Earlier this summer, Harvard dean Lawrence Bobo wrote an essay for the Harvard Crimson that provoked a chorus of criticism, much of it justified. Reflecting on the post-October 7 turmoil on his campus, which had led, among other things, to the resignation of President Claudine Gay, Bobo argued that faculty should be disciplined for airing the university’s dirty laundry in public:
Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?
Yes it is and yes it does.
In other words, if a professor engages in “extramural speech” about events on campus, posting on social media or using his prominent position to appeal to lawmakers and donors via the opinion pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, he is acting unprofessionally and irresponsibly, “seriously harm[ing] the university and its independence.”
The more resources universities need, the greater the temptation to dance to the tunes chosen by those who pay the piper.Plenty of people have responded quite effectively to Bobo, arguing that his position threatens academic freedom, which includes not only the freedom to argue and publish in professional channels about one’s area of expertise but also the freedom to speak “extramurally.” However, the treatment of extramural speech typically focuses on what professors say “as citizens,” not as experts either in their subjects or, so to speak, in university affairs. As one of Bobo’s critics acknowledged in an earlier paper, the central concern regarding extramural speech has, from the outset, been the reputation of the university with its stakeholders and with the broader public. Thus, Bobo’s concerns are not altogether unreasonable, however ham-fistedly and high-handedly he expressed them.
I would like to approach Bobo’s argument by focusing on the goal that he and his critics share: the institutional independence of the university as a knowledge-seeking enterprise.
To be sure, one could argue that that ship has already sailed. The university is subject, or has made itself subject, to all sorts of external actors—federal, state, and local government funders; individual, corporate, and institutional donors; and tuition-paying students and their parents. There are also laws and regulations, some of which exist as strings attached to public funding (or even tax-exempt status) and others of which are strictures that the university shares with all other social institutions (such as zoning). Universities court donors, recruit students (especially those willing to pay close to full tuition), and lobby governments. The more resources universities think they need, the greater the temptation (or necessity) to dance to the tunes chosen by those who pay the piper.
Of course, we have to acknowledge that, to some degree, universities can pick and choose their sources of support, seeking funding that supports their mission and refusing donors who would compromise it. The diversity and pluralism of the academic marketplace leaves room for a certain amount of independence, with every institution seeking its own niche or defining its own, er, “brand.” Indeed, while government funding has a substantial homogenizing influence, American higher education is distinguished from its global counterparts by the presence, first of all, of different levels of government with different agendas (consider the contrast between the Biden and DeSantis administrations’ approaches to higher education) and by the plethora of institutional and individual donors with different interests and affections.
I also don’t mean to deprecate altogether the norms of academic freedom that offer some measure of protection to faculty scholarship and pedagogy and to faculty self-governance (at least in curricular matters). But we shouldn’t forget that academic freedom is not a Kantian categorical imperative, let alone part of the Mosaic law. It is based on an implicit contract, in which we faculty members are left relatively free to teach and study what we will with the promise that what we produce—research, scholarship, and well-educated students—will be good for our employers and our country. The less trustworthy we seem, and the less apparent “good” we produce, the less willing governments, donors, and tuition-payers are to part with their money.
Academic freedom is not a Kantian categorical imperative, let alone part of the Mosaic law.I know it’s hard for us professors to resist making, in Platonic terms, the claim of the philosopher-king—or, in contemporary terms, the experts’ insistence that you trust us, implicitly and absolutely. We’ll take your checks, preferably with no strings attached, because we know better what to do with that money.
Let me count the ways that such claims are problematical. First, there’s the logic of the marketplace, in which consumer (not producer) preferences should be determinative. I’m willing to argue that education is decisively different from other consumer goods, just as philosophy is different from sophistry, but we can’t simply dismiss the prominence of the market.
Second, we in higher education have spent at least the last 50 years urging everyone to mistrust master narratives, to question authority. We shouldn’t be surprised if that skepticism—call it, as administrators are wont to do, “critical thinking”—is applied to our own claims.
Third, it seems reasonable that various constituencies would have their own views of what’s “good.” The needs of the state or the nation, for example, might be posed against the sometimes cosmopolitan, sometimes identitarian claims coming from college campuses. And if we’re going to talk about our common good, those elected by the people can make claims about it probably more plausibly than those hired by search committees.
Once we recognize academic freedom and the institutional independence that supports it as contingent—as goods threatened on all sides—it’s reasonable to ask how they can be restored or shored up.
A good start would be to think clearly about the mission of the university. Just as freedom of speech serves democratic or republican self-government, so academic freedom serves the advancement of knowledge in the institution that has become the home to teaching and research. To the degree that the university is meant or made to serve other ends—like “social justice” or the careerist and entrepreneurial aspirations of faculty and administrators, not to mention students—the case for academic freedom is diminished.
In this connection, I cannot improve upon the 1967 Kalven Report, issued by the University of Chicago:
The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.
The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic (emphasis added).
Needless to say, what follows from this line of argument is “institutional neutrality,” embraced once again in recent months, much to the dismay of some campus constituencies—not just students—who would rather enlist the university’s prestige and intellectual heft on behalf of their favored causes.
The independence of the university can be threatened from within as well as from without.This leads me to my next point. As I just suggested, the independence of the university can be threatened from within as well as from without. I can almost forgive students—who, at the outset at least, don’t know any better—for their attempts to make their university speak on their issues with their voice. But when faculty and staff do so, that’s a different question altogether.
The roots of this threat were identified almost 60 years ago by the great Robert Nisbet in his The Degradation of Academic Dogma. In Nisbet’s view, the instrumentalization of the university has two internal sources: entrepreneurial faculty, who create semi-autonomous labs and institutes to attract grants and build their own intellectual empires, and others (who now call themselves scholar-activists), for whom the university serves as a political platform for promoting their favored causes. The first of these sources is identified with the “neo-liberal university,” where the coin of the realm is, well, coin. The more grants and research contracts professors have, the less they have to pay attention to their colleagues, students, and, indeed, their institutions, which are just convenient places (for the moment) to hang their hats.
Scholar-activists treat everything as political. As one once told me, to think of the university as a community of scholars, leading the life of the mind in the pursuit of truth, is naïve. Although its standing has recently been diminished, the university still constitutes a political high ground from which one can promote one’s particular vision of America and the world.
One could say that the Kalven Report admits this by asserting that the university is the “home and sponsor of critics.” But the report also assumes that the critics who find their home in the university recognize the distinctiveness of their home and are thereby different from the critics whose home is the encampment or the street. University-based critics should make arguments and respect their interlocutors, not chant slogans and shout down those who disagree with them. If they take to Twitter or major newspapers to lambast their institutions, they should make very sure they aren’t simply grandstanding. All too frequently, they are.
Let me conclude by applying a lesson from the history of political philosophy to the contemporary university. Many great philosophers have argued that freedom and self-government require virtue. We can’t govern ourselves as a community unless we first govern ourselves as individuals. A person who has the cardinal—one might say in this context the “collegial”—virtues (courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom or prudence) can pursue the good without surrendering to the blandishments of “fame and fortune.” A community of such people at least stands a chance of upholding the integrity of the university against the various efforts to capture it for personal or ideological purposes.
Unless and until we restore the cultivation of these virtues to the center of university life, we’ll continue to witness performative pronouncements on one side and blunt and misplaced instruments of administrative control on the other. For those of us who love the idea of a collegiate community, that is a sad spectacle.
Joseph M. Knippenberg is Professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, where he has taught since 1985.