the U.S., scientists appear to have gotten it largely wrong. We don’t know the long term effects of puberty blockers, and perhaps objective rather than “affirming” therapy could kids from surgery, allowing them to become gay instead of snipping of their parts. There is very little good science behind “affirmative care.” And there is no science supporting the gender-activist issue (one supported no doubt by Fuentes) that transwomen should be allowed to compete in athletics against biological women. The science in fact says exactly the opposite: transwomen retain, perhaps for life, substantial athletic advantages over natal women. Has that stopped scientists from arguing that “transwomen are women” in every relevant sense? Nope.
To support the view that “affirmative care” isn’t supported by science, observe that countries in Europe, but not the U.S., are doing away with a lot of gender-affirming care, including deeming puberty blockers as clinical rather than normal treatments. That’s because the science is unsettled! It is clear what Fuentes’s agenda is here, and it’s pure, unsullied gender activism, which at present rests largely on scientifically unsupported claims. Fuentes is touting ideology here, not the weight of scientific evidence.
Which brings me to my final point. Science not only gets political and ideological pronouncements wrong, but often gets the science itself wrong—and gets it wrong because the “science” touted by activists is distorted to reflect ideology. Luana and I wrote about five such areas in our paper, including “race” differences, gender differences, evolutionary psychology, and indigenous “knowledge.” If journals and societies can get the very science wrong because they are blinkered by ideology, what hope do we have for getting political or ideological issues right?
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:
The University of Chicago is well known for adopting the principle of “institutional neutrality”—the dictum that our university should take no official position on ideological, political, or moral matters except in the rare situation that such matters directly affect the workings of the school. This principle is embodied in our “Kalven Report.” We see this as a way to avoid chilling the speech of people who fear professional punishment for speaking out against what they see as “official positions.” We also regard this as an important part of our Freedom of Expression policy, which includes not only Kalven but the “Chicago Principles” that guarantee free speech itself.
Although over 100 schools have adopted the Chicago Principles, the number adopting institutional neutrality—the Kalven Principle—remains stuck at just three: the University of Chicago, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt University. Another school—Columbia University—may be about to adopt a Kalven-ish stand, but still, that’s only four schools out of about 4,000 degree-granting institutions in America.
Why the difference between the willingness of schools to adopt free speech but not institutional neutrality? It has to be that schools feel that they must weigh in on issues of the day—that if they don’t, and an issue is seen as important and calling for a “right” response, they’ll be seen as bad actors if they keep their yap shut instead of affirming that they’re on the right side of history. This view is shortsighted (“right” views, of course, change over time) and also inimical to freedom of speech.
At any rate, three important organizations, the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), the Heterodox Academy (HA), and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have now joined to endorse institutional neutrality. They’ve produced a short open letter about the issue, which you can read by clicking on the headline below:
The gist of the open letter, which is longer:
It is time for those entrusted with ultimate oversight authority for your institutions to restore truth-seeking as the primary mission of higher education by adopting a policy of institutional neutrality on social and political issues that do not concern core academic matters or institutional operations.
In recent years, colleges and universities have increasingly weighed in on social and political issues. This has led our institutions of higher education to become politicized and has created an untenable situation whereby they are expected to weigh in on all social and political issues.
Most critically, these stances risk establishing an orthodox view on campus, threatening the pursuit of knowledge for which higher education exists.
As the University of Chicago’s famous Kalven Report of 1967 states, a policy of institutional neutrality is premised on the defining mission of the university: to pursue truth through “the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” And to accomplish this mission, “a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”
Furthermore, the report recognizes, “There is no mechanism by which [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.” In short, individual faculty members and students are the “instrument of dissent and criticism.” The university, on the other hand, “is the home and sponsor of critics.”
Where to draw the line between institutional neutrality and position-taking is a matter of careful prudential judgment. But, as the Kalven Report notes, there should be “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.” Smart observers will recognize good faith efforts to apply this principle.
Agreed. Nobody says that Kalven is perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than having no policy so that that universities or departments can issue official endorsements or condemnations of political and ideological views. That is precisely what got the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn in trouble when they testified before a House committee: on some issues there were official departmental statements, while on others there were not. It was largely this inconsistency that led to the fracas around their Presidents’ testimony in Congress—and to the resignation of Penn President Liz Magill. The University of Chicago wouldn’t even be considered for such an inquiry.
To me, the unity of these organization on the Kalven issue means that colleges have to have a good reason for NOT adopting institutional neutrality. I’m hoping that my constant harping on this issue may inspire some administrators or faculty to get neutrality considered by their schools.
