The UChicago Kalven Report and the Israel/Gaza catastrophe

The Kalven Report, whose lead author was a leading First Amendment scholar at Chicago, has once again come to the fore, in the wake of the Hamas butchery in Israel and the ensuing Israeli attack on Gaza. (Anyone who cares what I think about all this can see my other blog, or the letter I signed.  But I am not a Dean or university administrator.) 

I have written periodically about the Kalven Report, which I view as a central component of academic freedom in universities.  Universities are not political associations, they are institutions whose core purpose is the production and dissemination of knowledge.  That's it. The duty of administrators of universities is to facilitate the production and dissemination of knowledge.  The idea that university administrators should offer their views about the political issues of the day or the atrocities of the day, is as absurd as the idea that we should expect to hear from the head of the local electricity company.  No one is appointed a senior administrator at a University based on the acuity of their moral or political judgment.  Seriously, who cares what those folks think?

University administrators decide salaries, sabbaticals, teaching schedules and so on:  if one wants to protect the right of faculty to speak freely about the issues of the day, then one wants administrators to be silent. Full stop.

One thing the Kalven Report does not permit is Deans speaking in public "in their personal capacity":  that's meaningless.  Deans who want to speak in a personal capacity need to do so in private with their personal acquaintances.  Whenever a Dean or a President speaks in public, they speak for their institution.  

I do not mean to singe out Dean Caron, the Blog Emperor, here.  He was clearly inspired by Mike Schill, now the President of Northwestern University and previously my Dean here.  Mike Schill was an excellent Dean, but his statement on the current catastrophe also violates the Kalven principles, and I am fairly confident he would have been silent were he still our Dean. 

I will note we have heard nothing similar from Dean Miles at the Law School or President Alivasatos at the University.  It is not because anyone secretly thinks they support mass murder.  It is because we know they understand that they are not moral or political leaders, but academic administrators, and their primary duty is to preserve this space in their institutions in which faculty and students can express their views on the issue of the day, without any concern they are running afoul of an institutional orthodoxy, either pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, or otherwise.

University administrators can of course acknowledge events in the world that might affect students:  after all, a key part of their job is to facilitate the "dissemination of knowledge."  Deans here at UChicago have done that:  they have alerted students to institutional resources available to support them at a time when events in the world are, to put it mildly, upsetting.  Nothing in the Kalven Report prohibits that.