Brian Soucek’s newest book addresses universities’ most pressing questions on academic freedom
The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education
by Brian Soucek
University of Chicago Press, 202 pp., US$25.00 (paper)
In 1967, the University of Chicago published a document entitled, “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.” Authored by a faculty committee under the chairmanship of Harry Kalven, Jr., the colloquially referred to ‘Kalven Report’ broadly outlined what the committee identified as justifiable freedom of expression by a university. Both as it applies organisationally and for each of its individual members, seeking to maintain academic integrity and the university’s guiding values.
While the Kalven Report was quickly adopted by Chicago, and a variety of United States universities thereafter, it has never engendered such scrutinous discourse as today. The contemporary rise in student protests, amid governmental dissent on academia, along with institutions’ expansive advocacies of so-called ‘woke ideology,’ namely ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) standards, has brought renewed interest in the report. Questions of universities’ expressive rights, their responsibilities to both individual and broader academic communities, and most pressingly their influence on public opinion, have all fallen under a single phrase prescribed by the report: “The neutrality of the university.” For, as proponents of the report rightly note, the Kalven Report concludes, “Our basic conviction is that a great university can perform greatly for the betterment of society. It should not, therefore, permit itself to be diverted from its mission into playing the role of a second-rate political force or influence.”
Brian Soucek, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California at Davis, and longtime free speech and equality law advocate, addresses the university’s so-called ‘neutrality.’ In a furtive array of studies, ranging from DEI, institutional and campus speech, and what he deems genuine threats to academic freedom like biased student teaching evaluations and acquiescence to university rankings charts, Soucek proposes a unifying theme: what is the university’s mission and what are its values? Without a reorientation of our discourse on this theme, no productive—and certainly no genuine—headway can be made in the debate over the university’s academic freedoms and its actions thereof.
Soucek, a Kalvenist of sorts, distinguishes himself from the hardliner crowd by introducing throughout his book the very simple, yet crucial, self-critical lens of the university’s values. While hardliners argue that the report’s advocacy for neutrality requires absolute silence on all sociopolitical issues, Soucek reorients neutrality to the self-defining and valued principles that each university must decide for itself. As Soucek notes, and the report makes explicit, no university can maintain silence when its fundamental mission—“discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. … A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions”—is threatened. Silence is itself a manner of speaking, simply in the negative.
With an observant eye to the legal and juridical implications of his arguments, Soucek faithfully attends to both his and opponents’ claims concerning politics and demands of expressive freedoms. On DEI, he faithfully engages with arguments against, discussing dissenters’ concerns over political and viewpoint discrimination. Demanding that DEI not be a “political litmus test,” as its dissenters fear, but instead an “evaluation,” Soucek argues in its favour. DEI is no more discriminatory than requesting job applicants submit a teaching statement. If a university values the dissemination of knowledge across socioeconomic and racial divides as indicative of its mission, and as critical of dominant modes of thought (as prescribed by the Kalven Report), then professors who attend to these matters fulfill an educative responsibility aligned with their chosen university. A responsibility no different than ensuring one is sufficiently qualified (teaching experience and education, for example) to teach in one’s field of study. What DEI demands are required in each field of study is unique, and thus Soucek argues for deference to experts in each individual field over vague requirements.
Of the more genuine threats to academic freedom Soucek identifies are student teaching evaluations and universities’ catering to rankings charts, most notably U.S. News & World Report, at the cost of students’ educations. Soucek notes the blatant discrepancy of students, i.e., non-experts, evaluating their professors on their quality of knowledge, and the frequently documented sexism of these evaluations. Students are more willing, for example, to give a score of “10” to male professors over female ones (23 against 13 percent, respectively), along with using the term ‘genius’ along the same divide. That universities, upon hiring new faculty (almost always on a contractual, part-time basis, by the way), give exceptional credence to these evaluations even with their biases, indicates the favouritism of academia over its commitments to rigorous inquiry.
It falls upon each of us, now, to question what our universities’ missions and values are, such that we may continue the free and unfettered pursuit of inquiry and the discovery of knowledge.