FIRE also issued a press release (click below) with quotes from the leaders of all three organizations.
Here are statements endorsing neutrality from the heads of HA, FIRE, and AFA:
“A top-down, father-knows-best mentality is absolutely no way to support the next generation of free thinkers. Students and faculty deserve the freedom to experiment with different perspectives and explore entirely new ways of thinking without the college claiming to have done all the thinking for them.”
— Greg Lukianoff, FIRE President and CEO
“American colleges and universities need to keep the pursuit of knowledge their principal mission. A public pledge by the overseers of colleges and universities that their schools will take no stance on the controversies of the day will also go a long way to restoring public confidence in the integrity of higher education.”
— Lucas Morel, Chair of the Academic Committee of the AFA
“Colleges and universities should be extraordinary places for the pursuit of knowledge. By adopting neutrality, university leaders empower students and professors to debate tough questions for themselves, allowing them to express heterodox opinions and consider unsettling data, without fear of being silenced or punished.”
— John Tomasi, President of Heterodox Academy
About this issue I’ll just say one more thing: “If not now, when?”
Over 100 universities have adopted some version of the University of Chicago’s Principle of Free Expression, also called the “Chicago Statement”: a strong version of free speech, pretty much adhering to the First Amendment. But the same doesn’t hold for another mainstay of our free-speech program: the Kalven Principles. This is the principle of institutional neutrality: that the University is, with very few exceptions, to make no public statement about politics, ideology, or morality. (The exceptions involve issues which directly affect the mission and workings of the University.)
“Kalven,” as we call it, is an important part of ensuring free expression, for it avoids “chilling” our community’s speech by avoiding official positions that might inhibit opponents from expressing themselves. For example, any statement taking a position on the Mideast War, if it were to come from the President of the University or from a department, might inhibit junior professors or students from arguing contrary positions for fear of losing their job, angering their department, or losing tenure. Thus our statement on the Mideast war is lean and anodyne, merely saying that it might cause people difficulties and giving a list of resources for help.
Kalven holds not just for the administration, like deans, the President, and the Provost, but for all official units of the University, including departments. (Note that, as expected, faculty and students are encouraged to excercise freedom of speech as individuals, or even as unofficial groups, so long as they don’t express an “official” university position.) Likewise, our investments are kept secret from the community so that people can’t demand that we take a political position on how the University endowment is handled.
Although some units can’t seem to avoid trying to make Kalven-violating statements, they are prohibited from doing so officially, and it’s worked pretty well. People speak freely and we don’t get in the Congressional trouble that Penn, Harvard, and MIT did. (Had they adhered to a Kalven statement instead of sometimes making political statements and sometimes avoiding them, their waffling wouldn’t have caused such a fracas.) In contrast, we got in no trouble because we hardly make any statements about anything. Ergo we’ve lost no donors, for all potential donors know that we’re not going to take positions that will anger them.
Why, then, have only a few universities followed our Kalven principles while over 100 have followed our free expression principles? After all, they are mutually reinforcing: both parts of a unified program to keep expression free and flowing. The only universities that have adopted Kalven-esque principles, besides us, number two: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt University. (Vanderbilt’s Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, is a free-speech advocate who was Provost here before he moved south.) Some professors at Northwestern University have urged adoption of institutional neutrality, but so far little seems to have happened.
Why have universities resisted institutional neutrality? I think it’s because some people, in or out of a university, think that it’s immoral for an institution of higher learning not to weigh in on politics or ideology if they think the “moral” position is clear. During the Red Scare of the Fifties, the University held to institutional neutrality despite calls for us to denounce communism and fire communist professors (this was before Kalven, but the principle, though uncodified, began with president Robert Maynard Hutchins). It seemed clear to many at the time that Communism was bad, but of course not to everyone, and taking an anti-Communist stand would simply inhibit discussion. Try to think of any political position that can be held by a University without potentially inhibiting speech!
But I digress. I want to note that another university has just joined the three having official institutional neutrality. And that is Columbia University, as I learned from this announcement:
From the Columbia Academic Freedom Council:
The Columbia University Senate today passed a resolution for the University to adhere to a standard of institutional neutrality as envisioned by the Kalven Committee. The specific language is attached and is as follows:
The University and its leaders should refrain from taking political positions in their institutional capacity, either as explicit statements or as the basis of policy, except in the rare case when the University has a compelling institutional interest, such as a legal obligation, that requires it to do so.
If you read the resolution above, and go to page 40, you’ll see this affirmation of neutrality:
Now this isn’t yet perfect, but it’s very close to Kalven. Columbia still needs to clarify what they mean by “The University and its leaders”. Do departments count? Presumably. What about other units, like Museums and the like? We enforce Kalven for them, too, but that was clarified only through challenges.
