Category: Kalven Report

Harvard adopts a Kalven-esque policy of institutional neutrality

June 6, 2024 • 9:30 am

I signed up as a Harvard Alum (you have to prove it with dates and degrees, and they look it up!), just so I could get stuff like this. It’s a letter from the interim President (Claudine Gay has not yet been replaced) as well as the interim Provost and 18 deans, affirming that Harvard, joining a handful of other universities, has officially adopted the institutional neutrality policy confected by a working committee (see here for the earlier committee report).

It’s time for the the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to start making a list of schools that have adopted institutional neutrality, a policy first started by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report in 1967)—just as FIRE has a list of 108 universities that have adopted some version of Chicago’s principles of free expression.  As I always say, both institutional neutrality and First-Amendment-style free speech are mutually supportive in ensuring an atmosphere that permits and encourages free speech on campus. And the more schools that sign on, the more schools that will be willing to sign on.

Here’s the announcement I got via email:

it was also signed by 18 deans, but I won’t list their names as it’s not that important.

Click to read the pdf:

Here are a few quotes from what now seems to be Harvard’s official policy. This is the raison d’être for the statement:

Accordingly, the university has a responsibility to speak out to protect and promote its core function. Its leaders must communicate the value of the university’s central activities. They must defend the university’s autonomy and academic freedom when threatened – if, for example, outside forces seek to determine what students the university can admit, what subjects it can teach, or which research it supports. And they must speak out on issues directly relevant to the university’s operation.

The university and its leaders should not, however, issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.

. . . First, the integrity and credibility of the institution are compromised when the university speaks officially on matters outside its institutional area of expertise. Faculty members, speaking for themselves, have expertise in their respective domains of knowledge, and they may often speak about what they know. In so doing, however, they do not speak for the university. The university’s leaders are hired for their skill in leading an institution of higher education, not their expertise in public affairs. When speaking in their official roles, therefore, they should restrict themselves to matters within their area of institutional expertise and responsibility: the running of a university.

Second, if the university and its leaders become accustomed to issuing official statements about matters beyond the core function of the university, they will inevitably come under intense pressure to do so from multiple, competing sides on nearly every imaginable issue of the day. This is the reality of contemporary public life in an era of social media and political polarization. Those pressures, coming from inside and outside the university, will distract energy and attention from the university’s essential purpose. The university is not a government, tasked with engaging the full range of foreign and domestic policy issues, and its leaders are not, and must not be, selected for their personal political beliefs.

Third, if the university adopts an official position on an issue beyond its core function, it will be understood to side with one perspective or another on that issue. Given the diversity of viewpoints within the university, choosing a side, or appearing to do so can undermine the inclusivity of the university community. It may make it more difficult for some members of the community to express their views when they differ from the university’s official position. The best way for the university to acknowledge pressing public events is by redoubling intellectual engagement through classes, conferences, scholarship, and teaching that draw on the expert knowledge of its faculty.

Good stuff! They even add something that we had to modify in our own Kalven report: “departments, centers, and programs” should remain institutionally neutral as well as statements from the top administration (presidents, provosts, deans, etc.).

I have only two beefs, and they’re minor. Here’s the first one:

The most compassionate course of action is therefore not to issue official statements of empathy. Instead, the university should continue and expand the efforts of its pastoral arms in the different schools and residential houses to support affected community members. It must dedicate resources to training staff most directly in contact with affected community members. These concrete actions should prove, in the end, more effective and meaningful than public statements.

This is a bit ambiguous in that it raises the issue of “which pastoral arms should be extended”?  Who, exactly, are the “affected community members”? In the case of the war in Gaza, for example, should both Jewish and pro-Palestinian students be supported as two different groups? Do they get equal support? What about others disturbed by the conflict? There are multiple sides on every debatable issue.

It would be better simply to say, “You might be affected by this circumstance, and if you are, you can find help here,” listing the various therapy or helping groups. This is what we did when Chicago issued its statement about the war. And that way the pastoral support goes out to everyone, without anybody needing to decide who the affected groups are.

