What the Champions of Neutrality Get Wrong

More than a half-century after it was released, an obscure University of Chicago faculty committee document known as the Kalven Report has become the center of a national debate about campus institutional statements. The Kalven Report stands for the ideal that faculty academic freedom is so precious that the mere statement of a position by the administration should be discouraged for fear that it could intimidate faculty members. Now, this same report is being abused to demand legislative and administrative censorship of the faculty.

For most of its existence, the Kalven Report was a useful excuse invoked by the University of Chicago administration to repel the demands of left-wing activists. But after the election of Donald J. Trump, right-wing groups angered by campus criticism of Trump began to pursue more aggressive efforts to silence colleges. In 2017, the conservative Goldwater Institute proposed model legislation to enact institutional neutrality on campuses, but no state adopted the plan. That started to change in 2020, when campus antiracism statements in response to the murder of George Floyd spurred a right-wing backlash demanding an end to the expression of political opinions by colleges. In August 2020, the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal issued a “Blueprint for Reform” on institutional neutrality, invoking the Kalven Report to call for legislators to impose it on colleges, and include curriculum and faculty hiring under its broad definition of neutrality. The University of North Carolina Board of Trustees in 2022 adopted a resolution declaring “its commitment to academic freedom as embodied in the Chicago Principles and the Kalven Committee Report on the university’s role in political and social action.” But the Kalven Report never achieved the popularity of the Chicago Principles, which have been adopted by more than 100 colleges.

The October 7, 2023, mass murders by Hamas in Israel spurred attacks on colleges for their alleged hypocrisy in failing to speak out against antisemitism, and it also invigorated the campaign for the Kalven Report. Five days after the terrorist attack, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) issued a formal statement calling on all colleges to endorse the Kalven Report. A February 7, 2024, statement by the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), FIRE, and Heterodox Academy called upon trustees at all colleges to adopt institutional neutrality by the fall.

Legislators are increasingly imposing neutrality on public colleges. In 2023, North Carolina enacted a new law declaring that all University of North Carolina campuses “shall remain neutral, as an institution, on the political controversies of the day,” and as a result, on February 15, 2024, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte trustees formally adopted the Kalven Report. Indiana Senate Bill 202, signed into law earlier this month, requires that public colleges “must limit the circumstances in which an employee or group of employees from the institution may establish an official institution, school, college, or department position on political, moral, or ideological issues to only those circumstances that affect the core mission of the institution and its values of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”

These efforts to externally impose the Kalven Report on colleges violate the most important, and overlooked, aspect of its creation. The Kalven Report was a document created by the faculty. Actions by legislators, trustees, or administrators to impose the Kalven Report’s doctrines, without any faculty control (or even input), violate the shared-governance process that is an essential part of the Kalven Report.

The Kalven Report is a monument to faculty power. It was the product of a faculty committee, decreeing restraints on the administration purely in order to protect faculty freedoms. And faculty members were given the sole power to interpret these limits. The Kalven Report noted that “the application of principle to an individual case will not be easy”; it called for “faculty or students or administration to question, through existing channels such as the committee of the council or the council, whether in light of these principles the university in particular circumstances is playing its proper role.” In other words, the administration (like everyone else) is required to go to a faculty committee for any question about how to interpret the Kalven Report. (Unfortunately, the University of Chicago administration has been violating the Kalven Report for decades by imposing its own interpretations of neutrality without faculty consultation.)

Perhaps the greatest value of the Kalven Report is its nuance. Contrary to the common impression today, the Kalven Report is not a prohibition on colleges taking positions. It’s a guide, not a guideline. The Kalven Committee recognized the danger of letting the college speak on every current conflict, since then the faculty — as the true voice of the college —would need to endlessly debate political topics or allow the administration to speak for them. The committee’s solution was “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.” But this is a presumption, not a ban. The Kalven Report provides for exceptions whenever the college “must act as an institution”; beyond that, it allows that the college has an obligation “actively to defend its interests and its values.” Although intended to be narrow, those loopholes are potentially enormous.