Finally, (d) is unclear. What does it mean to “permit inquiry into whether the University’s corporate activities remain compatible with paramount social values”? What are those values? Does this mean that the University can take political positions on investments (“corporate activities”)? That needs clarification.
Still, this was adopted by Columbia’s University Senate, and it’s a good start.
I’m not sure if this new principle applies to Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia University but still somewhat independent. Still, surely Barnard should follow Columbia by adopting institutional neutrality. If it does, it wouldn’t be able to make statements like the following, which is a clear violation of institutional neutrality. I won’t go into detail why it does violate neutrality, but such a statement would be prohibited at the university of Chicago. This one is from Barnard’s Africana Studies Department. Click to read, and if you see the problem affecting free speech here, put it in the comments:
I haven’t prowled Columbia’s website looking for violations, but this site came into my hands via a reader.
Another thing Columbia needs to do, which caused a bit of an issue here, is how, exactly, violations of institutional neutrality will be reported, adjudicated, and dealt with. Still, all universities should take heed. The benefits of institutional neutrality far outweigh its few problems.
The litany of college wokeness, and especially the harm it causes, is now being discussed by the mainstream media, including the Atlantic and the Washington Post. Here, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the most respected venue for discussing college affairs, published a long piece (ca. 6000 words) discussing how “a decade of ideological transformation”—and that means “wokeness”—is no longer off limits to criticism.
The most obvious sign of this is the congressional hearing that led to the resignation of the President of Penn, the weakening of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, and a general tendency for donors to pull their money out of colleges because of their hypocrisy—a hypocrisy that led colleges to punish minor speech transgressions (like misgendering and “microaggressions”) but to suddenly raise the banner of free speech when it came to calling for genocide of the Jews.
As I’ve said, a decent college free-speech code—one that adheres to the First Amendment—would allow for calls to kill Jews, but only under certain conditions (you can’t, for example, do it to harass someone or create a climate that impedes education). In that sense all three Presidents were right—context does matters. But what rankled many people, including me, was that these colleges did not have decent speech codes, and what codes they had were applied unevenly. This created a kind of hypocrisy that led to the downfall of Penn’s President Elizabeth Magill, who didn’t know how to handle the issue thoughtfully and humanely, and walked back her free-speech advocacy the very next day.
The problem is how to maintain free speech, which allows students to say really offensive things, including “From the River to the Sea. . ” (a disguised call to eliminate Israel and Jews), while at the same time preserving a campus climate that is conducive to discussion and learning. That’s a hard problem, one that I’m dealing with now and trying to solve in my own way (more on that later).
After giving lots of examples and offering potential causes of the last decade’s illiberal campus climate, author Len Gutkin offers a solution, which turns out to be colleges’ adoption of the principle of “insitutional neutrality”: there should be no official statements by administrations or departments about ideology, politics, or morality. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’ll give (indented) quotes from the article in three sections, which I’ve arbitrarily constructed.
1.) THE PROBLEM
Author Gutkin dates the problem as really beginning with the demonization of Nicholas and Erika Christakis at Yale after a dust-up about Halloween costumes. This took place in October of 2015, when Erika wrote a note to the students in her residential “house” saying that the administration’s policy of specifying politically correct Halloween costumes should be regarded with some critical judgement. The students didn’t like that, as you can see from the video below, in which they go after Nicholas like gangbusters for what his wife did. Watch the students going wild as Christakis kept his cool. (For background information, go here or read the part on “Yale Halloween Controversy” at Nicholas Christakis’s Wikipedia page.)
The result: Nicholas and Erika resigned as heads of Silliman House, and Erika left Yale permanently.
Whether or not that marks the formal beginning of a tide of wokeness, a lot of reprehensible behavior ensued, exacerbated by the death of George Floyd in 2020 (see next post). A few examples:
An almost-random sampling from June 2020: The Rutgers University English department released a letter detailing its “actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter”; these included a “Racism in Education Reading Group” as well as workshops on “how to have an antiracist classroom.” The latter would be “mandatory for all tenure-track, tenured, non-tenure-track, part-time, and graduate instructors — everyone.” The Harvard College Office of Admissions and Financial Aid issued a statement promising, among other things, to “commit to engaging more deeply in antiracism work to support our work in admissions and financial aid and in hiring, professional development, and promotions within our office.” Cornell University’s Office of Student and Campus Life issued a statement explaining that “the institution of higher education is founded on and continues to function with intentional systemic barriers in place for marginalized people, especially our Black community members.” The president of Brandeis University promised to “transform our campus and address systemic racism” via a series of “action plans”: “We must go further than dialogue and understanding. We must rapidly move toward concrete change.”
