All of this might have been enough to convince the people who run Harvard that they needed to make some changes, and, in fairness, they have made a few small ones. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences did away with mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring but replaced them with a service statement that could easily be used to weed out candidates on the same grounds. And it partially adopted institutional neutrality, leaving out a key and currently essential part: that political divestment to get the university to take sides is off the table—National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood saw this coming.

But, despite these small steps, or even because of how small they were, it was reasonable to remain skeptical about whether Harvard had really understood the message. Professor and Dean of Social Science Lawrence D. Bobo has made it eminently clear that it did not get through to him.

Rather than admitting the need for soul-searching and real, substantive changes, he argues in a new editorial posted to The Harvard Crimson that faculty who criticize Harvard publicly should be sanctioned by the university. Yes, you read that correctly. Instead of recognizing that Harvard is under intense scrutiny and suffering a reputational crisis because it has proven itself to be morally and intellectually corrupt, Professor Bobo thinks the way to restore calm to campus is to weaken the academic freedom of Harvard’s faculty even further.

Consider the irony: this institution consistently ranks dead last and occupies its own “abysmal” category for free expression on campus. This is the same place that forced Carole Hooven out for stating there are two sexes. Tyler J. VanderWeele was canceled for his views on marriage. Bobo himself participated in the punishment of Professor Roland Fryer, whose academic work Bobo had previously criticized. After a sexual harassment investigation recommended sensitivity training for Professor Fryer, Professor Bobo and the then-dean of FAS Claudine Gay suspended him for two years and closed his lab.

It is not surprising but still stunning that Professor Bobo thinks the solution to Harvard’s ills is to clamp down on faculty speech. His desire to punish faculty members who “incite external actors—be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government—to intervene in Harvard’s affairs” is yet another revelation of how firmly entrenched the problems at the university are.

His perspective, which implies that Harvard’s issues are merely a public relations problem rather than a profound moral and intellectual crisis of its own making, reveals a level of arrogance and entitlement shared by too many faculty members—an attitude that urgently needs to be corrected.

Calling donors and alumni “external actors” and suggesting they should have no role in the institution’s governance is wrong and insulting.

Alumni do participate, for example, in selecting Harvard’s board members. Donors are obviously entitled to have a say in how their donations are used. Alumni and donors are undoubtedly members of the Harvard community, and any self-respecting person associated with Harvard should demand that Bobo retract this claim and apologize.

Harvard relies on the media to share news about its research and societal contributions. The idea that its faculty should protect it from negative scrutiny suggests a cultish commitment to face-saving that is at odds with Harvard’s commitment to truth and only deepens public suspicion of the institution. It is also deeply ironic given that Bobo published a public editorial criticizing Harvard and its policies but would happily take away his colleague’s speech and limit their ability to voice their concerns.

Beyond all of this, universities, including private ones like Harvard, need to recognize that their autonomy and academic freedom are granted as part of a social contract from which American society expects to benefit. They should be generally free to govern their own affairs and allowed a broad degree of latitude out of respect for academic freedom, but academics have done such incredible damage to their own sector that the most recent poll shows that public confidence in higher education has dropped to 28 percent. When will they recognize just how strained their relationship to American society is and accept that they are largely to blame for it?

The idea that Harvard should respond to scrutiny by closing in on itself and punishing faculty who make public criticisms of the university is both perfectly on brand and so stunningly obtuse that it beggars belief. Bobo accuses his colleagues of “conscious action that would seriously harm the University and its independence.” However, he and any like-minded colleagues should realize they are harming Harvard.

As Dean of Social Science at Harvard, Bobo is powerful. He controls funding and has huge influence over the careers of scores of faculty; his remarks are clearly intended to threaten his colleagues to follow particular norms and suggest an informal policy that punishes particular speech and expression, which is the antithesis of Harvard’s mission of pursuing “truth.”

Bobo and his colleagues should remember the following warning from the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 Declaration of Principles:

If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy or to prevent the freedom that it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others.

Rather than asking how they can protect themselves from richly deserved and necessary criticism, Professor Bobo and his colleagues should ask themselves what they can do to earn back the trust and respect of alumni, donors, and the American people.

This post appeared on Minding The Campus on June 17, 2024.

