Category: Kalven Report

The University of Chicago’s statement on the war versus other university statements

November 2, 2023 • 12:30 pm

I’ve been sent or seen quite a few statements by college and universities about the war. Most of these schools don’t have a policy of institutional neutrality, so they get all tied up in knots trying to express concern for all students while judiciously avoiding mentioning the butchery enacted by Hamas on October 7.  And since a lot of these schools have made political pronouncements previously, about things like the murder of George Floyd, the assault on the Capitol, and so on, it’s a gaping lacuna in their politics to avoid condemning Hamas. Harvard lost donors because of this kind of political hypocrisy. And this is why the University of Chicago has the Kalven Principles, assuring that we make no official pronouncements about ideology, morality, or politics save in those rare instances where public events affect the working and mission of the University.

Here, for example, is the short, lean statement our University issued two days after the Hamas attack:

Support for the University Community

OCTOBER 9, 2023

Dear Members of the University Community,

The attack, ongoing conflict, and loss of life in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank have brought deep concern and sorrow to the University of Chicago community. Our Office of International Affairs (OIA) has extended support to students affiliated with the region who may be directly affected. We recognize that the loss of life, casualties, and escalating conflict bring pain and distress for those in our community, especially those with family members or other loved ones in the region.

Please note that the U.S. State Department has issued a Travel Advisory for the region; we advise anyone considering travel to the affected areas to check the latest guidance from the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Israel. Members of the University community who are planning international travel are always encouraged to use the UChicago Traveler resource.

Students can also contact OIA at 773.702.7752 or international-affairs@uchicago.edu if they need any information or assistance. Students can walk into the Student Wellness Center (840 East 59th Street) during open hours (8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday to Friday) to meet with the clinician on call in Counseling; or they can call 773.702.3625 and speak with a clinician after hours. Visit the Student Wellness website to learn more about mental health services and for information on how to schedule a counseling appointment. Assistance for faculty and staff is available through Perspectives at 800.456.6327.

Please contact our offices if you need support or assistance during this difficult time.

Sincerely,

Michele Rasmussen
Dean of Students in the University

Nick Seamons
Executive Director of the Office of International Affairs and Assistant Dean of Students in the University

Compare that statement to one from McGill University below, only one of THREE statements issued (multiple statements are common for this war), as apparently the first one was deemed insufficient. McGrill’s bloated and full of virtue signaling.

The statement above minus the signatures, is 250 words long; the one below is more than twice as long: 621 words. And the second statement doesn’t accomplish anything more. Note too that the McGill letter is one of three sent out, so multiply that 621 by about three.

Dear members of the McGill community,

I write today because I feel compelled to speak once again to the profound sorrow, suffering and distress shared by many of our colleagues and students in the wake of the horrifying loss of so many Palestinian and Israeli lives.

Institutional messages carry weight, and they bring with them a responsibility that I take seriously. So, when I write to you as your Principal, I do so after considerable reflection, taking pains to first consult a range of stakeholders and viewpoints. Despite this, these messages can sometimes be received in unintended ways; as noted in the Oct. 20 message sent by Angela Campbell, Associate Provost (Equity and Academic Policies) and Fabrice Labeau, Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning), recipients will read and interpret institutional communications “through the lens of [their] lived reality.” This is inescapable. Keeping this in mind, my role in divisive times is to listen attentively to those who are hurting, lead from a place of compassion, and work to bring our community together.
In that spirit, I hope today to make two things clear.

1.  Even in my brief time so far as Principal and Vice-Chancellor, I have come to care profoundly not only about the McGill community as a whole, but also about its members as individuals. Given this, it is not my place to weigh the anguish of one McGillian over that of another. Likewise, I will not draw distinctions between the suffering caused by the loss of Israeli and Palestinian life. Seeking to weigh the pain being experienced by one group over another both detracts and distracts from the collective grief within our community, which is where we must direct our focus and care at this time. Relatedly, while I can understand the many impassioned calls for McGill to weigh in on geopolitical crises around the world, doing so lies beyond a university’s mandate and role. Our academic mission is most faithfully served when institutional views are limited to what happens here on our campuses, so that all students, faculty, and staff feel included as members of our community, regardless of their identities and personal beliefs. As stated above, it is an inescapable reality that each of you will understand and interpret my messages based on your lived reality; rest assured however that my intentions are never to make a political statement through these communications. My focus is on you and on our community.
2.  This brings me to my second point, which is to call, once again, for respectful and constructive engagement on our campuses. In recent weeks, we have heard reports of intimidation, doxing, and other threatening behaviours targeting McGillians. These hostilities are unacceptable and must stop. As I have stated earlier, words and acts of retaliation and intimidation will not be tolerated, and reports of such conduct will be investigated and acted upon pursuant to our policies. Although I am firmly convinced that a university should remain impartial with respect to political questions, I am equally convinced that here on our campuses we must act clearly and decisively to ensure that institutional values, which include academic freedom, responsibility, integrity, equity, and inclusiveness, are upheld.

In our university community and beyond, we will inevitably come across viewpoints with which we disagree, sometimes vehemently. And here, as elsewhere, we are called upon to act with the empathy and respect that we ourselves wish to receive. Echoing Profs. Labeau and Campbell once again, I ask you to remember that words have great weight in times like these – not only my words, but yours as well. I invite us all to reflect upon this weight, and to choose words – and actions – that foster an environment of compassion, inclusivity, and respect.

