This can turn into an endless cycle unless colleges and universities decide to end it now. Higher education needs to find its way back to a place where institutions do not weigh in, as institutions, on the controversies of the day. Silence is not necessarily complicity. Rather, it is a sound practice consistent with academia’s role in society, which is to foster open inquiry.
A study in 2021 by the professional association for student affairs administrators found that 230 of 300 institutions of higher education surveyed issued statements in the two weeks after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. More than half addressed broader debates around institutional and structural racism. Harvard University not only issued such a statement but also flew the Ukrainian flag over Harvard Yard after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Then-President Lawrence S. Bacow declared, “Harvard University stands with the people of Ukraine.” The University of California system’s president called the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade “antithetical to the University of California’s mission and values.”
This is why former Harvard president and former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers had a point when he said, after the school’s initial response to Oct. 7, that it had “decided not to pursue a position of neutrality.” And so did the House of Representatives, when it adopted a resolution on Nov. 2, by a vote of 396 to 23, condemning antisemitism on campus. The measure says that colleges “frequently speak out on public issues, but have failed to speak out clearly after the October 7 attack by Hamas.”
We support abortion rights, condemned the invasion of Ukraine and decried Floyd’s murder. We of course condemn Hamas’s massacre. The problem with official university statements is that, however valid and well-intentioned, they imply there is an orthodox view of those matters — and related policy issues — within a particular school. This can deter debate and set off competition for a university’s moral imprimatur, as we are seeing now.
Universities need to recommit to the principles in the University of Chicago’s Kalven report of 1967. Drafted during a similar period of conflict and upheaval, the report says: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. … It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.” When a university takes a “collective position,” it says, this inhibits the “full freedom of dissent on which [the university] thrives.” After Oct. 7, the University of Chicago adhered to the Kalven principles. Its president, Paul Alivisatos, did not speak out on the Hamas attacks or the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Two university leaders sent a generic message to students, notifying them of relevant travel advisories and pointing them toward the university’s support services.
All rules have exceptions, and the Kalven principles are, well, no exception. Religious schools such as Catholic University, Yeshiva University or Zaytuna College may choose to take stands consistent with their founding doctrinal commitments. The Kalven principles allow universities to weigh in on issues that “threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.” The best interpretation of this exception would confine it strictly to policy questions touching on academic freedom, though admittedly there are gray areas. Racial diversity in admissions is an issue of both social justice and academic practice, about which several institutions weighed in after the Supreme Court ruled against race-conscious admissions.
However, for secular institutions committed to unfettered and contentious speech, silence is the best policy. Paradoxically, nonintervention by university leaders can empower students and faculty members to speak their minds and register dissent from the prevailing wisdom. When administrators take sides, they are sending a message to students and professors that there is a right way to think. The role of colleges and universities is not to tell students what to think, much less what the administration thinks. It is to teach students how to think.
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