The situation for academic freedom at the University of Chicago is light-years better than (just to take some recent cases) the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill or the University of Toronto. At the same time, the University of Chicago has set for itself a higher bar for academic freedom than most universities. The clearest example of that is the "Kalven Report," prepared in 1967 under the leadership of Harry Kalven (see also), a leading First Amendment scholar at the University of Chicago. The Kalven Report requires more of the University than the AAUP does with respect to academic freedom; it is a model every university in the country should adopt. According to the Kalven Report:
A university has a great and unique role to play in fostering the development of social and political values in a society. The role is defined by the distinctive mission of the university and defined too by the distinctive characteristics of the university as a community. It is a role for the long term.
The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. Incbrief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.
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.
As I like to joke, the Kalven Report means Presidents, Provosts, Deans, and Chairs are "to be seen, and not heard," unless they are speaking about institutional business. Their opinions on the current issues of the day are their own business, to be shared in private. They are not entitled to speak for their communities (their school, their department) on these matters. And the component parts of the university should also be silent on matters unrelated to their research and teaching mission: collective opinions are verboten, lest they squelch the "full freedom of dissent" that is essential for university life.
Unfortunately, since the police murder of George Floyd last year, numerous departments at the University (Music, English, History, Human Genetics, others), and even the Provost (a chemist), have repeatedly violated the Kalven Report proscriptions by making pronouncements about systemic racism, the role of racism in Floyd's murder, solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and so on. My colleague Jerry Coyne, the evolutionary biologist, collects many of the examples of the problem here. Something about the ghastliness of the video of Floyd's murder has produced a kind of collective insanity. Although a year later, no evidence that racial animus played any direct role in his murder has emerged, whole academic units purport to pronounce on the causes of his killing and the positions we are obligated to adopt because of it.
No department has adopted the far more plausible view that the victims of police killings are overwhelmingly poor and economically marginalized (which is why most victims of police killings are white), and that looked at that way, Blacks are killed by police in proportion to their representation among the poor and economically marginalized. The latter fact is obviously a legacy of actual cases of systemic racism, i.e.,, de jure Jim Crow in the South, de facto widespread Jim Crow-like practices in many parts of the North--the former now being moribund, the latter much less severe, thanks in part to remedial government policies, including affirmative action.
It would also violate Kalven, however, for any department to endorse the preceding position: the whole point of Kalven is that departments and schools and the University as a whole should not be taking any position on these questions; individual faculty should do so, and the University has committed to protect them from sanction for expressing their views on these matters. One might wonder how free any member of the departments of Music or Genetics might feel to endorse my view of the matter, given the department's official position displayed on the department's homepage? As any observer knows, too many academics are by nature cowards and herd animals, so it doesn't take much to silence them, especially given the many punitive tools that a Chair or Dean can quietly wield (e.g., course assignments, teaching times, research money and so on). The whole point of the Kalven Report is to take the specter of departmental and university orthodoxy off the table, in order to encourage "the full freedom of dissent." It will be an important challenge for the new President to restore Kalven's academic freedom commitments to a central place at the University of Chicago.
(Jerry Coyne calls to my attention that University College London recently affirmed a position similar to that in Kalven.)
Recent Comments