In July 2020, an open faculty letter circulated at Princeton and signed by several hundred faculty members likewise asked that the university take “immediate concrete and material steps to openly and publicly acknowledge the way that anti-Black racism, and racism of any stripe, continue to thrive” on campus. The suggested steps were many and heterogeneous, including “implement administration- and facultywide training that is specifically antiracist,” “acknowledge on the home page that the university is sited on Indigenous land,” and “fund a chaired professorship in Indigenous studies for a scholar who decenters white frames of reference.”
. . .Indeed, in the two years following the murder of George Floyd, it became apparent that academic freedom and activist demands — even some demands backed by administrators — were sometimes in severe tension. Almost every week seemed to bring a fresh incident. Some of the cases are farcical: In 2020, a white professor of clinical business communication at the University of Southern California, Greg Patton, used the Mandarin word “nèige,” which means “that,” in a lesson on filler words (nèige can be used similarly to “um” in English but sounds vaguely like the N-word). A joint letter signed by “Black MBA students” referred to the “emotional exhaustion of carrying on with an instructor that disregards cultural diversity and sensitivities and by extension creates an unwelcoming environment for us.” Patton was removed from the course. Other cases fundamentally threaten academic freedom as it pertains to classroom teaching: At the University of Michigan, Bright Sheng, a composer from China who teaches in the music school, showed a 1965 film version of Othello in which Laurence Olivier appears in blackface. Students were upset; Sheng apologized and agreed not to finish screening the film. That response was felt to be unsatisfactory. Sheng was removed from the course. His dean, David Gier, explained that Sheng’s misdeeds “do not align with our school’s commitment to antiracist action, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
And then there was the affair of the Yale Law School trap house. , ,
You may have heard about most of this, and the article gives more examples. But we already know about this tsunamis of wokeness, and how it’s inhibited students from speaking their minds. Gilken has a psychological diagnosis of the problem which aligns with the one Haidt and Lukianoff offered in their excellent book The Coddling of the American Mind:
2.) WHAT CAUSED ALL THIS?
Gutkin sees one main cause of this atmosphere: the entitlement of students created by a new atmosphere of “safetyism”, itself promoted by the desire of students to have colleges act in loco parentis. Earlier students didn’t want that, but simply wanted independence. This atmosphere is discussed thoroughly in Haidt and Lukianoff’s book. A few quotes from the Chronicle piece:
When Erika [Christakis] asked her Sillimanders whether they should be more skeptical about “bureaucratic and administrative” power over college students, she put her finger on a generational rift between baby boomers like herself and the millennials she was superintending. She simply couldn’t fathom that many students welcomed the guiding hand offered by administrators at the Intercultural Affairs Council. Her own generation, after all, had demanded that college students be emancipated from the in loco parentis oversight of their elders on campus. “Whose business is it,” Erika had asked in her letter, “to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.” Students disagreed.
. . .The last decade’s protest culture, with its emphasis on harm and care, abandons one of the central goals of an earlier age of student activism: the nullification of colleges’ in loco parentis controls. Instead, Gersen observed in 2015, students approach college administrations with a kind of “family feeling” hard to imagine in an earlier era. Of the Yale Halloween protests, she writes: “The world in which it’s not bizarre for a young person to rebuke someone for failing to ‘create a place of comfort and home,’ or to yell, ‘Be quiet … You’re disgusting!’ and storm away, is the world of family, where a child in pain desperately desires empathy and understanding from a parent.”
These psychodynamics are crossed with other, older traditions of campus protest, including the rhetoric of the left in the ‘60s. The result is an oddly psychologized species of militancy, a blend of personal insult, wounded outcries, radical political prescription — and demands that offenders be punished. Indeed, Gersen’s observation about students’ desire for familial protection from administrators should be supplemented with a complementary account of punishment. Families, after all, are where children are trained and corrected. The last decade has been marked by a decided willingness on the part of campus activists to ask administrators to train and correct both wayward faculty members and fellow students — and a decided willingness on the part of administrators to oblige them. Although the term “cancel culture” has become tainted by partisan political bickering, it gets at the broadly punitive atmosphere of campus life now.
