By Greg Lukianoff
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
It didn’t take long after the terrorist attacks on
Israel for college campuses to once again become a culture-war battleground.
Pro-Palestinian — even explicitly pro-Hamas — statements and
demonstrations from activists at Harvard, George
Washington University, the University of Arizona, and other schools have
unsurprisingly prompted considerable backlash and debate about university
neutrality, academic freedom, and free speech on campus.
Many prominent college and university donors have led
that backlash and questioned how their alma maters have reacted to the
events of October 7. That crisis of confidence has spurred many to say “enough”
and sever their ties with certain institutions — including their financial
support. Some donors are threatening to withhold donations
until universities condemn the Hamas attacks. While that impulse is
understandable, it would be a squandered opportunity to take a situation that
underscores what’s so deeply wrong with higher education and make a meaningful
change.
Of course, donors are under no obligation to give money
to universities — certainly not those whose policies and values they disagree
with. Indeed, mindless and automatic giving to higher education without
considering administrative bloat, academic freedom, and free speech has enabled
many of the problems we have seen on campus over the last two decades. I would
know: My organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE),
has been dealing with these issues since 1999.
Given that experience, my message for donors today is to
use your influence wisely. Don’t miss this critical chance to transform
campuses for the better. Donors have the ability right now to lead schools away
from conformity-inducing pressures such as DEI statements, “bias-related incident” hot lines, and the conspicuous lack of faculty viewpoint
diversity and toward nonconformity-inducing pressures such as institutional
neutrality on social and political issues and an emphasis on academic freedom.
For one thing, donors should demand de-bureaucratization
on campus. Administrative bloat is a problem across the country,
and it tends to be bad for free expression. The Harvard Crimson has noted that “Harvard employs
7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the
undergraduate population. What do they all do?” Every one of those
administrators must find some way of justifying their job, and unfortunately,
policing campus speech is often the lowest-hanging fruit. So it’s no wonder
Harvard scored dead last on FIRE’s
2024 College Free Speech Rankings.
Donors should also make their support contingent upon the
university’s promotion of free speech and freedom of inquiry across the board,
from Day One. This means emphasizing the importance of free expression during
orientation week and adopting speech-protective policies such as the Chicago Statement.
It also means establishing administrative accountability
for violations of these principles. Any time there is a shout-down of a
speaker, or a campaign to either get a professor fired or a student expelled
for their speech, there should be an investigation into the administration’s
role in it. Administrators found to be enforcing political or
ideological orthodoxy or encouraging censorship or cancel culture have no place
at the university.
Donors should insist that students and administrators
alike are aware that shout-downs, disruptions of events, and mob censorship
will not be tolerated. They should also demand that schools publicly defend the
free speech and academic freedom of students and professors — a difficult ask,
because universities have been notoriously cowardly on this front.
That cowardice is one reason donors need to do all of
this with an eye toward constant vigilance — something FIRE knows well in our
watchdog role. Donors should make clear that convenient applications of
principle can no longer stand.
And speaking of pressure, why not market pressure?
Another way donors can influence policies and standards on campus is to give to
other institutions that may do a better job, like the University of Austin or Minerva University in
San Francisco. We need new experiments in the higher-education space, and on a
massive scale. Meaningful competition for elite college students could be the
best path to reform at legacy universities. Otherwise, these schools will know
they’re the only game in town and will call donors’ bluff. Since they have seen
themselves as the sole option for so long, giving to other institutions may be
the only intervention that elite higher education will pay attention to.
In the last couple of weeks, some schools have appeared to
rediscover the value of free speech and academic freedom in response to the
uproar on and off campus over the Hamas attacks. Stanford,
Harvard, and the University of Florida have issued statements
defending free expression and affirming the value of a campus free from
censorship of dissenting viewpoints. Some have even adopted or emulated the
University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, which insists that institutional
neutrality is the bedrock of a free and open campus culture.
The standards set forth in the Kalven Report are
fantastic models for a college campus. But people, including university donors,
are justified in suspecting that many universities’ sudden adoption of these
standards is a ploy. Universities were more than eager to weigh in with
institutional positions on the war in Ukraine or Black Lives Matter just a
minute ago, so this conversion looks a lot more like fear — of activist
professors, students, and administrators, and the kind of noise those groups
are likely to make.
If a school shows an enduring commitment to free speech
and political neutrality, then we should support it. However, universities’
recent rediscovery of these principles seems entirely self-serving — and
temporary. Higher education always circles the wagons against an outside
threat, whether it’s donors or public pressure. But standing up to demands for
political or ideological conformity from within is much more difficult, and
succumbing to it has sadly been the norm on campus for years.
This is why the next time a threat to academic freedom
comes from on campus, or there’s a social-justice-oriented
cause that appeals to the political Left, I suspect schools will abandon their
commitment to academic freedom and free expression just as quickly as they
reaffirmed it. I would like nothing better than to be wrong on that.
Regardless, right now, donors to universities have a
chance to help reform campuses into the oases of free speech and academic
freedom they always should have been. Rather than demand that students be
expelled or professors fired for speech they disagree with, they can insist on
free speech and academic freedom. Instead of pressuring universities to adopt
specific perspectives, they can demand institutional neutrality. And in lieu of
groupthink, fear, conformity, and cancel culture, they can promote the habits of a free mind, open inquiry, good-faith debate,
and diversity of opinion.
In other words, donors can help make universities once
again the home for those who seek knowledge and truth no matter where their
inquiries take them. That will be well worth their money.
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