The Value of Institutional Neutrality for Free Inquiry

Last fall, the First Amendment Law Review at the University of North Carolina hosted a symposium on campus free speech issues. The issue with articles from the symposium is now out. You can find my contribution here.

The article is called “The Value of Institutional Neutrality for Free Inquiry.” There are multiple reasons for universities to adopt a policy of what has become known as “institutional neutrality.” This article focuses on the value of such an institutional policy for protecting a climate of free inquiry for individual scholars at the institution.

The article revolves around three core concerns about how a departure from institutional neutrality norms damages free inquiry.

One is mission erosion.

Scholarly institutions that seek to take positions on matters of social and political controversy have altered their core mission and have done so in a way that will do damage to that mission. Rather than being a forum within which scholarly controversies rage, the university will position itself as a judge of those controversies. Rather than playing host to ongoing scholarly disagreements, the university will attempt to authoritatively settle those disagreements. Rather than privileging the process of scholarly disputation, the university will come to privilege a set of particular scholarly findings and conclusions. Rather than elevating expertise to better inform the polity, the university will exalt non-expert opinion in the hopes of influencing the polity. Institutional statements risk subverting the university’s commitment to free inquiry into difficult and controversial subjects.

Especially at the level of academic units, empowering departmental faculty to issue institutional political statements breeds a climate of political orthodoxy and transforms scholarly entities into political clubs.

Early in the twentieth century, the German sociologist Max Weber called attention to these dangers when universities were struggling to maintain their autonomy from political forces. The public interest on which the autonomy of the universities rested, he thought, depended on the ability of professors to think freely and speak independently of social and political pressures. “Society as a whole has no interest in guaranteeing the permanent tenure of a professorial corps which has been carefully screened to determine that its political views are unexceptional.”

Professors are quick to recognize the truth in Weber’s statement when the ideological screening of the professoriate is being done by political officials or trustees. They are slower to admit its truth when the ideological screening is done by the incumbent members of the professoriate itself. But if it would be damaging to the public good for the governor of Florida to screen state university professors for their political conformity, it would be equally bad for the faculty of the law school to impose such a screen themselves—even if the political conformity that such a screen would create would differ depending on who deployed it. Weber contended, “‘The freedom of science, scholarship and teaching’ in a university certainly does not exist where appointment to a teaching post is made dependent on the possession—or simulation—of a point of view which is ‘acceptable in the highest circles’ of church and state.” Things are not improved if a potential faculty member must simulate the political perspectives of the existing members of the faculty rather than the highest circles of church and state. Faculties should not “function as deputies on behalf of the political police,” even if the political police are not the ones currently reigning in the state capitol. It is a disservice to the greater public if scholars must pass through a screen to ensure that their political views are acceptable to those in power.

Finally, leaving the norm of institutional neutrality behind as a vestige of a bygone era can eventually be expected to result in the demand that many traditional practices of universities be altered. If scholarly entities, whether universities, scholarly associations, or scholarly publishers, posture as political actors, then there will be demands that they act like it — by suppressing dissenting voices and inconvenient truths.

Exclusion of dissenters and suppression of dissent is the most obvious thing to do if an institution is a committed partisan rather than a neutral platform. Universities routinely resist the call to purge the campus of political dissenters on the grounds that the university is the home to many diverse voices. The university does not endorse any of those voices, and none of those voices speaks for the university. A professor who expresses a controversial political opinion speaks for himself alone. Likewise, a controversial speaker who is brought to campus is not endorsed by the university that hosts him. The university has no one message to convey, and thus it tolerates the exhibition of many messages on its campus. It is the marketplace of ideas, not the purveyor of one idea. If the institution instead becomes an advocate rather than a forum, then there is less reason to tolerate counterprogramming to its favored message. It can no longer distinguish its own voice from the voice of those who speak on campus because now it has become the messenger for delivering a particular point of view. A diversity of voices only muddles the message the university has resolved to communicate. If the university as an institution knows the right answer to any particular political or social question, then it can only breed confusion if it allows on campus those who express the wrong answer to those questions. If the university has a dogma, then it need not tolerate heretics.

If universities wish to remain the serious scholarly institutions that they have held themselves out to be since the end of the nineteenth century, then they must refrain from committing themselves, as institutions, to particular right answers on contested and controversial political and social issues.

Read the whole thing here.

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