Sincerely,

Deep SainiPrincipal and Vice-Chancellor

Both statements express the same things:

  1. There’s a war on
  2. People are upset
  3. If you need help in dealing with this situation, here are our resources:

Can’t you see Principal Saini wringing his hands and using the thesaurus to find new words to show how compassionate he is?  And although he argues that his university should remain impartial with respect to political questions (and he does in his letter, but at tedious length), he also gives a list of “institutional values”, including “academic freedom, responsibility, integrity, equity, and inclusiveness.” The good Principal can’t write very well, either: he’s apparently afflicted with logorrhea.

The only valid value here is “academic freedom”. The rest are moral values not officially specified by the university. If there is, say, inequity in representation of genders or races in computer science or sociology, is that a violation of “university values”?  If a student treats another badly but not illegally, is that a violation of “responsibility and integrity”? If there are “affinity spaces” for black or indigenous students, does that violate the value of “inclusivity”?

All this shows how necessary it is for all universities to have a policy of institutional neutrality, and to NOT espouse “values” beyond the ones necessary to fulfill the University’s mission, which pretty much comes down to “teaching, learning, academic freedom, and freedom of speech.”

Four Northwestern University profs endorse adoption of Kalven Principle

October 23, 2023 • 9:20 am

As regular readers here know, since 1967 the University of Chicago has had a policy of institutional neutrality, a policy embodied in our Kalven Report. This report forbids the University from making official pronouncements on any political, ideological, or moral issues, with the few exceptions being those issues that directly affect the workings of the University.  So, for example, our school issued no statements about Vietnam, Dafur, anti-communist pronouncements during the Red Scare, the murder of George Floyd, and, lately, the butchery of Israelis by Hamas. (Individuals, of course, are urged to make their views known so long as they’re not made in the name of the University.)

You can see the University of Chicago’s restrained statement on the Hamas attack here, published October 9.  It takes no sides, condemns nobody, and simply says, in effect, “There’s violence in Israel and Gaza; people are upset; the U.S. has issued a travel advisory; and here’s a list of resources for students who need help with this.”

Unlike Harvard, Cornell, and many other schools, we did not get involved in”officially” judging the conflict, for that would chill speech since people have diverse opinions ab0ut what happened. (Yes, there are those who think the Israelis who were killed had it coming!)  The result is that we did not, as Harvard’s President did, have to keep modifying our administration’s view of the attack because the faculty and society weren’t satisfied with our response.  Ergo we lost no donors, unlike other schools like Penn and Harvard.

What I am trying to say is not that people should have personal opinions on the matter, but that their views should not be expressed as official policy, either though university administrations or departments themselves.  Since only two other schools had a Kalven policy, and universities like Harvard had a history of issuing political statements, those schools would be remiss for not condemniong Hamas for its butchery.  The President of Williams College, for example, waffled, suggesting that maybe her school should also become institutionally neutral. But a sudden change of mind by the President about this, right when the school should normally have been condemning the slaughter of Jews, would look very bad.

The best policy, then is for schools to adopt, through the administration and faculty, a rule of institutional neutrality, and not just disgorge it suddenly when  a college would normally be expected condemn something ideologically unpalatable to the “progressive” Left.

But in the past 55 years, the University of Chicago has been the only school to have such a policy. In the last two years, though, we were joined by the University of North Carolna at Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University.  Given that there are 3,982 universities in America, only 0.07% of them have policies of institutional neutrality. In contrast, FIRE reports that over 100 universities (2.5%) have adopted another of our “foundational principles”: the Chicago Statement on free speech—the most liberal speech policy among all schools.

Given university-president waffling, social-media criticism, and disappearance of donors in the last two weeks, I think schools should realize it’s time (and appropriate) to join the other three schools that have adopted the Kalven Principles.

Here’s an article from Heterodox STEM signed by four professors at Northwestern University right outside Chicago, urging their school to adopt Kalven. I’ll give an excerpt and show the signers (they are not anonymous). Click on the screenshot to read the whole thing:

This letter comes on the heels of a personal statement issued by Northwestern’s President Michael Shill condemning Hamas for the attack.  Since the statement was not “official”, it would be okay under Kalven. However, I still think it unwise for higher-ups at Universities to take public stands on social media, as this too could impede free speech at their schools. (I understand that college administrators may want to make such unofficial statements, and they’re perfectly entitled to do so, even under Kalven, but I think it’s best to refrain.)

At any rate, given that context, here is an excerpt from the professors’ letter and the names of the four signers.  I’ve put the last paragraph in bold because it shows what happens when schools try to get involved in politics or flaunt their virtue. It’s invariably a mess, and it impedes discussion. The penultimate paragraph shows how President Schill was influenced by our Kalven Principles.

. . . . we also agree with President Schill’s decision not to speak for Northwestern University on this grave political matter. This has nothing to do with the present context. If moral clarity were sufficient justification for official pronouncements, it is difficult to imagine a clearer case.

Rather, it is time that university presidents, provosts, deans, and chairs recognize that they should not speak for their students and faculty. As President Schill eloquently observed: “We are a University which celebrates free expression, diversity of people and diversity of viewpoints. This is essential to our role in society. The University does not speak for our faculty, students and staff on these matters — they have their own voices, and I would venture to say, there are no doubt differences among our students and faculty on what Hamas did and how Israel is responding. For me to speak for them displaces their own freedom to speak.”

President Schill admits that he has been influenced by the University of Chicago, where he was Dean of the Law School. Specifically, his position is that recommended by the Kalven Report published there in 1967, during a period of considerable national upheaval. The Kalven Report is stirring and wise and should be read completely. It includes the following propositions: The university’s mission is the “discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” “A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions.” “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.” That is, faculty and students are allowed and expected to engage in intense debate among themselves. The university should facilitate this but should not take sides: “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.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (formerly Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has recently endorsed the Kalven report.

