It is easy, if you are concerned about the future of higher education, to focus on the continual war of rhetoric, budget, and legislation coming from Governor Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo, and the Florida GOP because that definitely requires our attention, yet ...
... to focus almost exclusively on that would be to ignore a completely different war against academic freedom being waged nationwide by right-wing "think tanks" like the American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, or the Manhattan Institute, along with old standbys like the Heritage Foundation -- and one that, in the long run envisions the political neutering of high education in the public square.
They're beginning the process now, obscured by the peals of thunder and bright lightning created in Florida, by using dryly "intellectual" op-eds in places like Christopher Rufo's Manhattan Institute mouthpiece City Journal by people like Dr. Joshua T. Katz, formerly a Linguistics professor at Princeton, who became "formerly" either for inappropriate sexual relationship with one or more female undergraduates or because Princeton wanted him out of the way because his conservative views bothered the ruling elites there.
Given those circumstances, it is hardly surprising in today's climate that the Right has made Dr. Katz into one of its "poster child" academic heroes or the Dr. Katz himself has become a critic of Universities speaking out -- as Universities -- on the social and political issues of the day.
The best way to maintain your bonafides with the new Radical Right -- especially if your closet is full of unsightly items from your past -- is to double-down on your "intellectual" critique of higher education (which hired you and then tenured you as a known conservative at a liberal, elite institution until you started mucking around with the students), ahem, anyway ... the best way is to write pseudo-intellectual dreck like "Academic Freedom or Intellectual Neutrality" so that in a year or two the Right can include it in a footnote to make it seem like somebody distinguished actually did research and wrote an article of merit.
He didn't. But he has obeyed ideological orders to begin popularizing and legitimizing a new catch-phrase designed to more fully throttle the expression of any ideas the Right doesn't like to see in the public square.
Enter the concept of Institutional Neutrality, which the Right wants to replace Academic Freedom.
His vehicle is the 1967 Kalven Report, :
which a faculty committee chaired by law professor Harry Kalven, Jr. issued in the midst of the Vietnam War and which has stood unmodified since, states that there is “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day, or modifying its corporate activities to foster social or political values, however compelling and appealing they may be.”
Pay particular attention to that wonderful phrase, "and which has stood unmodified since," which makes the Kalven Report sound like some bedrock of sanity in a world gone mad that has been the subject of contention and interest and influence ...
... except for the fact that ONLY the University of Chicago (which commissioned it) adopted in during the next five and one-half decades, after which it gained its second adherent in the University of North Carolina. UNC is a renowned institution, but one should probably note that the Kalven Report was only adopted by the Board of Trustees (after a Florida-style revamping) in 2022 over the express objections of the overwhelming majority of the faculty.
In other words, what Dr Katz does not tell you that UNC academics did not embrace the concepts within the Kalven Report, but had those concepts imposed upon them by political appointees to the Board.
Let's think about the intellectual heft of the Kalven Report here for a second (we have to do it, because Dr Katz does not). There are about 2,400 colleges and universities in the United States, and it took 55 years for the second one to endorse these principles.
Hillsdale College, the flagship of conservative academic advocacy has not endorsed the Kalven Report. (It couldn't. Most of its income comes from institutional political advocacy.)
Notre Dame, the flagship of great Catholic universities has not endorsed the Kalven Report, because to do so would be to violate its charter to be a bulwark for a specific set of cultural and religious values. (The same would apply to Brigham Young or any other religiously affiliated institution.)
No Historically Black College or University (HBCU) would be found endorsing such a report, because these institutions came into existence to provide access to education to people of color long denied such by segregation, and have built their entire identities as advocates for that and similar causes.
No 1892 Land-Grant agricultural college of university would endorse that report, as their very existence involves constant public, institutional lobbying of Congress to pass specific legislation on agriculture, natural resources management, and even (horrors!) climate change.
What Dr Katz also doesn't really want you to know is that the Kalven Report was the product of a specific time and controversy (students were pressuring the University of Chicago for a more activist institutional role in criticizing the Vietnam War), or that Dr. Harry Kalven's son and co-author Jamie Kalven, according to an extended piece on him in The Chicago Maroon,
believes that the University is using the Kalven Report in a less flexible way than its writers had intended, and that this application is to its detriment as an institution.
In fact, the younger Kalven points out that the University of Chicago has repeatedly set aside a rigid reading of his father's work, including published institutional criticisms of President Trump's Muslim ban on immigration, as well as his efforts to role back Delayed Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the program begun by President Obama's Executive Order regarding the status of very young children brought to America without documentation. These, Jamie Kalven points out, were considered by the University to be "paramount values," and thereby considered as exemptions from the Kalven declaration of Institutional Neutrality.
Dr Katz tells us none of these things, except to sideswipe those "paramount values" and to raise the specter of State legal action through the IRS against universities that violate his particularist and radical revision of the Kavlen doctrine:
Now, in the words of the Internal Revenue Service, Princeton, as a 501(c)(3), “may not be an action organization, i.e., it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities.” Even aside from the law, though, those of us who appreciate the Kalven Report believe strongly that no college or university should issue official statements about matters that do not pertain directly to its mission or the mission of higher education generally—and that schools should be extremely sparing in issuing even statements that some (but surely not all) may deem pertinent.
He goes on to expand his premise of radical institutional neutrality by suggesting that individual academic departments should fall under its aegis in determining who might or might not be brought to campus as speakers or scholars in residence. He is especially upset by Palestinians, from the famous Edward Said, author of the groundbreaking 1978 work "Orientalism," which he casually misrepresents in passing, to an invitation to controversial Palestinian scholar and activist Mohammed El-Kurd to speak on campus.
Katz's careful linking of the radical El-Kurd to the thoughtful Said (done with the appearance of casualness that only a professional linguist might attempt) seems to be as much about declaring any consideration of Palestine from a non-pro-Israeli view as inherently anti-semitic and eternally out of bounds for either academic freedom or institutional neutrality.
The cards slipped up the sleeve here are fascinating to observe. Katz paints El-Kurd as anti-semitic on the authority of the Anti-Defamation League, which is at best unintentionally humorous since his own employer, the American Enterprise Institute, routinely lambasts the ADL for being a leftist tool that spreads disinformation about racism and CRT. Katz routinely speaks of the AEI as "the Princeton of think tanks," a bit of self-serving hyperbole (he landed there when Princeton fired him)
Apparently the ADL is not a leftist organization spreading disinformation when it is criticizing Palestinians, and nothing surrounding Israeli occupation of Palestine or the linguistic paradigms used to form public opinion could ever possibly be a valid issue for American universities to take up.
It's not so much that Dr Katz has written a deceptive position paper distorting the meaning and influence of the Kalven Report that -- aside from me -- only a few diehard radical right "intellectuals" will skim before filing it to use for the purpose of legitimizing further restrictions on academic free speech.
It's not the cognitive dissonance of a man who claims to have been a victim of cancel culture and not of his own inclinations and appetites who nonetheless supports canceling the ability of his former peers to make certain kinds of statements ... and vaguely threatens that the IRS could be called in to chastise them.
It's not even the fact that Dr Katz has not so much been "liberated" by "being canceled" as he has so publicly announced as that he has voluntarily reduced his own status from scholar and intellectual to mercenary hack who seems not to have the slightest concern that he is representing the interests of those whose ultimate objective is not only to fashion a country in which educators can't "say gay," but also one in which people who criticize the government will be required to register themselves with the government before publishing.
It's all of them, cynically conscripted, mobilized, and deployed in service of a bad cause.
I'm certain there are members of the Wagner Group who could explain to Dr Katz that none of this will end well, either for him or for the rest of us.
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