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In an essay published by the New York Times the same day the report was released, Noah Feldman and Alison Simmons, co-chairs of the Institutional Voice Working Group, wrote that they “didn’t address . . . the hard problem of when the university should or shouldn’t divest its endowment funds from a given portfolio.” The University of Chicago, on the other hand, which has led the way on institutional neutrality since the publication of the Kalven Report in 1967, has made clear that divestment is incompatible with the values of a great university. It issued an unequivocal statement in 2016 saying that it will not entertain economic or academic boycotts against any nation, including Israel.

ACTA has also long stood against divestment, including in our 2017 report detailing the coordinated efforts of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine to advance the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement. We explained that BDS referenda passed at 12 colleges in the 2014–15 academic year and urged trustees to stand firmly against this pressure. When external agitators try to bend university governance toward a given agenda, a commitment to institutional neutrality quickly disposes of that.

Other academic leaders have shown a better way forward in recent months. Vanderbilt University’s chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, advocates for (and practices) “principled neutrality,” arguing that a university should be unyielding in the values it upholds and that those values “should be expressed as behavioral norms necessary for fulfilling its mission, not as an imposition of one opinion on the university community.” The same principle enlivens the classroom, too. University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos wrote in November 2023, “It is the imperative of individuals within the University to seek truth without being limited by authority. This institutional neutrality is essential to vesting freedom of speech in our faculty members and students.” He relied on principle this spring when he refused to consider divestment, as demanded by the protesters on his campus.

ACTA will be carefully monitoring actions taken by Harvard leadership in the coming months and whether the Kalven Report’s principles of institutional neutrality are correctly practiced. At present, ACTA cannot recognize Harvard University as a practitioner of principled institutional neutrality. ACTA President Michael B. Poliakoff stated, “It is good that Harvard will no longer issue official political statements, but we should never forget the circumstances that led to the adoption of this policy, and, in light of them, it is deeply troubling that Harvard could not bring itself to rule out divestment and adopt a full policy of institutional neutrality. In other words, Harvard needs a firm policy, not an evasive pretense.”

Steven McGuire, ACTA’s Paul & Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom, added, “While Harvard has taken an important first step toward adopting institutional neutrality, its new policy remains disappointingly incomplete, and Harvard has a lot of work to do before it will embody the commitments to free expression and diversity of thought that this policy seeks to support and protect. We continue to encourage Harvard to become an institution that truly embraces the values of academic freedom and viewpoint diversity that it appeals to in this report.”

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Northwestern president Michael Schill insisted that he spoke in his own voice, “Mike Schill, citizen, Jew and human being” in his condemnation of the October 7 massacre  and not for the institution. His respect for institutional neutrality was reasoned and defensible. But how ready he is to jettison it now, quaking in the face of student demands!

His self-congratulatory statement of April 30 is spineless capitulation, or, to use Churchill’s phrase, “boneless”: “This agreement was forged by the hard work of students and faculty working closely with members of the administration to help ensure that the violence and escalation we have seen elsewhere does not happen here at Northwestern” and that “the agreement includes support for our Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students.” Schill notably ignored Northwestern’s Anti-Defamation League Campus Antisemitism Report Card drop from “D” to “F,” and, in his Congressional testimony before House Committee on Education and the Workforce, he defended his encampment deal claiming, “By engaging students with dialogue instead of force, we modeled the behavior we want to apply going forward.”

Schill is now joined by the leadership of Brown, Evergreen, Minnesota, and the University of Washington. On the same day as Northwestern’s capitulation, Brown’s president Christina Paxson agreed, in return for the dismantling of the encampment (which, she specified, violated Brown’s policies) that there would be no suspensions or expulsions of those protesters, and discussion of divestment would proceed. Also on April 30, Evergreen State University added a particularly noisome twist to its capitulation on divestment: it will no longer approve study abroad in Israel, in other words, agreement to a discriminatory academic boycott. And one day later, Minnesota caved to five of the six demands, including divestment talks, balking only at banning targeted employers from its job fairs. It was a very bad week for rule of law and university governance. Tacitus once wrote, “They wreak devastation and call it peace.” It works for boneless wonders, too.