Our agreement with the Kalven Report reflects not only intellectual appreciation, but bitter experience. Our previous President believed it was his duty to pronounce, widely and frequently, on issues of the day. He did this even when he had no plausible expertise on relevant matters. The summer of 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, saw a seemingly never-ending flood of missives from the President, the Provost, deans, chairs, and other administrators, about police violence and racial politics. These statements were invariably unscholarly, and they were often factually inaccurate. Importantly, they discouraged rigorous discussion and debate in favor of shallow emoting. They were bad for the Northwestern intellectual community, even if many in our community wanted them. We deeply resented administrators making these statements on our behalf and know plenty of others who felt similarly. We are relieved by President Schill’s intention to abstain from this practice and hope that Northwestern can recover some of the intellectual vibrancy it has lost during recent years.

 

J. Michael Bailey (Department of Psychology)

Thomas J. Meade (Department of Chemistry)

Richard B. Silverman (Department of Chemistry)

Leif Rasmussen (Department of Computer Science)

Kudos to these four professors! Now that Northwestern’s President has also endorsed Kalven, the school should start the process of becoming institutionally neutral on political issues of the day. That would, I suppose, involve cooperation of the faculty, administration, and trustees. I’m sure the donors would support this, too!

Brian Leiter defends the Kalven Report

October 13, 2023 • 12:30 pm

Brian Leiter, a law school professor here and my partner in crime in finding Kalven Report violations, is touting Kalven’s Principle of institutional neutrality in this new letter from the Chronicles of Higher Education. Click to go to the site, but I’ve reproduced the letter below.  As instantiated several times this week, college administrators who try to make political or ideological statements not only chill speech by doing that, but also get themselves in trouble if they don’t phrase their ideological pronouncements exactly right. The several convoluted and controversial statements made by administrators trying to be on the right side of history just demonstrate more than ever why every college and university in America should adopt Kalven. (Only three have done so.)

As usual, Brian doesn’t pull any punches. It’s worth following his website, Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog.

To the Editor:

I find it baffling that anyone would want to hear from a college president or senior administrator about any domestic or international issue (“Here’s What Colleges Are, and Aren’t, Saying About the Israel-Hamas War,” The Chronicle, October 10). Administrators should be seen and not heard, unless they are speaking about college business. That is one of the ways in which the Kalven Report proposes to secure a wide open space for members of the college community to express their views, without fear that they are running afoul of institutional orthodoxy.

You again quote Brian Rosenberg, a visiting professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education and president emeritus of Macalester College, who claims that, “You cannot escape politics.” This statement doesn’t become less idiotic the more times it is quoted. If a college president remains silent about a political controversy and focuses on administering his or her college and its core functions of teaching and research, then he or she has indeed “escaped politics” in the only sense that matters in this context. If, instead, the president uses the bully pulpit to pontificate about politics, then he or she has injected politics and the pall of orthodoxy into the institution. That is exactly what the Kalven Report wants to avoid.

Brian Leiter
Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence
Director, Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values
University of Chicago

Harvard’s President is STILL trying to get it right

October 13, 2023 • 11:00 am

After Harvard’s President and administration sent out a mealymouthed email to the College on October 8 about the Israel/Gaza situation, they were criticized by more than 350 Harvard faculty for their failure to draw any moral lessons from that war. Gay and the admin were criticized for missing a “teachable moment” by “contribut[ing] to the false equivalency between attacks on noncombatants and self-defense against those atrocities.”  Others criticized that letter, too, but then things got worse: 33 Harvard student groups, most of them Muslim in nature, issued an inflammatory statement blaming the carnage wrought by Hamas on Israel. That made things even worse, as virtually nobody supported the Muslim-group statement (it’s now disappeared and many organizations have rescinded their endorsements).

So, on October 10, Gay, writing on her own, tried to clarify what she really meant in the administration’s first letter (both Harvard letters here):

A Statement from President Claudine Gay
October 10, 2023

As the events of recent days continue to reverberate, let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas. Such inhumanity is abhorrent, whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the region.

Let me also state, on this matter as on others, that while our students have the right to speak for themselves, no student group — not even 30 student groups — speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.

We will all be well served in such a difficult moment by rhetoric that aims to illuminate and not inflame. And I appeal to all of us in this community of learning to keep this in mind as our conversations continue.

Claudine Gay
President, Harvard University

That’s a decent letter; it condemns what Hamas did and affirms that the student groups were speaking on their own behalf. (As I’ve said before, however, it would be better if Harvard, like the University of Chicago, remained institutionally neutral and didn’t weigh in on political, moral, or ideological issues that didn’t directly affect the working of the University. But given that Harvard had made pronouncements before, it more or less had to say something about the Middle East situation.)

But apparently Gay wasn’t satisfied with what she wrote on October 10, and so has sent out the following statement to the Harvard community. It also contains a video that I’ve embedded below. (You can click on it to go to its site.)

The video:

I’m not sure what this adds to the two letters she already signed, but there’s nothing odious about it. But it adds confusion to the mix.

The issue for me is that Gay says, “We can issue public pronouncements declaring the rightness of our own points of view and vilify those who disagree, or we can choose to talk and to listen with care and humility. . . “.  But in her letter above, and in her condemnation of the terror attack on Israel, what else is she doing but affirming the rightness of her own point of view (which is right, but she says she’s not going to do that), and implicitly vilifying those who disagree—the members of those 20-odd Harvard organizations who are still blaming Israel for Hamas’s butchery? (Note that at 1:58 she denigrates those who are inflaming an “already volatile situation”, clearly referring to the 33 student groups.