And I like this explanation, which comes from Lukianoff and Haidt:
In 2015, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identified a disposition they termed “vindictive protectiveness,” which combines a neurotic fixation on one’s own vulnerability with a thirst for punishing others: “The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable [and] to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally.” The sociologists Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen can help us understand how that disposition sometimes becomes the glue holding student activists together. In a 2017 paper, “Why Punishment Pleases,” Carvalho and Chamberlen coined the concept of “hostile solidarity,” whereby punitive rituals bind groups together at the expense of the punished. This concept, they note, might “assist an analysis of why the deployment of what can be deemed a punitive logic has become particularly appealing in contemporary liberal social settings” — like colleges. As one protesting student told Nicholas Christakis back in 2015, “Now I want your job to be taken from you.”
“Vindictive protectiveness”! Yes, the combination of fragility and aggressiveness is not something I’ve seen on campuses before. Aggressiveness, yes, especially during the Vietnam War and civil rights protests of the Sixties. But not the fragility, also explained by Haidt and Lukianoff as a result of overparenting and other factors.
But Gutkin skims but lightly another cause of campus unrest: the proliferation of DEI bureaucracies, which promote identitarianism and the oppressor/victim narrative (“fragility”) as well as divisiveness (“aggression”). It’s mentioned only two or three times in the article; and, indeed, Gutkin may see DEI as simply another outgrowth of the safetyism dsecribed above. But the DEI intrusion into academia began well before the Yale incident, and is somewhat independent of it (the Bakke case was in 1978). And there’s evidence that DEI, by creating divisiveness, self-segregation, and inhibition of free expression, is contributing to this problem. Bolding in the excerpt below is mine:
Still, there is some evidence that the proliferation of administrative bureaucracies like the Intercultural Affairs Council stimulates student protest against certain kinds of speech, especially conservative speech or speech, like the Christakises’, taken by student activists to be conservative. A recent study by Kevin Wallsten, a political scientist at California State University at Long Beach, finds that student tolerance toward conservative speakers is negatively correlated with the number of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators, but it finds no such effect for tolerance toward liberal speakers. By the same token, Wallsten found, the student bodies at campuses with a high number of DEI administrators are more likely than those at campuses with lower numbers of DEI administrators to support disruptions of controversial speech. The perception that some administrators are soft sponsors of student protests has, in the last year, invited intense scrutiny and even official policy revisions. In a memo issued in March 2023, for instance, Jenny Martinez, then dean of Stanford Law, included a section called “Academic Freedom, Free Speech, DEI, and the Role of University Administrators,” in which she specifically focused on the troubled relationship between free speech and DEI.
Getting rid of DEI would, I think, help reduce this kind of campus tension, for DEI sets group against group and inculcates the “privileged” with guilt and the “oppressed” with resentment and fragility.
3.) WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THIS?
This is the hard part. If you maintain a campus policy of free expression, people are going to get offended, and, without due care, it could create a climate of fear and safetyism on campus. The sole solution offered by Gutkin—a good one, to be sure—is to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality like our Kalven Report. We’ve had far less trouble in Chicago than at places like Harvard (which bought striking pro-Palestinian students BURRITOS, for crying out loud), and although we have demands for the administration to take stands on issues or divest from some corporations, the students know that this is useless, and their hearts aren’t really in it. So yes, adopt institutional neutrality. (It’s worth noting that unlike the Ivies, which lost big donors after the House hearing, this hasn’t happened at Chicago.)
What will they do now? One possibility: Commit to the institutional neutrality enshrined in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which calls for “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political or social issues of the day.” No more statements from college presidents scolding the Supreme Court; no more declarations of solidarity with Ukraine. One leader adopting this approach is Maud Mandel, president of Williams College, in Massachusetts. “Our most important mission,” she wrote to her campus, “is to teach students how to think, and empower them to do so for themselves — not to tell them what to think.” Danielle Allen, the Harvard political scientist, likewise told me that she thinks it would benefit colleges to “embrace” the Kalven Report. So did Ellen Cosgrove, the retired Yale law administrator who got ensnarled in the Trent Colbert case. Cosgrove predicts, too, that colleges will become much clearer in the future about the consequences of participating in disruptive protests.
Whatever neutrality’s intrinsic virtues, the intense scrutiny brought to bear on campus politics by Republican politicians makes it politically expedient, too. Colleges are under pressure to reverse the appearance of a political double standard on campus, and a policy of neutrality might not only remove a provocation to politicians but give colleges a tool with which to resist the imposition of a conservative orthodoxy by state legislatures.
