The Review

Last week in The New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler wrote about a fascinating development on some elite college campuses, including Harvard, Columbia, and Yale: disputes between opposed factions of faculty over the meaning and status of academic freedom and free speech. Here’s the pattern: A group of faculty members, disturbed by what they see as the illiberal, censorial campus atmosphere of the last decade or so, band together to demand that their institutions affirm a bundle of principles and commitments including Kalven-Report-style institutional neutrality, robust protection of controversial research or disfavored speech, and, implicitly, limitations to the influence of DEI administrators on core academic activities like curricula and hiring. Other faculty members then criticize this group, whom they tend to see as involved in a stealth operation meant to increase the power of political conservatives on campus and suppress the activities of student activists.

Dueling documents at Yale exemplify this opposition. The first, from a group calling itself Faculty for Yale, lists its core commitments thus:

• insist on the primacy of teaching, learning, and research as distinct from advocacy and activism, and on the centrality of the faculty to these core activities;
• confirm Yale’s commitment to robust free expression, including affirmative efforts to foster more open campus and classroom discourse, coupled with institutional neutrality;
• affirm the university’s commitment to the pursuit of excellence; critical thinking applied to all points of view; and a tolerant and broad-minded campus ethos and culture;
• urge greater administrative transparency and increased faculty oversight of all pedagogic and academic activities.

In response, a group of Yale faculty members wrote a letter “To the Future President of Yale University” which listed, among the threats to be fended off, attacks “from members of their own faculty, who argue that universities have lost their way.” Other threats include “politicians who use their power to coerce universities to squelch positions they oppose” and “donors who threaten to withhold resources in service to their agendas.” The line about “members of their own faculty” links to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece celebrating “Faculty for Yale.”

“To the Future President of Yale University” is quite a bit longer, and quite a bit fuzzier, than the “Faculty for Yale” statement it is responding to, but it can be reduced to two key points. First, the protection of academic freedom is not only not in tension with diversity administration, each requires the other: “We call on you to reject calls to ‘Make Yale Great Again’ and continue to work toward making Yale a model for inclusion and diversity — the true guarantee for excellence.” (The suggestion that the Faculty for Yale signatories are essentially Trumpian is one of the response’s more aggressive flourishes.) Second, Kalven-style neutrality is to be rejected: “Inaction always feels safer than action — but we would like to encourage you to realize that with the challenges facing our academic institutions, our society, our planet, taking a neutral position is itself a choice with dire implications.” (Given the earlier rhetorical deployment of Trump’s campaign slogan, this antagonism to neutrality presumably takes on partisan coloring. It implies although it does not state outright that Yale should align itself with the Democratic Party.)

A third important prong appears at the end of a passage that might otherwise seem to agree with Faculty for Yale. After calling on Yale to “defend our campuses as spaces for critical inquiry” and “robustly protect free speech,” the writers add this: “Protecting our campuses also means protecting students’ right to civil disobedience and other forms of protest as a way of addressing the urgencies of our world.”

To the extent that “civil disobedience” prevents the kinds of speech that universities are supposed to protect — including political speech by invited speakers like the conservative Christian lawyer Kristen Waggoner, who was shouted down by Yale Law students in 2022 — it will be difficult for the authors of “To the Future President of Yale University” to convince their colleagues, and the public, that their definition of “free speech” is compatible with academic freedom as normally understood. That is one reason so many colleges now, including Williams, Stanford, and Columbia (at least its university senate), are supporting some version of institutional neutrality. The alternative, they fear, is a perpetual contest over whose values get endorsed, and whose — by heckler’s veto — denounced.

Recommended

• “At one point, Elia tries to tell us that the ancient Chinese first discovered the deliciousness of roast pork by accidentally setting a house on fire with pigs in it, and then proceeded to keep destroying their houses in order to taste it again.” That’s Clare Bucknell, discussing Charles Lamb’s alter-ego with Zachary Fine and Jess Swoboda on The Point’s “Selected Essays” podcast. Bucknell’s main subject is Lamb’s “The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers.”
• “Lamb’s own manner of courting, the performative intimacy of his printed voice, has tended to repel as much as seduce.” For more of Bucknell on Lamb, check out her review of Eric G. Wilson’s biography, in The New York Review of Books. (From 2022.)
• “Some of its efforts ... petered out in fiasco,” for instance an “ill-judged initiative to convince the prostitutes of Rome to renounce their trade, a self-allotted task for charismatic celibate males that raised the likelihood of disaster, duly pointed out by sceptics.” In the London Review of Books, Diarmaid MacCulloch writes about the history of the Jesuits, by way of Markus Friedrich’s newly translated history.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin