Neutral Universities

the impossibility of

I spent most of two days at the national meeting of the Federalist Society, an organization of conservative and libertarian law professors, students, and judges that I occasionally speak for. One of the panels was on “Institutional neutrality in academia and beyond.”

It was a topic that I devoted a chapter to in my first book more than fifty years ago, written in response to attempts, often successful, to politicize universities, get them to take positions on political issues. At the University of Chicago the issue, pushed by the SDS, was disinvesting in South Africa. The university’s response was the Kalven report, which argued for a policy of institutional neutrality. Chicago has attempted to follow that policy ever since. Few if any other universities imitated it at the time but the issue has come up again recently, mainly as a result of the conflict over Gaza policy. Harvard has announced that it will, in the future, refrain from taking official positions on controversial public policy issues has have, very recently, many other universities.

The argument for the policy follows from the role of the university as an institution seeking to produce truth. As I wrote back then, the university:

cannot take positions because if it does, the efforts of its members will be diverted from the search for truth to the attempt to control the decision-making process. If it takes a public position on an important matter of controversy, those on each side of the controversy will be tempted to try to keep out new faculty members who hold the other position in order to be sure that the university makes what they consider the right decision. To hire an incompetent supporter of the other side would be undesirable; to hire a competent one, who might persuade enough faculty members to reverse the university's stand, catastrophic. Departments in a university that reaches corporate decisions in important matters will tend to become groups of true believers, closed to all who do not share the proper orthodoxy. They so forfeit one of the principal tools in the pursuit of truth—intellectual conflict.

The problem, as I also observed then, is that a modern university is a large organization taking decisions that depend on its views of controversial issues. The decision of Chicago to invest, among other places, in South Africa was probably taken for financial not political, reasons but it was still a decision that many members of the university community had political reasons to object to. Choosing to disinvest would be a political statement but so was not choosing to disinvest. Serving meat in the dining halls is, implicitly, a statement that meat eating is not immoral, choosing not to serve meat a statement that it is, and similarly for a wide variety of other decisions. A modern university can avoid making public statements about controversial issues but it cannot avoid making decisions that imply views on such issues. To the extent that members of the community are aware of such decisions — and if they are not interested parties can make them aware, as SDS demonstrated — the resulting controversy undercuts the university’s role as a seeker of truth.

Given the structure of a modern corporate university such as Harvard or Chicago the conflict cannot be eliminated, which is why I titled my chapter “The Impossibility of a University.” But it can and should be minimized. The university has to either serve meat or not serve meat in its dining halls. It does not have to make a public statement for or against the proposition that meat eating is wicked. It has to invest in something but it can try to avoid, in advance of controversy, investing in things that are likely, at some point in the future, to become controversial.

As best I can recall the Chicago controversy — I was a graduate student at Chicago at the time — nobody was arguing that investing in South African securities was a positive good, something the University had a positive obligation to do. One side argued that it was a positive bad, hence that the University was obliged to disinvest. The other side argued that disinvestment was a positive bad, not because South African firms needed the money — if Chicago sold the securities someone else would buy them — but because it would be a public statement on a controversial issue and universities should not take public stands on controversial issues for the reasons I offered above. My guess is that the SDS students involved in the controversy, at least the more intelligent of them, did not really believe that Chicago’s investment had any significant effect on the stability of the apartheid system. For them as well the issue was symbolic. Disinvestment by Chicago would support the idea that South Africa was an outlaw state and the controversy over disinvestment would politicize their fellow students. Given that situation, a sufficiently prudent university administration could have avoided the problem by never buying South African securities or by quietly selling them before it became an issue. The problem would be unavoidable only in a situation where there were factions on both sides, some people strongly in favor of investing in, say, Israeli bonds, and some strongly against.

A policy of not making public statements is not costless; there are some public issues, such as immigration or government subside of research, that affect the university. It is tempting, especially for a university as prominent as Harvard, to try to use its influence to support the policies that are in its interest. Even for issues less directly related it is tempting for individuals in the university community to try to use the university’s reputation to push what they see as the good. Those temptations should be resisted. Individual faculty members should feel free to use their own reputation to push for policies they support, whether in the interest of their university or other things they value.

Whether the university does or does not have meat in the cafeteria is an unavoidable problem but not a very serious one; most vegetarians will be satisfied with a vegetarian option. The serious unavoidable problem is academic decisions, faculty hiring and courses. The best that can be done there is to try to maintain a faculty norm of tolerance, an attitude that evaluates colleagues by how intelligent and original they are not by their views on controversial issues, political or academic, decides on courses by whether they teach ideas students should be familiar with, not by whether they teach ideas you agree with.

When I applied for a position at Santa Clara University I was interviewed by, among others, the number two man at the university. SCU is a Jesuit school. He was a Jesuit and, I was told, a believer in “Liberation Theology.” I made no attempt to conceal my political views (libertarian) or religious (atheist). I am told that he supported the decision to hire me. I spent some thirty years at SCU, a school whose two ideologies were Catholicism and soft leftism, neither of which I agreed with, and it was never a problem, so it is possible to maintain a tolerant university, even one run by a religious order. One year they announced a week dedicated to “sustainability,” suggested to professors that they might want to give a talk on the subject. I asked if there was any problem with my giving a talk against sustainability. There wasn’t.

I have been discussing institutional neutrality in the context of universities but the issue is broader than that. Consider any professional association whose field has some connection to some controversial issue — The British Psychological Association (heritability of intelligence), The American Physical Society (climate change), the American Economic Association (economic policy). Members with strong views of the issue are naturally tempted to try to get the association to endorse them, in the belief, possibly true, that doing so will be convincing to the broader public.

It probably shouldn’t be, since the endorsement usually reflects the views of the small minority actively involved with the issue not the profession in general. More seriously, the controversy over what position the organization should endorse has a corrupting effect on the association and the profession for reasons similar to those in the case of a university, an issue I discussed in an old blog post.