Finally, talk with “humility” to those who blame Israel for what Hamas did? What does that mean?

In other words, by trying to clarify what she meant, Gay has gotten herself balled up in a self-contradictory policy. It would be best if she bit the bullet and made the Kalven Principles of institutional neutrality an official principle of Harvard.

She should have let well enough alone after October 10 instead of continuing what looks like virtue-flaunting. My prediction is that Gray is not going to last long as Harvard’s President, a position that seems to come with a revolving door on the boss’s office.

h/t: Norman

The National Academies post a position statement on affirmative action, followed by an email exchange between Steven Pinker and NA President Marcia McNutt

July 17, 2023 • 11:00 am

Note: This post originally was to include both Steve Pinker’s emails to National Academies President Marcia McNutt as well as her responses to Pinker (two from each), but in the end she decided that she did not want her emails reproduced here. (Both she and Pinker were sent my introduction given below.) Pinker, however, gave me permission to reproduce his.  You can try to infer McNutt’s response from Steve’s second email.

Steve sent the first email in response to the “National Academies Presidents Statement on Affirmative Action” below.

*******************

Intro (by JAC):

On June 30, the Presidents of our three National Academies issued a joint statement on the Supreme Court decision handed down the day before, the decision that found race-based admissions in universities unconstitutional. Affirmative action, at least as we’d known it for six decades, was dead.

In response to this decision, Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), John L. Anderson, President of the National Academy of Engineering, and Victor J. Dzau, President, National Academy of Medicine, issued the statement below. Because it’s on the home page of the National Academies website, was co-signed by all three presidents, is labeled “National Academies’ Presidents’ Statement” rather than “Opinion,” and lacks the standard disclaimer that the views expressed are those of the writers and not the organization, it’s natural to read it as an official position. I thus take it as an official position of the Academies and not just a personal expression of the Presidents’ sentiments.

National Academies Presidents’ Statement on Affirmative Action

Statement | June 30, 2023

Yesterday the Supreme Court issued a ruling to restrict affirmative action that will present challenges to efforts to diversify the nation’s colleges and universities. We strongly believe that the nation should remain committed to these efforts and find solutions that address racial inequities, including past and current racial discrimination and structural, systemic, and institutional racism in education.

A 2011 National Academies report stated that policies that have included affirmative action are fundamentally important to increasing the participation of members of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups at the postsecondary level across all fields (NASEM, 2011, p. 100). The report further states that increasing their participation and success contributes to the health of the nation by expanding the science and engineering talent pool, enhancing innovation, and improving the nation’s global economic leadership (NASEM, 2011, p. 3). A National Academies report issued in February 2023 recommends that leaders of organizations, including colleges and universities, take action to redress both individual bias and discrimination as well as review their own processes to determine whether they perpetuate negative outcomes for people from underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups at critical points of access and advancement (NASEM, 2023, pp. 14-15).

It is essential that our nation extend the opportunity for a college education to all, enhance diverse learning experiences for all students, and create equitable pathways to grow a highly skilled workforce and to solve our most complex problems. Diversity is crucial to the success of our society and our economy.

We must also remain committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within our own institution. We will continue to examine the implications of the decision for our staff and our work as an institution, our relationships with partners and volunteers, and our essential work of providing evidence-based advice to the nation on issues related to science, engineering, and medicine.

Marcia McNutt
President, National Academy of Sciences 

John L. Anderson
President, National Academy of Engineering 

Victor J. Dzau
President, National Academy of Medicine 

This statement could not be issued by my own school, the University of Chicago, as it violates the position of institutional neutrality laid out by our 1967 Kalven Report, which forbids our school from making official statements about politics, ideology, and morality unless they are essential to bolstering the university’s function: teaching, learning, and researching. (Our own five-line statement supporting equal opportunity and access for minority groups, while saying that we’re committed to affirmative action, says nothing about the Supreme Court decision, nor have we issued a statement about it.) The Kalven Report was issued because official statements by University officials or departments could be seen as chilling the speech of those who disagree with these positions. (Unofficial and personal statements, of course, are encouraged as free speech, but official statements impede free speech.)

The National Academies’ (NAs’) statement violates institutional neutrality in several ways. First, it is clearly a response to the Supreme Court decision, and to any reasonable individual says “that decision was wrong”. The first two paragraphs lay out why it was wrong, including the NAS’s belief that the Court’s decision presents “challenges” to the NAs’ policy to address and rectify “racial inequities”, and notes the NAs’ previous claim that affirmative action was “fundamentally important” in rectifying these inequities.

Another reason why this political statement couldn’t pass muster at Chicago is because it asserts as fact tendentious propositions like the value of affirmative action and the causation of minority underrepresentation as “past and current racial discrimination and structural, systemic, and institutional racism in education.” Again, this statement can be debated, particularly the part about existing structural, systemic, and institutional racism.

Further, the last paragraph urges people—I presume members of the NA—to engage in advancing “diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within our own institution.” That now-familiar phrase does not, of course, refer to the abstract goals of diversity, inclusion, and equity per se, which are unexceptionable, but to a specific set of policies employed in many universities and other institutions that include affirmative action, reporting of data on racial composition, and race-conscious orientation and training sessions.