The appeasements continued. Williams College, whose president wrote on October 12 of her neutrality that precludes sending campus-wide messages no matter what the circumstances, quickly abandoned neutrality and agreed to allow the protesters to present their views on divestment to the board of trustees.

Harvard University, which earlier had set up a committee to consider institutional neutrality, offered a sit-down between protesters and a representative of the Harvard Corporation.

Divestment should, from the very beginning, be off the table. Wise institutions have steadily, especially since October 7, recognized, albeit late, the wisdom of the University of Chicago Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.

Written amidst the desperate turmoil of the era of the Vietnam War, it reads, in part: “…there emerges, as we see it, a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day…”  The University of Chicago recently invoked it, in the face of demands from its own students for divestment from Israel:

Over more than a century, through a great deal of vigorous debate, the University has developed a consensus against taking social or political stances on issues outside its core mission. The University’s longstanding position is that doing this through investments or other means would only diminish the University’s distinctive contribution — providing a home for faculty and students to espouse and challenge the widest range of social practices and beliefs.

If the boneless wonders regain their vision and fortitude, they also have good models to follow at Vanderbilt and the University of Florida. Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier’s logic was crystalline:

…our three commitments are free speech, or we call it open form, institutional neutrality, which means that the university will not take policy positions unless they directly affect the operating of the university. So we don’t take a position on foreign policy, and a commitment to civil discourse. Now, calling for BDS, for a boycott of Israel, is inconsistent with institutional neutrality… we’re not going to go there.

President of the University of Florida Ben Sasse has properly steered the university through the storms. Sasse proclaimed that adult behavior at UF is mandatory: “This is not complicated: The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.”

This is the way forward from the campus disgrace we are witnessing. Our nation’s colleges have long been engines of equality and innovation and they must have leaders who can keep them focused on reaching those goals by being neutral and having rules and standards applied consistently and universally.

This post appeared on AEIdeas on May 28, 2024.

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Which makes you wonder: Who put this crew in charge? It does not seem to occur to the protest community that such decisions are supposed to be the result of stakeholders pushing for change and officialdom wanting to accommodate them.

Not extortion.

College protests have spread beyond Columbia and Harvard to campuses across the country. And if a poll of 719 Columbia students, faculty and workers conducted by New York Magazine and the Columbia Daily Spectator is to be believed, 68 percent of those at Morningside Heights hope pro-Palestinian demands are met.

Hamas should be happy with American academia.

Me? I stand with Israel. I also agree that all students and faculty have a free-speech right to express opposing views. But they do not have a right to trespass on campus quads, and they do not have a right to keep students who want to learn from college classrooms.

As Steven McGuire of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA, told me, “Most if not all of these encampments can and should be shut down on the basis of content-neutral policies.” He’s right.

So where do we go from here?

Fight hate speech with smart speech. Social media platforms have enabled critics to see just how twisted many of the woke pro-Hamas protesters are.

At George Washington University, a small group of students had a bullhorn dialogue about how great it would be to execute — actually behead — administrators. “To the guillotine,” they chanted, apparently undisturbed that they were aligning themselves with the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

Columbia student Khymani James shared his negative views on Zionism on social media: “I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill,” James wrote. James, who has apologized, has been barred from Columbia’s campus.

Good luck finding a good job if any of you actually graduate.

Last year, hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman called on fellow big shots not to hire students who blamed Israel, not Hamas, for the Oct. 7 massacre that left more than 1,200 dead. It’s time the protest class realized that bad ideas and a general lack of judgment can have consequences.

Activists who broke laws — by damaging property or trespassing — should face serious consequences. They prevented students who wanted to to learn in a classroom from a chance to do so. They also cost their institutions a lot of money. Their privileged status as students should not exempt them.

Anyone who’s involved in organizing or leading campus occupations, McGuire offered, “should receive some pretty significant discipline.” That could be a suspension, and in extreme cases “even expulsion.”

(I’d add clean-up duty. Make tent dwellers clean up after themselves.)

But McGuire cautioned, “I’d be surprised if we see consistent, strong follow-through,” because for too many years, administrators caved to chaos.

Now it’s time to grow up.

This appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on May 7, 2024.

