Bell: Where Does Your Department (Or Law School) Stand On Abortion? Antiracism? Immigration?

Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed: Where Does You Department Stand on Abortion? Antiracism? Immigration?, by David A. Bell (Princeton; Google Scholar):

Programs [and law schools] are issuing statements on a host of political issues. That’s a mistake.

Where does your English department stand on abortion rights? What does the School of Public Health think about the occupation of the West Bank? If these questions strike you as strange, you haven’t been paying attention to American universities lately. Over the past few years, public statements on current affairs by academic units have proliferated. Not surprisingly, given the politics of the professoriate, these statements have largely supported left-liberal causes such as restraints upon the police, abortion rights, and affirmative action. Some academics, meanwhile, have criticized the practice — notably my Princeton colleague Robert George in The Atlantic — and have called for academic units to practice “institutional neutrality” along the lines of the Kalven Report issued by the University of Chicago in 1967. Princeton itself is currently considering guidelines for the issuing of such statements.

At issue in this debate are two very different conceptions of what “politics” means in an academic setting. Does the word refer primarily to consciously held and explicitly expressed claims about matters openly debated in government and the media — something that can be consciously refrained from? Or does it connote a much broader, more pervasive set of assumptions and practices? Is it possible for an institution to be politically “neutral,” or is that very idea a fiction? Many of the statements issued in recent years, reflecting influential cultural theories of the past several decades, imply that academic work is inherently and inescapably political. For this reason, many scholars will dismiss criticism like Robert George’s out of hand as naïve, or as a disingenuous screen for the advancement of an exclusionary conservative agenda. As a former president of Macalester College put it recently to The Chronicle: “You cannot escape politics. Your choice is to act as if you have no stake in those arguments or you can have a little more courage and actively engage in those debates.”

But even if one agrees, does it follow that academic units, as opposed to individual scholars, should be issuing public statements on current affairs? …

[T]he statements fail to acknowledge that academic units themselves are political, in the basic sense that they are structures of power, and ones in which certain individuals, namely chairs and tenured professors, wield hugely disproportionate influence. In any such structure, it is vital to have clear procedures for deliberation, and to protect the rights and interests of individuals against the leadership and against the majority. But the more a statement is presented as self-evidently necessary, as an act of sheer moral obligation, the harder it is to leave room for significant deliberation, disagreement, or dissent. ,,,

It may well be naïve to think that a university can ever be a wholly neutral space, and that it can maintain, as the Kalven Report put it, “an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” It is not naïve, however, to recognize that universities host scholars with different, often conflicting beliefs, and that these differences need to be respected and protected. Allowing academic units to issue public statements on current affairs erodes that respect and those protections.

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