As such, this call for action again establishes an official policy, which is especially problematic because NA members are being adjured to advance “equity” in the recent sense of representation of groups in proportion to their presence in the American population. Given other causes of deviations from the population average besides bigotry (e.g., differences in preference or education), it’s debatable whether “equity” in the statistical sense is what we should be striving for instead of equal opportunity. Either way, what we have here is apparently an official endorsement of a particular political position: affirmative action was right; the Supreme Court was wrong; all discrepancies from population statistics are caused by bias; and we must keep striving to match institutional racial proportions to national ones. In taking a particular moral position—and note that both Steve Pinker and I agree with more limited ways to boost ethnic diversity, but disagree with institutional statements about such issues—the NAS is violating institutional neutrality. The Academies were created and tasked (and are still tasked) not with taking sides on ideological issues, but, as Steve notes below, to provide “independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology”.

Finally, note the assertion that “diversity” is crucial to the success of colleges, our economy and society. What kind of diversity? The only kind mentioned is diversity of “racial and ethnic minority groups.” But other kinds of diversity may be even more important to the advancement of science, particularly diversity of viewpoints (the members of a given ethnic group, of course, don’t all share a single viewpoint!), political orientation, religion, and socioeconomic status.  Again, the Supreme Court made this point in its decision:

A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

This joint statement, then, makes a number of tendentious points that, in toto, would chill the speech of NA members who disagree.  This violates any institutional neutrality that the National Academies have—or should have based on its mission statement, which says that the job of the NAS is not to promote ideological positions but to provide scientific advice to the government.

And, as Steve points out below, taking political positions like this (again, a position that both Steve and I agree with to some extent) runs the danger of alienating the public, whether those statements be Left- or Right-wing. I recently posted about a survey in Nature showing that the magazine’s political endorsement of Biden for U.S. President (a one-off endorsement) led Republicans to be more distrustful not just of the journal, but of science in general.

It is for these reasons that scientific journals and organizations should remain as far away as possible from ideological, moral, and political statements. While editors and scientists may feel compelled to inject their opinions into official venues, they are best made in statements clearly labeled as “opinion” (and distinguished from official positions of the organization), as their overall effect on science is negative—both in chilling the speech of scientists and eroding public trust in science.  While I encourage scientists to express their own views on these issues, it should always be done in personal-opinion statements that don’t carry the imprimatur of institutions like the NAS.

In response to the statement above, Steven Pinker, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, had an email exchange with Marcia McNutt, the NAS President  (His emails were copied to the Presidents of the other two Academies as well.)

There were two back-and-forths between Pinker and McNutt. Steve gave permission to put up his emails here, but Dr. McNutt decided not to have her emails published.

Although it will become clear that I agree with Steve’s point of view in this exchange (after all, I’ve been defending the Kalven Report for years), I am posting this material to begin a discussion about diversity, about affirmative action, and about institutional neutrality. I invite readers to go through this post and give their opinions in the comments.  All I can say now is that McNutt and Pinker were in unanimity about some matters, but differed strongly about others.

Pinker’s emails:

From: Pinker, Steven <pinker@wjh.harvard.edu>
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2023 11:20 AM
To: McNutt, Marcia K. [JAC: I’ve omitted the NAS Presidents’ email addresses]
Cc:  Anderson and Dzau
Subject: NAS Statement on Affirmative Action

Dear Marcia,

I would like to express my disquiet at the recent NAS Statement on Affirmative Action. The desirability of racial preferences in university admissions is not a scientific issue but a political and moral one. It involves tradeoffs such as maintaining the proportion of African Americans in elite universities at the expense of fairness to qualified applicants who are rejected because of their race, including other racial minorities such as Asian Americans. Moreover it is a highly politicized policy, almost exclusively associated with the left, and one that majorities of Americans of all races oppose.

It’s not clear to me how endorsing one side of a politically polarizing, nonscientific issue is compatible with the Academy’s stated mission “providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology”.

The problem is worse than being incompatible with the Academy’s mission; it could substantially harm the Academy’s goal of promoting politicians’ and the public’s acceptance of science. Extensive research has shown that rejection of the scientific consensus on evolution, anthropogenic climate change, and other scientific topics is uncorrelated with scientific literacy but predictable from political orientation: the farther to the right, the greater the rejection of evolution and climate change.

In this regard, for the nation’s foremost scientific organization to identify itself with the political left is to all but guarantee that a substantial proportion, perhaps a majority, of politicians and the public will reject science as just another partisan faction with which they have no sympathy. This strikes me as unwise.

I wonder whether these considerations entered into the decision to issue the statement, and the Presidents decided to proceed nonetheless. Perhaps you considered the downsides and decided that the benefits outweighed the costs. Or, am I bringing up something that the Presidents did not even consider? If the latter, I urge you to at least take it into consideration in the Academies’ public communications, and other activities, in the future.

Sincerely,
Steven Pinker
Member, National Academy of Sciences
Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology
Harvard University

Dr. McNutt teplied that day, and the next day Pinker wrote the following in response:

On Jul 11, 2023, at 11:15 AM, Pinker, Steven <pinker@wjh.harvard.edu> wrote:

Thank you, Marcia, for your swift reply. My concerns, though, have not been allayed.

First, if your goal in issuing the statement was not to criticize the Supreme Court decision, I believe you did not succeed. Nowhere did the statement distinguish legal from scientific issues, the first two sentences are:

“Yesterday the Supreme Court issued a ruling to restrict affirmative action that will present challenges to efforts to diversify the nation’s colleges and universities. We strongly believe that the nation should remain committed to these efforts …”

I don’t think any reader of the letter could read that as anything but a criticism. If the Presidents’ goal was to issue a statement that was not perceived as criticizing the Supreme court or defending affirmative action, was a draft shown to politically diverse commentators (that is, including ones who are not on the political left) to ascertain whether it would be understood that way?