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On April 11, 2024, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni hosted a webinar exploring antisemitism, how it manifests on campus, and how to prevent harassment of Jewish students while upholding free expression on campuses.

Panelists include: Lawrence H. Summers, President Emeritus at Harvard University and former U.S. Secretary of Treasury; Pamela Paresky, Senior Fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute, Senior Advisor to the Open Therapy Institute, and Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at New York University; Nadine Strossen, John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union; and Eli Noam, director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information and Garrett Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Business Responsibility at Columbia Business School.

This webinar is part of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s Institute for Effective Governance®

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Download a transcript of the podcast HERE.
Note: Please check any quotations against the audio recording. The views expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of ACTA.

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Dear Governing Board Member:

 For over 28 years, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has helped governing boards promote academic freedom, academic excellence, and accountability at our nation’s colleges and universities.

Today, I write to encourage you to consider adopting a policy of institutional neutrality at your institution. Such a policy, exemplified by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee Report of 1967, counsels against taking official institutional positions on current social and political events. It is a bulwark against politicization, and, like the Chicago Principles on Freedom of Expression, signals integrity to students, faculty, and the public.

Colleges and universities that remain above the political fray can most effectively help students learn how to think, not what to think. A policy of institutional neutrality guards this high purpose of our academic institutions. It also shields them from the consequences of becoming embroiled in political disputes.

Institutional neutrality does not mean silence on issues that affect the mission or operations of the university. Nor does it prevent college leaders from articulating their personal views in response to events that violate basic principles of morality and human decency. By avoiding engagement in political disputes, the capacity for appropriate leadership is enhanced.

In the words of the Kalven Report, “The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints.”

We urge you to join the growing movement of universities that have embraced institutional neutrality. We list them on our website, https://www.goacta.org/kalven-report, which also includes sample board resolutions and other resources you will find useful. We are at your service to help in any way we can.

Warm regards,

Michael B. Poliakoff, Ph.D.
President

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Campus Freedom Initiative

ACTA Gold Standard for Freedom of Expression

“Political tensions are inevitable on college and university campuses,” said Steven McGuire, ACTA’s Paul & Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom. “Who can imagine a genuine place of learning, free inquiry, boundary-pushing, and intellectual growth that does not also invite robust debate, discussion, and sometimes even discord? But in recent years, colleges and universities have abandoned their roles as impartial incubators of debate and inserted themselves into the fray, acting and speaking for the university at large on matters on which there is no campus consensus. ACTA is urging higher education leaders to resist the temptation to impose their views on their communities and instead promote free and open debate and inquiry by adopting and enforcing robust principles of institutional neutrality.”

In addition to launching a web page dedicated to promoting institutional neutrality policies and tracking schools that have adopted or affirmed them, ACTA has leveraged its longstanding relationships with 23,000 higher education trustees to share information on institutional neutrality via mailings and emails. Trustee training and webinars will follow throughout 2024. Dr. McGuire will host Tony Banout, the inaugural executive director of the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, and Tom Ginsburg, Leo Spitz Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago, on ACTA’s podcast Higher Ed Now. The episode will be dedicated to the issue of institutional neutrality and will be released on February 22, 2024.Drs. Banout and Ginsburgare co-editors of a volume entitled The Chicago Canon on Free Inquiry and Expression, available for pre-order in March, which features the University of Chicago’s seminal documents articulating the principles of freedom of expression and institutional neutrality. These documents, developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, now form the intellectual foundation of the campus free expression movement. 

One of the two documents is the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which explains the vital role of institutional neutrality in protecting the vibrant exchange of ideas that is the lifeblood of higher education. Colleges and universities that adopt institutional neutrality empower students and faculty to form and express their opinions on contemporary social and political issues fearlessly, without being stifled by an official policy or the personal beliefs of the university administration.

ACTA President Michael Poliakoff stated, “Too many college leaders are too quick to make political pronouncements, taking it upon themselves to speak for every member of the college community. But their sacred duty is ultimately pedagogy not punditry. By scrupulously following the guidance of the Kalven Report, they will do much to restore the intellectual diversity essential for higher education.”  

