Recently, The University of Texas System’s Board of Regents enhanced its free speech policy for all its member schools. No longer will Texas public universities be able to offer official political statements on matters that only tangentially affect their campuses. The new policy announces that it is not “the role of the UT System or UT institutions to adopt positions based on political or social passions or pressures. . . Institutions should not, in their official capacity, issue or express positions on issues of the day, however appealing they may be to some members of the university community.”
In my view, this is a welcome, long-overdue development, as UT spokesman Paul Corliss granted when he said that the new policy follows the University of Chicago’s Kalven report, which was issued 47 years ago in 1967. Under the Kalven protocols, universities are required to remain neutral on political issues except when such issues pose direct and immediate harm to the school.
Why is the UT System’s adoption of the Kalven policy so important? As someone who previously was both a college professor and administrator, I can testify to the chilling effect it has on the campus community—students and faculty alike—when university officials weigh in on controversial political and social issues that have no direct bearing on the school’s well-being.
What happens is this: Once the “official orthodoxy” has been announced by some university official from on high, it serves either to entice or to intimidate students and professors.
Those who agree with the announcement are enticed to push further their social/political agenda on other students or faculty without fear of being called out for indoctrinating rather than teaching, because, after all, they have the cover of the university administration to back them up.
Those who disagree with the announcement feel intimidated—and rightly so. Ask Professor Bret Weinstein, who was hounded off the campus of his former university, Evergreen State College, in Washington, for disagreeing with one of the university’s “Days of Absence,” which in this case, and at the suggestion of an administrator there, called for whites not to be allowed on campus. You can learn all the grisly details here.
Such evils can only be expected when university leadership trades in its honorable task of teaching for the less-than-noble project of proselytizing. Free discussion is trampled. But the freedom to question and disagree is essential to the teaching and learning function that is a genuine university’s sole reason for being. After all, universities enjoy academic freedom because their mission transcends—or is supposed to transcend—everyday partisan politics. That politics-transcending mission is to employ the human intellect to discover truth. Academic freedom enjoys its high status because it is the indispensable means to truth-seeking.
But when colleges decide to dictate this or that social or political agenda, truth-seeking becomes subordinated to political correctness, and colleges lose respect, because they have abandoned their public trust.
The good news is that besides the UT System, California’s Stanford University, along with Illinois’ Northwestern University and Harvard, adopted similar policies this spring.
The UT System’s sudden about-face could have a number of causes—among them, the donor backlash at the Ivy League schools for their failure to protect Jewish students during the campus protests that followed in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas, and the Texas Legislature’s ban in 2023 on DEI programs and staff.
For my part, I will take the system at its word when it says that it wants to protect the free speech rights of all the members of its community. It demonstrated its seriousness when, in 2022, it inked a new “Freedom of Speech and Expression policy” and signed on to the University of Chicago’s “Statement on Free Speech.”
My hope and prayer is that every college and university in the country will do likewise. American higher education and, therewith, American democracy, cannot survive without it.