It’s also hard to understand how the statement did not “defend the approach to diversifying the student bodies that was struck down by the courts.” The third sentence approvingly says, “A 2011 National Academies report stated that policies that have included affirmative action are fundamentally important….” But it is exactly the policy of affirmative action that the court struck down. Even more puzzlingly, the 2011 report in fact says little about affirmative action, does not review research on its effects on innovation or global economic leadership, and does not list it among its six “Recommendations” or two “Priorities.”  The citation on p. 100 merely lists it among a range of policies it deems “fundamentally important.”

Even more concerning, the statement could have been lifted out of the pages of any recent left-wing opinion magazine, since it reiterates the current conviction that racial inequities are primarily due to “past and current racial discrimination and structural, systemic, and institutional racism in education” and to “individual bias and discrimination.” Entirely unmentioned are other potential causes of racial discrepancies, including poverty, school quality, family structure, and cultural norms. It is surprising to see a scientific organization attribute a complex sociological outcome to a single cause.

Finally, the statement, and your letter, equate diversity of ideas with diversity of race. The advantages of intellectual diversity are obvious (though I have not seen any statements from the Academy addressing the shrinking political diversity among science faculty, nor the increasing campaigns that punish or cancel scientists who express politically unpopular views). The assumption that racial diversity is the same as intellectual diversity was exactly what the Supreme Court decision singled out and struck down, since it carries with it the racist assumptions that black students think alike, and that their role in universities is to present their race-specific views to their classmates.

Of course, citing rigorous empirical research that is relevant to the issues facing the court or guiding admissions policies going forward would be a highly appropriate role for the Academies. These might include comparisons of the outcomes of racial versus socioeconomic preferences, the effects of standardized test­-based admissions policies on student success, and the implications for scientific quality at institutions like UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan of mandates to eliminate racial preferences. But simply extolling the ambiguous word “diversity” would seem to be beneath the intellectual standards we expect of a scientific academy.

Our goals are the same: to enhance the progress and political and public acceptance of science. In that regard I urge the three of you to give more consideration to the way that communications from the Academies signal solidarity with a political faction rather than “providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology.”

Best,
Steve

Dr. McNutt replied soon thereafter, but the response is redacted at her request.

Vanderbilt’s Chancellor sticks up for institutional neutrality

May 16, 2023 • 9:15 am

To me it makes eminent sense for a university to maintain a position of institutional neutrality—that is, to avoid taking public stands on moral, ideological, and political issues.  By taking such stands, the University, which is supposed to be a place where questioning and free speech are encouraged, chills the speech of its members. What graduate student or untenured faculty member would risk punishment by publicly taking issue with an official University position on, say, abortion, DEI, gun control, and the like? (Evidence of such punishments are widespread; I’ll mention a few below.) Official University statements serve to “chill speech”, which is inimical to the very purpose of a university.

In fact, up to now there were only two colleges in America that took an official position in favor of institutional neutrality. One was the University of Chicago, which has held that position since 1967, when the Kalven Report became policy. As I wrote two years ago:

At the University of Chicago we have a policy, based on the 1967 Kalven Report, that prohibits official units of the university from making moral, political, or ideological statements—unless those statements are about issues that directly affect the mission of the University. This includes university departments. The purpose is to promote freedom of speech by preventing the chilling of speech, for “official” university statements, by the nature of their “offficial-ness”, make those who disagree with them reluctant to speak out, including students, grad students, postdocs, and untenured professors. The University has refused, over the years, to issue any statements about stuff like Darfur, the Vietnam War, Communism and the Red Scare, and now about various forms of social unrest.  (Over the last few years I’ve written many posts on this issue.)

The one exception for us is that official statements may be all right if they bear on the mission of the University of Chicago. So, for example, our University supported the DACA program because kicking out students whose parents arrived here illegally would be unfair to students already in college and also force the university to vet the immigration status of applicants. But these exceptions are rare.

I’ll give one quote from Kalven, my favorite bit:

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.

Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues.

The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints.

Can you seriously oppose those sentiments? If you do, then you see the University as a venue for taking sides in public debates at the expense of chilling the speech of its members.

I should add that nothing prohibits university members from taking personal stands on these issues; the statements just cannot carry any university imprimatur. (And because the university president’s stands may be conflated with “official stands,” it’s probably best for those at the top to keep their views to themselves.)

The second school that abides by Kalven, which recently adopted this policy, is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

But now we apparently have a third school: Vanderbilt University. Its Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, recently declared that his school would embrace a possibility of “principled neutrality”. This is described in the Wall Street Journal op-ed below by Lamar Alexander, former President of the University of Tennessee, U.S. Senator from the same state, and U.S. Secretary of Education.  Yes, it’s in the conservative op-ed section of the WSJ, but do you really expect to see a defense of institutional neutrality (ergo free speech) in the liberal mainstream media? Click to read:

 

(Diermeier had laid out the basis of his stand in a short Inside Higher Ed piece in 2022.)

In this case, Diermeier’s declaration was prompted by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which outraged many (including me). Urged by his faculty and students to officially weigh in opposing that decision, Diermeier refused, declaring his principle:

When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the University of California’s president denounced the decision as “antithetical” to UC’s values. Vanderbilt University’s new chancellor took a different approach. Daniel Diermeier, who was appointed in 2020, reaffirmed Vanderbilt’s commitment to “principled neutrality,” in which the college and its leadership refrain from taking positions on controversial issues that don’t directly relate to the function of the university.

If “principled neutrality” sounds anodyne, you haven’t been paying attention. Mr. Diermeier’s stand is boldly reassuring. That his policies are an exception among elite universities isn’t.