MEDIA CONTACT: Gabrielle Anglin
EMAIL: ganglin@goacta.org
PHONE: (202) 798-5425

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The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and two other groups this week penned an open letter calling on university trustees to adopt institutional neutrality. “In recent years, colleges and universities have increasingly weighed in on social and political issues,” the letter reads, in part. “This has led our institutions of higher education to become politicized and has created an untenable situation whereby they are expected to weigh in on all social and political issues.”

It’s unclear whether more campuses will heed the call. Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni who specializes in academic freedom and free-speech issues on campus, told The Chronicle that he hopes they do. “We’ve noticed especially in the last few months that there’s been increasing discussion around the principle of institutional neutrality,” he added.

To read the full article, visit the Chronicle of Higher Education here. (Registration may be required.)

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Ms. Gay, of course, tendered her resignation at the start of the year amid allegations, subsequently founded, of habitual plagiarism in her not-very-substantial canon of published articles. These were uncovered after her disastrous and morally bankrupt appearance before Congress on Dec. 5, where she equivocated on the question of whether or not calling for the death of Jews and the extermination of Israel violated campus policies. Her answer: it depends on the context.

She was not the only head of an elite college to fumble what ought to have been a strikingly easy question to answer; the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill resigned four days after she offered a similarly evasive response at the hearing. In any case, Ms. Gay is merely a symptom of a wider rot that has been infecting higher education for several decades now, but appears to have particularly crystallized in the responses and reactions of the elite universities to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

Earlier this week, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni sponsored a discussion examining higher education in the U.S., in light of these foundational problems exposed after Oct.7. The brilliant panel, introduced by former University of Colorado Regent Heidi Ganahl, and moderated by ACTA president (and eminent scholar) Michael Poliakoff, included Hebrew Education Alliance Emeritus Rabbi Bruce Dollin, Colorado Christian University Chancellor Dr. Don Sweeting and former U.S. Senator, CU President, co-Founder of ACTA, and all-around great guy, Hank Brown. Much of their discussion did indeed revolve around the repugnant instances of flagrant antisemitism on campus. Rabbi Dollin cited a lengthy, but by no means exhaustive, litany of examples — none of which would have seemed out of place if attributed to Nazi supporters in 1930s Germany — including a repulsive statement issued by the CU Ethics Studies Department on Oct. 22, which failed to make any mention of Hamas’s crimes against humanity, but said in part: “Starting October 7… We witness another unprecedented genocidal attack on the Palestinian people,” and a bit later, “We also reject the language of ‘terrorism’ used by the US and Israel to justify the Israeli state killing machine.”

That an “ethics studies” department of a major university of reasoning makes such a public statement illustrates as clearly as anything the decomposition of what used to be called “higher education.”

That decomposition far predates Oct 7, 2023. Thirty-seven years ago, Allan Bloom, in his book “The Closing of the American Mind,” was among the first to diagnose the underlying malady; namely the universities’ sacrifice of educational excellence and the preservation of our intellectual patrimony on the alter of modernism and specialization — replacing “education” with “training”. Said Bloom: “The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a democracy of the disciplines — which are there either because they are autochthonous, or because they wandered in recently to perform some job that was demanded of the university. This democracy is really an anarchy, because there are no recognized rules for citizenship and no legitimate titles to rule. In short there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is.”* That leaves an awfully big vacuum to fill with extraneous matter.

The panelists at the ACTA event, digging deeper into what ills modern universities, agreed, and expanded on that analysis. Dr. Sweeting, citing the Gallup poll that revealed the precipitous decline in public confidence in higher education (36% now compared to 56% in 2015, said “what happened? We forgot the basics,” and described how “moral relativism and nihilism have replaced character.” Sen. Brown pointed out the unique economics of modern higher education: “We don’t pay on output. We pay on the faculty’s qualifications, not on what people learn.” He said this has led to universities being run by that hyper-specialized faculty, not the trustees — leading in turn to an expansion in the number of “core” courses offered to more than 200; some good, others, as he put it, more “creative.” Or as Dr. Poliakoff put it, “we for years heard the chant, “hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Well, it did, and here we are.”

All of which to say Buckley’s quip is even more apt today than it was 60 years ago.

*This, for the edification of Ms. Gay, is an example of a “citation.” KS

This article appeared on Colorado Politics on January 19, 2024.

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