An even smaller beef (not even a filet mignon) is this:

Let us be clear: the university is not a neutral institution. It values open inquiry, expertise, and diverse points of view, for these are the means through which it pursues truth. The policy of speaking officially only on matters directly related to the university’s core function, not beyond, serves those values. It should enable the university to endure and flourish, providing its unique public good even – and especially – in times of intense public controversy

Well, the university is indeed (or should be) a neutral institution on matters of ideology, politics, and morality that don’t bear on the workings of the school.  The “pursuit of truth” might, at a stretch, be conceived as a “value,” but it’s really the purpose of a university.  I’m not sure why Harvard wrote this, though it appears to have done so to set it apart from Chicago, criticizing us because Chicago doesn’t explicitly admit that we really aren’t institutionally neutral (“we’re Harvard and we are better”). But I don’t really care. What’s important is that this is a good, workable policy of institutional NEUTRALITY, and, given that it’s at Harvard, it should prompt other schools to adopt similar policies.

Here’s the head of Chicago’s Kalven Report committee, law professor Harry Kalven:

The Maroon, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Harvard Committee apes the University of Chicago, recommends institutional neutrality

May 29, 2024 • 10:15 am

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNC Asheville adopts institutional neutrality

May 21, 2024 • 10:46 am

I didn’t realize this until I read the article below from the Asheville (North Carolina) Watchdog, but apparently the entire University of North Carolina (UNC) system is adopting institutional neutrality à la the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, put in place in 1967.  About two years ago I reported that the flagship school of UNC, the branch at Chapel Hill, had adopted not only the Kalven Principles, but also the University of Chicago’s Freedom of Expression Principles. The latter guarantees free speech on campus, comporting with the First Amendment but also subject to the University’s “time, place, and manner” restrictions that allow the institution to function.

Institutional neutrality, embodied in Kalven, supports free speech by prohibiting schools, academic units, or departments from taking official positions on political, ideological or moral questions—with rare exceptions that involve issues involving the functioning of our institution. (For an example of our Kalvenish restraint, see this statement by the University after the October 7 attack on Israel and the resultant war.)

So far, over a hundred American colleges have adopted a version of our Free Expression principles, but only a handful adhere to Kalven. It appears to be very hard for schools to keep their gobs shut about political issues of the day, and it’s made worse because students, who often don’t understand the purpose of institutional neutrality, put colleges under heavy pressure to issue statements.

The article below is about that pressure, pressure exemplified by students defending the banners below hanging from the library of the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNCA) library. There are three political ones, supporting Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ community, and a land acknowledgment to the Cherokee. The students also don’t understand why UNCA doesn’t take a position on the war in Gaza.

Click any of the items below to read the piece.

What started the debate about institutional neutrality was the removal of the banners above in 2023, along with a Black Lives Matter Mural that was taken down during renovations and not replaced. The Chancellor explained that the banners, and now any statements about the war in Gaza, would be violations of institutional neutrality:

Since University of North Carolina Asheville students began protesting against the war in Gaza in early May, Chancellor Kimberly van Noort has maintained that the university should avoid an official stance on the matter.

“Neither the University nor I, the chancellor, should interfere by taking an official stance,” van Noort wrote in a public update to students and faculty earlier this month. “Institutional neutrality promotes the open exchange of ideas and avoids inhibiting scholarship, creativity, and expression. Compromising this position carries great risks.”

Her adherence to institutional neutrality mirrors other universities’ stances across the country, which have experienced growing protests in the past few weeks. Institutional neutrality also has been applied to other cultural issues on campus, including the Ramsey Library display of Black Lives Matter, Cherokee land acknowledgement, and LGBTQ+ banners – and comes at a time when the university system’s Board of Governors is considering removing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion positions and offices across the system.

In spring 2023, the banners were removed to allow repainting of the library and were not replaced. At the time, van Noort reported in public updates that the banners suffered from “expected wear and tear” from “time and the elements.”

Van Noort told Asheville Watchdog recently that the decision to not reinstate the banners hinged on institutional neutrality.

“For us to make a decision of privileging some over others is really problematic for a university, where we strive to have this neutral state so students can express themselves,” she said in an interview. “They can express opposition. They can express conflict. They can express disagreement in a peaceful, non-violent, respectful manner, but it’s not the place of the university to take a stance in those conversations.”

Or, as our Kalven report states in a brilliant passage:

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.

Here’s more from the newspaper that describes how the whole state system adopted institutional neutrality; it’s a recent development:

The idea of institutional neutrality dates back to the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Committee Report, which argues that university neutrality is important in fostering a diversity of viewpoints. The idea caught steam in 2021 when Vanderbilt’s chancellor Daniel Diermeier advocated for it in pieces for USA Today, Inside Higher Ed, and Forbes, UNCA’s chief university communication and marketing officer Michael Strysick said.