Even within Vanderbilt, Mr. Diermeier’s stance is under attack. “Many of us—faculty, students, staff and alumni—are ready for a divorce from the chancellor’s position,” Brian L. Heuser, a Vanderbilt professor, argued in an Inside Higher Ed column. Mr. Heuser wants the university to take a stand against the Tennessee Legislature’s votes on a variety of issues.

(I’ll deal with Heuser’s arguments in a moment.)

Diermeier’s stand arose from the same roots as Chicago’s: repeated demands that the University take stands on public issues. At the University of Chicago this began decades ago, when people demanded that our university take a stand against Communism and then the Red Scare. It refused, and likewise refused when asked to make statements opposing Vietnam, Darfur, and the like. From the WSJ:

Mr. Diermeier’s commitment—as well as the university’s embrace of free expression on campus—is a legacy from the time when I was a student at Vanderbilt. In the 1960s, the university was being pummeled from the left and right for hosting controversial speakers like Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael and Strom Thurmond. Chancellor Alexander Heard said at the time: “A university’s obligation is not to protect students from ideas, but rather expose them to ideas, to help make them capable of handling and, hopefully, having ideas.” Vanderbilt doesn’t take positions on abortion, guns or climate change, but it will ensure that on its campus you are free to state your position and hear others’ viewpoints.

That freedom is of course chilled when the powers that be have official stands that differ from your own. And so Diermeier embraced Kalven, though the Kalven Principle, sadly, isn’t mentioned in this op-ed:

Principled neutrality isn’t enough to prepare students to be good and thoughtful citizens. Too many are “taking cues from the polarized culture around them,” Mr. Diermeier says—they’re declaring that those with opposing views aren’t merely incorrect but immoral. Such “moral tribalism” and a culture of condemnation has severely impeded the free exchange of ideas that is higher education’s lifeblood.

Colleges today, Mr. Diermeier believes, must teach students how to debate constructively and “avoid the us-vs.-them dynamic that can lead to a breakdown in discourse.”

Did I mention that Diermeier was Provost of the University of Chicago for four years before he took the Chancellorship of Vanderbilt? I like to think that his ideas are drawn in part from the Kalven Principles that reign here.

Now the existence of a mere three colleges embracing institutional neutrality out of the 4,000 degree-granting colleges in America is a pathetic proportion: 0.075%. (In contrast, nearly 100 colleges have adopted a version of Chicago’s 2014 Principles of Free Expression). Other schools really must join Chicago, UNC, and Vanderbilt lest America’s universities change from institutions of learning, teaching, and discussion into instruments of social change. Make no mistake about it: this will happen until college administrators wise up and make free speech their most important guiding principle.

Finally, have a look at Deirmeier’s opponents, exemplified by Vanderbilt Professor Brian Heuser in his Inside Higher Ed piece, “A Critique of ‘Principled Neutrality‘.” Heuser insists that universities must take stands on political or ideological issues to stave off threats to the well being of American citizens:

Despite the chancellor’s insistence that “staying neutral requires courage,” many of our university stakeholders are experiencing significant fear as Nashville’s social conditions have deteriorated for women and members of our LGBTQI, Jewish, Black and immigrant communities. In this context, such neutrality is better understood as a toxic form of indifference to the lived realities of our citizens. We have also experienced horrific gun violence arriving on our doorstep, and our undergraduate students have taken the lead in defending our community’s safety. In this context, such neutrality is better understood as a brutal fear of governmental intrusion into our affairs.

Due in large part to our exceptional stock of human capital and economic impact, universities can be powerful—even profound—actors in the public discourse. But adeptly leveraging this potential requires transformational leadership, political acumen and a steadfast commitment to prioritizing the common good. Universities can—and often do—create significant social cohesion by using their knowledge capital to shape the public’s understanding of and commitment to inclusive causes. But this potential must also be activated by administrators who believe that it is worth their time and effort to engage with their larger communities on difficult issues.

[Note the woke Social Justice language: “toxic indifference”, “lived realities”, etc.]

The problem here, as you’ve probably seen, is that all the positions that Heuser thinks the university should take are liberal or leftist positions. I happen to agree with them, but that’s not the point. The point is one that Christopher Hitchens always made when opposing censorship: who decides which positions are the official and approved ones?  What if a Catholic chancellor decides to issue a statement opposing all abortions? That would be allowable if institutional neutrality weren’t in play. Or, what if a Southern university issues statements opposing gun control because it’s in America’s interests for its citizens to protect themselves?  As political and moral views change, so must the university’s “official” stands, and those who oppose them risk being punished. It’s better to avoid taking any official stands, allowing free speech to proliferate on campus. Colleges are not, as Kalven states (again), instruments of political change:

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.

No, a university is not a club, a trade association, or a lobby; neither is it a political party.

With respect to official positions quashing free speech, Heuser’s argument, I think, is dead wrong:

To be clear, the chancellor and I agree that universities require significant internal freedom—academic freedom—to enable the continuous free flow of ideas that leads to everything from drug discoveries to political revolutions. We also agree that universities have an obligation to safeguard the intellectual freedom of our stakeholders—especially when their views are offensive—so long as it is exercised in constructive and nonviolent ways. However, his assertion that advancing institutional positions on political and policy-making issues somehow undermines an institution’s commitment to free speech and open discourse is utterly wrong. To the contrary, it is impossible to guarantee the free exchange of ideas without first assuring the participants of those exchanges that their basic human rights will be protected and defended, internally and externally. Failing to publicly defend those rights permits faculty, students and staff to be interrogated (and marginalized) on the basis of their human identities, rather than on the merits of their ideas and scholarship. From this vantage, “principled neutrality” is intellectually unprincipled and incongruent with the tasks of assuring personal safety and equal opportunity for all members of our university community. It is best interpreted as a privileged position of political convenience rather than a requisite for rigorous intellectual engagement.

