The Wrong Debates
Viewpoint diversity and institutional neutrality aren't going to do much to help higher ed.
If I’m paying attention to the debates about academic freedom and university operations being carried out in spaces like the Chronicle of Higher Education or the New York Times, and I am, I would imagine that among the most pressing issues for institutions right now are “viewpoint diversity” and “institutional neutrality,” or even more pointless, a “truth-and-reconciliation” process over last decade’s intramural fights at elite institutions over wokeness, as recently suggested at the Chronicle Review.
Significant ink has been spilled debating these issues, and, truthfully, I have no objection to having these debates, but also, deep down, I find debates about the abstract principles supporters of these ideas espouse not particularly meaningful in a world where, as reported by Josh Moody at Inside Higher Ed, “Universities are increasingly citing institutional neutrality and related state laws to suppress innocuous student speech in the latest sign of eroding free speech rights on campus.”
One of the examples Moody shares is an incident at Cape Fear Community College where administrators demanded that a set design featuring “No Kings” protest signs as part of a contemporary production of Greek tragedy, The Bacchae, be removed hours before the first performance.
Believers in the principle of institutional neutrality can claim that this is not what they mean, but this rings pretty hollow these days. Laura Belz, director of policy reform at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), does just this, saying to Moody,
“For universities to be taking these institutional neutrality policies and actually applying them to restrict student and faculty speech totally subverts what the entire premise of that policy is and what it was intended for originally. I don’t think that we need to throw out institutional neutrality. I think it’s a problem of misapplication and that there needs to be stronger guidance from universities for their staff about how to actually apply this in practice.”
FIRE has made adopting institutional neutrality policies one of its centerpieces for its free speech rankings, and here is their centerpiece being “misused,” which has got to sting, but also, I’m here to say that it was inevitable because no matter the intention behind such policies, the establishment of them gives administrations a rationale to crack down on speech it finds inconvenient or uncomfortable.
The idea that adopting an “institutional neutrality” policy is going to be some kind of leading indicator of a consistent pro-speech stance is, at this point, willful ignorance. Michigan State University, which has adopted a position virtually indistinguishable from institutional neutrality, recently passed a code of conduct for its trustees that punishes individuals for expressing opinions contrary to the board’s majority.
In Michigan, trustees are democratically elected, and at least in theory, accountable to the public constituency. The threat of being removed for dissent hardly sounds like a pro-speech stance. Institutional neutrality has become “institutional you-better-toe the line.”
This “misuse” of institutional neutrality is identical to the desire for a greater diversity of viewpoints in higher education, on its surface an unobjectionable goal, but in practice looks more like the wasteful and divisive “civic centers” that have been cropping up.
The debate around academic freedom has to go beyond policy. It’s got to be about, you know… freedom, and it must be grounded in what is actually happening at institutions.
In some ways, these debates remind me of the arguments over tenure of 10 or 15 years ago, when faculty would stand up and vociferously declare that eliminating tenure would make it impossible to do their work of teaching and research without fear of unjustified reprisal.
True, but also, as I wrote repeatedly at Inside Higher Ed, huge swaths of instructional faculty at higher ed institutions were not eligible for the specific protections of tenure, a state which made protecting the principle of tenure for a select class of faculty a rather limited goal. And of course, over time, by simply replacing tenured faculty with non-tenurable faculty, a way to reduce the overall protective value of tenure, we see the problem of resting our arguments on an idea that can be limited, ignored, or grotesquely perverted by the people who hold the power.
I believe that colleges and universities benefit from a range of viewpoints. I also believe that the individuals working in these institutions should have the freedom to express themselves without feeling as though they will run afoul of an institutional stance.
But the idea that signing up for some abstract idea as though this will make diversity of viewpoints and freedom of expression happen is pure fantasy if you’re paying any attention at all to the way the world works.
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The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
This does leave me wondering, what is the right debate, and how do we shift the debates? Shifting debates is a social and political process. It also cannot be achieved purely through abstract debate. If the right debate is “freedom” or “academic freedom,” that is also an abstract debate.