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.
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.
Steve Pinker has published his remedy for Harvard’s woes in today’s Boston Globe; he outlined these to me last week over a beer, but I didn’t feel at liberty to divulge what he said he was writing about. Now I can.
But the fricking Globe is completely paywalled, so I had to go to our University library to get this article. If you click on the title below (the subtitle is “For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This includes Harvard.”), you won’t be able to see it. So I’ll give a précis and some excerpts, and perhaps a judicious inquiry will get you the article.
For now, excerpts (indented) will suffice. As usual, Pinker’s piece is very well written. First he talks about Presidentgate, when the Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn were excoriated first by Republicans in a Congressional hearing, and then by most of the media.
. . . . The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. [President Claudine] Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.
I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.
Pinker then notes that Gay was correct in answering Stefanik’s questions the way she did, for what you make of the calls for genocide of the Jews depends on how you interpret the intentions of the chanters. Further, Harvard can’t punish anyone without an investigation. (Remember, Harvard doesn’t abide by First-Amendment speech principles so Gay was answering according to Harvard’s code of student conduct.)
The real problem with Gay’s testimony was that she could not clearly and credibly invoke those principles because they either have never been explicitly adopted by Harvard or they have been flagrantly flouted in the past (as Stefanik was quick to point out). Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens. Harvard’s subzero FIRE rating reveals many other punishments of politically incorrect peccadillos.
So for the president of Harvard to suddenly come out as a born-again free-speech absolutist, disapproving of what genocidaires say but defending to the death their right to say it, struck onlookers as disingenuous or worse.
That was the problem: the hypocrisy of having damned free speech in the past but suddenly adopting it when it involved calling for the deaths of Jews. It’s the double standard that got Harvard in trouble.
Pinker then tenders his five-point solution (I’ve condensed the text):
For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.
Free speech. 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. These include crimes that by their very nature are committed with speech, like extortion, bribery, libel, and threats, together with incitement of imminent lawless action. It also permits restraints on the time, place, and manner of expression. The First Amendment does not entitle someone to blare propaganda from a sound truck in a residential neighborhood at 3 a.m. or to set up a soapbox in the middle of a busy freeway. . .
Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer. It’s even worse when individual departments take positions, because it sets up a conflict of interest with any dissenting students and faculty whose fates they control.. . . .
It’s about time that Harvard adopt Chicago’s Kalven Report. (Only three schools have done so: the U of C, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt.) But institutional neutrality only makes sense, for it exists to promote free speech. If colleges adopt official moral, political, or ideological positions, those who buck them will be intimidated. Speech will be quashed. Institutional neutrality is really required for a college to have free speech.
Nonviolence. Some students think it is a legitimate form of political expression to drown out a speaker, block the audience’s view with a screen, obstruct public passageways, invade a lecture hall chanting slogans over bullhorns, force administrators out of their offices and occupy the building, or get in the faces of other students.
Universities should not indulge acts of vandalism, trespassing, and extortion. Free speech does not include a heckler’s veto, which blocks the speech of others. . . .
Note that the “heckler’s veto” is permitted under the First Amendment, but not under any decent college speech policy. This is one place where I accept not fully embracing the First Amendment in college speech. But of course I do agree with Steve about prohibiting acts of vandalism, extortion, or trespassing. But that part of the recommendation is superfluous, as those are prohibited by all colleges.
Viewpoint diversity. Universities have become intellectual and political monocultures. Seventy-seven percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and fewer than 3 percent as conservative. Many university programs have been monopolized by extreme ideologies, such as the conspiracy theory that the world’s problems are the deliberate designs of a white heterosexual male colonialist oppressor class. (The appalling antisemitism infesting college campuses grew out of the corollary that Israelis, and by extension Jews who support them, are a party to this conspiracy.) Vast regions in the landscape of ideas are no-go zones, and dissenting ideas are greeted with incomprehension, outrage, and censorship. . .
Agreed, of course. And then Steve tenders a controversial but necessary nostrum:
Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them. . .
. . .Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.