But of course this raises the problem, recognized by Gutkin, that such neutrality doesn’t do much to dispel either the psychological tendency of students to be fragile nor the DEI-promoted rivalry between identity groups. All Gutkins can offer here is the idea that adopting the Kalven principle (so far embraced by only two schools beside Chicago) will let the air out of protestors’ tires:
If neutrality is a negative doctrine of restraint, pluralism is its positive consequence, the fruit it allows to grow. It is not conducive to “family feeling” — families tend toward consensus or else, à la the students screaming and weeping at Nicholas Christakis in the courtyard of Silliman, embittered antagonism. Perhaps, as happened after the explosive campus protests of the late 1960s, we are entering a new period of quiescence, all passion spent. Or perhaps not.
To be sure, this is not an easy problem to resolve. But I think there are other things to do, like encouraging discourse between groups and ensuring that although speech remains free, there may be a few tiny curbs on the First Amendment that would facilitate interaction. One of these would be to prohibit shouting down speakers or deplatforming them. That is allowed by the First Amendment but is not salubrious for campuses. And it’s important that although free expression should be encouraged, students who violate campus rules via sit-ins, deplatforming, and disrupting classes with chants, be punished, and that those punishments be known to students. For without punishment there is no deterrence, and no way to curb disruption.
And that means no free burritos for those who violate campus rules!
I found the tweet below, reflecting the views of a few dozen faculty of Swarthmore, one of the wokest colleges in the U.S. The profs, in their op-ed in the college paper, apparently are demanding that the college abandon any institutional neutrality and become politicized.
The text of the statement appears below in the Phoenix, the Swarthmore College student newspaper. Go down and click on the headline below (or here) to see it. While the 41 sweating professors cry loudly for free speech, what becomes clear quickly is that they want the freedom for their professors to proselytize for Palestine in the classrooms, take their students to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and for Swarthmore to either make official statements supporting Palestine and Swarthmore’s “complicity with U.S. militarism”, or to at least encourage the expression of that sentiment. They further argue that it’s impossible for any college to be ideologically neutral, even though at least one of them is—mine.
The tweet (the text is below):
NEW: Statement on “academic freedom” by 41 @swarthmore faculty quickly goes off the rails:
The idea that “the classroom is not a political space or that the College is a neutral institution” is a “fantasy” that “obscures the College’s ongoing complicity with U.S. militarism.” pic.twitter.com/XitgPPKmN7
Click to read (the list of faculty signing this is also at the link). Bolding is mine.
Drafted: December 11, 2023
As faculty members at Swarthmore College, we are deeply concerned about the erosion of academic freedom in the United States, particularly in regards to the ongoing crisis in Gaza. Over the past few weeks, we have learned that our administration has made several attempts to discourage, intimidate, and/or silence pro-Palestine speech on campus. According to reports by students and faculty, college officials have warned specific students about their activism via personally-directed emails; they have selectively enforced rules concerning flyering, postering, and/or demonstrating on campus; they have privately requested that specific instructors refrain from moving their classes to the site of an ongoing sit-in, even if they do so at the request and/or with the unanimous consent of their students; and they have reassured alumni that the college will pursue “counter-programming” in response to support for Palestine. These deterrence measures have the effect of frightening faculty and students alike from engaging in legitimate and non-violent freedom of expression, and they have set a worrying precedent for future events and conflicts.
We are alarmed by the use of such tactics at a time when academic institutions should reaffirm their commitment to free speech. Speaking to the renewed debates about academic freedom since Oct. 7, Princeton professor Keith Whittington has recently suggested that colleges may either “reaffirm their core principles on free speech and academic freedom,” or “bow to political pressure and double down on an ethos of safetyism and a machinery of speech surveillance and suppression.” In its latest statement, the American Association of University Professors has similarly insisted that college officials “resist demands from politicians, trustees, donors, students and their parents, alumni, or other parties to punish faculty members for exercising [their academic] freedom.” We therefore urge our administration to refrain from joining a nationwide campaign, reminiscent of McCarthyism, against colleges and universities that aims to crack down on thought, speech, and actions that are critical of Israel.
All members of our campus community must be able to freely express themselves during such a pivotal moment in history. The suggestion that the classroom is not a political space or that the College is a neutral institution that is in some way hermetically sealed from our broader geopolitical context contradicts the College’s commitment to rigorous scholarship that engages with the most pressing contemporary issues. This fantasy also obscures the College’s ongoing complicity with U.S. militarism. Public protests and sit-ins can be generative spaces for deliberating about issues of justice, ethics, and policy, and for reminding us that our pedagogy is inextricably embedded in a wider material reality. In the present context, they are particularly important for giving students room to voice their sincere concerns regarding the Israeli military assault on Gaza and their desire for better understanding this world-historical event.
(Note that they don’t argue that public protests should also give students the right to voice their sincere concerns about the brutality of Hamas and the oppressive way it rules Gaza.)