This is a “free speech but. . . ” argument.

Given the many examples of professors being deplatformed, sanctioned or even fired for taking positions against DEI and other university-approved positions, it’s risible that Heuser argues that free speech won’t be chilled by institutional non-neutrality. Has he heard of Joshua Katz’s firing at Princeton, or the three professors at Texas’s Collins College fired for making political statements? (Some of these statements, by the way, were from the Left, showing that “who makes the rules?” is the big objection to institutional non-neutrality.)

___________

UPDATE: I’ve just found that Vanderbilt has published an official statement on Freedom of Expression that includes both free speech and “principled neutrality”.  Welcome to the trio of free-speech schools, and raspberries to Dr. Heuser.

On University administrators and departments making political, ideological, or moral statements

December 16, 2022 • 12:30 pm

At the University of Chicago we have a policy, based on the 1967 Kalven Report, that prohibits official units of the university from making moral, political, or ideological statements—unless those statements are about issues that directly affect the mission of the University. This includes university departments. The purpose is to promote freedom of speech by preventing the chilling of speech, for “official” university statements, by the nature of their “offficial-ness”, make those who disagree with them reluctant to speak out, including students, grad students, postdocs, and untenured professors. The University has refused, over the years, to issue any statements about stuff like Darfur, the Vietnam War, Communism and the Red Scare, and now about various forms of social unrest.  (Over the last few years I’ve written many posts on this issue.)

We are in fact the only university I know that has an official policy of viewpoint neutrality, though the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is in the process of enacting the policy, too. But that’s it. In the article below, form the Inside Higher Ed (click to read), various universities ponder making viewpoint-neutrality policies, but they all chicken out in the end and simply proffer “recommendations” which, if implemented, could create a viewpoint-neutral university. But there’s no requirement for such a policy anywhere except here and at UNC-CH.

The article centers on two schools: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of California system.

Here are the “guidelines” passed by the UIUC Senate:

The UIUC Senate guidelines include five major recommendations, beyond the ultimate counsel against broad departmental statements on external matters:

  1. Academic unit bylaws should detail a clear process, based on shared governance principles, for issuing any statement expressing the position of that unit.
  2. Any faculty members who believe a departmental statement violates their academic freedom can appeal to standing faculty committees.
  3. To avoid giving a “false impression of unanimity, in many cases (especially on highly contentious and controversial issues),” it’s better to issue a statement signed by specific signatories and to include any dissenting views.
  4. To “prevent any misunderstanding,” statements should include a disclaimer that the unit doesn’t represent the university as a whole.
  5. As specific academic units don’t own their websites, departments “should not post on their website, or disseminate through university-affiliated departmental social media sites, statements that are not directly tied to the unit’s core academic research and teaching activities or addressing matters of university policy.”

UIUC’s Senate approved the policy committee’s work 76 to 19, with 22 abstentions.

While #5 recommends that departments cannot post on their websites statements unrelated to their mission of teaching and research, remember that this is only a recommendation, not a requirement.

Here it’s required, and in the last several years ten University of Chicago departments or units have published ideological statements on their websites. Nine of them have been forced to remove those statements. Only one remains, and people are discussing it. In the end, UIUC can still issue departmental statements, as the guidelines are merely recommendations.

Note as well that UIUC allows the administration and University officials to make political/ideological statements, but according to a “clear process” that hasn’t yet been developed. In other words, the President of UIUC can say what he wants about politics or social issues and so on. So can other officials like deans and provosts.

It’s similar at the University of California, which has these rules:

The University of California’s Academic Council, part of the system’s Academic Senate, also approved new recommendations for departmental statements in May. Drafted by the University Committee on Academic Freedom, these recommendations say that:

  • Departments should develop clear but flexible standards for developing and issuing statements on controversial topics.
  • Departments “should be transparent about who is included when the department speaks as a department” and whenever possible vote anonymously to “minimize chilling effect or pressure on members of the department with minority views.”
  • All statements on controversial matters should explain the position taken and who is taking it.
  • Departments ideally should consult with their campus Committee on Academic Freedom prior to publishing a departmental statement on a controversial issue.

Brian Soucek, professor of law and Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Davis, and former chair of the systemwide academic freedom committee, said the points are “guidance, not regulations or mandates. The gist is that departments should develop procedures for how statements on controversial issues get made. They need to think about—and make clear in the statement—who those statements are speaking for. And they should include a disclaimer making clear that they are not speaking on behalf of the University of California.”

Again, there are no prohibitions here, merely a recommendation for developing “clear but flexible standards for developing and issuing statements on controversial topics”, and it’s recommended that such statements should include who, exactly, stands behind them.

These schools are cowardly. Viewpoint neutrality, like freedom of speech, is a principle that has a clear purpose: fostering free expression. There is not much wiggle room here, and the University of Chicago has almost none (the University did support DACA because overturning it would mean that we’d lose some of our students). The reason schools are so timorous about implementing Kalven-like regulations is because departments and faculty INSIST on having their say, on University websites, about politics and ideology. They have a burning, aching need to parade their virtue and weigh in on issues of the day.

Well, they can have their say on private websites, or in letters to the school newspaper, or in non-official statements.  Viewpoint neutrality of colleges remains, in my opinion, the best way to maintain freedom of speech at a university, as well as at many other institutions.

I’ll give one quote from our Kalven Report that I love: