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The Illusion of University Neutrality
63 Plays5 months ago
In the final episode of season four of the SpeechMatters podcast, guest host and former fellow Emerson Sykes of the ACLU sits down with UC Davis law professor and former fellow Brian Soucek to explore the idea of institutional neutrality in higher education and why neutrality may be a myth. Drawing on Soucek’s forthcoming book, “The Opinionated University,” the conversation examines whether universities can, or should remain neutral amid political polarization, how claims of neutrality can undermine academic freedom and what role administrators, faculty and students should play in shaping a university’s mission and values.
Episode Resources:
- The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education, Soucek
- Institutional Values, Academic Freedom, and the First Amendment | UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement
Recommended
Transcript
Principles of Free Speech and Justice
00:00:03
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I think what we need to do is explain how our principles of free speech, free inquiry, will help serve the cause of justice.
00:00:12
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The First Amendment, the constitutional freedom of speech and freedom of conscience that is the bulwark of our democracy.
00:00:22
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There was a passion in what was being said, affirming this, what people consider a sacred constitutional right, freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Introduction to Speech Matters Podcast
00:00:34
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From the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, this is Speech Matters, a podcast about expression, engagement, and democratic learning in higher education.
00:00:45
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I'm Emerson Sykes, a former fellow with the center and a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, and I have the privilege of being your guest host.
Academic Freedom with Brian Sochek
00:00:53
Speaker
I'm excited that today's guest is another former fellow, UC Davis law professor, Brian Sochek.
00:00:59
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Brian's new book, The Opinionated University, Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education, which arrives in January, is published by the University of Chicago Press.
00:01:11
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And it challenges the idea that universities can remain neutral in our deeply polarized public climate.
00:01:18
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Back when Brian was a fellow with the center, he began to wrestle with questions around diversity statements and university hiring practices and the foundational values of our universities.
Neutrality in Universities: Myth or Reality?
00:01:28
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We're excited to dive into his new book in today's episode and ask, is neutrality desirable or even possible?
00:01:35
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But before we dive in, let's turn it over to the center's communications and program associate, Melanie Zement, for class notes.
00:01:42
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We'll look at what's making headlines.
00:01:46
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Northwestern University has agreed to a settlement with the Trump administration, agreeing to pay $75 million in exchange for the release of nearly $790 million in frozen federal research funding.
00:02:00
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The settlement is the sixth instance of its kind and represents the second largest payment to the U.S. government by a university, following only Columbia University's settlement.
00:02:11
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The funding had been withheld during a federal investigation into alleged discrimination and anti-Semitism tied to pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
00:02:20
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As part of the agreement, Northwestern agreed to reverse a prior deal that ended a student encampment, revise its protest-related policies, enhance anti-Semitism training, and reaffirm its compliance with federal civil rights law.
00:02:34
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University leaders emphasize that the settlement includes no admission of wrongdoing and was necessary to protect crucial research, while critics warn that the settlement continues the worrying trend of university pre-compliance with federal intervention.
00:02:49
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At UC Berkeley, a computer science lecturer was suspended for six months without pay after being found to have repeatedly introduced political advocacy into classroom settings, including references to his 38-day hunger strike in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
00:03:06
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University officials cited Regents Policy 2301, which bars the use of instructional time for unrelated political content as the basis for the suspension.
00:03:16
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Supporters of the lecturer argue that the decision infringes on academic freedom and free expression.
00:03:23
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The lecturers union and several civil rights groups have vowed to appeal, framing the dispute as emblematic of broader tensions around political speech and protests on college campuses.
Legal Challenges and First Amendment Concerns
00:03:34
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On December 4th, 2025, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense and Secretary Pete Hegseth over a new Pentagon policy, which the Times asserts restricts journalists' ability to gather and disseminate information, violating constitutional protections.
00:03:52
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The policy requires reporters to pledge not to seek or publish information not explicitly approved by defense officials, and
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and gives Pentagon leaders broad authority to revoke press credentials, changes that led the Times and other major outlets to relinquish their press badges rather than comply.
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The Times contends in its complaint that the new rules violate First Amendment press freedoms and Fifth Amendment due process rights,
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and the newspaper is seeking an injunction against enforcement and restored access for its journalists.
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Press freedom advocates have condemned the policy as an unprecedented limitation on independent reporting, while Defense Department officials maintain that the restrictions are intended to safeguard national security.
00:04:38
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Now back to today's guest.
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Brian Socek is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Davis.
00:04:47
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He's a constitutional law scholar and philosopher of art, whose work ranges from equality and free speech law to academic freedom to topics at the intersection of law and aesthetics.
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Professor Socek is a member of the American Association of University Professors Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
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He's chaired the University of California Systemwide Committee on Academic Freedom and been a fellow at the UC's National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.
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Professor Sochik was elected to the American Law Institute in July 2024.
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Welcome, Professor Sochik.
00:05:22
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Thanks, Emerson.
00:05:24
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I feel like you undersold yourself in the intro right there.
00:05:26
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I almost feel guilty drawing you away from your litigation efforts on free speech issues on campus, which I think are some of the most important in the country right now.
00:05:37
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But I'm really glad that we have this opportunity to talk, and thanks to the UC National Center for making it happen.
00:05:43
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Indeed, it's a good opportunity to sort of re-engage with some of my podcast roots and take a different angle on some of these important questions about academic freedom and the First Amendment in higher ed.
00:05:54
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But we are old friends and acquaintances and colleagues, so I'll call you Brian from now on, if that's okay.
00:05:59
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Perfect.
00:06:01
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So let's kick things off with sort of orienting us in this debate that you're wading into.
00:06:07
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The book is called The Opinionated University.
00:06:10
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And we might think of sort of the neutral university as the idea that you're responding to.
00:06:16
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So before we get into this, why don't you just orient us?
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What do you mean by an opinionated university?
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And what is, by contrast, sort of a neutral university?
00:06:26
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Great.
00:06:26
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So starting from the second side of that, the neutral university, I'm really excited that the book is being published by the University of Chicago Press, because in many ways, the University of Chicago is the ideal of the neutral university.
00:06:40
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They have a
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tradition of neutrality that dates back to 1899.
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But really, it took hold in 1967 with this faculty committee report called the Calvin Committee Report, named after the First Amendment scholar, Harry Calvin.
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And that was a report that came in the midst of student protest, administrative building takeovers on campus, mostly around the draft, Chicago's sharing of student grade point averages with the draft board, and around divestment in South Africa.
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And in response, the Calvin Committee gave guidelines about when the university should speak out on social or political issues.
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And the guidance was basically they shouldn't.
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The university itself shouldn't do so.
00:07:27
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That should be left to individuals within the university.
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With one big exception, when the university's mission is under threat, then the university, it said, actually has a duty to speak out.
00:07:38
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So that was the Calvin Report.
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It didn't get a lot of attention at the time.
00:07:42
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But these debates were happening elsewhere.
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The AAUP was inviting a national debate that it published in one of its publications in 1969, 1970.
00:07:52
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So it was a hot topic during the Vietnam War.
00:07:58
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And it's one that has come back with a vengeance in recent years.
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There has been an organized campaign from some of our biggest campus speech organizations, FIRE, Heterodox Academy, the Academic Freedom Alliance, to try to get university trustees to institute commitments to institutional neutrality like Chicago's.
00:08:19
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There has been state legislation compelling universities to remain neutral on social and political topics.
00:08:26
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And most recently, the Trump administration, as part of its proposed so-called compact for higher education, would actually require universities to stay neutral on social and political topics.
00:08:38
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So it's something that's very present right now.
00:08:40
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Heterodox estimates that somewhere around 150 universities have adopted neutrality pledges or something like it just since October 7th, which is one of the events that has increased interest in getting universities to remain quiet more often.
00:08:59
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And so it's certainly something where, like many of the topics in this book, I'd say I'm on the losing end of this debate.
00:09:07
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The trend is absolutely away from the opinionated university and towards the neutral one.
00:09:14
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That's a very helpful framing and introduction of sort of what folks mean by neutrality.
00:09:19
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But you call neutrality a myth.
00:09:22
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So, you know, on first blush, for those who may not be deeply versed in these issues, the idea of a university staying out of politics doesn't necessarily seem like a terrible one on its face.
00:09:34
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But as I said, you call this a myth about neutrality and encourage reframing.
00:09:40
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So can you say more about why you think this is a myth and more specifically, why is it a problem?
00:09:46
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Great.
00:09:46
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So I call it a myth because, or an illusion or a pledge that doesn't get us very far in these debates, because when we look at, let's just take Chicago's Calvin Report, it's not a claim that universities need to stay silent in general.
00:10:04
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It's a claim that universities need to stay silent on social and political issues that don't implicate the university's mission.
00:10:12
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And that's the crucial carve out for me, because it's one thing to say that a university needs to stay silent, let's say on partisan politics.
00:10:21
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You know, my university, University of California can't endorse a candidate for governor or president that is illegal under state law and it would endanger our nonprofit status.
00:10:30
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That's fine because we can all agree what partisan politics are, what it means to endorse a candidate.
00:10:36
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The question of a university's mission, on the other hand, is a deeply and properly contested, it's the kind of thing that we should be having these debates about.
00:10:47
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And in those debates, no side counts as neutral.
00:10:50
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That's the point.
00:10:51
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And so if you have a policy that says we will only speak about things that implicate our mission,
00:10:59
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And if the question of what's your mission is one on which there are no neutral answers, neutrality hasn't gotten us very far.
00:11:08
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And I think we see that especially
00:11:10
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when we expand from just the statements that universities make, which is what this debate is normally framed as being about, to the equally or even more expressive actions and policies that universities have.
00:11:24
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And that's why the book ends up spending as much time on things like diversity initiatives, diversity statements, and other types of policies
00:11:33
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or campus speech policies, because those are the types of places where I see a university really defining what its own particular mission is.
00:11:44
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And again, on those types of questions, there really is no neutral answer.
00:11:49
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This is not a new issue, right?
00:11:51
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You talked about how this debate has been raging for decades.
00:11:55
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But when you started this project, what was front of mind was something you were just mentioning, which is diversity statements and similar policies or requirements by universities.
00:12:07
Speaker
So I wonder if you can just spend a moment talking about diversity statements in particular and what you think is interesting and others might find problematic about them.
00:12:16
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And then I want to think more about sort of what is this neutrality versus opinionated university look like in the current Trump administration.
00:12:25
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So let's start with diversity statements, which you can frame us, but I sort of peg that more around the Trump first administration.
00:12:32
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And then we can move into Trump too and the special challenges that we're all facing today.
00:12:38
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I got interested in the topic of diversity statements while I was serving as head of the Academic Freedom Committee for the UC system.
00:12:48
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UC has been using diversity statements for... Sorry, what year was that?
00:12:54
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That was in 19, 20, 21, around there as vice president, then vice chair, and then chair.