This moment calls for moral and intellectual courage. The scale of destruction and human suffering that is currently unfolding in Gaza has almost no precedent in Palestine/Israel. According to U.S. military historian Robert Pape, Gaza will “go down as a place name denoting one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns.” An investigation by +972 magazine has found that Israel’s use of both artificial intelligence and unrestrained airstrikes on civilian targets have turned Gaza into a “mass assassination factory” that has resulted in “one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.”
This gets history completely wrong. First of all, the “Nakba of 1948” referred to the defeat of 5 Arab armies who invaded Israel on the day it became independent. Israel, by some miracle, defeated all five armies, and the “Nakba”, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, was the humiliating defeat of those armies. Many Arabs fled Israel at the time, thinking that Israel would lose within a week and they’d be able to return home in a country that was Judenrein. They didn’t and now they can’t because most of those who fled are dead. Their descendants have no “right of return”.
Second, there were no “Palestinians” in 1948: there were Arabs. There was no state containing people called “Palestinians”. (That wasn’t until the Sixties.) The Naqba was against the inhabitants of Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. None of these countries were part of the British Mandate of Palestine, and so the inhabitants of that mandate did not invade Israel. There was not a “Palestinian invasion of Israel.”
I’ll add that the sweating professors neglect the huge and deadly campaign of Bashar al-Assad against the inhabitants of his own country of Syria, with a death toll estimated now to be over 400,000. But those are Muslim deaths inflicted by a despotic Muslim ruler. It’s only when the Jews cause Muslim death when defending themselves that they get demonized this way. But let’s proceed:
An Israeli newspaper found that the ratio of civilians killed in Gaza is “significantly higher than the average civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world during the 20th century.” More children have been killed in Gaza than the annual totals for children killed in all of the world’s conflict zones for the past three years. These realities and the justifications presented for them by Israeli leaders have led hundreds of scholars, lawyers, and U.N. experts to warn about the Israeli government’s intent to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. All of this has unfolded with unconditional support from the Biden administration, which recently stood alone in vetoing a ceasefire resolution at the U.N. Security Council that was backed by more than 100 countries around the world.
In light of these catastrophic circumstances, we urge the college administration to protect the academic freedom of both students and faculty and to abstain from any intimidation or threats of disciplinary action against them. The statements from administration and faculty alike constitute an archive that, in the years to come, will reflect our institution’s stance in this pivotal moment. It is our conviction that Palestine cannot be an exception to academic freedom.
While this screed pretends to be a call for free speech, it’s really an ideological statement about the perfidy of Israel in the ongoing war with Hamas. Indeed, if Swarthmore is really violating the rights of students favoring Palestine, then that should be called out. So should any assurance that Swarthmore will do any “counter-programming in response to support for Palestine. It’s just that, knowing Swarthmore, I highly doubt it. While Googling “Swarthmore demonstrations”, the only things I could find were notices of pro-Palestinian demonstrations by the students, with no sign that they’re being censored. I found no notices of pro-Israeli demonstrations, though perhaps they happened and I missed them. (Note: Swarthmore and Haverford are in a three-college consortium together with Bryn Mawr).
For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer, reporting on one demonstration on December 8 (a week before the statement above), says this:
Students at Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges are preparing for finals, but some supporters of Palestinians are also spending the final days of their semester holding antiwar demonstrations in their school administration buildings.
More than 50 Swarthmore students were occupying a building that’s home to the office of college president Valerie Smith on Thursday afternoon. At Haverford College — another liberal arts school that joins Swarthmore in a consortium with Bryn Mawr — around 30 students sprawled throughout the lobby of Founders Hall on Friday as a large “Ceasefire Now” sign hung above the building’s entryway.
The protests come after students demanded that campus leaders speak out against Israel’s ongoing strikes in Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Gaza health officials estimate that since the war’s outbreak, over 17,000 Palestinians have died in the conflict.
Palestinian-aligned student groups at both schools estimate that more than 100 students have attended each sit-in this week.Both groups say they intend to remain until university administrators meet their demands.
. . . At Swarthmore, students urged administrators to release a statement condemning “Israeli aggression in Gaza,” and to drop disciplinary warnings against pro-Palestinian student organizers.
There’s also an article in the Phoenix about a student sit-in in Parrish Hall (the oldest building at Swarthmore, which contains the President’s office) supporting Palestine:
Posters, banners, and sleeping bags line the walls of Parrish Hall as students in support of Palestinian freedom, led by the Swarthmore Palestine Coalition (SPC), continue a now four-day sit-in. SPC — composed of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and 28 other member organizations — plans to continue the sit-in until the semester’s end; a culmination of two months of student protest calling for SJP-written demands.
