What are we talking about when we talk about institutional neutrality? Lost in recent jeremiads against it is the central intent of “neutrality’s” most referenced statement, the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Committee Report. It hides in plain sight within the report’s title, “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.” It is about role.
“Institutional neutrality” is not a term that appears in the title of the Kalven Report and is not the most useful frame for understanding the report. As the first paragraph explains, the committee was charged with preparing “a statement on the university’s role in political and social action.” It “conceives its function as principally that of providing a point of departure for discussion in the university community of this important question.”
Of course, the Kalven Report is concerned with the “neutrality of the institution.” But it arrives at that principle as an answer to the question of the proper aim of the university itself. The question — not the answer — is the key heuristic. That question is about the very mission and purpose of the enterprise, which the report expresses as the “discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” As the Yale law professor Robert C. Post has observed, neutrality “is actually a contingent question that depends, in part, on mission.”
This emphasis on mission is precisely how the University of Chicago understood its preferred posture on social and political matters from its very founding. Contrary to popular belief, the Kalven Report did not offer a novel response to the student sit-ins and tumult of the late 1960s. Rather, in its own words, the committee wished to “reaffirm a few old truths and a cherished tradition.” The University of Chicago’s first president, William Rainey Harper, referenced those “old truths” in a speech from the first decade of the university’s existence. In it, Harper states a principle formally adopted in 1899: “It is desirable to have it clearly understood that the university, as such, does not appear as a disputant on either side upon any public question.”
A frequent dissenting view on institutional neutrality holds that it is illusory. This critique takes two forms. The first is from a standpoint epistemology perspective: If all knowledge is perspectival, there can be no neutral, Archimedean point of perfect objectivity. The world as we experience it is necessarily mediated through human subjectivity. As one newly arrived assistant professor recently put it to me, “the university itself is a legal fiction.” Of course, the claim that all knowledge is perspectival is a self-refuting absurdity — the claim itself purports to transcend any epistemological limitations.
Institutional neutrality is always relative to a particular dispute, public question, or controversial matter.
But even if it were true, this argument completely misses the point. Institutional neutrality, as understood by the Chicago tradition, is always relative to a particular dispute, public question, or controversial matter. It is decidedly not a philosophical argument about epistemology.
The second form of the neutrality-as-fiction critique emerges from a socio-political analysis holding that no institution can be neutral simply because prevailing socio-political arrangements are not neutral. Rather, they entrench the power of a dominant class of people and further marginalize others. As the historian Howard Zinn put it, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. Claiming neutrality, then, is a cop-out: At best self-deception, at worst a false pretense that gives cover to an institution that is anything but neutral. At its extreme, this critique alleges that the institution knows full well it is not neutral and should own up to its hypocrisy.
The flaw in this approach is that its understanding of “neutrality” relies on a socio-political analysis that is not shared by all members of the university community and is properly subject to debate by the community itself. Its own premises are admittedly non-neutral and partisan. A common rejoinder here points out that neutrality of the institution relies on an agreement to engage all ideas discursively, and that this idea itself is non-neutral. But this rejoinder does not succeed. It is akin to saying democratic discourse relies on liberal norms of free speech, and that those norms are themselves partisan. They are not; rather, such norms are constitutive of the democratic arrangement itself, which makes possible a body politic with an array of partisan positions.
Further, the neutrality-as-fiction critique fails to reckon with the reality of diverse viewpoints comprising the university community, as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah convincingly explains in an essay in The Atlantic: “Neutrality is a fiction — but an indispensable one.” Appiah argues for a principled neutrality regulating public institutions charged with serving and representing a diversity of identities and viewpoints. This sort of diversity is intrinsic to the United States writ large and to our college campuses. In these settings, we take as a given that members of the community will have various political understandings, moral commitments, and ideological viewpoints. Neutrality is premised on the ethic of treating all community members with the respect each person deserves by refusing to privilege the identities or the ideologies of any one group. This sort of neutrality should be sought by institutions regardless of whether in some ultimate sense it is fictitious.
Appiah is talking about institutions in general, not colleges specifically. But colleges in particular ought to encourage the proliferation and constructive engagement of diverse viewpoints. A climate of such diversity constructively engaged is a major accelerant of discovery, knowledge, and innovation.
The anti-neutrality arguments now circulating are even weaker than those Appiah rebuts. They often clothe their threadbare assertions in the garb of moral indignation. Some charge fear and cowardice on the part of college presidents who refuse to make statements on behalf of the institution. Others allege that the University of Chicago has made a mockery of the very principles it is known for.
Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, and Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, a Yale professor, claim college presidents who maintain intuitional neutrality are cowards, as if it takes great courage to cave to pressure from students or faculty to take a stand or to write to a member of Congress. They claim that the Kalven Report was “aimed at presidents who might have been tempted to speak up on behalf of the struggle for civil rights.” That is simply false. The report is not an open letter to presidents on the question of civil rights. It is straightforward in addressing the University of Chicago community with the intent to initiate a conversation on the institution’s role qua university.
John K. Wilson’s recent opinion piece in these pages likewise draws false conclusions about the report based, seemingly, on a misreading. While Wilson rightly pushes back on state mandates that seek the imposition of neutrality on public colleges, he goes on to argue that the most important and overlooked aspect of the Kalven Report is that it was a faculty creation. Wilson then concludes that the report enshrines the faculty as the sole arbiter and adjudicator of neutrality. In his view, the report promulgates that “the administration (like everyone else) is required to go to a faculty committee for any question about how to interpret the Kalven Report.”
With that false conclusion drawn, his critique follows: “The University of Chicago administration has been violating the Kalven Report for decades by imposing its own interpretations of neutrality without faculty consultation.” For Wilson, the late University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer is guilty of a “radical reinterpretation” of the report. This presidential usurpation led to a sequence of events in which the “scope of censorship at the University of Chicago conducted in the name of the Kalven Report has been breathtaking.” This is a fringe, faculty-supremacist view that is not intrinsic to the text, as University of Chicago faculty members Brian Leiter and Richard A. Shweder effectively show.
If we’re going to dissent from the Kalven Report, we need to grapple with the issue at heart: the role and purpose of the university itself. On a campus environment in which a great variety of legitimate views exist in tension — a tension that is fuel for the knowledge-based mission of the university — neutrality properly understood respects and enhances diversity. It fosters the conditions in which diverse views can be productively and respectfully engaged, both an academic and a civic priority. As David French reminds us in his New York Times opinion column, the stakes are even higher in this springtime of wide campus discontent, making neutrality all the more critical.
The committee that wrote the Kalven Report, which included the First Amendment scholar Harry Kalven Jr., the Black history primogenitor John Hope Franklin, and the Nobel laureate George Stigler, knew full well what they were doing when they framed the report around the role and purpose of the university itself. Argue with it, sure, but let’s argue better.
