Princeton historian David A. Bell thinks such official pronouncements are a mistake. Here is a taste of his piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Where does your English department stand on abortion rights? What does the School of Public Health think about the occupation of the West Bank? If these questions strike you as strange, you haven’t been paying attention to American universities lately. Over the past few years, public statements on current affairs by academic units have proliferated. Not surprisingly, given the politics of the professoriate, these statements have largely supported left-liberal causes such as restraints upon the police, abortion rights, and affirmative action. Some academics, meanwhile, have criticized the practice — notably my Princeton colleague Robert George in The Atlantic — and have called for academic units to practice “institutional neutrality” along the lines of the Kalven Report issued by the University of Chicago in 1967. Princeton itself is currently considering guidelines for the issuing of such statements.
At issue in this debate are two very different conceptions of what “politics” means in an academic setting. Does the word refer primarily to consciously held and explicitly expressed claims about matters openly debated in government and the media — something that can be consciously refrained from? Or does it connote a much broader, more pervasive set of assumptions and practices? Is it possible for an institution to be politically “neutral,” or is that very idea a fiction? Many of the statements issued in recent years, reflecting influential cultural theories of the past several decades, imply that academic work is inherently and inescapably political. For this reason, many scholars will dismiss criticism like Robert George’s out of hand as naïve, or as a disingenuous screen for the advancement of an exclusionary conservative agenda. As a former president of Macalester College put it recently to The Chronicle: “You cannot escape politics. Your choice is to act as if you have no stake in those arguments or you can have a little more courage and actively engage in those debates.”
But even if one agrees, does it follow that academic units, as opposed to individual scholars, should be issuing public statements on current affairs? Many of the statements from the past few years suggest that because of the inherently political nature of academic work, academic units in fact have a moral obligation to declare their positions on certain issues. But that is an unjustified logical leap. Regardless of how one understands the relationship between politics and academe, there are very good reasons why schools, departments, programs, and centers should refrain from making such statements.
The claims about moral obligation are eloquent, passionate, and heartfelt, and often invoke shameful aspects of a discipline’s political past. For instance, the “Statement on Anti-Racism” issued by the Princeton English department after the killing of George Floyd decried “literary study’s long history as a prop to the worst forces of imperialism and nationalism, and its role in underwriting crimes of slavery and discrimination.” The department of religious studies at the University of Iowa promised: “We will work to acknowledge and expose the racist histories of our discipline and of the religions that most of us have studied and taught.” A statement from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health lambasted the role of public-health professionals in promoting “slavery, Jim Crow, scientific racism, eugenics, and other structural atrocities.” Taking a slightly different tack, the department of classical studies at Boston University spoke to the present day, condemning “the appropriation of classical antiquity as a tool of white supremacy, nationalism, and gender or class-based discrimination.”
By invoking their discipline’s political histories and uses in this manner, the statements imply that taking a stance on current affairs constitutes a self-evident and morally necessary corrective, a form of reparation for past political sins. The statement by the Princeton English department, for instance, asserts that the discipline’s history “compels us … to actively dissociate literary studies from their colonial and racist uses.” But in taking this stance, the statements leap over several crucial questions. Why should academic units of a university, as opposed to individual scholars or disciplinary organizations, be making these pronouncements? What if certain members of the unit do not agree with them, or consider them factually flawed? What if they feel that their unit should be issuing statements about a different issue than the one chosen, or disagree about the language of the statement and the specific actions called for? What if something in the statement violates their moral convictions?
Read the rest here.
Even noble moral stances need some form of principled questioning in academic settings–if not of the content at least of the structural or institutional issues raised here…that’s part of what it means, or should mean, to be an academic setting. There have always been orthodoxies, acknowledged and not, but we have to negotiate them in a collegial spirit grounded both in personal responsibility and a shared sense of the academic enterprise.
…seems to me
“You cannot escape politics. Your choice is to act as if you have no stake in those arguments or you can have a little more courage and actively engage in those debates.”
So, unless you’re channeling your concerns in precisely the way this administrator has determined to be the right one, you lack courage and are evading your responsibilities. Got it.
I miss the days when you could rely on college presidents, to avoid cheap ad hominem arguments.