Strysick said it was a 2017 state law involving campus free speech – and UNC policy – that brought institutional neutrality to the UNC system. The law, born from HB 527, stated “the constituent institution may not take action, as an institution, on public policy controversies of the day.”

The law did not include the term “neutrality” until it was amended by SB 195 last summer. SB 195 requires all North Carolina colleges and universities to remain neutral on “political controversies of the day.”

Last summer, the General Assembly passed another bill, SB 364, using language mirroring the Kalven Report, prohibiting UNC institutions from asking employment applicants to describe beliefs around “contemporary political debate or social action.” A few weeks ago, a UNC System committee approved a policy that would remove Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion positions and offices across the system, if approved by the full Board of Governors on May 23. The committee’s decision sparked a student protest in front of the Ramsey Library.

Student protesters met with Chancellor Van Noort in May, and were advised that taking a stand on the war, or even on DEI, was a violation of institutional neutrality. Students and some faculty don’t like that, because it means that the university doesn’t publicize debatable ideas or political initiatives that students and faculty like. (Yes, DEI is debatable, at least the way it’s used in colleges, though of course bias in university treatment or admissions is illegal.  But DEI goes far beyond simply “color blindedness,” as most of us know.)

Here’s some pushback:

“A big part of the DEI policy is recruiting and retaining students. The system is shooting itself in the foot if we do this because we are not going to be able to recruit,” said Kelly Biers, associate professor of French. “It’s going to drive away high quality faculty and students.”

But of course they can still recruit, though retention of students with lower qualifications will always be a problem. But you can’t give special privileges to students because of their ethnicity (face it, this is not about “viewpoint diversity” but about race and ethnicity). I suppose Biers means that they can’t recruit on the basis of race, which is illegal anyway because of the recent Supreme Court Decision, but of course UNCA can cast their recruiting net as widely as possible, and by all means cast it over students from different social classes and ethnic groups. But the DEI that gives arrant racial preferences, tries to instill guilt in people who are male or white, taints everyone with “unconscious bias”, or requires applicants for jobs to submit DEI statements, will no longer fly.  But truly, I don’t understand how killing the “progressive” DEI while retaining policies against bias and bigotry will “drive away high quality faculty and students.”

There’s more pushback:

Alondra Barrera-Hernandez, student government president and protest organizer added, “It’s important to advocate for this (DEI) on our campus especially because UNC Asheville is a very diverse campus, especially for DEI. It can impact a lot of marginalized students.”

Again, DEI is construed, I suspect, to mean students marginalized because of their race or ethnicity, not because they’re conservatives. But remember that an important part of campus diversity is viewpoint diversity, yet the implicit assumption for “etbnically marginalized” students is the patronizing notion that they all share a common viewpoint.  They don’t, of course, but campuses are looking for the ones that do. They don’t want young versions of Coleman Hughes or John McWhorter.

One more misguided criticism of institutional neutrality, dealing with a student’s reaction after the banners and the BLM mural was removed:

Alumna Lauren Brasswell was the student government president at the time.

“By choosing not to take a stance, the institution is taking a stance on ignoring the historical significance of the harsh realities that marginalized individuals face,” said Brasswell. “This reality does not and should not go against any universities’ mission or values. And, if it does, that institution is and will be a hostile, discriminatory and unsafe environment for any black or brown student, faculty, or staff.”

No, that’s not true at all.  Saying that if a university doesn’t take an explicit stance on a historical or present-day controversy, it’s favoring one side of that controversy is wrong. It’s like saying that if you don’t declare that you have a hobby, you still have one, which is “not having a hobby.”

Again, the University is not the critic but the sponsor of critics.  Students and faculty are welcome, nay, encouraged to publicize their personal views about anything, and the rejection of centuries of bigotry is now enshrined in rules that prohibit academic and personal discrimination in colleges.  With such recognition, the claim that the environment is “unsafe” seems overblown , though of course people may feel unsafe without actually being unsafe.  I wonder how many students of color at UNCA live their lives in fear of constant attack or discrimination? We don’t know; all we have are these assertions.

The only statement by the Chancellor which seems a bit off is this one:

The chancellor would like to see a local art piece instead of the banners and clarified that UNCA has “no intention of lessening or eliminating the University’s commitment to the [Cherokee] land acknowledgement, but to the contrary exploring ways to more permanently honor it.”

