University administrators faced with the challenge of responding to the various (and opposed) constituencies invested in the Hamas-Israel war have come up with a number of strategies.
- Condemn one side and express sympathy with the other, a sure loser.
- Condemn both sides, an even surer loser; all parties will feel aggrieved.
- Support the legitimate aspirations of both sides and reject violence; you will be faulted for occupying a perch so lofty that the pressing issues of the day disappear.
- Issue a general statement in support of peace and diplomatic negotiation; you will be accused of trafficking in pious platitudes that provide no firm guidance.
- Stay silent, say nothing.
Staying silent and saying nothing is the right thing to do, but it has been criticized by leaders like Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, who declared that “neutrality is a cop-out.” But staying silent, properly understood, is not neutrality. Neutrality is a position you take after considering the alternatives and affirmatively deciding not to come down in either direction. It is in the fray, even if it pretends to be above the fray. Staying silent, as I urge it, means refusing to have a position. You say, if you say anything, that we are not considering or even thinking about the alternatives because we are not in that game; that is not what we do; we administer academic organizations, and were we to take a political stance, we would be doing someone else’s job and probably doing it badly.
Ron Robin, president of the University of Haifa, is on McGuire’s side: “When college leaders are silent, they abdicate part of their mission.” No, they are being faithful to their mission. Or, to put it another way, they are being faithful to the correct meaning of academic freedom, an unfortunate phrase because those who invoke it usually emphasize the word “freedom” and forget about the controlling and limiting adjective. “Academic” tells you what the scope of the claimed freedom is: It is the freedom — or, as I prefer, the “latitude” — necessary to the performance of the academic task for which you are trained and paid.
Staying silent, as I urge it, means refusing to have a position.
And what is the academic task? That’s easy: It is to advance the state of knowledge in the humanities and sciences. Since the path to advancement is not pre-known — if it were, there would be little if anything for academic researchers to do — no path should be either anointed or dismissed in advance by an administration or a legislature or a donor. Academic inquiry should be free only in the sense that it follows no foreordained, imposed script, which is exactly the opposite of the many enterprises where there is a script that the employer (or the district attorney or the governor) gets to write and the employee is obliged to follow.
The bottom line, then, is that academic freedom is not a general license to say whatever you like on any topic under the sun. It is a limited freedom to follow where the evidence pertaining to an academic question leads. It certainly does not include the freedom to advocate for your political views or turn (or try to turn) your students into social-justice warriors or anti-social-justice warriors. You and they are jointly engaged in an intellectual effort to understand something, and that engagement is, or should be, intensely focused and has no legitimate room for activities that belong to other enterprises.
What is true of faculty is true of the administration. Those who insist, or should insist, that faculty stick to their academic knitting should stick to it too, pronouncing only on matters that directly affect their institutional — not general or human — responsibilities. If a legislature wants to take funds away from you or a public official insists that certain professors be hired and others fired or a city council proposes a traffic plan that will make access to your campus more difficult, you speak up loudly and everywhere, in person, in the press, in the courts. But when world events that touch every member of the college community call out for a response, you do not give one, not because you think the matter unimportant, but because the matters that are appropriately the objects of your official attention flow from what Maud Mandel, president of Williams College, in Massachusetts, has called “our core educational mission.” That’s it, nothing else.
Academic freedom is not a general license to say whatever you like on any topic under the sun. It is a limited freedom to follow where the evidence pertaining to an academic question leads.
This severely narrow view of what colleges are about is not in fashion now, but it has a long and rich history of adherents, including Aristotle (Ethics, book 10), Kant (What Is Enlightenment?”), Cardinal Newman, Max Weber, Michael Oakeshott, and Harry Kalven, whose report, issued on behalf of the University of Chicago in 1967, put it this way: “Since the university is a community only for limited and distinctive purposes, it … cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and its effectiveness.” And in the current scene there is this recent statement by Richard Saller, president of Stanford University, and Jenny Martinez, its provost: “We believe it is important that the university, as an institution, generally refrain from taking institutional positions on complex political or global matters that extend beyond our immediate purview, which is the operation of the university itself.” To the point, but a bit wordy. I much prefer the succinct response by the then provost of the University of Wisconsin at Madison to demands by students that the university speak out against the impending invasion of Iraq. He said, “The University of Wisconsin does not have a foreign policy.” That is beyond perfect.
But can this parsimonious mode of college performance succeed when so much shouting has already occurred? Can it even be attempted at this late date? I don’t know, but I think it is worth a try, both because it is the only mode of performance faithful to what colleges are and because it gives you something to say. You can say to students (and some faculty) who wish to politicize the academic landscape, “That’s not the kind of thing we do around here, and if you insist on doing it, look for another venue.” You can say to legislators and public officials who want you to pronounce on this or that global issue and put the college on public political record, “Don’t ask me to do your job, and respect my resolution to do mine.” You can say to donors who want to call the college’s tune, “We welcome your contribution, but it does not buy you the right to set or even advise on academic policy, and if that is the price you exact for your gift, we shall have to return it.” And you can say to the general public, “We are standing firm and doing the job assigned to us — teaching, researching, producing knowledge — and you should be happy that we don’t try to do everyone else’s job in the bargain.” Or, in short, say that we do not have a foreign policy.
