Universities Should Adopt Institutional Neutrality – Heterodox Academy | Heterodox Academy
On July 27, 2022, the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees passed a resolution adopting both the University of Chicago s Free Speech Statement and its Kalven Report. Chicago s Free Speech Statement, which guarantees free expression at the university, is well known in academia. According to the campus free speech organization FIRE, 87 universities have adopted the Statement as of July 2022. Much less well known is the Kalven Report, which focuses on institutional neutrality.
Institutional neutrality is the idea that the university, as the Kalven Report states, cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. It comes to this conclusion on the basis of the view that the mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. The university follows this mission to advance society and humankind. What higher mission could there be?
The instrument of the mission, per the Report, is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. Thus, to perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.
This philosophy does not mean a university as an institution can never speak out. The Report states that from time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values. However, this should not be done lightly or often, and there should be a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day&