Colleges ought to embrace the spirit of the Kalven Report by opposing all legislation compelling neutrality, and by rejecting the call by FIRE, the AFA, and Heterodox Academy for unilateral action by trustees to impose institutional neutrality without any faculty voices in the discussion. Instead, colleges should follow the approach of Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, and Harvard University by appointing a faculty committee to guide policy, a policy that should persuade leaders to exercise restraint rather than banning speech.

The Kalven Report should also be followed for its approach to what institutional neutrality means, by limiting the term to actions and speech by top administrators on behalf of the entire college. The most dangerous betrayal of the Kalven Report’s principles is the extension of neutrality beyond the central administration to include all sub-units and faculty departments of a college.

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.

The expansion of institutional neutrality to cover sub-units and departments is not an implementation of the Kalven Report, but a betrayal of its core principles. The Kalven Report does emphasize the importance of the “individual faculty member,” but it only refers to restrictions on the college “as an institution” and “in its corporate capacity.” A statement by faculty in one department cannot represent the “corporate capacity” of a college because it cannot speak for the entire institution.

The February 7 statement by the AFA, FIRE, and Heterodox Academy likewise applies its restrictions not only to the central administration but also to “the units of the university, such as schools, departments, centers, and programs” and their leaders. Imposing neutrality on all units of the college poses a threat to academic freedom.

Heterodox Academy has since issued a more extensive report, “Extraordinary U,” explaining its call for institutional restraint. In many ways, the report is an important advance beyond the limits of the Kalven Report. The Heterodox Academy report recognizes that neutrality alone is not sufficient to promote academic freedom. It asks for colleges to “foster rich, vigorous, and wide-ranging inquiry and expression about contested topics” and to “clearly, firmly, and consistently reject any calls to sanction faculty, staff, or students based on their speech about contested topics.”

But other aspects of the Heterodox Academy report are much more repressive, such as when it urges colleges to “[collect] complaints about violations of the policy” and argues for “sanctioning leaders or units who do not follow it.” A system where some faculty and staff could be monitored and punished for expressing views is a threat to academic freedom, not a defense of it.

The Heterodox Academy report argues, “While statement neutrality at the top level is the vital first step, a culture of free inquiry and expression can also be chilled by statements from other official campus units.” But what Heterodox Academy ignores is the chilling effect when top administrators censor faculty and staff under their control.

According to Heterodox Academy, “position statements by institutional sub-units can be especially pernicious, since they affect closer communities.” But bans on position statements by sub-units can also be especially pernicious — because they involve imposing orthodoxy from a central authority. Unlike central administrators (who interpret these policies for themselves and can carve out thoughtful exceptions), when sub-units are subjected to these policies they are given orders from the top to shut up. And while it can be a good idea sometimes for powerful people to voluntarily shut up in order to encourage others to speak, it’s never a good idea to force underlings at an institution to keep silent.

We need to separate the issue of statements by sub-units from the much-different question of comments by the central administration that represent the entire institution. Because these sub-units include faculty voices, do not speak for the entire institution, and are vulnerable to censorship by top administrators, they need to have a completely different policy that recognizes the reality that neutrality can be more repressive than liberatory when it is externally imposed rather than freely chosen. Any policy for sub-units should follow the approach of the Kalven Report: The guidance for faculty departments and other sub-units should be written by a faculty committee; it should be a guide rather than a ban, it should be voluntarily followed rather than imposed from above, and it should allow for broad exceptions so that free speech is always encouraged and never repressed.

The Kalven Report should be a guide for campuses making policies about institutional neutrality, by offering an approach that carefully limits the power to impose neutrality. Colleges need to restrain administrative power by voluntarily curbing the authority of top administrators to speak for the institution, not by expanding the administration’s authority to silence controversial speech.