These demands include a statement from President Valerie Smith condemning “Israeli aggression in the Gaza strip,” college divestment from companies funding Israel, and a boycott of Sabra and HP products which support the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). According to SJP, a petition with these demands and over 1000 signatures has been refused by the administration throughout November. The overnight sit-in averages 40 or more participants, according to SPC, and general meetings have had an attendance of 80 or more students, according to daily updates from Voices, a member organization of SPC.
These sit-ins are against University regulations, of course, so, in an archived article in the Inquirer, we learn that Haverford students abandoned their sit-in when threatened with discipline by the administration (nobody was arrested or charged), while, on the day of the petition, Swarthmore students continued to sit in, and I have no update. The college should remove them should they continue their illegal sit-in.
Tensions rose at Haverford and Swarthmore colleges this week after administrators warned that students could face disciplinary action for holding demonstrations that protested the war in Gaza.
At Haverford, those calls effectively ended a weeklong sit-in that saw around 100 students occupy Founders Hall, a main administration building in the heart of campus.
Some Swarthmore students were continuing their sit-in on Thursday, though talks between organizers and administrators could soon bring the demonstration to a close, a school spokesperson said.
Students at both colleges began their demonstrations last week, refusing to leave until administrators publicly called for a cease-fire. Swarthmore students also urged their school to divest portions of its $2.7 billion endowment from companies that are shareholders in defense contractors, among other demands.
It’s not suppression of free speech to enforce college regulations against trespassing, and I strongly suspect that this threat is what the sweating professors describe as “attempts to discourage, intimidate, and/or silence pro-Palestine speech on campus.” I’m also guessing that none of this happened to Jewish students because, like at the University of Chicago, Jewish groups don’t engage in activities that violate University rules.
What’s also interesting is that the University is indeed trying to support academic freedom and free speech by trying to discourage faculty from taking their classes to “ongoing sit-ins” (you can bet they’re not pro-Israel sit ins). In my view, moving a class to a sit-in is a way of not only supporting that sit-in, but of suppressing the views of students who may oppose what the sit-in is for. I don’t care if the class gives “unanimous consent,” for that could well be coercion: what student is going to oppose the professor’s call that the class move to a sit-in?
Finally, there’s this statement from the professors’ screed:
The suggestion that the classroom is not a political space or that the College is a neutral institution that is in some way hermetically sealed from our broader geopolitical context contradicts the College’s commitment to rigorous scholarship that engages with the most pressing contemporary issues.
Of course the classroom is not “hermetically sealed” from geopolitical events, but that doesn’t mean those events have to intrude into the classroom, or that professors should constantly bring them up, not withholding, perhaps, their own point of view.
And yes, a college can be a politically and ideologically neutral institution. The University of Chicago is one! That’s because we’ve adopted the Kalven principles of institutional neutrality. So although students may demand divestment, and professors may demand that Chicago take stands and issue statements about political issues, our administration and departments don’t do that stuff. (Individuals, of course, are free to say what they want so long as their statements are not presented as official views of the University or its constituent units. Saying that “the personal is political”—something that’s never made sense to me—doesn’t work for classrooms, either. These sweating professors are all heated up about Israel winning the war in Gaza, and they want Swarthmore on their side.
Swarthmore would be better off (as would Harvard, MIT, Penn, and nearly every other college in the U.S.) to adopt principles of institutional neutrality. Then students would get disciplined not for free speech, but only when they violate college regulations about the time and place of speech so that they don’t impede the business of the university.
Note at the original site just two of the signers are in STEM fields: Cohen in Physics & Astronomy and Thornton in Mathematics & Statistics. In contrast, 13 signers are in “studies” departments and nearly all the rest are in various humanities departments like English, History, and Philosophy. I don’t think that there’s equity here: surely more than 4.8% of Swarthmore faculty are in STEM fields! Of course this imbalance may simply reflect who the petition was passed around to, but may also show that it’s the humanities people are the ones who want their university to get political and support Palestine.
Just to emphasize again how strongly Chicago sticks to its policy of institutional neutrality as embodied in the Kalven Report, here is the only statement that the University of Chicago issued on the Israel/Hamas war after October 7. We have not gotten into trouble; our President has not been called to testify in front of Congressional Representative, and we have lost no donors. Click to enlarge; the site is here. I’ve also pasted the text below the fold since the script is so light in the statement. Now it’s a constant battle to support Kalven, and, as I posted earlier today, some units of the University insist on violating it. Nevertheless, few schools do as well in avoiding making ideological statements irrelevant to their mission.
