Where’s the Line? On the Kalven Report, academic freedom, and the limits of institutional neutrality
Former Princeton Professor Joshua Katz writes that “Students, faculty, administrators, and the wider public are all paying attention these days to two hot-button topics in higher education: free speech and academic freedom*. Meantime, a third topic, institutional neutrality, is slowly rising to national prominence.” While Katz supports the Kalven Report on institutional neutrality, he calls for a revised version “that bars any unit of the university from issuing statements about hotly contested matters outside the most exceptional of circumstances.”
“The bar must in my view be extremely high for an educational institution, or any unit within it, to issue an official statement on a controversial sociopolitical matter,” he explains after describing how Princeton’s English Department hosted an anti-Semitic speaker. He also notes that when a department whose mission is disconnected an issue gets involved, it can “complicate the line between academic freedom and institutional neutrality.”
For example, he says, “If Princeton adopts the Kalven Report, then individuals will still be able to say whatever they wish in a personal capacity, but the Department of Molecular Biology will not be able to issue a statement condemning or supporting the state of Israel. The Department of Near Eastern Studies, though, might—under the guise of academic freedom. And so, too, might the Department of English…”
“Though I am a fan of the Kalven Report, I worry that the vaguely worded loophole [the university may take a stand against actions that ‘threaten [its] very mission’] is ripe for exploitation,” he explains, and that the Report “provides insufficient guidelines to help departments, programs, centers, and academic divisions and schools navigate the line between institutional neutrality and academic freedom.”
As such, Katz urges universities “to put on the books a revised version of the report that bars any unit of the university from issuing statements about hotly contested matters outside the most exceptional of circumstances—and these circumstances should not include hotly contested matters loosely connected to the unit’s self-defined ‘mission.’”
*except Harvard’s 2023 Board of Overseer candidates
Related:
Kalven Report: Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action (University of Chicago, 1967)
Harry Kalven, Institutional Neutrality, and the “Charisma” of the First Amendment (Leslie Spencer, Director, Princetonians for Free Speech, 2022)