00:13:02
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And even before that, when I was chairing Davis's committee, it was a hot topic.
00:13:05
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We had university-wide faculty resolutions back-to-back for and against our use of diversity statements.
00:13:12
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something that was really polarizing the faculty.
00:13:15
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And yet it was something that the university system-wide, all 10 campuses, had been working on since at least 2012.
00:13:24
Speaker
And going back before that, we had seen system-wide discussion, widespread shared governance on the question of how diversity itself, contributions to diversity, equity, inclusion, play into our conceptions of academic merit.
00:13:40
Speaker
And that's what I came to think is really at stake in these disputes over diversity statements.
00:13:47
Speaker
So basically, if a diversity statement is something that goes in your file when you are applying for a job as faculty or your advancement or tenure file, it can be used in both those contexts.
00:13:59
Speaker
And the question is, or at least should be, if it's done right, what have you done in your work?
00:14:05
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in your teaching, in your research, in your service to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:14:11
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I see that as asking, how have you been concerned in your work to identify shortcomings in your field in those areas?
00:14:22
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What's not diverse about your field?
00:14:24
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What's not equitable in your particular field?
00:14:28
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identifying those kinds of shortcomings and then doing something to address them, which is not fundamentally different than what we would talk about in a scholarship statement, for example, where I see some kind of shortcoming in my field, an underexplored question that needs to be addressed, and I write articles about it.
00:14:47
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Similarly, in a diversity statement, I would talk about how I've made my curriculum, my syllabus, more diverse in the topics it addresses, perhaps, or in the authors that it considers and that we read.
00:15:00
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It could mean more equitable access to students by writing my own textbook so that they aren't paying $400 for a casebook.
00:15:08
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In any event, critics worry that these are
00:15:12
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pledges of allegiance, that there's something like loyalty oaths that we're all familiar with from the McCarthy era, or that they introduce a form of viewpoint discrimination into faculty hiring and advancement.
00:15:23
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Just to bring this answer to an end, what came to be really interesting to me about the viewpoint discrimination claim is we engage in viewpoint discrimination, of course, all the time.
00:15:35
Speaker
in judging faculty merit.
00:15:37
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A tenure decision is thoroughly viewpoint based.
00:15:40
Speaker
Do you have good ideas about the law or philosophy or whatever field you're in?
00:15:46
Speaker
The issue is to be unconstitutional.
00:15:50
Speaker
It would be unconstitutional if the viewpoints you're considering are irrelevant to the job description.
00:15:57
Speaker
That's when we have a constitutional problem.
00:16:00
Speaker
That means that when it comes to diversity statements, the real question is, are these kinds of contributions to DEI relevant to academic merit or not?
00:16:10
Speaker
Are they relevant to the university's mission or not?
00:16:13
Speaker
And that's what really got me thinking about this broader issue of what a particular university's mission is to be.
00:16:21
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And my claim in the book, to be clear, is not that every university has to care about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the way that my university has for the last couple of decades, at least.
00:16:33
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We're a public university that's trying to serve a diverse public.
00:16:37
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But if you care about it, then it should be seen as something that is part of internal to the mission.
00:16:44
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It's internal to our evaluations of academic merit.
00:16:48
Speaker
And if that's so, then the university needs to reward it and it needs to know about it.
00:16:52
Speaker
And that's where diversity statements come in.
00:16:55
Speaker
Great.
00:16:55
Speaker
So, I mean, the way that you described diversity statements was sort of a question that needs to be filled in with updates on activities, right?
00:17:04
Speaker
That's right.
00:17:04
Speaker
As I understand it, there are a wide variety of so-called diversity statements, some of which may pose First Amendment problems on their own, or at least they've been challenged on First Amendment grounds.
00:17:15
Speaker
As far as I'm aware, the type that you've described, where it's just sort of listing what you've done to contribute to diversity, and I would note that seems like it's diversity broadly defined, not just racial or gender diversity, but viewpoint and socioeconomic and regional and ideological and all those sorts of types of diversity.
00:17:36
Speaker
Those types of questions, reporting requirements, are
00:17:40
Speaker
seem to be on the sort of safer side of the spectrum.
00:17:43
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I've also seen some allegations and lawsuits challenging what look more like loyalty oaths, sort of signing statements saying, in accepting this position,
00:17:55
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at this university, I will, throughout my work, prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion or in these specific ways.
00:18:04
Speaker
Is that a mischaracterization of these, of some of these statements?
00:18:08
Speaker
What about the ones that seem to pose more of a First Amendment problem?
00:18:13
Speaker
And I'm curious if you have any updates on sort of where those First Amendment challenges are in the courts to those diversity statements.
00:18:21
Speaker
Good.
00:18:22
Speaker
So the only legal challenge that I have seen in the federal courts is the one that was brought against the University of California a couple of years ago by a psychologist who said he wanted to apply for a job at UC, but didn't feel he could because of the diversity statement requirement.
00:18:38
Speaker
That case was dismissed at the pleading stage for lack of standing, actually, because he hadn't applied for the job.
00:18:45
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He didn't have standing to bring the case.
00:18:48
Speaker
I would agree with you if somebody was imposing a diversity statement that required somebody to sign something, sign something saying that they believe particular things about diversity.
00:18:59
Speaker
I would join your or someone else's lawsuit against that kind of policy.
00:19:04
Speaker
I am completely against that.
00:19:06
Speaker
And I just want to make it clear, diversity statements can be done well and constitutionally, or they can be done poorly in ways that ask for pledges that are completely useless, that could be done pretextually, that really tell us no valuable information at all, and which are unconstitutional.
00:19:24
Speaker
And universities shouldn't do that.
00:19:26
Speaker
I'm in complete agreement with the critics on that.
00:19:30
Speaker
Where I get perplexed is why the critics of diversity statements never seem to want to do them the right way or find ways of fixing them as opposed to simply calling to abandon them.
00:19:43
Speaker
That doesn't make sense to me, particularly because the problems that are so often identified about diversity statements are
00:19:50
Speaker
are the exact same kinds of problems that we see in other areas of faculty evaluation.
00:19:56
Speaker
For example, student teaching evaluations, which have racially and gendered disparate impacts, which, it's well documented, change what professors teach in the classroom, what they're able to say.
00:20:11
Speaker
It judges professors on their political opinions and even things like their appearance.
00:20:15
Speaker
It's, you know, they're a mess.
00:20:17
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They're watering down academic standards.
00:20:19
Speaker
They're a leading cause of grade inflation.
00:20:22
Speaker
All of the types of criticisms that we hear about diversity statements are equally true in the context of teaching evaluations.
00:20:30
Speaker
And yet I have never been at a conference where they wanted to talk about these problems in teaching statements.
00:20:37
Speaker
I've never been asked to submit an op-ed or be in a debate on those kinds of topics.
00:20:42
Speaker
It's always diversity statements.
00:20:44
Speaker
And I really wonder why that is.
00:20:46
Speaker
Is it something about who those disparate effects actually affect?
00:20:52
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's an important point.
00:20:53
Speaker
Why the focus on diversity statements?
00:20:56
Speaker
I will say, though, in 2025, we have lots of threats to academic freedom.
00:21:01
Speaker
There's lots of things to talk about.
00:21:03
Speaker
Diversity statements continue to be an important issue.
00:21:06
Speaker
But let's think also about sort of
00:21:09
Speaker
What are you seeing, you know, even since you started working on this book from the Trump administration, from state governments, these threats to, you know, the issue around student evaluations is a really fascinating insight, but that's not necessarily a new thing in particular.
00:21:27
Speaker
Are there any new threats that you're seeing in the current context?
00:21:30
Speaker
I know we're seeing on a daily basis the Trump administration trying to exert influence over various institutions of higher education in different ways.
DEI Policies and University Changes under Trump
00:21:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's a very different world than when I proposed this book and started writing it.
00:21:45
Speaker
I did those things even before October 7th, which was, of course, prompted major changes in higher ed, specifically on the topics I'm writing about, much less the second Trump administration, which has dramatically escalated the attacks.
00:21:59
Speaker
When I say that I'm on the losing side of
00:22:02
Speaker
of all of the issues I write about.
00:22:04
Speaker
My opinions on campus speech, my opinions on diversity statements, my opinions on institutional neutrality.
00:22:10
Speaker
That's just gotten worse and worse since I started writing the book.
00:22:13
Speaker
When it comes to DEI, for example, of course, the retrenchment has been traumatic, both in universities and, of course, in society writ large, in our corporations, et cetera.
00:22:23
Speaker
I mean, just this week we saw the university of Alabama shutting down or refusing to continue funding two of its student magazines because one address was a women's lifestyle magazine and the other address black culture and student life.
00:22:38
Speaker
And they said that those ran afoul of DEI prohibitions, like just because what they talked about women or black people, I mean, unbelievable.
00:22:47
Speaker
And,
00:22:47
Speaker
Even my university, even the University of California, which, as I said, has this more than two decade history of saying that diversity is integral to our achievement of excellence, spending just untold millions of dollars trying to experiment with different ways to read faculty applications and conduct advancements to make them more equitable.
00:23:11
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Even you see that.
00:23:13
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has abandoned its use of diversity statements earlier this year, at least for hiring, not yet for advancement.
00:23:20
Speaker
So we really see it everywhere.
00:23:23
Speaker
So yes, I think the arguments of the book are, if anything, more relevant than ever.
00:23:28
Speaker
But the examples that I could have been drawing from just continue to be generated every single day in the newspaper.
00:23:37
Speaker
And how do you think higher education institutions are responding?
00:23:41
Speaker
I mean, people are sort of turning to Harvard of all places to lead us.
00:23:49
Speaker
in the litigation team at Harvard?
00:23:51
Speaker
Or what would you wish to see from institutional leaders?
00:23:55
Speaker
And I want to then talk about faculty and then my favorite, which is students.
00:23:59
Speaker
But let's start with institutional leaders who are often the ones who are making the statements, deciding whether to make statements.
00:24:06
Speaker
How do you think they're doing in the face of these current challenges?
00:24:09
Speaker
I think this is a particularly unfortunate time for this push towards neutrality to be happening.
00:24:17
Speaker
This is the time where we need university leaders to be speaking more than ever.
00:24:23
Speaker
And yet all of these threats from the Trump administration with funding, with the compact, with the individual campus deals, the extortionate attempts to get them to sign on to the administration's agenda,
00:24:35
Speaker
in any number of areas.
00:24:37
Speaker
All of that happening at the same time that, as I said before, 150 or more schools have said, we're not going to comment.
00:24:43
Speaker
And of course, there's always that carve out.
00:24:45
Speaker
These are threats to the university's mission.
00:24:48
Speaker
Everybody should be agreed.
00:24:49
Speaker
So this is precisely the kind of thing where even the most hardline Chicago type folks must agree that this is the time when the Calvin Report and other such pledges would allow or even impose a duty on universities to speak.
00:25:05
Speaker
And yet we've seen so little of that.
00:25:10
Speaker
My takeaway from that is that we need to reinforce the idea that when I talk about a university speaking, that doesn't necessarily have to be the administration.
00:25:21
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I want to be very clear.
00:25:22
Speaker
The university should not be identified with its administration.
00:25:26
Speaker
The faculty can be speaking or should be able to speak.
00:25:29
Speaker
There's some legislation on these issues surrounding faculty, senates, et cetera.
00:25:34
Speaker
But a faculty, whether at the university level or at the department level, the school level, should be able to have its own voice and even should be able to speak on behalf of the university.
00:25:46
Speaker
We have a new bylaw at my law school after some serious debate that had gone on system-wide at UC and with our regents about whether departmental speech would continue to be allowed.
00:25:56
Speaker
It's the institutional neutrality debate brought down to the level of the individual school or department, which I think is a very important issue.
00:26:04
Speaker
level to be talking about.
00:26:06
Speaker
And there was debate and the regents ended up coming up with a new policy, allowing that kind of speech, but imposing some new requirements that you have to have procedures in place in advance before a department can speak out, which I think is a great thing.
00:26:20
Speaker
So at my law school, we put those new policies in place and it says that our dean can speak on behalf of the law school if she feels that that would be helpful.
00:26:31
Speaker
Or the faculty, through an anonymous majority vote, can decide to release a statement, again, on behalf of the law school.
00:26:41
Speaker
Because the law school isn't the dean.
00:26:42
Speaker
It's just as much the faculty, the students, the people who make it up as it is the administration.
00:26:48
Speaker
And
00:26:48
Speaker
That's an important lesson to return to.
00:26:50
Speaker
So to go to your specific example of Harvard, yes, it's to Harvard's great credit that they filed a lawsuit rather than simply submitting, as we've seen several other universities, most recently Northwestern, doing.
00:27:03
Speaker
That's a great thing.
00:27:04
Speaker
But of course, they're not the only one who sued.
00:27:07
Speaker
The faculty sued as well through the AAUP.
00:27:10
Speaker
And that is crucial, both in showing, again, that a school is not just its administration, and also, down the line, should Harvard decide to settle its lawsuit, there will still be the AAUP's lawsuit.
00:27:25
Speaker
And that's what's happening here at the University of California as well.
00:27:28
Speaker
We don't have a
00:27:30
Speaker
administration filed lawsuit.
00:27:32
Speaker
The regents haven't sued yet at least, but the faculty has and our unions have.
00:27:39
Speaker
And those suits have been successful.
00:27:41
Speaker
So the Trump cuts to funding throughout the UC system have been enjoined at this point.
00:27:47
Speaker
They've been paused.
00:27:49
Speaker
And that's a great thing that shows the power of multiple types of voices within the university.
00:27:55
Speaker
It's one of the most fascinating insights I felt from your book.
00:27:58
Speaker
As someone who cares deeply about higher education, but I'm primarily a litigator, this idea of governance and sort of who gets to make decisions within the university is so crucial.
00:28:08
Speaker
And it's actually been a part of our project to get courts to understand that it's not just a state government.
00:28:16
Speaker
and a university, or in the case of public universities, a university that is synonymous with the state.
00:28:22
Speaker
That's right.
00:28:22
Speaker
But getting to sort of peel back those layers a bit, who actually has what role in governance, what role does a department have versus a provost versus a board of directors, never mind a state legislature.
00:28:34
Speaker
or a governor.
00:28:35
Speaker
So this sort of, all of them may be officially public employees employed by the state, but they have very different roles.
00:28:41
Speaker
And I think the way in which you highlight the importance of that governance and those structures is really key.
00:28:48
Speaker
But coming back to this idea of mission, you know, this is one of the first issues that you mentioned that I want to talk about in a little bit more depth, because
00:28:55
Speaker
We talk about the mission of higher education, and we may or may not be able to come up with a pithy one for the whole enterprise.
00:29:03
Speaker
But within higher education, there's a broad variety of institutions with a huge variance among their students, who they serve, what kinds of issues they take up, their boldness in the face of these challenges, but also sort of their fundamental values.
00:29:20
Speaker
reason for being.
00:29:21
Speaker
So can you talk about this idea of mission in terms of neutrality, but also in the context of a huge variety of institutions?
Defining University Missions and Academic Freedom
00:29:30
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:29:32
Speaker
Every single one of the debates that I talk about in the book ultimately comes down to this question that you just asked of what is a particular university's mission.
00:29:40
Speaker
So I'm not asking what is the mission of higher ed?
00:29:43
Speaker
What is the mission of a university in general?
00:29:46
Speaker
I think people need to be at universities need to be asking what is the mission of our university?
00:29:52
Speaker
And I am a pluralist about that.
00:29:54
Speaker
That doesn't mean there isn't commonality.
00:29:57
Speaker
I mean, every school is dedicated to research and teaching.
00:30:01
Speaker
That's clear.
00:30:02
Speaker
But to say that that's the mission of the university is just to speak at way too high a level of generality.
00:30:07
Speaker
So I want to dig deeper where a university's mission isn't something that you get by reading a committee written mission statement on its website or anything like that.
00:30:16
Speaker
The mission is something that you glean from looking at whether it has diversity policies or not, initiatives or not, whether what its speech policies are, what its anti-discrimination policies look like, where it's spending its money.
00:30:31
Speaker
I mean, you see the university's mission in its budget.
00:30:34
Speaker
You see it in its investment decisions.
00:30:36
Speaker
You see it in its faculty strengths and what kind of students it's trying to attract.
00:30:41
Speaker
So even when we talk about something like teaching, I tell this story in the book about how there have been three times in my life where I've either taken as a student or taught as a professor a great books type curriculum, the kind of Plato to NATO thing that...
00:30:57
Speaker
One of them was at Chicago.
00:30:59
Speaker
Chicago is famous for its core curriculum.
00:31:02
Speaker
And there, I think we are really reading those books, teaching those books because of their greatness.
00:31:06
Speaker
You know, they're hard.
00:31:07
Speaker
They're the kinds of things that Chicago thinks educated folks should know.
00:31:12
Speaker
Before that, I had taught it at Columbia, which started its Great Books program back in World War I.
00:31:18
Speaker
to really teach the boys what they would be fighting for, to show the background to the principles of American democracy.
00:31:26
Speaker
And before that, as a student, I had taken that curriculum at Boston College, which is a Catholic Jesuit school, where it was really about moral and spiritual discernment, what you would see as a life worth living.
00:31:39
Speaker
Those are three completely different reasons for reading the exact same books.
00:31:44
Speaker
And they go to a different set of things that you value in education.
00:31:48
Speaker
They really ultimately go to three different missions at three different universities, I'd say.
00:31:54
Speaker
And that's the kind of specificity with which I'd like to talk about these issues and debate them.
00:31:59
Speaker
And that's what I mean when I say that the question of what a university's mission is to be is one on which there are no neutral answers.
00:32:07
Speaker
It's not just a matter of neutrality or opinionatedness, right?
00:32:12
Speaker
It's about independence and the ability to choose what your mission is.
00:32:16
Speaker
That's exactly right.
00:32:17
Speaker
That's central to academic freedom, right?
00:32:19
Speaker
When we think about academic freedom, we think about it in a few different ways.
00:32:23
Speaker
One is the independence of the, or the freedom of the university as an institution to be free of political influence from other governmental actors.
00:32:32
Speaker
Right.
00:32:33
Speaker
But then we also think of academic freedom, at least some jurisdictions do.
00:32:37
Speaker
and most scholars do in terms of the individual faculty members or researchers or educators or even students on the sort of fringe having academic freedom rights.
00:32:49
Speaker
I believe deeply that they do, but courts don't tend to recognize that.
00:32:52
Speaker
But I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about the relationship between academic freedom, which is about independence, either at the institutional or individual level, with this idea of neutrality.
00:33:04
Speaker
Sure.
00:33:05
Speaker
So let's just start with the idea of institutional autonomy.
00:33:08
Speaker
Because I'm a pluralist on university missions, it's crucial to me that that kind of autonomy be preserved.
00:33:15
Speaker
And one of the things that I worry about most with efforts like the Trump Compact is that it would bring the sameness to higher education.
00:33:25
Speaker
It's requiring, in order to get federal funding...
00:33:27
Speaker
a set of pledges that you will do your campus speech policies in this particular way, your approach to gender identity will be that of the Trump administration, your approach to recruiting international students will be that of the Trump administration, your way of talking about diversity and racial issues and gender on and on.
00:33:46
Speaker
All of this, it's a flattening out if it were successful.
00:33:50
Speaker
It would be a homogenizing of the higher ed sector, which I think would be a real impoverishment.
00:33:55
Speaker
And of course,
00:33:56
Speaker
The Trump administration is not the only actor that's doing this kind of thing.
00:34:02
Speaker
I won't go into it now, but I write in the book about the way that things like U.S. News rankings does the same thing.
00:34:09
Speaker
I think FIRE's campus speech ratings has this kind of effect of requiring a sort of sameness across the board in the way that universities balance politics.
00:34:19
Speaker
in the fire case balance, the right to protest versus smooth, efficient administration of campus activities, et cetera.
00:34:28
Speaker
These are things that all go to the university's mission.
00:34:30
Speaker
And I think that should be something that each university within limits, of course, has the ability to choose for itself.
00:34:38
Speaker
Now, when a school does that, of course, it's not going to be acting or speaking in a neutral way.
00:34:44
Speaker
It's going to be making a politically and socially freighted decision about what it sees as valuable.
00:34:52
Speaker
That doesn't mean that everybody within the university loses their right somehow to dissent or say that the way that their particular university is going is one that they disagree with.
00:35:04
Speaker
Of course, they should be able to do that.
00:35:07
Speaker
And academic freedom, both in what you teach and research, but also in intramural speech, your participation within shared governance, is absolutely crucial.
00:35:17
Speaker
This kind of individual level academic freedom is absolutely crucial.
00:35:21
Speaker
So that, to go back to an earlier example, sure, my school had a policy about diversity statements, but it was crucial to me that those be framed in a way that left space for people to dissent
00:35:35
Speaker
even to the idea that the University of California is valuing diversity too much.
00:35:40
Speaker
Now, you don't do that in your diversity statement.
00:35:42
Speaker
You do that through shared governance.
00:35:44
Speaker
You do that through op-eds.
00:35:46
Speaker
You do that through your own research.
00:35:48
Speaker
But of course, that space has to be protected as a matter of individual academic freedom.
00:35:53
Speaker
That, to me, is compatible with the idea that
00:35:56
Speaker
yes, the faculty is going to make collective decisions.
