Campus leaders shouldn’t be judged on their political pronouncements

There has in recent years been considerable hand-wringing about how administrators have turned college campuses into safe spaces, full of coddled students, However, we have learned in the past few weeks that all members of the university community must be prepared to be offended – if not today, then soon enough. It is a salutary lesson, for this is what academic freedom is all about.

The growth of campus protests following 7 October underlines that students (and others) still take for granted not just that campuses are proper venues for political speech and action, but also that administrators will speak out on behalf of their political positions – and should be held to account for not being quick or forceful enough in doing so.

Institutions such as Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, where I have taught and held senior administrative positions, have been regular sites for conflict involving students, faculty, administrators and external critics over issues ranging from the meaning of academic freedom and the responsibilities of teachers to the funding of campus programmes and student groups.

These debates are not new, but the tone is harsher now, both because of the horrific scale of the violence in Israel and Gaza and because all the tensions inhabiting the campus culture wars of the past two decades have finally collided with the politics of the Middle East. That there are significant differences of opinion on most campuses is to be expected; what is new is the extent to which critiques of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians have spread across faculty and student groups, even as more Jewish students have reported a climate of antisemitism around campus activism.

Universities have found themselves at the centre of virulent debates about matters ranging from the responsibilities of their leaders to speak with “moral clarity” about the conflict to the sense that professors, and academic modes of thought and pedagogy, have inculcated political ideologies rather than objective thought – even while a recent suggestion by the president of the University of California system to teach Middle Eastern history in a “viewpoint-neutral” manner received significant pushback from faculty, who noted that even the most scrupulous and comprehensive historical scholarship necessarily has “a point of view”.

The question of institutional neutrality, however, merits further examination, especially after the recent forced resignation of Elizabeth Magill as president of the University of Pennsylvania. After all, there was a time, before the Berkeley free speech movement of 1964, when it meant prohibiting all political speech on campus. Even subsequently, many administrators tried to maintain a posture of neutrality – most famously at the University of Chicago, with the 1967 Kalven Report.

Increasingly, however, students, faculty, alumni, donors and politicians have demanded that university leaders comment on the political events of the day. This has been a slippery slope. While all universities seek to be welcoming to their students and other constituents, they cannot and should not guarantee that this welcome will always be palatable – intellectually, politically, ethically or even religiously. Leaders need to be outspoken about the specific values of the university, which necessitate some positions that are hardly neutral. However, their interpretation of different forms of political speech or the nature of the current conflict should not be the currency by which we evaluate either their leadership or their primary responsibilities as academic leaders.

Those who have focused on the “effects” of political conflicts – and in the case at hand, extreme political violence – on local constituents (faculty, students, staff) have done the right thing, worried as they naturally are about how the violence affects the primary mission – and members – of the university.

University leaders generally agree that no one should be insulted or abused for who they are, how they identify or what they think. This, as much heated recent commentary has made clear, is far more complex than it sounds. But administrators should not be required to support one constituency over another or to make declarative statements or complex analyses of the historical or political context of the ongoing violence.

What they should do is what most have done: decry all expressions of antisemitism, Islamophobia or other versions of hate that target specific groups and individuals on campus. Sure, students and faculty will demand more. So will donors and other critics. And now that universities are in the political cross hairs, we may see increasing efforts to target academic freedom itself, in the name of political causes.

But universities must not retreat from this fundamental commitment. Even if we acknowledge that, either as institutions or as collections of smart and strong-minded people, universities are never fully neutral, institutional aspirations to political neutrality have a power to legitimate the real work of being receptive to competing ideas. That requires ensuring that intellectual debates on campus continue to take place.

There should be as much protection for diverse perspectives as possible, but this must not come at the cost of the core intellectual plenitude at the heart of what universities are and were meant to be.

Nicholas Dirks is president of the New York Academy of Sciences, former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and author of City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University (Cambridge University Press).