If UNCA really wants to honor the commitment that their university stands on lands stolen from the Cherokee, they should either reimburse that group or give the land back. Anything else is performative virtue-signaling that costs nothing to the University oppressors.

At any rate, the article ends with the pro-Palestinian students promising to continue their activities in the fall while planning strategy during the summer. More power to them—so long as they don’t violate University regulations.  I disagree with nearly all of their views, but hey, it’s free speech, and they’re welcome to say what they want, even “Globalize the intifada”, a call for violence that’s legal so long as it doesn’t incite imminent and predictable violence.

And short-term banners or displays from student groups are also okay, but once they’re made permanent they can be regarded as an official position of a university, which is a violation of neutrality.

In light of protests, UNC Chapel Hill cuts diversity funding and beefs up security funding

May 15, 2024 • 10:30 am

“Defund the police and fund DEI,” were common cries on campuses in the last few years. But, in at least one case, the funding directions have suddenly reversed.

As NBC News reports, this happened at the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina (UNC): UNC at Chapel Hill.  As I’ve reported, this was only the second university in America (after the University of Chicago) to adopt official institutional neutrality on ideological, political, or moral issues. (This is the equivalent of Chicago’s Kalven Report.) Sadly, while the school has adopted neutrality, it’s still violating it in several ways. So we can say that UNC Chapel Hill talks the talk, but still doesn’t completely walk the walk.

Curiously, the violations of Kalven UNC enacted involve just those that are now endangered for lack of funds: mandatory antiracism policies, including DEI initiatives. Click the headline below to read:

An excerpt:

North Carolina’s public university system considers a vote on changing its diversity policy, the system’s flagship university board voted Monday to cut funding for diversity programs in next year’s budget.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees approved a change that would divert $2.3 million of diversity funding to go toward public safety and policing at a special meeting to address the university’s budget. The board’s vote would only impact UNC-Chapel Hill’s diversity funding, which could result in the loss of its diversity office.

The vote to shift more funding to public safety comes as continued pro-Palestinian protests on UNC’s campus have resulted in several arrests in recent weeks. The budget committee vice-chair Marty Kotis said law enforcement has already been forced to react to protests, but they need more funding to keep the university “safe from a larger threat.”

“It’s important to consider the needs of all 30,000 students, not just the 100 or so that may want to disrupt the university’s operations,” Kotis said. “It takes away resources for others.”

It’s ironic that this tradeoff is apparently happening because of college protests (DEI was on the way out in many places before the war, anyway), for many of the protests are fueled by the DEI mentality, which sees Israel as a land of white colonialist oppressors. And yet the police are needed to ensure that the protests don’t produce any violence to people or university propertly. (To be sure, there has been almost no physical danger from either side, although Jewish students did attack the encampment at UCLA, and that may have followed a Jewish woman being stepped on and kicked by protestors.)

There’s more:

Last month, the statewide board’s Committee on University Governance voted to reverse and replace its DEI policy for 17 schools across the state. The change would alter a 2019 diversity, equity and inclusion regulation that defines the roles of various DEI positions — and it would appear to eliminate those jobs if the policy is removed.

The full 24-member board is scheduled to vote next week on the policy change. If the alteration is approved, it will take effect immediately.

Many of us have called for an end to diversity offices and diversity statements at colleges and universities on several grounds, including that of ineffective programs and compelled speech. But I’ve also argued that at least a few people in each school should be tasked with investigating and enforcing prohibitions against bigotry as well as harassment in the workplace.

h/t Jay

Speaking of Kalven and ideological neutrality. . .

March 21, 2024 • 12:20 pm

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 Enemies and 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):

Years ago, I was impressed that Mr. Wilson (a freelance “academic freedom” expert [sic] as it were) was one of the few who spoke up on behalf of the attack on the free speech rights of Ward Churchill.  Alas, it’s now clear that his interest in free speech and academic freeodm is partisan through and through, as his astonishingly dishonest attack on the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report makes clear.

. . . 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.

In what ways should scientific organizations remain politically neutral?

March 21, 2024 • 10:45 am

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?

h/t: Luana

Pamela Paul on why universities can’t stop themselves from promulgating and pronouncing on Social Justice

March 14, 2024 • 9:30 am

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: