Main Edition
US
FR
August 26, 2024 - 10:50pm
Cornell University announced on Monday that its president and provost will refrain from making statements on issues that do not directly impact the school. This makes it the second Ivy League university to adopt such a policy in pursuit of institutional neutrality, after Harvard.
The school pledged that its response to expected protests in the coming months will be content-neutral, and said it will need to balance free speech rights with the legal obligation to protect students from harassment and discrimination. “Thus it is our responsibility and our obligation to enforce our policies ensuring that speech or actions by some members of our community does not violate the rights of others,” the announcement read.
This spring, Cornell was subject to widespread media coverage of its campus protests over the war in Gaza, with one piece in Tablet describing a campus culture which was hostile to “normal” students — including the one-third of the student body who belong to Greek life — and permissive of rule-breaking protests and encampments. The university also received pushback from pro-Israel donors and alumni, who expressed concerns about campus antisemitism. Going forward, Cornell will ensure that protests, particularly encampments, do not block other students from accessing campus spaces.
Institutional neutrality, most famously articulated in the 1968 Chicago Statement, is a policy under which universities remain neutral on hot-button issues in order to protect academic freedom for staff and students. In past years, most notably during the racial reckoning of 2020, American universities took stances through official statements in violation of this principle. After years of taking public stands, universities were slow to publish statements in the wake of the 7 October attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, angering those on both sides of the debate and leading to a donor revolt by pro-Israel alumni as well as months-long anti-Israel campus protests that derailed the academic year at many Ivy League universities.
The debacle of the past year has prompted a change of heart among university leaders. Earlier this month, Johns Hopkins University announced that its president, provost and deans would no longer make public statements on current events unless they were directly related to the functioning of the university, instead adopting a “policy of restraint”. There has been a growth in demands for the university to make official statements in recent years according to the announcement, which explained that such statements “can be at odds with the university’s function as a place for open discourse and the free exchange of ideas”.
“The very idea of an ‘official’ position of the university on a social, scientific, or political issue runs counter to our foundational ethos […] to be a place where competing views are welcomed, challenged, and tested through dialogue and rigorous marshalling,” university leaders wrote.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“…its president, provost and deans would no longer make public statements on current events…”
So, a handful of administrators will remain studiously mum while–wink wink–thousands of faculty are free to continue indoctrinating students in progressive orthodoxy. These are meaningless actions meant only to silence critics without changing the underlying source of the problem.
Correct, this has got mainly to do with appeasing sponsors. A very important stakeholder in US Ivy league education.
Not so fast. President Pollack was pushed out and her successor is on thin ice while they search for a new Prez. The Cornell Free Speech Association has been at the forefront of bringing pressure to bear on the administration. Things are changing. CFSA will continue to monitor and act on any official actions of the university like deplatforming of speakers, harrassment, etc. I expect the Admin will become neutral.
That’s all you can expect. Individual professors have as much right to speak freely as you do.
Unfortunately many of those professors are still indoctrinated and insist on doing the same to their students. It will take much longer for universities to shed the neo-marxism that has contaminated higher education.
I’m not being fast. You are slow to appreciate the current state of academia. You seem to take comfort in the ability of “individual professors having the right to speak freely” but that is moot if the professors are homogeneously progressive, which they are. Generations of potential conservative professors have opted out of academia for the last quarter century because they rightfully perceived as undergrads that a university neither offers them opportunity for advancement nor even welcomes their presence. They’ve gone into other professions instead. Many existing conservative faculty left academia when they saw the handwriting on the wall. The demographic compositions of faculties is now above 90% liberal. Contracts for new faculty require the signing of progressive compliance documents that make a mockery of free thought. And institutions blatantly discriminate in hiring against those known to profess conservative ideas. So what good is free speech if the composition of faculties are effectively unanimously progressive? There are no longer significant numbers of alternative faculty voices willing to confront the status quo. Academic “freedom” policies in such a context only codify coverage for leftist faculty’s continued condemnation of the rara avis conservative. We also have recently seen the hollowness of university administrative actions vis a vis recent protests where in the overwhelming majority of cases the miscreants who defied policies and (seldom) received some type of suspension or dismissal saw the punishments quietly vacated. Only the credulous would expect administrations to enforce policies in the future if doing so is inconvenient to the prevailing established orthodoxy.
