The Costs and Benefits of University Position-Taking
REVISITING THE KALVEN REPORT: THE UNIVERSITY’S ROLE IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ACTION (Keith E. Whittington & John Tomasi eds., Johns Hopkins Press, forthcoming).
17 Pages Posted: 4 Jun 2024
Date Written: May 8, 2024
Abstract
Debates over institutional neutrality at universities are heating up and higher-ed is approaching a critical moment of reform. After a decade of university presidents announcing positions on nearly every political issue du jour—abortion, immigration, criminal justice, race incidents, and so on —universities are now waking up to the sobering fact that trust in higher education has plummeted. Survey after survey shows that Americans view universities as increasingly politicized. This trend, along with the difficulties of responding to the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel and the crisis in Gaza, has reignited calls for institutional neutrality —the idea that a university should not take a position on external political events. Long the sole province of the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, more than a dozen universities seem poised to adopt a principle of neutrality or restraint.
Yet critics of institutional neutrality are raising a new set of objections. In the past year, prominent critics have argued that institutional neutrality rests “on an empirical judgment that whenever a university addresses significant social issues, it implicitly inhibits faculty freedom.” But that claim, the critics charge, “lacks empirical evidence.” Moreover, critics argue that universities cannot be said to be neutral because they “constantly monitor and evaluate the merits of faculty research,” and “[s]uch decisions are not neutral in any ordinary sense of the word.” Other critics claim that the university’s core mission of educating students requires that it take positions on events that implicate fundamental values, especially in ways that teach students how to be better citizens. (We can refer to these critiques as the empirical objection, the impossibility of neutrality, and the educational imperative, respectively.)
But these critics make several fundamental mistakes. First, they take as their baseline that universities should issue statements—a policy of position-taking. By doing so, they focus on the costs of institutional neutrality without ever bothering to evaluate the costs and benefits of position-taking. Second, these critics misunderstand some of the core purposes of institutional neutrality and the harms of institutional position-taking. The debate is currently riddled with abstract references to values, unfounded concerns, and confusing jargon.
In this essay, I step back and provide a simpler way of evaluating institutional neutrality and its opposite, position-taking. To determine the optimal policy for a university, we should first identify the benefits and costs of the current policy, the practice of regularly taking positions on events external to the university. One of the essay’s main contributions, then, is to shift the debate from an exclusive focus on the merits of neutrality to, instead, an examination of the merits of position-taking. Once we approach the issue this way, it becomes surprisingly clear that there are nearly no benefits to position-taking and the costs are clear, concerning, and compelling.
Institutional neutrality is simply a much better policy for most universities because it can serve several principal purposes: to avoid institutional orthodoxy (and preserve the academic freedom of faculty and freedom of speech of students to opine on matters of the day), to preserve the university’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public, and to avoid the administrative costs of dealing with endless demands for position-taking. These goals are consonant with the university’s foundational missions of producing knowledge and educating students. Free from official positions on external politics, students and faculty can better focus on research and learning, on airing their own opinions and engaging in open arguments, and on pushing the boundaries of knowledge. And administrators can avoid constant requests to take positions on a multiplicity of political issues that expand by the day. As a result, the university can focus on its twin missions.
Setting aside this commonsense cost-benefit approach, I also take up the three objections to neutrality mentioned above: the empirical objection, the impossibility of neutrality, and the educational imperative. Among other things, I argue that the critics misapprehend both the theoretical and empirical claim and misunderstand the argument for neutrality.
Keywords: academic freedom, institutional neutrality, Kalven Report, universities
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation