Years ago, I was impressed that Mr. Wilson (a freelance "academic freedom" expert [sic] as it were) was one of the few who spoke up on behalf of the attack on the free speech rights of Ward Churchill. Alas, it's now clear that his interest in free speech and academic freeodm is partisan through and through, as his astonishingly dishonest attack on the University of Chicago's Kalven Report makes clear. As I wrote in a letter that CHE has published:
Although John K. Wilson links to the actual text of the Kalven Report, he mischaracterizes it throughout his piece while alleging, ironically, that others “misunderstand” it (“More Colleges Are Swearing Off Political Positions. They’re Getting It Wrong”, The Chronicle Review, March 18). He declares that “shared-governance...is an essential part of the Kalven Report,” although it is not mentioned and has nothing to do with the principles articulated in that document. He says falsely that “the University of Chicago administration has been violating the Kalven Report for decades by imposing its own interpretations of neutrality without faculty consultation,” even though the Report requires no such consultation and even though, in the most recent cases, it was precisely faculty (including myself) who raised Kalven violations with the University, prompting it to act. Most astonishing, however, was Mr. Wilson’s claim that,
"In 2020, the president of the University of Chicago at the time, Robert J. Zimmer, announced a radical reinterpretation of the Kalven Report, declaring that the document applied to all sub-units of the university, including departments. The Kalven Report was transformed from a document where the faculty asked the administration to keep quiet to protect the faculty, to one where the administrators ordered faculty units to remain silent. Since then, the scope of censorship at the University of Chicago conducted in the name of the Kalven Report has been breathtaking. In 2023, the University of Chicago administration imposed a ban on all land acknowledgments by any department or program, even when they are merely factual statements about history."
President Zimmer’s clarification made explicit longstanding understandings of Kalven’s principles; after all, as the report emphasizes, “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student,” not the university or department or school. Kalven cautions that we “cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues,” which is exactly what many departments started doing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Department orthodoxy is, arguably, far more dangerous than university orthodoxy: An untenured faculty member might perhaps ignore the provost’s pronouncements about “systemic racism” but be more wary when her own department issues a statement of an official position. The idea that “land acknowledgments” are “merely factual statements” is obviously absurd: Of all the factual statements that might be made, what is the point of making only those? The answer is obvious.
Many state legislatures no doubt have bad motives for embracing the Kalven principles, but criticizing that does not require lying about the Kalven Report, which has contributed substantially to the institutional culture of free expression and academic freedom here,
Mr. Wilson is not as egregious an enemy of academic freedom as Jennifer Ruth or Michael Berube, but he is not an honest broker. (I have corresponded with Mr. Wilson about other academic freedom issues, after being e-introduced to him by Nadine Strossen, and my impression from that is that he was not very smart and not really interested in a principled conception of academic freedom. This latest incident confirms my impression then.)
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