Universities Need to Defend Themselves, Not Remain Neutral

My initial reaction to the title of a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Daniel Diermeier and Andrew D. Martin — “Universities Must Reject Creeping Politicization” — was a mixture of surprise and relief. Diermeier and Martin, Chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, respectively, have been among the most vigorous proponents of “institutional neutrality” on political issues, so their willingness to oppose the attack on higher education coming from the federal government seemed like an important acknowledgment of the seriousness of the problem.

My mistake.

Diermeier and Martin write as if the events of the past month had never occurred. No drastic cuts to NIH funding for research. No “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education filled with misinformation and misrepresentation of existing law. No suspension of an important scholarship program for students at HBCUs. In their telling, the most pressing threats to higher education come from student protesters, politically biased faculty members and admissions offices, and institutions that aren’t sufficiently committed to “excellence.”

To be fair, a number of the problems cited by Diermeier and Martin are real and have damaged both the fundamental mission and public perception of higher education. For a complex set of reasons, colleges have, especially in the past decade, become much more politically active. Orthodoxies have taken hold that have stifled open debate and silenced many conservative and even moderate voices. Diversity work has been imperfect, though it has also been cynically caricatured for political gain. There is plenty that needs fixing.

But Diermeier and Martin appear to believe that the mission of the university is to be neutral on the question of its own existence, which is right now under unprecedented threat. In this they go further even than the Kalven Report, the document produced at the University of Chicago in 1967 that is treated by some with a reverence usually reserved for the Pentateuch. The authors of that report note that there is an important exception to the general stance of institutional neutrality: “From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its value of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.” The word used here is “obligation,” not “option,” and it seems almost impossible to deny that the crisis imagined by the authors of the Kalven Report is upon us.

Disagreements regarding institutional neutrality stem in part not from changes in universities but from changes in the scope of what is today considered “political.” Reliance on fact-based research has become politically divisive, yet it is also the ground upon which the university stands. It is one thing to stay away from debates about the wisdom of tariffs or of annexing Canada; it is quite another to remain silent on the question of whether evidence and expertise matter, whether teaching and research should be free from governmental censorship, and whether students from historically underrepresented groups should have appropriate support on campus. On these matters the university has “an obligation…to defend its interests,” even if it means wading into debates that are politically fraught.

The three principles to which Diermeier and Martin believe higher education should commit itself are “excellence,” “academic freedom and free expression,” and “accessibility,” an assertion with which it is, in the abstract, difficult to argue. But their vague definition of excellence — finding “high-potential talent” and making “pathbreaking discoveries” — seems mostly to describe the nature of very wealthy, very selective research universities and fails to reflect either the fiscal realities or the various forms that excellence might assume across the diverse set of institutions in the United States, many of which don’t have the luxuries of selecting which students they serve or of doing pathbreaking research.

They echo, moreover, the popular talking point that the chief threat to academic freedom and free expression in higher education is the “intolerance [that has] gripped far too many campuses” without even a casual reference to the more consequential threats coming almost daily from an increasingly repressive government. To focus on the soft power of campus orthodoxies and ignore the hard power of state censorship strikes me as more than a little perverse.

As for accessibility: Vanderbilt has an endowment of over $10 billion, a comprehensive fee for some students of nearly $100,000, and a median family income of over $200,000. Washington University is even wealthier, with an endowment of over $12 billion and a median family income of over $270,000. According to a study published in The New York Times in 2017, more than a fifth of the students at Wash U. came from families among the top 1 percent of earners. If accessibility is a foundational principle of higher education, neither institution is setting a particularly good example.

My point is not that we should be too hard on those presidents who, out of care for their institutions and legitimate concern about reprisals, choose at this point the silence of “neutrality” — though I wish that more would, and I believe that more will, speak up. It is, rather, that we should extend equal respect to presidents who feel that silence at this point is not an option. Lecturing them about the importance of institutional neutrality when their mission is under sustained attack and their students, faculty, and staff are demoralized and fearful is — to put it as kindly as I can — immodest and unhelpful.