When Politicians Pressure Presidents to Find Prejudice

The leaked audio hardly came as a surprise. In the brief recording, the University of Michigan’s president, Santa Ono, can be heard explaining to an unknown audience that we are being blackmailed by Congress, “who are not shy to say that they will hold the whole institution accountable for not addressing antisemitism. To have the government say something like, ‘Well, we will withhold your two billion dollars in funding if you don’t address antisemitism….’” He delicately calls the extortion “unbalanced.” Islamophobia, he notes, is of no concern to the pressure campaign. (Granted, the clip is very brief, and may not capture Ono’s full thoughts on the matter.)

The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has filed a complaint with the Department of Education. To date, the university has neither disputed nor addressed the audio. And why would they? We all already know that the Republican House majority — and the right more generally — have landed on Israel as the one topic that tears apart the broad liberal consensus at most American universities. They do that largely by dishonestly and shamelessly conflating all critique of Israel with antisemitism and accusing all critics of Netanyahu’s massacres in Gaza and now Lebanon of Jew-hatred — never mind that so many of these critics are themselves Jewish.

Ono is no doubt in a difficult position. Two billion dollars is a lot of money, and a university president better not be responsible for losing it. Protecting and increasing revenue streams is a core part of the job. It is not easy to act honorably in a world governed by the dishonorable, and while it is perhaps also not necessary to overperform your marching orders quite as enthusiastically as he has done, Ono deserves some sympathy even if he may have forfeited the right to admiration.

The immediate political project is to make Jewish students, faculty, and staff live in fear, the sort of fear the far-right organization Betar USA is pushing on its Instagram feed (“From Times Square to University of Michigan, Rice University to University of Pittsburgh Jews are in great danger with terrorists hosting events.”) Ono’s pained comments in the leaked audio certainly help explain why we have gotten near weekly crime reports from the president’s office. The first email-to-all, on September 16, referred to an indeed clearly antisemitic incident near campus. The second, on September 27, told us about an off-campus frat-party brawl where a Jewish student got punched. Ann Arbor police told Michigan’s Hillel that the student’s identity was unrelated to the attack. The third, on October 3, concerned a home invasion at a rabbi’s house in Southfield, 40 miles away from Ann Arbor. It was no doubt a harrowing experience for the rabbi and the students who had gathered at his house for a Rosh Hashanah meal, but nobody could explain why Ono’s email tied what police called an obvious crime of opportunity to the war: “As tensions in the Middle East have escalated in recent days, it is more important than ever that we work collectively to offer solace and safety to one another,” Ono declared. Here’s how one colleague responded to the President in a private email:

It is deeply ironic that this veritable orgy of political side-taking coincides with a push to adopt “institutional neutrality” at UM, as recommended by a 13 member subcommittee appointed by our general counsel, Timothy G. Lynch, who also chaired the overarching “Advisory Committee on the University of Michigan Principles on Diversity of Thought & Freedom of Expression.” The subcommittee was tasked with determining “whether the University should adopt some form of the University of Chicago’s Kalven Principles, which establish ‘[a] heavy presumption against the University . . . expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.’”

The hastily composed bylaw draft specifies that “University leaders, including Regents, the president, executive officers, chancellors, deans, directors, chairs, and others in similar positions, will not issue statements on behalf of the University or the unit, campus, school, college, department, institute, center, division, board, or executive committee under their authority, unless such statements directly relate to matters of internal governance.”

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, particularly, as an editorial in our student newspaper observed, “if it means an end to Ono’s far-too-frequent emails.” Most people, including myself, aren’t particularly fond of such statements — far too many of which reek of moral posturing, preach to the choir, change absolutely nothing, and express either a facile consensus (“racism is bad”) or misrepresent and potentially suppress the views of those who dissent but don’t feel comfortable voicing their disagreement. We need to protect such voices on campus from reprisals (though certainly not from pushback).

Institutional neutrality, a formal ban on particular kinds of speech, does not accomplish this goal, however. A policy advocated by the right-wing Goldwater Institute and liberal-washed by the libertarian organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, it was initially implemented at the University of Chicago on the recommendation of a small all-male committee appointed by the president in 1967 and reaffirmed in 2014. As the University of Chicago philosophy professor Anton Ford has pointed out, “Neither document was ratified by the faculty Council or the student government. Nor do they have any other democratic credential. The ordinary members of the university community are related to the Chicago Principles in something like the way that the employees of Procter & Gamble are related to the ‘values’ described on its corporate website.”

In the wake of October 7, institutional-neutrality policies have surged in the United States, coinciding with the repression of campus protest so ferocious that the United Nations weighed in. While in theory a commitment to neutrality would mean honoring and accommodating these protests, nobody who has been following the events of the last year will expect such an outcome. As we heard Ono say on tape, there are billions at stake.

Our bylaws draft is not, in any case, designed to ensure any practices resembling neutrality, because it exempts “matters of internal governance.” At a university of our size and type, it is impossible to think of any currently contested issue that is not a matter of internal governance. Our medical system will either perform abortions or it will not, our campus police will either pepper spray our students or they will not, our digital personnel files will either make room for preferred pronouns or they will not, we will either collaborate with potential future orders to betray our undocumented students or we will not. Neutrality ends where policy begins.

Moreover, our regents — and in this we are unlike the University of Chicago — are elected, not appointed, and they run on political-party tickets. Expecting them to be “neutral” would make a mockery of a process in which voters have every right to expect the Republican regent they elected to act and govern like a Republican, just as we liberals are still hoping to see our Democratic regents, who hold a 6:2 majority on the Board, act like Democrats.

The committee, to be fair, understands all this. “A university cannot govern itself without making difficult decisions on contested matters,” the report sensibly states. The committee was not interested in curbing the voice of the regents or the upper administration, in fact. They were most worried about faculty. “We note that while individual faculty may speak about politically contested matters on their own behalf, groups of faculty should not speak collectively about external political or social matters on behalf of their schools, departments, and other academic units. Because of the smaller scale of these units, the real or perceived risks associated with disagreement (including lower grades, poor performance evaluations, and tenure denial) loom larger and the impact on the educational and scholarly environment is greater. As a result, the threat to the University’s mission is especially acute.”

I take their point, but I suspect that mechanisms of ideological ostracism will continue to thrive in the absence of the kind of statement they appear to have in mind. Its natural home is the social-media sphere, over which we do not and should not have any jurisdiction whatsoever, and its enforcers are deans with the power to sanction faculty largely at will. In the meantime, the most hotly debated departmental statements of the last few years here concerned our graduate students’ strike and the administration’s response to it, surely matters of “internal governance” par excellence and hence another topic exempted from the ban.

The bylaw, then, will not address any of the problems it purports to solve — because it is not actually meant to solve them. Instead, as Ford notes, “Neutrality has been most useful to university presidents and to those at whose pleasure they serve: chancellors, regents, boards of trustees, donors, and state politicians” — a list to which we can now add Congress. “In their hands,” he continues, “the principle has been employed as an all-purpose tool for repelling social criticism. … In the midst of a national protest movement, nothing could be more convenient.”

But that convenience may itself be overstated. No vague, aspirational bylaw will deter those of our students who care from protesting the slaughter in the Middle East, and I suspect that even the most ingenious administrator cannot conclude that endowment investments are not matters internal to the university. We shall slog on then, as before, with one more layer of institutional dishonesty draped over us.