00:36:00
Speaker
The university is going to be making institutional decisions that will affect what the university is funding, all that kind of thing.
00:36:09
Speaker
That will have effects on academic freedom of individual researchers.
00:36:12
Speaker
But what's crucial is that their ability to choose, their ability to dissent to that and participate in the making of those policies, that has to be maintained at all costs.
Student Protests and University Policy
00:36:24
Speaker
Let's talk about students.
00:36:26
Speaker
We've talked a lot about, we've mentioned students, but we've talked more about sort of institutions and faculty and governance and missions.
00:36:35
Speaker
What about students?
00:36:36
Speaker
Aren't they really what this whole thing is about?
00:36:38
Speaker
Like, you know, we can't have a university without professors, but we also can't have a university without students.
00:36:45
Speaker
So where do you see them fitting into this?
00:36:48
Speaker
Aside from, you know, I get frustrated because
00:36:52
Speaker
Courts so often view students as just receptacles, especially in K-12, but even in higher ed.
00:37:00
Speaker
And I think that's a pretty inaccurate view of the vibrant way that students engage in multiple ways in their campuses.
00:37:07
Speaker
People are often, you know, students, teachers, employees, residents, all of these things all at the same time, right?
00:37:15
Speaker
That's right.
00:37:16
Speaker
I'm curious how you see students fitting into this picture.
00:37:20
Speaker
Well, it's important to note the way that students have driven these kinds of debates, really prodded them into existence, both historically and in the present.
00:37:31
Speaker
So I mentioned how the Calvin Report was the result of student protest at three particular student protests in the late 60s.
00:37:41
Speaker
I think it was the first major takeover of a campus building,
00:37:45
Speaker
in the 20th century.
00:37:46
Speaker
And so Chicago had responded in two ways at that point, both of them, interestingly, chaired by Harry Calvin.
00:37:54
Speaker
So he was in charge of the disciplinary committee for the students that had taken over the administration building.
00:38:00
Speaker
and then was also in charge of the Calvin Report Committee to talk about how schools should speak about these issues.
00:38:06
Speaker
And I just don't think those two things can be disentangled.
00:38:10
Speaker
You know, it was the students' protests that prompted this whole thing.
00:38:14
Speaker
And notice they were protesting about a set of issues on which there is no such thing as a neutral position.
00:38:21
Speaker
You know, Chicago was either going to send their GPAs to the draft board or it wasn't.
00:38:25
Speaker
It was either going to continue investing in South Africa or it wasn't.
00:38:30
Speaker
And students saw that and realized that there's no neutral position here.
00:38:35
Speaker
We are going to advocate for the position that we think is most just.
00:38:39
Speaker
So that's a crucial insight, I think, to see as the background to this whole debate.
00:38:44
Speaker
I've mentioned October 7th a couple of times in this conversation because that was another moment where these issues suddenly became so salient.
00:38:53
Speaker
October 7th and the aftermath, the war in Gaza, students' response to that has really been at the
00:39:01
Speaker
the center of this entire debate.
00:39:04
Speaker
Their protests, their encampments, the way that administrators have responded well or poorly to those kinds of protests, the message that students are receiving about the extent to which protest is a welcome thing on their campus, all of that is just completely central.
00:39:21
Speaker
And one of the things that made me especially sad in Northwestern's settlement this past week with the Trump administration is
00:39:30
Speaker
not just, I mean, there's so many things.
00:39:32
Speaker
It's not just the way that they've sold out their admissions priorities, the way they've sold out trans patients at their hospitals or trans students of theirs in their dorms.
00:39:45
Speaker
They've done all of that, but they've also gone back on, reneged on the deal that they made with protesters on their own campus a year or two ago.
00:39:55
Speaker
And I...
00:39:57
Speaker
I worry about the kind of message that that sends to students going forward when even the rare successes that they were able to, tangible successes, I think they had lots of success in changing narratives and raising awareness, all of the sorts of things that you hope protest will do.
00:40:14
Speaker
But in terms of tangible policy type changes, the Northwestern example was one of the notable examples there.
00:40:23
Speaker
And so to see under pressure from the Trump administration, the school to just go back on that pledge is really disappointing to me.
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of sort of the, you were talking about the harm of the homogenization of the sector.
00:40:38
Speaker
That's right.
00:40:38
Speaker
Definitely not only accrues to faculty, but also to students and their lack of choice and lack of agency as well.
Governance and Advocacy in Universities
00:40:45
Speaker
That's right.
00:40:46
Speaker
Let's consider the myth dispelled, right?
00:40:49
Speaker
The myth of neutrality has been dispelled.
00:40:51
Speaker
We acknowledge that the university is inherently opinionated.
00:40:55
Speaker
We have gained some insights along the way.
00:40:57
Speaker
Now, I guess the question is now, how do we govern our campuses, right?
00:41:01
Speaker
So in within the acknowledged opinionated university, how do we deal with bad scholarships?
00:41:09
Speaker
How do we deal with problematic speech?
00:41:12
Speaker
How do we deal with all of these sort of concerns?
00:41:14
Speaker
How does this insight implicate the daily running of the university and how you would like to see these institutions in the future?
00:41:24
Speaker
Well, it seems like there are different problems there.
00:41:27
Speaker
So the problem of bad scholarship, for example, is one that's addressed through peer review.
00:41:33
Speaker
Our whole system of academic freedom, it's important to remember, it's often framed as a kind of individual right.
00:41:42
Speaker
But of course, it's a tightly cabined individual right.