Additionally, the lock on thought-expression in academia extends beyond universities to the realms of academic journals, where heterodox ideas are professionally dangerous to submit and usually rejected, and to professional associations that have become politicized in conformance with progressivism. University administrations have no control over these entities but these entities police and enforce academic orthodoxy. Finally, MY “speaking freely” that you refer to is on any platform like this contingent upon the whims of some nameless, faceless, content mediator and algorithm. Many of them would block what I’ve written or, in the case a social media, withdraw amplification of it.
Institutional neutrality, most famously articulated in the 1968 Chicago Statement
I’m always proud of my alma mater’s continued commitment to academic freedom.
There you are. No speech without responsibility for what’s said.
So a handful of universities are starting to appear to be fair-minded. Whoop-de-do ….
These are important universities that the less famous ones will follow. This represents an early step in the new, conservative march through the institutions to take them back to sanity.
Not a conservative match, thank goodness, but the simple acknowledgement that statements confer responsibility. If you can’t take it, don’t make it.
And the pendulum continues to swing, back and forth, back and forth…
Now only if the major news outlets will get the hint!
Time will tell whether these universities really live up to these commitments, but it is most certainly really encouraging that the dawn following a very dark night of wokism is really breaking in the USA. It is such a shame that the UK is heading further into the darkness with freedom under attack from every direction at the moment. The US experience does however show that it is possible to wake up from the woke nightmare.
Sorry, it’s a dawn following a very dark night of ‘free speech’.
Here are some well developed thoughts on free speech.
Doesn’t seem that complicated.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/not-in-our-name
To find Cornell’s position on anything look up Harvard’s six months earlier.
Ouch!
Which shows how little novelty of thought exists in academia and how much pure mimesis.
I have zero confidence this will make one iota of difference. Progressives are accustomed to, and take actual pride in, being heartily disliked by ordinary people. They will redefine doing the same thing as making a huge change and then carry on as usual.
It’s ‘ordinary people’ who push for progress. That’s what reactionaries can’t stand.
I strongly suspect that most ordinary people want to not have obstructions imposed on their lives and to not be told what they should think. In our times, that would be progress.
Greek life?
I wondered that.
Fraternities and Sororities. Think “Animal House”.
Sounds great…on paper. But will these woke institutions really permit free speech, or will they find ways to continue speech codes and censorship of non-woke beliefs as they have tried to skirt SCOTUS rulings on affirmative action?
What a morose and skeptical (US spelling) collective reaction here! Of course these moves don’t establish a sincere or total change of campus atmosphere, but they are a legitimate good start—right? Even 12-plus years of your favorite MAGA strongmen—for those who are fans of such flame-fanners— won’t create the ideal conservative/radical-right Academy of one’s dreams, but why not relax your pessimism and gloom for a moment?
Those charlatans Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are exposed—though way belatedly—and Woke Racism by John McWhorter and The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk are more in line with the zeitgeist. That’s better than nothing.
How staggeringly stupid for an institution ever to have taken any other position. That they did speaks volumes for the intellectual mediocrity of these universities.
What matters more than staying mum is that university presidents are not DEI types and know how to handle issues. It is also important that university life is not brought to a halt by any side in a debate.
I’m deeply sceptical. Vast swathes of academia have basically given up on empiricism and trying to think beyond one’s biases. I’m not just trying to be insulting here – many academics across the social ‘sciences’ and humanities will freely admit to that, though language like ‘prioritising individual subjectivities and reflective analysis’ or all things ‘critical’ (which specifically sets out to ‘counter hegemonic narratives and elevate marginalise voices’, meaning ‘I write what I do to further social justice’)
You can’t have free and open debate at an institution when over half of the professors there don’t rely on rationalism as a means of deriving truth, and will hound and isolate anyone who does fundamentally disagree with them as a bigot. It’s like expecting the Catholic Church to be home to spirited debate about the existence of god, it’s not a neutral environment for that discussion.
True political neutrality at these institutions would mean that half of all faculty will need to be replaced by conservatives and/or right wingers. That the administrators will henceforth hold their tongue on political issues is just a gesture to ensure continued enrollments into what are really left-wing indoctrination centers.