And the conclusion:
A fivefold way of free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity, and DEI disempowerment will not be a quick fix for universities. But it’s necessary to reverse their tanking credibility and better than the alternatives of firing the coach or deepening the hole they have dug for themselves.
Harvard would certainly be “fixed” if these plans were implemented, but the chance they will be is nil. The letter from Harvard’s Board of Overseers, shown in the previous post, suggests that they clearly don’t want institutional neutrality, and any plan like the one above requires the approval of the Board. Likewise, I don’t see Harvard approving of free speech anytime soon. Nor will it get rid of DEI: bad “optics”.
The fivefold way only makes sense, though ditching DEI is a no-go, even at the University of Chicago. But at Harvard I fear that Steve’s suggestions will remain a pipe dream.
Readers must know by now that while I’m sympathetic to Israel in the current conflict, I wouldn’t let those sympathies weaken my hard-line support for freedom of speech. So when universities rushed to condemn Hamas in official statements, I didn’t really approve. Universities shouldn’t be in the business of making official statements about politics, ideology, or morality (something embodied in the University of Chicago’s Kalven report), no matter what the issues are, for official statements chill the speech of those who disagree. Still, only two schools in America that I know of—ours and UNC Chapel Hill—have official positions of institutional neutrality. (Ours has a few exceptions when the statements involve issues directly affecting the mission of the university: teaching, research, and learning.)
However, if Universities issue ideological statements habitually, and have made statements about George Floyd, Kyle Rittenhouse, Breonna Taylor, and the like, then of course they should have condemned what Hamas did on October 7. It just wouldn’t do, after a history of emitting political statements, for a university to suddenly become institutionally neutral when called upon to defend Jews. That has, as they say, “bad optics.” But then they need to reassess their overall principles. And they should adopt Kalven. I think that this will happen more often after the war, even if it happens for the bad reason that universities can barely bring themselves to criticize antisemitism.
Unfortunately, several universities, notably Harvard and Penn, didn’t condemn Hamas strongly enough for many people, and they had to go through several iterations of the condemnations. Harvard went through three, as President Claudine Gay, who signed an official condemnation with other administrators, then had to issue two subsequent clarifications. Despite that, both Penn and Harvard lost big-time Jewish donors appalled by what seemed to them reluctance to condemn outright evil behavior.
And that pretzel-twisting by universities is the very reason they should adopt institutional neutrality. It simply avoids the impossible requirement to strike the right tone in a political statement, one that doesn’t offend a lot of students, faculty, and especially donors. The University of Chicago, whose anodyne statement about the war is here, hasn’t lost any donors because we took no official position.
Sadly, there will always be those who don’t recognize the utility of becoming institutionally neutral, and the reason why such policies exist. “Why?,” they demand, “can’t you simply condemn something so palpably evil as the butchery of Hamas on October 7?” To them it seems like you are timorous or even afraid to condemn Hamas. Not so: our university leaves it up to us to make unofficial personal statements about anything. It’s called freedom of speech, and we don’t have to worry about bucking what’s seen as “official policy”.
Sadly, four Israeli geneticists published a letter in Nature (below) which I’ve embedded, demanding the denunciation not just of terrorism, but of antisemitism, as well as calling for the release of kidnapped Israelis. Of course I agree with their views, but where I disagree is in their call that universities should issue official condemnations.
Below is the letter, which you can also read here:
Now of course universities should protect their members from “antisemitic actions” if those actions are repeated harassment of individuals, threats, or physical violence. That is illegal behavior. And they shouldn’t give academic credit to students who participate in pro-Palestinian rallies, unless there’s some reason to give academic credit to students who participate in any rally. (I can’t think of any.)
But beyond that, I reject all the other demands of the writers. Yes, there are people who think Hamas is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and their moral compasses are all twisted, but they have a right to express their views without fear of university retribution.
And the sentence “academic institutions should not condone distortion of facts in responses to the Hamas-Israeli conflict” leads inevitably to the view that “academic institutions should not condone distortion of facts” period, and that rabbit hole has no bottom.