00:41:45
Speaker
Or put a different way, it's an individual right that comes with a whole set of responsibilities, one of which is that unlike with normal free speech principles,
00:41:53
Speaker
The academic is submitting themselves to the judgment of their peers.
00:41:58
Speaker
That's a crucial part, that you have a right to speak as long as you're doing so in line with the norms of your discipline, the scholarly standards of your discipline, and that you're speaking in ways that are germane to your discipline and class, et cetera.
00:42:16
Speaker
That's all crucial.
00:42:17
Speaker
So there's a collective element to academic freedom that's just built into its very nature at the individual level.
00:42:24
Speaker
When we go up to a higher level of what do we think about how the university should exercise its autonomy, that higher institutional level of academic freedom, that's where...
00:42:35
Speaker
I think there are important questions to be asked for someone who's a pluralist like me.
00:42:40
Speaker
You say, okay, universities can have lots of different missions.
00:42:43
Speaker
Well, then how am I to object to, let's say, Chris Ruffo taking over a new college in Florida and imposing a brand new mission there?
00:42:52
Speaker
Is there anything wrong with that?
00:42:54
Speaker
After all, I'm supposed to be a pluralist.
00:42:56
Speaker
And there, I think the answer is, it does matter how an institution's mission gets chosen, how it gets developed.
00:43:05
Speaker
There is a difference between Chris Ruffo coming in and saying new college is going to be this, or the governor of Florida coming in and saying, this is what the mission of this university is going to be.
00:43:17
Speaker
versus a community of scholars and students and alums and people that are invested stakeholders in that institution coming together and through shared governance, setting the direction that that university is going to take.
00:43:32
Speaker
there are crucial differences there.
00:43:34
Speaker
And shared governance is messy.
00:43:37
Speaker
It's inefficient.
00:43:38
Speaker
It's kind of small C conservative.
00:43:40
Speaker
You know, it's a reason we don't often have, you know, universities don't change on a dime.
00:43:45
Speaker
But that has had
00:43:48
Speaker
proven historic success.
00:43:50
Speaker
We know that when faculty is involved in decisions around curriculum, in decisions around student admissions, faculty hiring, the judging of academic merit, that's what has made our universities, you know, these engines of change and these drivers of knowledge that they've been for so long.
00:44:13
Speaker
It's been a fascinating conversation.
00:44:15
Speaker
I wonder if you can sort of give our listeners some parting words of wisdom or advice in terms of concrete steps they can take to try to protect institutional independence and try to dispel this myth of neutrality and its dangerous implications.
00:44:32
Speaker
Well, I want to just acknowledge that faculty listening to this are differently situated across the country, that we're not
00:44:43
Speaker
There are people that are in a place of great privilege like I am.
00:44:47
Speaker
I'm a tenured professor at a state school in a blue state where our legislature is supportive of the University of California's efforts.
00:44:57
Speaker
So I'll start by just talking to people like me.
00:44:59
Speaker
If we aren't getting engaged in shared governance, if we aren't standing up for academic freedom, then nobody will.
00:45:07
Speaker
We have some of the most secure jobs in America.
00:45:10
Speaker
We have to be the people that are making these efforts and participating in the governance of our institutions and speaking out on behalf of those whose use of their voice would be much riskier.
00:45:22
Speaker
So that's number one.
00:45:24
Speaker
At the meantime, 68% of faculty at universities right now have contingent positions.
00:45:30
Speaker
They're adjuncts.
00:45:32
Speaker
Half of people teaching in universities are teaching part-time.
00:45:35
Speaker
So I just want to acknowledge not everybody is in the kind of position that I'm in.
00:45:41
Speaker
Plus, we have people, you know, I've got colleagues teaching across the country in states where they are very much under attack.
00:45:48
Speaker
Their academic freedom is being sold out by their own administrators or being attacked by their state legislatures.
00:45:54
Speaker
We've certainly seen this in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, the 50 or more people that have been fired because of things they said about that.
00:46:03
Speaker
You know, there is a lot of precarity here.
00:46:07
Speaker
So I just want to recognize that the things I would say you should do are different for people like me than people like that.
00:46:14
Speaker
For those kinds of people, I'm so glad that we have, well,
00:46:18
Speaker
organizations like yours that are bringing lawsuits, but then also organizations like the AAUP, that even in states where faculty senates are being disbanded or shared governance is being dismantled, we still have the ACLU, you all bringing the lawsuits, the AAUP bringing lawsuit after lawsuit.
00:46:37
Speaker
That's just been extraordinarily successful.
00:46:40
Speaker
So a kind of unionization efforts where those are available are a
00:46:45
Speaker
different way when shared governance is being denied by administrators, trustees, or legislators, the possibility of unionizing can sometimes stand there as a backdrop or litigation, of course.
00:46:59
Speaker
And of course, another concrete thing people can do is go out and buy your book, The Opinionated University from the University of Chicago Press.
00:47:06
Speaker
That's going to be available on bookshelves what day?
00:47:08
Speaker
By January 12th at the very latest.
00:47:11
Speaker
Great.
00:47:11
Speaker
And that will be available everywhere we get our books?
00:47:14
Speaker
Everywhere books are sold.
00:47:15
Speaker
That's right.
00:47:16
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:47:17
Speaker
Thank you so much to Professor Brian Sochek for joining us.
00:47:20
Speaker
Thank you all for listening in this year and for wrapping up season four of the Speech Matters podcast with us.
00:47:25
Speaker
Wishing you a very happy holidays and we'll talk to you next time.