Harvard's Institutional Voice
A report by Harvard’s Institutional Voice Working Group has been accepted by the interim president, along with its recommendation that the “university and its leaders should not.. issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” This prohibition applies not just to senior leadership, but also to any group within the organization using official channels of communication, including academic departments (emphasis added):
The principles articulated and recommended here should apply to any person or body authorized or purporting to speak on behalf of the university or its component parts. That should include the president, provost, and all deans as well as heads of departments, centers, and programs; it should also in principle extend to university governing boards and faculty bodies (such as faculty councils and the faculties of schools and departments acting collectively).
It would seem that adherence to this new policy would prevent the posting of statements of solidarity on official department homepages, which has been a very contentious issue at my own institution and beyond. I’ll return to this point below.
At first glance the recommendations sound a lot like an endorsement of the 1967 Kalven Report, which I discussed at length in an earlier post. The report argued that except in certain “extraordinary instances” having to do with its central mission, there ought to be “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.”
But the co-chairs of the Harvard working group have tried to distance themselves from the Kalven report:
While our policy has some important things in common with the Kalven Report, which insisted that the university remain silently neutral on political and social issues, ours rests on different principles and has some different implications.
The principle behind our policy isn’t neutrality. Rather, our policy commits the university to an important set of values that drive the intellectual pursuit of truth: open inquiry, reasoned debate, divergent viewpoints and expertise. An institution committed to these values isn’t neutral, and shouldn’t be. It has to fight for its values, particularly when they are under attack, as they are now. Speaking publicly is one of the tools a university can use in that fight.
As an example of a departure from neutrality in the service of its values, the authors point to Harvard’s submission of a series of amicus curiae briefs on affirmative action dating back several decades. Most of these interventions, they argue, were appropriate exercises of institutional voice:
Take the use of affirmative action to achieve diversity in higher education admissions. Harvard argued in defense of this idea in the Supreme Court on several occasions—starting in 1978, when the court’s controlling opinion allowing diversity in admissions relied extensively on a brief that Harvard filed, through 2023, when the court rejected the use of race in diversity-based admissions. Harvard’s advocacy all along was far from neutral and would arguably have violated the Kalven principles. On our principles, however, Harvard was justified in speaking out forcefully in support of the method it long used to admit students, because admissions is a core function of the university.
It is worth noting that Harvard’s amicus briefs over this period were submitted under several different presidents, including Larry Summers in 2003.
It is also worth recalling that the Kalven report itself carved out an exception to institutional neutrality in a key paragraph:
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. There is another context in which questions as to the appropriate role of the university may possibly arise, situations involving university ownership of property, its receipt of funds, its awarding of honors, its membership in other organizations. Here, of necessity, the university, however it acts, must act as an institution in its corporate capacity. In the exceptional instance, these corporate activities of the university may appear so incompatible with paramount social values as to require careful assessment of the consequences.
This paragraph resulted in a dissent by one member of the committee. At the end of the report one finds a “special comment” by the economist George Stigler in which he endorses every portion of the document with the exception of the above segment, and declares a preference for replacing it with the following:
The university when it acts in its corporate capacity as employer and property owner should, of course, conduct its affairs with honor. The university should not use these corporate activities to foster any moral or political values because such use of its facilities will impair its integrity as the home of intellectual freedom.
I suspect that some observers will follow Stigler in faulting Harvard’s new policy for its willingness to countenance departures from neutrality in defense of institutional values, on the grounds that the links between values and specific policy positions (such as affirmative action) are tenuous and open to debate.
The new policy will also come under attack from those who see the restriction on collective statements by academic departments as an infringement on academic freedom and a departure from free speech principles. This seems to be the position, for instance, of the New York chapter of the ACLU.
My own view is that the working group struck roughly the right balance. At any given time, a university will have some set of policies in place, and must be prepared to explain and defend these publicly in an official capacity. This applies not just to admissions policies but also to partnerships with other institutions worldwide, and to the manner in which the endowment is invested.
No matter what decisions are made regarding such matters, they will necessarily be official acts that involve value judgments, and they will invite scrutiny. The university may later come to reconsider or even reverse its decisions, and retract the public statements supporting them. But at any given point in time, neutrality regarding the merits of policies that the university itself has chosen to adopt is simply not feasible.
What is feasible, and indeed essential, is to ensure that individual faculty members are free to dissent from these public statements, and even from the underlying values that are said to support them. This is easier said than done, since there are strong pressures for self-censorship whenever one’s views depart from institutional orthodoxy. But when neutrality is not an option, the protection—and perhaps even promotion—of dissent becomes an especially vital undertaking.
